something queer going on

Well, back again after another loooong hiatus. I didn't mean to be silent for so long (as always), but the last 3 months have been taken up with errands and appointments of unbearable tediousness. Also, *gestures vaguely around at the state of the world*. It's been hard to do anything but look at the news and worry.

1) Name change: the various steps of this got delayed when I got a Mysterious Respiratory Illness at the end of January (more on this later) that left me tired for quite a while. But I finally managed to update my driver's license, which took 3 trips. Trip 1: Oh, I see appointments are required now. Trip 2: After waiting an hour past my appointment time, I learn that if I wait two more days, I can renew my driver's license at the same time and not have to pay twice. But it cannot be done two days early. Trip 3: Success! Also went to the bank that day to update my name on my bank account.

Note that every visit to the MVD involved an Uber, because it's far from the nearest bus and I didn't want to risk being late.

1a) No, I still don't have a car. It's been over a year now. I was waiting until I could access my retirement account (turns out I can't, I was mistaken about the age requirement), then came the US Dept of Education informing me that I still owed them $$$$$ on student loans that I thought had been rolled into the ones I was already paying, nobody having told me otherwise for EIGHT YEARS. So my monthly payments have nearly tripled. And now the price of cars is likely to skyrocket due to tariffs, so I'm not likely to have a car anytime soon. I wish public transportation here in my oh-so-progressive and environmentally aware town wasn't so awful. The latest thing is that they moved a whole bunch of bus stops due to construction, so what used to be a 20-25 minute walk between the bus stop and my work is now 30+, on a heavily trafficked and frankly dangerous road rather than being mostly a nice stroll by the park along the river. The move is temporary, but I know the pace of construction around here.

2) Reading and watching and etc. Unfortunately, the return of Trump has meant the return of my focus difficulties, and I'm finding it hard to read again. I keep bogging down. I am currently bogged down in Great Eastern, by Howard J. Rodman (a Victorian pastiche featuring Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Captain Ahab, and Captain Nemo--I'm still not sure if it's silly or Extremely Serious) and The Athenian Murders, by V. J. Randle (murder mystery set in contemporary Athens, but the murders have elements of ancient Greek religious ritual; thus far my vote is for silly despite some attempts at talking about policing, fascism, and the plight of refugees). I did manage to finish The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw, she of the Greta Helsing supernatural doctor novels. This one is contemporary, with the mc a psychic who assists in the investigation of airplane crashes, and I liked it a lot right up until the utterly ridiculous ending. I also read Melissa Scott's newest Astreiant novel, Point of Hearts, with enjoyment probably based more in my longstanding love for the world than the quality of the novel itself. (To be fair, I was expecting a very different book. Based on some WIP snippets Scott posted on her Patreon, I thought it would be Istre-centric. Instead, Istre's not in it at all. Maybe that'll be the next book.)

I continue to listen to a ton of podcasts, because I have a long commute. Mostly nonfiction ones that I've talked about in previous posts, but I'm always trying to find more. Currently I'm trying out Cautionary Tales, which is basically stories of things going horribly wrong and what we can learn from them--I like the actual content a lot, but there are really irritating moments of dramatization, voiced by actors of varied abilities.

3) Health: due to length and also TW for eye surgery and different possibly serious stuff, this one's ( going under a cut )

4) More cheerful news? I dunno. I got a haircut today? John Oliver did a really good segment about trans athletes? (It's on YouTube.) There's going to be a third Knives Out movie?

So, I turned 55 on Monday. Like all multiple-of-5 birthdays, this one is inspiring thought. Aging, mortality, all of that extremely fun stuff. And I can no longer set it aside with "someday." Someday is now, or in the next few years, at least. (I do not have a family history of people living long lives in good health. Maybe I'll be different. Maybe not.)

It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.


Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)

Other activities:

Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging. ( More under the cut. )

Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.

I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.

Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.

At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.


Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!

After another long silence for no good reason--mostly the feeling that nothing in my life is important enough to post about--I at last have Significant News.

To wit, I have COVID. For the first time, as far as I know.

So far it's been very mild, just tiredness, an annoying dry cough, mild intermittent sore throat, mild temperature elevation that technically doesn't quality as a fever (although it should, because my normal temperature is only about 97.5 F and I've been running about 2 degrees higher), and some tightness in the chest. I'm keeping an eye on it, of course. I have a pulse oximeter that I bought back in 2020/2021; I'll dig that out and check occasionally.

