Tales of dissidents, dissenters, and iconoclasts taking on the status quo...

Five SFF Books About Oddballs Resisting Conformity

I'm in Newport Beach, California for a few days of intensive sales training. The training hasn't even started yet— it's on Wednesday and Thursday— but the partying has. ...I know, I wrote yesterday that this trip is not a boondoggle. But last night we went out to a fancy-ish restaurant on the coast, Javier's. The valet parking was full of high end luxury and sports cars. The restaurant was full of people in their see-and-be-seen attire; a style I only see in certain places where wealth and vanity collide like in Southern California.

I was hoping for a not-late night last night. I even seriously considered blowing off the group dinner. But I decided to go because the group seemed small enough. There were just 12 of us. Well, dinner was languidly paced at the packed, fancy restaurant. We had drinks. Then simple appetizers. Then bigger appetizers. Then full dinner plates. I estimate my end would've been $175 all-in if I were paying my own bill. And we didn't get back to the hotel until almost 11pm. So much for my idea of a not-late night. I had been hoping we might be done with dinner early enough for me to take a dip in the hot tub before 10!

Getting back to my room at 11pm was bad enough— considering I was up, sick half the night the night before— but then, because it's a business trip and I'm in an unfamiliar bed, or possibly because I'd eaten too much food too late, I couldn't get to sleep right away. I tossed and turned until about 12:30. And this morning I was up at 5:30 for a 6:30am meeting before the all-day training sessions. Ugh.

Can Tokyo be liberated from the gods?


After God, volume 1 by Sumi Eno

I'm headed down to Orange County for 48 hours. Well, technically, it's more like 50 hours that I'll be in town, But "48 hours" scans better than 50, right? Like "24 hours in Phoenix" would've scanned better than 26 hour in Phoenix. Which turned into more like 28 hours. But at least I remembered to pack shirts this time. Yes, I checked twice to make sure. 😅

The purpose of the trip is work. We've got a deep-dive training seminar on a newly (re-)launched product. We'll be at a hotel in Newport Beach for two days.

Now, before you think, "Newport Beach? Is this some kind of boondoggle at a beach resort?" understand that Newport Beach is just the name of the city. The hotel is actually several miles away from the beach. It's two blocks from SNA airport. I'll be attending two days of seminars at an airport hotel.

Last night my cold took a turn for the worse. I've had a cough and body aches/tiredness since Friday. Monday night I got sinus congestion, too, and my cough got a lot worse. I took more OTC meds to combat the symptoms but, still, I tossed and turned, unable to sleep, most of the night.

This morning I took a Covid-19 test. I'd been telling myself for a few days that if the symptoms got worse than a mild cold, I'd test. Well, last night was when they got sufficiently worse. Oddly, though, by this morning the symptoms had abated. There's something about colds being worse at night and lighter in the morning. Anyway, I took the test this morning. Negative.

I was actually kind of hoping for a positive test. That at least would put a specific name to what I'm suffering and open up a clear course of action better than, "Take these at best semi-effective OTC cold remedies and let the virus run its course." Plus, "I can't. Covid," shuts down colleagues at work asking if I can't just join these 3 Zoom meetings way better than, "I have a cold" does. 😷

Kong Pocha is the second location of a Baltimore Korean pub in Columbia, in the spot where K-Manna briefly was (next to the noteworthy Boro Kabob off Snowden). Where K-Manna had all the personableness of a fast-food joint (while not being fast in the least), now the decor charmingly hints at pretending to be outdoors, with light-adorned awnings accenting the walls and tables separated by movable mini-fences. Rather than experimenting with many nifty offerings like rice bowls and omelets and noodles we had soy garlic chicken. The portion was sufficient for the both of us and came with mayo-slathered fries. The chicken reminded me of Seoul Pub - irregularly sized chunks like someone's grandma might make. I'm usually unexcited about fries, but the the mayo combination worked great.

Chin - located in Ellicott City over by Honey Pig - brands itself "A Xi-an Style Restaurant", that being (I learned) a location in Northern China. Their speciality is hand-torn noodles, most of which come in spicy or pork or spicy pork.

While the place had many vacant seats, we were directed to sign into the waiting list of zero on an electronic screen (which also permitted ordering take-out). We were seated within a couple of minutes, so no big deal, one supposes.

