tozka | Newest

Took a few weeks off from social media and came back to sad news about spikedluv; she was really great and I'll miss seeing her around here.

Internet Stuff

"Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.

We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same." - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Erin Kissane

Books

Some very interesting upcoming queer SFF books on this list from renay of ladybusiness -- I added like 6 books to my TBR/wishlist
rachelmanija posted a transcript of an interview she did about starting her bookshop
The Classics Club is a long-running reading challenge/club focused on reading and writing about classic books-- 50 books in 5 years, actually.
Found a new-to-me small publisher: Space Wizard, "an independent publishing house focused on telling great science fiction and fantasy stories with queer elements and under-represented people."

RSS Feeds

The K6 Project (RSS) -- covering the different re-uses of the iconic red phone boxes found throughout the UK!
Live Laugh Blog (RSS) -- fun personal blog with many millenial-nostalgic aesthetic things that make me happy
Tedium (RSS) -- online magazine focusing on "tedious" things; example: the history of the magalog aka magazine-catalog

I also subscribed to the Persephone Books monthly newsletter, as I read two previous issues and enjoyed them. They're subtle marketing, more about vibes, focused on sharing things similar to Persephone Books/the people who enjoy them then about blasting sales info or whatever.

<- previous linkspam | link library | all link posts ->

This is one of those niche 90s songs that if you missed it when it first came out you probably haven't heard it since then-- I'd still be in the dark, myself, except it was played on BBC Radio 2 the other day before an interview with Baz Luhrmann and it was so weird I had to look it up on Wikipedia and then listen to it again a few more times.

Crossposted to

onesongaday

It's another rainy/drizzly/grey day here and that means I get to cuddle with the cat under a heated blanket and read books! Yay!

I'm currently 150-ish pages into Sailing Alone by Richard J. King which is a deep dive into the memoirs/adventures of people who sailed across oceans on their own.

It's more about the reasons why someone would do that than a how-to, and each chapter or so focuses on a single sailor but ALSO compares their experiences to other sailors and how they're all intertwined-- including how they've influenced the author's life. It's really well-written; I love travel memoirs/travel histories in general, but this book takes pains to highlight people besides the big names (aka mostly rich white men), so I'm even more interested! And now I have a huge pile of books added to my TBR, too.

I also recently put down George Sand's A Winter in Majorca, which is a travel book about her time spent in Mallorca in the 1800s. Despite a decent first chapter I found it fairly boring (it's one of those ones where the traveler hates nearly everything about the country/people who live there), and the physical book is a pain to read because of the extremely tight binding, so I decided to give up on it for now. Maybe I'll come back to it as an ebook, or maybe I'll just read one of her other books instead.

First book: Adventure in Zanskar by Amy Edelstein, a travel memoir with a heavy Buddhist spirituality slant, about a 20-something hiking a mountain range in far-north India in the 1980s.

I actually really enjoyed reading this; I generally enjoy travel memoirs of women doing adventurous things PLUS I love travel memoirs that take place before cell phones. That, plus the author really had a great time on her trip and loved meeting local people, and the introspection stuff that's typical of a 20-something trying to figure out what to do with her life wasn't as annoying as it might've been because it was tempered with Buddhist philosophies.

Downside is she falls heavily into the "things are so much better for this primitive uneducated society because they don't have technology or money" mindset which is very surface-level, tbh. Maybe they're truly happy, maybe they're just showing you, an outsider, a positive face.

Second book: Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan, translated by Jean Hawkes, another travel memoir but this time from the 1800s. It's basically about a French woman traveling to Peru to try and get some family inheritance, and then getting caught in a civil war.

She's an excellent writer (and the translator did a great job) but she definitely has the old-school traveler mindset of "everything but my home country is horrible"-- she hates the food, the people, the location, etc. Her personality is quite funny, though; she kept saying she could run the country if only she could find the right man to partner with, but she couldn't even convince her miserly uncle to part with any money for the 9+ months she lived with him. Ha!

Civil war coverage was a slog and took up a good 1/3 of the book-- which was edited down even more from the original, actually-- and while it was interesting to read about 1800s Peru the fact that the author hated nearly everything about it made for rough reading. I WOULD read her other books, though, one of which is about traveling to England (The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842) and another about labor reform in France (not sure if this was translated into English).

I don't usually do yearly goals or whatever because I inevitably get bored and give up on them, but I think I'd at least like to make a list of things I'd ideally like to do for this year, and keep them in the back of my mind.

