cadadr | Reading

what book(s) have you read only once that have stayed with you so long that you can never stop thinking about them? (Good and bad)

Ha, I'm a compulsive re-reader, so it's more like, "what have I read only once?"

Two come immediately to mind:

1). Atonement. If you know, you know. I don't know that it is possible to read this book considering what the ending reveals — I mean, perhaps people do, but...lord.

2). A Fine Balance. It's a historical fiction novel about The Emergency declared in India in the 1970s. It's a brutal book. You end up caring for all the characters and, well. Given the time period and who they are socially, nothing good happens. It's not bleak per se (looking at you, A Little Life), but it's realistic in what was likely to have happened to each of them given considerations like caste, etc. It's a lot. I don't regret reading it, but I won't reread it. Once was enough.

I will say that for the most part, I don't finish stuff I'm not enjoying — life is short, there are many books, if I'm not into something I usually don't make it all the way through.

With that said, though, I absolutely loathed Blindsight by Peter Watts, and I am still annoyed that for a few years there it was held up as the piece of Science Fiction For Scientists.

(These days it seems to be stuff by Andy Weir, which I by and large haven't read, because The Martian was aggressively fine, and I could not get into Artemis.)

cosmolinguist

Looking at my podcasts the other day, glaring at the ones I want to update for not updating enough, I did a thing that I know I've done before and I'm sure I will again: I thought gosh I really like that Gareth Dennis, why am I so behind on his??

Then I listen to some and (when it's not about train crashes) pretty soon I'm like I should be taking notes on this, this is about WORK. Free bus passes, driverless public transport, that's stuff I get paid to think about so I don't wanna do it in my spare time so much.

So the podcast episode goes half-unlistened to. Again.

I was already thinking that before the most recent episode, about the Gorton & Denton by-election. I listen to podcasts for escapism, that's why I like baseball! This is no kind of escape.

But today, maybe because of my time off (both a break from thinking about transport policy, and more time to listen to podcasts so I'm burning through them quicker) or maybe because the podcasts I like really aren't updating enough no matter how much I glare at the app, I put this one on.

It was at first pretty novel to hear a voice I associate with engineering disasters etc. talking about roads I've been on and places I know well.

I do think it's interesting how much transport has been emblematic of this election: when I first saw the locally-infamous "Patricia Clegg" letter that Reform is trying to deceive people with, the thing that stuck out to me most was "the buses aren't working," and I just scoffed at this slight on my beloved Bee Network -- not like I'm anything to do with TfGM or Labour or anything, but I'm really impressed at what Andy Burnham has been able to do and it really is nonsense to say that buses don't work when we have, for the first time, real-time information available in the app and AV announcements on increasingly many buses. This more than anything, more than even a candidate from Hitchin, made me feel like that letter was not written by any "concerned neighbour" but by someone who hasn't been to Manchester, not recently.

We got a postcard today "from" Andy Burnham himself telling us "the community has to unite around our candidate or you'll get a Reform MP" (typical Labour, telling us we have to do what they tell us to) and on this postcard, as well as the expected photo of him with the candidate is just a particular photo of yellow Bee Network buses that I've seen in every TfGM press release and news story about them. It really is a symbol of his; bringing about the first franchise outside of London, and the coming integration with local train services, really does feel miraculous.

So yeah, it really is interesting how much transport has been a useful lens to view the by-election with.

But man. Between this by-election and Minnesota, I'm like... never mind living in interesting times, I'm weary of living in interesting places.

hafnia

favorite tarot card (whether for art, meaning, or something else)?

(As per usual, I will do the writing ones when I get my shit together, preferably on a day when I'm not dealing with a migraine.)

I have a few favorite cards, less because of art, and more because of meaning. As per usual, in no particular order:

The Magician: The Magician represents ambition, manifestation, resourcefulness and inspired action. I have a lot of fondness for this one simply because it was one of the major arcana I used to pull most frequently when doing readings for myself. One of the potential interpretations of the Magician is that it represents balance and having the ability to do things because you have all the resources at your disposal — and, yeah, I liked that. Ha. In my favorite (goblin) deck, he's a juggler and it's quite pretty art, but it doesn't appear to be online (boo), so I suppose you'll have to take my word for it.

Death: Not literally about death; also the card I tend to pull the most these days. Er, hmm. Death is about change, transformation, endings — it's a pretty positive card and it is only rarely about literal death. One of my favorite books about tarot talks about accepting Death as part of life, and I think about it a lot in that context — there are constant deaths in the form of endings around us every day, and part of finding meaning and purpose in life is learning to accept this.

