The DIE roleplaying game designed by the Image comic's creators, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, plus three volumes of adventures for an unbeatable bargain price!
Bundle of Holding: DIE the RPG
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The DIE roleplaying game designed by the Image comic's creators, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, plus three volumes of adventures for an unbeatable bargain price!
Bundle of Holding: DIE the RPG
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sovay Dec. 22nd, 2025 11:52 am)
sovay Dec. 22nd, 2025 11:52 am)Since the light is officially supposed to have returned in my hemisphere, it is pleasing that my morning has been filled with the quartz-flood of winter sun. I could not get any kind of identifying look at the weird ducks clustered on their mirror-blue thread of the Mystic as I drove past, but I saw black, blue, buff, white, russet, green, and one upturned tail with traffic-cone feet.
On the front of ghost stories for winter, Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Fiction 2024, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, is now digitally available from Psychopomp. Nephthys of the kite-winged darkness presides over its contents, which include my queer maritime ice-dream "Twice Every Day Returning." It's free to subscribers of The Deadlands and worth a coin or two on the eyes of the rest.
For the solstice itself, I finally managed to write about a short and even seasonal film-object and made latkes with my parents.spatch and I lit the last night's candle for the future. All these last months have been a very rough turn toward winter. I have to believe that I will be able to believe in one.
On the front of ghost stories for winter, Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Fiction 2024, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, is now digitally available from Psychopomp. Nephthys of the kite-winged darkness presides over its contents, which include my queer maritime ice-dream "Twice Every Day Returning." It's free to subscribers of The Deadlands and worth a coin or two on the eyes of the rest.
For the solstice itself, I finally managed to write about a short and even seasonal film-object and made latkes with my parents.
spatch and I lit the last night's candle for the future. All these last months have been a very rough turn toward winter. I have to believe that I will be able to believe in one.So, I'm reading something about an abusive relationship. So toxic, in every tiny respect. But the commenters! You've got a handful of them happily chirping things like "Oh, Abuser is trying so hard! He's really just controlling because he's worried, but look, he's trying to make Abusee happy!" and we've got another handful saying things like "I don't get why Abusee doesn't just leave. I mean, he's in public, is he scared of getting hit? In public? Like, geez."
Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?
Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.
(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)
***********************
( Read more... )
Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?
Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.
(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)
( Read more... )
I am drowning in unfinished and partly finished tasks so this will not be as detailed or vivid as my usual solstice descriptions. Also I have very few good photos because my hands were occupied and I didn't have a proper camera, so you'll have to make do with blurry impressions, I'm afraid.
The Longest Night was cold as balls, but tradition is tradition, and actually more of my friends made it out than is usual. We had the lanterns I made and they went over very well, which meant that basically we got drafted into the parade itself. There were new giant puppets (one in particular that I'll comment on in detail) and for the first time in years, the fire sculpture has returned to Alexandra Park. Giant puppets and lanterns are very important to me, but is it really solstice without a big art project that people worked very hard on getting lit on fire? I don't think so, and the fact that this happened again feels hopeful for the year to come.
( pictures but they're not great )
I'm hoping to have better pictures to share that other people took, as it was pretty well photographed. I do have one of me thatrdi took but this is a public post.
You can get a decent idea of the vibe (and how the fish and Mari Lynd looked in action!) in this video, if you have Instagram.
This post has photo and video of the Fire Finale.
As always, it was a beautiful night, and it looks like the sun is up, so we did a good job.
The Longest Night was cold as balls, but tradition is tradition, and actually more of my friends made it out than is usual. We had the lanterns I made and they went over very well, which meant that basically we got drafted into the parade itself. There were new giant puppets (one in particular that I'll comment on in detail) and for the first time in years, the fire sculpture has returned to Alexandra Park. Giant puppets and lanterns are very important to me, but is it really solstice without a big art project that people worked very hard on getting lit on fire? I don't think so, and the fact that this happened again feels hopeful for the year to come.
( pictures but they're not great )
I'm hoping to have better pictures to share that other people took, as it was pretty well photographed. I do have one of me that
rdi took but this is a public post.You can get a decent idea of the vibe (and how the fish and Mari Lynd looked in action!) in this video, if you have Instagram.
This post has photo and video of the Fire Finale.
As always, it was a beautiful night, and it looks like the sun is up, so we did a good job.
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If there's one food that's cheaper in Japan, it's low-end sushi. Supermarket had a tray of 8 seafood nigiri: 2 salmon, 2 tuna, mackerel, shrimp, the big roe, and some pink gel. 598 yen. $6 by PPP, which is already good deal; $4 by exchange rate. Probably would be $12 in a Philadelphia supermarket, or $15.
But! I actually got it at 50% discount, near closing time. So 8 nigiri for $2.
...maybe I should be more aggressive about walking off with as much discount sushi as I can carry...
