tetsab | Reading

Just finished: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Yeah, she lands the ending. This was just too good—scathingly funny, unexpectedly sweet, and a worthy take on Dante's Inferno. It's one of those ones where I rush to Goodreads to see what stupid people thought about it and I think the complete opposite of that. I just love Alice so much, basically.

Currently reading: Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest by Nick Mamatas. Complete coincidence that I'm reading two genre takes on classic works of literature with similar titles one right after each other. Anyway, this is the cyberpunk take on The Tempest that you didn't know you needed. Caliban/Kalivas is the last free-range human, i.e., lacking in post-human augments and able to die in a post-apocalyptic world of godlike enhanced assholes. It leans very heavily into the play's anticolonialist themes and also into our current state of being ruled by lunatic billionaires who want to live forever. It's very good, obviously.

the_siobhan

( nothing to see here )

the_siobhan

Welp, it has been a week.

I didn't really plan ahead for the day after NaDruWriNi, so I had to drag myself out of bed to work on Sunday. I woke up to a message that my dad was in the hospital. The medical issue was dealt with promptly, which is good. Thursday they announced they would be sending him home the next day.

Problem being, he has been getting weaker really fast and after almost a week in bed we were worried he wasn't safe to go up stairs on his own - they live in a two-story row house. So his wife rented him a bed and equipment to set him up in the living room. Since I'm the only family member who doesn't work Fridays I went over to haul furniture around and make space for the delivery. Their 100+ year old house has a staircase that gets narrower as you get higher, something I discovered while hauling a marble-topped fucking table up the stairs. (They've lived there for 30+ years and they have SO MUCH stuff.)

But room was made, bed was installed with no issue, and today the rest of the family showed up to finish organizing, hang a privacy curtain, and install some child-gates and locks. He was wobbly and exhausted when he got home on Friday, but reports are that he's a lot stronger today after a good sleep.

***

Meanwhile I got a call from permit-wrangler that he was showing up at the house on Monday with the inspector and to have the blueprints available. Last I heard she (the inspector) was going to talk to her boss about what could be done. I haven't heard anything back, but I'll follow up on Monday so cross your fingers for me.

I haven't done anything more in that basement room since I figure I'll wait to see if I have to rip it all out first. So today was spent trying to sort out my shit on the first floor. I'm trying to make enough room that I can empty out the storage unit, because that will save me just under $300 a month.

***

I spoke to a friend who spent the summer dealing with a broken ankle and he gave me the name of the physiotherapy clinic he goes to - which just happens to be barely a block from my house. The woman I met with came to the conclusion that the plantar faciitis is actually healing just fine - but that at some point my achilles got involved, and that's what is now causing the majority of my problems. She's been treating that for the last two weeks and holy shit, it is SO MUCH better. I'm still using the cane to protect the plantar fascia because that's not 100% yet, but already have so much less pain. Halle-fucking-lujah.

***

Goths Against Fascism are raising money for the National Immigration Law Centre this weekend. So listening to tunes after a day of hauling my own furniture around.

As I posted elsewhere, I would like my times to be less interesting now please.

lil_m_moses

No idea why, but our neighbors that moved in about a year ago have been gone for months. Usually folks come up here for the summer and leave in winter, so I've been assuming it's been a long term stay with ill family or something. It's been getting cold, though, and their sprinkler system was still running. I was going to write a card to remind and offer assistance, as I think their mail was being forwarded, but I happened to see what looked like a blow-out truck there a couple of days ago. Just in the nick of time, too, as we're expecting our first snow tonight. Their own vehicle was there yesterday and lights on in the evening, so maybe they're back back?

Nothing has started yet on the new house supposedly going in on the other side of us, so I'm hoping we'll at least get to keep our views of field and hill and distant trees through the winter.

sabotabby

Double feature because there was too much good content this week.

I'm going to take the rare step of recommending a two-part episode before I've finished listening to part 2, because I've listened to the Conspirituality episode on the same subject and I know who Peter Thiel thinks is the Antichrist. Through all of part 1 and the beginning of part 2 of Behind the Bastards' "Peter Thiel and the Anti-Christ" you can just feel Robert getting increasingly excited about telling Sarah Marshall who Thiel thinks the Antichrist is and she keeps guessing and getting close but missing, critically, how fucking insane Thiel is.

You should listen to this because the people making all of the decisions in our lives with all of the money are actually batshit and believe batshit things and we all need to adjust our political strategies accordingly.

The flipside is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's "The Gallae: Trans Priestesses of Ancient Rome," where Magpie talks to Gabriel Dunn about how ancient trans women were persecuted but powerful and badass, into noise music, and did rave culture. Part 1, part 2. Not as much on Sumerian civilization as I'd like but maybe that's another episode.

sabotabby

Any day that starts with Cheney dying and ends with Mandami getting elected as New York mayor, even with the forces of both wings of the Party allied against him, is a pretty good day.

But onto the books.

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Okay "academia is hell" is a cheap premise but 1) it's true, and 2) she does it splendidly, and I am devouring this book. It's so good. I love Alice. She's awful and such a fuckup and makes the wrong decision at every turn and I'm here for it. As I'm reading I just want to screenshot every page and text it to my academic friends.