The Ten of Cups: Cups as a suit are meant to represent relationships and connections, both romantic and not. The Ten of Cups is specifically about having those relationships/connections in abundance and feeling connected and cared for — it's basically "happiness: the card".

At one point, one of my very good friends, who does tarot, offered to tell each of us what cards in her deck she associated with us. She left it to us to figure out the "why". Most of my friends were major arcana — I still remember being mildly jealous of the person who was told theirs was 'the Star' — and I was sort of upset at the time that I was the 10 of Cups.

Now that I do tarot, I think it may be one of the best compliments I've ever been given. So. Yeah.

cosmolinguist

Tonight's knock on the door was a Labour canvasser who asked if I was planning to vote; I said I'd just done my postal vote this afternoon, and "I'm afraid I voted Green," I tried to let him down gently.

He still tried to show me the latest "only Labour can beat Reform" chart which baffled me: from my own time canvassing I can only expect that in such circumstances they have a box to tick for "voted for someone else" and you move on! Arguing with people who've already voted is a waste of time.

I hadn't been going to get in to this but since he wasn't going away I told him that I'm a disabled immigrant and Labour are making life more difficult for all of those so I couldn't vote for them. He said "well Angeliki settled here from Europe..."

It just felt so point-missing. I don't really care about the demographics of a candidate too much. I care how they'll vote, I care about their party's policies and how they'll affect all immigrants! (Or any other group on the wrong side of this power imbalance.)

I appreciate there's a lot of new volunteers on all sides in this by-election. (Seriously dude, I hope they trained you enough that you know there should be a box for you to tick that says I can be done wasting your and all your colleagues' time!) But it's hard not to feel like this is what Labour has been for all twenty of the years I lived here: focus on this exceptional individual, not the boring systemic problems that the party will always shy away from.

The funniest thing was, as I was finally getting this guy to go away, I'd spotted another guy behind him and I'd assumed he was a fellow canvasser with this guy, but as I started to close the door, he caught my attention to say "I'm from the Greens, did you want to put up a sign?" And only then I remembered that D had in fact asked for one the other day, so me and this guy and D eventually ended up out in the rain trying to find something to affix it to before ending up dragging a big tree in a big pot to the edge of the driveway for maximum visibility.

I hope that sends the Labour canvassers a message, for the couple more days until this election finally happens.

cosmolinguist

Today is a good day because I came downstairs to find that the house was warm enough that the heating hadn't needed to kick in, which is so much more comfortable for me.

First thing I noticed when I went outside yesterday was that it smelled like a rainy spring day instead of a rainy winter day.

I am so ready for fresh air and open windows.

hafnia

What is my favorite place in the world?

God. Uh. Hmm.

I want to toss some far-flung locales on here, but I haven't been there in over twenty years and God only knows if they're still nice, so. I guess we'll go with the places I have known well and loved.

It's a toss-up between:

The Salt Lake City Public Library, at least as I remember it circa 2010 (which, God, was a long time ago...!) — I went to a bunch of poetry readings etc here and always loved it and felt very in my element whenever I was there, and the rooftop garden is super neat.

Cape Perpetua, because it's fucking beautiful.

Swan Lake, Montana, because I spent just about every childhood here from the time I was 4 to the time I was 14.

Mesa Verde, because it's just fucking cool.

SF MoMA, because I adore it and have a lot of great memories of visiting different exhibits there (for several years in a row I had business stuff that took me to San Francisco at least once if not twice a year, and I always hit up SF MoMA when I went).

Anyway yes, I am Indecisive, you are welcome :D

cosmolinguist

Like D, I have been telling all the canvassers who come to the door that I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Reform, but I am relieved that now the constituency-level polling indicates that it's more likely to be the Greens than Labour, because I really didn't want to have to hold my nose and vote for Labour. I'm a trans disabled immigrant and they went through a phase last year of trying to make things more difficult for every single one of those groups of people.

And I do like the points the Greens in the person of Zack Polanski are making, particularly in their most recent party political broadcast. (With one note: I have very strong feelings about "make X Y again" constructions of any kind these days, but I'm grudgingly willing to make an exception for "make hope normal again" despite how loaded "hope" and "normal" are as the X and Y in this case!)

hafnia

A favorite or hilarious story from the TTRPG table?

Oh, God, there are so many little moments that are burned into my brain, but I think the one I have to talk about is the Desk Goat.

( Beneath the jump. )

I will say that the other "favorite" moments I have are all ones that had pretty serious story consequences, etc, and so aren't particularly funny (or easy to explain). Think along the lines of deciding to redeem villains, challenging certain narrative assumptions about where stuff was going (and forcing me to pivot on a dime, ha), etc.

