magnetic_pole | Reading

1. It's the weekend!

2. We ordered dinner from Coco Ichibanya tonight. Got the regular curry (we always get it with karaage and tonkatsu) but instead of just getting one to share, I got another order so we'd have some leftovers. For the second order I got their keema curry with cheese naan and it was also extremely delicious.

3. I got gas (and a much needed car wash) on the way to work this morning and it was down 40 cents from the last time we filled up before going to Japan. That's still about 30 cents higher than before our great leader decided attacking Iran was a smart idea, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see that not only had it not gone up, but had gone down so much.

4. Speaking of cars, we've been having so much trouble with the key fobs for the newer car that we finally took it in to the dealership. Of course they were trying to say at first that we should just replace the batteries in the fobs, but we've done that and it makes no difference. Plus it's both of them, so it's obviously something to do with the car itself. Anyway, they got that finished up today and apparently the battery in the car's sensor needed replacement, so hopefully that will have fixed it. We had also wanted them to fix the front windshield, which developed a crack the other day after the windshield wiper flew off and the metal part snapped back down and hit the glass. They didn't do anything and were saying it would be $2300 to replace it, but Carla spoke to a manager and showed him that it was not a chip or anything that caused it, but the malfunctioning wiper, so he agreed to replace it for free. They have to order the window, so we've got the car back for now and have to take it back in again next week, but I'm very glad we got these both fixed for no cost.

5. Look at these boys!

torachan

Recently Finished
A Case of Mice and Murder
First in a new to me (and apparently fairly new in general, as there are only two books so far) murder mystery series. Set at the turn of the (20th) century, a middle aged barrister gets roped into investigating a murder. This was very slow at first, but I did end up enjoying it at lot and I think I'll continue the series. I liked how the two plots came together in the end.

The Final Chapter
Another book with a murder at a writers' retreat. This is a thriller rather than a murder mystery, though. I liked it, but didn't love it.

Different Kinds of Fruit
When the MC starts sixth grade, there's a new kid in class, who identifies as non-binary. When her parents get really weird about this new friend, she assumes at first that they are transphobic, only to eventually learn that her dad is a stealth trans man and in fact is the parent who gave birth to her, not her mother. I loved this so much. I have another book by this author on my to-read list and am looking forward to reading more from him.

Busu Nante Iwanaide vol. 1
This popped up in Amazon recommended and the first volume was free to read, so I decided to give it a go and ended up liking it a lot. The MC is a woman in her 30s who was bullied for her looks in school and now wears hat/glasses/facemask when out to try and hide as much of her face as possible. She has recently been feeling heartened by the fact that lookism is getting more attention in Japan, only to find that the author of the articles she has been reading is none other than the ringleader of her high school bullies, who, while traditionally beautiful herself, now preaches about how no one is ugly and tries to help women improve their self-confidence. Unable to stand the hypocrisy, the MC goes to this woman's office meaning to stab her to death, only to be mistaken for someone interviewing for a job, and despite waving her knife around, she gets the job lol. I'm curious to see where this goes, but I liked it a lot so far.

Kinki Chihou no Aru Basho ni Tsuite vol. 1-3
Manga adaptation of a popular web novel. The premise is that someone is contacting the reader with all these articles and videos about a certain area that seems to be source of many strange occurrences, in hopes of finding out what happened to the previous person who was researching it. I'm enjoying it so far, but it's not one of my top faves.

musesfool

Does anyone know where I can get a Trinity Santos icon?