Interestingly, my symptoms started on Wednesday morning, but I got negative COVID tests on Wednesday and Thursday, and my first positive test was today. It was very, very positive though: a big bold line appeared within about 8 minutes of applying the sample.

So I'm off work until next Thursday, probably; if I continue to feel decent-ish it might be almost enjoyable.

I am, however, pissed off that after over 4 years of avoiding crowds and masking (almost) all the time indoors in public, a moment of truly pathetic weakness led to COVID.

I can't be sure, of course, but my best guess is this: Tuesday of last week, after a doctor's appointment, I wanted to go to Starbucks. I don't regularly go to Starbucks, but I had the craving. And it was a hot day, and this Starbucks had no outdoor seating that was in the shade. So I sat inside, and didn't put my mask back on between drinks because I felt silly. I was there for maybe 45 minutes tops, and wasn't sitting close to anyone. But that seems to have been enough to get whammied.

Apparently there's a new variant again and a new surge? I am an object lesson in why we should keep masking, or mask up again.


So, I'll have some time on my hands for the next week. Can anyone recommend me things? I'm more likely to get to books and podcasts than anything visual, but all recs are welcome. Preferably fairly lighthearted, preferably queer.


Here are some things I've been enjoying lately:

1) The novels of A. J. Demas. These are mostly male/male romance, set in a world based on ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia. They're fun, and there's plot beyond the romance. Some of them are a bit Tumblr-y for my taste, and unfortunately the last novel, The House of the Red Balconies, which was on track to be my favorite, ends very suddenly about 100 pages too soon. However I can recommend Honey and Pepper, and One Night in Boukos (which has two romances, one m/m and one m/f).

The author's notes link you to her other novels, written under the name (possibly her wallet name?) Alice Degan. I read one of them, From all False Doctrine. It was well-written and I enjoyed it in many ways, but it was very, very, very, very Christian. I think the Degan novels were written before the Demas books, and you can definitely see traces of a Christian worldview (specifically Christian sexual ethics) in the early Demas books. There's a lot less of it in the most recent ones.


2) The Old Bridge Inn series, by Annick Trent. Historical queer romance set in 1790s England. There are 4 books: 2 m/m novels, 1 f/f novel, and 1 f/f novella (more a short story imo). They can be read in any order, so I'd recommend trying the best two, The Oak and the Ash (m/m) and Sixpenny Octavo (f/f). These books are deeply, impressively embedded in history, and the central characters are all workers and artisans rather than rich people. The connecting thread is a "reading club" run out of the titular Old Bridge Inn, which meets for reading aloud and to which people can subscribe for a small fee and borrow books. But in the anti-revolutionary panic of 1790s England, the club is only dubiously legal even when it stays out of politics. And not everyone in it is staying out of politics.


3) Various by T. Kingfisher. I thought all of her Kingfisher books were adult books, and that the children's stuff was all published as Ursula Vernon. Turns out that's not true, but I enjoyed both of the kids' books I accidentally bought (Illuminations and Minor Mage). And I really liked Thorn Hedge, which is an adult book (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty) although sadly quite short.


4) World Gone Wrong, by Audacious Machine Creative. This is an audio drama in the form of a chat podcast that discusses the various happenings of what seems to be the ongoing end of the world. More light-hearted than it sounds, with hints that the characters are as deeply traumatized as you'd expect but are trying not to think about it. This is of course riffing off of the Covid pandemic in various ways, so a lot of the jokes are in the "it's funny because it's painfully true" category. But there's also pure silliness: the first episode tackles the question of what to do if your Pekingese dog becomes a werewolf. I've only listened to the first couple of episodes but I like it a lot so far.


5) G.O.B.L.I.N.S, a very new scripted audio drama by most of the people who made Stellar Firma at Rusty Quill. (This is not associated with Rusty Quill, just to be clear.) Features Tim Meredith, Ben Meredith, Imogen Harris, Jenny Haufek, and Amy Dickinson.

The premise is that a woman who works in planning for local government accidentally stumbles through the Veil and into a world of goblins, elves, fairies, the fae, and other such beings. Specifically, she finds herself in their equivalent of a local government planning office. Since she's stuck there until the next time the Veil thins, they offer her a job.

The show is crowdfunding right now, so there's only the pilot episode. But the pilot is very good indeed: funny, engaging, with a whole lot of worldbuilding and characterization threaded, apparently effortlessly, throughout. The pilot only seems to be available on acast, although the show itself will eventually be obtainable from all the usual suspects. You can listen here.

And if you like it, and can spare some money towards helping its staff get paid, the crowdfunder is here.


