Recent Reading: The West Passage

Aug. 25th, 2025 05:41 pm
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] books

Today I finished The West Passage by Jared Pachacek. This is a fantasy novel about a massive palace that encompasses the entirety of the state where the protagonists live and is ruled over by the godlike and somewhat tyrannical Ladies. The ancient Beast, the enemy of the Ladies, is threatening to rise again, as it has done in the past, which leaves our protagonists, Pell and Kew, youths of the Grey Tower, to try to raise the alarm.

I’m usually a fan of stories that throw you right into things, but The West Passage did leave me turned around for a while. I struggled to conceptualize what was being explained, and it’s definitely a book that asks a lot of your powers of visual imagination regarding the palace.

However, I loved the general creativity of this book. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy novel so firmly and intentionally grounded in the medieval. A lot of Western fantasy is generically medieval/pseudo-medieval (a la the Ren Faire), but The West Passage clearly took time to more securely set itself in this era. The technology is not always strictly medieval, as this is a fantasy world with all manner of fantastical beasts and tools, but the medieval setting is far more than window dressing here. To cap off the mood, the book is peppered with charming medieval-style illustrations at the start of each chapter and separating each “book” within the novel, showing our protagonists on their adventure.
 

Read more... )

 

Wolf! Wolf!

Aug. 25th, 2025 03:21 pm
oursin: The stylised map of the London Underground, overwritten with Tired of London? Tired of Life! (Tired of London? Tired of Life!)
[personal profile] oursin

Reading the first question addressed in Ask a Manager today:

I have been at my job for a two years, and the job requires international travel, often with members of a team. We often go to very safe countries (Europe, Singapore), but for a new client we had to travel to South Africa. I’m South African and therefore am quite aware of the risks and safety measures necessary, particularly in the areas in which we were traveling, as was HR, which repeatedly sent emails about safety precautions.
Unfortunately, my fellow team members continuously engaged in risky behavior over the course of the trip (jogging at night alone by the freeway, wearing expensive jewelry in public, getting rides from random taxis on the street…). I repeated my concerns to them repeatedly, as did the hotel manager (who was so concerned that he ended up asking me to tell them to stop, saying he didn’t want the hotel to be held responsible for their choices). They didn’t take my concerns seriously, saying they were “experienced” travelers because they’d gone to Europe before, and I was being “overly cautious.” The entire experience was incredibly stressful, it was like babysitting toddlers.

I can't help wondering if fellow-team members spent their youth being bombarded with stories about The Dangerous Big City (and that's just in USA) and the teeming hell-holes that are the Major Capitals of Europe, and now they have been there and discovered that they are not actually sinks of vice and depravity, they think that all such warnings are entirely spurious fear-mongering?

Besides the story of the boy who cried Wolf! (except this is more like, if the villagers kept crying Wolf! every time they saw a wee doggie coming up the village street) I have a vague recollection of a ?fairy tale/children's story of somebody who is brought up to think Out There is terribly dangerous. And something happens and they go out there and are not immediately eaten, so they think Nothing Is Dangerous. And if as the tale progresses they don't actually end up eaten it is only through luck rather than good risk management.

Insults

Aug. 25th, 2025 02:40 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] fem_thoughts
How to Piss Off Men: 109 Things to Say to Shatter the Male Ego by Kyle Prue (2024)

Praise Goddess and pass the ammunition! :D Some of these would make excellent prompts for fanfic. Just think of the most testosterone-poisoned characters in your fandom, and have at them.

Software rec: Libation for Audible

Aug. 25th, 2025 02:02 am
erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)
[personal profile] erinptah

After having this on my to-do list for an embarrassingly long time, I downloaded and ran Libation, a bit of open-source software to de-DRM your Audible purchases.

The walkthrough is really easy to follow. At first I used the default download settings, and got a file (m4b) that worked fine on my laptop, but my portable music player had some kind of trouble with the encoding. (It did play the file, but it was all crackly and poppy, like an old record.) Then I switched to “just download as an MP3,” and those worked fine.

…I had a lot more Audible purchases than I remember. Mostly “audiobooks I would’ve borrowed from the library if they were available, listened to once, no desire to re-listen.”

But it’s well worth having unlocked copies of the Murderbot books. And the Locked Tomb books. And this one book I don’t even remember reading the first time, so I don’t have to jump through any hoops to play it again and find out if I liked it or not.