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This is my second and last day in Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture. I'm writing about it now even though my last entry was so recent, because I don't know when I last visited a town I liked so well. (Sorry if a bit of Regency diction creeps in from time to time - I'm also transcribing some letters from that period in my spare moments, a subject for a later occasion.)
Onomichi (尾道 = "tail road") is not devoid of tourists, but most of the Western ones pass straight through. They get out at the station and immediately transfer to the little ferry that takes them over to the island of Mukaishima (a five-minute hop), and thence to the Shimanami Kaido cycle route across the Seto Inland Sea, a justly celebrated journey (though the only time I did it was on a rainy day and in a bus). I don't think many explore the town, which remains a bit of a hidden gem (or 穴場 - "hole place", in Japanese, as Mami informed me the other day). They should though, because it's really wonderful, at least if you share my tastes. Allow me to expatiate upon its charms under three broad heads.
First, physical geography. Onomichi is a town with a thin strip of flat land along the coast, where most of the shops are, then behind that a steeply rising hinterland. In this it resembles (on a much smaller scale) Kobe, where I'm going tomorrow, but the effect is more like that of a West country town - I was reminded oddly of Dartmouth. Mukaishima, though actually an island, feels like the far side of a river channel with a ferry connecting the two banks. Meanwhile, the narrow lanes and alleys above the town have more of a Cornish feel, with steps faced with granite in a more St Ives-ey manner. I got to know those steep lanes very well, because my hotel was at the very top of them, and it was not an easy climb on any of the three occasions I made it. (Luckily I'd forwarded my suitcase using the takkyubin, or it would have been impossible.) On the other hand, the view from my room is pretty damned good.
Yep, that's my hotel right at the top.
When I arrived yesterday I was told that, because it was the winter solstice, the public bath would have yuzu floating in it - something I've long wanted to experience, though I didn't have the body confidence to do so, sadly.
On the other hand, I did have the confidence to order the celebrated Onomichi ramen at an establishment in the town. An amazing meal at 900 Yen, which is (I'm almost embarrassed to write) about £4.50 at current exchange rates:
The second thing is cats. Onomichi is town of cats (which is presumably where the tails come from). Many of the cats are real, feral ones, lovingly fostered by the human population, but many are the inhabitants of stocks and stones, shrines and signs, and the twisty paths in the hills lead to many cat-haunted nooks, as you can see...
Clearly a lot of these displays are old and/or in relative disrepair, but that is far from detracting from their charm, at least to me. Rather, it helps create what one of the signs I saw described as "cat Ihatov" - a word borrowed from Kenji Miyazawa, who made his home of Iwate into a kind of palimpsestic enchantment, Ihatov, overlaying the quotidian. Onomichi is that, too, for those with eyes to see - which are, needless to say, cat's eyes. I ate lunch in a rather hidden restaurant called 'Owl's House' on one of these little paths, naturally choosing the 'Meow Pizza' with its sardines and bonito flakes. Two of the local feral cats sat inside watching me as I ate.
All of which brings me to the third charm of Onomichi - and actually my initial reason for wanting to visit - which is that it was the setting for the 2005 anime series, Kamichu! - a truly charming story of a middle-school girl, Yurie, who awakes one morning to discover that she has become a Shinto kami. This is not, however, a chunibyou story - i.e. the tale of a middle-schooler with delusions of divine power. Yurie, a shy and unassertive girl, doesn't really know what to do with her new status, or even what she might represent as a divine being.
Anyway, I learned from various web sources that not only was Onomichi the setting, but that its geography was adhered to particularly closely - which indeed I found to be the case, from the ferry that takes Yurie between home and school, to the shrine where her friend Matsuri lives and the many other places featured in the series.
By far the most moving thing to me, though, was seeing the school Yurie and her friends attended. I first saw it from above, coming down one of the steep slopes, so I had a good view of the roof:
It was all there! The roof where Yurie first exercised her powers as a god! The raised part where Kenji held his solo calligraphy club! Even the ladder connecting the two!
Now, because I write about the motivations for literary and anime pilgrimages in my academic work you mustn't imagine that I'm immune to such things myself. On the contrary, I found the sight profoundly moving, and all the more so when, as I got closer, I realised that Yurie's school was no longer a school. The building had clearly not been used in some years. The gate to the playground was open, so I was able to get a good look.
Note the least affecting was the set of swings, now consisting of the frame only, the swings themselves having been removed.
I don't know why the school closed, but as we are all aware, Japan's birthrate has been declining steadily and Onomichi's own population has begun to shrink. It's all a long way from 2005, still more from the 1980s, when the anime is actually set. (I did not find anybody in the town who remembered the anime, for that matter - not that I asked everyone.) I hope that Yurie can keep the poverty god away, as she did in the series.
Having visited Onomichi, I also now understand why they made an episode based on Fight Club, but with cats. Or at least, I understand the cats bit.
Anyway, Onomichi is great, and you should visit it - tomorrow if possible, but at any rate very soon.
