elanid | reading

As always on my birthday, I am having my annual birthday sale. This year, since I’m planning to raise prices post-sale ($3.99 for a novella, $5.99 for a novel), I decided to put everything on sale for one big final blow-out. So currently all my novellas are $0.99, and all my novels are $2.99.

Do you like Cold War spies falling in love on an American road trip, even though they're from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain? Then give Honeytrap a try!

If a Civil War soldier woke up from an enchanted sleep in 1965, how long would it take for him to cotton on that men are no longer allowed to touch? Find out in The Sleeping Soldier!

Are you interested in an m/m World War II retelling of Beauty and the Beast? Then Briarley may be for you!

How about a couple of boys riding the rails and falling in love during the Great Depression? Tramps and Vagabonds has your back.

Do you like watching post-World War I woobies suffer beautifully by the seaside? The Larks Still Bravely Singing may be warbling your name.

More Cold War spies, but this time CHRISTMAS! Deck the Halls with Secret Agents is a holly jolly short return to a favorite theme.

Do you like throuples and World War II and retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Then A Garter as a Lesser Gift may be coming to a Green Chapel near you.

Do you like throuples and pining and strawberry shortcake in post-Civil War America? Then give The Threefold Tie a try.

Do you want Cold War spies (again!), but this time they're the leads in the fandom that our two heroines are obsessed with? And kind of role-play as while trying out the joys of "your interpretation of this character is so incorrect" hatesex? Enemies to Lovers is calling your name.

You know it is when there's this new girl in school that you're sooo obsessed with because you both love art, and then you have an obsessive friendship ending in a terrible falling out, and then meet again years later in Florence? Have a gelato with Ashlin and Olivia.

And finally, a couple of oddballs. A retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in pre-Revolutionary Russia! Kind of f/f if you want to be! The Wolf and the Girl features forays both into the Russian forest and the nascent French silent film industry.

Last but not least, if your inner eleven-year-old yearns for a magical timeslip story, there's The Time Traveling Popcorn Ball

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3110/

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

https://xkcd.com/3110/

sovay

I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to

rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.

"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.

Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.

Current Music: Marmozets, "Major System Error"

osprey_archer

Today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!

Yesterday I took chocolate white chip cookies to Dulcimer Gathering and everyone played me Happy Birthday. Today, I caught up on my correspondence while sipping my free hot chocolate at Starbucks, then spent the rest of the day happily puttering: a little cross stitch, a little dulcimer, a little reading with tea and the last of the aforementioned chocolate white chip cookies.

Next up: dinner with the family, and then I will be taking them on a tour of the Hummingbird Cottage! This is the first time that my brother and sister-in-law have seen the place with actual furniture, so I also spent some of my puttering time tidying so that everyone will believe that I live in an oasis of peace and cleanliness.

The herbs and the cherry tomatoes are growing well. There are little green tomatoes on the tomato vines now! Also, one of the tomatoes is next to a climbing vine of some variety, which has latched onto the tomato cage and as far as I can see tied itself there. Most impressed with the plant’s knot-making abilities.

rachelmanija

In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.

I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:

Time to give her the Alpha Male rizzzzzzz, baby!

The ending was, unsurprisingly, also a cliche.

( Read more... )

musesfool

Last night I watched a cute movie on Netflix called Nonnas about that restaurant on Staten Island that hires grandmas as chefs. Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire, and Susan Sarandon play the nonnas, and Vince Vaughn plays the guy opening the restaurant. It's kind of a nice mellow detox from The Bear in terms of a bunch of Italian-Americans yelling at each other in a restaurant kitchen. *g* Plus a really horrifying rendition of capuzelle, which is a roasted (or baked?) sheep's head, which is one of those dishes I try to forget knowing about. Anyway, the restaurant still exists, and now it has grandmas from all different backgrounds who cook there (a review of the real restaurant).

Today was my Monday, and tomorrow is my Friday at work. I could get used to a 2 day work week!

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Sugar We're Going Down - Fall Out Boy

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

osprey_archer

This week I’m doing Wednesday Reading Meme a day early, as tomorrow is MY BIRTHDAY and I will therefore be frolicking through birthday festivities.

Books I Quit Reading

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which I’ve meant to read for ages because it’s been recced to hell and back. It’s an excellent example of literary fiction, which unfortunately means it’s reminding me why I don’t read much modern literary fiction, which is that I find it depressing. Olive is just so mean?? She’s so contemptuous to her husband in chapter one that I was actually rooting for him to ditch her and run away with his pharmacy clerk, and I never root for male characters to leave their wives.

I read a few more chapters, but then I realized I was actively dreading picking it up again, and life is simply too short.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing this week! The birthday festivities have already begun, and I spent the weekend in Bloomington, meeting a friend’s new baby and having cocktails at a speakeasy, where we had the best seats in the house watching the bartender make the drinks. He had a wonderful contraption for blowing a giant smoke-filled bubble over a drink, which clung to the rim of the glass until you popped it, and then the smoke wisped away in the dimness of the bar.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s The Time of Green Magic, which is a magical house children’s fantasy, and I LOVE a magical house children’s fantasy. Gorgeous. The heroine is already slipping into the books she reads, tasting the sea salt on her lips. Excited to report back.