(Speaking of Murderbot: if you haven’t read it yet, and you’re looking for the ebooks, Humble Bundle has them all in a Martha Wells special.)


Daily Happiness

Aug. 24th, 2025 08:13 pm
torachan: cats looking at a crow out the screen door (cats and crow)
[personal profile] torachan
1. The heat was not as bad today as yesterday (in fact we went for a walk a bit ago and it was quite pleasant) and it's supposed to be either high 70s or low 80s for the rest of the ten day forecast, so hopefully that holds up.

2. I made a rhubarb custard pie this morning before it got too hot. Now that we have the Breville oven, it doesn't heat up the whole house to bake things the way the regular oven did, but I still wanted to get it done early, especially since it always takes so long to cool and set up (it was good and ready by this evening for dessert, though). I still have a bunch of bags of already chopped up rhubarb in the freezer, so can make the pie (or something else) another couple times.

3. I finished another puzzle this morning. This is the first one of this brand I've tried and it was very interesting. The pieces were very irregularly cut, including some with straight edges that were not border pieces. It made for a little additional challenge, but for some really odd shaped pieces, it made it easier to find where they went just by shape rather than color.



4. He looks like he's having a good dream.

Culinary

Aug. 24th, 2025 07:21 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi goreng, with milano salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 light spelt/buckwheat flour, turned out well.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Woodland Mushrooms, garlic and thyme, served with steamed asparagus with melted butter and lime juice, padron peppers, and baby pak choi stirfried with star anise.

With which we had our traditional unwedding anniversary Bollinger (41 years).

speaking of ocd

May. 24th, 2025 12:23 am
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

Here’s the post about scrupulosity!

OCD is best known for germaphobia and hoarding and religious scrupulosity, all of which I’ve dealt with in varying degrees, but I think it’s less well-known that religious scrupulosity is basically a form of moral scrupulosity, and that it can take other shapes as well.

Sidebar: scrupulosity as a word just means an obsessive, overwhelming anxiety/fear of being bad, for whatever bad means to you. You can probably guess why it often hijacks religious beliefs, and why it loves to square dance with intrusive thoughts.

In practice, this means constantly feeling like I’m not doing enough: for new people, for friends, for mutuals, for the fandom as a whole. I want to be welcoming and encouraging. I want to read and chat with new writers so they write more! I want to keep up with my friends’ fics! I want to read other fics just because they look interesting! And of course if I’m reading, I want to be commenting and live reacting and reccing on tumblr! I want to gift drabbles and fanart and reaction fics to people so they know how awesome they and their work are!

(also I want to write my own fics and draw my own art, and I’m really not good at pushing my own work because I’m always fighting the idea that it’s selfish to want people to read my work.)

There’s a reason Mr Rogers is so prominent on my ancestor altar, y'all, and it’s because I want to be a good person so fucking bad. It’s because in my heart and soul there’s a part of me that’s constantly certain that I’m a fucked up, horrible monster and if people like me it’s only because I’m fooling them.

I know I maybe over-identify with Xaden, okay? He knows he’s going to be the bad guy for a lot of people no matter what he does, and he still does everything he can, and he gets shit on for it. I think about his comments in Samara, about how people are fuckheads to him but he doesn’t mind because they go easier on Garrick.

One of the things that’s come up when I write Xaden more than once is projecting my own insecurities onto him. The certainty that he can never do enough. The fear that he really is the monster people see when they look at him, and no amount of… well, no amount of anything is going to fix that.

There’s a reason he’s fascinated by Violet telling him he’s a good person.

I really, really struggle when people talk about how Xaden is a terrible person and an awful friend and everyone else would be better off without him because I feel like that’s true of me too.

Disclaimer: I know that’s not the same thing, and people are entitled to their interpretations of the characters! This is just me talking about what goes on in my head. The ways my brain lies to me ultimately have nothing to do with the way people write fic. If it doesn’t latch on to this, it would (and does) latch onto something else.

I still don’t have a point. I’m just finding it helpful to write this stuff out and work through it, and some people seem to have found the first post helpful to read so! Let’s be vulnerable.

just a little meltdown

Aug. 12th, 2025 03:35 am
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

I'm maybe having a slow-motion meltdown.

I've left two-thirds of my discord servers, deleted my writing server, and tonight I'm clearing out my tumblr follows.

