some good things
Jul. 16th, 2025 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett- Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
- First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
- Mulberries! ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
- I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
- My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
- And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
- AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
- We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
- I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
- Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)
Commission me?
Jul. 16th, 2025 03:41 pmsenmutHey all,
Phone started repeatedly throwing bad errors, overheating, etc. I have a replacement on the way (god I hope I did not get ripped off cheap as it was) but if anyone wants to ask for a story in exchange for donations, my ko-fi is here and you can DM or leave a screened comment.
Normal rate is 100 words per dollar. I do typically make a limit of 5K words, but that's negotiable for the right idea.
(This on top of being shorted pay that is STILL not sorted out has made for depression icing on the depressed cake.)
Phone started repeatedly throwing bad errors, overheating, etc. I have a replacement on the way (god I hope I did not get ripped off cheap as it was) but if anyone wants to ask for a story in exchange for donations, my ko-fi is here and you can DM or leave a screened comment.
Normal rate is 100 words per dollar. I do typically make a limit of 5K words, but that's negotiable for the right idea.
(This on top of being shorted pay that is STILL not sorted out has made for depression icing on the depressed cake.)
C.J. Cherryh bibliography
Jul. 16th, 2025 04:34 pmcoffeeandinkSources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves
I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.
Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.
( Cut for length )
Recent reading
Jul. 16th, 2025 04:00 pmegretMysteries by Charles Finch: A Beautiful Blue Death, The September Society, The Fleet Street Murders - These are very pleasant cozy mysteries set in Victorian London where Lord Lennox reads a lot of books and solves mysteries as a hobby. In the last one I read he has married and been elected to Parliament which are both interfering with his mystery solving, much to his consternation. There is a certain amount of flustering over the servant problem as the servants keep insisting on behaving like real people, which Liberal Lord Lennox admits they are but you know society has a structure for a reason. Very charming and entertaining. Originally these were a recommendation from my sister and believe me, if my sister and I both like something, it’s very broadly attractive. I think the other thing we agree is good is Keanu Reeves LOL
Obery M. Hendricks, Jr, Christians Against Christianity - A justified screed on why conservative/evangelical Christians are wrong to support Trump and Christian nationalism.
Tom Bower, Revenge. Scandalous royal family gossip about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. As an American, I enjoy British Royal Family gossip as a soap opera distraction. It’s entertaining to read about PROTOCOL and TRADITION and TASTE and TACKY when it has nothing to do with me. So I read this gossip book from the library during a terrible brain melting heatwave and it distracted me from how hot it was.
Lynette Eason, Too Close to Home and Don’t Look Back. These are from the Women of Justice series of Christian mysteries by Eason. In each one a woman law enforcement officer solves crimes and falls in love with another LEO, often having to lead him first to church and/or Christ. Eason is good at creating genuinely scary situations that keep you in there, and her characters are likable and relatable. The villains are a little wildly over the top and I guessed who the second one was about a quarter of the way through, but I didn’t get bored listening. So I endorse these if you like Christian mysteries. If not, the proselytizing might put you off. Currently listening to the 3rd one which is A Killer Among Us. Oh, did I mention that all the main character women are sisters? So you hear about what’s happening with the other sisters as you move through the series. Another thing these books lean into is the danger of stalkers and women’s safety of movement. I would like to dismiss this as paranoia but it’s really not. I follow a discussion group about walking and people are always sharing their playlists and books for listening to while walking to prevent boredom. I’m always a bit amazed because I never listen to headphones when I’m walking because I need to listen to what’s going on around me to stay safe. I can’t even say this is just a woman’s issue: No one should be so lost in the clouds while they’re walking around in public. Perhaps this comes from living in a city my whole life. But I think even in the country I would listen for bears or something. OK, this is a tangent.