The waiter expertly guided us through the no-pork-or-spicy options. I went for Northwestern style beef noodles, was given a choice of wide or narrow noodles and confirmed that I didn't want any chili oil in it. This landed me a beefy, gingery broth with rice noodles and thin slices of fat-specked beef; I was reminded a bit of pho, not so much in the specific flavor profile as in the comfort-meal vibe. (The specks looked ominous, but did not make for problematic texture).

Spouse went for a seasonal mutton dish. The herby green broth concealed cellophane noodles and finely sliced vegetables, and came with separate little bowls of chilis (which for my sake Spouse skipped), scallions, thin slices of meat, and a pita-like flatbread. That last item was dried to a nearly-cracker consistency, and we were instructed to break it into whatever-sized pieces one chose and throw them in the broth. If my soup was a warm blanket, this one was a picnic on the lawn. I added the beverage described verbosely as "Chinese Osmanthus Sour Plum Drink (Suan Mei Tang)", which was reminiscent of the better less-sweet grades of plum wine in non-alcoholic form, and I should see about finding that in a store sometime. Enough of soup leftovers came home with us to make a serviceable lunch next day. Definitely a place to revisit... though possibly on a cooler, cloudier day.

Ellicott City Diner had opened in the former Double T in the same strip mall as above at the top of the pandemic; we finally got around to trying it. Under new ownership the diner retained the general theme of overwhelming multi-page menus, but I was on a mission - EC Diner had bragged about being a contender for the county's best crabcakes, and has a Wednesday special of their crabcake sandwich with a soup or salad and a desert-of-the-month for about their regular price of just the sandwich. I've been meaning to try it, but they only have it for eat-in, which during the pandemic annoyed me into not prioritizing them.

I should explain for non-Marylanders: crabcakes here are a big deal. If you've had a "Maryland-style" crabcake anywhere outside of Maryland (and possibly a handful of DC places, though don't bet on it), you've never had a Maryland crabcake. If it doesn't have large lumps of crab, it's not a Maryland crabcake - at best it's an extra-large appetizer crab ball, which are permitted to exist, but do not deserve the title of crabcake. Or, it got lost on its way from Virginia. If it's seasoned with garlic or parsley or visible amounts of black pepper, it's not a Maryland crabcake. (Maryland crabcakes do have Old Bay in them in various proportions, and often come garnished with more). If it contains vegetables, it's not a Maryland crabcake - Louisiana and the Carolinas get to exist if they must, but should stay in their lane. If it's shaped like a hockey puck rather than a conical heap with identifiable lumps, it might possibly be a Maryland crabcake, but it probably shipped frozen. If there's more binder than crab, it's definitely not a Maryland crabcake, and it should be ashamed of itself. And if you think Marylanders are obsessed with the whole Maryland thing, you are correct, and we're ok with it.

Anyway, the verdict is that the crabcake is worthy - a generous serving for the price, with balanced seasoning and good crab-to-binder ratio with ample lumps. The soup of the day was cream of broccoli, which was fine; the dessert was creme brulee, which I was too full to eat in place, and by the next day it wasn't particularly brulee and I couldn't tell if it ever was crispy, but that aside it tasted good enough. (As far as "best"... possibly best-for-the-price in the casual category. Cozy's was downright disappointing twice; Timbuktu never disappoints but is pricier and not quite in the county for the purists; G&M is the golden standard but is a bit further out, Lee Lynn are pleasant and with the best summer ambiance, Floyd's are overseasoned, and Corner Stable overrated in every way. And Hudson Coastal are so good about every other kind of seafood that can't be found elsewhere that I've not actually tried the crabcakes there yet. Double T used to be very, very good when I first found them, and this is comparable, but they'd skimped on portions and ratios a bit over the years.)

The diner does have some wines and beers and cocktails; we didn't try them this time. They also have milkshakes - both regular and the trendy over-engineered with too many items perched precariously on top. Spouse had a classic milkshake and reviewed it favorably. He also had a Greek salad; when that arrived without the anchovy they apologized for having run out and offered to make something else, but then found the anchovies and by way of an apology served him a double serving of the fishies to add to the salad, so he was ultimately content, too.

