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nanila posting in

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

dine

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isis

What I've recently finished reading:

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo, which was enjoyable, although I really dislike the structure of having one POV in first person past and the other POV in third person present, it just feels weird to me. Basically a whodunnit with fox spirits. I liked the old lady the best!

The Hyena and the Hawk by Adrian Tchaikovsky - the conclusion of the Echoes of the Fall trilogy, and really not so much about the hyena and the hawk, but it does make for a nice alliteration. This was a great ending for the series, really fascinating worldbuilding, and as usual (for Tchaikovsky) it plays with the concepts of Us and The Other, and how to bridge the gap of understanding in order to appreciate The Other as Persons. Speaking of which,

What I'm reading now:

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which so far (20% in) is very much like Alien Clay except also very much not like it.

What I'm watching now:

We're about halfway through Pluribus. It's very slick and clever, a bit slow, I'm not sure if I like it, but I will watch the whole season, anyway. I am particularly charmed by all the random extras looking very much like regular everyday people. Also, Albuquerque! That's not too far out of my backyard...

What I'm playing now:

Still Ghost of Tsushima. I've rescued my uncle and am on to the second part of the story!

amberite

Speaking of Venice Beach being a retirement village for urban fantasy protagonists, something pretty funny happened last Sunday.

So, Titian and I had our jewelry sales booth parked next to two magical practitioners who we both know: N the energy healer, a very kind older Eastern European man who does chakra work, a straightforward sweetness and light Christian. Then there was T, who is interesting, he sells magical potions and powders, and does a kind of otherkin pop culture homebrew prophetic sorcery... and is also very Christian. In an eccentric way, but he's got a Bible right there next to the Key of Solomon. Then us.

And this evangelical dude turns up to argue with N, of all people, and tell him he's going to hell. And dude does at least actually read his own religious text, at least, so he's admonishing N with Bible quotes.

So N is talking back to him, holding his own, peacefully. All of us are watching, of course, because N is an absolute cinnamon roll and I think if someone hurt him they'd bring down the wrath of every other van dweller who isn't as pacifist as he is. I have a megaphone in our merch bag and if he looks more than mildly impatient at any point I'm gonna use it.

And then T steps in and gets the evangelical dude's attention. Dude moves over to T's booth and they get in an enthusiastic scriptural argument.

While all this is happening, the homeless guy who hangs out at our booth, who is also one of the most powerful practitioners on the beach if it's one of his better days, chimes in to talk about the archangel he channels, because, babe, this is Venice Beach, it was never not gonna get weirder.

And evangelical dude finally gets tired of being outclassed and moves on....

Then takes one look at our booth... Pride stickers, pentacles, interfaith esoterica, mushrooms, eyes... My femboy-looking ass behind the table in rainbow eye makeup...

We didn't bring the T-shirts that day, sadly, because I'm curious how he would've reacted to IF GOD GIVES ME A MANSION I PROMISE TO USE IT FOR EVIL SEX. But the vibes are enough. He gives up and walks away without saying a word. (That said, I won't take too much credit; T is a man of strong conviction and charismatic presence. I can't imagine wanting to get back in the ring for anything substantial after a religious argument with him.)

I was a little disappointed, I was going to greet him like, "Hi, congratulations, you've finally found the heretics! Test your faith looking on our gay shit!"

At one point during all this I turned to Titian and said "This is what it must have been like at the first ecumenical councils", to which she agreed. Pure exegetic chaos.

Hilarious exegetic chaos, because even if the evangelical guy was a total killjoy, it's pure comedy that he skipped the atheists and Satanists twenty feet away and found a stretch of beach inhabited by a bunch of wizards who do actually earnestly believe in Jesus, in one way or another*, and have thought out their beliefs at some length.

*Myself included; I just don't think Jesus' relationship to divinity was or is unique or non-replicable. This makes me a heretic in a lot of religions, which is even more fun than being a regular singly practicing heretic!

Current Mood: amused

pauraque

In 17th century West Africa, an immortal woman named Anyanwu encounters another immortal for the first time, a man named Doro. But while Anyanwu is a healer who uses her powers to help others, Doro is a brutal manipulator who has been gathering people with paranormal powers and attempting to breed a race of superhumans under his iron fist. Anyanwu is the only other immortal he has ever found, and he intends to use her as "breeding stock" to make more. The novel follows centuries of their power struggle after Doro takes Anyanwu to the New World, as she strives to protect those under Doro's control and he strives to bend her to his will.

