sovay | Sovay's Friends

My face is still mildly distorted from last week's gum graft - green-yellow bruising, puffy jaw, unevenly flattened smile. It irritates me more than it might otherwise, because it's on the left side of my face, which is the side that looks like me. I can't say it's my "good" side, exactly; neither side is bad, and the right side is probably prettier. But it's my left profile I identify as myself when I look in the mirror. The other side, not really.

I'm left-eye dominant, so it may fundamentally be that when I look at my profile in the mirror with my left eye, I have an easier (more comfortable) time processing what I see (left side of my face). I look at photos binocularly, and don't have the same alienation from my right profile in photos.

All of this has made me wonder whether other people's preferred self-profiles align with eye dominance.

Current Mood: curious

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a dear friend, and I read an earlier draft.

I'm so glad we're finally closing in on the day when the rest of you can talk about this delightful weird book with me. If you've been reading John's short stories for all these years, rest assured that this book has the same heart and the same absolutely fresh take on the world and its structures. If you haven't, what a treat you have ahead of you! Go forth and read!

This book, though. Okay. Ellie looks after the structure of the universe far more than most of us with physics training. She regularly visits the skunkworks, an extra-universe space that allows for tweaking and re-coding the laws of this and other universes. John puts the physics in metaphysics here--there's a whole community of people dedicated to this work in a way that's a lot more like a branch of engineering, architecture, or software design.

Unfortunately, most of that community has been poisoned against her by her self-righteous, violent, and gaslighting-prone sister Chris. And when their mother dies, Ellie is left scrambling against changes in the laws of physics themselves. She's not sure who she can trust. Thank goodness for her hulking cousin Daniel, the most food-focused metaphysician you'll ever meet.

So yeah, you'll be intrigued, you'll be hooked, but you will also be hungry. Maybe it's that John and I have similar taste in food (the bao! the brussels sprouts! WHAT DID YOU DO TO THAT EGG TART, CHU), but I was on the edge of my seat mostly to find out how Ellie and Daniel would beat Chris's machinations but also a tiny bit to see what food item Daniel would come up with next. I always knew that cooking was crucial to the maintenance of space-time. Soon the rest of you can see why. Highly recommended.

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: shook

minoanmiss

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thistleingrey

Across several weeks of wandering---

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020): many words proportional to ambiance/plot, such that I began almost to resent how often my finger had to tap the screen. Though I appreciate how the setting lets Osman juxtapose well-observed characters who wouldn't otherwise acknowledge each other---the members of the old-folks community are more interesting than the middle-aged and younger adults---I couldn't have read this story a few years ago. OTOH, I did finish reading it.

Rena Rossner, The Sisters of the Winter Wood (2018): paused since more than a week ago in ch. 19 (22.5%). I ran out of curiosity there. If I want the story to be doing a bit more than it does, that's a me-problem.

Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School (2019): paused at 5% to save up Painter's voice, for times when I'm pickier. Painter retired from teaching at Princeton to undertake a BFA and MFA at RISD. My classes are remote, my degree smaller and briefer, and I'm not 67 yet (Painter's age upon pivoting), but it's lovely to find an aware fellow-traveler in her text.

I've reached 68% in Grace Cho's Tastes Like War, up from 20something %.

I've DNFed Sherry Thomas's A Ruse of Shadows at 4%, which may be a record---it's within the reprise of recent events. I ran out of curiosity there.

I've dipped into Carolyn Lei-lanilau's Ono-Ono Girl's Hula (1997), whose short publisher's page erases her and me as potential readers: "If you think you know something about what multiculturalism means in real life, read Carolyn Lei-lanilau and think again." Eh, bite me. The title indicates performance outright, so being irritated by yet another trifle constructed for mainstream readers is a me-problem. Either I'll get over it before the library wants the book back, or I won't.

I'm currently at 10% of Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl (2023), a continuation of Memories of My Ghost Brother.

aurumcalendula

I'm kinda tempted to make a Wikipedia account so I can update Mary Lambert's discography - her page is missing the singles Tempest from last year and Minneapolis from last week.

imho they're both really good songs.

osprey_archer

What I Just Finished Reading

Kate Seredy’s The Open Gate. Driving toward their destination for summer vacation, a New York City family pauses at a farm auction. No one is bidding on the farmland itself, so Granny cunningly suggests to Dad, “Why don’t you bid? Just to get things started?”