Which probably adds up to more going out for meals than I really should indulge in, but lined up is a return to Ram's Head Waterfront for the sunset.

The sudden, shocking, return of Shockwave Reader. Will the living envy the dead?

From This Day Forward by John Brunner

It's been a few weeks since I've written about Better Call Saul. I've been busy with travel and catching up on work and other stuff after returning home. I'm actually not done with the series yet. Almost! Just a few more episodes. But I do have a few episodes I've already watched but haven't written about yet.

I've invoked what I call The Star Wars: Rogue One Rule several times in writing about Better Call Saul. A major character introduced in the prequel who doesn't appear in the original is doomed. Else, how do writers explain why that character wasn't in the original, without creating massive story discontinuity? While I've invoked that rule several times musing about one of BCS's protagonists, Jimmy's BFF and later girlfriend then spouse Kim Wexler, it also applies to the villains. And in episode 6.08 we see why Lalo Salamanca, head of the Salamanca branch of the drug cartel and Gus Fring's chief rival for two seasons, isn't part of the story in Breaking Bad.

( Spoilers! (click to open) )

The 2023 Second Edition corebook, TECHNOFANTASY, and more

Bundle of Holding: Fantasy AGE 2E

On Sunday it wasn't just "Screw being sick, I'm going to the hot tub". After a week of being too tired from jetlag and busy-ness at work to do anything relaxing other than sleep I was getting stir-crazy; stir-crazy in a way that just going to the pool wasn't enough to rectify. For a few weekends before our trip to Italy I was yearning to get outside for a hike locally. Alas, one or both of us was always too tired then, too. And now this weekend I'm sick? Screw being sick, I'm going hiking!

Hawk, mindful of the fact I'm struggling through being sick with a cold, suggested we could hike at Byxbee Park, a nearby favorite at the edge of the bay that's flat and has plenty of options for short hikes. I countered that No, I've been yearning for something further afield. So we headed up into the mountains for another regional favorite, Russian Ridge in the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District ("Mr. OSD")



As always, I like Russian Ridge because of the sweeping views it provides from atop a ridge in the coast range mountains. From the east side of the ridge (not quite pictured above 😂) you can see all around the San Francisco Bay, from San Francisco itself in the north to San Jose in the south, to Mt. Diablo and Mt. Hamilton in the mountains on the other side of the bay.

Oh, and from this side of the ridge...



...You can see out across the Pacific Ocean. Which is all socked in with fog today, as it often is. That's one reason why we're rarely like, "Let's go to the ocean!" when we live less than an hour away. Most days the view's better up here in the mountains.

BTW, that mountain near the middle of the frame above is Mindego Hill. After seeing it in this vista from Russian Ridge for years we figured out how to hike it a few years ago. Seeing it this weekend reminds me that we should plan another trek out there.



Most of our past several trips to Russian Ridge we've come up here earlier in the spring, or even in the winter. That's because it can be hot in the summer, and the grasses are all brown. We were surprised it wasn't all brown already here in June. And there are wildflowers, too. Not a lot, but definitely patches here and there. We thought they'd all have burned off by now.



Even when we aren't gazing at far-off views from the trail, Russian Ridge is just such a mellow place to hike. Partly that's because there are a lot of rules here. Dogs are prohibited and there are speed limits for bikes, for example. Rangers enforce the rules. We met a ranger at the start of the hike and chatted about things. No, he doesn't spend his whole day writing speeding tickets for dogs and cyclists. Sadly his most common trouble call is some speeding dipshit wrecking their car or motorcycle on the highway outside the preserve. It's technically outside his jurisdiction as a ranger, but when there's an accident and an injured person up in the mountains, the closest emergency responders answer the call. FWIW, I own a sports car, and on a beautiful day like this I think it's lovely to drive the speed limit and enjoy the beauty all around me.



I began this hike with a particular route in mind, one that traverses many of the highlights of the area without being too long or having too much climbing. Partway into the hike I was feeling bullish and thought maybe I'd extend the loop. That's another one of the great things about Russian Ridge— there are a bunch of connected trails here, making it easy to hike a longer route or cut it short.

