who only by moving can balance

Kintsugi Oxford have been great (and very fast!) about repairing a pendant for me; I am expecting it to arrive back with me tomorrow and am delighted by the photos I've been sent in advance.

Would you like a small friendly sheeplightbulb to look disappointed in you when you don't take regular typing breaks? workrave might be just the thing for you!

This message brought to you by Just How Bad typesetting is for (also) setting off RSI flares, which is quite clearly in no small part because every time I'm prompted to take a microbreak I go "but if I just finish this sentence/paragraph--"

-- and so I am enforcing, rather more than the hyperfocus would actually like, taking Breaks When Prompted.

(Today I have gone through chapters 1-3 for consistency of style and first on-screen proof-reading, and have naturally caught a whole bunch of typos. Tomorrow: 4 and 5, maybe, with breaks for typesetting chapter 6...)

Pluto Press are offering 40% off their Black Studies catalogue for Black History Month! Ebook and hard copy. (Spotted while looking up some of the terminology bell hooks uses that felt like it meant a specific thing I wasn't understanding.)

purplefringe did Good Omens to Vienna Teng's Gravity and it's perfect

all of it

is perfect

it has gone straight back on and I'm crying some more

this is a song I come back and back to, about feeling peripheral and broken and irrelevant; I think I didn't meet it until after I'd written Only This, but oh, the echoes are there.

Danez Smith is Black, Queer, and Poz (HIV+); Danez is an astounding poet. Don't Call Us Dead is amazing; I don't have good words for talking about it, but please please please consider looking it up. Here's a sample.

... and while grumpily looking for a place to buy the ebook, preferably DRM-free, I finally discovered Rebellion Publishing, who carry DRM-free multi-format ebooks under the 2000AD, Solaris, Abaddon Books and Ravenstone Press imprints. Here's the direct link for Revenant Gun.

My process for finding DRM ebooks has previously been a grumpy trawl through Smashwords (if self-published), Weightless Books (DRM-free, has very little), Foyles (which mostly doesn't seem to sell ebooks any more, though it did for a while, even if they were mostly DRMed), Hive (entirely DRMed, supports independent booksellers at your discretion, I was pointed at them by my favourite SF bookshop in Edinburgh), and finally landing up at Kobo (not linking because it's Big; has almost everything; sometimes DRMed and sometimes not, depending on the publisher/author request). Rebellion is... going to be my default for Solaris imprint books, from now on.

I am very excited about this.

... because I have just made P read it, and then we stayed up til 1am talking about it, and I haven't talked about it here yet because Too Many Feelings, which I will now attempt to sketch.

(Spoilers within!)

( Read more... )

jedusaur told me about it, of course, and staranise has just started writing fic about it, which in turn means that I've been flailing about headcanon.

( Read more... )

I DON'T EVEN GO HERE, etc etc etc.

Tuesday afternoon I went to Otherworlds with sebastienne -- an exhibition of space landscape photography -- and it was so good, people, so good. It was so good I started crying less than fifteen seconds after entering (good little space robot). I accidentally left with a scarf and two postcards. I am going to drag me_and along and let him wander the hall while I sit and cry over my favourites. I am willing to take absolutely anyone else along at all to wander the hall while I... sit and cry over my favourites, with breaks for getting loud and overenthusiastic at you about how geology is fucking FANTASTIC, okay, BECAUSE, right, [a totally relevant and utterly enthralling fact]. The curation is brilliant (you get to see reflections of other photographs in the black backgrounds of the ones you're looking at). I just -- I had a lot of feelings, okay, and then they leaked out of my face.

(And then we went and recuperated in the Members' Room for fifteen minutes before braving the thronged hallways of It's The Natural History Museum And It's The Easter Holidays once more, and a small child sat thoughtfully on the sofa said to its mother, "I wish the WHOLE WORLD was made of candy... except for us," and then in the queue for the accessible loo I had a fantastic chat with another three small children about why I use a wheelchair, and how it's polite to ask people before you touch their wheelchairs, and how they could give me a quick push to see how easy it was, and how I could do wheelies. OFFICIALLY COOLEST GROWN-UP IN THE TOILET, okay.)

And then! An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail! This month's -- it is a monthly thing -- featured Tom Scott (talking about emoji), Morgan and West (the time-travelling magicians), and a couple of other people sebastienne and shortcipher were actively interested in, I think; it was a show in three thirds, each third being subdivided into three acts; there was one act I Actively Disliked (a whole bunch of misc oppression-perpetuating not-actually-very-funny jokes strung together as a thinly-disguised ad for an upcoming show), but the other eight + MCing were great. I am now actively into Helen Arney and Marian Call (particularly Good Morning, Moon), and I also learned a great deal about how to cook in hotel rooms from georgeegg (it had not occurred to me that balancing a cereal bowl on top of the kettle would give you a double boiler, e.g.).

Meanwhile I have been reading a lot of excellent short fiction. Over the past few days I have particularly enjoyed John Chu's Hold-Time Violations (the politics of physics; content note for ill mothers) and Restore the Heart into Love (orthography); SL Huang's By Degrees and Dilatory Time (transhumanism and aids and vision; content note for cancer and surgery), and the diptych Hunting Monsters (content note for abuse) and Fighting Demons (... I mean this also has content notes but I am struggling to word them); and I have finally got around to starting T Kingfisher's The Raven & The Reindeer, which thus far I am finding very comforting.

And there is sunshine, and I am basking in it.

CN Lester is crowdfunding their new album, Come Home. I wasn't able to attend the first performance of it but I've heard the live recording: it's lush and lyrical and sharp, as all their work is, and is something I end up identifying with a lot, very frequently.

There's a pair of songs on their last album, one from the perspective of an audience member and one from the perspective of a performer. The former features the lyric I forgot my perpetual moving/because he marked time with a pen in his hand, which stills me and settles me and, well, it's not a wonder that fades with distance or knowing how it's done/it's hearing my thoughts, unspoken, on someone else's tongue: I have had that crush, more than once. The other -- well, the other is called You. That video has content notes for slurs and abuse, but it -- the pair together -- make me cry, every time.


Dave Hughes, about whom I am written before, has a memorial EP available for pre-order: all proceeds go to a specific charity (content notes: cancer; death).