redbird | Reading

Here we go! It's gonna be long though.

You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.

Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.

I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.

It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.

( opinions )

Tags:

Hey all, if you'd like to join the crafting hangout, it is tonight from 6-8pm ET!

Video encouraged but not required!

Topic: Crafting Hangout

Time: Mondays 6:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

Link

Meeting ID: 973 2674 2763

Tags:

crafting hangout

The weather is delightful right now--sunny and about 22 C/72 F--so I went to Central Square after lunch, for the Monday farmers' market and to buy ice cream.

At the farmers market, I bought Zestar apples--an early apple all three of us like--blackberries, peaches, and a loaf of Hi Rise bakery's "Concord" bread. I then walked over to Toscanini's, but noticed New City Microcreamery en route, and went in. I asked for a taste of the key lime pie ice cream, and was pleased that it tastes like key lime pie and works as ice cream, so I got a scoop and took it outside to eat at a nearby table.

Then to Tosci's, where the board said they had raspberry and sweet cream (among other flavors). I asked for a pint of each, and discovered they were out of raspberry. I asked to taste the mango sticky rice ice cream, which I didn't like. So I just got sweet cream, then walked back to New City for a pint of key lime pie ice cream.

I now have dairy ice cream from four different local ice cream places in my freezer, the other two being Lizzy's (chocolate orgy and black raspberry) and JP Licks (peach). Boston is a good city for ice cream.

Current Mood: pleased

Tags:

( tada )

Tags:

todo/tada

Counseling after work today was about how I'm doing well in some ways -- I said I'm finally getting that much-needed holiday, we'll be away for nine days; she asked me how long it's been since I had that long a vacation; I said I didn't know if I ever had. (Turns out I probably have, but the fact that I legitimately couldn't think of any of those occasions is indicative (and that's partly because they're trips back to Minnesota and visiting family isn't really time off).)

So I talked about how fortunate I feel that I have the stability to do that: this is the first time I've had the money and the ability to have time off; before I either had time or money but never both at the same time.

But I also talked about how badly I spiraled on Saturday when some gloomy news about the Twins of all things. (tl;dr: billionaires ruin everything. The hope that things would improve when the team sold to different billionaires has been snatched away; the current ones are keeping the team and it's very clear they're going to starve it of funds -- bad teams make more money than good teams and this family believes they need money right now. They don't share the view that beat writers and podcasters and fans of the team have which is that a sportsball team is a civic institution; for them it's just a way to make money. Like Gleeman started his article the other day, "It's hope that hurts the most." Or as I learned it from English pals: "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.") I was like I don't have a dog any more, awful things are happening in the country I'm from, I couldn't go back for my grandma's funeral or my family, work has been so stressful all year, in sky even manage to organize a hookup...and now I can't even have baseball as a little fun escapist thing??

So am I doing pretty good or pretty bad?? I feel bad about feeling bad, being aware that my bad-feelings are floating on a sea of basic-okayness and worrying that I'm being insufficiently grateful for it. But my counselor said that it's not like one is true and one is false; both can be valid.

I guess it's part of leveling up Maslow's hierarchy: once you get the basic shit sorted out you do start caring more about that higher-level shit. I didn't expect that to happen automatically; indeed against my will but it seems to have. I don't want to lose track of the fulfilment I do have. But also basic stuff isn't taking up all my time/mental capacity any more so I have to figure out what else to do with my adult life.

Tags:

tmi (too much introspection)

https://xkcd.com/3130/

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

According to the checkout card tucked into its back cover, the black-boarded, jacketless first edition of Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) which I just collected this afternoon through interlibrary loan came originally from the Hatfield branch of the now-dissolved Western Massachusetts Regional Library System, whose bookmobile

spatch remembers vividly because it was not the library across the street from one of his childhood homes but the one about a mile up the road. The dates on the card are well within the span of his family's residency. It would be nice to imagine that one of his parents took it out, or at least browsed through it, sometime. The punch line of discovering Lampell as an author is that while I did not in the least recognize his name, I would recognize his voice because along with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers. It was only later in his career as a screenwriter that he was blacklisted.

Current Music: Martha, "Sycamore"

13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.

Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...

...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?

Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.

Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.

But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.

The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!

The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.

The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.

Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.

Tags:

An assortment of tabletop roleplaying games from Gallant Knight Games that use the streamlined, minimalist TinyD6 rules.