*

Always need some Dorianne Laux during poetry month, so here's today's poem:

Prayer
by Dorianne Laux

Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take
your hands and hold them to her breasts,
slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down
on sheets beaten clean against the fountain stones.
Let her rest her dark head on your chest,
let her tongue lift the hairs like a sword tip
parting the reeds, let her lips burnish
your neck, let your eyes be wet with pleasure.
Let her keep you from that other life, as a mother
keeps a child from the brick lip of a well,
though the rope and bucket shine and clang,
though the water's hidden silk and mystery call.
Let her patter soothe you and her passions
distract you, let her show you the light
storming the windows of her kitchen, peaches
in a wooden bowl, a square of blue cloth
she has sewn to her skirt to cover the tear.
What could be more holy than the curve of her back
as she sits, her hands opening a plum.
What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth, your life
rising behind them, your name on her lips.
Stay there, in her bare house, the black pots
hung from pegs, bread braided and glazed
on the table, a clay jug of violet wine.
There is the daily sacrament of rasp and chisel,
another chair to be made, shelves to be hewn
cleanly and even and carefully joined
to the sun-scrubbed walls, a sharp knife
for carving odd chunks of wood into small toys
for the children. Oh Jesus, close your eyes
and listen to it, the air is alive with bird calls
and bees, the dry rustle of palm leaves,
her distracted song as she washes her feet.
Let your death be quiet and ordinary.
Either life you choose will end in her arms

*

Current Mood: thoughtful

felis

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tielan

The fifth day of the tour (for me) involved food food food and, welp, yes, more food...

( Day 5: I'm not even going to talk about the wine... )

torachan

1. This morning on my walk I stopped in the bakery I always pass by since there were no customers at the time (a miracle), just to see what pastries they had in the case, and they had a lemon muffin with ube frosting, so I had to get it. Then since I was getting breakfast for myself, I felt I had to stop next door at the bagel place to get something for Carla as well, and they had a new carrot cake latte, so I got that for myself. The latte was fine, but I couldn't really detect anything carroty or cakey about it, but the muffin was really good.

2. Today was a work from home day again and I just took it easy. I am going in tomorrow, but it's been nice to have a mostly WFH week to ease back in to things.

3. One of my regular Thursday meetings was cancelled this morning, and the other (a 4pm one) was cancelled about half an hour before its start. My kind of day!

4. Jasper has claimed the top perch of the new cat tree as his own and has already spent many, many hours curled up there, but Ollie is the only one who's shown interest in the hole. We've never had a cat tree with a hole platform before, but watching him poke up through the hole to play with the dangle toy gave me some of the most joyous moments of my life. Truly a still photo cannot convey how silly and adorable he looked.

torachan

I had a really hard time getting to sleep that first night despite having gone a long time without sleep during our travel (no sleep for me on the plane) and the bed being relatively comfortable. Carla seemed to sleep well, though. I think I got a total of about 2.5 hours and then ended up getting up around 4am or something.

( Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium )

conuly

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

************************************

Link

redbird

I had an appointment with my neurologist this afternoon. The weather was nice enough that I got onion soup at the Panera in the clinic lobby and ate it outdoors before seeing Dr. Sloane.

The doctor did some low-tech neurology, including watching me walk quickly down the hall, having me walk tightrope-style to check my balance, and testing my grip strength by having me squeeze his fingers. The doctor said there was no change in those, but I think my balance was better today than at the last visit. He then sent me downstairs for blood tests: my vitamin D is where we want it (at the top of the "normal" range), and the abnormally low antibody count is what we expect from the Kesimpta.

I asked about reducing the gabapentin dose to 900 mg, since when I went from 1500 mg to 1200 the medication continued to be effective at stopping my legs from twitching at night. (For a while, it was 1500 mg, with the option of taking another 300 mg capsule if necessary. I went to 1200 after a few months of never needing the extra capsule.) The doctor said I could try it, but he would prescribe 1200 mg/day (I think the last refill was for 1500 mg/day.)

I then walked up the hill to Brigham and Women's Hospital to keep

adrian_turtle company in the epilepsy monitoring unit. We talked some, I made some phone calls on her behalf, and I sat quietly reading next to her bed for a bit.