Onomichi (尾道 = "tail road") is not devoid of tourists, but most of the Western ones pass straight through. They get out at the station and immediately transfer to the little ferry that takes them over to the island of Mukaishima (a five-minute hop), and thence to the Shimanami Kaido cycle route across the Seto Inland Sea, a justly celebrated journey (though the only time I did it was on a rainy day and in a bus). I don't think many explore the town, which remains a bit of a hidden gem (or 穴場 - "hole place", in Japanese, as Mami informed me the other day). They should though, because it's really wonderful, at least if you share my tastes. Allow me to expatiate upon its charms under three broad heads.
First, physical geography. Onomichi is a town with a thin strip of flat land along the coast, where most of the shops are, then behind that a steeply rising hinterland. In this it resembles (on a much smaller scale) Kobe, where I'm going tomorrow, but the effect is more like that of a West country town - I was reminded oddly of Dartmouth. Mukaishima, though actually an island, feels like the far side of a river channel with a ferry connecting the two banks. Meanwhile, the narrow lanes and alleys above the town have more of a Cornish feel, with steps faced with granite in a more St Ives-ey manner. I got to know those steep lanes very well, because my hotel was at the very top of them, and it was not an easy climb on any of the three occasions I made it. (Luckily I'd forwarded my suitcase using the takkyubin, or it would have been impossible.) On the other hand, the view from my room is pretty damned good.
Yep, that's my hotel right at the top.
When I arrived yesterday I was told that, because it was the winter solstice, the public bath would have yuzu floating in it - something I've long wanted to experience, though I didn't have the body confidence to do so, sadly.
On the other hand, I did have the confidence to order the celebrated Onomichi ramen at an establishment in the town. An amazing meal at 900 Yen, which is (I'm almost embarrassed to write) about £4.50 at current exchange rates:
The second thing is cats. Onomichi is town of cats (which is presumably where the tails come from). Many of the cats are real, feral ones, lovingly fostered by the human population, but many are the inhabitants of stocks and stones, shrines and signs, and the twisty paths in the hills lead to many cat-haunted nooks, as you can see...
Clearly a lot of these displays are old and/or in relative disrepair, but that is far from detracting from their charm, at least to me. Rather, it helps create what one of the signs I saw described as "cat Ihatov" - a word borrowed from Kenji Miyazawa, who made his home of Iwate into a kind of palimpsestic enchantment, Ihatov, overlaying the quotidian. Onomichi is that, too, for those with eyes to see - which are, needless to say, cat's eyes. I ate lunch in a rather hidden restaurant called 'Owl's House' on one of these little paths, naturally choosing the 'Meow Pizza' with its sardines and bonito flakes. Two of the local feral cats sat inside watching me as I ate.
All of which brings me to the third charm of Onomichi - and actually my initial reason for wanting to visit - which is that it was the setting for the 2005 anime series, Kamichu! - a truly charming story of a middle-school girl, Yurie, who awakes one morning to discover that she has become a Shinto kami. This is not, however, a chunibyou story - i.e. the tale of a middle-schooler with delusions of divine power. Yurie, a shy and unassertive girl, doesn't really know what to do with her new status, or even what she might represent as a divine being.
Anyway, I learned from various web sources that not only was Onomichi the setting, but that its geography was adhered to particularly closely - which indeed I found to be the case, from the ferry that takes Yurie between home and school, to the shrine where her friend Matsuri lives and the many other places featured in the series.
By far the most moving thing to me, though, was seeing the school Yurie and her friends attended. I first saw it from above, coming down one of the steep slopes, so I had a good view of the roof:
It was all there! The roof where Yurie first exercised her powers as a god! The raised part where Kenji held his solo calligraphy club! Even the ladder connecting the two!
Now, because I write about the motivations for literary and anime pilgrimages in my academic work you mustn't imagine that I'm immune to such things myself. On the contrary, I found the sight profoundly moving, and all the more so when, as I got closer, I realised that Yurie's school was no longer a school. The building had clearly not been used in some years. The gate to the playground was open, so I was able to get a good look.
Note the least affecting was the set of swings, now consisting of the frame only, the swings themselves having been removed.
I don't know why the school closed, but as we are all aware, Japan's birthrate has been declining steadily and Onomichi's own population has begun to shrink. It's all a long way from 2005, still more from the 1980s, when the anime is actually set. (I did not find anybody in the town who remembered the anime, for that matter - not that I asked everyone.) I hope that Yurie can keep the poverty god away, as she did in the series.
Having visited Onomichi, I also now understand why they made an episode based on Fight Club, but with cats. Or at least, I understand the cats bit.
Anyway, Onomichi is great, and you should visit it - tomorrow if possible, but at any rate very soon.
Tags:
- 1. Trail hunting to be banned under new animal welfare push
- (tags:foxes uk law )
- 2. Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere
- (tags:batteries electricty co2 )
- 3. Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most
- (tags:relationships friends parents psychology )
- 4. Why British Jews are experiencing their biggest change in 60 years
- (tags:Jews UK Israel bigotry demographics )
- 5. Exceptional adults reach peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice.