Technically, the players becoming attached to and deciding to redeem one specific villain is what led to the weird poly romance novel I (mostly) wrote last year, but...yeah.

(I say "mostly" because

shadaras was there the entire time and most of the worldbuilding etc was stuff done in tandem as, wouldn't it be fun if..., so though the prose is like 95% mine, the story is definitely a collaborative effort.)

cosmolinguist

I am so tired I can hardly string a sentence together but I wanted to say that today went great from a "finding a new place on my own" perspective, from actually being incredibly useful from a work perspective. Getting back was actually the annoying part (road works made it difficult to escape the area I'd arrived to by bus, and I got lost trying to walk back to anywhere I could get a bus or Uber; getting back from Stockport took much longer thanks to Piccadilly still being closed).

But I made it just in time to get to a much-needed yoga session, and got home to eat delicious takeout, and a basically-empty weekend and most-of-a-week off now stretches before me.

hafnia

Tabletop goals for the year?

In no particular order:

1). Finish the Bounty Hunter's Guild and give it a satisfying ending.
2). Run and wrap Goodbye My Darling.
3). Start the long-form Eberron campaign (name TBD).
4). Finish Space Heist and get it on itch.io, even if it's only as a public beta or something, because IT HAS BEEN LONG ENOUGH.

That's nice and concise, I think? :D

Will say that I do have a brief update re: sourdough — I made a successful starter and yesterday, I baked bread with it for the first time. Nothing fancy; I made two regular boules. The prove on it could probably have been a bit better, but dang, y'all, it tasted great. :D I ate sourdough toast this morning and it was everything I wanted. 10/10, would do again. ♥ So that's one thing crossed off my, "I want to try to do this" list, and now that I've done it the straight way, I can start playing with different flours and such (want to incorporate a bit of rye into it, for flavor), start thinking about inclusions, etc. I had this amazing fruit and nut bread at one point that I kinda want to try remaking...was like, walnut with dried cranberries? so, yeah.

We shall see!

cosmolinguist

I thought I'd just get dropped off at the train station after our session (and the all-important debrief in Costa) was finished. But I should've known: my lovely colleague has sight loss herself and assured me that they -- she, her husband/PA, her guide dog -- would wait until I was safely on a train.

But first, I needed to pee, so I got directed to the gents' and I was only gone for a few minutes but when I walked back up the platform I saw those two (three, counting Flick the dog) standing with two other ladies chatting away. As I got closer I'd have guessed they were people R knew from work; one of them mentioned another charity that's known to us. I was happy to chill while they did that "Oh you know Nick?" kind of thing. But it turns out they didn't know each other; these women had just been at some sight-loss related event but one of them just spoke up when she saw the guide dog because she always does and is clearly the kind of person who'll talk to anyone. They had made friends at a local society for blind people, and had just come from, of all things, a funeral for someone they knew from that group. The chattier one told us about her eye condition, Homonymous Hemianopia -- and R and I said "that's the one we couldn't say before!" when we were going through a list of them at the session earlier; we both know about hemianopia but neither of us could get the word out at the time.

Then the other person said "And I have optic nerve hypoplasia."

And then I said "Shut up!" because I was so surprised. That's what I have! And even among other blind people, no one's heard of it. It's an odd, rare thing. I literally don't think I've ever met anyone else who's got it.

They and I ended up getting on the same train for the first 15 minutes or so, by which point the chatty one had made friends with the conductor and exchanged numbers with me.

My hypoplasia pal lives in Runcorn and says she comes to Manchester regularly; I said she should let me know if she wants to hang out.

Such a goofy coincidence, but an uplifting end to a day that could've gone better. (It was fine, it just...well, I'm too tired to explain it now. But it was fine. Just, could've been better.)

hafnia

Fiber arts project I've finished that I'm most proud of?

There's two that I'm really proud of, honestly — the rainbow afghan (pictures of which have been lost to time, alas), which was a queen-sized afghan I made from these blocks. It was, literally, red/orange/yellow/green/blue/indigo/violet flowers, yellow-centered with black edging about them to set it off (instead of white as in that pattern).

My ex pressed on me to give it to his mom, since she was going through a hard time, and so I parted with it and we shipped it to her. I have mixed feelings about that — on the one hand, it was so much work and it was really pretty (I made it all from thrifted yarn; it was jewel-toned and beautiful), but on the other hand, I don't tend to keep stuff I make, so who knows where it would have ended up otherwise? She was grateful to get it, so.