This is the chronologically earliest novel in Butler's Patternist series, though it was the fourth to be published. I was assured by leading experts (i.e. book club friends) that this is a perfectly good entry point to the series, so I started here and do not actually know yet what happens next!

It's the kind of book where it's hard to sit down and think of what to write about it, because it has so many layers that are worth thinking about and talking about, and they're all woven together so tightly and effectively that I'm not sure where to start pulling threads to unravel everything the book does. Butler had a gift for writing stories that resonate deeply with real situations without being simplistic, didactic one-to-one mappings. The speculative narrative and the real world historical setting illuminate each other in complex ways, and all the while Butler never loses sight of the characters as people with their own specific hurts, flaws, and needs. She makes it look so easy.

spoilery thoughts

The obvious comparison is to her stand-alone novel Kindred, published just the previous year, which had a contemporary Black American woman time-traveling to the era of slavery. Anyanwu also travels from a life of freedom to the New World under slavery. Against this backdrop, Doro acts as a master over "his people" in the eugenics program—and he definitely uses the phrase to indicate ownership, not kinship. His program isn't legal slavery, but it is inextricably entwined with it; sometimes Doro buys enslaved people who have the powers he's looking for, and if they wanted to leave, how could they? Even if Doro didn't catch them, they'd only be fleeing into a land where they'd be assumed to be runaway slaves. Anyanwu's powers are a match for Doro's, so saving herself is an option, but he controls the lives of everyone she knows and cares about. What this book shares most strongly with Kindred is a devastating portrayal of how people can be trapped into compliance with systems of oppression.

The book's religious themes are also complex. Anyanwu does not pray to gods, as she feels she has all the power she needs within herself, but she does not see herself as superior to other people either. Meanwhile, Doro shamelessly plays the part of a god over his people because it serves his purposes and he can get away with it. But not a loving god. Rather he reminds me of the way people will sometimes talk about the so-called "Old Testament God": bloodthirsty and hypercontrolling, demanding absolute obedience and destroying anyone who gets in his way. In which case his favorite son Isaac plays the corresponding supposed role of Jesus: the "good cop" son who draws Anyanwu into trying to appease his father. If this is a distorted image of Christian theology, well, distortion and misuse of Christian faith are certainly a deliberate theme in the book, as Anyanwu overtly calls out Christian enslavers for their hypocrisy.

On a deeper and unspoken level, the book comments on the thought processes underlying patriarchal power structures. Doro has the power to kill and he uses it to control others without a second thought; might makes right. Anyanwu could also use her powers to kill if she chose to, but it doesn't even occur to her. Instead she heals—but everything she has goes to other people, all her nurturing and self-sacrifice. She has total control over her own body's inner workings (while Doro doesn't even have his original body anymore!), and she uses herself as a scientific test subject to learn to heal wounds and diseases, suffering pain and injury so others can recover. She always puts others first, and the rightness of this is so ingrained in the assumptions of the characters that nobody ever questions it. Even when she escapes Doro temporarily, she keeps coming back to him, in part because she can't bring herself to leave others unprotected.

The fact that Doro and Anyanwu both have male and female bodies at different points in the story made me think about how patriarchy isn't defined by anatomy, but by power dynamics. I would not describe either of them as trans characters, but there is a trans resonance with the way Anyanwu remains confident in her womanhood regardless of her physical form, and in the many ways she remains vulnerable to misogyny even when people who don't know her read her as a man.

The bond between Anyanwu and Doro is both twisted and deeply understandable. They're the only two immortals; everyone else they know grows old and dies. They're lonely. Doro wants someone like him, but he can't get that by force, much as he has been trying. Anyanwu's well of empathy seems boundless, but somehow excludes herself. Her threat of suicide makes sense as it's the only way she can escape the cycle of returning to him again and again—she can't trust herself not to keep going back as long as she is like him. And the only way she can be unlike him, as she sees it, is to sacrifice her immortality and die.

The book's protagonist is a healer, and I think one of the book's core questions is who deserves healing, and who is too far gone to ever be healed. Doro tries to punish Anyanwu by forcing her to bear a child by Thomas, an uncontrolled psychic who is so deep in addiction and depression that he has become physically repellent. To Doro's surprise, Anyanwu responds with empathy (her greatest superpower, I think) and begins to heal Thomas's physical and mental wounds. Doro's reaction—to murder Thomas and possess his body—is the moment when he tells on himself the most. He intends to show power and cruelty, and he does, but he also reveals himself as a desperately isolated person who yearns to be healed, to be transformed from something repulsive into someone loveable. The book has the courage to leave it less than settled how possible that really is for him.

