1. Breakfast dal. This experiment continues to work extremely well.
2. I have definitely reached the point with the Incomplete White Puzzle where it's speeding up significantly on account of enough pieces are in place to significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that need checking. Today's decision was to start filling in from the bottom edge, where I still had a chunk that was just edge and no middles, because I think that up in the top left (interior) corner I've identified The Missing Piece, and will get annoyed if I wind up with non-contiguous gaps...
3. Today alternating Locate One Puzzle Piece with Do One Useful Job has been nice and smooth and easy. I have got Several things done. Is pleased.
4. Really really enjoying my ridiculous washi tape collection. Today I self-indulgently Added More Week Dividers, including replacing some pre-existing ones that I was Not Enjoying, Actually.
5. ( Exercise & embodiment. )

Earlier this month, Kickstarter backers got access to the early release of Selini, a week before it went into general early access. I've been playing a lot since then, on what the dev refers to as the "great bug hunt." I still recommend the game and I'm excited about it but I'm done with the EA version for now.

I've been playing pretty obsessively. The game has no written language and no dialogue. It does have a visual hint system that will show you, often, what your next objective ought to be. But since this is EA and full release is something like eight to twelve months in the future, it's still kind of rough. What's got me to the point of being "done" is running up against a wall where it feels like whatever I need to do to keep going is either not in the game yet, or I'm somehow misreading the symbols. I've done several things that it looks like I ought to do, but nothing happens. There are some other elements that I know I ought to do, but which are actually impossible at the stage I'm at.

For example, there's a puzzle, with four symbols arranged on four posts. There's a hint screen elsewhere in the room, showing the symbols arranged a certain way. Moving the symbols into that order does nothing. In fact they were already in that order when I found them. There's a lamp you need to light, but no way to actually carry the spark to it, as there are no ways to recharge the spark midway and you run out of time before getting anywhere near it. There's a boss somewhere, I think. A series of red paths appeared on my map, but following them did nothing.

I've played much earlier builds of this game and run into a similar problem. One early build had a puzzle like the four symbols that I spent a long time trying to figure out, only for the dev to admit that wasn't really set up and there was no solution. He is, however, very responsive and on top of things, and every single day there's been an update to the game. One day, there were two updates. I have no doubt he's doing his best here.

I'm just going to step away for a while and go play something where I don't feel like I'm beating my head against a wall. I get the feeling I'm not alone in this, since the final achievements are still showing that less than .01% of players have them, and the fact that I somehow already triggered the credits to roll by defeating a boss ... that respawned? What.

Anyway, good game. Wait for the full release. I'm dropping it for now and hopefully getting some of that time and brain power back, LOL.

I have bagels to make today, along with a pot of chicken chili. I've been writing every day but I need to start putting the fragments into a more coherent story.

I have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.

( Read more... )

What I’ve Read

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher – Another Sworn Soldier spooky mystery with a creepy cave and inhuman intelligences. I liked it, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as the first two. I’ll probably re-read to see if I continue to hold that opinion later. Kingfisher is always a good re-read.

Latchkey by Goldkirk – Long and self-indulgent Batfam fic focus on a young Tim Drake. None of the bad things have happened yet – Jason Todd makes friends with Tim, and Tim’s parents are awful and he’s rescued. The writing is good and there’s probably more I can say, but it just makes me feel content to see someone recovering from a bad situation.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh – A magical school story (NOT my thing) where the main character is an intelligent administrator and instructor who’s also a 38 year old woman in a slow rolling life crisis (TOTALLY my thing.) Honestly, this is a great book and the only failure of the work is mine – I have no tolerance for the kind of Potterstalgic Anglophilia that permeates some magical school stories, and so I would have never read this book if my book club hadn’t suggested it. I am not immune to foolish choices. It’s legitimately good and puts enough work into showing the foulness of English hierarchical society that I could actually trust Tesh to not brush over it. I really enjoyed the main character’s sheer unrelenting busy-ness and the complexities of running a larger school appealed, and the way the school kind of eats her until something breaks. 

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Scholomance Book 1) – Also an author I trust to look at a magical school and then take a hatchet to the hierarchical bullshit built into it! This is a re-read and I enjoyed it a great deal. This book is about capitalism and hierarchy and aristocracy and all the ways El Higgins grows to realize that she’s rather build something new than choose a safe path. Book club picked this series, and the Incandescent, because we tend to do better with a quarterly book club meeting and we need something meaty and complex. These books are going to make a fascinating set of comparisons. This book has zero teachers in it.