“DON’T YOU DO IT, BOY!” I shouted, but as so often happens, the characters ignored my wise advice.

Of course Dad wins the farm. Of course, the family has to stay the night, and having stayed one night, they have to keep on staying. And then Granny goes to another farm auction, promising piously not to open her mouth to bid–

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH TO BID AT AN AUCTION!” I shouted at Dad, who once again foolishly failed to listen to me. He accepted Granny’s promise, and Granny promptly rules-lawyered the farm into two cows (both pregnant) and two horses (also both pregnant) by bidding with a twitch of the hand.

I am all for people going back to the land if they want to, but I prefer stories about it to feature people who actually want to, rather than people who get bamboozled into it by Granny.

Multiple people have recommended Uketsu’s Strange Houses (translated by Jim Rion), and it did NOT disappoint. The book is a mystery based around floor plans, and I am happy to report that there are indeed MANY floor plans (I love a floor plan), which makes the book an even zippier read than you might guess from its size.

Now, do I think the mystery is “plausible” or “makes psychological sense”? Well, no, not really, and if it took longer to read that might have bothered me. But the floor plans and the pacing make the book fly by, and I enjoyed it for what it was, which is an amusingly bizarre puzzle box mystery with, let me repeat, enough floor plans to satisfy even my floor-plan-mad self.

What I’m Reading Now

After years of procrastination, I’ve begun Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Happy to report that this ALSO features a floorplan in the endpapers. All the rooms are lettered, but curiously the key only includes some of the letters, so we are left guessing just which room Q might be.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously I need to read Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, too.

lauradi7dw

Three years ago I posted about flag football for grownups.
https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/729969.html

This morning I learned that the NCAA has made women's flag football an emerging sport eligible for scholarships. Here's the roster of the Alabama state team (I don't know any more about them than this link from someone on twitter)
https://bamastatesports.com/sports/womens-flag-football/roster/2025

lauradi7dw

I love the way the sounds (real or added) of the weapons and the background music are synced in part of this.
I have not seen its animated predecessor, presumably also named Blades of the Guardians.
I have seen and enjoyed the video of one of Jet Li's 20-something daughters going through his closet of almost identical black shirts ("this one is older than you") to style an outfit.

Watch on YouTube

I feel obliged to mention that I am not oblivious to the world. Being terminally online, I saw video of the attack on Ilan Omar at a town meeting last night (she's fine) within minutes of the occurrence. She has security people but it was a room full of concerned constituents and Omar acted like she was going to go after the guy herself if other people didn't grab him. Then she resumed speaking, despite the pleas of her staff.

In the local part of the world, I finished my driveway but have only done part of the walk. I cleared enough of the front that I thought it would be possible for the letter carrier to come, but no mail has happened for the past two days. The weekly Wednesday gathering outside the ICE building in Burlington has been cancelled because the sidewalks and parking spaces are still deep in snow. There are a few observers there most of the time and they will go, but not the bigger crowd with speakers and singing.

conuly

and god, I love her so much. She truly is a sweet and gentle kitty.

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asakiyume

I've been reading Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo because it was our book group book. Usually I can take or leave (or prefer to leave) our book group books, but this one I expected I'd like, because I loved Acevedo's The Poet X (ended up teaching that one in the jail). And I am liking it! So much that although the book group date came and went, I've kept on reading it because I want to finish it.

It's about two generations of Dominican women, whose life stories we get in bits and pieces around the occasion of a living wake that one of them is throwing for herself. The characters, their lives, the language--it's all so vivid. I marked this, one woman (older generation) talking about her older sister:

The person I've hugged most in the world, beside my own offspring, has been Flor. It was she who carried me on her hip. As a child, hers was the first body I remember vining around, the way climbing plants claim homes.

Also, the women all have gifts. One has dreams that foretell when someone will die. Another can tell if someone is lying. Another can salsa like nobody's business. And one has an alpha vagina ;-)

( cut for frank talk about down-there )

I've been surprised and delighted by how much I'm enjoying this character's thoughts and experiences with her gift. The book is overall super sensual and VERY sex positive.

