Network

Episode 2661: Shivery Delivery

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2661.html

Episode 2661: Shivery Delivery

Is there anything more sinister than armed goons conducting a door-to-door search? It's a great way to indicate that authority has become corrupt and oppressive. And to ramp up tension as any unfortunate heroes caught amidst the scene have to decide between confronting the overwhelming forces or trying to hide. And when the thugs bully or drag away obviously innocent civilians, heroes can be forced into terrible dilemmas.

It can be a bit heavy and not for everyone, so know your audience. But can be a very effective dystopian mood setter.

aurilee writes:

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

Snow and gloom, but not a frozen ice ball planet? Okay, that's actually kind of impressive. And if we're going to have an actual blacksmith, not just a suspiciously sci-fi equivalent, that's going to make things even more interesting. I think the closest we might have gotten to that would be the factory back in Episode II, and that hardly counts as blacksmithing.

And of course the First Order agents seem threatening, that's the whole point of the armor and uniforms they've got. The armor doesn't actually seem quite as odd as when I first remember seeing it now either. Maybe that's because I'm just used to the appearance now, or maybe I've just seen even odder choices for the movies that they're alright by comparison.

Either way, this particular scene can only end well as Poe seems to be on his own.

Transcript

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2661.html

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fandom: red white and royal blue

heavy is the head that wears the crown by shirmirart (not entirely SFW)

Fandom: Red White and Royal Blue (RWRB)
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Alex/Henry
Content Notes/Warnings: not really NSFW, but naked torsos, even if disguised by sparkles
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: shirmirart on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A RWRB version of the popular pic of gay dancers, complete with barely-there crowns and glitter. Sappy, but beautifully done.
Link: heavy is the head that wears the crown

Current Music: JVK, "My Own Man"

I'm the left hand ticking on the timeless clock

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.

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delusional sometimes, but not stupid

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dreamwidth: community thursdays

Community Thursday

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on common_nature.

Chit-chat on booknook.

Promoted fan_writers to potentially interested folks >:D

Signal boost:

worderlands is hosting a 3-sentence challenge based on a table of 10 prompts, if that's of interest!

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web images

Ida knows from rugged experience that nothing gets paved for good.

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reading Wednesday

Just Finished:. Gifts by Ursula LeGuin, the first of the Annals of the Western Shore. A re-read, but it had been probably 15 years since I first read it, so it was good to visit again. Such creativity, such a wonderful voice, such marvelous characters, even if so much of the content is grim (as it involves using supernatural gifts for power and violence). Good stuff.

Now reading: Voices, the 2nd of the Annals. And The Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer, on audio. This one is remarkably charming and I am definitely enjoying it.

Up next: The Scarlet Pimpernel, for book club (on audio from Librivox), and Powers, the finale of the Annals of the Western Shore.

****

Today I was in a meeting with many people from around the organization, strategizing on how to spend $100M, and there were 10 people on the call and I was the only woman. Joy.

I had takeout Thai on Sunday when I hosted two friends, and ended up with a small container of leftover peanut sauce. So tonight I mixed it with extra olive oil, garlic, rice vinegar, and peanut butter, and stretched it enough to make it into salad dressing. Very tasty! I recommend.

In a few minutes I have to get up and make a tray of dessert for the division summer BBQ on Friday. I think I shall probably make these.

Work is entirely out of control. Apparently I could ask for OT for some of this work but I just cannot bring myself to do any more than I have the time to do in a 40-hour week. And if not enough gets done, well, that's just not my problem.

(no subject)

😔 Another month when I have to ask for help with rent again. (My landlord lets me split it into two payments, but uh the second payment is coming up fast)

A GoFundMe for keeping my business (and me) afloat.

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(no subject)

Bro comes by for a visit in the sweaty muggy achy morning, since he still patronizes a barber in the 'hood. Cottage is on the market but he is not sanguine about it selling, given the way markets are now. It didn't sell before the pandemic when things were ever so much better. One can still hope. But since he was here he opened my unbudging cold brew coffee cap for me, so that was a win.

Wind picked up in the afternoon and blew away most of the mug. Temps stayed under 30C/ 86F and thus were pleasant, whereas this morning's 25/ 77 felt 10C hotter. Also I had another sleepless night last night, threw in the towel at 6 a.m., and have felt lousy all day in consequence.

Finished Return to Dragon Mountain, another Charles Finch, and a couple of George Bellairs on the tablet. Am still reading Terra Nostra until I get to the library, but wonder how I never registered how very very much of it is about the building of the Escorial. Varied by dipping into Walpole and, inevitably, more rereading of Murderbot. One-eyed insomnia reading is still Emma and Emma is so very much justifying Austen's characterisation of her as unlikable. I gather one mustn't call her a snob because that had another meaning back then (IIRC it was lower class people trying to cultivate their betters and scorning the base degrees from which they sprung/ not knowing their place/ sort of?) but from the viewpoint of a society not so caste-ridden as Emma's, Emma is a snob. All these will be put on hold once I get to the library.

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第四年第二百十七天

部首
口 part 5
司, to manage; 叹, to sigh; 吃, to eat ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=30

语法
To go: 去 vs 走 vs 离开
https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/qu-zou-likai-to-go/

词汇
选手, athlete/player (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-3-word-list/

Guardian:
你可别忘了我才是你的上司, don't forget it's me that's your boss
我们都不希望他离开, none of us wants him to go
[no 选手]

Me:
你怎么了，一直叹气啊。
你最喜欢的选手是谁？

Things we don't talk about

Humanitarian groups say that Sudan is a worse civilian crisis than Ukraine or Gaza.

