Got steroids to the left wrist on Tuesday, and sulked for the rest of the day because it was tender ( Read more... ).
Friday I put together the Cronch Tower, to replace the Cronch Pile. It's a 5 foot construction of wire shelf panels, with two two-foot high baskets and a final open topped container. This is to manage the chip needs of 3+1 people.
After shopping Friday, Belovedest pulled the Holiday Morass in front of me, for me to sort out into Yuletide, Halloween, and It's Fall, Y'All Decorative Gourd Season. Plus None of the Above. And Thorn came up for company while working and sociability. Since they had hung the work privacy shade on the window.
Today before I woke up, Belovedest had herded the Cronch Tower further. And unboxed my printer. And while I took advantage of the 80+F weather to lounge, they ran a test print.
The print came out fine! Belovedest now knows where I keep the spare filament (in The Heir and the Spare, naturally). We are discussing next steps!
Having a bit of a month, not least because it turns out I really am having the a full-scale One Piece crisis in 2025, please know that the icon attached to this post is just my whole entire expression about this, send help. Also however translation projects are just wreaking absolute havoc on my ADHD, it’s so so not helpful wrt getting caught up on work, aughhh… I keep losing 6-hour chunks of my day in what feels like the blink of an eye, hyperfocus absolutely kills, Vernor Vinge gets it! I could do this 18 hours a day and let the entire rest of my life completely fall apart, it would be so easy. I need to! Not do that! Augh.
Anyway, obviously I want to talk about the disastrously absorbing translation projects, I’m pretty sure everyone in my contacts is sick to death of hearing me talk about the quirks of the Russian language, sorry, everyone:
Actually this also seems like a good moment to share this extremely funny, extremely wholesome segment of Andrey Makarevich’s autobiography that I translated a few years ago, he loves the Beatles exactly the same way that I love the Beatles, bless him (and also I just love every story about Soviet kids passing around Beatles contraband):
Really everything started when I heard the Beatles.
Strictly speaking, prior to “Time Machines” the band was called “The Kids,” and before that it wasn’t called anything at all, and everything didn’t happen right away. Really everything started when I heard the Beatles. I came home from school at the moment when my father was taping “A Hard Day’s Night,” borrowed from a neighbor, onto a little Philips tape recorder. I’d heard some kind of scraps of the Beatles even before that, at someone else’s house. A tiny fragment of their concert (about five seconds) could be heard on the television, thereby demonstrating how far bourgeois culture had fallen. In class a photo of the Beatles was passed around: re-photographed multiple times, worn and cracked like an ancient idol, enough that by now it was impossible to tell who in it was who, but magic still emanated from it.
So, I got home, and my father was taping “A Hard Day’s Night.” There was a sense that my entire life so far I’d been wearing cotton wool in my ears, and suddenly it had been taken out. I simply physically felt something within me churning, stirring, changing irrevocably. The Beatles days had started. Beatles were listened to from morning until evening. In the morning, before school, then immediately after and straight through until knock-off. On Sunday Beatles were listened to all day. Occasionally my Beatles-exhausted parents would kick me out onto the balcony together with the tape recorder, at which point I’d turn the volume up to full, so that everyone in the area would also listen to the Beatles.
Obligatory additional translation note about the Beatles in the USSR: Soviet newspapers often referred to them as «Жуки-ударники»—literally, “Hitter Beetles,” since they’re the Beat-les—which is very funny to me as a reverse pun, since of course they were hitmakers, but also led to them being called the diminutive «Жучки», which has exactly the same energy as present-day English-speaking fans referring to them as “the bugs,” I love.
Also I translated another fic last weekend about a dumpster war with seagulls (which, like the emu war, is obviously won by the seagulls) which was so funny I immediately got the crow-brings-friends-a-shiny impulse to share it, still need to finish cleaning that one up to post, ahhh.
Oh, and I finished this translation a couple weeks ago, played it pretty fast and loose in terms of how much license I gave myself to tweak phrasing and was quite pleased with how it turned out: Occam’s Scalpel! The extremely funny black humor scene 2/3 of the way down was definitely at least 70% of my motivation for translating that one, lol.
I accidentally walked up on this lovely heron at the lake today (US Midwest, small man-made lake that just happens to be close enough for me to walk to), and he was obliging enough to stand still until I had a chance to get out the camera! I see a lot of birds out there every year (right now we also have ducklings, a small geese population, and a lot of red-winged blackbirds), but this is the closest I've ever gotten to one of the herons, and I thought this community might like to see him.
Fairly sure it's a great blue heron, though I'm not a bird-identifying expert.
I resent that you woke me up for this. On a Saturday.
Totally fair. Go ahead and ask your questions.
Ugh, fine. First: Have you, in fact, written thirteen novels in ten years?
I have not!
So much for Mister “oh, I never miss a deadline” over here.
Two things here: One, I do actually only rarely miss a deadline, and then for good reason, and also usually only by a couple of weeks at most, so there, and two, my release schedule is primarily dictated by Tor, my publisher, so if I didn’t write 13 books in ten years, it’s mostly because Tor decided that schedule was not actually what they wanted.
So how many books have you written in those ten years?
For Tor? I’ve written eight: The Collapsing Empire, Head On, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, and The Shattering Peace, which comes out in September. Outside of that I’ve written four novellas, a bunch of short stories, some which have been made into two published collections, and two collections of essays. Plus four screenplays for Love, Death + Robots. So I would say I haven’t exactly been slacking.
I mean, I guess.
Thank you.
Why didn’t Tor want all thirteen of those books within ten years?
That timeframe was partially built on the idea that three of the novels I wrote would be young adult novels. Putting out those novels would run on a parallel track, because the YA market is not the same as the adult SF/F market, so we could release them on a schedule not too far off from by main releases and not worry about them cannibalizing sales. But then I didn’t end up writing the YA books.
Why not?
For a combination of reasons. One, in the ten years since the contract was signed the dynamic of the YA market has changed considerably, and yes, that is a euphemism, and two, the adult science fiction I was releasing was doing really well in terms of sales and market presence. So the question came down to, do we want to spend the time/effort to try to crack a wildly-changing market, or keep building sales and audience in the market we’re already strong in? Guess which we picked.
What’s going to happen to the YA books on the contract?
As a matter of the contract, we’ll convert those books from YA to adult books, so I will still owe the three books, I’ll just write them for the adult market, and put them in the adult market release cycle. The YA books I was planning to write weren’t science fiction novels, so I’ll come up with new ideas for those novels. Which is fine. Coming up with ideas has never been a problem for me.
As for the ideas I came up with for the YA books, a number of things could happen with them. I could pitch them as film/TV ideas — and in fact one of them had already been optioned for a TV series a few years ago, I “sold it in the room” a while back, but it didn’t pan out in development — or I could retool them and write them as novellas, or I could hand them off to another writer to build out, or whatever. There are options. They just won’t be YA novels from me at this point.
Even at a “one novel a year” schedule, you’re still slightly behind, you know.