Loves of His Life - Lesley Ann Jones - this is an older rehash/update of her Freddie Mercury biography focusing on his relationships. I pre-ordered her dubious book about his alleged secret daughter, which is releasing on his birthday, but in the process of doing so I found this unread and lurking on my Kindle. Main new contribution is a theory that Freddie was more traumatized by the Zanzibar revolution and the income extremes around Mumbai than he liked to discuss and that trauma explains his avoidance of Africa and India for the rest of his life. (I don’t totally dismiss this theory and add that the one time he did return to Africa — to shamefully perform at Sun City during the boycott — he lost his voice, which sounds psychosomatic as heck.)
Currently: Alaska Twilight by Colleen Coble. Another Christian one that’s not even the beginning of the series. It’s about a wildlife photographer traveling in Alaska to film a guy who gets too close to bears. She has brought a dachshund into the Alaskan wilderness and if that little dog is eaten by a bear I will stop listening. Listening to it because it reminds me of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man documentary and because other things I have on hold have not arrived yet. Still have not finished Herland and have de-emphasized it in favor of writing my fall syllabi.
Obery M. Hendricks, Jr, Christians Against Christianity - A justified screed on why conservative/evangelical Christians are wrong to support Trump and Christian nationalism.
Tom Bower, Revenge. Scandalous royal family gossip about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. As an American, I enjoy British Royal Family gossip as a soap opera distraction. It’s entertaining to read about PROTOCOL and TRADITION and TASTE and TACKY when it has nothing to do with me. So I read this gossip book from the library during a terrible brain melting heatwave and it distracted me from how hot it was.
Lynette Eason, Too Close to Home and Don’t Look Back. These are from the Women of Justice series of Christian mysteries by Eason. In each one a woman law enforcement officer solves crimes and falls in love with another LEO, often having to lead him first to church and/or Christ. Eason is good at creating genuinely scary situations that keep you in there, and her characters are likable and relatable. The villains are a little wildly over the top and I guessed who the second one was about a quarter of the way through, but I didn’t get bored listening. So I endorse these if you like Christian mysteries. If not, the proselytizing might put you off. Currently listening to the 3rd one which is A Killer Among Us. Oh, did I mention that all the main character women are sisters? So you hear about what’s happening with the other sisters as you move through the series. Another thing these books lean into is the danger of stalkers and women’s safety of movement. I would like to dismiss this as paranoia but it’s really not. I follow a discussion group about walking and people are always sharing their playlists and books for listening to while walking to prevent boredom. I’m always a bit amazed because I never listen to headphones when I’m walking because I need to listen to what’s going on around me to stay safe. I can’t even say this is just a woman’s issue: No one should be so lost in the clouds while they’re walking around in public. Perhaps this comes from living in a city my whole life. But I think even in the country I would listen for bears or something. OK, this is a tangent.
Loves of His Life - Lesley Ann Jones - this is an older rehash/update of her Freddie Mercury biography focusing on his relationships. I pre-ordered her dubious book about his alleged secret daughter, which is releasing on his birthday, but in the process of doing so I found this unread and lurking on my Kindle. Main new contribution is a theory that Freddie was more traumatized by the Zanzibar revolution and the income extremes around Mumbai than he liked to discuss and that trauma explains his avoidance of Africa and India for the rest of his life. (I don’t totally dismiss this theory and add that the one time he did return to Africa — to shamefully perform at Sun City during the boycott — he lost his voice, which sounds psychosomatic as heck.)
Currently: Alaska Twilight by Colleen Coble. Another Christian one that’s not even the beginning of the series. It’s about a wildlife photographer traveling in Alaska to film a guy who gets too close to bears. She has brought a dachshund into the Alaskan wilderness and if that little dog is eaten by a bear I will stop listening. Listening to it because it reminds me of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man documentary and because other things I have on hold have not arrived yet. Still have not finished Herland and have de-emphasized it in favor of writing my fall syllabi.
The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread
Jul. 14th, 2025 10:48 pmcoffeeandinkWelcome to the Very Slow Cherry Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.
Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) She has been writing since the mid-1970s, at a rate of 1-3 new books per year, for a current total of 77 novels (1) and four short story collections; self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.
I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:
This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.
I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.
Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure about how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.
I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.)
1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]
2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]
Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) She has been writing since the mid-1970s, at a rate of 1-3 new books per year, for a current total of 77 novels (1) and four short story collections; self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.
Notes towards an overview
- It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won two Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like the rest of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think it also interacts with the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and figuring out oceanography and navigation while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)
- Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up and put together information by implications and asides, or, if not, to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no compression of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.
- Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned as a tossed-off aside in deep background, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.
- Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)
- I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.
Series and other groupings
I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:
- The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.
In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.
The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)
Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.) - The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.
The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.
The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.
This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.
The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.) - Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).
Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably to end up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought. - Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.
For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh resurrected her college major and Master's degree in Classics to focus on Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories, some of them also incorporated into two novel collaborations with Morris and a solo novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.
Finally, Cherryh launched the Merovingen Nights series with her solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies, many of them "mosaic novels" with an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the original stories. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are a solid effort.
Full disclosure
This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.
I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.
Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure about how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.
I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.)
Other Cherryh reading projects
- The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward
- Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers
- The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh
- sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag
- james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search
Endnotes
1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]
2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]
Wednesday has socialised enjoyably
Jul. 16th, 2025 07:35 pmoursinWhat I read
Finished Long Island Compromise, and okay, didn't quite go where I was expecting but didn't pull a really amazing twist either.
Alison Espach, The Wedding People (2024), which somebody seemed enthusiastic about somewhere on social media while mentioning it was at 99p. Well, I am always there for Women's Midlife Narratives but this struck me as a bit over-confected plotwise and I was not entirely there for that ending.
Latest Literary Review (with, I may as well repeat, My Letter About Rebecca West).
Simon Brett, Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse (The Major Bricket Mysteries #1) - Simon Brett is definitely hit and miss for me and some of his more recent series have been on the 'miss' side, come back Charles Paris or the ladies of Fethering. But this one, if not quite in the Paris class, was at least readable.
On the go
I have got a fair way in to Jonny Sweet, The Kellerby Code (2024) but I'm really bogging down. It's an old old story (didn't R Rendell as B Vine do a version of this) and for someone who cites the lineage Sweet does, his prose is horribly overwrought.
I started Rev Richard Coles, Murder at the Monastery (Canon Clement #3) (2024) but found the first few chapter v clunky somehow.
Finally picked up Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life (2020), which is on the whole v good. Okay, blooper over whether Sybille could have become a barrister: hello, the date is post Sex Disqualification Removal Act and I suspect Helena Normanton had already been called to the bar. However, the actual practicalities might well have presented difficulties. And wow, weren't her circles seething with lady-loving-ladies? And such emotional complications and partner changes! there's no 'quiet spinster couple keeping chickens/breeding dachshunds' about what was going on. Okay, usually conducted with a fair amount of discretion and probably lack of visibility, though even so.
Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014), which I actually started a couple of weeks ago at least, and picked up again for train reading today, as the Bedford bio is a large hardback.
Up next
I am very much in anticipation of the arrival of Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward Book 2)
Bundle of Holding: Battlezoo
Jul. 16th, 2025 02:17 pmjames_davis_nicoll
The Battlezoo Bundle presents the Battlezoo line of monsters and monster hunters from Roll for Combat for D&D 5E and compatible tabletop roleplaying systems, compiled from winning designs from the annual RPG Superstars competition.
Bundle of Holding: Battlezoo
Miles Vorkosigan alternate careers
Jul. 16th, 2025 08:46 amlannamichaelsIt's not exactly a secret that I hate Miles Vorkosigan being in the military, so for RL reasons I was thinking hmm could Miles instead become a doctor, and then followed up immediately with "absolutely he could not" and in fact I could not think of any position in a hospital that he would be suited for, but then I realized I was overthinking this.
