not a month since my last post
Jan. 17th, 2022 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've survived my first week back at work. It was rough, both because I'm still in some pain and because spending so much time in bed left me much weaker than I used to be. But I managed, and fortunately my bosses and co-workers are being helpful and understanding.
In less good work news, my boss is quitting. Technically today is his last day, but he'll be around a bit filling in until his replacement is trained up. I'm sad about it because I like him a lot and we had a good working relationship. Also nervous, for both personal-ish and purely work reasons. Personal-ish: he is a trans man too, and I know how lucky I've been to have a boss who is not only supportive, but who knows from his own experience what kinds of issues face trans people in the workplace. Work-specific: he was there for the whole process of getting curbside pickup and online ordering in place, he understands how it works and what the challenges are, he knows that it's hard work, and he believes in its importance. None of this will necessarily be true of his replacement. (I did think about applying for his job. But he has a lot of responsibilities I wouldn't want, e.g. climbing onto the store roof to figure out WTF is leaking this time. Plus, store management isn't really the direction I want to go in for what remains of my working life. I'm much better at the admin/process side--finding ways to make things work more smoothly--than I am at the people side, whether dealing with customers or managing team members. Hopefully something will open up in that direction at some point. I definitely don't want to change employers--it's a fairly good and supportive work environment, the health insurance is cheap and mostly excellent, and once I hit my four-year anniversary in February, I'll get 4 weeks PTO a year--currently it's 3. So unless I move--and I would really like to go back to Minnesota--I prefer to stay where I am if possible.)
I wish I could say I spent my month off of work learning Russian or watching classic documentaries or something, but between the pain, the meds, and the concentration problems that I (like a lot of folks) have been having for the last two years, I can make no such claim.
I re-read a lot of Terry Pratchett, and have concluded that Carpe Jugulum is seriously underrated by Discworld readers, and Night Watch may be slightly overrated. Neither book quite sticks the landing, but CJ is as serious as NW in its themes and doesn't suffer from, well, being about cops. Or from Pratchett's increasing tendency, as the Watch books continued, to make Vimes the moral arbiter. Granny Weatherwax slightly plays that role in the Witches books, but she remains more of a flawed and difficult character, who has two or three other independent-minded witches to counterbalance her. There's no real counterbalance to Vimes--Vetinari is a pragmatic genius but his morality is detached and unemotional rather than humanly appealing, and while Carrot is often shiningly moral, he's officially subordinate to Vimes and generally follows his lead. I wish there'd been a book where Carrot and Vimes came into serious conflict.
I've finished my Pratchett re-read for now, and I'm currently a little over halfway through A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, by H.G. Parry. The premise is a familiar one--what if European history, but with magic?--but Parry changes it up by focusing not on the fantasy!medieval period, nor on the world wars, but on the late 18th century, specifically the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, and the abolition movement in England. Many people have magical abilities in this world (usually limited to some specific type, such as telekinesis or extraordinary persuasiveness), but in Europe, only aristocrats are allowed to use their magic. Commoners are punished with prison or death for unauthorized magic use. And in the European colonies of the Caribbean and elsewhere, magic is used to enforce total control of enslaved people (starting with preventing them from using their own magic, but definitely not ending there); magical enslavement in the book manages to be even more brutal than slavery was in the real world. The main characters are mostly historical--Pitt, Wilberforce, Robespierre--with the addition of an enslaved woman known as Fina, who was kidnapped so young that she can no longer remember her real name.
It's an interesting book, but one that feels like the author's reach exceeds their grasp. There's a lot of info-dumping, and a tendency to include historical events (e.g., Wilberforce's evangelical conversion) regardless of whether they advance the book's story. And so far, its politics seem pretty iffy. The story so far strongly implies that gradual political reform, led and shaped by well-meaning privileged people, is good, but revolutionary change is very very bad and perhaps literally demonic. It's a complicated issue--obviously both the French and Haitian revolutions involved a lot of killing--but I think any proper account of that violence also needs to consider the violence, both direct and systemic, of the regimes people were rebelling against. The novel doesn't do more than gesture in that direction. But maybe there's more and better to come.