Maybe. On the other hand I can’t complain. For example, I didn’t have a novel come out in 2024 because, as it happened, the one day Tor had open on its schedule for a book from me was Election Day in the United States, and oh boy we didn’t want to put a book out that day. We bumped When the Moon Hits Your Eye to March 2025 instead. That turned out to be a pretty smart maneuver, not just in avoiding election nonsense, but because the previous book, Starter Villain, has had some really strong legs, and we were able to promote the paperback release in October, putting the book back into bestseller lists for weeks at the end of the year, and into the holiday season.
The long-term contract isn’t just about “a book a year, every year” even if, on average, that’s the goal. It’s also about having the long-term flexibility to map out the best course for all the books we have to work with. Sometimes, as in the case with Starter Villain, that means letting them have a little extra time in the spotlight. The schedule is a guideline, not a rule.
That sounds like something a slacker would say.
Well, I’ll have two books out in 2025, if that’s really important to you. And another in 2026. And so on, for a while.
So your “ten-year” contract looks like it will take fifteen years at least.
That’s about right.
And everyone’s just okay with this lackadaisical schedule.
It seems so. One, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not like Tor or I am losing money with this release schedule; we ran the numbers a while back and this contract’s been in the black for everyone involved for years now. Or to put it another way, hey, remember last year, when I got a ten-book extension to the already existing contract?
Yes, I do, you woke me up for that one, too.
Sorry.
No you’re not.
Anyway, my point in mentioning that is that we’ve done well enough on the first contract that we’re pretty sure Tor’s already in the black for what they’ll owe me for the extension.
So they got you for cheap, is what you’re saying.
That’s not what I’m saying.
Discount Scalzi.
No.
Half-Price Hugo Winner.
No.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings.
Stop that.
I promise nothing.
Fine. They’re not getting me for cheap, I assure you. I will be buying whatever questionable guitar I like for some time to come. What they are getting, and by design, is a pretty safe bet. I sell decently out of the gate and extremely well in the backlist and it’s all set up so none of us is reliant on a single book being “make or break” for the whole enterprise. There’s flexibility and margin, and in publishing, that’s a rare thing indeed. It’s a contract designed to weather storms, and these days, that’s an extremely good thing.
You’re talking about the whole “The US is currently run by a dickhead working very hard to destroy its economy and global standing” thing, aren’t you.
Not just about that, but certainly about that too, yes. I sell a lot of work to foreign markets and the current administration making the country look bad isn’t a great thing for any US-based author. It means I have to think about what and how I write — for example, whether I write books that take place in the US, as Starter Villain and (largely) When the Moon Hits Your Eye do. It may be that for the next four years at least, I spend more time in space, and in futures where the current administrative fuckery will be less of a drag on my potential sales. We will see what happens! The nice thing, however, is that we — me and Tor — can plan and prepare as well as anyone can for what the (immediate) future brings.
Hey, a decade ago, weren’t there a bunch of dudes who were furious about your deal, or arguing you could have done better for yourself, or that you should have self-published, or whatever?
There were!
Man, what even happened to them?
I suspect at least some of them are asking themselves the same question. In a general sense, it’s possible that they should have spent more time focusing on their own careers and work, and less time focusing on the careers and work of other people.
If you could go back in time to 2015, would you sign the same contract again?
Pretty much? I understand this sort of contract is not for everyone; not everyone wants to know what they’re doing professionally, and who with, for a decade or more, or wants the pressure of being on the hook for multiple unwritten books. But as for me, back then, I was pretty sure in a decade I would still want to be writing novels, and I would want to be doing it with people and a publisher who were all in for my work. Turns out, I nailed that prediction pretty well. And from a financial and career point of view I can’t say that it hasn’t benefitted me tremendously.
Now, to be clear, other writers have sold more than me, or gotten bigger advances than I have, or have won more awards than me, in the ten years since that contract made the news. But I’ve sold enough, been paid enough, and have been awarded enough to make me happy and then some. I’m happy with the work I’ve done in this last decade. I’m happy with how it’s been received. I’m happy with where I am with my career and life. Much of that is because of this contract. So, yeah, I would do it again. I kind of did, last year, when I signed that ten-book extension.
With that extension you’ll be writing until 2040 or so.
Barring death or significant brain injury, yes, probably.
What will you do then?
I’ll be 70 then. I have no idea what 70-year-old me will want, except possibly a nap. Ask me then.
Do I have to?
I mean, you’re my fictional interlocutor, you literally have no other function, so, yeah, probably.
Final update on Mr Holmes! He has been officially adopted! His foster mom fell in love with him basically on sight and she and her partner have given Mr Holmes a forever home. I am so grateful that he found a loving family and a comfortable life for the rest of his years. Picture book readings: Home is a Wish - Julia Kuo, author and illustrator Dealing with a big move to a new home, and the worries that come with that. Cute but not memorable. 5/10
A Cat Like That - Lester L. Laminack, author; Nicole Wong, illustrator A chubby cat and his wanderings around his town. Illustrations were a bit off for me, but I did like the little map that showed the cat's movements. 5/10
Pavlo Gets the Grumps - Natalia Shaloshvili, author and illustrator Pavlo is a grumpy kid/kitten that doesn't want to play. Mom and friends help with his big feelings. Okay, but nothing special. 5/10
Midnight Motorbike - Maureen Shay Tajsar, author; Ishita Jain, illustrator I liked the story and setting of this - Amma and daughter take a motorcycle ride through India at night when it's too hot to sleep - but the illustrations were very muddled. Lovely story, not a joy to look at. 4/10
We Are Lion Dancers - Benson Shum, author and illustrator Lovely book about children watching lion dancers and learning how to do the dance themselves. 7/10
Scamp - Anden Wilder, author and illustrator Cute story about a little girl who is almost more cat-like than her cat. 7/10
Another Word for Neighbor - Angela Pham Krans, author; Thai My Phuong, illustrator Gorgeously written, excellent vocabulary, lovely illustrations. This was a winner of a book, where a new family with two kids moves next to an older man who just wants quiet. They make friends and they make pho! 9/10, would definitely buy.
Safe Crossing - Kari Percival, author and illustrator This was adorable. Environmental education and citizen outreach, plus a diverse set of characters. There is a touch of a sad moment when the unfortunate realities of salamanders and frogs crossing a road gets explained but it's not huge, and treated with compassion. 9/10, would absolutely buy.
Reading goal #9! Ben Aaronovitch - Masquerades of Spring If you had set me down and said this is Aaronovitch's Yuletide fic, I would not have been in the slightest bit surprised. This read like a Folly-based Jeeves and Wooster AU, which is not a criticism! It was a frothy book, very enjoyable and fun. 8/10
DNF: Manda Collins - Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem. Five chapters in and I kept picking something else to read, so back it went!
