It's a magical world

source: Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper
audio: Eels, "I Like Birds"
length: 2:31
download: 306MB on MediaFire
summary: Christian Cooper likes birds.

AO3 page | YouTube link

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

Festivids went live on Saturday! I have still not watched most of the vids because I was at an Alex Pretti memorial bike ride on Saturday and then at some transit activist events on Sunday and I am trying to also do an Escapade premiere, but what I have watched has been great. And I got a great gift vid!

I ran the Berkeley Half Marathon 10K again today. Contrary to my ambitions, my time this year was even slower than last year, although still more than 30 seconds/mile better than my worst-ever showing in 2022. I think part of it is that I really didn't put enough training in over the last month for various reasons. And yet my split times actually came down by nearly 10 seconds/mile over the course of the run per the tracking, which does seem to show that I've gotten better at the downhills. 

So yeah, I'm not particularly satisfied with this result, but on the other hand I was once again physically pretty okay afterwards, not completely destroyed like I used to be. I haven't done a great job at integrating 8K or 10K runs into my training plans over the past year, so I think a clear goal is to start doing an 8K run regularly and ideally aim for a 10K once a month or so. And I've also bowed to the inevitable and acknowledged that my shoes really only last eight months at the outside--I bought a hardly used pair of shoes on eBay the other day so I'm looking forward to new ones.

I haven't gotten a race shirt since 2019 because I have more than enough running shirts, and amusingly now that's apparently old enough to qualify as vintage--one woman in the corral was asking me about the shirt, and another dude gave me a fist bump mid-race because we were both wearing the shirts. Pleasingly enough, the "loyal runner" gift this year was actually useful: a running hat that I wore in today's race. Previous gifts have been mostly...more T-shirts...which seems to defeat the purpose of not getting a race shirt.

One final bit of shenanigans: I left the bike station after parking my bike and the keypad went dark behind me. I figured I would deal with that after running the 10K, and the eventual answer (after "Someone else called about this earlier!") was "I dunno, no one's answering because it's Sunday." "Yes, a day of the week." (The entire premise of the bike station is 24/7 access to cardholders.) The dude swore up and down I would get a call back about the keypad status, which of course I didn't, so tomorrow I will have to call them because a) it's not difficult to get back down to the bike station, but I'm not making the trip unless I know I can retrieve my bike; and b) I want a refund of the money I've unwillingly spent on it being locked in there. Overall BikeLink is great! But the edge cases where there's a problem have, in my experience, been extremely annoying. Luckily I was able to call my roommate to come pick me up, so at least that worked out.

source: Star Trek: Prodigy
audio: Kim Boekbinder, "The Sky Is Calling"
length: 3:09
download: 361MB on MediaFire
summary: The sky calls to us/And we go

AO3 page | YouTube link

Lyrics on Genius

Kim Boekbinder on Bandcamp

Made for colls for festivids 2024

New Year's Eve Eve and I have accepted that I will not be finishing any more books in the next twenty-five hours. It is what it is, so here we go with the statistics.

• Books read: 81, of which 4 were a reread
• By gender: 36 (44%) by men, the rest by women and other genders
• By race: 36 (44%) by people of color
• By language: 11 (14%) in Japanese, 11 (14%) in translation
• New books: 21 (26%) published in 2024
• New-to-me authors: 18

...versus 2024 Resolutions

• Read 125 books ==> Fail
• Read 25 physical books owned since 2022 or earlier ==> 14. Not bad!
• Read 35 books by authors of color ==> Success!
• Read 10 books in translation ==> Success!
• Read a volume of manga a week in Japanese ==> Fail. But not all the books I read in Japanese were manga.
• Read all the comics bought before 2024, both physical and digital ==> Fail, but a worthy goal.