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how do your gardens grow

finally it is tomato o'clock

a tomato with a dark purple upper and red lower, speckled with gold

(This cultivar is called Blue Fire. I was very late getting my tomatoes started, but I am about to have lots of them and I am excited by this! Rainbow planting didn't quite work partly because none of the Yellow Pear-Shaped made it but largely because I lost track of which were my purple plum tomatoes and which were instead my orange, but -- I'm about to have A Bunch of ridiculous coloured tomatoes, and this is probably the showiest of the lot of 'em!)

Eyeball stabbing confirmed

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Nonfiction and Wednesday

I'm 2 episodes into s2 and I think I'm going to have to stop. She's not funny, she's not punching up, she's just selfish and mean. I think this might be the showrunners having no theory of how the Addamses fit into a larger supernatural universe. Sigh. On to Alien: Earth!

Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland: In South Dakota, people largely welcomed missiles but landowners often didn’t like giving up their land for them (NIMBYism for weapons of mass destruction). Heefner also tracks the persistence of antinuclear protest once it got started, and she makes the point that one reason the lack of success didn’t stop the hardcore protestors was religious faith—protest was an act of sacrifice and witness even if it didn’t have worldly effects.

Nathan Bomey, Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back: Newsy-ish account of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Bomey really doesn’t like unions; he’s more neutral about the interests of lender-creditors.

Grant Faulkner, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story: Paean to the affordances of flash fiction, including drabbles and six-word stories, with exercises. Interesting read.

Tiya Miles, Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits: Another attempt to reconstruct a history of people who were mostly spoken about in the records we have. I didn’t think the speculation about what they felt and thought was very helpful, but it was a useful reminder that there was an active slave trade in Indians in the area for a long time, as well as African/African-American slavery. Michigan was supposedly free territory after the Northwest Ordinance, but that didn’t mean that slavery disappeared (despite opportunities that many took to cross borders to change status).

Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015: The premise here is that the disaster didn’t start in 2005. Most of the book is pre-hurricane explanations of why the city was so vulnerable. Greed and racism play their roles.

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution: Schama focuses on loyalist African-Americans who were forced out to Canada and then to Sierra Leone. While most whites were indifferent to their fate and willing to violate the promises that the Crown had made during the Revolutionary War, a few took their duties seriously, which is how the transitions were made. The first elected black government, and the first women voting for that government, was in Sierra Leone (though a subsequent white guy sent to replace the good one removed women’s ability to vote). It’s beautifully written as well as interesting.

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murderbot

Murderbot rec

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Current Mood: awake

Victory is mine

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Current Music: Deus King: Why

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Temporarily Protected and other statuses

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

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It Figures

I essayed

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The Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

( Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: Louisville, Kentucky
Current Music: "Christmas Song" Nat King Cole

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Due South Story: Z Is For Zoo

Title: Z Is For Zoo
Series: The Due South Alphabet Series
Author: Grey/Grey853
Fandom: Due South
Pairing: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Rating: Explicit
Tags: male slash, Alternate Universe-Canon Divergent, explicit language, implied sexual content, Christmas fic, casefic
Word Count: 50,274
Summary: Ray has to help Fraser solve a case of exotic animal smuggling. It's Christmas in Whitehorse.
LinK
https://archiveofourown.org/works/69171186

Snippet:

"That’s what I need from you, Ray. If I’m not allowed to do this officially and Inspector Paris won’t let me assign any of my men, you’re my last hope.″

Ray formulated a quick plan. ″Okay, I’ll do the checks, get as much info as I can on Bailey and anyone who’s working with him, but to get what we really need, I should go inside the camp.″

″But that’s dangerous.″

″I’ve never met Bailey. You said he breeds and sells sled dogs, right?″

Ben got there before he said it. ″You want to go undercover as a buyer.″

″I could pretend to want a dog, maybe even a whole team, but I could feel him out for other possibilities. I might be able to sneak back in later and get pictures.″

″It’s too risky.″

″Breathing is risky some days.″

″I know, but you sneaking in as you call it isn’t legal.″

″Neither is killing or stealing valuable animals. I mean, I might not get what we can use to arrest him, but it could give us a chance to know exactly what he’s up to. It’s a starting point, not an end game.″

″I can’t let you go in without back up.″

Ray shook his head. He couldn’t have that. ″You can’t go in with me, Ben. You’d lose your job if you got caught.″

″What about you? You could get arrested for trespass or worse.″

″Well, then it’s a damn good thing that I’ve got a great lawyer on standby.″

″Do you think we should tell Gus the plan?″

″Nope. He’d advise against it.″

″Which is probably wise.″

″We’ll just have to play it by ear, Ben. I won’t do anything illegal unless I have to. But first things first. Tomorrow I’ll do a complete background check using all our resources. I’ll track down every known associate I can. He has to be getting the animals from other people in the ring. I’ll also want to talk to some of the people who’ve made complaints or reported him. They might know more than they’re saying. The more information I have, the better we are before I try to actually meet the guy or infiltrate. You’ve just become my number one client.″

Ben reached out and took Ray’s hand. ″Thank you.″

Ray grinned. ″You want to know the terms for my retainer?″

Ben closed the folder and stood up, drawing Ray to his feet. As he led him to the bedroom, he teased. ″I believe I can guess.″

″Smart Mountie.″