Currently checked out: Boyd and Beth Morrison, Lawless Land Evie Woods, Lost Bookshop
We’re both 20, and I think we’ll look back on them when we’re older and remember what a fun life we’ve lived. Tattoos are a reminder of a particular time, and I want to cherish our youth. I’ve found a cool tattoo parlour in northern Thailand, where we’ll be staying. I’ve seen videos of people having great experiences there and the tattoo artist is really talented.... It’s not like I want to get a random tattoo. I’m quite creative and have already started sketching ideas that represent who Kady and I are.
You're 20, duckie....
***
In other gruesome news, okay, it is not one bloke spreading his seed to 100s, but I'm not actually sure that 'a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor' as applied by the European Sperm Bank isn't somewhat on the high side, even when it doesn't turn out further down the line with more sophisticated testing that a donor has a rare cancer-causing mutation.
***
And this is sad, rather than gruesome, and makes me wonder about the whole marketing of the 'freezing eggs' thing as 'a groundbreaking act of empowerment', especially as it hasn't turned out like that:
I did not anticipate the emotional landscape that I would face a decade later, as a scientific intervention became a personal meditation on time, money, and unfulfilled dreams.
Read Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, a 2011 YA novel I'd originally read in high school but that I a. had completely forgotten about and b. don't?? think?? I'd ever realized was by the Daniel Handler, better known for his writing as Lemony Snicket, until recently stumbling across a copy in a used bookstore. (I was not re-read-curious enough to buy the second-hand copy, but I found it on Libby.) The tl;dr plot is that a teenage girl unravels the threads of a short-lived relationship through the objects she'd collected during it: bottle caps, ticket stubs, etc. (Illustrated, which is a fun touch.) I can see what appealed to teenage!me - not a big reader of YA even when I was the target audience - about this book, which is that it's sort of endearingly pretentious: main character Minerva "Min" Green is obsessed with old and/or foreign films, and her narration is full of references to (fictional) movies and actors; the novel opens at her best friend's "bitter sixteen" party; the narrative voice has a very circa-2010s Tumblr Poetry vibe, addressed to "you", i.e., the boy Min is breaking up with. On the other hand, it is a teenage romance novel from 2011, which reminded me why I was, and am, not particularly into romance novels and also that 2011 was actually quite a while ago. (It also occurred to me, this time, that this can't possibly be set in 2011: there is exactly one reference to Min having a cell phone, but no one texts, she and her boyfriend have late-night calls over their landline home phones, and the internet does not appear to exist.)
On reflection, I wonder whether this was an intentional exercise in writing from the point of view of a character who would be the manic pixie dream girl love interest in a different story? Her love interest is a fondly baffled jock who says things like "I don't know any girls like you" and doesn't really get why it's important to her that the old woman they see at the cinema is maybe, possibly the actress in the film they just saw but goes along with the idea of throwing her (the actress) an eighty-ninth birthday party. ( Spoilers? ) There's a whole bit at the end about how she's not actually arty or interesting, she's just herself, a flawed and normal person; honestly, I'm not sure if that weighs for or against this theory.
For those who have go-to versions of common things like, say, meatloaf or brownies or curried chickpeas, how many recipes do you try before settling on one? Is there a point when you say "THIS. THIS is my [x]", or do you sometimes try new versions even when you have one you love? (Possibly this is a "once you've actually cooked a lot, you can look at a recipe and have a fairly good idea of what the different seasonings might add up to"?)
1. Dylan has been diagnosed with lupus and given medication. When we got done with the appointment, I sat in the car and cried. It's been so long with no one helping us that I had started to despair that it would ever happen. I'm scared, of course; I don't want my child to have lupus. But this means they can now take medicine to make them feel better, and they can get accommodations at school if they need to because they have a formal diagnosis.
I am also incandescently angry at the first rheumatologist we saw. Dylan's labs are essentially THE SAME as when we saw that doc; she just didn't think Dylan was SICK ENOUGH to do anything about. They could have been getting help all this time.
In the same vein, I've got a routine appointment with my PCP later this summer; I'm going to have her run the same labs she did on Dylan that led to the referral, and if my labs are at similar levels, I'm going to get a referral to the same rheumatologist. I have always firmly believed that Dylan and I have the same issue, just that they started on the path much earlier and much more severely. I couldn't get that awful rheumatologist to take me seriously, but clearly this one will.
I haven't said anything to my parents yet. I guess I will next time we talk, but I don't want to initiate contact with them. I know mom's going to be hurt and sad that I didn't immediately tell her, but I don't want to talk to them.
Why the fuck is a lawyer retained by my company CC'ing me on official correspondences with an employer like I have any authority to deal with this shit I'm going to start biting people's kneecaps off.
Also, I have TWO MONTHS worth of work sitting on my desk and I can do NONE of it. The files aren't uploading to the new system correctly.
Anyway, it's a three-day weekend, and I'm going to do my best to rest this weekend. I have my last clearance appointment on Tuesday, and Jon has given the OK to skip this month's payment and possibly next month's. Our disability system is fucked and I'm just worried about getting the car payment taken care of.
I started my day with a walk on my treadmill. Got 10 minutes in before I had to stop. It felt good.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
If you look at it from a certain angle, East Side Voices (2022, ed. Helena Lee) is a highly successful book. This nonfiction anthology is hyped up as the first of its kind dedicated to British East and Southeast Asian experiences. Considering that the U.K. writing scene is 94% white, this is indeed a significant intervention. The editor of East Side Voices, Helena Lee, views this book as contributing to a British ESEA consciousness, situating it in conversation with Asian American nonfiction texts. Lee also views the American context as being “a lot more politicised” as “they’ve had the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Exclusion Acts,” as if having a series of historical events equates to doing political organising.
Another way of understanding Asian American politicisation is through Ken Chen’s tribute to the late Corky Lee, an Asian American photographer who captured the breadth of migrant organising over fifty years. Chen notes the shift away from radicalism once material conditions improved: “Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author.” When I look at the best of Asian American cultural discourse, I see deep engagement with socio-political context and a willingness to critique. I also see the very same no exactlyyyyy conversations that plague ESEA conversations. In 2022, critic Som-Mai Nguyen asked why Asian Americans aren’t embarrassed about, among other things, a persistent false sense of cultural authority which makes the performance of IYKYK and “cloying racial cosplay” frustrating in cultural production and its surrounding discussion.
In Britain, ESEA cultural criticism is gradually developing in response to a seeming zeitgeist of cultural output. In a dissenting opinion on the so-called golden age of ESEA cinema, film critic Ian Wang points out the “stale performance of relatability, the beleaguered ‘between two cultures’ navel-gazing” in diasporic narratives. We find many of the same stock conventions in East Side Voices. I’ve been struggling to review this book since February 2023 because I don’t know if this work can fruitfully bear the weight of my critical attention. It’s clearly written for the liberal aspirational and middle class fraction of the ESEA demographic who are still new to any form of politicised collective thinking, as well as outsiders who know nothing of ESEA experiences. For example, Bidisha’s effusive 2022 review of East Side Voices notes all the contributors are successful and predictably concludes their stories show that “no amount of privilege protects you from the racism of others.” But that’s also why I think it’s time to open up a critical conversation. This book is by already-successful people, is supported by a big publisher, and has a nigh-ubiquitous presence in mainstream bookshops. And although the social category of ESEAs is marginalised and fragmented, the book does little justice to this complexity because it prioritises stories of success, assimilation and failing upwards into business ownership.