What I’m Reading

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Scholomance 2) – This book is doing numbers on my head in the scarcity mindset compared to the last book. El finally gets her hands on some RESOURCES and it changes the whole game and also I fully related to how resentful she is of the past ages she spent scraping by. One of the best elements of this book series is El going from an outsider with no leverage and a deep fear of incurring debts she can’t repay, to the linchpin of a vast network of people willingly supporting each other for the good of it. She’s not there yet, but she’s laying down the foundations. It’s wonderful.

Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die – so far, so good. Cute and funny, more horny than I realized. Do people like sprayed edges on a book? I find them oddly smelly, and it’s a glue-bound paperback, so it feels a bit like putting your money on a nice paint job for a beater car.

What I’ll Read Next
Viriconium

Wednesday Work in Progress – Happy Sock Madness to all who observe! I have one third of a sock done and I am starting the other before I settle down and do the colorwork heel that is currently intimidating me. The qualifier pattern is called Newspaper - - and while it’s not actually that hard to knit if you’ve got good colorwork technique (and I do) the heel style (flap and gusset) is not my preferred mode and I have to secure myself a few hours to really dig into it. Hopefully I can get far enough that get a substantial amount done over the weekend.

Specifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.

I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.

I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.

This should actually be titled fun with HTML lol. Come with me if you want to talk about Spanish verb tenses.
( Read more... )

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Figures Without Facial Features on the Cover
✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Set at a School/University

The Whole Truth by Kit Pearson and its sequel And Nothing but the Truth are a pair of middle grade historical novels set in British Columbia in the 1930s.

The main character is Polly Brown, who begins the story age ten, relocating from Winnipeg to the Gulf Islands to live with her grandmother following the death of her father—an event that's the subject of secrecy between her and her older sister Maud. Shortly after arriving at their grandmother's, Maud leaves for boarding school, leaving Polly to adjust alone to her new life on a small island and deal with the carrying the secret by herself. The second book picks up a couple of years later, when Polly also needs to leave the island for secondary schooling and struggles to adjust to being away while more big changes come to her family.

I read a few of Kit Pearson's books as a kid, and when she came up in conversation recently with a friend, I decided to check out some of her more recent novels. I don't know how her older books would hold up to a re-read for me, but I ended up having a mixed reaction to these two.

They were largely pleasant reads. They're well-written, and if spending time in upper middle-class circles in 1930s western Canada appeals, there are a lot of detailed descriptions of clothes, food, and rural seaside life to enjoy. As someone with an interest in that part of the world but who doesn't have family history there, I appreciated this look into the period.

These books feel like they're in the tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, A Little Princess, Heidi, etc.—stories I associate with girls changing the world around them, whether through action or because of their positivity. But that's not really the deal with Polly, who's a very passive character and doesn't seem to bring anything unexpected to her new community. It's also not a Secret Garden or Goodnight, Mr. Tom situation where it felt like Polly herself was changed by her new home, aside from benefiting from more money and opportunities. Things just kind of work out for her while the least dramatic version of eventful situations unfold around her.

I think what particularly didn't land for me was this sense of complacency with regard to the arc of the moral universe. Polly is shown recognizing injustice and then just...never does anything about it. Her grandmother racially discriminates against a neighbour, and Polly disagrees but then lets it lie. We don't see her ever interacting with the neighbour, or even with the neighbour's son, who's a schoolmate. She has the instinct to give money to a homeless man, but then stops when her teacher scolds her and doesn't help anyone again. She never takes a stand or makes any sacrifice, aside from the one time when it's strongly self-serving, but other characters praise her for seeing the world clearly with her artist's eye, in a way that implies that just seeing is enough and that things will work themselves out over time (at least for those who happen to be the loved one of someone with money and property).

While I was reading, I often found myself thinking how glad I was that the author was avoiding the most predictable conflicts I kept thinking were coming, but by the end of the second book, I looked back and felt like something critical was missing. I don't need big culminating moments in historical coming-of-age novels—I absolutely love A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and could write a whole essay on how it shares a sliver of the same flaw but how all of its positives outweigh that for me—but I needed just a little something more to care about these characters and their fortunes.

( An Excerpt )

ETA: Spoilers in the comments

Yesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by

[description in alt text, better to follow]

Reading. A Variety of books with the Child, including One Fish, Two Fish and A Squeeze and a Squash.