The other one that I'm very proud of is a cross-stitch project I did earlier this summer. It was the first time I'd actually cross-stitched anything in about five years, and I did it without a proper pattern (I did get instructions on how to do the worms and the dragon, but, you know). Pictures of it are up on Mastodon, so here. Perfect? Definitely not, but the person it was made for appreciated it, and I am still proud of it, so. ♥

hafnia

(Day 16 was technically due YESTERDAY and I WILL DO IT, I just have a lot of thoughts on writing!)

1-5 novels/series I've read that I think other people should read so I can talk about them

Ha. Um. Hmmm.

This is always fun because it's like, "what DO I want other people to read, that isn't something they've already read?"

So!

A couple of pitches 'cos, you know, yeah.

1). Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. This is always one of those ones where it's like, "I feel like people were told to read it and bounced hard off the premise", because it came out when "vampires" was still "Anne Rice" and pre-Twilight. Post-Twilight (and I guess to some extent the Sookie Stackhouse books?), we're all kind of burnt out on 'em, and yet.

Sunshine — or Rae, to her friends — is a baker in the coffee house that's owned by her stepdad, Charlie. In a world where vampires, demons, and weres are common, she's about as normal as you can get. High school graduate by the "skin of her teeth", as she puts it, she's not exactly a deep thinker. A huge introvert with a desire for nothing more than to be left alone, the coffee house is her life, and she sees nothing wrong with that.

...until, you know, she's kidnapped by vampires to be used as an object of torment for a different vampire, and has to tap on the heritage granted to her by her extremely powerful sorcerer father to escape.

In other books I feel like this would turn into something where she learns to "embrace her dark self" or whatever, but no — she really does just want to go back to the coffee house and keep on Doing The Thing.

Alas, alack, the world has other opinions — and the vampires who nabbed her are very curious how the hell it is that she managed to escape...and why it is she took their other (vampire) prisoner with her.

2). Mudlark, by Lara Maiklem. Nonfiction. If you have no idea what mudlarking is, you need to read this. If you do know what it is, you should probably already have read it, and if you haven't, well, what are you waiting for?

(I know, I know, that's a hell of a review, and yet. I'm not wrong!)

3). Ombria in Shadow, Patricia McKillip. People who know me are probably going, "??" at the idea that I'm not recommending you read Riddle-Master; that's fine.

Ombria in Shadow opens with a death: the rule of Ombria, Royce Greve, has died, and a woman of unknown relation, Dominia Pearl, is taking over as regent for his heir. As her first act, she tosses Lydea, Royce's mistress, into the streets of Ombria.

This could be the beginning of some kind of weird revenge/redemption arc, but that's not where it goes.

Lydea is capable and clever, sure, and there is someone else who people want to see on the throne of Ombria, but there's multiple things at play, multiple factions at work, and much to consider going on beneath the surface. The politics are fun, the magic is wonderful, and the ending is entirely unexpected. It's lyrical and beautiful and I love it so. Finding a signed copy at a used bookstore was one of the best unexpected gifts I've ever gotten from the universe.

4). Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers. It's in the public domain now! You really have no excuse not to read it. Er.

Warnings for the usual period-typical stuff to the side (and Sayers is not as bad as most), it's a book about a murder trial — specifically, murder by arsenic — that's laid out rather well and plotted in a way that's quite fun. It's dated as hell, of course, being as it came out in the 1930s, but it's fun, the characters are likable, and the plot itself is quite good.

Also I find that if people read it and like it, I can convince them to read Have His Carcasse and Gaudy Night, which are, I think, two of the best ones. :)

I think that's it, though of course I imagine

shadaras will pop up and remind me about all the books I have been like, "?! you haven't read THAT?" at them about, so watch this space? :P

cosmolinguist

For work-related reasons, I can get a free round trip on any TransPennine Express train.

I'd basically be working on the outbound journey but could come back any time I want, doesn't have to be the same day or anything.

I was excited at having an excuse to go back to York, until I remembered that TPE trains go to Scotland as well... I could go to Edinburgh or Glasgow!

I've got I think four days' vacation I have to use up in March, as well...

It's much longer since I've been to Glasgow, but Edinburgh is closer to where I have friends.

It'd probably mean going on my own though, and that isn't my best thing. But a few days away from Normal Life does sound really nice...

I've got all of next week off work except the Wednesday, which I'll be spending in Chester. It did occur to me that it'd be fun to see how cheap a midweek Premier Inn or whatever would be, and hang out for a few days around the work trip...

I love my house and my people but I like to do different things too.

hafnia

You know the drill, and you probably even know where you can ask questions if you have 'em :D

Favorite installment of a video game series or a favorite standalone video game?