The more discerning reader is required adjust their position to understand East Side Voices‘ key perspectival trick: #representasianmatters. I have to work very hard on this for Sharlene Teo’s piece, ‘Mistaken for Strangers’. Its very title leads with the core liberal ESEA belief that racial misrecognition drives anti-Asian violence and harassment. Teo’s essay has been contextualised by the editor as “nourishing the soul a little bit when bad things happen” by “giving us vocabulary” to talk about the 8 lives lost in the 2021 Atlanta murders. This is an unnecessary burden placed upon the writing as its conception of racism – “stereotyping and socio-culturally categorising”, “microaggressions and unconscious biases”, naming “Cool” or “Nerdy” Asians à la Mean Girls – lacks explanatory power and structural attention. This is echoed in Zing Tsjeng’s essay, ‘Vector of disease’: racism is stereotypes and beliefs caused by “unconscious behaviour”.
It’s unfortunate that, of all the pieces in the book, the essays that take on the ‘big’ ESEA issues of orientalised misogyny and Covid-related racism are by authors who think that racism is misrepresentation inside the minds of disturbed individuals. Teo’s essay does not convincingly explain how and why Asian women in general are placed in danger, let alone the intersection of gender, race, class and labour that vulnerablised the Asian massage workers in Atlanta. For this, there’s decades of rigorous work by Asian organisers and scholars, such as the rapid-response statement by Red Canary Song (a collective of Asian migrant massage- and sex-workers in the ‘U.S.’) and the University of Wisconsin’s free and publicly available #AtlantaSyllabus: An Asian American Studies Perspective on Anti-Asian Violence in 2021. Rather, Teo shows what it feels like to experience orientalised misogyny when you’re a university-educated law student-turned-writer who gets harassed in public and treated as interchangeable with other Asian women in professional and romantic life. The most successful part of the essay is allowing space for aspirational and middle class Asian women to be angry. I mean this sincerely. Her essay burns brightest near the end, the material of racism cracking into sentence fragments:
Yellow fever as servile innuendo, as punchline: ironic racism is still racism. Not laughing with, laughing at. It’s not funny. Second-guessing desiribility is an aberration. An Asian fetish is more than just a harmless preference, it’s a hangover of imperialism. Deliberate other: imbalanced, sustained.
The language comes close to fizzling out with the frustration of trying to name the violence of the entire world when the only tool currently available to you is a little cartoon pain scale.
I don’t necessarily expect personal essays to feature heavy-hitting socio-political commentary. After all, this is a trade book from an imprint of a big 5, not a radical political press. But it’s worth noting this book will be read as if it’s politically radical by the more naïve reader, in part because post-covid ESEA liberalism has created a successful version of identity that’s commingled with prestigious markets as consumer-activists. To buy this book, published by a highly profitable imprint of a major publishing house, potentially becomes an example of “activism” or “solidarity” for the middle class of racially marginalised communities. This mainly benefits the publishing company as social capital is converted into book sales. Anyone searching for deeper answers will be largely frustrated.
But some of the writing in this book manages to locate politicised strength within deeply personal experience while remaining light and readable. For example, June Bellebono’s tender essay, ‘Ladyboy’, concerns their experience with indigenous Burmese trans femininity. While it was deeply affirming to experience a Nat festival with femme gay men and trans feminine spiritual mediums being adored by the crowd, Bellebono acknowledges their positionality as a Westerner:
I think my initial connection with the Nat Kadaws has slightly worn off. Our experiences, contexts and lives are wildly different. […] I’m limited in understanding their lives, and also in translating them. What is unlimited is the fluidity of my gender.
I would have liked to see Bellebono draw out the comparison between the Nat festival and a queer night out in terms of labour. This would have added resonance to “ladyboy” as the title and term of contention: in Thailand, ladyboys, kathoey, trans women and trans feminine people have limited employment options due to transmisogyny. According to a 2015 report by the International Labour Organization, Thai trans feminised labour in urban areas is often self-employed in the sex, entertainment, and beauty service industries, while in certain rural areas it takes the form of specific fruit-picking tasks or spiritual mediums. It makes me think of how trans feminised labour and meaningful public visibility is both different and the same in the West. What would it mean to recognise certain continuities while paying close attention to specificities?
What’s refreshing about Bellebono’s writing is how they move through these contradictions with openness and discernment, offering us ‘both/and’ as a way of thinking through the political and personal. Bellebono reflects on the tension between public visibility and personal knowledge, observing that hypervisibilisation does not solve how trans people, particularly trans women and trans feminine people, are rendered vulnerable to structural violence. Theirs is the only essay in this book that questions if visibility in public life is desirable.
In contrast, Tsjeng analyses “miniscule representation” in the ruling class as contributing to anti-Asian racism. This surface-level conception of racism means she does not adequately historicise the relationships between race, xenophobia and medicine in her essay about this very subject. “You would think that the advent of modern medicine would bury this kind of prejudice,” Tsjeng writes, after describing late 19th–early 20th century pogroms in the U.S. settler colony that targeted Asian migrant workers as disease-carriers. But the beginning of modern medicine does fall within the period she describes. Healthcare as we know it continuesin service of colonial knowledge-making and upholding colonial material structures. This failure to really follow through with theoretical frameworks reminds me of Teo’s attempt to ground personal experience in a mish-mash of W.E.B. DuBois’ double-consciousness and Krafft-Ebing’s sexology. In Tsjeng’s essay, History mainly lends believable weight to her personal experience of Covid-related sinophobia, rather than historical method that could show us new insights into how and why sinophobia is reproduced. (I dread to think who’s fooled by this.)
Romalyn Ante’s essay, ‘Battle Ground,’ also looks at the initial devastation of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, focusing with loving pride on her mother’s tireless work as a nurse. Ante deploys military metaphors and rhythms to vividly describe this intense, precise and risky labour, blending form with subject to open a rich conversation around the social role and history of Filipino nursing. But there’s a similar historiographical issue as with Teo and Tsjeng’s essays. I’m curious about the author’s decision to gloss over the origins of medical training in the Philippines as a natural response to Japanese occupation in WWII, while the creation of an overseas healthcare workforce is reduced to merely following erstwhile American comrades for “greater opportunities” in the U.S.
Community organiser and writer Francesca Humi offers a significantly different historicisation: health education was specifically designed as a U.S. imperialist endeavour, producing a workforce destined for outward labour with the promise of self-rule through “benevolent assimilation.” Ante’s sanitisation reads as if she can’t directly address this part of a history that she otherwise so vividly describes. Indeed, she later repeats higher-paying opportunities with increasing discomfort, revealing intimate details of what it’s like to nurse the world for remittance that ensures basic resources for distant family back home. Humi notes that the cultural narrative of the “modern-day hero” who endures tremendous hardship to form the backbone of the Philippines’ economy is well-established, normalising exported labour. As there’s an asymmetric narratival void in UK mainstream media, it’s understandable that Ante writes, “Why is so very little known about our community? Especially when this country relies so heavily on us? These thoughts plague me every day.” However, the extractive, invisibilising function of the colonial metropole is not a secret. There’s intellectual work and labour organising both within and outside a Filipino context that not only answers the questions which trouble Ante, but fights for meaningful recognition that directly improves people’s material conditions.