What I Plan to Read Next

Blue Balliett’s Out of the Wild Night.

musesfool

Recs update ahoy:

unfitforsociety has been updated for June 2025 with 15 recs in 3 fandoms:

✭ 13 Batfamily
✭ 2 Percy Jackson crossovers

✭

I'm not sure why I went looking for PJO crossovers but I'm kind of glad I did?

Anyway, I took today and Thursday off and I'm looking forward to this 2 day work week. *g*

✭

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Texarkana - REM

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

oracne

My schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.

Who will I see at Readercon next month?

The Works of P. Djèlí Clark

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!

The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT

Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.

Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing [I'm moderating this one]

Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.

Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen

Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

Meet the Pros(e) party

Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT

Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?

rydra_wong

* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

~~Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.~~

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3109/

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

https://xkcd.com/3109/

sovay

As I hollered after the inapposite license plate of the SUV that had blown through the crosswalk without even thinking about stopping while we were in it, "Psalm 23? With that driving?" I am informed by

spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.

(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)

Current Music: The Heavy Heavy, "Feel"

kaydeefalls

So on top of the general shitshow that has been this year so far, we lost our hamster yesterday. Mr. Samwise Hamgee was an excellent little buddy, who came a LONG way with us from his very skittish origins. By the end, he was regularly curling up into our hands to nap - holding on tightly to our fingers with his little front paws - and had many squeaky opinions which he shared with us vociferously. Seriously, I have never experienced such a chatty hamster, and that includes the childhood hamster I literally named Squeaks for her squeakiness. It will be very strange going back to quiet hamsters after this little guinea pig impersonator.

He was about six weeks shy of his second birthday, which put him in just under the average hamster lifespan. But he had some mysterious hammy health problems that started last September (we did take him to a vet, but they couldn't find anything to explain the VERY noticeable behavioral changes), so honestly, we're just thrilled he continued trucking along for so long with us. He was determined to make the most of his little life, and he brought a lot of joy to ours, and we miss him very much.

sammyhammy

And we've already made arrangements to go pick up our next hamster from the same breeder next weekend, because life is short and these lil critters make ours so much better. So. That's something, anyway.

Current Mood: sad

musesfool

So I watched season 4 of The Bear. ( spoilers )

*

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: The Mets losing again

osprey_archer

Although I got Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia: A Memoir for the book talk, in fact it’s a mental illness memoir with some books in. Chihaya is pondering about the stories we tell ourselves - in her case, her certainty that her story would end in suicide, and the concurrent certainty that this could only be averted if she found the exact right book to save her.

Also about her relationship to her Japanese-American identity, her feeling that as a person with ancestors who were in Japan during World War II she doesn’t really belong in the Asian-American community (because of the whole bit where her ancestors were brutally invading other Asian countries), the effect of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on her own sense of racial identity, A. S. Byatt’s Possession as a book that shaped her understanding of what it means for “reader” to be a load-bearing identity, the fact that she doesn’t usually relate to characters in the way that many readers do as the point of a book, for her, is not to see yourself in it but to become an invisible eye experiencing things without having to be perceived…

Until she realizes upon rereading The Last Samurai that she actually does identify with one of the characters in the story, and maybe that was why she found herself able to read this particular book after her hospitalization, when for a time she found it impossible to read anything. Not just in a “I’m psychologically blocked on reading” kind of way, but in the sense that the text generally appeared to be swimming.

And it’s about the writing of books, the fact that what precipitated her long-awaited hospitalization (because she’d been waiting for this to happen for years) was, in part, her failure to write the book that she needed to write to get tenure. She didn’t write it and didn’t write it and then she lost the tenure-track position and therefore the need to write it and then wrote this book instead.

And she ponders: does that make this book the one that saved her? Or was it unrealistic all along to expect any one book to bear so much weight?

So, although it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, an interesting read for sure.

selenak

Aka the series which was delayed for years, with the result that there is much preemptive sceptism. Having watched the first three episodes which got dropped a few days ago, I very much like what I'm seeing so far. The way the series provides a distinct feeling of a place and people reminds me of what the show Ms Marvel did with the Pakistani community in New Jersey - in this case, Riri Williams comes from the Chicago South Side, as does the director, google tells me, and that's where she returns to in the series' pilot.

( Spoilers could make an Iron Suit in a cave, but would need the cash to be brought to the cave first )

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Sylt

rydra_wong

Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in

astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.

rachelmanija

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.

I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis

The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

For Reading More Than Speaking

Birthday Sale

Global Ranking

You think one plus seven seven seven makes two

Happy Birthday to Me!

The Way Up is Death, by Dan Hanks

a loaded god complex, cock it and pull it

J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large

Wednesday Reading Meme on Tuesday

waiting for the moment to turn

Rebuilding journal search again

Readercon 2025 Schedule

For anyone I've successfully lured: my top Disco Elysium tips

Dehumidifier

I don't change, I don't even notice the scene

don't go where i can't follow

still a lot of catching up to do

Book Review: Bibliophobia

Ironheart (TV Series) Episodes 1 - 3

PSA

Misc Books: Helene Hanff, Lauren Tarshis, Stuart Turton

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July 2025

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