Alas, though I was feeling bullish partway into the trail, by the time I got to the bottom of the hill I realized there was no way I was going manage the long version today. It'd take my remaining energy just to get back to the trailhead via the shortest route. That's not bad, though. I did 2+ miles and several hundred feet of ascent while sick with a cold!

In beauty I walk. Even if I'm achy and coughing up phlegm.

No rules, no bureaucracy, just some randos messing around with the past, present, and future.

Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale

2000: The theft of an Enigma Machine comes too late to play a significant role in World War Two, Sellafield highlight British dedication to nuclear saafety, and the Conservatives, informed polling has them 2% ahead of Labour, discover that they are actually trailing by 13%.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2000 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Distraction by Bruce Sterling
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Silver Screen by Justina Robson
The Bones of Time by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Time by Stephen Baxter

I'm still sick with a cold. And I expect I will be for a few more days. But, dammit, I am sick of being too tired to relax this week. I will not let being literally sick and tired on the weekend stop me from enjoying myself! So I went out to the hot tub again this morning, like yesterday.



I even sat out in the sun again after enjoying a soak in the hot water.

Ironically I am a bit less tired while being sick than I was before I got sick. Maybe it's because I'm getting a bit more sleep now? At any rate, I am determined not to let this mild bout of sickness— and so far it is mild, thankfully— keep me from doing pleasurable things.

I swung by Old Goat Books to pick up a book I ordered, which meant I was in the right place at the right time hear the confused customer next to me ask "What's speculative fiction?" Which, after I explained what it meant, was followed by the question. "Do you know anything about Andre Norton?"

It was only with great effort that I resisted shouting "BEHOLD! I AM Marshall McLuhan" before helping.

A local pizzeria, A Slice of New York, has had a sign out for months that they're closing soon. Now they have a sign showing a date: Next Saturday.



This restaurant has been circling the drain for several years. The pandemic was tough on many restaurants, but this one did the WTF coming out of the pandemic of reducing their hours in late 2023 to just one and two-half days a week. At the time I mused they wouldn't make it a year by cutting their own revenue so badly. Somehow they held on for 18 months. (I wonder if the landlord had given them a sweetheart deal and it took them this long to raise the rent to market rates. Or for an eviction to work its way through the courts.)

I have mixed feelings about seeing this pizzeria go under. I used to love this pizzeria. When their pizza's good, it's great. But for the past few years now, more often than not their pizza has been left sitting out too long. It's usually dried out and sad looking. Half the time I've gone in there recently I've turned around and walked out after seeing the choices. It's become an in-joke between Hawk and me; I've got to have a "Plan B" for where else to eat any time I try to go to this pizzeria.

A decrepit fleet sails from Germany to play its role in a futile war, crewed by sailors who seem more eager to kill each other than the perfidious Australians.

The Heirs of Babylon by Glen Cook

Best Novel: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK)

Best Novella: The Dragonfly Gambit, A.D. Sui (Neon Hemlock)

Best Novelette: Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being, A.W. Prihandita (Clarkesworld 11/24)

Short Story: Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld 2/24)

Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction: The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts, Vanessa Ricci-Thode (self-published)

Best Game Writing: A Death in Hyperspace, Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Infomancy.net)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Dune: Part Two by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve (Warner Bros)

Kevin O'Donnell, Jr Special Service Award: C.J. Lavigne

I was too busy all week to use the pool even as the temperatures have gotten warm. I was too tired in the evenings to use the hot tub as I'd been waking up at 4:30/5am all week due to jet lag. So tops on my list for today, Saturday, was "Relax at the pool, dammit."

Today I even slept in 'til a leisurely 6:30am. But a new wrinkle appeared. I am sick. I've come down with a cold, probably from my quickie trip to Phoenix Mon/Tue. The sickness is slowing me down, but I'm not going to let it keep me from the pool, dammit!



This morning Hawk and I soaked in the hot tub. After lunch we went back out to hang out by the pool a while. Between the weather being not quite as warm as the forecast promised and my achiness and fatigue from this cold, I didn't feel like swimming or even wading in the water. But I did enjoy sitting on the deck for a while, in the shade, a cup of punch in hand.

Sadly, because the aches and fatigue, even relaxing by the pool took a lot out of me. I went back inside after an hour or two to lie in bed until dinner time.