- (tags:learning development education )
Tags:
- batteries,
- bigotry,
- co2,
- demographics,
- development,
- education,
- electricty,
- foxes,
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- israel,
- jews,
- law,
- learning,
- links,
- parents,
- psychology,
- relationships,
- uk
Of course I hope you've enjoyed my short fiction and poetry (and nonfiction!) this year. But other people have been absolutely lighting the place up as well, and here are my recommendations for speculative short fiction and poetry for 2025. Even I can't read everything, so please do not take this as a comprehensive list! I'm sure there's great stuff out there I've missed, and if you want to comment with it, that's great. Spread the joy.
Heritage/Speaker | Hablante/Herencia, Angela Acosta (Samovar)
The Witch and the Wyrm, Elizabeth Bear (Reactor)
Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)
Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)
Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)
Bestla, James Joseph Brown (Kaleidotrope)
Mail Order Magic, Stephanie Burgis (Sunday Morning Transport)
With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)
As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)
And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)
“To Reap, to Sow,” Lyndsey Croal (Analog Mar/Apr 25)
Atomic, Jennifer Crow (Kaleidotrope)
Flower and Root, J. R. Dawson (Sunday Morning Transport)
Six People to Revise You, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)
The Place I Came To, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Lightspeed)
Understudies, Greg Egan (Clarkesworld)
All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys (Reactor)
Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth, Kate Francia (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
The Jacarandas Are Unimpressed By Your Show of Force, Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gorgon, Gwynne Garfinkle (Penumbric)
The Otter Woman’s Daughter, Eleanor Glewwe (Cast of Wonders)
In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)
In Connorville, Kathleen Jennings (Reactor)
Michelle C. Jin, Imperfect Simulations (Clarkesworld)
What I Saw Before the War, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Reactor)
The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)
Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)
Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch (Uncanny)
The Loaf in the Woods, David Marino (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
One by One, Lindz McLeod (Apex)
10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills (Uncanny)
Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)
Liecraft, Anita Moskát (trans. Austin Wagner) (Apex)
The Orchard Village Catalog, Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Last Tuesday, for Eternity, Vinny Rose Pinto (Imagine 2200)
The Horrible Conceit of Night and Death, J. A. Prentice (Apex)
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)
Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off, Margaret Ronald (Sunday Morning Transport)
Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Reactor)
No One Dies of Longing, Anjali Sachdeva (Strange Horizons)
Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)
Orders, Grace Seybold (Augur)
Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens, Rachel Swirsky (Reactor)
“Holy Fools,” Adrian Tchaikovsky (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)
A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Willrich (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“An Asexual Succubus,” John Wiswell (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)
Phantom View, John Wiswell (Reactor)
Brooklyn Beijing, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)
Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)
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The hot yoga place has two levels of classes: "hotpod flow" and "nurturing flow". In January I found the nurturing one a bit too relaxing and slow, and I've been doing the free yoga classes through work pretty consistently all year, so I thought sure, I'll be fine in the standard class. I'll have to modify some of the harder positions but I'm used to that.
It was hot in the class. Not sauna hot, but I was definitely finding it harder than I'd expected based on the January classes. I took the teacher at her word about it being fine to take breaks and drink water as needed, but well before the end I just had to stop, sit, and let my heart rate come down. She checked in with me, and I assured her that I know my body and I'm not going to let myself faint, but yes it was harder than I'd expected. I've switched my classes for the next couple of days to the "nurturing flow", so we'll see how that goes.
My workout clothes were saturated when I finished. I thought I was sweaty after Huskies practice (two hours skating hard, trying to keep up with young men), but this was a new level. Luckily I had a hoodie and skirt to throw over the top for the bike ride home - it's a weirdly mild December week but not so mild I wanted evaporative cooling all the way. Absolutely everything went in the wash when I got home.
I emptied my 950ml water bottle in/just after the practice, and had another couple of litres of water over the course of the evening, this time with my trusty electrolyte tablets, and managed to see off the lurking dehydration headache. I'm going to make sure there's electrolytes in the in-class bottle too from tonight onward.
It was hot in the class. Not sauna hot, but I was definitely finding it harder than I'd expected based on the January classes. I took the teacher at her word about it being fine to take breaks and drink water as needed, but well before the end I just had to stop, sit, and let my heart rate come down. She checked in with me, and I assured her that I know my body and I'm not going to let myself faint, but yes it was harder than I'd expected. I've switched my classes for the next couple of days to the "nurturing flow", so we'll see how that goes.
slightly gross body stuff
My workout clothes were saturated when I finished. I thought I was sweaty after Huskies practice (two hours skating hard, trying to keep up with young men), but this was a new level. Luckily I had a hoodie and skirt to throw over the top for the bike ride home - it's a weirdly mild December week but not so mild I wanted evaporative cooling all the way. Absolutely everything went in the wash when I got home.
