7nov2026

My efforts to tidy up links continues.

Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland —one of those books the blurb writers like to call ‘searing’ —Solomon certainly has the right to rage in their SFnal take on how an alphabet org colludes? collides? —ultimately perverts a patriarchal, fundamentalist cult compound and the separatist Black families living there to achieve their goals. This book, which the library was featuring in an October display of horror themed books, had several blurbs by authors I at least recognized, most notably Charlie Jane Anders (whose work I s'pose I oughta try some day) and a pretty, eerie cover with strong vibes of botanical illustration. The first page (of wild birth no less) was lyrically written. Why not? So I checked it out, and yes, it's well written. It's also definitely SF (I really do think my problem with a lot of the books I've read recently is this current fashion of crossing over one's genres, and I haven't quite got used to that, yet) and has mild elements of body horror.

Not to mention culturally distinct approaches to child-rearing that I found fascinating. Now that I've had time to think about it, I believe the thing I appreciate most about this book, besides its very authentically depicted protagonist, is the way the story indicts both the appallingly racist treatment by the gov't org but also the appallingly sexist treatment by the cult leader.

Kindt, Matt (writer), Jean-Denis Pendanx (artist) and Jim Campbell (letterer), Mister Mammoth. Another ‘evil schemers experiment on innocent children’ story. Come to think, it's been a rather common theme in the fiction, especially mysteries, that I've been reading (it's part of that Birds one I reviewed a while back). That part of the story works just fine, but the conceit of this graphic novel is that the titular character is the ultimate gentle giant, who never hurts anyone, just takes whatever punishment people choose to dish out, his super-body healing from (nearly?) all wounds, I guess. That part needs to be a bit clearer for the book to work. I mean, I'm fine with the idea that he can solve any case, it's an axiom of the setup, but the writer did not make a convincing case that he never, ever hurt anyone, that it was a fundamental part of his humanity. I mean, why would someone be like that, especially if they were horrifically tortured to make them what they are?

Without that critical component, the basic plot of what is, in effect, a revenge story, makes for rather (ahem) colourless reading, despite the richness of Pendanx's painterly art. Also—nitpick—if you're going to have a secondary character wearing a vivid floral blouse, at least change the pattern from scene to scene, it's beyond belief that some one who cares enough about her appearance to tie up her shirt in a mid-riff baring way would not swap out her top from day to day, to wash if nothing else. Give her a closet of similar but distinct shirts, then the reader can have fun tracking them through the story.

I made this page as a reference so I could make a painting of it;)

6nov2026

Really, I ought to track down Nozomi Naoi's The Land of Happiness, given my interest in Japan, but even the excerpts (especially the poster art) of its century old department stores is pretty fascinating, partially, I suppose, cuz the F2’s made a point of dragging me all over several in Kyoto in search of leather goods this summer: I, of course, haven't really felt comfortable with the USian versions since I was a child and the neighborhood's “big” multi-story cream-coloured art deco Hudson's near my house was closed down, slowly becoming a ruin until it was at last torn down—and why yes my mother-in-law used to tell me charming stories of taking the trolley, decked out in white gloves and having lunch on the sixth floor with her mother and sister of the huge flagship store downtown, a bygone era 30–40 years go and basically unimaginable now—but department stores very much are still a thing in Japan.

To be honest shopping is very much a thing in Japan, and after all those stupid tariffs were instituted, plus the exchange rate, I gave myself permission to buy stuff stuff while I was over there. In other words, I bought two new outfits and at three pairs of cotton socks. (Oh and a serger, since it cost about a thousand dollars less than the US version.)

But mostly I trailed after the indefatigable f2tE who had a grand old time, especially at the myriad flea markets—Kyoto has oodles of temples and old stuff, and since flea markets are quite often staged on temple courtyards (there's not really space to have them on the streets or parks like we do here in the US) there's plenty of those too. Plus little vintage shops.

Then of course, was the fun of transporting all this stuff home, which thankfully was not my problem. Postcards or paintings to give away were much easier to dispose of.

5nov2026

Whoops, needed an old link to go live, so here we are:) I can clean out the linkies while I'm at it. Oddly enough they seem to be rocking a ‘well-designed’ sort of theme...