Earlier today I posted about bringing home a bit of money from Italy as a souvenir. Sadly, no, it's not ancient denarii or sesterces... though that would be awesome if we did! It's just a few dollars worth of modern coins. They're not even particular to Italy because they're Euro. There are 20 countries that use Euro.

I'm not much into souvenirs from foreign countries. So many of the things sold as souvenirs are stupid crap— and just make the house look junky when displayed. Hawk and I will often buy one thing we agree on as a physical memento, something that means something to us and represents the place we visited. For example, we brought back from our Panama trip a painted wood carving of a harpy eagle. This trip, though, we forgot to shop for a souvenir. 😱

How did we forget? First of all, like I just said, it's not a huge reflex on our part to buy ready-made-for-tourists stuff. Second, there surprisingly weren't gift shops scattered all around Rome prompting us to buy stuff. I mean, that's awesome. It's awesome that a city filled with so much history doesn't have junk peddlers every 3 meters trying to monetize the tourist experience.

Sure, we have all our memories of the trip. But no unique souvenir means that we have nothing physical in the house to remind us of a great trip.

I've remarked before that one simple souvenir I like to bring back from foreign countries is money. On our trip to Italy two weeks ago we got cash from an ATM just in case we needed it. It turned out we didn't. Even the subway in Rome could be paid by tapping a credit card directly at the fare gate. (It was the same with the subway in Panama City... how many more years until this 2010s tech appears in the US?) Thus we strove to spend down our cash but leave just enough to take home as a memento.



There's what was left in our pockets when we headed to the airport last Saturday— €1.47. Or about $1.68 at current exchange rates. Or about $1.98 at the cooked exchange rate the ATM in Italy charged me. 😡

This money now goes in my bagged collection of various foreign currencies I keep in a desk drawer. ...Which I should've checked before the trip... because I already had €5.26 (about $6) from a previous trip years ago. Well, now I have more Euros.

A while back, lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

Whew. It's been a busy week. It's a good thing we came home from Italy Saturday, giving ourselves an easy day at home Sunday instead of booking the trip all the way through Sunday, because I've been go-go-go at work all week.

We've done an "AI innovation week" this week. It's kind of like a hackathon. The upshot is that it's been another 12 hours of work on top of an already full schedule this week.

Where am I finding the extra time for extra work? Would you believe... in the mornings. Well, okay, there were two 9pm+ evenings this week, but I've actually been waking up early every day. It's jet lag coming back from Italy.

I've been waking up at 5am, give or take 15 minutes, every day this week. But rather than toss and turn in bed I've been getting up and starting my day. I'm not starting work at 5am but getting some of my personal time in. Then I've been starting work at 6:30 or 7am.

This is an approach similar to what I started doing when I was traveling to Asia frequently for work many years ago. Traveling 8-9 time zones west I'd wake up stupid early in the morning for the next 5-6 days. Rather than suffer the jet lag I decided to make it work for me. I'd start my day as early as 4am, getting things done before breakfast and going out to meet clients for the day.

The only drawback to this approach of starting each day early was that I'd poop out early. And that's been happening this week, too. Last night I laid down for bed at 7:30pm!

Now that the work-week's winding down I hope that my jetlag will wind down, too, and I'll be able to get back onto a normal schedule this weekend.

I haven't read any dreamwidth for a little bit, but over on Facebook I think there's only one non-jewish person I've seen say anything about the fire attack in Boulder on mostly elderly people walking in solidarity with hamas's hostages.

I don't have time to write it right now but I definitely want to write more.

This one's about right: gift link:nytimes - Jews Are Afraid Right Now


And this one is every time I read it a slight bit more infuriating, because it came out in an email blast from new republic, and barely manages to accept that nobody deserves to be hit with a flamethrower, but instead spends all its time on why the act was the opposite of politically useful, as well as a bunch of time on what awful Netanyahu is doing. Violence against Jews is tragic and undermines the Palestinian cause

Readers may remember an essay back in 2021,
Dear American progressives your Jewish friends are terrified by your silence, in which the author knows how so much of the time it seems especially in progressive spaces any attack on Jews is met with discussion of the Middle East.