6) Speaking of Rusty Quill, I keep bouncing off of The Magnus Protocol. Not for any fault of writing or acting, but because the sound design makes portions of it incomprehensible to me. Any scenes set in the staff breakroom or outdoors have background noise, echoes, lower dialogue volume, etc. etc. and while I can see that it's realistic and atmospheric, it's hard for me to understand even listening in my relatively quiet apartment. In my more usual podcast-listening environment (walking through town, or on the bus) I can barely catch one word in four. And I guess transcripts exist but I don't want to have to look at transcripts; I want the sound design to be listener-friendly.

And, well, nothing so far (I've listened to eight episodes) has made me think the show's doing anything genuinely new with the Magnus Archives world. (If I'm wrong, let me know, okay? No need for spoilers, just tell me if you think I should keep trying with it.)

1. In the end I didn't sign up for Yuletide. For one thing, the whole sign up process seemed more onerous than I remember it being. For another, work has been kicking my ass for about three weeks, and will kick my ass harder during the holiday season, so I had to seriously consider whether I wanted to come home feeling dead tired and then be obliged to write an exchange fic. For yet another and probably the most important, I found myself only interested in writing quite specific kinds of fic for the fandoms that interested me. I could've offered Taskmaster, but what happens what I get matched to someone who really loves the show's kinky implications when I'm that weirdo who's mostly uninterested* in Taskmaster kink? I could've offered The Left Hand of Darkness, but I don't want to write Estraven/Ai romance or a fix-it where Estraven lives, and those are popular requests. So I thought it was better for all concerned if I didn't play.

(*By "uninterested" I mean, "interested in idiosyncratic ways, with a whole collection of anti-kinks and squicks some of which are apparently very popular in the fandom; most of what interests me about kink does not interest other people, including and perhaps especially those who are kinky in their own lives.")


2. Apparently the first episode of The Magnus Protocol has dropped? I feel a depressing level of indifference. I'm still very fond of Jonny and, despite everything, Alex, but I'm finding it hard to get past the sense that this is overhyped and cannot possibly match up to the original.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong.


3. Relatedly, can anybody rec me some audio drama? What I'm looking for: genre stories such as horror and sff preferably (I'm flexible on this); focused on or prominently featuring queer stories and characters, including queer men (I'm not at all flexible on this); writing that besides the usual good characterization etc. is appropriate to the audio medium (no trying to shoehorn a visual story into a podcast); decent acting and production values. By the way, while I want queer stories, I don't need the stories to be cheerleader-y about it. I know it's okay to be queer! I don't want to be relentlessly affirmed by fiction like it's a fucking support group session.

I said audio drama but I'm also fine with gaming/actual play podcasts provided they're ideally audio-first, or edited for audio. I've bounced off a couple of actual play podcasts that were just unedited audio tracks from a video stream.

Podcasts I like/d a lot: The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quill Gaming; Old Gods of Appalachia despite some reservations.

Podcasts I have tried that didn't work for me: The Secret of St. Kilda, Malevolent, Wolf 359, The White Vault, Folxlore, and sadly also Pseudopod because while I love Alasdair Stuart, every one of the stories I have listened to was terrible. Quite possibly I just got a bad sampling. I did like many aspects of Neighbourly but it started to feel too derivative of TMA without being as skilled at dealing with all the red strings.

I'm picky, sorry. Please help a picky person find something to enjoy?

Reading: I bought (ebooks of) a bunch of titles by Paul Magrs, because he was Sad on Twitter about feeling irrelevant/left out of sff. And . . . I absolutely don't mean this in a disparaging way, but so far I think his best work is what I read first, his Eighth Doctor Adventure novels and DW short stories. I think the scaffolding of an established world and characters frees him up to be as weird and intellectually daring as he wants. In his original work he seems more constrained, like he's trying to be marketable.

Anyway. I've read his first two Brenda & Effie novels (supernatural mysteries in Whitby, investigated by two old ladies, neither of whom is quite what she seems). They're fun and have some genuinely moving moments; I'm not sure when they were first published, but I wonder if some of what seem like pretty well established tropes and plot developments now were more groundbreaking then. Recommended if you want a popcorn read with a lot of comedy and a touch of light horror.


I'm also reading The Kind Worth Saving, by Peter Swanson, a mystery about a private detective who's been hired by a wife who wants proof that her husband is having an affair; there's a second narrative track from the wife's POV as a teenage girl, in which we start to see that much, much more is going on than our detective is aware of.

