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irilyth ([personal profile] irilyth) wrote2025-10-02 09:26 am
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Three sentences about 2025-10-01

Long day of work yesterday. We've had a couple of outages lately, none of them caused by anything my particular team was doing, but everyone has their hair kinda on fire, and it's stressful. I was working on something that I was trying to finish before I had to leave to take Quentin to Marshals Academy, and ran into an unexpected and confusing snag, and ended up going to pokego Raid Hour after dropping him off anyway, but then went back to the car and spent an hour on my laptop (which I'd brought for this purpose) trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't, and then worked more on it once I get home, which I finally did.

(Marshals Academy is the LARP Adventure Program thing for high-schoolers, which LAP recently extended to include eighth-graders. Quentin did it over the summer, and is now continuing into the school year; among other things, it qualifies him to serve as a CIT for the after-school middle-school LARP program that LAP runs, which he's excited about starting, even though approximately a quarter of the participants will be older than him. :^ ) It's cool to see him picking up a teacher/mentor/leader sort of role like this; he is not our crazy little baby any more.)

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irilyth ([personal profile] irilyth) wrote2025-10-02 09:24 am

Three sentences about 2025-09-30

Happy half birthdays to kiddos! They have collectively turned 30, and are pretty great. :^ ) We celebrated with sushi for dinner and Friendly's Butter Crunch ice cream sundaes for dessert.

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irilyth ([personal profile] irilyth) wrote2025-10-02 09:10 am
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Three sentences about six months

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

On 2025-05-09, I said

(Huh, it's been less than a month since I posted? It feels like ages. Well, maybe I'll catch up a bit this weekend. Anyway, I am not back yet.)

hahaha no

Well, I'm obviously not going to catch up; I certainly don't remember details of the past almost six months down to a day level.

I've been thinking of starting again, but I just feel like I don't have anything good to say. So many things are so terrible; and yet pretty much everything in my little world is pretty much fine. It feels wrong to chirp away about the mundane pretty-much-fine things every day. It feels wrong to post three sentences of relentless doom every day, even if that's really the most interesting thing happening right now, by a lot.

And why even bother? Penn Jillette has a journal that he goes back and re-reads, which sounds so awesome. I'm not going to do that in any case, but if I did, what would I even want to read about? What would anyone else want to read about? I'm not writing the next Diary Of Anne Frank here, as our country slides into becoming a fascist dictatorship. Bleah.

Well, I guess just chirp away about mundane stuff, for now. I think I am not here to capture some sort of historical record of what's going on and what I'm doing, just to have slightly more contact with something slightly behind the 1600 sqft where I spend most of my time. So, hi.

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psocoptera ([personal profile] psocoptera) wrote2025-09-28 05:40 pm
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Metal From Heaven

Metal From Heaven, August Clarke, 2024 fantasy novel. I am not shy about how much I like a book with momentum and this is definitely not one - after a promising (and intense) opening, I spent a good two-thirds of it slogging my way through. It took until midpoint for anything like a plot trajectory to develop (along with a sudden dump of new characters) and I don't even know now what the hell was happening between 10% and 50% and why there was so much of it. And then even when the plot emerged, it was disjointed and muddled. But! I can't simply disrecommend it, because there's good stuff here too. It's a big ambitious book and I appreciate that; Clarke does some nice work with details of setting and place and aesthetic; when the geopolitical plot shows up, this is the kind of book where all the world's key players happen to be queer women and that doesn't feel forced. If you get tired of cozy and its sometimes-lean into twee, this is a book where people are messy to the point of being awful, and sex might be a way of genuinely wanting to hurt each other (or hurt oneself). There was a wildly funny gonzo sequence around the 80% mark that felt worth a lot of the slog and then a development around 90% that gave the last arc of the book all the motivation and urgency that had been missing. Recommended for fans of Catherynne Valente, the Locked Tomb series, and people who are faster readers than me, who will take fewer weeks wading through the slow parts.

Spoilers: Read more... )
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psocoptera ([personal profile] psocoptera) wrote2025-09-28 05:16 pm

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Shaenon K. Garrity and Christopher Baldwin, 2025 YA SFF graphic novel. Sequel to The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, and despite opening with a charming little recap, I think you will want to have read that one to appreciate this one. If you have read that one you know it was delightful and this one is as well - fun new characters and an expansion of the premise, some excellently silly moments, Baldwin's adorable art, great stuff.

Spoilers: Read more... )