Even more than reading, my ability to watch things has suffered since the pandemic began. I haven't been able to watch any new movies, start any new TV shows, or even continue with shows I was already watching. I'm just unwilling to engage with narratives that might disappoint me, I think.
Light non-fictional TV is easier. I did watch the Great British Bake Off, and lately I've watched a couple of series of the Great British Menu, which is streaming on BritBox. Despite the similarity of names, the shows are quite different. Menu is a competition of professional chefs (all competitors are restaurant head chefs), and the prize is to cook at a banquet honoring the work of a charity--the location and the charity involved change from year to year. Every year has some theme the chefs are supposed to adhere to, such as "source as many as possible of your ingredients locally" or (for a Comic Relief banquet) "your dish must show humor as well as be delicious."
Initially there are 24 chefs, who all compete in 4 different courses, with three levels of judging, so there are a lot of episodes: 45 in total for a complete season, of which 40 are half an hour long and the last 5--the finals and the banquet itself--are an hour. It can be repetitive and also padded (I'd gladly lose the little vignettes about the chefs sourcing their ingredients or doing fundraising for Comic Relief), but I had a lot of time on my hands.
Besides the length, my least favorite thing about Great British Menu is the way it differs the most from the Bake Off: the show encourages conflict between the chefs, and also clumsily attempts to create the appearance of conflict through its editing. I love it when the chefs just roll right over that and support each other, but that doesn't always happen.
Also, be warned that at least in the series I've seen, there are hardly any women. This is ultimately the fault of the culture of professional cooking that keeps women out, but I feel the show could have tried harder (starting with allowing in contestants who aren't head chefs).
Having said all this, I do enjoy the show. The skill and creativity of the cooking is fun to watch, as well as being a hilarious/infuriating looks at culinary trends (must you always serve the vegetables as a puree? must the sauce be plated as tiny scattered dots or thin smears?). And many of the chefs compete for multiple seasons, so there's a bit of non-manufactured narrative and human drama.
Not a show I would recommend to anyone who isn't interested in food and/or cooking, but it might be worth a look if you are.
In less good work news, my boss is quitting. Technically today is his last day, but he'll be around a bit filling in until his replacement is trained up. I'm sad about it because I like him a lot and we had a good working relationship. Also nervous, for both personal-ish and purely work reasons. Personal-ish: he is a trans man too, and I know how lucky I've been to have a boss who is not only supportive, but who knows from his own experience what kinds of issues face trans people in the workplace. Work-specific: he was there for the whole process of getting curbside pickup and online ordering in place, he understands how it works and what the challenges are, he knows that it's hard work, and he believes in its importance. None of this will necessarily be true of his replacement. (I did think about applying for his job. But he has a lot of responsibilities I wouldn't want, e.g. climbing onto the store roof to figure out WTF is leaking this time. Plus, store management isn't really the direction I want to go in for what remains of my working life. I'm much better at the admin/process side--finding ways to make things work more smoothly--than I am at the people side, whether dealing with customers or managing team members. Hopefully something will open up in that direction at some point. I definitely don't want to change employers--it's a fairly good and supportive work environment, the health insurance is cheap and mostly excellent, and once I hit my four-year anniversary in February, I'll get 4 weeks PTO a year--currently it's 3. So unless I move--and I would really like to go back to Minnesota--I prefer to stay where I am if possible.)
I wish I could say I spent my month off of work learning Russian or watching classic documentaries or something, but between the pain, the meds, and the concentration problems that I (like a lot of folks) have been having for the last two years, I can make no such claim.
I re-read a lot of Terry Pratchett, and have concluded that Carpe Jugulum is seriously underrated by Discworld readers, and Night Watch may be slightly overrated. Neither book quite sticks the landing, but CJ is as serious as NW in its themes and doesn't suffer from, well, being about cops. Or from Pratchett's increasing tendency, as the Watch books continued, to make Vimes the moral arbiter. Granny Weatherwax slightly plays that role in the Witches books, but she remains more of a flawed and difficult character, who has two or three other independent-minded witches to counterbalance her. There's no real counterbalance to Vimes--Vetinari is a pragmatic genius but his morality is detached and unemotional rather than humanly appealing, and while Carrot is often shiningly moral, he's officially subordinate to Vimes and generally follows his lead. I wish there'd been a book where Carrot and Vimes came into serious conflict.