I'm ostensibly getting the condo ready to show so we can put it on the market but it feels like an utterly sisyphean task. Mostly because every time I turn around my kid is making a new mess, and it's summer so all of Moth's spoons and then some are going to managing the kid and her camps and stuff.

When I get anxiety flairs I want to declutter everything. Like, everything. This is not practical for a number of reasons, including the fact that I live with two other people. But in this particular case, it means I'm trying to actually declutter/pack/clean the house to show it whilst at the same time not get rid of anything I'll actually regret getting rid of, or do anything that will give my kid Hoarding Trauma, or... well, you get the idea.

Basically I'm trying to declutter but only a reasonable amount while my brain wants to declutter everything. I keep having nightmares where I discover I've thrown out Bug's stuff or Moth's stuff and I'm sure they'll hate me, or I'm supposed to be going abroad to live or study or something but I can't find my passport and I realize I'm going to be leaving my family and I can't remember why I thought I wanted to do this.

So I focus on what I can control. I clear out my files, or I leave most of my discord servers and mute the rest, or... well you get the idea. And I try not to have a full-on meltdown.

I hate it.

worse than the end

Jun. 2nd, 2025 11:33 pm
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

I have nightmares about the world ending periodically.

It's different every time, but they tend not to be the kind of world-ending situations that you see in books or movies. They're about reality failing, the laws of... well, the laws of everything ceasing to work.

The one I still remember most vividly even years later, it was one I couldn't stop, and everything was just... slowly falling apart. I remember when words just stopped working and I lost the ability to read and the panic and sadness I felt were so raw that it stuck with me.

Last night's dream was one where I kept repeating it when I "failed" and the situation became more complicated every time. At first I thought I was just trying to fix one bad situation, where I got shot, and when I managed to make everything go smoothly so no one got killed, it just... kept rolling forward to a more complicated situation, and eventually it was about understanding different kinds of magic, and the songs that kept the universe from falling apart (the only ones I remember were on the Bat Out of Hell II album by Meatloaf), and I had to solve riddles but every time I went through of course I could remember the answers from the previous times and it got so weirdly boring.

Boring apocalypses suck.

As I was going through I was also constantly worried about where my spouse was, where my kid was, were they okay, if they weren't with me, where had they gone, over and over. Finally my spouse and I got in to some side dimension and were able to stabilize everything and it was safe, yay, etc, but when we came out it turned out time had been different in there and we'd been gone two and a half years. We were able to be reunited with our kid almost immediately and she seemed fine? She'd missed us but she had been with a foster family that was apparently really nice.

And then she said something about Jesus and I just... recoiled in horror, in the dream. It was like my kid had been replaced with a pod person and I didn't know what to do.

That was when I woke up.

Memory

May. 23rd, 2025 11:32 pm
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

What triggers a memory is super weird, when you think about it. We went out to the coast last weekend and stayed in a little beach house that was built in the 40s, probably from a kit and all. The place we stayed in had ceiling tiles in a style that I haven't thought about in ages, even while dreaming about redoing the ceiling in our condo because it's fucking popcorn. But the tiles looked exactly like the ceiling tiles in my Yaya's house did, and if you'd asked me what they looked like before this weekend I wouldn't have been able to tell you, but as soon as I laid on the bed and looked up at them I remembered.

I ate a bite of taffy and somehow the taste of it reminded me of the smell of the pizza place where my mom used to stop and pick up pizza on Friday on our way home. The dark wood, the vinyl seats, the smell of the onions and the spices and the cheese. How a dill-flavored taffy managed that, I'm not sure, but it was incredibly specific and clear.

I've been thinking about descriptions in fiction lately because I follow a couple of fanfic writers who write incredibly lush, vivid descriptions of places and it makes me want to do that more thoroughly when I'm writing.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

May. 22nd, 2025 11:29 pm
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

(Reposting from my Tumblr because this is more personal than I usually get over there.)

I'm not putting this on my fandom blog because ultimately it's not fandom specific... but since we're talking about mental health as fic writers and fandom people, I asked myself, should I insert myself into this conversation?

Because if I'm not on Tumblr, I would not have an excuse to avoid doing my accounting homework and while I do find figuring depreciation to be calming I don't want to do it before today. Read more... )

I built that city...