For my own purposes I have been continuing with The Rose Field, Philip Pullman, and I do indeed continue unimpressed. Not enough to stop! But.

I also picked up What Is Queer Food? (John Birdsall) from the library when I was having an insomnia; I have made it most of the way through the introduction but I am not yet grabbed.

Writing. Words... increase.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac catch-up! "While doing the laundry" or indeed "weeding" continues to work quite well.

Playing. Puzzle progresses! I am not calculating current %age but Significant Progress.

I think we did a leeeeettle bit more of our current run of Inkulinati? But it is petering out.

Cooking. Pineapple upside-down banana bread! This time with some ground almond in it. Otherwise I think... very little of note.

Eating. I was very excited to get to try a Neuhaus dark chocolate poppy seed praline, which on the one hand was not actually quite as dark as I would like and on the other has given me Ideas.

Growing. I got some broad beans in the ground?

One (1) duplicate letter from the DWP, which I had actually requested, because the council is apparently incapable of giving me the concessionary rate on the basis of disability without me providing one letter per year from the DWP telling them I'm still disabled, despite the fact that for anything that is not the allotment rent they can work this out from all the other information available to them without needing me to have Special Executive function;

three (3) rolls of washi tape from Sweden, one of which I have been Tempted By for probably actual years at this point and the other two of which are relevant for this year's notebook set-up and I was sad and wanted a treat;

and one (1) book, Citrus: A History, because it was £4.56, on a topic I have previously been interested in, and Interest Has Been Expressed in me yelling about it. (When will I get to it? Unclear, because once I've finished reading The Rose Field I should probably do some more pain reading, but. Eventually.)

(And why have I been sad? I genuinely do not know; my brain has just been having a Sustained Patch of Uncooperative. I would like it to stop. In addition to post, today's efforts in that direction have included a batch of pineapple upside-down banana bread, this time with some of the flour replaced with almond meal.)

Before getting myself onto the mat: all is woe, everything is too much and takes too long, I Cannot Face Cooking, we shall be forced to Resort to Sad Pasta

Ten minutes after getting myself onto the mat and starting moving: ... actually, you know what, stir-frying the purple sprouting broccoli with Stuff sounds both achievable and Vastly More Appealing, scratch the Sad Supermarket plan

It was just warm-up! I hadn't even got the endorphins going yet!

What I’ve Read
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein – I think I get why people love this book so much. Rowan the steerswoman feels like a very centered and clear kind of person. Her calling has a purity to it – to find and share knowledge – and that seems like the kind of philosophical and moral outlook that could be catnip to the right reader. And here I am! Just, the final chapters of this book are just a conversation where she tells someone the truth, and it changes the world. Moral dilemmas, sneakiness, and a rising suspicion that we are living not in a fantasy world, but a science fiction one where some people are keeping secrets.  
Her books are a bit hard to get a hold of but you can buy them via the links on her website, here https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/

Fanfic round up -  Cover of Knight by ErinPtah is just part of an ongoing story of the Disney/Marvel Moon Knight tv show spinning off to cover how our superhero community would handle someone who has multiple personalities. This is part of a long and ongoing series of fics that cover Marc Spector figuring himself and his alters out. It's fun and charming and I think I will read more. 

What I’m Reading Now
City by Clifford Simak – This is a book that came up in last year’s Arisia’s discussion about old classics. The short stories in this ‘fixup’ novel are linked together by interstitial reflections from an academic dog, who is reflecting on the stories as the surviving literature of a post-human earth where dogs are served by self-building robots, but no one can confirm that humans ever existed except as a literary trope. The stories are weirdly prophetic and some are didactic, but, they are making interesting points about the knock-on effects of future technology in small bites, which charmed me. The first story posits a world where the trend towards suburban living, already changing cities in Simak's lifetime, pushed to the point where everyone in the US lives on 20 acre private wilderness retreats and commutes to work by private plane. 
(I have a habit of starting a book on vacation, loving it, and then immediately forgetting I started it when I get home. Trying to break that cycle.)

Latchkey by goldkirk – Tim Drake is semi adopted by the Bats pre-death of Jason Todd, and it’s episodic and charming and indulgent.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfish – The library had this, and so far, I am enjoying the oddness of the thing greatly. It is however a little too spooky for bedtime reading. It was on my To Read list for last week, tho, so we are trending in the correct direction. 