I emptied my 950ml water bottle in/just after the practice, and had another couple of litres of water over the course of the evening, this time with my trusty electrolyte tablets, and managed to see off the lurking dehydration headache. I'm going to make sure there's electrolytes in the in-class bottle too from tonight onward.
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I attended a piano recital in San Francisco on Sunday. It just wasn't the piano recital I'd intended to go to.
The one I'd intended would have been Sarah Cahill playing music by Terry Riley in a meeting room of the main SF Public Library at 2 p.m. The occasion was to honor Riley's 90th birthday, which was last June. Riley was one of the founding fathers of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s, though he's reinvented himself several times since then, and Cahill is an indefatigable proponent of new and unusual music; she was, among other things, one of the tag team of pianists who played Philip Glass's complete Etudes some years back.
But when I got to the library I found the building closed due to a power outage. This, I eventually learned, had begun the previous evening, but I hadn't heard about it. This was irksome, especially as I'd checked the website that morning to confirm the concert was still on. The power outage was widespread, but in spots, and this particular spot covered just a few blocks around the library. Not a concert in sight.
But! Earlier, on my way to lunch, which I had at a Chinese place nearby but well outside the outage zone, I'd walked past a pizzeria which had, taped to its front window, a small notification of a concert of Bach on the piano, to be held at a church in the Mission District at 3 p.m. "Too bad Cahill's concert won't be over by then," I thought, but when I found the library closed, I simply changed my plans.
So instead of Riley I heard Bach's seven keyboard toccata suites (BWV 910-916) played on a Baldwin baby grand in a 19th-century Lutheran church across the street from Mission Dolores. The pianist, whose name was Michiko Murata, was really good. Too bad there were only about 20 people there to hear her.
She played crisply and emphatically, with clean separation of parts and with the call-and-response patterns so basic to Bach clearly enunciated. It was 90 minutes of the master of intricate counterpoint showing his chops, and with this clarity of enunciation it was sheer pleasure to hear.
Fortunately there was a brief intermission halfway through, and I returned from the long trudge to the men's room just in time to see Murata in the sanctuary's foyer, about to make her entrance. "You're back," she said to me. "I thought you'd left." This is something you can say when your audience is so small you can count them. "Oh no," I replied, "I've got to hear how this comes out." (With one of Bach's few excursions into the major mode, as it turned out.)
The one I'd intended would have been Sarah Cahill playing music by Terry Riley in a meeting room of the main SF Public Library at 2 p.m. The occasion was to honor Riley's 90th birthday, which was last June. Riley was one of the founding fathers of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s, though he's reinvented himself several times since then, and Cahill is an indefatigable proponent of new and unusual music; she was, among other things, one of the tag team of pianists who played Philip Glass's complete Etudes some years back.
But when I got to the library I found the building closed due to a power outage. This, I eventually learned, had begun the previous evening, but I hadn't heard about it. This was irksome, especially as I'd checked the website that morning to confirm the concert was still on. The power outage was widespread, but in spots, and this particular spot covered just a few blocks around the library. Not a concert in sight.
But! Earlier, on my way to lunch, which I had at a Chinese place nearby but well outside the outage zone, I'd walked past a pizzeria which had, taped to its front window, a small notification of a concert of Bach on the piano, to be held at a church in the Mission District at 3 p.m. "Too bad Cahill's concert won't be over by then," I thought, but when I found the library closed, I simply changed my plans.
So instead of Riley I heard Bach's seven keyboard toccata suites (BWV 910-916) played on a Baldwin baby grand in a 19th-century Lutheran church across the street from Mission Dolores. The pianist, whose name was Michiko Murata, was really good. Too bad there were only about 20 people there to hear her.
She played crisply and emphatically, with clean separation of parts and with the call-and-response patterns so basic to Bach clearly enunciated. It was 90 minutes of the master of intricate counterpoint showing his chops, and with this clarity of enunciation it was sheer pleasure to hear.
Fortunately there was a brief intermission halfway through, and I returned from the long trudge to the men's room just in time to see Murata in the sanctuary's foyer, about to make her entrance. "You're back," she said to me. "I thought you'd left." This is something you can say when your audience is so small you can count them. "Oh no," I replied, "I've got to hear how this comes out." (With one of Bach's few excursions into the major mode, as it turned out.)
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apod_feed Dec. 22nd, 2025 06:06 am)
apod_feed Dec. 22nd, 2025 06:06 am)
Can you tell that today is a solstice by the tilt of the Earth?
The music is great, but the plot + worldbuilding raises some issues that they don't bother to even attempt to address properly.
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I don't think the upstairs bathroom will be done before christmas but I have accepted this, these things happen. I've got some momentum going with it, which is perfect, that will keep me working on it until it is done, my guess mid-jan. There just isn't enough time to get it all done with everything else that needs doing in the next three days.