Mar. 11th, 2025 11:27 pm
finch: (Default)
[personal profile] finch

Well, I half-built that city, by which I mean leusana.city, but renewal for it is $18 dollars and I haven't even finished building it out. Which sounds kind of wild when I say it like that, it's been almost a year, and somehow $18 feels like so much more money than the $11 I pay for other domains.

Nobody reads this weblog but I'm just kind of writing this out here so I can think it through. There's something to be said for not having an audience.

Like, I currently own 11 domains. One I'm already planning to let expire, plus leusana, and then one's for my building's HOA (and I should really get them to reimburse me for that just on principal). Three are for small business stuff, three are for fandom stuff, and then there's skyhold and the domain name that I mostly just have for family email.

I don't need that many, lol.

No matter what I do my internet presence seems to end up really fragmented anyway. Every time I want to simplify I swear I somehow end up making it more complicated.

blog

Aug. 23rd, 2025 11:12 pm
finch: (looking up)
[personal profile] finch

I don't understand why I'm so bad at existing in more than one space at a time.

I haven't been here in ages, and that's because I've been on tumblr. I'm on tumblr (and also IG) because that's where my fandom friends are. I'd love to have them here but... no luck.

And it's hard to convince them when I'm not posting, so I guess it's a catch-22, isn't it?

I occasionally make long serious posts over on tumblr, because it's there and people read it. It's rare, but let's be honest, any posts are rare here so... idk.

I periodically think about having a "real" blog and I even set one up on weblog.lol but then I feel like I'm posting into the void because there's no way to even know if someone's reading it really.

And I guess it's like realizing you used to go to this one coffee shop all the time but suddenly you realize you haven't been for ages and ages, because your schedule changed or something else shifted and there was just enough friction that it didn't happen.

What I really need is automated crossposting, probably. The best way for me to make sure something happens is to automate it. But I don't think I have a good way to do that right now in either direction. (If you have a good one, let me know.)

We've been dealing with a dollop of stressful stuff offline this year- there were major changes at work, Bug graduated fifth grade and is starting middle school in a few weeks (how!?), we've been thinking about selling the condo if we can find a place with a yard that's in our budget.

I'm going to move over the couple of posts and backdate them, probably. At this point, between this dw account and the locked one where we backed up our LJ, dreamwidth has by far the longest share of my life history.

No point, not really. Just rambling.

Daily Happiness

Aug. 23rd, 2025 07:55 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Got a decent farmer's market haul this morning. The lemonade place did not forget their lemonade twice in a row, and they've added some flavors, too, so I got a yellow watermelon lemonade (not sure if it will actually taste any different to the regular red one) and a cucumber lemonade. I did drink the latter already and it was a bit disappointing as it was too chunky for my liking, but the flavor was good.

2. It was hot today but aside from my trip to the farmers market in the morning (I went right when they opened at eight but it was so muggy and gross already) we stayed in the house and kept relatively cool.

3. Ever since we had the pizza pockets with cajun ranch dip at DCA, we've been on the lookout for that kind of sauce in the store and could not find any, but the other day Carla finally did find some (Hidden Valley Kickin Cajun Blackened Ranch) and we got pizza tonight and it was perfect!

4. Look at this little face!

Weekly Reading

Aug. 23rd, 2025 06:14 pm
torachan: (cartoon me)
[personal profile] torachan
Currently Reading
What Happened to Lucy Vale?
5%. A girl and her mother move into a house where sixteen years ago another girl disappeared and her mother was found hanged in the house. The story will be told in alternating timelines, but I haven't gotten that far yet, so it's just present day. Sounds interesting. I read another book by this author and liked it, though I blank out on what book it was literally seconds after looking it up each time, so I don't think it was that memorable.

Our Hideous Progeny
41%. A sort of Frankenstein fanfic. Victor Frankenstein's grand niece decides to follow in his footsteps and try to create life, but this time since she and her husband are paleontologists, they decide to create a dinosaur rather than a human. That said, while that is the main plot, it's only a small part of the book, which is more about the MC's struggles to be taken seriously as a woman who is interested in science. I'm really liking this so far. I'm listening to the audiobook and the narrator is great.