I have so far been heavily critical about misrecognition and misrepresentation. It isn’t only because the book frequently tries to explain structural racism this way. It’s that most of the attempts to describe personal experiences of misrecognition are #relatable content rather than being well-written prose. Claire Kohda’s ‘Portraits’ is a successful example of diverging from stock convention by approaching a common experience from a uniquely horrifying angle. The essay opens with a younger Kohda’s full-body dissociation while travelling to visit her emotionally withholding white English grandparents. To make matters worse, her grandmother has painted a portrait of her with lighter eyes, hair, and blushing skin. Kohda tries to place this work in its proper art historical context alongside other artists who have depicted their family, including her father’s own portraiture. “A painting, I think, is always a labour of love,” she writes, after denying the idea that her grandmother may have deliberately created a whitened image of her.
It’s excruciating. I struggled against this, the art school pedant in me rising up with a neeky correction – Well actually, there’s online classes on painting skintone these days – but that’s not the point. Kohda musters her knowledge of art, her empathy and writing ability, into constructing her grandmother as a figure incapable of outwardly exerting violence. Nana is merely withholding: Kohda’s cousins get bags of sweets, she gets nothing. Only in the postscript does an adult Kohda apprehend that painting, and thus her grandmother, can be emotionally violent. She now has proof that her grandmother deliberately “toned down” her skin colour with a paintbrush “sharp as a knife” – painting as surgical, subtractive, bloodstained. The portrait’s “beautiful, soft English-rose blush” participates in the historical construction of whiteness, as Angela Rosenthal writes in her analysis of 18th century English portraiture: “White remains the ‘unraced’ norm […] Thus black skin, rather than red cheeks, emerge as raced.”
If a painting is a labour of love, we must ask ourselves who or what is the object of love. In Kohda’s story, it seems whiteness itself was lovingly painted – a pink-cheeked grandchild, the hope of white futurity. Unpicking the previous ending of the essay finally allows the author’s own anger to exist, reframing the beginning of the piece: we realise that her grandmother is such a negative force that anticipating her presence pushes the younger Kohda out of her own body. The strength of this essay lies in its refusal of an easy resolution.
Now, how should I end this piece of critical writing? I’ll return to Som-Mai Nguyen:
Cherishing the self-respect of ambivalence amounts to neither “gatekeeping” nor holding a “scarcity mindset.” Of course, the observation that “shallow” “representation” “fails” is by now practically its own unbearable, obvious cliché (in which I have nonetheless engaged), but I refuse to forfeit “the gift of being disgusted,” to appropriate Walter Benjamin.
I feel the urge to head off any defensiveness with my own by making it clear that I literally don’t have the power to gatekeep anything. I’m a small-time writer and artist. Worry more about pissing off some Goodreads weirdo! We must be able to treat things like this for what they are: intentionally high-profile, well-resourced projects that miss the mark exactly because of these layers of privilege. If a project like this can’t be positioned in our discourse as being able to tolerate engaged, rigorous public critique so that we all might re-engage (re-present!!) a little more deeply, then what can?
But I also see how people might think that if I have an untender opinion of this book, then it means I think problematic work deserves the same public blasting to discourage its reception – the “scarcity mindset” that Nguyen mentions. I’d like to share that I avidly support the proliferation of the ESEA cultural scene, especially independent projects. I engage with a lot of work which I think is mediocre, perhaps even actively harmful, and I carefully discuss it in private – especially if it’s clearly raw work by smaller creators and for communities which are deeply marginalised within the current ESEA context. I’m also going to reiterate I sat on this review of East Side Voices for multiple years because I wanted to see how the broader cultural landscape developed. In the meantime, I was constantly doing my own research and holding conversations with close friends and trusted people in the broader ESEA community about the critical vacuum that’s maintained here. I don’t want to just react, but really engage and share that thinking with others in order to encourage generative conversations. Don’t you want the same?
Maybe this is the thing: rather than a definitive conclusion (or, even worse, a star rating), it would be helpful to share some questions. I don’t want to authorise what’s ‘worth’ ‘consuming’ (ugh!), or give ‘constructive criticism’ that the creator literally cannot act upon and has no reason to respect my recommendation because, well, I’m not part of their creative team.
Rather, these questions should encourage everybody’s imperfect and sincere attempts to make something, anything. It shouldn’t just be stupid middle class-ish ESEAs like me who do the work of seeing. I want to see what you’re doing. Promise.
The title of Ken Cheng’s essay on Corky Lee’s photography features the words, ‘the work of seeing.’
What does ‘the work of seeing’ mean to you personally? Your friend groups? Your wider communities?
What kinds of relationships can we create by seeing and recognising one another?
How do we know we’re recognised by each other? Can this be documented in some way? If so, how do we do this with both care and creativity?
Who else has done this work before us? How can we acknowledge this?
How can we share this recognition in a way that suits our group? Who can help us do this – and what kind of relationship will we have?
Is public sharing the only way to take up space in public discourse? (Which public, what space, which discourse?)
How do we want outsiders to engage with our experiences? (Who is “us”, “we”, “outsider”?) What parts can we control, what parts can’t we control, and why?
What happens when things go right? What happens when things go wrong?
What is the process for repair, reflection, accountability and growth for inside and outside the group?
How do we let each other know we’ve done well and want to see more of something?
I got a text this morning about Yahtzee: as of Thursday he can't use his back legs, and while he's still alert and appreciating belly rubs, it's basically Time. He has a vet appointment at 5 today.
This isn't entirely shocking -- he's 15.6 years old -- and I've been low-key anticipating this; but it's still sad.
He is a very good boy and the bestest first service dog.
(I am leaving comments enabled but have disabled email notifications.)
Just in time for Memorial Day, a hefty stack of New Books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound! What here would you like to have for your long weekend reading? Share in the comments!
I think the most hashtag dadcore thing I've done lately is
dig through all the pressured cans of spray we keep under a counter next to the washing machine
to find something lubricating to put on the lawn mower
because I haven't used it since last year so the axle was stuck solid
spraying the stuff on said axle
wondering "is it supposed to look like that?"
and rubbing it in (really just steering it where it's supposed to go)
while trying to read the back of the can to see if I should be touching this stuff with my skin
I'm fine, it's fine. (It did say to use it in a ventilated area and I had that sorted by being outside.)
By the time I came back in from mowing the lawn, I'd recently washed my hands like three times but my fingers still smelled like a synthetic lubricant and freshly-cut grass.