But! I have laid the second layer of plywood, which was a fight, stapled it down and have started working on the flooring. The area that needs flooring is an L shape around the shower, with two pipes at the end of the wall for plumbing and the one wall is the uneven plaster and lathe. I cut it exact to the dimensions needed and couldn't get it fit into the spot because I forgot about the one pipe that is the not-hooked-up heating pipe. The plywood was 3/4 inch, it was 47x80 inches and heavy as fuck. So getting it picked back up was an absolute nightmare. It only worked because I was able to brace one foot against the wall above the plywood and pry up with a prybar until I could slide a chunk of wood between it and the wall. Then I tried fitting it in the other direction and ran into issues with destroying the drywall that stuck out slightly too far on the other side. Finally, I just cut the plywood in half and slide both pieces into place in two minutes. The whole process sucked! The third piece that went in was comparatively easy even if it needed three notches.
I got them stapled down quickly, it took as much time to get the compressor pressure correct as it did to actually staple everything in. I caulked it this afternoon although the caulk was old and I think there is something wrong with it since it has been at least three hours and it is still wet. Might need to run to town for more. (steps still to go: drywall on two walls, toilet in place, sink in place, their plumbing to be hooked up). I will lay vinyl flooring soon.
( more projects under the cut )
But! I have laid the second layer of plywood, which was a fight, stapled it down and have started working on the flooring. The area that needs flooring is an L shape around the shower, with two pipes at the end of the wall for plumbing and the one wall is the uneven plaster and lathe. I cut it exact to the dimensions needed and couldn't get it fit into the spot because I forgot about the one pipe that is the not-hooked-up heating pipe. The plywood was 3/4 inch, it was 47x80 inches and heavy as fuck. So getting it picked back up was an absolute nightmare. It only worked because I was able to brace one foot against the wall above the plywood and pry up with a prybar until I could slide a chunk of wood between it and the wall. Then I tried fitting it in the other direction and ran into issues with destroying the drywall that stuck out slightly too far on the other side. Finally, I just cut the plywood in half and slide both pieces into place in two minutes. The whole process sucked! The third piece that went in was comparatively easy even if it needed three notches.
I got them stapled down quickly, it took as much time to get the compressor pressure correct as it did to actually staple everything in. I caulked it this afternoon although the caulk was old and I think there is something wrong with it since it has been at least three hours and it is still wet. Might need to run to town for more. (steps still to go: drywall on two walls, toilet in place, sink in place, their plumbing to be hooked up). I will lay vinyl flooring soon.
( more projects under the cut )
Sometimes I hit a romance in media and I'm like well. I don't know that I'd say that I ship this. I wouldn't be sad if these people broke up. But unfortunately I do actually believe that they are in love and find it compelling to watch what happens about it ....
anyway that's how I felt about the central relationship in The Legend of ShenLi, which is a xianxia cdrama about ✨ The Greatest General Of The Demon Realm ✨ and her epic romance with -- well. For the first five or six episodes ShenLi, the Greatest General of the Demon Realm, is trapped on Earth in the form of an angry CGI chicken, in the care of a sickly human scholar who has discovered that his angry CGI chicken is in fact some sort of supernatural entity and thinks the whole situation is very funny.
Here, for the record, is angry chicken ShenLi:
and here is ShenLi and her love interest when nobody is a chicken:
This whole introductory arc is really charming. Incredibly happy for that sickly scholar and his angry bird wife. But alas! all things must end, the lovers are parted, and ShenLi The Greatest General of the Demon Realm grimly returns home to confront her upcoming political marriage to a playboy from the Divine Realm, in the full assumption that she will never see her sickly scholar again because even aside from the political pressures one day in the Demon Realm equals a year in the human realm so the time difference is not workable.
However! then some monster nonsense starts happening in the Demon Realm, and so the Divine Realm sends its last surviving actual factual god to help out -- who bears a Mysterious Resemblance to ShenLi's sickly human boyfriend .... ( spoilers )
But enough about the leads! ( Here's a short list of my other favorite people in the drama, cut for some images as well )
anyway that's how I felt about the central relationship in The Legend of ShenLi, which is a xianxia cdrama about ✨ The Greatest General Of The Demon Realm ✨ and her epic romance with -- well. For the first five or six episodes ShenLi, the Greatest General of the Demon Realm, is trapped on Earth in the form of an angry CGI chicken, in the care of a sickly human scholar who has discovered that his angry CGI chicken is in fact some sort of supernatural entity and thinks the whole situation is very funny.
Here, for the record, is angry chicken ShenLi:
and here is ShenLi and her love interest when nobody is a chicken:
This whole introductory arc is really charming. Incredibly happy for that sickly scholar and his angry bird wife. But alas! all things must end, the lovers are parted, and ShenLi The Greatest General of the Demon Realm grimly returns home to confront her upcoming political marriage to a playboy from the Divine Realm, in the full assumption that she will never see her sickly scholar again because even aside from the political pressures one day in the Demon Realm equals a year in the human realm so the time difference is not workable.