What I’ll Read Next
Monks Hood – Ellis Peters
Master of Poisons – Andrea Hairston
Frankenstein
The Brightness Between Us -Eliot Screfer
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun – Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (I picked this up after seeing that it was beloved by a fic author whose work I recently enjoyed but I have no idea what I am looking at here)
The Craft of Lace Knitting by Barbara Walker
Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country by Emily Tesh
Viriconium by John M Harrison

I also bought some books! 
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers (who I follow on Tumblr) 

The Glass Pearls
To Ride a Rising Storm 
Elisha Barber

Necromancy book club picked The Scholomance Series to read - Naomi Novik 


Other things!
I have decided to try Sock Madness year 20 with a friend. It's a speed knitting competition - you get free patterns for socks, and you must knit two socks according to spec. It's a good balance of technical challenge and friendly competition - I'm nowhere fast enough to get in the running for the actual prize, but merely participating gets you access to all the patterns for free after the actual race is over. It's been a good stretch of my skills in the past - I had viewed it as leveling up! And maybe I don't actually use the socks that much, but I can give them out to people who are sock worthy. 
https://www.ravelry.com/groups/sock-madness-forever

I watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which is a anxiety-inducing character study of a woman who is figuring out, under fairly harrowing conditions, that she is really fucking things up in her life. It's like watching a coyote decide to chew its leg off to get out of a trap, only the trap is a child with complex medical needs and also your own personality flaws. Really good - Rose Byrne deserves the Oscar but I know she won't get it. 

(Which last I took in part because A only discovered last week that many snowdrops have decorative green bits on their frilly inner noses, courtesy of a waist-high planter outside one of our local pubs!)

I actually made this as a protein to go with Meera Sodha's winter pilau, after An End Of Breakfast Dal went really well and for the purposes of using up the chaat masala I made for The Ongoing Cook All The Book Project, freely adapted from a number of recipes (which were The First Few Search Results when I prodded the internet). A is sufficiently convinced that I provide notes herewith in service of being able to repeat it in future.

( Read more... )

Reading. I have FINISHED Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), including both indexes, including The Games Therein, and had a Great time.

Started (just now) The Rose Field, volume three of The Book of Dust (Philip Pullman). ( Grousing; vague spoilers for vol 2 )

so as I say I'm not hugely hopeful for this, but hey, maybe I'm being unfair to it.

Writing. Did you know that getting knowledge out of your own head and into other people's is a specific set of skills that has very little to do with how well you know the things you're trying to communicate? TRY TO LOOK SHOCKED, PLEASE. (6.3k words, and am absolutely in an Iterative Cycle of trying to make the introduction more-or-less work. It is progressing, just... very slowly.)

Listening. I realised that Hidden Almanac was possibly in fact exactly a useful sort of thing to listen to while Wrangling Laundry, and have therefore started again from the beginning, at least in part as an attempt to actually listen to some of the episodes I dozed through while they were playing in the car...

Playing. Incomplete White Puzzle progresses. (Today I have added I think three pieces to the contiguous section, two of which I had already joined to each other as a free-foating lump, and made another couple of free-floating lump connections.)

I think we also did a bit more Inkulinati before I got horrendously distracted by Puzzle. And the sudoku fixation continues, though it is at least ramping down a little.

Cooking. I have been having A Rough Week brain-wise, but I have today managed to make some bread, and I did earlier in the week gently fry up some celery and garlic to add to the mashed potato & parsnip that we were having with Vegetables and Veg Sossij. I think that is about the extent of it.

Eating. VEGETABLES, including a couple of peppers from an overwintered plant. (Restricted diet for a week up until the Tuesday just gone, so the return of Fibre was Extremely Welcome.) Favourite chocolate stars with raspberries. Fruit With Skin On. Lebkuchen. Stollen. Seeds and nuts.

Growing. I think the nematodes (applied as a split dose a few days apart) have dealt? at least temporarily? with the sodding Sciarid Flies? for now?

Lemongrass needs pricking out. Physalis are showing zero indication that they have any intention of germinating, which is mildly annoying. There are still three not-dead Lithops seedlings, though I doubt they're the same three as last week. Orchids getting increasingly enthusiastic about their plans to flower.

Have not managed to get anything else sown, yet.

Observing. Lots of bulbs: daffodils and crocuses various and snowdrops are Definitely Underway, at this point. We are fairly convinced that the Yelling from the garden around dusk is Amorous Foxes, though we have not (yet?) bestirred ourselves to ask the internet if what we think we're hearing is in fact what we're hearing...