General Comments

• John Wyndham, Trouble with Lichen
• Jared Pechaček, The West Passage
• Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil
• Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution
• Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup
• Nghi Vo, The City in Glass
• Ikeda Riyoko, The Rose of Versailles
• Hagio Moto, Poe no ichizoku (1970s series)

I ran the Berkeley Half Marathon 10K again today. Approximately two months ago I finally decided to heed my dad's advice and start running longer so that I wouldn't feel physically destroyed after running the 10k, which happened all previous three times I did it. So I upped my normal 4.5K run to 6K and started switching it up with 8K as well. I have mapped a 10K route as well but what with one thing and another I haven't actually run it yet. Also last weekend I was in Montréal and so I basically skipped a week of training, which wasn't ideal. All of which is to say my time was actually slightly slower than the last one, which was depressing because I definitely did better on the downhills and because I skipped getting water at the second water station, which I did the last three times. Yet, I was still slower.

The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon was really great -- great vibes, great panels and programming, good organization, and an actual sense of accessibility in multiple senses. Definitely the best of the three Worldcons I've been to, and I would really hope the group decides to do it again. 

• People in the UK still smoke like chimneys and I had forgotten that it is absolutely disgusting. This tells me that cigarettes are way too cheap. Incomes in the UK are low! Make smoking more expensive and people will stop!
• Since the UK shot itself in both feet with Brexit, the exchange rate is no longer murderously against the U.S. dollar. It was about 1.67 when I first visited in 2000 and maybe about the same when I went back in 2014 and 2015, but now that it's about 1.28 the prices are pretty comparable to California. Which enabled me to finally realize that price levels even in London are actually pretty low -- which isn't to say that London isn't an expensive city or that you can't spend £££ on everything you want, but yeah, this is definitely a country where the GDP per capita is just 27th worldwide. It's a shame that Labour is ruling out most tax increases, because an actual wealth tax would give them much more money to fund public services and actually improve things.
• The LNER high speed trains are pretty slow for HSR and they need to double the luggage rack space. I suppose since the track isn't elevated/grade separated there's only so much they can do, but they should definitely go faster.
• Edinburgh Waverly is a nice station but it is at or pretty close to capacity, it was a real zoo getting in and out of there.
• They really need to revive HS2. There are still signs up about it in Euston (awkward), and there's really just no alternative. 
• We were able to get around entirely by bus, subway, walking, and train, which is expected in London but I was proud of us in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where the mass transit basically stops between 6pm and 9pm on Sundays and we just wound up hiking back and forth around town. In Edinburgh we went to Craigmillar Castle on foot from Duddingston and then had to tramp through a field to get to the bus stop back into town, which I was very proud of us for. All in all the buses were great and ScotRail is definitely a pretty reliable operator (the £5 convention train pass is also quite nice), except when they had to cancel trains because they didn't have enough staff.
• We took the Caledonian sleeper from London to Glasgow, and then in the seats cabin from Fort William to Glasgow. It was a nice experience and I'd do it again but I will also bring duct tape to stick over the awful bright LED indicators in the sleeper cabins. I have a line on a travel memory foam pillow and a travel pillow that supports the neck and I need to get them.
• I am a museum person, so we ducked into the V&A, which is excellent as always, but my favorite of the trip was actually the Kelvingrove in Glasgow, despite the weird taxidermy everywhere. The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is chaotic, poorly organized and laid out, and crowded. 
• We took a lot of tours and they were mostly pretty cool -- the Barbican architecture tour, the Aldwych Tube stop tour, and a ghost tour in Edinburgh. The latter was through Mercat and yup, the vaults are definitely haunted. I didn't feel anything emotionally, but I definitely felt cold spots and heard some unexplained noises, as did my brother. So if you want a ghost experience, do that tour.
• Edinburgh was so crowded. I was warned, but it's been ~20 years since I was wandering around bona fide tourist areas at the height of tourist season in Italy and Prague, and I'd forgotten. Plus the geography of the Old and New Towns means that there are really only a few north-south streets for everyone to walk on so it's just a bunch of choke points. The Fringe definitely added a fun vibe of markets on the streets, don't get me wrong, but I while I want to go back I would definitely not go back in August if I could at all avoid it. 