Anyway, I'm out of time and finding that last reminds me I need to figure out an alternative for pocket.

Veterans Rally today at 2EDT on the Mall near Air and Space, so nearest Metros are L'enfant and Archives. It's also live streamed Unite4Veterans.org, and they've got the Dropkick Murphys.

Later today a vigil at WWII. Stuff with Cliff Cash the rest of the weekend, like at FOX 'news' and Heritage. And Non-cooperation training with FreeDC tomorrow.

Later this evening, I just noticed there's celebrating nonmonagamy with World Pride. I think I'm pretty much missing world pride?

Tomorrow, the World Pride parade. 50501 is walking in it. Acro at Franklin Park to watch the parade. I'm sure all sorts of really cool stuff in the evening.

Sunday, some sort of Pride March to the Lincoln.

Here, we will go to Food Bank in an hour ish, not sure for the evening. There's a kink place if you wanted to drive like over an hour and have sweetie be bored and I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to do.

Tomorrow and Sunday nights I'll be mostly on my own because EverQuest. I do know a couple people in the city, but I think both of them are busy sunday. And borrowing a car I've only driven across town to drive well over an hour feels weird anyway.

We've watched a few episodes of The Last of Us. Last night we watched Constantine.

Wednesday evening into yesterday was very very nice.

There's been a lot of very very nice. Including shower time.

I attended a webinar by one of the people whose research gets us that 3.5% figure for how much of the population on resisting authoritarianism. Just got the recording and additional resources. I feel vindicated in my insistence for the last however many years that divesting oneself of anyone the other side of Center is incredibly unhelpful and one should only do for one's own sanity. Because you need to build Bridges and connections on values.

It's Moon time so there's only so much seducing I'm trying this morning anyway. We will have the house to ourselves for at least part of tomorrow, tomorrow morning at least. Need to figure out what's manageable.

Running out of time. Need to get some coffee into me.

A foundling boy raised by a great snake becomes intrigued by a reclusive calligrapher living near the river snake and boy call home.

Numamushi by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

One more successful Balticon under my belt.

( details )

I haven't even caught up with my backlog of blogs from our trip to Italy last week (they're held up on my time to deal with touching up photos) but already I'm ready with a retrospective. Here are Five Things:

1. Despite a few frustrations around the edges of the trip and a few things that went wrong with the parts my company planned, I very much appreciate being named to Club and getting to go on this trip. There were times I grumbled (privately), Maybe I should skip this trip and plan my own. Well, that would've been expensive. Just the flights alone would've cost us $5,000. The three hotel nights that were included plus the food and misc. expenses were worth another $2,500.


2. The highlight of the trip was our 2½ days in Rome. This was a side-trip we planned— and mostly paid for— on our own. (The Company let us book a stopover on the flights they paid for.) We hired private tours for the Colosseum, ruins of Caesar's palace, the Roman Forum, and Vatican City (the part that's still in my backlog), and augmented that with trekking to the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon (also in backlog) on our own.


3. Hiring private tour guides was expensive, eye-wateringly expensive in the case of the Vatican tour, which cost us over $1,200, but there's real value in it. With guides we saved the time of having to do lots of research and planning ourselves, we avoided waiting in lines and wandering around trying to figure out where to go, and we had someone who helped us ensure we saw the best things we could. Yeah, we could have cut the costs maybe in half by booking group tours instead, but we've had mixed experiences with even smaller, 12 person sized group tours. When time's limited, when it might be years, if ever, before you go back to that place again, go big.


4. Our "beach" resort stay, the part paid for by the company, reminded me that when you're at the beach there's an enormous different in really being at the beach. If you can't just walk out the door of the building, across a pool area, and be on the sand, you might as well stay a few miles away and drive to the beach. At the resort in Chia, Sardinia, it literally was a drive; the beach was 4km away from the resort hotel! As a consequence we went to the beach just once. We could have had more fun going back to our favorite splashy pool resort in Phoenix instead.


5. As much fun as visiting Italy/Rome was, and as little a fraction of the whole as we saw, we're kind of done with it. We're definitely not feeling, "Ooh, let's plan another trip to Rome!" Partly that's because we saw the highlights we cared about; partly it's because there's so much else in the world we want to see, too! I could see returning to Italy specifically for Pompeii, to see the ruins; Venice, for its unique canals; and maybe Florence, for its Renaissance architecture. But I don't think I'd want to spend more than a few days in each.

