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Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Typhoon - Crooked Fingers

Entry tags:

trouble seldom sees what she leaves behind

So here's a question for you, especially if you do office-type work: when did people start sending pictures of things instead of actual documents in a work-related setting? And WHY???

I have had this happen repeatedly recently, and then instead of just going on with my work easily, I have to email back and ask for a version in a program that I can edit. (If I don't need to edit, I will sometimes just print it as a PDF so I can attach and send it to people, but that is still an extra step I have to take because someone else couldn't put their work in a work-appropriate format.)

Personally, I get not wanting to share a linked document - I do it but I kind of hate other people in my documents because of version control issues (...or maybe just control issues? 😬😬😬) - but anything is better than a useless JPEG pasted into the body of an email when what I ASKED FOR was a list of attendees for a meeting I may need to sort, or a purchase requisition that I will need to update.

As a related item, stop with the QR codes! Our HR department sends emails about training opportunities or other events and is like, "Use the QR code to register!" Like, how about no? And certainly not when it's an event to which we are inviting board members, some of whom are LITERALLY in their 90s and not tech-savvy. What is wrong with a nice LINK to a FORM on a regular WEBBED SITE?

I guess I am feeling very Abe Simpson yells at clouds today, but come on. These are not things that make work easier! (Well, maybe it's easier for the people who do this, but then they have to deal with my annoying follow up emails, so is it really easier for them???)

In other news, my younger nephew got a promotion that required him to move to California in a hurry, so he flew out last night. I will miss him! Who will I call now when I need a tall person to do things in my apartment??? (Just kidding! It's a great opportunity for him, and he is some kind of regional manager now with a region that includes Hawaii, so my sister and I are already like, "let us plan a trip to visit him IN HAWAII!" [note: I will likely never be able to afford a trip to Hawaii, but a girl can dream.])

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Dual Roomba

https://xkcd.com/3133/

I tried uploading it to a household appliance porn site I found, but apparently their content is limited to only fans.

https://xkcd.com/3133/

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Once upon a time, I read Exiled from Camelot, the novel-length Sir Kay angstfic by Cherith Baldry that Phyllis Ann Kar politely called 'one of the half-best Arthurian novels that I have yet read,' and then launched it off to Be Experienced by

osprey_archer and

troisoiseaux.

Now my sins have come back upon me sevenfold, or perhaps even fifteenfold:

troisoiseaux has discovered that, not content with the amount of hurt and comfort that she inflicted upon Kay in exiled from Camelot, Cherith Baldry has written No Less than Fifteen Sad Kay Fanfics and collected them in a volume called The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay.

This book has now made its way from

troisoiseaux via

osprey_archer on to me, along with numerous annotations --

osprey_archer has suggested 'drink!' every time Baldry mentions Kay's 'hawk's face,' which I have not done, as I think this would kill me -- to which I have duly added in my turn. I am proud to tell you that I was taking notes and Kay only experiences agonized manly tears nine times in the volume. That means that there are at least six whole stories where Kay manages not to burst into tears at all! And we're very proud of him for that!

The thesis of The Last Knight of Camelot seems to be that Kay is in unrequited love with Arthur; Gawain and Gareth are both in unrequited love with Kay; and everyone else is mean to Kay, all the time, for no reason.

troisoiseaux and

osprey_archer in their posts have both pulled out this quote which I also feel I am duty-bound to do:

"Lord of my heart, my mind, my life. All that I'll ever be. All I'll ever want.”

He had never revealed so much before.

Arthur leant towards him; there was love in his face, and wonder and compassion too, and Kay knew, his knowledge piercing like an arrow into his inmost spirit, that his love, this single-minded devotion that could fill his life and be poured out and yet never exhausted, was not returned. Arthur loved him, but not like that.

He could not help shrinking back a little.