I'm also still reading and enjoying Breath, Warmth, and Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne, but I had to put it aside to read this one. But this one is nearly done, and Breath, Warmth, and Dream is very easy to fall back into.

sabotabby

Just finished: Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, edited by Dianna Gunn. There are enough good stories in here that I'd recommend it, but the general problems—earnestness, literalness—persist throughout many of the stories. Ah, author-led anthologies.

Neosynthesis, edited by Bryan Chaffin. Speaking of! This almost had the opposite problem, which is a bunch of stories where I actually didn't know what was going on at all and couldn't orient myself. But it's rescued by quite a few standouts—Rohan O'Duill's Cold-verse short stories, especially "The Lore of Seven," "Nova Domus," which is about a spaceship becoming a person, and "The Nexpat," which is about life extension and virtual existence.

I also flipped through the winter edition of "The Colored Lens," though I ended up just skipping ahead to J.S. Carroll's "Romeo Popinjay vs Iron Hans in the Beauty and the Beast Match You Won't Want To Miss," which was what I bought the anthology for, and which is 1000% worth the cover price. I want an entire novel of this short story. It's about an alternate universe where other hominids survive into more or less the present era, and feature in sideshows and pro-wrestling. Two heels—one human, one a wildman—end up forming a strange and touching friendship and rebel against their promoter. It's so so good.

Currently reading: I think next up is going to either be the rest of the aforementioned anthology or Changelog by Rich Larson, since that's what's sitting on the top of my TBR pile.

troisoiseaux

Finished the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, technically for the first time— I've read bits and pieces out of order when encountering the different installments at bookstores or libraries, but this was my first time reading the whole series from front cover of book one to back cover of book six. I enjoyed this a lot, partly out of teenage nostalgia for the 2010 movie and for living in Toronto - which is so specifically the setting that I recognized multiple specific locations, even excluding the obvious landmarks - but also in its own right as a somewhat meandering coming-of-age story with a high Nonsense Quotient/casually bonkers world-building (the league of evil exes! subspace highways! the University of Carolina in the Sky!). Other than just having a lot more time and space to explore other characters/plotlines than the movie adaptation, I feel like the big difference is that the 2010 movie was taken (presented?) more at face value and so there's this tendency for people to be like Scott is the protagonist but he actually sucks?? like it's some sort of retrospective gotcha, while the comics are like yeah, no, Scott suuuuucks and he needs to grow the hell up. That's literally just the plot!

Re-read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the whatevereth time, in an attempt to mentally reboot with an actual, physical book and something short and familiar, because my brain started sliding off of the various e-books I had in progress. Having first read this at 14-15, it was slightly startling to realize that I'm now the same age as Nick Carraway (for most of the book, anyway: he turns 30 on the day of the ill-fated trip to New York).

Anyway, mental reboot evidently worked and now I'm reading Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay, a 1935 murder mystery set at the fictional Persephone College, Oxford— making, as

sovay pointed out, for two women's colleges of Thinly Fictionalized Oxford which were the scene of criminal investigations in 1935, alongside Sayers' Shrewsbury College in Gaudy Night. (The scandal!)

I've been slightly neglecting War and Peace (see above) but have made a non-zero amount of progress since last week, and one thing that's struck me about this first "war" section is the way that the main soldier characters have a tendency - for now - to fantasize about it...? Nikolai Rostov, who does not have the brain cells god gave a little orange cat, is so distracted by his I'LL BE WOUNDED AND THEN HE'LL BE SORRY fantasy vis-a-vis the commanding officer he has an entirely one-sided beef with that he zones out during his first skirmish with the French (or at least French grapeshot), but even the more mature Andrei has his daydreams of heroics:

As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless situation it occurred to him that it was he who was destined to lead it out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift him from the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to fame! Listening to Bilibin he was already imagining how on reaching the army he would give an opinion at the war council which would be the only one that could save the army, and how he alone would be entrusted with the executing of the plan.

vass

Books
Finished Evelyn Araluen's The Rot, which was, as mentioned last week, very good indeed.

Reading KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning and Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff.

Tech
Still working the phone side of my tech problems: prolonged backup of All The Things onto a different external drive. But I did also run Slay the Spire on my desktop once, just to confirm whether that would cause it to shut down: it did not. But of course it's less resource-hungry than Hollow Knight.

Garden
Three more ripe tomatoes. I tried to plant some basil, but it didn't survive the heat.