So far it's an intelligent, decently written book, perhaps a bit show-offy about the fact that our main character (a former English teacher) and therefore our author have Read the Literary Classics. However it is book 2 of a series; normally in mysteries that doesn't matter much, but I seem to have missed important character backstory, and also there seem to be major spoilers in this book for the plot of the first one. I'll have more opinions once I've read it all.


Listening: I'm most of the way through S3 of Old Gods of Appalachia, and I think I may be becoming a bit, er, disenchanted. The show seems to be becoming less creative as it goes on and reveals more of the world.

More on this under the cut; it's not super spoilery, being mostly focused on premise and metaphors, but may be more spoilery than you'd like.

Most of the magic has turned out to be based in bog-standard European neopaganism (Cam Collins leans heavily into this in the episodes she writes, Steve Shell less so in his), with a layer of borrowings from Lovecraft. The neopaganism is there in both the premise (the green vs the dark) and a lot of the details like a witch's ritual knives. I don't want to overstate this--it's not The Mists of Avalon, though honestly I think there's a resemblance now and then--but when the magic gets weirder and more specific, like the Man from the Railroad, I like it better.

There's also a lot of reliance on tropes that I find dull at best and dodgy at worst. The whole darkness = evil thing is a well known pitfall in horror, and I think could have been easily avoided here by using more creative metaphors. And I really, really dislike the presence and the growing importance of magical bloodlines. I can understand, from a storytelling perspective, why having groups of interrelated characters is useful. But the trope comes with heteronormative baggage and potentially even some "blood and soil" bullshit. To be clear, I think the creators are doing their absolute best to avoid going there. But I'd rather they had thought deeper into their magical system and avoided the problem by avoiding this fraught trope.

The show's critique of capitalism and big corporations is appealing, of course, but not always well thought out in worldbuilding terms. (If you're the head of a powerful corporation, why would you do a deal with monsters that results in you being so isolated from the world that you can't enjoy your wealth and power? Conversely, if you have deals with dark gods going on, why bother with union-busting? It seems a bit petty.) And at times it veers into "development is bad because it's bad," territory, which I don't always care for. Sometimes, more and easier movement between rural areas and the rest of the world is good, actually.

On a more petty level, I'm tired of confrontations that are either video game levels or boss fights. And if I can spot it, as ignorant of video games as I am, it must be really, really obvious to other listeners.

I'm still listening to Old Gods, but I don't have as high hopes for it as I did.

Watching: nothing, though I do want to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie I'll probably end up waiting to watch on stream, because I like to see movies alone but I do NOT want to be a solo middle-aged man at the Barbie movie. As for Oppenheimer . . . I'm not really that interested, but some of the reaction has gotten my back up.

Under the cut, a bit of a rant and some probably unpopular opinions.

Some people are on very high horses about how the bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime, as though the whole of the Second World War wasn't one long war crime.* And as though Japan didn't commit systematic atrocities against civilians throughout its conquered Asian territories, atrocities that Japanese governments have mostly refused to even admit to while burnishing up the image of innocent Japan every time those August anniversaries roll around.

(*The Allies deliberately bombed civilian areas in Germany and Japan as much as possible, because destroying Axis industrial capacity was key to winning the war. One way you destroy industrial capacity is by making workers homeless, hungry, exhausted, and if possible, dead. And the awful thing is, we'd still better all be glad the Allies won, because the other side was a thousand times worse.)

Other people are bringing up the way the Manhattan Project kicked Hispanos off the lands they'd farmed and ranched for generations (bad, but I also keep wanting to ask how their Spanish conquistador ancestors got that land and who they took it from). And the suffering, from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses, of thousands of down-winders. As though Oppenheimer somehow was personally responsible for all this. As though, maybe, winning the fucking war--and the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb too, they were just bad at it--wasn't so overwhelmingly important that the US accepted the suffering and death of millions, including a lot of young men who were conscripted into the military whether they liked it or not.

I know there's significant debate among historians about whether dropping the atomic bombs was necessary. I don't follow it closely enough to know all the arguments and evidence, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere around "not absolutely necessary, but it saved a lot of Allied lives and probably Japanese lives too."

Anyway, I'm baffled by the moralism of people who can, eighty years after the fact, lament that we didn't keep our hands clean when fighting a total war against opponents who in one case didn't object to committing genocide, and in the other case deliberately embraced it as a goal.

Wars are bad. Wars ARE atrocity. But sometimes, winning them prevents worse.