• Colour wheels are cool. I have one of these reproduced on a favourite book bag, a gift from my glass daughter. Also, pantone may think they have a lock on colour systems, but they've been around since forever.
• I've known about Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's pioneering work in kitchen design for years, but this handsome article, which puts a preservationist twist on the history of Frankfurt kitchens, is a good survey, heartening to see, and especially appealing because of the shift to not only preserve this important architectural history, (also dating from about the same era as above, the 1920s) but update it for modern users as well. (In much the way I was grateful to IKEA for stocking cabinets and porcelain farm sinks that echo kitchen design when our century old house was built; sure, tin ceilings were mostly for commercial establishments and they didn't have granite counters back then, but I like to think that our kitchen “goes with” the rest of the house. (And, honestly, the original wallpaper was not only really dark & dreary, it was ugly besides, sort of that era's version of dusty rose country, shudder; actually, what we have now does have echoes of the Frankfurt kitchen, come to think). —Though I saved what I could and if some hardy future owner wants to recreate it, there's samples up in the attic.)
• John Scalzi on What a good policy on AI looks like; so tired of the moral panic about this tech (which, no, aside from the predictive text on my phone, [and boy howdy do i appreciate the japanese keyboard throwing up kanji as I type in hiragana] I don't use, because while I think it has real potential, the implementations I've brushed up against have been deeply problematic), it's nice to see people wrestling with it—I can't wait to see it accessibly and widely implemented in good, as opposed to creepy or deceptive, ways.

Or you can check out this progress page that goes with the mouse featured a week or so ago.

4nov2026

I had few expectations for the election, besides hoping that—perhaps—maybe—El-Sayd would overcome the breathtaking racism (not to mention the last minute turncoat endorsement of the other democratic nominee) and squeak to a victory. Sure, the polls were saying that—possibly—there might be a blue wave. A blue tsunami, no less.

I'd heard that refrain before. Once burnt, twice shy, and all that.

What this election brought back, most vividly, was the memory, 10 years ago, of the morning after Hilary Clinton was defeated, weirdly enough: the same sense of dislocation, whiplash and the lack of mooring. But anyone who's ever wondered why I like to make political arguments strictly on financial grounds, this would be why: I still think the reason Obama got elected was that Bush & the GOP had trashed the economy to such a point that even the dimmest of us realized we needed someone clever and effective to keep from plunging the country into another Great Depression, (also that enough olds still remembered, or at least remembered their parents’ stories about those times) and so, as subsequent events proved, a goodly proportion of the electorate held their noses and voted for the PoC.

Frankly, I think that's what happened this time, too. Excepting bleeding heart liberals, not a lot of folks really seem to care about the slaughter of brown people, either abroad or right here at home, nor the impending doom of climate change, nor the horrors of measles and all those other diseases I hereto hadn't worried over my entire six decades on earth, nor, nor...but gas at $6 or $8/gallon and food skyrocketing in cost (with the attendant joys of getting sick by eating it, no less) finally caused voters to sit up and take notice.

Once upon a time, when I was a relatively new driver, I was returning home (probably from my part time job at MickeyD's) on what looked like a safe road that was (evidently) covered in black ice, and the station wagon started fishtailing. I did as instructed, turning the car ‘into the turn’ but periods of its waggling back end got bigger and bigger, until at last it hopped the curb and buried itself to the front axle in the boulevard, rotated nearly 180 degrees into the bargain. I walked the last half a mile home, told my parents, and as I recall, we trooped back with shovels to dig the car out, my brothers included, whose merciless teasing was especially not welcome, as I was already plenty humiliated. I was most extremely lucky there was no other traffic and so nothing besides my pride was hurt.

But that pretty much cemented my fear & loathing dislike of driving.

To be frank, I'm kind of seeing US politics the same way—Obama! historic election of a Black guy! yes! Trump: historic election of a racist, corrupt misogynist, boo! hiss! Biden, 4 blessed years not having to think about what awfulness was going on, just like as if I were living in Japan, a sigh of relief. Then Trump again. Wait, wut? And the much, much much worse level of corruption. And now this blue tsunami, a wild swing to the left. As much as we need the corrective, because the damage (mostly still hidden, frankly...) these larger swings scare me, because I don't really want the US buried up to the axle in a metaphorical ditch. (Or worse, off a cliff & drowned dead.)

Back when I was a child, the term for these giant waves, now deprecated, was ‘tidal waves’; deprecated, because they do not, in fact, have anything to do with the tides, and so now we use a term from an island nation whose language is one of the few that specifically names this phenomenon.

And tsunami should frighten: they are cataclysmic.

But, finally, the point of all this blathering, which is that Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the letter ‘t’ in tsunami, riffing off the melon guy's joke about the letter ‘b’ in dumb, and— me! me! me! I can explain why there is there is that silent t in ‘tsunami’. Really anyone with a rudimentary understanding of 日本語 in general and its simplest, writing system(s) in particular, i.e., ひらがな(1) can: in hiragana (a syllabary, though technically the glyphs denote morae) the word tsunami is spelled つなみ—with the kana being rendered as (in English) as tsu, na, mi (mee). But english doesn't really “do” the ts sound combo (at least not at the beginning of words), so what we're saying is more like ‘su-na-mi’ —rather like the way we don't (usually) pronounce the ‘l’ in stalk,(2) or the k and gh in knight. (However, there is also a mora that is written as す, or su, which is why it would be incorrect to spell tsunami without its leading T.)