All in all, I did a lot of walking today, despite taking a Lyft to the neurologist; some of that was because I got turned around a couple of times, including inside the hospital. (I stayed home yesterday because my knee was bothering me, and wasn't sure how much walking I had in me today.)

musesfool

It's been a few years since I posted some Shakespeare on his birthday, but I am tired so have one of the most famous poems in the Western canon:

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

*

I was all excited that it's Thursday, thinking about how there'd be a new episode of The Pitt until I remembered, alas, that there will be no new episodes until next January. Sigh.

I keep meaning to post my thoughts here and not doing it, so in brief, my thoughts on the season 2 finale of The Pitt: ( spoilers )

I guess this sounds like I had a lot of complaints but I really loved this season - I just thought the writing fell down a little sometimes, for some characters.

*

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Get Him Back - Olivia Rodrigo

primeideal

I was feeling pretty optimistic about the sort-of-blank-verse poem I wrote a couple months ago, both in terms of how I felt about it personally and "no news is good news" when other people are getting rejections via Submission Grinder ;) but that didn't pan out. So now I get to try sending it (and some older stuff) to a new journal. (This is a spinoff of another magazine that I generally like and support but have been burned by in that they never responded, not even to the "hey did you get this," the first time I submitted to them. To their credit, the new mag has a policy of "if you don't hear anything after four weeks, assume rejection.")

Fun fact: in undergrad I semi-often wound up writing blank-verse-ish stuff as the result of a tug of war between my professors, who liked pretentious completely free verse, and me, who preferred more formal constraints like sonnets and stuff. ;) This time at least it's more deliberate.

I am out of the country seeing the world for the next few weeks! Not sure what my computer access will look like, I may have some downtime, but no promises--comments on exchange fic, etc. may be delayed. I have stocked up on plenty of reading material so hopefully there will be a couple bingo reviews coming later or sooner.

In the process of stocking up, there was a free giveaway of hardcopy books on a library shelf, and the original "Mistborn" was up for grabs, score! I don't think I need it on the plane, but good for canon review, or to give to someone else to get them into Sanderson :P

topaz_eyes

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Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Iron & Wine, "Passing Afternoon"

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were written by

nondenomifan.

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

pennswoods

I still haven't viewed the Heated Rivalry television series but I have seen LOTS of fan edits and I have read every book in the Game Changers series, including the ones I didn't like as much just so I would have the full backstory. Heated Rivalry and Role Model have become comfort reads - I think I've read each about 4-5 times. The Long Game is a little more bittersweet so I haven't read that as much, but I cherish it. I have also been reading more fic - I particularly like the hilarious stuff where Ilya is being a charming asshole via text.

The other day I found myself imagining what Ilya and Shane would look like as little boys in their hockey gear and I wanted to draw them. I have not, but I have developed a sudden interest in learning facts about hockey. It's Stanley Cup time too...

I'm officially fangirling and I like it.

torachan

1. I had a WFH day today so we went down to DCA for lunch. It was such a nice day weather-wise (just the right amount of warm, lots of cloud cover for the most part but not just a grey sky) and the crowds were low. We had some delicious food from the Food and Wine Festival, which wraps up this weekend, and since it's been a month since we were there, there was lots of new merch to admire.

2. We were out for about five hours, which is the longest we've been away from home since we got back, and we were a little worried we might come home to another pee incident, but there was no pee! Jasper was super needy this morning (but he often is on mornings I work from home) and we had a good half-hour snuggle at my desk before leaving. He did hork on the sofa while we were out, but I would rather deal with a hundred incidents of vomit than a single pee incident, so while it wasn't ideal, it wasn't a big deal, either.

3. One thing I do not miss about Japan is the allergies. I have in the past decade or so developed some degree of allergies at home as well, having not ever had any growing up or in my early adulthood, but not to the degree that I get them in Japan. Before our trip, I think the weather here was bringing them out more as I did have some reactions many days, if not all, but I have been blessedly sniffle-free since getting back (though today my eyes are a bit stingy).

