Entry tags:
quarterly report?
Still not king. Very far from being king, in fact.
I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.
But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.
All right, first, the boring life stuff.
( health, job, OMG MY FUCKING JOB )
Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.
I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.
Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.
Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.
My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.
On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.
TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.
After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.
Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.
Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.
Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.
This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.
I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.
But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.
All right, first, the boring life stuff.
( health, job, OMG MY FUCKING JOB )
Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.
I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.
Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.
Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.
My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.
On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.
TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.
After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.
Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.
Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.
Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.
This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.