My dearios will have heard me whinge about the massive point thahr misst of so much spam I get offering deals and collaborations with my entirely non-profit and very niche personal website -
- and that sometimes one can see that they've picked up on a word or even a phrase but have totally missed CONTEXT quite apart from the fact that I am Not In Trade, perish the thort, not to mention that they tend to miss what one might consider obvious links.
But, lo, I am boggling like a boggling thing over this:
[A] vertically integrated manufacturer based in China with over 14 years of experience specializing in high-efficiency equestrian gear and innovative pet products. Our 22,000m² facility provides in-house manufacturing of a wide range of products including saddle pads, horse rugs, fly masks, halters, pet beds, leashes, harnesses, and other items. We are pleased to offer top-tier European and American brands known for their superior quality, cost-effectiveness, and prompt delivery.
I don't think I've even got anything on the site relating to e.g. 'pretty horsebreakers' in Victorian England or, indeed, wot abaht bestiality. Or I have a vague recollection that the annals of Victsmut here and there include ponyplay but I don't actually Go There.
I am boggled but in a different way by the spam from a mirror factory in Hangzhou city which informs me that ' it only takes more than ten minutes to drive from our company. I can show you our factory at any time and give you quick feedback to inform you of the production progress.' Pretty sure it does only take more than 10 mins....
I just had a telemedicine appointment with the gastroenterologist. Her office called at about 9:30 this morning, to ask if I was available for a 10:30 appointment, and I said yes.
The diagnosis is collagenous colitis, which I already knew from MyChart. The good news is that it's both benign and curable. The treatment will be nine weeks of budosenide pills, starting at three/day for the first six weeks, then two/day for the next three weeks, and a final three weeks of one/day. Those are to be taken with food, and in the morning because it's related to steroids and can interfere with sleep. [I mis-remembered, it's a total of 12 weeks of these pills.]
The most common risk factors for this kind of colitis are being a woman over sixty, and regular use of NSAIDs. Therefore, Dr. Morgan wants me to talk to Carmen about whether there's a plausible alternative to me taking naproxen almost every day, but she did say there may not be, since tylenol doesn't work the same way and may not be effective for the hip and knee pain I'm using it for.
I asked about continuing the Imodium and the fiber capsules, and Dr. Morgan said I could stop using them when the budosenide starts to be effective for the diarrhea, which might be within a week. I told her that the combination of Imodium and fiber is working well enough that I may not notice a difference, so the tentative plan is to wait at least a week, then pick a day or two when I won't need to go out, and try stopping the Imodium. (Adrian pointed out that I'm currently taking two pills twice a day, so I could try halving the dose and see how I feel. That sounds plausible, but I'm going to ask Dr Morgan if she thinks that's worth doing.
Also, a significant number of people with collagenous colitis also have celiac, so she wants to test me for that. I asked, and it's a straightforward blood draw, which I can do at my convenience: I don't need to wait until after getting blood drawn to start on the new medication.
She is sending the prescription to CVS, and told me to call her office if there's any problem with the insurance company.
ETA: I looked at the doctor's visit notes on MyChart, which reminded me that I should be checking my blood pressure about once a week while taking the budosenide.
At my age, I have started to have more and more friends decide to start families. Settle down, get married, have kids, the works. So many of my peers and even close friends are choosing this path, and it’s been hard for me to think of ways to support them through this journey of theirs. Sometimes I feel disconnected to my friends because of it, since I just can’t relate at all to what they’re going through, but at the end of the day I still want to be there for them and be a good friend. But I couldn’t figure out how.
About a month ago, I was scrolling on Tik Tok, and this video from Mad About Food popped up (click on it if it doesn’t show up for you or if the window here is wonky):
meal prep for a new mom I dropped this food off to a friend who recently had her first baby because there is nothing better when you’re a new parent than someone else cooking for you. Full recipes at the link in my bio! meal prep breakfast sandwiches stuffed shells with meat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies apple cider vinaigrette
Meal prep for a new mom. It was genius! How had I not thought of that? Food is basically my love language. I should’ve realized sooner that making food for my friends was the answer I had been searching for. It’s helpful, practical, and something I can do to help that doesn’t involve dirty diapers!
The menu seemed simple enough: breakfast sandwiches, stuffed shells, and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. All of that seemed pretty cheap, easy to make, and convenient to have on hand to bake whenever they were ready. So let’s talk about if it actually was, in fact, cheap and easy.
Step one was gathering ingredients for everything. I had to assess how much I had on hand already, and what I needed to go buy. The recipes themselves are pretty simplistic. There’s nothing you wouldn’t be able to find at the store, and no special expensive ingredients or anything like that.
For the breakfast sandwiches, I needed to go buy all the ingredients. The breakfast sandwiches required a dozen eggs, but the cookies also required eggs, so I bought an 18-count of eggs. She uses bacon in the video, but I opted for Canadian bacon so I didn’t have to actually cook any bacon.
First, you blend up a dozen eggs with a container of cottage cheese and bake it. I thought that was a strange mixture of ingredients, but it baked up so nicely and came out perfect! Once the eggs cooled and I cut the sheet of baked eggs into twelve squares, assembling the breakfast sandwiches was so easy. Just split the English muffin, put a square of egg on it, top it with Canadian bacon and a slice of cheddar cheese (I used Sargento), and that’s really it.
Like she does in the video, I individually wrapped each one in foil and put each one in its own freezer sandwich size Ziploc bag.
Let’s talk dishes. I used a mixing bowl and an immersion blender, a 13×9 baking dish, a knife, and a baking sheet. Not bad!
For the stuffed shells, I did in fact need to go buy every single ingredient. The recipe contains a lot of common pantry items though that you might have regularly, like the pasta and the marinara, and I’m sure some of you have a log of ground beef as a regular grocery you buy. I will say normally I have Italian seasoning but I had just ran out last week so I needed a new bottle.
Anyways, the stuffed shells were not too complicated. You cook the meat, and you mix the meat with the ricotta, parmesan, and mozzarella. I did this in a stand mixer, but you can totally do it by hand if you want. You cook the shells, you wait for them to cool, and then ya stuff ’em. Top the shells with sauce and more mozzarella and bada bing bada boom, stuffed shells. Easy peasy! Do not bake it after you assemble it, whoever you’re gifting it to will just throw it in the oven when they’re ready to have it!
The dishes count on the stuffed shells was considerably higher than the breakfast sandwiches. I used a pan and spatula to cook the meat, the stand mixer bowl and attachment, a pot to boil the pasta, a strainer, several measuring cups and measuring spoons, and a spoon to scoop the filling with.
Finally, for the cookies, I can’t believe I’m saying this but I had every ingredient on hand! Please, hold your applause until the end. Though, my brown sugar was sadly rock hard, so I bought a new bag of light brown sugar. Other than that, I didn’t have to buy anything for the cookies.
The cookies were second nature to me, as cookies are my favorite thing to make and I do it semi-regularly. Plus, when making cookies, the stand mixer is your best friend. So, it was no trouble mixing the butter, sugar, egg, vanilla, and dry ingredients, and folding in the chocolate chips. It was quick and easy and honestly the biggest issue I faced was spilling some oats all over the counter.
