Frühlingsglaube

As promised, ( an Eliot pastiche about hostnames )

Books
Finished reading City of Brass. Enjoyed it enough that I'll go looking for book 2 (in paper or ebook, since the library only has book 1 in audio, and while libro.fm has the whole trilogy, it only has it in German, and while I can understand German well enough to read a book, this is not that book!

I'll be interested to see how I deal with it, when reading at my own pace. What made it a good choice for audiobook despite my missing a lot through my auditory processing issues and the Arabic names and all the different djinn factions and just how crap I am at following action scenes was that I was largely reading it as a captive audience (while driving a car) or while playing phone games in a pit of inertia. So it'll be interesting to see if (as I predict) I end up stalling on paper or ebook whenever I find the characters' choices too frustrating.

That said, I can appreciate how the major characters were all periodically getting hit with the stupid stick. That no one had narrative protection against the narrative's need for them to make obviously bad decisions about which they should have known better.

Finished reading Casey Johnston's Liftoff. I think it's mostly a good program, and that a lot of her advice and cues, applied flexibly, would be helpful to a new lifter, especially one struggling with the terminology and all the unspoken assumptions in many similar beginner programs (e.g. how exactly you do ask to "work in", and whether your warmup sets count, and whether a "50 pound barbell press" means 50 pounds on each side of a 45 pound bar or 25 pounds on each side, or the bar itself plus 2.5 pounds on each side.)

That said, if you're sold on doing the program, then unless you're already a fan of the author's writing or are closely aligned to her ideal reader (able-bodied, not fat-fat woman, struggling with diet issues or an eating disorder specifically focused on food restriction for fear of weight gain or getting bigger, does a heap of cardio but no strength training) I'd advise against actually reading this book. Just skim it for the bits you need to know, less her earnest assurance that with enough pushups you won't need to fear the bench press lead you to sprain something laughing: ( Read more... )

I read the audiobook of Adam Kay's memoir This Is Going To Hurt about his time as a junior doctor in the UK.

I had last heard of Kay back in his med student Amateur Transplants days, and was reminded of that band and their song Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin because a friend on Discord is studying pharmacology at the moment. Since then, he's had a whole career in ob/gyn, quit medicine, came out to his parents, established himself in his second career as a comedy writer, gotten married, had two kids, and wrote three memoirs, one of which was adapted for TV.

This particular book is funny but also a devastating condemnation of the systematic exploitation of junior doctors as a workforce. What makes it even grimmer is knowing that it was published in 2017, and what was coming for his colleagues three years later.

(There's also completely unexamined medical fatshaming and some attitudes to patients that you'd expect from someone working 120 hour weeks and losing his relationship and completely crispy-fried burned out.)

( a couple of the less grim bits. cn: medical grossness )

Also read: Henry Bean's novella The Event, which evoked, idk... feelings? Depth charges? A vast empiness that is somehow also like being on fire?
(CN: Israel/Palestine, war, disaster, suicide, animal death)

Links

Gender Census 2026: nb people, it's this time of year again

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop: this makes me livid. You've heard of "archivists debate ethics of destroying hard-to-find books to digitise them so they'll still be available" and "LLMs plagiarising every ebook they can slurp up", now get ready for "AI companies buying up and destroying hard to find books to digitise them so their model will have that text and no one else's will". I hate it here.

Meanwhile, in the Northern Territory, Member of the NT Legislative Assembly Robyn Cahill, Order of Australian Merit, director of the Darwin Private Hospital, chair of the NT Cancer Council, former director of the Australian Medical Association, explains some science.

Food
Bought an unreasonable quantity of carrots for very cheap (20kg for $8), and must now make soup, curries, pickles, etc.

So far, made fried patties with carrot and leftover dal and rice.

Cats
Dorian's decided he wants to drink from the tap. Any tap I'm running. The bath, after I've showered, is also acceptable, but the sink is preferable. He comes running when I wash my hands.

Books

Finished listening to the audiobook of Monkey King (abridged, Monkey-centric, version of Journey to the West translated by Julia Lovell, narrated by Kevin Shen.) It was very fun.

Tech
Dug out the soldering iron etc that I bought years ago with the annual intention of learning electronics this year. Now to check whether they work and haven't become damaged over two moves and mumble years of storage.

Books
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.

Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.

Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.

That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.

Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.

Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)

Weather
Wet and cold.

Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.

Books
Finished reading T Kingfisher's Paladin's Strength and Paladin's Hope, and then before I could start What We Are Seeking, Radiant Star dropped, so that's what I'm reading at the moment (new books by Ann Leckie have priority for me.) So far Radiant Star is reminding me of Trollope in the way the narrator engages with the reader.