So there you have it, some disordered ramblings that constitute my reaction to the US midterms, and that explain something not one person in a 100 could care (less) about.

Have some patriotically coloured beads, if you like.

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(1)So Japanese has three—or four (or five, I s'pose, counting arabic numbers) writing systems: hiragana and katakana, which are “syllabaries” and function in roughly analogous way to our two writing systems, upper and lower case: both refer to exactly the same sounds, in a 1 to 1 correspondence, but are applied to differing parts of written English. Just as lower case is our default, hiragana is theirs, with the more angularly shaped katakana being applied to—for example—foreign words; kanji (Chinese characters, from which the simplified kana are derived, actually); romaji (roman letters), and, if you're stretching things, arabic numbers. But if you stop and think about it, English has 3, then: lower case, upper case, and numbers.

(2)One of the peculiarities of my idiolect is that I do, in fact, pronounce the l in stalk.

26oct2026

Well, hello there, we're having beautiful autumn weather, so I thought I might make a post:)

One of the weird ways I've been wasting my time since failing to re-install my usual approaches—Instagram being at the top of the heap—I've been trawling best-of lists to find some books to read. It's been...semi-successful, eventually I just reverted to re-reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, much heartened by not only the lessening of the sexism, especially the homophobia centered around lesbian characters, but its active reversal. Yay, now I can read these again.

Anyway.

This is more the, oh, yeah, I did read that before list than an actual review, but hey, whatevs, as Abigail would say:)

So here's my brief reactions to recent reading, mostly stuff I found off various NPR best-of lists:

• G.S. Denning, Warlock Holmes: A Study in Brimstone —the conceit for this parody is Watson is the bright detective, Holmes is some sort of sorcerer trying to conceal the weird about his person. I kinda bounced, but if you enjoy full-throated parodies & are familiar with the source material, this strikes me as reasonably well-done—just not my taste, at least at the moment. One of the few on this list I stumbled across at our local little free library.
• O'Donnell, Padraic, The House on Vesper Sands and its sequel, The Naming of the Birds. The recce was actually for the second book, but I thought the first was better, honestly—creepy and reasonably well balanced between the three leads, with a nice touch of the supernatural, featuring the irascible Inspector Cutter, failed (by lack of funds) divinity student Gideon Bliss, and plucky reporter Octavia Hillingdon: I use the cliches deliberately, but at least we do have an active female protag. Like the Denning, these books owe their setting—Victorian London in the 1890s—and to some extent the detective characters, to Doyle.
• Though imperfect—I couldn't follow Bliss’ detective leaps at all (which mebbe was the point?) and I wished Hillingdon's storylines had intersected more robustly with the men's—by book II the supernatural had receded, as had Bliss’ otherworldly deductions, and the Hillingdon had just flattened into the background as the super-researcher who never fails. Like most other reviewers (at least on Goodreads) I found the horrific prologue the most compelling, but it does mean there's not only no supernatural, there's no mystery either, and the substitution of Cutter's past was not especially compelling.
• Tasha Edwards, And Only to Deceive (Lady Emily Mysteries) I think I spent more time trying to re-find the title and author to this one (after I'd returned it to the library & then found it on a pile next to my computer, siiiiiighhh) than I did actually reading the novel before giving up on it. Last in my trio of Victorian/Holmes era collection it was, for me, by far the least successful, as I got so bored with the irritating female protag, who married her sweet, academically minded and classically trained spouse solely for convenience and had no idea he loved her till after he was dead, that I skipped the bulk of the present day narrative only to read the excerpts of his journals.
• Mind you, the fellow was also a big game hunter & an avid collector of Greek antiquities, which along with his widow's unconsidered appropriation of his fortune was just incredibly grating—there was just no class consciousness, awareness of colonialism, nor even a living male love interest who wasn't tiresomely sexist.
• About the kindest thing I can say is that I did feel the designer, that is, the person responsible for laying out the interior, picking out fonts & choosing some quite nice ancient-greek-themed patterns, Deborah Kerner, did a really nice job. (And while at least the fi's were properly ligatured, wouldn't’ve been fantastic to have properly doubled up letters, such tt, ff and ll's? Alas, the font companies are really screwing publishing houses over, or so I understand...)
• Needless to say Lady Emily gives up on her avowed determination to remain single & eventually marries the guy, who does become less of an asshat, so I guess if you can ignore assorted subtexts, it's a popular series?