However! then some monster nonsense starts happening in the Demon Realm, and so the Divine Realm sends its last surviving actual factual god to help out -- who bears a Mysterious Resemblance to ShenLi's sickly human boyfriend .... ( spoilers )
But enough about the leads! ( Here's a short list of my other favorite people in the drama, cut for some images as well )
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Reasons to Swear Up a Storm, Part the Bazillionth
I'll not go over what this image is about, because y'all know it. Thank you, superbly foul-mouthed political commentator Jeff Tiedrich for showing it to me and many others.
Here you go:
I'll not go over what this image is about, because y'all know it. Thank you, superbly foul-mouthed political commentator Jeff Tiedrich for showing it to me and many others.
Here you go:
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I finished my last full day in Tokyo for now by meeting Yuki for lunch at a Taiwanese place, followed by mitsuan, and finally dinner with Miho and Yuko, where we talked over our slow-burn project to research chirimenbon (books made in the Meiji and Taisho eras for Western tourists, usually telling Japanese folk tales and translated by some notable authors of the time such as Lafcadio Hearn). Here is a lovely view of the three would-be researchers outside a Christmassy Tokyo Joshidai:
On Wednesday I met my friend Mami at Haneda, and we flew to Nagasaki for a couple of days. I'd long wanted to visit, not least because this is the city that was the only toe-hold for direct contact between Japan and the West (more specifically the Dutch) from the 1630s to the 1850s - i.e. for most of the Edo period, when Japan had a policy of isolation (often known as sakoku). Even the Dutch, who were there purely as traders, were confined to a small artificial island known as Dejima - about 120/75m. (This was not reclaimed land, as I had somehow imagined, but was formed by a cutting a canal through a small peninsula.)
Dejima is no longer an island, but they've done a fine reconstruction job. Life there was rather more spacious than one might have enjoyed on a ship of the era, but it must have been tantalising being just a short bridge's width from the rest of the city. Nagasaki citizens weren't allowed in, either - though an exception seems to have been made for prostitutes.
The tablet computer in the last picture shows Nagasaki as it would have looked at the time, with a clear view to the mouth of the bay - rather than with a bunch of buildings in the way.
Nagasaki is, by Japanese standards, a very cosmopolitan city, with its relative proximity to the Asian mainland (it has a famous Chinatown) and its history of Dutch and, before that, Portugese trade - which can be seen in the ubiquitous Castella cakes. Here and there, though, a trace of the old sakoku spirit still remains, as in this pair of QR codes, where the Japanese "Guidance to business opening hours" has been Englished simply as "For foreigner" - which felt a little on the nose!
There's more to Nagasaki than Dejima, not least in terms of food. Most famous of all perhaps is Nagasaki champon, which, having been invented in Nagasaki by a Chinese restaurant owner, is as Japanese as chicken tikka masala is British. We sampled it in the original restaurant:
Nagasaki bay, when seen from above, sans buildings, is lovely. Other highlights included the trams (I'm a sucker for a tram, and this is the third Japanese city I've seen them in after Matsuyama and Hakodate) and a really charming bookshop-cum-picture-book museum, which had something of the air of the Ghibli Museum in its architecture:
We also took a day to visit Hui Ten Bosch - the Dutch theme park. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't this:
And yet, in retrospect, how could it have been otherwise? Actually, Huis Ten Bosch is on a truly grand scale, and in terms of recreating buildings it puts even British Hills in Fukushima in the shade. Highly recommended if you find yourself on the shores of Omura bay with time on your hands!
I said my goodbyes to Mami on Saturday and started working my way back to Tokyo, albeit by a very circuitous route. First stop was Miyajima, home of the famous floating torii gate. This was the one night of the trip when I splashed out on a ryokan, mostly so that I could stay overnight on Itsukushima island (where Miyajima is located). I'd been told that it was easier to beat the crowds if one stayed overnight, though to be honest the crowds weren't that big - no doubt because of the season. (There were, however, more Westerners in evidence here than anywhere else I've stayed.) This meant that I was able to experience the shrine about both low and high tides:
It also got me this view from my bedroom window:
And, of course, ryokan style meals. This was breakfast, before and after the battle:
Altogether, an amazing place. The next day I set off on the next leg of my journey, to the place I'm writing this entry. But where is that place? Tune in next time to find out!
On Wednesday I met my friend Mami at Haneda, and we flew to Nagasaki for a couple of days. I'd long wanted to visit, not least because this is the city that was the only toe-hold for direct contact between Japan and the West (more specifically the Dutch) from the 1630s to the 1850s - i.e. for most of the Edo period, when Japan had a policy of isolation (often known as sakoku). Even the Dutch, who were there purely as traders, were confined to a small artificial island known as Dejima - about 120/75m. (This was not reclaimed land, as I had somehow imagined, but was formed by a cutting a canal through a small peninsula.)
Dejima is no longer an island, but they've done a fine reconstruction job. Life there was rather more spacious than one might have enjoyed on a ship of the era, but it must have been tantalising being just a short bridge's width from the rest of the city. Nagasaki citizens weren't allowed in, either - though an exception seems to have been made for prostitutes.