When a woman looked around her for her husband, who had been right behind her on the stairs but was now nowhere to be seen. I was very worried I was facing a repeat of the time not too long ago when I spent an hour looking for a missing patron.

The missing husband turned out not to have been behind his wife on the stairs after all, so mystery solved. The missing patron I spent that hour looking for was found once I thought about where she had to be to have not been found where we looked: row H or J, somewhere near seat 26.

An arduous journey in a prince's entourage offers a courier escape from immediate, judicial danger, at the cost of an entirely different assortment of dangers.


The Witch Roads (The Witch Roads, volume 1) by Kate Elliott

Pursuing their vow to bring down the government, NDP ... do nothing of the sort.

I wonder if they got phone calls from voters expressing their displeasure at the prospect of an election so soon after the previous one?

Over Memorial Day weekend genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

Italy Travelog #29½
Somewhere near Greenland - Saturday, 31 May 2025, ??pm

We're aboard a flight on Level airlines from Barcelona to San Francisco. Have you never heard of Level before? Yeah, neither had we until a few weeks ago. When we booked these tickets 7-8 weeks ago Level was a subgroup of Iberia Air. Since then they've started flying on their own license. Apparently they're yet-another low-cost European carrier.

What does Level being a low-cost European carrier mean? It means practically everything is an extra charge. You want to pick seats before T-24 check-in time? That costs. (We paid $110 to select half-decent seats 8 weeks ago.) You want a cup of soda? That costs €3. Even a bottle of water costs. That's €2. Somehow we booked on tickets that include basic food and drink— but some of those around us are having to swipe credit cards just to get a shitty airline sandwich.

But, hey, by ponying up an extra $110 several weeks ago Hawk and I at least made sure we have seats together, aisle-window (on an Airbus 330 the seat config is 2-4-2), instead of two scattered middles like on the way out here. OTOH, they are still tight seats, and it's a long flight— scheduled at 13 hours!



It's interesting that our flight path takes us over the tip of Greenland. That's where I think we are right now, anyway. This aircraft's entertainment options don't include a real-time flight map. In fact the entertainment options pretty much suck. And headphones cost €2. And there's no personal device based entertainment. For an airline that just got its license a few weeks ago, their tech is surprisingly 10 years old.

The impact of this old tech is that this is turning into a long flight. There's no worthwhile TV/movies to watch, there's no internet. And it's too early to sleep. We're just 5.5 hours into this flight, less than halfway there, and already I'm ready for it to be over.

The core rulebook in .PDF from SOULMUPPET

Bundle of Holding: Inevitable

there's an emotions wheel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Healthygamergg/comments/1axjiw8/emotional_wheel_a_resource_for_better/

Mission accomplished! Quest completed! Now what...?

Five Stories About What Happens After You’ve Defeated the Big Bad

Exuberant Youko and stoic Airi continue their tour through the remaining wonders of post-apocalyptic Japan. Carpe diem!

Touring After the Apocalypse, volume 4 by Sakae Saito

My on-time flight to Phoenix yesterday was an anomaly. I thought about that as things worked so smoothly— I'd better enjoy this, because it's not the norm. (Except I forgot to pack a shirt.) Because usually this is how things go when flying Southwest:



Today it's back to normal. I got a text as early as 11:16am that my 6:30pm flight was delayed. At first it was a 2 hour delay. Then it became a 30 minute delay. Then 2 hours again. Then 1 hour. Then 90 minutes. The inbound aircraft is in the air now, so that 90 minute delay should hold steady. Thus my 26 hours in Phoenix becomes 27.5, and I won't be getting home— as in, home-home—until almost 10:30pm.

Ugh.

And I've got a full schedule tomorrow starting with a 7am meeting.

Well, at least I get to kick up my heels at PHX airport. But I wish I could kick them up at home, in bed.

In an uncommon turn for famed author Card, he presents a very special boy in very difficult circumstances faced with great responsibility. What will the Young People make of it?

Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists: Mikal's Songbird by Orson Scott Card