And then we have some odds and, heh, ends:

• Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows, another thriller. I've read Cole before, with perhaps the historical romance featuring the Black woman doing reconnaissance and white Union soldier during the Civil War being the most memorable. She writes perfectly decent romances, and was one of the earlier mainstream romance authors to do PoC historicals; I like her stuff, but not enough for comfort re-reads, which to be honest was sort of what I was looking for here. If you like her stuff, you'll like this, though there's not much romance, and some of the plot resolutions could've stood to have been set up a touch better. I did think the main character(s), a System who suffers DID (dissociative identity disorder) were pretty cool, & unlike the previous book, why yes, the impacts of race (& class) absolutely had an impact, being treated in a very matter-of-fact way); plus of course being a sucker for an archivist protag.
• Arizona O'Neill, Opioids & Orchids Organs (Jeez, my brain is turning to swiss cheeze...) Class is front and center in this full-colour graphic memoir by a Canadian woman whose rage is directed at her country's health care system that wasted no time harvesting her father's organs after he died, but couldn't be bothered to treat his addiction to drugs while he was alive. In it, she cleverly uses the alter egos of a gila monster and Frankenstein's Monster to work through her grief and loss. The library was featuring it for October, and the cover is both beautiful and beautifully macabre, my choice reinforced by the librarian's accolade as I snagged it; highly recommended.
• T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea. My other highly recommended item—I'd seen recces for this before, but hadn't managed to check it out, but this time, I lucked out & the library had it waiting for me:) Very much in the style of British children's fantastical stories such as Narnia stories, The Secret of Platform 13 and Roald Dahl, excepting the main protagonist is a 40 something man who's lived an absolutely colourless life as a cog in a bureaucracy for 17 years, specifically, the agency tasked with inspecting various orphanages responsible for housing unwanted magical children—until his spotless record means he's tasked with checking out an orphanage with the most daunting inmate ever: the Antichrist. Naturally, our hero's superiors have got the willies over this kid. Off he goes, discovering romance love in assorted forms , courage, personal growth, and joys of found family. The depiction of his dreary circs at the beginning of the book is worth the price of admission alone.
• And, finally, to end (heh) things, Anders Nilsen's The End, his memoir/journal in graphic novel form, of the year he spends recovering from the death of his beloved. The Ignatz award winning work notes that it's ‘assembled’ from the creator's sketchbooks, which no doubt explains the scratchouts in some of the word balloon. It's a quiet, personal exploration; I found the maze like graphic designs contrasted vividly with spare outlines used to depict the humans, as empty as the void Nilsen feels. Again, recommended.

Bonus: I didn't bother finishing the Lady Emily mystery because it hardly seemed worth my time, but I felt bad about doing the same to The Bruising of Qilwa, a ‘medical fantasy’ in the words of its author Naseem Jamnia. I mean, this had everything to be rejiquar catnip (or roses): a fantasy set in a cool place, a nonbinary protag (with a trans sib, no less), a gifted apprentice with a kindly master doing magical medicine, who moreover comes from a downtrodden (magical blood using) people, likely to be blamed for a frightening ‘blood bruising’ disease sweeping the city.

Written by a Persian (Chicagoian), the problem was, this author felt compelled to wrestle with the idea that her people were both oppressors (once upon a time) and now oppressed; there are no easy resolutions or fabulous (nor even mundane) triumphs here. Fans of Shannon Chakraborty's City of Brass (another book I really, really wanted to like but couldn't finish) might like this, but aside from the lack of the easy sort-of believable faery tale HEAs I wuz looking for, I just couldn't get into the main character Firuz-e Jafari, who seemed to spend most of their time feeling guilty that they couldn't help everyone, right now, (in a free clinic for the poor!) most especially their trans brother, who wanted his top and bottom surgery, um, re-alignment, right now, and damn the incredibly dangerous consequences, Firuz's other obligations or anything else. The main character was noble, exhausted and flat, the sibs demanding and whiny and seemingly completely unwilling to concede that the resources to improve their lives simply weren't there. It was just...dreary.

The vivid orange and purple cover, beautifully decorated with Middle-Eastern inspired curliques, definitely inspired me to give the book a try, and is gorgeous; I sincerely hope the publisher continues to put some effort into this first time novelist, because the themes were great, I just felt the characters needed to be more vivid.

Oh, and speaking of colourful, here's a favourite mouse, which, spoiler alert, is no longer mine.

26sep2026

I kinda like those sort-of bilateral dates (i.e. 26sep26), so here's a bonus post on one, albeit not a very exciting one.

So here's a couple of cool linkies, the “new” (to western science, that is, not the locals living with them) tiger cat species plus Audobon's splendid collection of a hundred photos submitted to their 2026 challenge —seeing all these wonderful bird pix makes my heart happy, but the ongoing theme in the photographers’ comments (which I find adds to the interest) is ‘please, we must protect this disappearing species, this shrinking habitat’ —which gets no argument from me.

Or you can check out this very mid doodle;)