However, I also must provide the additional context that this tender moment is immediately interrupted by the ARRIVAL OF MORGAUSE, TO SEDUCE ARTHUR, TO MAKE MORDRED, leading me to believe that Baldry is suggesting that if Kay had instead seized the chance to confidently make out with Arthur at this time, the entire doom of Camelot might have been averted. Alas! instead, Arthur dismisses Kay to go hang out with Morgause, it all goes south, Arthur blames Kay for Some Reason, and Kay spends a week on his knees in the courtyard going on hunger strike for Arthur's forgiveness until he collapses on the cobblestones and wakes up to a repentant Arthur tenderly feeding him warm milk.

If the stories in this volume are any judge, this is a pretty normal week for Kay. I also want to shout out

- the one where Lancelot and Gaheris set up a Fake Adventure for Kay to prove his courage, which destroys Kay emotionally, and kitchen-boy-squire Gareth runs after him and tries to swear loyalty to him and ask Kay to knight him, but Kay is like "you cannot AFFORD to have Kay as a friend >:(( for your knightly reputation >:(((" and Gareth shouts "you can't make me your enemy!!" and then Lancelot finds them arguing and is like 'wow, Kay is abusing this poor kitchen boy' and sweeps the lovelorn Gareth away, leaving Kay's reputation worse than before
- the one where Arthur gets kidnapped by an evil sorcerer who demands Excalibur as Arthur's ransom, and then Kay decides to try and trick the evil sorcerer with a Fake Excalibur even though Lancelot is like 'FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE,' and then Kay rescues Arthur from being magic-brainwashed by pure power of [brotherly?] love, and as soon as their tender embrace is over Arthur is like 'wait! you brought a FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE'
- the one where Kay is accused of rape as a Ploy to Discredit Arthur and has to go through a trial by ordeal where he walks over hot coals while on the verge of death from other injuries and Gawain flings himself into the fire to rescue him but it turns out it's fine because Kay is So Extremely Innocent of the Crime that they both end up clinging together bathed in golden light that heals their injuries

Again: FIFTEEN of these. Baldry is truly living her bliss and I honestly cannot but respect it. The book is going to make its way back from here whence it came, but if anyone else is really feeling a shortage of Kay Agonies in their life, let me know; I'm sure an additional stop would be welcomed as long as whoever gets it pays the annotation tax.

Current Location: Munich

Entry tags:

Of Beatles and Georgians

I used my time in GB to acquire a lot of books as well, of course. Some of which were:

Ian Leslie: John & Paul. A Love Story in Songs. No prices for guessing whom this is about. The songs of the title are 43, all in all (the majority of which but not all hail from the Beatles era), used and explored as sign posts to where John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in their respective lives and emotional development. ( Spoilers get by with a little help from their friends. )

Sean Lusk: A Woman of Opinion. Which is a novel about the fascinating Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Georgian wit, poet and travelogue, whose most famous work I reviewed here. ( Spoilers have indeed opinions alore. )

and lastly, a pictorial postcript to my Born with Teeth review:

Current Mood: baffled
Current Music: Mets vs Braves on tv

Entry tags:

adventures in cooking

righthanders wear him out

I tried making mozzarella sticks again for dinner tonight and I don't know if the oil wasn't hot enough or what, but they stuck to the bottom of the pot. They stuck to the spatula when I finally scraped them off the bottom of the pot. They stuck to the PAPER TOWELS.

I have fried a lot of things in my time and then put them on paper towels to absorb the excess oil and NEVER BEFORE has anything stuck to them. What the actual fuck. I still ate whatever I was able to salvage, but wow, what a mess.

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Entry tags:

(no subject)

genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where ( various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.

Coastline Similarity

https://xkcd.com/3132/

Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

https://xkcd.com/3132/

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

Entry tags:

Foundation 3.07

In which it's backstory time, for more than one character, while in the present the end times keep rolling.

( Spoilers wouldn't like to be a ferret on Trantor )

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The Ocean - Dar Williams

Entry tags:

wade in our workboots, try to finish the job

I meant to post yesterday but fell asleep on the couch after dinner, which has been happening with more and more frequency over the last few months - usually it's only for 30 - 45 minutes, because it's never intentional and I am not in a comfortable sleeping position, but oh boy the dreams I have when it happens are super vivid and weirdly almost always take place here in this apartment. Usually "home" in my dreams is the house I grew up in (or some dream facsimile) or my first apartment - my second apartment is never what it actually looked like but always some much larger Manhattan apartment with a view! But when I am falling asleep on the couch, I am frequently also asleep on the couch in my dreams, and trying to wake up and not managing, or waking up in the dream to answer the door or something. Weird how that works!