Ha, I love being asked about favorites, because invariably my mind goes blank and all I can think is, "I have never enjoyed a videogame in my life..."

A handful, both standalone and not, in no particular order:

-The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Cyrodil is beautiful, alchemy is broken and fun, and the mages guild quest and the Dark Brotherhood quests in particular are very fun. Parts of it are extremely silly (the speechcraft minigame comes to mind), but on the whole the game is immersive in a way that I did not find Skyrim to be, and it's just...fun. It's fun to pop it open on a very gloomy day and bop around Cyrodil for a while, picking flowers, following whatever catches my fancy, and just generally dipping in and enjoying myself.

-Stardew Valley. I've achieved Perfection twice; I think that speaks for itself? Ha. I love the game — it has a nice rhythm to it that, once established, makes it very easy to sink into it and enjoy yourself. No matter what you do, it's almost impossible to fuck stuff up to the point where you break the game. (Not completely impossible, but very difficult!) Plus there's just something extremely satisfying about growing giant cauliflower. :D

-Slime Rancher. You ranch slimes and explore. The slimes are cute, the map is pretty, the puzzles are satisfying, and the overarching story (yes, there IS one) is queer-coded and very bittersweet.

-Strange Horticulture. You grow plants! You solve tiny puzzles to figure out what plants will solve different people's problems, and then you give them those plants! You have a cat! It's very fun, and the branching story is satisfying.

-Baldur's Gate III. The companions are good, the storyline is excellent, the mechanics are very fun...yeah. I mean, yeah. It deserves the praise it got, is that enough? :D

-Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Okay, look, sometimes you just want a hot nonbinary paladin to name you their noble...squire? and send you out on a quest to save the land. Sometimes you want that to come in a setting where you have guns that shoot swords and the goal is simply, Numbers Go Up. Wonderlands does that, and it also manages to be this actually incredible emotional payoff about loss and grief, growing up and moving on.

Other stuff, hmm.

Honorable mention to Portal/Portal 2, perpetual favorites. NetHack also gets a shout-out, I'm awful at it but it is probably the game I've played the most (and I do love it, though I cannot possibly explain why). Gone Home and TACOMA also deserve mentions for being wonderful (though they're very much one-and-done), and, like, y'all, I love The Room I-IV. Fable! Super Mario World (and more importantly, Yoshi's Island, the first games I ever 100%ed, without the benefit of a game guide or the internet). Super Mario 64, which I still remember all the cheats and warp points for! I played and loved the Pokemon games (I've played almost every generation, oddly, despite not thinking of myself as a "Pokemaniac" in any sense of the word :D ), I loved Breath of the Wild, and I enjoyed ACNH.

But I didn't think of them until just now, so. :D

cosmolinguist

I had a pretty dispiriting conversation with my parents this evening.

Whenever I think "wow I'm shit at speaking up when I should," I hope I remember how far I've come.

My mom won't argue with the people in her life who persist in Trump support despite living in Minnesota in 2026. "We just don't talk about politics," I remember hearing this when I was growing up (once or twice; one didn't even need to talk about not talking about politics very often), and it seems so nonsensical as well as enraging these days.

And when she told me about a parent being ableist toward his young son, after said child's disability had been explicitly compared to mine... She was talking to the parents and made that connection herself, saying that how they described his sight reminded her of me, which got the mom to ask if I'd ever "had to" use braille. At this point I was wincing a little, she made it sound like an emergency plan I didn't have to resort to (when actually I taught myself (by sight, not touch) Grade 1 braille when I was 11 because I so desperately wanted to learn it), but whatever. Mom replied, accurately, that I did not learn braille. The kid's mom said that she'd asked because they as his parents had been told braille might be relevant to their child, and I guess here the kid's dad interrupted their conversation to say "absolutely not, he will never do that."

I was so upset. I shouted "that's horrible!"

Mom was upset...with my outburst. "I'm only telling you what he said," she told me, clearly not interested when I tried to explain why I thought this is horrible.

I've been having a bad-brain time anyway, but the idea that there are people out there who insist that their visually impaired kid will never learn braille is bad enough... and it stings to see that my mom isn't even interested in advocating otherwise even when she had been explicitly treated like an expert by the kid's mom by drawing this parallel between my condition and his.

My mom isn't really much of an expert on my condition -- she told me that people in her church prayed for me to stop being blind when I was a baby and I'm a miracle; Wikipedia tells me it's normal for people born with my condition to acquire some sight by the time we're five years old. And her own ableism was baked into the conversation: she's intensely uncomfortable with wheelchair users unless they are expected to "walk again some day" and she was just so paternalistic about the kid that even modeling better reactions (which is usually all I can do when my parents are like this) didn't feel good enough for me.