Tonight I gave in and bought this Humble Bundle, a complete collection of Terry Moore's comics (with about a day to at the moment), and am as I type this contending with the problem of downloading and keeping a complete collection of Terry Moore's comics.

A problem for Future Me: reading comics PDFs effectively.

Fandom
No new fic posted to AO3, some ephemera on Discord, a little progress on WIP and drawerfic.

Crafts/DIY
I have been (a bit at a time, weather and energy and light permitting) sanding and then painting not-yet-assembled flatpack furniture, namely two cube type shelf units to go under my living room table, replacing its legs (which are too wobbly).

Games
I've been going through a Slay the Spire 1 situation lately.

Current Events
The news sucks.

Cats
Had their annual checkup/vax, and were pronounced healthy and beautiful.

Okay, well, three weeks behind is better than two months. Hi!

Books
Read T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace for the first time, and found it soothingly undemanding.

Listened to the audiobook of Rick Morton's Mean Streak, about Robodebt, on the strength of how excellent Morton's livetweeting was during the Royal Commission.

I found Mean Streak initially a bit hard going not just because of the awfulness of the subject matter (which I'd factored in) but because of Morton's extended literary riffs (in the first seven chapters, he draws detailed analogies with Heller's Catch-22, Kafka's The Trial, Borges' entire body of work, and Piranesi's Carceri.

Reading this as I was over Easter, I began to anticipate that any moment now he'd go "According to the Christian gospels, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy. Do you know who else was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy? Welfare recipients under Robodebt!" like a reverse youth pastor, but he never did, and eventually I came to understand the analogies as not an excessive and unnecessary stylistic choice but rather the last defences of a mind besieged by Lovecraftian horrors.

There was some levity, though: Morton and his publisher were obliged to allow some of their subjects to exercise their right of reply. He provided space for this as an appendix at the end of the book. There were no real surprises in the politicians' responses, just some unpleasant reminders for readers, e.g. Stuart Robert exists and is presumably the same species as us.

Kathryn Campbell's reply, however, was the funniest part of the whole (admittedly deadly serious) book. It was amazing.

Just knowing she paid her lawyers, plural, to draft and send this document to Morton's publishers for inclusion in his book, is such a wonderful reminder of the wide variety of people in this world.

Morton could not possibly have condemned her as harshly as her own self-defence did.

One of the allegations Campbell disputes, in this rebuttal which took 57 minutes 56 seconds for Rick Morton to read (the whole audiobook being 15 hours 32 minutes) is that she is a micromanager.

Another is that (as Morton stated) the commissioner said she "failed to address in any manner concerns about the illegality of income averaging, despite being aware of concerns about the illegality of the scheme".

Having already argued that Commissioner Holmes was wrong; and then that Commissioner Holmes' above finding was only the commissioner's opinion, not a finding of fact; she then felt the need to stipulate that Commissioner Holmes' wording was not "failed to address in any manner," it was "did nothing of substance".

She didn't say I didn't do anything at all, she said I did fuck all. Unless you correct the record to reflect that the Royal Commissioner's report into the worst public service fuckup of the century (so far) said that I did fuck all, not nothing at all, I'll sue you.

Ms Campbell either has never read Much Ado About Nothing (act IV, scene 2), or she did, and she took it as personal advice and unlike Dogberry had the power to ensure she was writ down an ass.

Currently reading: Sax Brightwell's Low Dawn and the audiobook of Rachel Neumeier's Tuyo.

Fandom
Posted a thing.

Crafts
Got around to packing up and sending another Sekrit Project.

Tech
Started watching a five hour YouTube video about data structures and algorithms, then (half an hour in) spent the evening making a number guessing game in Twine Harlowe, using binary search.

Next time I'll use Python or Javascript or something. I don't care that I don't know Javascript.

The problem is, I keep telling myself I'll just do a quick snack-sized learning activity on my phone, and Twine (or another thing I've tried recently, jsdares.com) will seem so convenient and then I'll be in a self-made hell of how unsuited their web-based interpreters are for mobile, ugh.

Garden
Bought some calendula seeds to sow.

Cats
Their previous favourite toy, the Mousie, is on stress leave: after some gastric issues it was eventually diagnosed with disembowelment.

I'm happy to say that Ash and Dory are welcoming the Mousie's substitute, the Birdie, with full lethal force.

How are you all?

Anyone know why Private Mode might be failing to clear cookies when I close the browser?

(Saving this draft then closing the app to see whether I can reproduce it on Dreamwidth. Yup.)

That's the bug.

Books
Finished reading Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff. I am extremely baffled by the theological worldbuilding choices she's making. What is she doing? Is it on purpose? Where's she going with this? Does she realise the implications of what she's doing? i.e. that this is a fantasy-Anglican religion which somehow managed to replace original sin with something worse?