Anyway, I did read something so Wednesday reading on a Thursday:

What I just finished
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, book one of the Burning Kingdoms trilogy. I really liked Suri's Books of Ambha duology - the second one in particular I thought was AMAZING - but this one isn't really doing it for me. It's fine.

What I'm reading now
Allegedly, the second book in the trilogy, The Oleander Sword but I haven't really been picking it up when I have time to read.

What I'm reading next
Well if I finish The Oleander Sword I will probably move onto the third book, The Lotus Empire, but who knows?

I did find time to finally watch K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix and I enjoyed it very much. It's like Buffy except there are 3 girls and they're in a band. Very fun!

Work today has been bonkers - it was 1 pm before I even thought about having breakfast so I just held out until 2 (my regular lunch time) for lunch. Hopefully the afternoon is quieter!

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Cesium

https://xkcd.com/3131/

Someday I hope to find a way to mess up a recipe so badly that it draws the attention of the International Air Transport Association, the International Mathematical Olympiad, or the NSA.

https://xkcd.com/3131/

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: Heathrow

Entry tags:

London Theatre Finale: Born with Teeth

At long last, the highlight and ending of my London theatre marathon, and it would be yours, too: On stage Marlowe/Shakespeare slash fiction! I had hoped this to be the case from the sexy poster and the short summary, and when I acquired the programm and read it, I knew it, because among the listed crew is one Katherine Hardman, Intimacy Coordinator, whose previous Intimacy Coordinating tasks included AMC’s Interview With the Vampire. Clearly a woman who coordinated Lestat/Louis, Louis/Armand, and Lestat/Armand in an actor and audience friendly way would be up to Kit/Will, thought I. Thank you, RSC. And Liz Duffy Adams, who wrote the play. And Daniel Evans, who directed it.

Wyndham’s Theatre: Born With Teeth

Incidentally, the posters hadn’t said who would play whom, but I just assumed Ncuti Gatwa would be gay atheist spy Marlowe, and Edward Bluemel Shakespeare, and indeed this proved to be the case. Since this play is a two hander, meaning only two actors show up and are on stage the entire time, it needs a combination of great acting and hotness, and they both delivered.

( Come live with me and be my love… )

In conclusion: loved the play, loved the actors, loved the production, and am travelling back to Munich in a state of fannish delight.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

( ungenerous readings below )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: London

Entry tags:

London Theatre Watching III

No, still not the Marlowe/Shakespeare one, that’s on tonight. Instead, two plays I had on my list as maybes, but not musts, hence only bought the tickets on the day and therefore cheaper. :)

Charing Cross Theatre: The Daughter of Time

By playwright named M. Kilburg Reedy, based on Josephine Tey’s novel of the same name which three quarters of a century ago stroke a mighty blow for Richard III in hte public imagination. Background here for people who haven’t read it: Josephine Tey wrote this as the last and most unusual of her series starring her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, who in the novel, which takes place then-contemporary to its publication in the late 1940s/early 1950s (pre Elizabeth II’s coronation at any rate, her father is still on the throne), fights off the boredom of many weeks in the hospital by getting interested in Richard IIII and deciding to solve the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. More Background: Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Scottish Author Elizabeth MacIntosh, who also was a playwright under the alias Gordon Daviot. Her most famous historical play was probably Richard of Bordeaux, about that other controversional Plantagenet royal named Richard, Richard II., which she wrote after having seen young John Gielgud play Shakespeareas Richard III. It was a smash hit and contributed to making John G a star. However, The Daughter of Time is a novel, by its very premise is confined to one hospital room and a lot of thinking about history, some of which, granted, presented via arguments with other people, but a lot also via thoughts and musings about text excerpts, and I was really curious how someone would manage to dramatize it in a way that works on stage.

( Spoilers still aren’t sure whether truth is the daughter of time… )

The Other Palace: Saving Mozart.