It just felt like the last straw: a difficult weekend, I accidentally broke the fastening on my current-favorite glasses chain while I was trying to clean glasses that always seem to be dirty lately, I have realized only tonight that all my train journeys this coming week will be even more complicated because Manchester Piccadilly is effectively closed... D kindly tried to fix a problem with my phone not sending e-mail only for it to confound him, leaving him frustrated and confused.

And now it's past my bedtime? I somehow have to go to sleep when I'm so dejected? Bah.

hafnia

(As per usual, if you want to ask, you can do so here!)

Romance! Tell us about your fav romance media (books, movies, TV, etc.)

Ha, I guess it is Valentine's Day? :) (Not that Maximo and I did much except watch The Boy and the Heron and eat pots de creme!)

I'm going to be very casual about this and divide it roughly between books and films.

Books

So — I've read a fuckload of romance novels. Like, more than is probably healthy? Anyway. There's a few book-romances (not necessarily romance books) that will always get a nod from me. In no particular order:

-War for the Oaks, the romance between Eddi and the Phouka. It has, hands-down, one of the best descriptions of romantic love I think I have ever seen in a book — specifically, an exchange where Our Brave Heroine asks the hero how he can be sure he loves her, and he lays out a very specific list of reasons that is just...yeah. That's what I think of when I think about love.

The quote is here.

Reluctantly, she remembered her suspicion, that he was playing at being in love. She didn't believe it anymore, not really. But she heard herself asking the hateful question anyway. "How do you know it's love? Maybe you haven't learned anything after all.

She expected a joke, an impassioned protest, an airy denial. Instead he looked gravely in her face and replied, "I've no surety that it is. I know only the parts of what I feel; I may be misnaming the whole. You dwell in my mind like a household spirit. All that I think is followed with, 'I shall tell that thought to Eddi.' Whatever I see or hear is colored by what I imagine you will say of it. What is amusing is twice so, if you have laughed at it. There is a way you have of turning your head, quickly and with a little tilt, that seems more wonderful to me than the practiced movements of dancers. All this, taken together, I've come to think of as love, but it may not be.

"It is not a comfortable feeling. But I find that, even so, I would wish the same feeling on you. The possibility that I suffer it alone — that frightens me more than all the host of the Unseelie Court."

-The Flatshare, Beth O'Leary. This was one that hit me at the right point in time, I think — I was roughly two years out of the relationship with my ex, finally beginning to acknowledge how fucked the whole thing had been from the beginning, and here was this really lovely novel that was about, well, realizing that you'd been in a horrible abusive relationship but that there was light and hope and laughter on the other side, that you could love someone wholeheartedly again and it would be okay. Plus the initial little setup for it — communicating solely through notes — was really lovely!

-Uprooted, Naomi Novik. The scene with the rose illusion...whew. If you know, you know. Also it's just a great book, hands down, so. Yeah.

Honorable mentions to: Beauty by Robin McKinley (twelve-year-old me was rather obsessed with it), Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip (tho I'm not sure I would term it a "romance", romantic attraction is rather at the center of it, ha), myriad other books that I'm trying to think of and just completely and utterly failing at right now? The problem with reading a lot and reading widely is that I can think of zillions of things and then the instant that I go to write something like this about them, my mind goes utterly and completely blank. Whoops.

Film

Again, in no particular order, and being sort of loose and easy with what we consider "romance", ha, I do not promise that I have good taste:

-"His Girl Friday". Hildy Johnson, intrepid girl reporter! She hides a murderer in a desk! Cary Grant romances her! It's a weird screwball comedy and it's one of my, "I don't feel well and I just want to watch something where everything turns out okay" movies. I watched it when I was recovering from surgery in 2021. V good, highly recommend. ♥

-"Three Thousand Years of Longing". It's Idris Elba as a djinn, with Tilda Swinton as a bookish scholar, with story and direction by George Miller, and if that's not enough for you, well — fine; it's a beautiful, strange fairy tale for adults.

-"Notting Hill". I have...such a soft spot for this movie, ha. Various people over time tried to ruin it for me by pointing out that the relationship at the heart of it would "never work out, long-term"; I know that, but that's not the point. For people who are not familiar: Will Thacker (Hugh Grant, this is literally the only role I like him in!) is the owner of a bookstore in the eponymous Notting Hill. Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) happens to come into his bookstore, sparks fly, it all sort of spirals out from there? The romance itself is fine, very 1990s in a lot of ways — I actually love it specifically for the deep and abiding love that exists between the friends that Will has in the film. The other romances that we see in the movie are very sweet and read as very genuine, and his friends are wonderful and support him when he needs support, and tell him he's been a twat when, well, he's being a twat. :D Who couldn't use a friend like that?