Here's what I've got:

1. Don't shop on Amazon, with an exception for a Kindle Unlimited sub if/when I get a discount offer
2. Buying used is preferable, when possible
3. $50/month allowance for books (paper or ebook)
4. Learn new skills (tbd)
5. Go on walks
6. Try something new/be open to new experiences ✨️
8. Don't worry about money

Some of my though processes for these under here: ( Read more... )

Welcome back to another Community Thursday! Original Community Thursday info here, if you're interested and want to participate, too.

Posted/Commented

Rec'd a Star Wars fic for fancake's January theme of "crack treated seriously"
Also voted for next month's theme in fancake

New-to-me Comms

vkotd -- Visual Kei of the day! A song-sharing comm focused on Japanese rock bands
fanmix_monthly -- recently-opened fanmix community
pkmnkinkmeme -- a new Pokemon Kink Meme comm!

Interesting Comm Posts

goals_on_dw is doing a slightly more formal Community Thursdays thing this year

The rain let up yesterday so I went into town to do some thrifting! I spotted some interesting knick-knaocks, like a tiny Limoges decorative bowl and some bone china stuff but nothing that wowed me (or that I wanted to haul around until I get back to the US, for that matter). I DID find a decent book selection, though! I got 5 books for £17/$22 USD, which I think is pretty good.

A stack of 5 books on a kitchen table

Titles:
1. Viva South America by Oliver Balch
2. Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving (comes with a soundtrack CD!)
3. Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
4. I Planted Trees by Richard St. Barber Baker
5. Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan, translated by Jean Hawkes

I'm pretty sure I have at least one of these books as an ebook already, but whatever. Now I need to track down a CD player...

Mood: accomplished

🎬 Wake Up Dead Man: Directed by Rian Johnson. With Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin. Detective Benoit Blanc teams up with an earnest young priest to investigate a perfectly impossible crime at a small-town church with a dark history. 🔗

What I liked: the cast; how the director/writer obviously had an itch to scratch re: Christianity and the State of Things Today and really wanted to Say Something; how it's structured like an Agatha Christie novel almost exactly, or at least some old fashioned one (which in that context the plot pacing makes perfect sense). I also liked the makeup/wardrobe, which didn't glam up any of the actors except maybe Josh Brolin.

What I didn't like: the overly long introduction sequence which focused on characters that made barely any impact and weren't even good red herrings; the people who need to hear about the kinder Christianity stuff wouldn't watch this movie anyway so it ends up kind of like, well...preaching to the choir.

Unbeknownst to me, my parents were watching it on the same day-- but it turns out that we liked/disliked almost the exact opposite things. They loved the long intro!

Welcome back to another Community Thursday! Original Community Thursday info here, if you're interested and want to participate, too.

This time I focused on posting to comms that haven't had a lot of engagement recently, partly just to show other people who may be looking that, yes, someone is interested in this topic! I'm going to keep doing it for January, too.

Posted/Commented

Posted some podcast recs to podjoy (last post 236 weeks ago)
Copied over a news post from Bookcrossing.com to bookcrossing (last post 391 weeks ago)

New-to-me Comms

gamechangerhr -- a fan comm for Heated Rivalry/Game Changers
bookclub_dw -- a monthly book club! The January book is The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst and the discussion goes up at the end of the month
vintageads -- a community for sharing vintage ads from TV, magazines, etc.

Interesting Comm Posts

bookscorpion posted these lovely photos of a cemetery covered in snow in common_nature
wiscon has a form up for suggesting panels for this year's convention
sixbeforelunch posted a nice reading journal setup in journalsandplanners
unclutter is doing a January challenge; this week's focus is work spaces
and here's some more fandom comm recs on fandom_on_dw

🎬 The Residence: Created by Paul William Davies. With Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito, Molly Griggs, Ken Marino. Inside the White House's staff residence and the lives which workers share with the First Family. 🔗

Binge rewatched The Residence today and I liked it much more this time around (tho I still think it's a bit too long).

In my first watch, I was too anxious to get to the solution and it became frustrating when they went on tangents. Knowing the solution and watching it again was much more fun. I enjoyed the humor more and caught some things about the murder motive that I missed the first time around.

I wish they'd do another season, or even a movie! I love the Cordelia Cupp character.

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watched: wake up dead man (2026)

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