It’s London, it’s theatre, there had to be at least one musical. In my case, a new one by Charli Eglington, which feels a bit like someone on Tumblr after watching Amadeus decided they wanted to write prequel fanfiction with a feminist slant, focused on the women. Which means that while we’re following Mozart’s life story from Wunderkind to early death, in the first half of the musical Nannerl has a claim to being the main character and in the second half Constanze. It’s about as historical as Amadeus (meaning it uses some facts with a lot of fictionalisiation), with a lot of laudable #JusticeforNannerl and #ConstanzeRules sentiment.

( How the women in his life saved Mozart )

All in all: not a must, but if you want a new musical where everyone sings soulfully in Steampunk Rokoko costumes, go for it.

Current Music: Kind and Generous - Natalie Merchant

Entry tags:

i don't know how you keep on giving

Just ordered some not really necessary stuff from Penzey's since they've got a 25% off everything (but gift cards) sale going until midnight. Also ordered some cute monstera-leaf-shaped earrings because sometimes I need cute new earrings. And a couple of new books and a dress with llamas on it for Baby Miss L.

I guess I needed a little retail therapy...

Here's a cool link: On Set for The Pitt Season Two: Noah Wyle and the Cast Finally Lift the Curtain (contains some spoilers for season 2).

And here is a cute video of a bunch of NY Mets being interviewed at the Little League classic. #LFGM

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Predicament

https://xkcd.com/3130/

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

https://xkcd.com/3130/

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.

rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile,

genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of

genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: London

Entry tags:

More theatre and a tv episode

More plays:

Harold Pinter Theatre: A Man for All Seasons

By Robert Bolt, who at least in terms of this particular play is to Hilary Mantell what C.S. Lewis is to Philipp Pullmann, i.e. Wolf Hall and sequels are the His Dark Materials to A Man for All Seasons’ Narnia, and as in the Pullmann-Lewis case, Mantell ended up doing exactly the same thing they begrudged in the end, just from the opposite direction.

( A Thomas by any other name… )

Foundation 3.06: In which the moon isn’t the only thing eclipsed.

( Spoilers have provided data )

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: 'cause I speak of the pompatus of love

Entry tags:

movies,
superman

some people call me maurice

I finally saw the new Superman this afternoon and I enjoyed it a lot! The casting was exceptionally good - Nicholas Hoult was the best Lex Luthor since Rosenbaum, and I thought Fillion was just the right amount of bumptious asshole as Guy Gardner. (Do I wish we could get John Stewart in a live action movie? Yes. But I'm still so glad they didn't go with boring Hal Jordan.)

The writing for Clark was great and he and Lois had fantastic chemistry. Mr. Terrific was indeed terrific! Plus KRYPTO!!! ( spoilers )

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Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: London

Entry tags:

Play-Watching in London I

I can spend a few days in London right now, and that already meant two plays.

Globe Theatre: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Rarely performed these days, and actually one I never read, which is one of the reasons why I used the chance to watch it in an afternoon performance, that and the way watching plays at the Globe, in a perfectly reconstructed Elizabethan theatre, has yet to cease being special to me.

( Shakespearean Spoilers have mixed feelings )

The Garrick: Mrs Warren’s Profession

One of George Bernard Shaw’s early “problem plays” and scandals. (He wrote it in the early 1890s, and except for a club performance in 1902, it would take two decades to make it to the London stage. By contrast, it was already performed in Germany in the 1890s as well. Legendary producer Max Reinhardt was a big Shaw fan and so were a lot of Wilhelmians.) This production is starring Imelda Staunton as the titular Mrs. Warren, and her real life daughter Bessie Carter (known to the general audience probably best as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton) as Vivie Warren; the director is Dominic Cooke.

( Shavian Spoilers argue about the ways of making money )

Having thus watched Shakespeare and Shaw, I have on my schedule next: Robert Bolt, and then a new play, which from the sound of it is Shakespeare/Marlowe slash, starring Ncuti Gatwa as Kit M. Stay tuned!

Archaeology Research

https://xkcd.com/3129/

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

https://xkcd.com/3129/