(To be clear: I want the US to massively cut its military spending. I want everyone to eliminate nukes. I want wars not to happen. I want honesty from the US government about the effects of atomic testing and proper compensation for injured people or their survivors. It's just the fucking "oh, the US is so guilty, guilty" thing that I can't stand. It reminds me a bit of those self-described leftists who support Putin's Russia because the US is a nasty imperial power. Yes, we fucking are. And Putin is doing his best to be bigger and nastier, not to mention ruling his own country as an outright dictatorship. Supporting Russia is not progressive and to hell with Glenn Greenwald, his fellow travellers, and all the deluded tankies who think he has a point.)

So, yeah, apparently I'm a little bit pissed off. I didn't realize I had that much of a rant in me until I started writing it. My original point was that I mostly want to see Oppenheimer as a fuck-you, which may not be strong enough motivation to actually see it.

Reading: For now at least, I've DNF-ed Katie Daysh's Leeward. It wasn't doing anything for me, and I mean that literally. I felt nothing for any of the characters and none of the story development, such as there has been, caught my eye. (I know I've said I want slow, less plotty stories. Did a monkey's paw twitch somewhere? For a slow story to work, other things about it--characters, worldbuilding, language--have to be awesome. In Leeward, they're . . . not. And the pacing manages to be both slow and too fast--nothing happens for pages and pages, then emotionally important moments flash past with neither preparation nor adequate follow-up.) I may give it another chance at some point, because I admit I've been tired and not concentrating well. But I don't have high hopes.

Melissa Scott's new novel Master of Samar came out, and I've started that. This isn't an Astreiant novel, but it's of the Astreiant type, with urban life and magical systems out of European history (except they actually work), and a mystery to solve. Since I didn't love Water Horse, Scott's foray into epic fantasy, I'm glad we're back to the kind of thing Scott does well. Her strengths are here, and so are her flaws (functional prose, characters who aren't very distinctly drawn); she's a long-time favorite writer of mine, who was writing queer sff before almost anybody else, and I will forgive things from her that might have me DNF-ing somebody else's book.


Other media: Apparently Rusty Quill's podcast Cry Havoc, which they announced as TMA was ending, finally dropped? I've seen good reactions but haven't listened yet. I don't know if I will. I'm troubled by things I know RQ has done, and I don't 100% believe the other accusations but I don't 100% disbelieve them either. And regardless of their ethics, they've pretty thoroughly demonstrated an inability to make a worthy follow-up to either The Magnus Archives or Rusty Quill Gaming. *shrugs* If it's still around in a year and people still like it, maybe then.

I have gotten back into podcasts somewhat, because I'm back to taking walks 5 days a week and needing something to listen to. Mostly I'm still working my way through the large backlog of the British science podcast The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, but I've also started listening to S2 of Old Gods of Appalachia.

I had mixed feelings about S1 of Old Gods. It was impressive storytelling and technically well-made, with a strikingly unique voice created by the use of the accents and speech patterns of southern Appalachia (where podcast creators Steve Shell and Cam Collins grew up), and a mythos that builds wild, interesting new things on a Lovecraftian foundation. But it was so violent and so gory that I often had a hard time listening.

S2, so far, has been less violent and gory while keeping all the things I loved. I'm liking it a lot. (Sadly, I don't think I can recommend starting with S2, because the stories are connected and S1 does a lot to set up the mythos.) If you're less of a wimp than me, you may not find S1 hard going anyway.

I've tried a couple of other podcasts with less happy results. I keep wanting to listen to Pseudopod (which is a genuine anthology horror series, hosted mostly by the lovely Alasdair Stuart), but I bounce off the amateurish writing of the contemporary stories every single time. (There was a trans rights episode a couple of months ago, which of course I listened to, but it was awful.)

I also listened to the first episode of Malevolent, which has been praised here and there, but again I found the writing really clumsy, full of infodumps and the most awkward rationale for narrating everything that I've ever heard. (Audio drama podcast folks: please just take the audio format for granted. The audience isn't going to ask "why is this well-told, cool story being narrated?" any more than they'll ask "why can I see these people planning their big heist or having an intimate conversation?" about a movie. They will suspend disbelief if you give them the space to do so!) Anyway, if Malevolent gets better, please tell me.

I haven't watched any TV or movies. I keep wanting to go back to seeing movies in the cinema (I'll mask, as I mask everywhere public and indoors) but every time I check there's nothing good playing.

ETA: Make that no TV apart from Taskmaster. Which I'm still enjoying, but my watching has slowed a bit because it does start feeling same-y if you watch too many episodes in a row.