Read Victoria Goddard's Stone Speaks To Stone, a rollicking boy's own adventure from Jemis' father's soldier days. I get that it was necessary to show the mindset of an imperial subject who "well believed in its civilising mission". I do understand that it was necessary. I just. Ugh. I'm still waiting for the ironic twist to that refrain "he was a loyal son of the Empire." One day Jack's going to learn better, right? Or else Jemis, who fancies himself a revolutionary, will have to contend with his beloved father's role in imperial expansionist wars.

Reading Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon, long after everyone else. It's time. (I still have some leftover guilt and anxiety about the roleplaying game during which ursula conceived this setting, and it's been getting in my way.)

Tech
*whimpering*

Garden
More tomatoes!

Books
Nearly finished Evelyn Araluen's 2025 poetry book The Rot. It's very good. I keep thinking of people I know who would appreciate it, and wanting to shove the book at them and say "here, look". (sovay, you're one of them.) Depression, colonialism, girlhood, death, hauntology, Country, survival.

Listened to Margaret Killjoy's narration of Katherine Mansfield's short story 'A Cup of Tea'. Margaret gave a little context about the story afterwards, including that the main character was thought to be based on Mansfield's cousin, also a writer, whom Margaret herself hadn't heard of. I looked her up afterwards: Elizabeth von Arnim, and went WHUT, Elizabeth and her German Garden? I haven't actually read it, and am not sure how I knew about it, just that it was on my radar. Mansfield's story is simultaneously scalpel-sharp and more merciful than it might have been: the story doesn't attempt to puncture the protagonist's saviour fantasy, or allow it to go as wrong as it could have done, but does make clear in every detail how entirely it is a self-serving saviour fantasy, how entirely she's disregarding the needs, safety, boundaries, and basic consent of the woman she's trying to help. (I thought of the scene in chapter 6 of What Katy Did in which Katy and Clover kidnap an Irish child from her parents and lock her in their attic because they want to "adopt" her.)

Went to the library and borrowed the second Asterix book, having not really given Asterix a chance since I was too young to have any historical context (plus the only one we had in the house was missing several pages, possibly by my own actions at a far younger age.)

Comics
Really feeling for Dina in Dumbing of Age right now. The part about her and Becky is sad and believable, but the part that hit me right where I live was "now even my room is not my own. It's been... ransacked. Strangers have touched... everything." Same fucking autism. I would be out of my fucking mind.

Fandom
Working on my claim for Fanoa'ary, the next Lays server event.

Games
Redactle and Squardle with kaberett, cryptic crosswords with shehasathree.

Little puzzle games on my phone: Breakout 71 (breakout with many possible upgrades to unblock, with a lot of flexibility in possible builds) and Tessel, a tile game in which one rotates multicoloured tiles to match the colours, creating enclosed areas of a single colour. I tend to get way too engrossed in this kind of game and spend too long on it, so I like very much that neither of these two are gamified beyond "actually being a game": no ads, no freemium, no nudging to play at a particular time or for a particular length of time. They're very pausible.

Tech
No progress on desktop problems yet: I'm working on paying down some technical debt on my phones before I try more intensive desktop troubleshooting. In the meantime, no Hollow Knight for me.

Crafts
Finished framing/backing a cross-stitched item which I had intended to give bookgirlwa for her birthday in 2025. Now to wrap it up and send it to her.

No weaving progress yet.

Garden
Two ripe tomatoes (pear-shaped, cherry form factor.)

Cats
Suspicious scab on Ash's nose seems to be healing up okay. *touch wood*

Nature
After a week of more moderate summer weather, we're heading into another heat wave. I hate hot weather, and physically don't deal well with it, but my biggest concern here is fire. Some of the fires from the last heatwave are still burning. The politicians are fighting about the CFA's funding (and yeah, they've been underfunded for a long time and have ageing equipment and an ageing volunteer force, and due to the governments' (plural but including ours) inaction on climate change, the fires they're fighting are getting more numerous and more severe) and there's a distinct scent of manufactured grassroots blame for the Labor state government (and. Like. I don't like Jacinta Allan either! Her authoritarian leanings concern me. But that doesn't mean the opposition would be better, or that a lot of her critics aren't misogynistic or conspiracy-theorists in distinctly Sky News flavours.) Which political digression I find easier to think (grumble) about than the fires themselves. The people and animals harmed already, the likelihood of more and worse in the next week. (And also, personally: the stress of managing my own potential evacuation in a situation where the danger zone is all over the state, my brain's in a constant loop of "but other people have it worse" and it's too hot to think.)

Current Events
It's bad. It's all so bad.

via sanguinity

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 126
3. The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Immortalized in ballads, they became a central part of the mythology of the Australian past.