So, I guess I'll be continuing this series! I have been warned that not all of the books in it are this good. I'm sure I will cope somehow.

hunningham

From The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth

adjectives absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.

Recently seen in the wild :

On what fucking pink foggy raccoon-ridden planet do you think this happened?

merrileemakes posting in

common_nature

common_nature,

stonpicnicking_okapi shared their love of this comm as part of February Love Fest and inspired me to join. :)

I have been experiencing nature up close and personal thanks to some frogs. At the end of November, following a rain storm, my Partner and I could hear a frog in our tiny, ornamental garden pond/water feature. We're always so thrilled when this happens!

The next morning when I walked past the pond I saw a pile of bubbles and thought that was cool. The male frog has been making a bubble nest, like a betta fish, pining for a female to come join him (spoiler: I don't know much about frogs).

The next day I went to clean the pond (a bi-weekly feat during summer) and noticed that only only had the bubbles persisted, but some of them had developed little black dots. Oh my god, they're not bubbles they're eggs!
( Life, uh, finds a way )

oursin

What I read

Finished The Doxies Penalty - I wonder where my copies of the first two in the sequence have got to? should like to revisit.

Kent Haruf, Plainsong (1999) - I think I mentioned when reading another work by Haruf that I had been intrigued by an essay in a collection by Ursula Le Guin about his novels, so I was looking out for these at 'taking a punt' prices. I feel that, um, admire the writing, the subtle subdued effects etc etc etc but not impelled to rush out and acquire everything he ever wrote.

For a massive change of pace, Megan Abbott, El Dorado Drive (2025) which was good if grim noirish about sisters who were brought up in comfort and then the economy crashed, getting caught up in a rather creepy pyramid-type scheme.

Then another change of pace, Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Bridgertons, #4) (2004) as it was on Kobo promotion and I felt maybe I should given these a whirl, but not massively taken. Kind of slow.

Then yet another Dick Francis, Decider (1993), pretty good, even if we have yet another dysfunctional privileged family (this one owns, or at least, is in the process of inheriting, a racecourse), at least one of whom is a raging psychopath. The competence-porn in this one involves architecture, in particular restoration of ruined buildings, with a side-trip to erecting a big top and how circuses deal with potential fires etc (plot-relevant).

On the go

Somebody somewhere some while ago was mentioning Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (1930), which I literally read in my schooldays and never since, and had it mentally on a list to look at again, so downloaded it from The Faded Page and am well stuck in. Love Our Narrator being bitchy about Literary Circles, not so much enthralled by the actual plot.

Up next

Dunno. It's that time of year when I really have no idea what I want to read. Maybe that book about the Bigfoot Community?

james_davis_nicoll

This all-new Human Gorilla Heists Bundle presents .PDF ebooks from Human Gorilla Creations that help you create tabletop fantasy roleplaying adventures of thieves and thievery.

Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists

lightreads

The Everlasting

3/5. Fantasy about the soldier turned scholar who ends up going back in time (and back . . . and back . . . and back) to meet the lady knight who is pivotal to the founding myth of his nation. Arthurian time travel about nation-building and myth creation and racism.

Man, I don’t know what it is, but I just do not like Alix Harrow books the way I should. Even this one, where the overwrought quality of her writing finally has a story to match its tone. The writing in some sections is notably strong, I should say. But there is something in every single one of her books that I cannot put my finger on, and it just annoys the crap out of me.

I will admit this is structurally clever. The narrative gets rewritten multiple times to create new founding national myths, and she manages that while not being too terribly repetitive, and also establishing a few important touchpoints that orient the reader to how the angle of history has changed in just a few sentences. That is well done.

I still don’t know. The one objection I can concretely point to here is that I don’t like the way this book centers nation-building around the ego and trauma and psychopathy of one single person. The metaphor of it all collapses there, because that’s not how this works. Systems of racial oppression and societal violence don’t form on the whim of a single person, and there is something trite in the way Harrow has her villain reconstructing this nation over and over again based on, like, ten minutes of history that get played out a thousand years before the modern day events. Which is a real objection – I think that is a weakness of the book. But it’s not the thing I found annoying and off-putting, and I still don’t know what that is.

I’d bet on this to go on a bunch of award lists, though, just you wait.