I'm about 3/4 through and if Kuang lands the ending, this is going to be one of the best things I've read this year.

dancingdragon3 posting in

terror_sffa

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

the_siobhan

Dione! Bed!

Turning off my alarm clock for tomorrow because oucyh.

( final chapter )

the_siobhan

At least one more gin & tonic went into this chapter.

Everybody else hsa buggered off to bed and I really want to be done so I can do that too.

( chapter four )

the_siobhan

I have legit lost track of where I am.

I think two gin & tonics went into this chapter. Ish

( chapter three )

silentq

Books:

24 Wizards and Weavers: Cozy Questing #1, Nazri Noor.( Read more... )

25 The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, Malka Older.( Read more... )

26 Packing for Mars, Mary Roach.( Read more... )

Movies:

6 Spy on the Ice.( Read more... )

7 CIFF: Merrily We Roll Along.( Read more... )

the_siobhan

I have just finished the wine and will now be moving on to the gin & tonic

I am now at the point where I only vaguely know what's going to happen, but if I keep drinking I'll figure it out, right? Right. Onward.

( chapter two )

the_siobhan

I am drinking my third glass of wine. I usually start earlier, but I've been running behind schedule all week, so here we are.

Maerchen1313 is doing an hour-long stream in the middle of her writing night and she is hilarious. Right now she's talking about writing a poem about sheep in her walls.

( chapter one )

the_siobhan

Right. NaDruWriNi

Rules here

I am on my second glass of wine. What shall I write about?

lil_m_moses

Books Finished
- Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey [Kindle] (3rd? read)
- The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks [e-audio]
- The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar [e-audio]
- I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin [e-audio]
- John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin [e-audio]
- Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey [Kindle & e-audio] (3rd? read)

Library DVDs/Streaming Programs Watched
- Pokemon Concierge: S2 [1 equiv]
- Gen V: S2 [3 equiv]
- Wear Whatever the F You Want: S1 [2 equiv]

sabotabby

HAPPY SPOOOOKY DAY and blessed Samhain if that's your thing.

This week's podcast episode sure is spooooooky! It's It Could Happen Here's "Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI," and the moment that title popped up in my feed, I knew I'd be talking about it (even though I Don't Speak German covered Mother Night, this week, which is my favourite Vonnegut book. Maybe I'll talk about that one next week).

I had never heard of the Occulture conference, which is...what you think it is. As a good little Marxist materialist, I am not a chaos magick practitioner or believer as such except that definitely magic and the occult are a terrain we should not cede to the enemy so I am not not a chaos magick believer, y'know? At the very least as a philosophical and narrative system it's something that I'm quite interested in.

And of course for all his being one of the most Problematic Faves of all my Problematic Faves—he killed his wife ffs—I never really got over my teenage obsession with William S. Burroughs. As the episode points out, he's lumped in with the Beats but more properly belongs with the Surrealists (and the Dadaists) in terms of what he was doing. And y'all know how I feel about the Surrealists and the Dadaists. So there's an unexpected amount of discussion of Burroughs as a magickian at the the conference and his techniques (some of which were extremely funny, such as cursing a restaurant that took his favourite thing off the menu) and particularly his use of technology to channel the non-human.

Which brings me to the argument that I get into way too fucking much, which is "well isn't GenAI basically the same as cut-up poetry," and that's apparently something that was asked repeatedly at this conference. Spoiler: No it is not. Like, neither artistically nor magickically, which is a relief as that wasn't necessarily where the discussion might have gone. The short version has to do with Third Mind theory, which is quite interesting, and again, I feel there's a much more materialist explanation for why it's not the same but I also appreciate the occultist explanation.

Anyway it's a big meaty feast for my special interests and apparently there will be a second part dropping this weekend, so yay!

lil_m_moses

Well that's alarming. One of the folks in our neighborhood said a camera on their back porch caught a bear walking by. Their back porch faces kiddo's bus stop, where she waits in the dark in the mornings. I believe it because I found several articles and video of other bears in the area, wandering around in broad daylight in the city, and others talking about the general comeback of black bears across northern Michigan in the last decade. I think the new plan is for Josh to drive her the few hundred feet down there and wait with her. In general I find that parental behavior ridiculous, but I had never ever considered BEARS.

lil_m_moses

I keep seeing articles saying the new boil from the White House's ass will be 90,000 square feet. I feel like that can't be right, as it's over 2 acres, or 0.8 hectares, or 8360 square meters. I would believe 9,000 square feet, the size of a good-size city home's lot. Are people not checking their numbers, or is that actually supposed to be 2 frakking ACRES of ballroom, like the size of a football stadium (not just the field)?

Style Credit

Style: Sienna for Nouveau Oleanders by branchandroot
Resources: OpenClipart

DWT

Reading

Reading Wednesday

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NextDoor (without the social network)

podcast friday

Reading Wednesday

Post of Squee and Ventilation (11/02/25)

Fashion Plate: Chapter Five

Fashion Plate: Chapter Four

Fashion Plate: Chapter Three

October books and movies

Fashion Plate: Chapter Two

Fashion Plate: Chapter One

NaDruWriNi point O

October Media

podcast friday

Coming in hot from left field with another worry...

Yet Another National Disgrace

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