The tablet computer in the last picture shows Nagasaki as it would have looked at the time, with a clear view to the mouth of the bay - rather than with a bunch of buildings in the way.
Nagasaki is, by Japanese standards, a very cosmopolitan city, with its relative proximity to the Asian mainland (it has a famous Chinatown) and its history of Dutch and, before that, Portugese trade - which can be seen in the ubiquitous Castella cakes. Here and there, though, a trace of the old sakoku spirit still remains, as in this pair of QR codes, where the Japanese "Guidance to business opening hours" has been Englished simply as "For foreigner" - which felt a little on the nose!
There's more to Nagasaki than Dejima, not least in terms of food. Most famous of all perhaps is Nagasaki champon, which, having been invented in Nagasaki by a Chinese restaurant owner, is as Japanese as chicken tikka masala is British. We sampled it in the original restaurant:
Nagasaki bay, when seen from above, sans buildings, is lovely. Other highlights included the trams (I'm a sucker for a tram, and this is the third Japanese city I've seen them in after Matsuyama and Hakodate) and a really charming bookshop-cum-picture-book museum, which had something of the air of the Ghibli Museum in its architecture:
We also took a day to visit Hui Ten Bosch - the Dutch theme park. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't this:
And yet, in retrospect, how could it have been otherwise? Actually, Huis Ten Bosch is on a truly grand scale, and in terms of recreating buildings it puts even British Hills in Fukushima in the shade. Highly recommended if you find yourself on the shores of Omura bay with time on your hands!
I said my goodbyes to Mami on Saturday and started working my way back to Tokyo, albeit by a very circuitous route. First stop was Miyajima, home of the famous floating torii gate. This was the one night of the trip when I splashed out on a ryokan, mostly so that I could stay overnight on Itsukushima island (where Miyajima is located). I'd been told that it was easier to beat the crowds if one stayed overnight, though to be honest the crowds weren't that big - no doubt because of the season. (There were, however, more Westerners in evidence here than anywhere else I've stayed.) This meant that I was able to experience the shrine about both low and high tides:
It also got me this view from my bedroom window:
And, of course, ryokan style meals. This was breakfast, before and after the battle:
Altogether, an amazing place. The next day I set off on the next leg of my journey, to the place I'm writing this entry. But where is that place? Tune in next time to find out!
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Reading. Nothing (quite) finished; various snippets. ( Scalzi, Bourke, Boddice, Cowart )
Watching. Wake Up Dead Man (the third instalment in the Benoit Blanc/Knives Out mysteries). ( Read more... )
Three episodes of Man vs. Bee, in company; this is... not for me.
Playing. Inkulinati! And, with the niblings: Match Madness, The Genius Square, Rummikub, Dixit.
Cooking. A new-to-me fruitcake recipe from one of my cookbooks; a dal from the cookbook I am not actually going to manage Making Everything From by the end of the calendar year (but I am pretty close).
Eating. I have now had A Mince Pie. Also a very long lunch at the Gardeners Arms. The brownies that all the reviews of the place we wound up staying in Ardlingy mentioned (which were indeed v good).
Exploring. Wakehurst Place, both at night for Glow Wild and during daylight (a little)!
Growing. Bought curry leaves. Proceeded to strip most of the stems (freezing the leaves) and Treat As Cuttings. There's at least one of them that doesn't look actually dead yet...
Observing. OWL OWL OWL. Very talkative tawny, as we were leaving Wakehurst on Friday night. Snowdrops, also at Wakehurst, to my mild horror. And, blessedly, NOT The Charity Tractor Parade...
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Since Keldor was still feeling off in his digestive track this morning we didn’t head to Barbara’s birthday brunch today, which is a shame, but we got so much done, which is nice.
I started the day with HIT/yoga 30 minutes workout, then saw a message from my friend Vandra, whom I haven’t seen in mor than 20 years. She is wanting to do a trip over to Norway in February or March, and wondered about the possibility of seeing me while on this side of the ocean.
Of course, I encouraged her to come to JMBards in March, and it is looking likely. I am very excited!
By then Keldor was awake, so we played Qwirkle over breakfast, and then we went to the cellar and continued the great cleaning and organising of the shop. At long last, after at least four work sessions, I have taken all of the screws, nails, rivits, bolts, and other miscellaneous small things and put them into the wall mounted drawers we had installed some time back.
Much to my delight, I managed to get everything in there. All of the screws that had still been in their original packaging fit in the little sets of small drawers, and I clipped the labels from the packaging and taped them to the drawers, and I had just enough small drawers left after that to hold the other screws (found in random piles and jars) that had enough of the same type to justify giving them their own drawer (occasionally dividing the drawer in half with a chunk of cardboard and tape). Then I made lots of little open top cardboard boxes to organise all the other categories of things in the larger drawers. I am quite pleased with the result.
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