Suddenly a Murder
9%. A group of friends from a ritzy high school go to a 1920s themed party and there's a murder. I decided to pick this up because the 1920s themed party aspect sounded interesting, but I have quickly (within the first few paragraphs) become annoyed by rich teens being obnoxious (though the MC is a scholarship student and not rich herself). I'll finish it because I dislike not finishing things, but I doubt I'll really like it that much.

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
No progress.

Recently Finished
How to Survive a Horror Story
This was an interesting premise but I never felt like it really got good and I didn't think the twist was all that. It was fine, but doesn't make me want to run out and check out more by the author. Also, this didn't really have an impact on my enjoyment of the book, but I could not believe that the author couldn't take two seconds to google to see if a store they are mentioning by name exists in the place they are saying it does. No one in LA is going to the Piggly Wiggly, because it is very famously a southern grocery store chain. She could have just said grocery store, or she could have checked to see what stores exist, but nah. (The same character also lives in his parents' basement, which is not quite as unbelievable as the Piggly Wiggly, because I'm sure there are at least a couple houses here that have basements, but it just added to the general vibe of carelessness.)

Newcomer
I found the format a little tedious at first, but ended up enjoying this.

Shady Hollow
This was definitely a miss for me. Too much focus on describing the animals and their town compared to the rest of the story.

DeadEndia vol. 1-3
I reread the first two books because the third is finally out! Apparently it came out last year, but I just realized it was out a week or so ago. It's been too long since I read the others, so I had to refresh my memory, and I'm glad I did, because I would have been struggling to keep up if I'd just jumped right in to volume three. This was a good conclusion and I really love this series.

Skip to Loafer vol. 12

Hen na E vol. 3

Reading not-Wednesday 23/8

Aug. 23rd, 2025 03:24 pm
liv: Bookshelf labelled: Caution. Hungry bookworm (bookies)
[personal profile] liv
One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:

Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:

  • Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
  • Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
  • Will Super Villains be on the final? by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
  • Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
  • Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
  • A free man of color by Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
  • I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! by Lanna Michaels, 2025


Circe )

Coconut Unlimited )

Will Super Villains be on the final? )

Some desperate glory )

Ancillary Mercy )

A Free Man of Color )

I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! )
oursin: Fotherington-Tomas from the Molesworth books saying Hello clouds hello aky (Hello clouds hello sky)
[personal profile] oursin

I was very taken with this article (from 2008) about a genre of nature writing, and how, really, it's very dubious to invoke wild and untamed NAYCHUR in our green and pleasant land.

Wild and not-wild is a false distinction, in this ancient, contested country. The contests are far from over. When the wild is protected by management, or re-created by the removal of traces of human history, you have to ask, who are these managers? Why do conservationists favour this species over that? Whose traces are considered worth saving, whose fit only to be bulldozed? If the landscape is apparently empty, was it ever thus?

I mean, we are all about nature, but here I am in London Zone 2 and we have wildflower plots at the edge of the local playing field and an eco-pond, and little copses of woodland and apparently an RSPB sparrow meadow in the local park, rus in urbe, hmmm. In fact London is one of the world's greenest cities, a development which might have surprised dear old Mad William when he was trudging along the chartered streets.

It's also wonderfully codslappy about a certain type of (male) writer going alone into the Wild Places (and not meeting the existential horror that attacked poor Moley in the Wild Wood before he found Badger's house).

It seems to me to resonate with this other thing I came across lately about Rights of Way. Which is of particular interest to me since I am pretty sure that the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 owed rather a lot to my dear fubsy interwar progressives rambling and occasionally organising mass trespasses because the countryside was for The People and they had a Right to Roam. And was much more about collective enjoyment.

(no subject)

Aug. 23rd, 2025 12:34 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] natlyn and [personal profile] quinfirefrorefiddle!

Daily Happiness

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:29 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. So glad it's the weekend!

2. One nice benefit of the timing of my promotion/role change is that I don't have to help with inventory. People are busy with inventory this week and next week, but not me! It's not my problem anymore!

3. We had a nice time at Disneyland and I'm glad we went today instead of tomorrow, despite the heat and crowds, because now I have a weekend with no big plans so I can just rest and relax.

4. Jasper!

2025 Disneyland Trip #57 (8/22/25)

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:19 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
It's officially the start of Halloweentime at Disneyland. It was also in the mid-nineties today, so crowds and heat, not a great combination, but we still wanted to go, and we had a great time despite the heat (crowds weren't actually too bad once we were actually in the park).

Halloween! )

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