-"Moonstruck". Again, it's one of those movies where I have a huge soft spot for it. Cher stars alongside Nicholas Cage as a widowed woman who is trying to convince her fiance's brother (Cage) to come to their wedding. Of course, it's not that easy — Our Intrepid Heroine knows that her fiance is wrong for her in every conceivable way, but she's afraid of actually falling in love again, because her first husband died very young, in a horrible way. Enter her fiance's brother, who is a weird tortured artist of a baker (of all the things!), with whom she falls horribly, passionately in love with despite it being objectively the worst choice possible.

The thing is, they make it work. It's sort of funny, like — you don't want to root for them (she's blowing up her life!), but sometimes the right choice is the one that looks wrong on paper, and the two leads have great chemistry and really sell the whole idea of "right person, wrong time, fuck it, let's go for it anyway".

Also Olympia Dukakis is in it, and she's absolutely wonderful. Big ups to the granddad, too — he's amazing. :D

-"But I'm A Cheerleader". I cannot believe how many people I have had to introduce this movie to, good lord. Natasha Lyonne plays Megan, a high school senior and captain of the cheer squad who gets sent to a "pray the gay away" camp by her parents, who are convinced (as are her peers) that she is actually a lesbian. This despite her having done everything "right" — like, she's got a hunky boyfriend (quarterback on the football team), she participates in traditionally girly activities, etc, etc.

Enter camp, where at first she's fairly certain she doesn't belong, until a group therapy session goes awry and she realizes that she is, in fact, a gigantic lesbian. Whoops.

It is notable for being one of the first films I saw that had a lesbian couple as the focus where nothing horrible happened and they in fact got their happily-ever-after (implied). (The other was Better Than Chocolate, which I barely remember, so. :) ) Growing up in Utah, well — this movie was revolutionary, and seeing Clea Duvall as Graham was extremely helpful in some aspects. Is it a good movie? No, but I saw it at the right time and I think that while it's imperfect it holds up okay.

I'm sure there's other media, including podcasts, etc, but I genuinely cannot think of anything off the top of my head, whoops. :x Oh, well, maybe someday this post will get a sequel?

cosmolinguist

I hung out with a guy from Ecuador today, and we talked about what immigrants always talk about: how much we miss the food we can't get here. (His wife is originally from Venezuela -- they both grew up in Spain before ending up in England -- and our extensive talk about food made me miss the Venezuelan who made arepas, but I think that place didn't survive lockdowns. Apparently there's no Ecuadoran food here; the closest thing he could console himself with is a Colombian place in Liverpool.)

When someone from queer club who has chronic pain and fatigue asked for help with the heavy lifting of moving house, of course I volunteered. This was the man-with-a-van that he hired.

It's funny, when Matt told me to text Dennis I expected that Dennis would be an old gammony bigot, but instead I got Denis, an adorable wife guy, a decade younger than me, helping people move house as a side hustle.

Denis called me Matt at first, which didn't bother me -- Matt's the person he's mostly been dealing with! -- but he could not have been more apologetic. And then apparently he called me Kevin for a while, which did make me laugh (I didn't even know this until he apologized for it!). I did try to assure Denis that all these white guy names are the same but he was adamant.

I don't know Matt well, except that he's a single-in-the-sense-of-not-cohabiting person who's 30 or 40 years old. I expected a room full of stuff. This guy had an amount of books I'd expect from boomers who haven't had to move to a new house in fifty years. And the heaviest bookcases, I think Matt said they were made of old scaffolding or something? And because the bookcases had to go in the van first, they had to come out last, and thus be taken upstairs when I was already wiped out.

We collected stuff from his storage unit and brought it to his house first, then went to his previous house to get stuff from there and there was so much we didn't think we could fit it all in the van and that we'd have to come back to make a second trip. We really really didn't want to do that, though, and managed to avoid it by packing the van so full that Denis's hand truck had to come with us in the front -- I sat in the middle, and it got shotgun. But we were so pleased with ourselves for not having to go back, and it's a damn good thing. I could barely walk the 20ish minutes home by the time we finished -- and when I got there, it took me most of an hour to eat and shower even though I very much wanted to do both of those things!

As we were dragging the bookcases up the stairs, Denis could not stop talking about how strong I was, he was shocked when I told him (not quite in so many words) that I have a bullshit email job, he absolutely thought I was a fellow manual laborer. "How did you get so good at this?" he said. I didn't know how to tell him it's a combination of my dad instilling his (manual laborer) work ethic, and transgym making me hench.

