I'll never see my mom's guitar again
Jun. 10th, 2025 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
From This Day Forward by John Brunner
Jun. 10th, 2025 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

The sudden, shocking, return of Shockwave Reader. Will the living envy the dead?
From This Day Forward by John Brunner
The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott
Jun. 9th, 2025 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is the first book in a duology, and it's the kind of duology that's really one book split into two volumes. The end of this book is merely the stopping point of this book, not in any way an ending. If that bothers you, wait around until the other half is out.
Honestly I can't tell you why I didn't love this book. I wanted to love this book. It's a secondary world fantasy where one of the central relationships of the book is an aunt and nephew, and that kind of non-standard central relationship is absolutely up my alley. It's a fantasy world where magical environmental contamination is a major threat, which is also of great interest to me. Sensitive yet matter-of-fact handling of trans characters, check. Worldbuilding that deviates from standard, check. And there wasn't anything that made me roll my eyes or say ugh! It was just fine! But for me, at least, it was just fine. Honestly if this is your sort of thing I kind of wish you'd read it and tell me what you think might have been going on here, or if it's just...that some books and some people are ships passing in the night.
Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale
Jun. 9th, 2025 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

No rules, no bureaucracy, just some randos messing around with the past, present, and future.
Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale
Clarke Award Finalists 2000
Jun. 9th, 2025 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Which 2000 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Distraction by Bruce Sterling
11 (22.4%)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
36 (73.5%)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
38 (77.6%)
Silver Screen by Justina Robson
8 (16.3%)
The Bones of Time by Kathleen Ann Goonan
4 (8.2%)
Time by Stephen Baxter
11 (22.4%)
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
Letter Writers!
Jun. 9th, 2025 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
All that skin against the glass
Jun. 9th, 2025 05:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )
tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.
boring knee update
Jun. 8th, 2025 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I can do more things standing up, and walking around the apartment is easier. However, I seem to have been leaning too much on the other leg, because my left knee started to hurt earlier. Not badly, but enough that I am putting the cane aside for the moment.
update Monday, 6/9: my knees feel mostly OK today. I am still being careful about walking a lot or standing too long. I just got the mail, figuring the two steps down to the mailboxes would be a useful check of how I'm doing. It was doable, but did hurt a little; I'm glad I decided not to go out. (The sidewalk is down another half dozen stairs, which are a bit more difficult than the ones inside, but the main thing is that this way I only had to climb back up two stairs.)
I heard from the GI doctor's office this morning, and have an appointment Friday at 10:30, which will be telemedicine. I hope my knees will be feeling a lot better by then, but if she had wanted to see me in person, I would have called a lyft and taken the quad cane with me just in case.
Timing
Jun. 8th, 2025 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
It was only with great effort that I resisted shouting "BEHOLD! I AM Marshall McLuhan" before helping.
I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet
Jun. 8th, 2025 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Heirs of Babylon by Glen Cook
Jun. 8th, 2025 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

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
Tanks, armored vehicles, howitzers delivered to DC [curr ev, US]
Jun. 8th, 2025 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
WATCH THIS: https://x.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1931375699786334704
Click through to see the video. You really, really should. Sound is irrelevant.
Text: "Tanks, fighting vehicles and howitzers arrive in Washington, D.C. ahead of next week's military parade. They departed from Texas on June 2." Two minutes and forty seconds.
Allegedly that train is a mile long and is transporting:
• 28 Abrams tanks (M1A2 main battle tank)
• 3 armored recovery vehicles (M88)
• 28 Bradleys (M2A3 infantry fighting vehicle)
• 5 Paladins (M109A7 self-propelled howitzer), and
• 28 Strykers (infantry carrier vehicle)
Source: 2025 Jun 6: @USAMilitaryChannel on YT [not official military channel]: "1-Mile Military Train -Texas to D.C. with Tanks, Armor, and More for Army's 250th Parade". I do not know if that source is reputable or if that inventory is accurate.
USA Today is reporting that "The military vehicles will be joined by 1,800 soldiers". (Source: 2025 Jun 6, USATODAY on YT: "Watch: Tanks, fighting vehicles head to DC for Trump's military parade", CW: face full of Trump, alt: screenshot).
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that maybe the guy who attempted one coup already bringing a well-armed military force into our capitol city and, crucially, within artillery-range of the Pentagon, is just throwing himself a birthday party, but also maybe not.
ETA: For those of you confused by this, thinking, but doesn't he already control the military? You might want to watch this video about the rise of Xi Jinping.
Now, obviously, Trump would never play a long game like Xi did. But, 1) there are other ways to achieve the same end and 2) he doesn't have to, because his buddies, the Dominionists, did.
Nebula winners announced
Jun. 7th, 2025 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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
It's morphogenesis
Jun. 7th, 2025 06:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Finally, time to write the book on you
Jun. 6th, 2025 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:
One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.
Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.
Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.
(no subject)
Jun. 6th, 2025 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
Numamushi by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh
Jun. 6th, 2025 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

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