Cats
Ash's nose looking good. Both cats coping with the heat as well as can be expected, i.e. better than I am but still largely horizontal.

Nature
I am a delicate flower and do not like hot weather. This is a problem at this time of year. Slight understatement. But only slight. (My part of the state is not the worst-off. Our highs are low 40s, not high 40s. And I have aircon at home and don't have to go out. It's still bad, and I do have medical conditions that make me more sensitive to heat.)
Also I sustained mosquito bites on my arms while doing my nightly "try to keep the plants alive" water, and am very itchy, which at least has the advantage of being a small problem to grumble about without the undercurrent of constant dread.

Current Events
Australia Day bringing out the racists. Some unmitigated arsehole threw a bomb at an Indigenous elder at one of the Survival Day protests. I didn't protest: couldn't manage the logistics of getting to a protest.
Watching the events in Minnesota and thinking of you all.

conuly

Do you know how hard it even is to get people to protest in this sort of crappy weather? It's cold out!

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poliphilo

I like the story (which I believe is true though I don't insist on you believing me) about the traveller on the inner planes who met an ET and asked them if they'd ever had an incarnation on Earth- to which the ET replied "I wouldn't stoop so low."

Thiis sounds contemptuous but probably wasn't. The ET- insensitive to nuance because English is not their first language- would have done a mind meld and extracted the words they thought appropriate from the Earthling's memory banks- and all they were actually saying was they had no intention of undertaking such a difficult assignment. Earth is known through all the worlds as a particulary difficult planet- exceptionally low vibration, exceptionally low everything else apart from opportunities for learning and growth- and these are exceptionally high. The tougher the game the greater the reward- and those of us who come down here and submit to Earth conditions are acknowledged as stupidly brave....

I also like the story (almost certainly true) about the four year old who told his mother, "I'm bored with this reality; I can't fly, I don't have X-ray vision, I can't read minds....."

tamaranth

2026/016: Nowhere Burning — Catriona Ward

"We're here because we want to understand them, right?"
"Right."
"Not because we are them. Not because it wants us here... You know what they say. Nowhere draws lost kids to it. Are we lost kids too?" [loc. 2044]

Riley and her little brother Oliver live with Cousin. Their mother committed suicide a couple of years before the novel opens: Riley never knew her father, while Oliver's father is dead. Now Riley is biding her time until she can graduate from high school and escape Cousin's brutal regime.

One night a girl in green appears at her second-floor window, and gives Riley directions to Nowhere, an abandoned and ruined mansion that used to belong to famous film star Leaf Winham.( Read more... )

Current Mood: thankful

siderea

Overheard on Reddit, u/Itsyademonboi:

Sorry, Nazis are from Germany under Adolf Hitler, what we have here is Sparkling Fascists.

minoanmiss

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muccamukk

I honestly never did finish the last season of 9-1-1 Lone Star because I didn't like it as much after the cast change, and the new stories weren't grabbing me. Then I changed streaming services, and couldn't be bothered to find it another way.

But I was looking at what was on Crave, since I have that right now, and saw that there was a new show called 9-1-1 Nashville, and thought I'd give it a whirl.

Boy, whatever new direction notes they got, were not my thing. It's all about some rich guy and his sons fighting with each other, and a scheming baby mamma, and we basically don't meet any of the other characters in the pilot. How on earth did they talk Chris O'Donnell into this nonsense? He can't be that hard up!

Plus the rescues were just very silly. And this is by standards of the 9-1-1 franchise, which is already extremely silly. This girl gets carried into the air by a kite! Not like a special kite, just a... regular one. A tornado is bearing down on a country music festival and they save it with the power of heart!

I vaguely considered watching the second half of the pilot before deciding there's got to be other trash shows I'd enjoy more. When is the new Stargate show happening?

I think if you're interested in foe-yay half brothers who want to fuck, you might be in business?

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Myth Happens

Sovay's Friends

profiles in profiles

The Subtle Art of Folding Space, by John Chu

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Wednesday Reading Meme

Not quite instant gratification

the trailer is probably enough for me

My precious Callie is sitting on my lap, purring up a storm

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Both the news and the weather continue awful

This Reality

2026/016: Nowhere Burning — Catriona Ward

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Letters from Minneapolis

I'd like my trash TV paramedics to be a little less trashy!

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January 2026

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