I was not looking forward to having to go help V's relative get stuff from his mum's house to the tip again tomorrow, but it sounds like we almost certainly won't be needed! He got extra done this week and extra help today, which is wonderful for him and well-timed for me. Apparently the last bit, a friend of his with a van, might fall through tomorrow so we're on standby but that slight possibility feels a lot better than the absolute certainty!

Now I'm off to take some more ibuprofen and sleep forever.

hafnia

(As per usual, if you have a burning question, you can ask here!)

A science fact everyone should know and/or that is cool.

Oh, gosh — the difficulty with being someone with expertise in chemistry is that I never know what people do/don't know, because stuff that I take for granted might be something that everyone does, or it might be something that makes everyone sit up and go, "what the fuck are you talking about?"

Suppose I can be a little self-indulgent, since it's my journal, and say —

The history of synthetic dyes is really interesting stuff. We'll settle on that, because it's weird and fun.

We're (probably) all familiar with the whole thing about how purple is the color of royalty because for centuries, purple/violet dyes were incredibly difficult to come by — think Tyrian purple, which was labor-intensive and required thousands of snails to create.

As alchemy became chemistry, with chemists moving more toward natural science and away from transmutation, part of the shift in approach was a desire to understand what gives rise to different natural products. How do we make them, what's their structure, etc. Not dyes so much as medicines and other valuable products that can be found in nature but that it might be nicer to be able to synthesize.

Starting in the early 1800s, we're getting a better grip on the periodic table, etc (though it isn't a table, yet) — we've been able to isolate some of the elements, we're beginning to have better understanding of different reactions, especially organic reactions, and what leads to the products that are desired. There's an interest in understanding how plants like indigo are able to work as dyes — can we isolate what molecule it is that gives rise to those dye colors. A lot of work is done to identify that molecule — one that gets called aniline — though the interest in it is less in using it as a dye (since it's not useful as one) and more in using it as a precursor for other chemicals (like eventually, polyurethane).

So.

Fast-forward to 1856. William Henry Perkin is a student at the Royal College of Chemistry. His PI, a guy named August Wilhelm von Hofmann, was an important organic chemist (he coined the term "synthesis" and if you have ever taken organic chemistry you are certainly familiar with his work) who had done a great deal of work on aniline and was hellbent on synthesizing quinine. He had a scheme that he thought would work to create it, and like all great PIs, he shoved it off on one of his students — in this case, Perkin. "Go do this and see if it works" — nice to know that some things never actually change, ha.

The synthetic scheme itself was unsuccessful — instead of making quinine, Perkin made what we would charitably call "black goop". Trying to clean it out of the flask he'd done the reaction in with alcohol, he was surprised to realize that the liquid was bright purple. Some initial tests showed that it could dye fabric, and so Perkin dropped out of college to patent it, selling it as "mauveine", and kicking off the synthetic dye frenzy. Mauveine was cheap and easy to make — after all, we'd figured out how to make aniline industrially — and so here was a color that had previously been unattainable, suddenly everywhere. People went a bit nuts for it, you had everyone running around wearing mauve, to the extent that different satirical publications wrote about the "mauve measles", and chemists everywhere sat up and went, "If that asshole can do it, I bet I can, too" — the real basis of scientific discovery. (TRULY.)

The craze for mauveine would eventually die down, as other aniline dyes (as they were called) were discovered, and other colors became available, but mauveine was the first. Despite its drawbacks (it's carcinogenic and prone to fading), it was the first commercially significant synthetic dye, and it really did kick off a huge line of work in organic chemistry.

It's sort of funny, actually, but the first line of synthetic dyes would also lead (indirectly) to the discovery of sulfa antibiotics. :)

cosmolinguist

I'm going to Huddersfield for work on Monday, Wrexham on Wednesday, and at the very end of today I had a call where I ended up agreeing to go to "somewhere near Walsall" on Friday next week (I'm still awaiting the promised email with more specific details than that!).

(For non-locals, these are all 2ish hours away, or less, but one of these in a week would usually be a big deal and leave me really tired the next day and etc.)

They're all trips I really want to make, all for unrelated things that just happen to have turned up at the same time. I'll be fine. But oof!

Tomorrow I'm helping a fellow Queer Club member move heavy furniture to his new place, while V has an unpleasant hospital appointment testing for something potentially serious. Sunday D and I will once again be doing tip runs for V's relative who's clearing out his mum's house...

Everything is... a bit intense at the moment.

I do have almost all of the next week off work (except for a trip to Chester lol, which I actually really want to do). Really looking forward to that.

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göktuğ's blog

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