In the instructions she says to chill the dough before rolling it into balls, and usually I’m tempted to skip this step because I’m impatient, but I actually listened. And thank goodness I did because even after that hour chilling, when I was rolling the dough into balls it was definitely like, very heat sensitive. I don’t know if my hands were just hot as heck for some reason or what but I almost had to put it all back in the fridge because the balls were just becoming hot messes.
But, I managed to make all the balls and instead of baking them, you just freeze the balled dough. Then the person you’re gifting them to can bake as many as they want at a time. They could just take two balls out and bake up one or two cookies, or they could put the whole tray in at once. Very convenient.
Dishes for cookies were the usual suspects, the stand mixer bowl and attachment, various measuring cups and measuring spoons, a rubber spatula, nothing too wild.
I bought everything at Kroger, and after buying the ingredients as well as disposable trays like in the video, plus some Ziploc bags and aluminum foil to cover stuff with, my total was a little less than a hundred dollars. And the time I spent actually preparing the food was probably about five hours, six if you count the time it took to do dishes and clean up. Admittedly I am sort of slow when it comes to cooking, though. Things that take “only thirty minutes” will take me double that time, if not more.
So, it took like a full afternoon and a decent chunk of change for ingredients, but honestly I think it’s worth it and I’m just happy I found something that I can contribute to a friend who is going through something as monumental as becoming a parent. My friend was so happy to receive the food, and that made me happy in return! It was a great feeling, and I can’t wait to do it all again for my other pregnant friends. I have a lot of those right now, it seems.
Do you make freezer meals often (this was my first time)? Do you like Canadian bacon? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
Shown above is the impressive extension of a lava eruption I observed moving down the slopes of Mount Etna (island of Sicily) on the night of February 10, 2025. The bottom photo is a closeup. This eruption was initiated at a vent on the western portion of Etna's southeast crater. Mount Etna is the most active volcano in Europe. Standing at approximately 11,165 ft (3,403 m), it's often snowcapped during the winter months.
Photo Details: EOS R camera; 150-600 mm Sigma lens; F 6.3; 5000 ISO: 2 second exposure; Photoshop. Photo taken on February 10, 2025, at 23:15 local time.
Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.
I recently got around to listening to the cast album for Operation Mincemeat, a new-ish musical about the 1943 British deception operation to disguise the planned Allied invasion of Sicily by planting false documents on a corpse, which I can only describe as "what if Team Starkid wrote a British version of Hamilton?" (Which I don't mean in a bad way! It's not going into my Spotify rotation, but I'd like to see it at some point during its Broadway run.) Obviously, after that, I had to read Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory— it's a doozy of a spy story, stranger than fiction at every turn, from the sheer bonkers Rube Goldberg Trojan Horse of the whole idea to the farcical period where German spies in Spain were trying to get their hands on the documents and the British were pretending like it was of utmost important that they didn't, while also trying to make sure that they did - since that was, you know, the entire point - to the fact that operation mastermind Ewen Montagu's own brother was a Russian spy. (Which explains a subplot of the musical I couldn't quite piece together from the cast album.) I'd actually first encountered this particular bit of spy history during my middle school spy phase, and I remember being enchanted by how they'd conjured up this whole fictional persona down to the stuff in his pockets; it occurred to me this time that they'd essentially reverse-engineered a mystery, with puzzle pieces laid out to be pieced together into the intended misinformation: one of the carefully drafted letters sent by the doomed courier was included solely for a passing reference to sardines as A Clue that the second choice for the planned invasion discussed in the other letters was Sardinia (and definitely not Sicily). It is completely wild that this actually worked.
Anyway! While the plot and characters of the musical Operation Mincemeat appear to be a particularly tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of the actual events and people involved, I genuinely got a little choked up to discover that one of the lines from its song Dear Bill - And why did we meet in the middle of a war? / What a silly thing for anyone to do - is a line from an actual letter the actual Hester Leggatt wrote to "Bill" from his fiancée "Pam."
Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!
Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
In large swabs on Tomoe River paper the ink has gold, pink and green shimmer. I know it only looks like it has pink, but you can see the other colors when you shift the page back and forth.
Writing samples:
Let's take a look at how the ink behaves on fountain pen friendly papers: Rhodia, Tomoe River, and Leuchtturm, as well as cheap copy paper.
On 20 lb copy paper the ink had feathering in all nib sizes and some bleeding.
Comparison Swabs:
Violet Giraffe is darker than KWZ Grey Plum. Click here to see the purple inks together.
Longer Writing:
I used a Kaweco Sport Transparent Purple with a medium nib on a Taroko Enigma notebook. The ink has a slightly wet flow.
Overall, I really love the deep color, slightly wet flow and water resistance. It performs well and is a lovely color. I would probably use it the most in the fall and winter seasons.
Thanks to all my Patrons! I couldn’t do these reviews without you! You can find my Patreon page here.
Disclaimer: All photos and opinions are my own. This page does not contain affiliate links and this post is not sponsored.
The world can be a dark and scary place. It would be foolish not to acknowledge this, but to author Christy Climenhage, it’s also important to acknowledge the ways in which we all keep on keepin’ on in the trying times. Follow along in the Big Idea for her debut novel, The Midnight Project, and see how the world is ending, and yet still going.
CHRISTY CLIMENHAGE:
There are lots of themes underlying my debut sci-fi thriller, The Midnight Project: genetic engineering gone wrong, man-made ecological collapse, what it means to be human, what exactly is wrong with late-stage capitalism and the commodification of science. But for me, the Big Idea behind my book lies in the resilience of the two main characters who just keep going as everything collapses around them. The book asks: how do we live a good and meaningful life in a crumbling world? How do we muddle through the pre-apocalypse?
I’m slightly appalled by how familiar this fictional dystopian world feels – powerful billionaires, dying pollinators, corporate greed, off-the-charts scientific possibilities but everything is spiraling into disaster. These days (today, I mean), I can read about ultra-rich men with a messianic complex who want to save humanity while carelessly destroying the environment, or mining companies that want to strip the ocean floor before even bothering to map its ecosystems. Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler would weep. J.R.R. Tolkien would be mightily pissed off at the companies stealing words from his realms to name their businesses.
I suppose the world of The Midnight Project is rooted in reality as well as fiction. I wrote it and re-wrote it during the darkest part of the covid-19 pandemic when we were all just getting up and getting on with it. The bad news “out-there,” until it encroached on “in-here.” The work piling up even while the stores closed, the hospitals filled and everyone stayed home. The kids still in school, online, then in-person, with the rules changing every five minutes to try to keep them safe. No enrichment, no entertainment, just everyone hiding under their rock, trying to get by, putting food on the table, getting the laundry done. I suppose it’s typical of late-stage capitalism that even as the world was crashing down, everyone still needed their paycheque to cover groceries.