Miles would be a great plumber. It's perfect for him. No boss, just clients, and he can pick the interesting jobs. It's bounded but also a place for creativity. He has to find out what the problem is and fix it. Because of his size, he may even be a better choice for certain jobs than other plumbers. He can pick his hours by picking the clients and the jobs, and then hyperfocus on a problem until it's over. If he wants, he can pack his schedule, or he can relax it. But he's not answering to anyone and people are grateful for his help because it's a problem they can't fix themselves, and it's also necessary: everyone will at some point require the assistance of a plumber.
The only problem is that there's no wonderful recognition and pride from his peers, unless we can get him to value the opinions of other plumbers, and then he can just brag about all the impossible disasters he fixed before breakfast. The sense of accomplishment is built-in, as in the sense of being valuable and needed.
And I feel like even Miles Vorkosigan would not find a way to commit treason whilst doing it.
Red Sword by Bora Chung (Translated by Anton Hur)
Jul. 16th, 2025 08:57 amjames_davis_nicoll
The only fate more glorious than dying for the uncaring empire is dying over and over for the uncaring empire.
Red Sword by Bora Chung (Translated by Anton Hur)
Two non-fiction books
Jul. 15th, 2025 08:03 pmlannamichaels- Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell (2023): lirazel posted about the audiobook version of this, which got me to put this on my list, but alas my library only has access to the print version; I feel that the audiobook version is probably superior. There were several parts in the book that were a slog to get through the paragraph, that would be perfectly fine if you were listening to a patented David Mitchell Rant about the subject. In fact, imagining them in David Mitchell's voice is how I got through them. ( Read more... )
- Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share (2021): A bookified version of a Instagram account I never followed, a copy of which I read at someone's house who was using as a bookmark something that indicated they had gotten it as a gift when it came out and never got past the first fifth of the book. This book would have been fine if it had not decided it was going to fight the one star reviews, and instead just showed the artwork and mentioned how great the park was. As it was, it positioned itself as an argument between the one star reviewers and the author, and the one star reviewers won.( Read more... )
today I have been dragged kicking and screaming into maybe reading some Descartes
Jul. 15th, 2025 10:01 pmkaberettSpecifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is
something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response
and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...
(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)
Feeling just slightly disingenuous
Jul. 15th, 2025 07:49 pmoursinHave been involved over the last day or so in the discovery and revelation of a hoohah over an esteemed bibliographer having copped to having fabricated a set of letters, of which the transcriptions appear on their website, with, true, a provenance note that might give one to be a tad cautious when citing.
But anyway, someone I know did actually cite something from one of these letters - fortunately not as a major pillar of an argument or anything like that - in their book which is only just published (and copy of which for review I finally received last week). And was informed by the perpetrator.
Cue kerfuffle. The ebook can be readily corrected but not the hardback copies.
But anyway, this led to me (particularly given subject and period) to think upon an instance I had encountered of learning - from the author no less - that a series of supposedly authentic Victorian erotic novels had been knocked up (perhaps that is not the phrase one should employ?) as remunerated hackwork for a paperback publisher in the 1990s.
A few of these are now accessible via the Internet Archive and I discover that they have introductions setting them up as Orfentik Discoveries of the writings of a Private Gents Club.
Anyway, I wrote this all up for my academic blog, and there has been discussion on bluesky about hoaxes and fakes and also I introduced the topic of people being misled by fictional pastiches that were not meant to mislead (or at least, like 'Cleone Knox''s work, have long been known to be made up).
(Ern Malley complicates this like whoa, since it has been claimed that the authors of the hoax actually produced SRS surrealist poetry whether they meant to or not.)
And as a scholar and an archivist I am against hoaxes and fakes and people inserting false documents into archives and so on -
- but I still have the occasional qualm that some naive reader will not read the disclosure of the real origin story right at the back of the volumes and think that the Journals of Mme C-, subsequently Lady B-, actually exist.
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Costume Bracket: Round 4, Post 6
Jul. 15th, 2025 06:27 pmpurplecatTwo Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.
( Outfits below the Cut )
Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!
Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!
Costume Bracket Masterlist
Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
( Outfits below the Cut )
Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!
Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!
Costume Bracket Masterlist
Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.