I've finished my Pratchett re-read for now, and I'm currently a little over halfway through A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, by H.G. Parry. The premise is a familiar one--what if European history, but with magic?--but Parry changes it up by focusing not on the fantasy!medieval period, nor on the world wars, but on the late 18th century, specifically the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, and the abolition movement in England. Many people have magical abilities in this world (usually limited to some specific type, such as telekinesis or extraordinary persuasiveness), but in Europe, only aristocrats are allowed to use their magic. Commoners are punished with prison or death for unauthorized magic use. And in the European colonies of the Caribbean and elsewhere, magic is used to enforce total control of enslaved people (starting with preventing them from using their own magic, but definitely not ending there); magical enslavement in the book manages to be even more brutal than slavery was in the real world. The main characters are mostly historical--Pitt, Wilberforce, Robespierre--with the addition of an enslaved woman known as Fina, who was kidnapped so young that she can no longer remember her real name.
It's an interesting book, but one that feels like the author's reach exceeds their grasp. There's a lot of info-dumping, and a tendency to include historical events (e.g., Wilberforce's evangelical conversion) regardless of whether they advance the book's story. And so far, its politics seem pretty iffy. The story so far strongly implies that gradual political reform, led and shaped by well-meaning privileged people, is good, but revolutionary change is very very bad and perhaps literally demonic. It's a complicated issue--obviously both the French and Haitian revolutions involved a lot of killing--but I think any proper account of that violence also needs to consider the violence, both direct and systemic, of the regimes people were rebelling against. The novel doesn't do more than gesture in that direction. But maybe there's more and better to come.
Even more than reading, my ability to watch things has suffered since the pandemic began. I haven't been able to watch any new movies, start any new TV shows, or even continue with shows I was already watching. I'm just unwilling to engage with narratives that might disappoint me, I think.
Light non-fictional TV is easier. I did watch the Great British Bake Off, and lately I've watched a couple of series of the Great British Menu, which is streaming on BritBox. Despite the similarity of names, the shows are quite different. Menu is a competition of professional chefs (all competitors are restaurant head chefs), and the prize is to cook at a banquet honoring the work of a charity--the location and the charity involved change from year to year. Every year has some theme the chefs are supposed to adhere to, such as "source as many as possible of your ingredients locally" or (for a Comic Relief banquet) "your dish must show humor as well as be delicious."
Initially there are 24 chefs, who all compete in 4 different courses, with three levels of judging, so there are a lot of episodes: 45 in total for a complete season, of which 40 are half an hour long and the last 5--the finals and the banquet itself--are an hour. It can be repetitive and also padded (I'd gladly lose the little vignettes about the chefs sourcing their ingredients or doing fundraising for Comic Relief), but I had a lot of time on my hands.
Besides the length, my least favorite thing about Great British Menu is the way it differs the most from the Bake Off: the show encourages conflict between the chefs, and also clumsily attempts to create the appearance of conflict through its editing. I love it when the chefs just roll right over that and support each other, but that doesn't always happen.
Also, be warned that at least in the series I've seen, there are hardly any women. This is ultimately the fault of the culture of professional cooking that keeps women out, but I feel the show could have tried harder (starting with allowing in contestants who aren't head chefs).
Having said all this, I do enjoy the show. The skill and creativity of the cooking is fun to watch, as well as being a hilarious/infuriating looks at culinary trends (must you always serve the vegetables as a puree? must the sauce be plated as tiny scattered dots or thin smears?). And many of the chefs compete for multiple seasons, so there's a bit of non-manufactured narrative and human drama.
Not a show I would recommend to anyone who isn't interested in food and/or cooking, but it might be worth a look if you are.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-17 10:06 pm (UTC)Agreed, that would have been very interesting.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-18 02:53 am (UTC)That is a hell of an issue for an author to take on, so I too would be wary of that.
My Pratchett reading slowed down a lot after the Watch books started - they're very much not my favourites, and the adoration from some fans really put me off them. But I'll give Carpe Jugulum a try, then!