Of course, when I talk about today’s world in pre-apocalyptic terms, I’m not being prescient. I’m recognizing the fear and anxiety that underlays much of what is happening in the world right now. And the feeling of powerlessness that might make a person desperate enough to attempt to create an oceanic hybrid human just to feel they could make a difference. In Frankenstein, the monster’s creator is motivated by a dark ambition to create life and then is horrified at the result. In The Midnight Project, Raina is motivated by money and ambition but also wants to salvage something good out of the circumstances she finds herself in. In her heart, she is motivated by a desire for redemption.
In the midst of cataclysmic problems around the world that just keep piling up, our two genetic engineer heroes see an opportunity to do some good in the world, or at least try to prevent someone else from doing worse. It’s not much, but it’s within their control, and their abilities.
Going back to the today’s reality for a second, I think it’s normal to wonder how to live a meaningful life in our current circumstances too—how to lead a life filled with hope, ambition and purpose. And I can’t deny how much I relate to the two main characters of The Midnight Project, Raina and Cedric, just getting up and going to work every day, in spite of everything barreling toward them. So, according to the story, and my own experience, how does one muddle through the pre-apocalypse? Let’s take a lesson from our plucky heroes.
First, Raina and Cedric hold onto their comforting routines. They drink coffee together every morning out of the same mugs, watch the Holo-News and compartmentalize their lives. Then they turn to the hard work of inventing deep-sea human hybrids. The big bad world out there, the safe world inside their laboratory. They keep tabs, they know what’s happening in the outside world, but they hold it at bay and get on with the things they need to do to get by. They ignore some things. As Raina says, “They were trying times and I only wanted to try in certain ways.” They get up, they go to work, they keep solving their problems. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. With perseverance. With persistence. With, occasionally, steely-eyed determination.
Second, at the heart of everything, Cedric and Raina hold fast to meaningful relationships, even if they’re isolated and cut off. Even if those relationships are themselves imperfect. They cling to comfort and each other and keep drinking their coffee to the bitter end (bitter, get it? Because it’s coffee).
And finally, through it all, they try to do just a little good in the world, even when it feels like the world is too big and too far gone to make much of a difference. As Cedric says, “We cannot fix the world. But in this tiny corner of it, perhaps we can control our own destiny, at least for a while.” This little bit of agency and momentum is the way they light a candle against the darkness. This is the way they cleave to hope in the pre-apocalypse.
And maybe there’s something in that for our trying times too.
By lunchtime I was thinking: it feels like I'm getting a migraine...and the massive sudden change in weather would back that up...but... I can't have a migraine! I just had one on Friday!
Yeah that's not how it works. I do feel like it's "not my turn yet," though. Hmph.
I refuse to read any more about this but D, who sent me this link, has been updating me since on it. The Boss keeps saying the government of his country is a threat to life and liberty every night on stage and Trump keeps insulting him on Truth Social: apparently now his skin is like a wrinkly prune.
I listened to (most of) it while I was trying to work this afternoon. I'm just so delighted that it was in Manchester, which prides itself on being a city of rebellious and momentous music. (If only the gig had been at the Free Trade Hall instead of Coop Live! but it still makes me think of Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols...)
I listened to the introduction, some of the lines I'd read about, and then the song and it struck me that "Land of Hope and Dreams" is a song closely connected to Clarence Clemons's death. It couldn't be as good a song as it without stemming from a profound lifelong love that Springsteen talks so movingly about in his autobiography and in Springsteen on Broadway, and that love existed between a Black man and a white man, about whom a Springsteen biographer said "They were these two guys who imagined that if they acted free, then other people would understand better that it was possible to be free."
And the song has taken on this whole new life, which I'm glad of even if I'd rather The Big Man got to live a longer life.
I listened to the intro for the other song, I was trying to eat my lunch and I ended up with my eyes closed, unable to do more than listen and breathe. And after talking for a few minutes, he quotes James Baldwin -- "There isn't as much humanity in the world as I'd like. But there's enough" -- and then says "Let's pray." And for some reason, the next track didn't start. And that was the end of that one. So I just sat there, over my bowl of leftovers, imagining this happening a few miles down the road and a few days ago, I felt like I was there.
But suspended in this weird silence that went on for a long time before I realized that something technological had gone wrong.
I read all about his Catholic childhood in his autobiography and recognized a lot of it myself, but neither of us have retained it. Silent prayer isn't his style. Going right in to the next song is. And that's what he did.
Muscles are annoying. I understand the biological method by which we develop our muscles after using them; they're still annoying when the delayed onset muscle soreness hits. Which it has, and now my hips and quads and hams are in misery.
I am working on pullups as well, and my deltoids hate me. That's fine, I can hate them back just as equally.
On the more cheerful side of working a body and being reasonably good at it, I have had several people ask me to teach them stretching so they don't do anything awkward to themselves during high impact activity.
Since I see this is dated 2020, I may have posted it before: but hey, let's hear it for C18th women scholars of Anglo-Saxon Elizabeth Elstob, Old English scholar, and the Harleian Library. I think I want to know more about her years in the household of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (1715–1785), duchess of Portland, who I know better through her connection with Mrs Delany of the botanically accurate embroidery and collages of flowers.
***
I like this report on the 'Discovery of Original Magna Carta' because it's actually attentive to the amount of actual work that goes into 'discovering', from the first, 'aha! that looks like it might be' to the final confirmation.
Not a plumbing emergency, thankfully, but we need to replace some things, and as it happens the (multiple) plumbers needed to replace these items all had today available, so: Plumbingpalooza! The backing up of computers is coincidentally timed, but, you know, today is as good a day as any. While I’m dealing with that, here are some photos of flowers from the house and Camp Krissy. Enjoy!
Summer is here! (Or almost here!) Even if your personal schedule isn’t dictated by a school calendar, life generally looks different in the summer as many activities take breaks or change their schedules. If you’ve found a cleaning or decluttering routine that works, or you feel like you’re finally gaining some much-coveted traction, this can […]
Our records had a participant missing a month of payments. She disputed that back in April. I asked Ken for the cash logs I needed to research it. He made note of it and carried on. I never got the cash logs, She called to check on the status of the situation yesterday. I again asked for the cash logs, and he made note of it and carried on. So I'm like, this is getting me nowhere, and tried to think of another way I could do this. I ended up going through the bank, checking each statement for the check, but it would've been much easier and faster with the cash logs.
But I did find the error, in the end, so it's all good.
Second appointment for the surgery done. I think we might actually get this done this time!
Okay, time to get ready for work. So glad for the day off coming up.
Current Music:Broken Wings (Dance), Olivia Newton-John
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At my age, I have started to have more and more friends decide to start families. Settle down, get married, have kids, the works. So many of my peers and even close friends are choosing this path, and it’s been hard for me to think of ways to support them through this journey of theirs. Sometimes I feel disconnected to my friends because of it, since I just can’t relate at all to what they’re going through, but at the end of the day I still want to be there for them and be a good friend. But I couldn’t figure out how.
meal prep for a new mom 
meal prep breakfast sandwiches 
stuffed shells with meat 
oatmeal chocolate chip cookies 
apple cider vinaigrette 