Content notes: Racialized oppression, violence in war and otherwise, discussion of the killing of civilians, mention of stillbirth and sexual assault, something that is not the death of children but awfully close.

troyswann

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Current Mood: Undefined

james_davis_nicoll

Aisha's unique senses could help the empire escape the ecological crisis the empire has inadvertently engineered. Too bad dynastic security requires her death.

The Girl from the West (Kokun, volume 1) by Nahoko Uehashi (Translated by Cathy Hirano)

amberite

You can buy Kirkland Signature paper towels on Temu from a "local vendor", presumably someone drop-shipping them from Costco. They cost about $10 more than the regular price but if you manage to get on the rolling credit deal you only pay for about 10-15% of your whole purchase amount - as long as you don't mess up on claiming the rebate. So next time we're out of paper towels I may get to pay about $4 actual cost.

The Chinese government is probably subsidizing this purchase from a US middleman to a US buyer, of which most of the price goes into Costco's pocket, since I can't imagine a shoplifting ring going after these packages. (They're volumetrically about the size of my partner, a small adult human. I can barely wrestle them into the shopping cart when I go to Costco in person.)

Weird time to be alive!

Another seller has a 1.75 oz jar of Maison F Crayssac truffle caviar (list price $25) going for $100. I admire the chutzpah. It'd only be about $12 actual cost after everything averaged out, but I have a tiny jar of potent truffle aioli that I got for $2 at Grocery Outlet and it is already as much truffle as I need in my life.

Do be aware, not every deal is good at the end of the day, occasionally you will be sent the stupidest substitutions so never rely on a Temu order for a time-sensitive need, and actually "winning the game" takes being thoughtful and methodical.

sabotabby

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Changelog by Rich Larson. Whenever I mention Rich Larson to normies, they go, "Who?" Whenever he comes up among writers, the discussion invariably includes the adjective "underrated," which is a bit weird for someone who's kindasorta won an Emmy. It's absolutely true, though. He's prolific af and everything I've read by him so far is an absolute banger.

Changelog is a short story anthology. It's all cyberpunk, a lot of it set in the same cyberpunk future, spanning from Niger to Nuuk, wildly inventive and beautifully written. There are obvious Black Mirror and Love, Death + Robots (the Emmy was for an episode of that adapted from one of his stories) but the cyberpunk aspect of it is mostly backgrounded to focus on character.

It's hard to pick a favourite because there's not a single weak link here, but the standouts so far are "Animals Like Me," which is about a young gig worker recruited to do motion capture work for increasingly disturbing AI-generated children's animation, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man," which is about a low-level gangster targeted by a genetically modified assassin that only lives for about a day and a half but is otherwise nearly unstoppable, and "Tripping Through Time," which is the most hopeful story I have read in forever (positive; I don't normally like hopeful stories).

oursin

Happy birthday,

aquila1nz and

wychwood!

shallowness

The Night Manager - 2.3

( Read more... )

nanila posting in

awesomeers

dine

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mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

Profile

masquerading as a man with a reason

January 2026

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Page Summary

nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (05 February 2026)
dine - just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and flowers
isis - wednesday reads and things
amberite - Ecumenical council, beach weirdos edition:
pauraque - Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (1980)
hunningham - Grammar
merrileemakes in common_nature - From little things big things grow
oursin - Wednesday was agreeably surprised first thing with Brahms' Double Concerto finale
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists
lightreads - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
troyswann - The state of the Sal
james_davis_nicoll - The Girl from the West (Kokun, volume 1) by Nahoko Uehashi (Translated by Cathy Hirano)
amberite - (no subject)
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 04-02-2026
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
oursin - (no subject)
shallowness - trust issues
nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (04 February 2026)
dine - and now, on with your regularly scheduled faggotry
mark in dw_maintenance - Minor operations; testing new serving path

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Page generated Feb. 5th, 2026 09:19 am

i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Network

Just One Thing (05 February 2026)

just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and flowers

wednesday reads and things

Ecumenical council, beach weirdos edition:

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (1980)

Grammar

From little things big things grow

Wednesday was agreeably surprised first thing with Brahms' Double Concerto finale

Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

The state of the Sal

The Girl from the West (Kokun, volume 1) by Nahoko Uehashi (Translated by Cathy Hirano)

(no subject)

Interesting Links for 04-02-2026

Reading Wednesday

(no subject)

trust issues

Just One Thing (04 February 2026)

and now, on with your regularly scheduled faggotry

Minor operations; testing new serving path

Profile

January 2026

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