Bundle of Holding: Tiny Dungeon MEGA (from 2023)

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.

rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile,

genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of

genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

Tags:

Video of adult cat and kitten interacting, with all cat vocalizations removed and replaced by sappy piano music.

2010: Cadbury falls into shadow, electoral loss sends the Labour Party off on a delightful journey of reinvention, and millions of travelers spontaneously learn how to spell Eyjafjallajökull.

Poll #33506 Clarke Award Finalists 2010

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

View Respondents

Which 2010 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The City & The City by China Miéville
24 (100.0%)

Far North by Marcel Theroux
0 (0.0%)

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
5 (20.8%)

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
2 (8.3%)

Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones
0 (0.0%)

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
2 (8.3%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2010 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The City & The City by China Miéville
Far North by Marcel Theroux
Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Tags:

clarke award

The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist:

His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?
....
In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship.

Okay, I am jumping up and down going BURN! because one of the editors is someone who wrote a ghastly retro piece of work within my own Field of Endeavour which I had occasion to review back in the day.

(The Literary Review was kinder)

But also, while I guess Bensons are a minor fandom of mine, the diaries I would be interested in reading are those of Minnie (Sapphic romps at Lambeth Palace!) and of naughty Fred, EF Benson, author of the camp classics about Mapp and Lucia and the Edwardian bromance David Blaize. Though once attended conference paper claiming that the M&L novels were essentially romans a clef about his circle, so maybe he didn't need to write a bitchy diary as well.

I think we already had as much of AC as anyone would wish to know in that Goldhill volume on the family, which had a bit too much AC for my taste to begin with.

Tags:

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/8/18/sea-otter-on-the-rocks-and-make-it-a-double

Via Oregon Coast Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/8/18/sea-otter-on-the-rocks-and-make-it-a-double

Tags:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250817.html

What kind of clouds are these?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250817.html

I've been cleaning up and putting away for a while now. It isn't just the normal entropy that attacks while one isn't looking, it is all the stuff coming up from Henry St that needs to be sorted, put away or thrown away. With the new stove coming the spice cabinet needs to be removed from the wall, so all the spices are being sorted and old ones thrown out. The spices are now sorted but I need to figure out where they will live temporarily, and then build a new cabinet for them. Yes, I want them in a cabinet, not in a drawer.
Everyone talks about using tools in a shop. Almost no one ever talks about maintaining the tools. In the last two days I did a deep clean, lubrication and alignment of the table saw. The saw wasn't used much the last few years and arrived with a thick coat of rust on the cast iron top. Rust is, um, sticky. Nothing slides easily over it. I used steel wool to take the worst of the rust off, then 220 grit sandpaper, a razor scraper to get up lumps of resin and (I think) some spilled oil based stain. 320 grit sandpaper in the orbital sander took the last of the rust and grime off the top. Having looked up proper table saw care, the next step was to wax the top with Carnuba wax. What a difference! There are gears underneath the saw that can get pretty gummy with dirt, sawdust and resin but that was minimal. A stiff scrub brush and a spray with graphite as a lubricant fixed things up. The final step was to check the blade alignment which looks fine. None of the tuneup was hard, it just took a while, and should make everything MUCH easier to use. If nothing else the wood will positively glide over that waxed top! Next up is re-attaching the fence to the body of the saw, which shouldn't take long.
One whole cardboard box of misc shop stuff, including lots of orphaned screws, bolts, washers, hand tools got sorted out and mostly put away. Several chisels got sharpened and hung up. Clearly I really need more peg board.
Early this morning I moved the mouse traps into the garden and caught two more voles.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: happy

I have being doing a lot sewing projects recently so here are some more pictures:

( Read more... )

Tags:

sewing

Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

you asked for my Hugo opinions

(no subject)

local food shopping

tada for the week

How am I doing, anyway?

Predicament

The Food Pantry

You know this city like the back of your hand, but deep roots are holding me down

The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens

Bundle of Holding: Tiny Dungeon MEGA (from 2023)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Clarke Award Finalists 2010

For people who like this sort of thing, this is what they like?

Sea Otter on the Rocks - And Make It a Double!

Interesting Links for 18-08-2025

(no subject)

Update

Social Sunday

More Sewing!

About Me

A Few Useful Links

Page summary

Style credit

Expand cut tags