• Relatedly, we did a lot of outdoors-y things which enabled us to get away from the crowds--climbing Arthur's Seat and then walking to Craigmillar Castle, hiking the loop trail near Rosslyn Chapel (which we didn't get to see; next time, although why they don't extend opening hours in August is beyond me), going to Kew Gardens and Highgate Cemetery (in the rain; the last time I tried to go see Karl Marx's grave it was also raining and so cold that I turned back, but not this time), the Necropolis and the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow (except the signs in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens were written by a weird anti-vanilla truther??? Sorry, but vanilla does actually have a flavor, you numpty!), going to see the bandstand in Battersea Park, and on my last day in London I went to see the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and ate a chestnut crepe and a chicken cranberry sage Scotch egg from the weekend vendors. We also went to see Grimaldi's grave and wandered along the canals near King's Cross, which was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
• We took the West Highland line from Glasgow to Mallaig, though not the steam train because they are fighting with the regulators about the doors on their trains. Not taking the steam train meant that we had time to take the ferry to Knoydart and have a pint at the remotest pub in Britain, the Old Forge, which is now community-owned and was delightful.
• I really liked Glasgow, and I need to go back to check out the rest of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh buildings we didn't get to see, which makes sense as I had never heard of Mackintosh until I went to the Kelvingrove, despite the fact that we booked afternoon tea at the Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, which was quite good.
• Haggis was very tasty, as was the black pudding. I'm realizing now that we didn't really eat enough Scottish cheese, another oversight to remedy on a future trip. We went to The Aragon in Glasgow, which was fortuitously having its weekly traditional music night, and also had the best Guinness I've had since I was in Ireland. My brother: "This tastes like soy sauce." Me: "That's how it's supposed to taste."
• We ate at Dishoom twice, in Battersea and in Edinburgh, and it was so good. I have the cookbook and I need to see about making the Ruby Murray with tofu.
• I successfully bent the algorithm on one of my Instagram accounts to deliver me Scotland content and we got some pretty good stuff to check out because of it. Between that and Reddit and Seat61, we did pretty well, augmented a little by the trusty Rough Guide.
• My brother and I take vacations that would kill other people. I walked around 130 miles and he walked around 150 since he spent some of the days I was at the con hiking. This was a good one, and also my feet were much less destroyed than when I went to Japan last year (when we walked more miles per day). I mostly wore my hiking sneakers and that was a good choice.
• The Elizabeth line is so good. It would have been so good in 2014 when we were all sitting on the poky DLR out to the Excel Centre. I love it and want it for the States.
• Also London was full of Swifties on our last weekend and it was a fun vibe. Also we walked from Tottenham Court Road to Seven Dials and saw a dude doing heroin in the street in broad daylight. Which makes me realize...I guess people in the UK aren't doing fentanyl? In San Francisco it would have been fentanyl or maybe crack.
• We were pretty conscientious about masking indoors and on transit, with the exception of restaurants and bars, although we did take the opportunity to eat outside as much as possible. I did unmask to eat in the convention center a few times--the Clydeside Bar was right under the HVAC so it felt pretty okay--but I didn't go to barcon in the Crowne Palace at all. It sounds like a lot of people got covid, which, yeah, not surprising. I was expecting more people to mask, honestly, especially since the UK is also in a summer covid surge.

Anyway, it was a pretty great trip. I'm tentatively planning to go back in 2028 for VidUKon, and now that the highway that would have destroyed it has been cancelled (thanks Labour), I would like to go to Stonehenge as well as spending time in Wales. We'll see how it goes. Next time I definitely need to cash out both of my Oyster cards, I tried to do it with one of them on Sunday but was at a machine that didn't take cash. The daily and weekly fare caps in London and Edinburgh are really great, everywhere should have them.

source: Good Omens
audio: Paloma Faith, "Never Tear Us Apart"
length: 3:05
download: 255MB on Backblaze; subtitles on MediaFire
summary: Only Crowley and Aziraphale could destroy Crowley and Aziraphale. Or, the latte theory is a lie. Or: but have you considered Michael Sheen's face??

source: Nimona (2023)
audio: Taylor Swift, "Anti-Hero"
length: 3:22
download: 361MB on MediaFire
summary: Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I'm a monster on the hill

AO3 page | YouTube link

Lyrics on the Taylor Swift wiki

Made for thiswildernessismyhome for festivids 2023

sovay and Rob lost their excellent cat Autolycus to kidney disease and there is a fundraiser to cover the myriad expenses associated with his medical treatment. They have less than $1k to go!