4. Molly's showing off her perfect snoot.

torachan

It's been exactly a month since we've been to Disneyland. Well, our Disneyland anyway. We had originally planned to go last weekend, but were still too worn our from our trip, so we put in for a mid-week trip today and went down for lunch.

( Read more... )

musesfool

Today's poem:

Pyrocumulus
by Arthur Sze

Peony shoots rise out of the earth;

at five a.m., walking up the ridge,

I mark how, in April, Orion's left arm

was an apex in the sky, and, by May,

only Venus flickered above the ridge

against the blue edge of sunrise.

In daylight, a pear tree explodes

with white blossoms—no black-

footed ferret slips across my path,

no boreal owl stirs on a branch.

At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled

when a black bear snagged a shriveled

apple off a branch; and, waking out

of a black pool, I glimpsed how

fire creates its own weather

in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching

the ditch, I drop the gate: it's time

for the downhill pipes to fill,

time for bamboo at the house

to suck up water, time to see sunlight

flare between leaves before

the scorching edge of afternoon.

***

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Twins on tv

primeideal

Anthology of thirteen Chinese science fiction stories, all appearing in English for the first time. Ni notes in the introduction that "Even the most whimsical and humorous of space-travel stories will tend to end with a melancholic tone, because Chinese stories tend not to have happy endings," and in one story's endnotes, that "In the Chinese language, time is signified by the temporal adverb, so all actions are, without context, in the present."

Unfortunately, the prose comes off in many places as clunky at best and not proofread at worst, so I'm not sure how much to chalk up to the translation. And many of the stories (not only those written by men) were weird about (heteronormative) romance.

That being said, given my gripes with the prose, I did want to give a shoutout to "Qiankun and Alex," by Hao Jingfang, for successfully translating three-year-old speech in a way that makes it clear it's a three-year-old and not just clunky prose.

"What am I learning you?" Alex asks Qiankun.
"That which I don't know," Qiankun replies.
"What do you know?" Alex asks again.
"I know a lot of things," Qiankun replies.
"Show," Alex requests.

The two highlights for me were both on the longer side. "The Great Migration," by Ma Boyong, imagines that Mars' close approach to Earth every two years would culturally become an excuse for lots of travel, even when the technological needs weren't as prevalent. If you can suspend your disbelief at the dysfunctional premise, it's very funny (and based in reality, as Ni mentions in the endnotes, given the huge scale of migrant workers vacationing during Lunar New Year). Ma is also the author of "The First Emperor's Games," which I enjoyed from Broken Stars.

"They say that during every Great Migration, Olympus gets so overcrowded that Mars tilts a few degrees further on its axis."
"Is that a joke?"
"It's a red planet joke. I guess you haven't red enough to get it," I quipped back.
...
"You never know, apparently the occurence of one night stands increases tenfold during the GM."
"Of course, but the funny thing in this joke is that during the GM, whilst you might be able to find a partner you desire for a perfect one-night stand, you'll be hard pressed to find a room."

(How common is "whilst" in UK English, compared to "while"? I felt like the "whilst" per page count density was out of control, but that might just be my US dialect talking.)

"Flower of the Other Shore," by A Que, is a very humorous, meta, and occasionally fourth-wall breaking story about zombies. The narrator is a zombie, and his "who am I, what am I doing here" amnesia is reminiscent of "Project Hail Mary," in a good way. Zombies lose their powers of speech, but have innate sign-language skills.

Just as we are half fighting with instinct, and half talking nonsense, the thin man who was bitten gets to his feet, his body rigid, and starts charging towards the crowd: eyes blood-red, teeth bared. The blood from the wound on his throat has already darkened and begun to congeal.
"Hello, I'm new," he signals to me in a friendly manner. "What are the rules on this side?"
"Don't run in front of a--" I begin warning, but before I can finish signing "gun", the barrel of a Gatling gun sweeps towards him, its stream of high caliber rounds tearing him into two.

Spoilers: our narrator is not like other zombies.

"Shut your mouth!" the captain roars at me.
But I couldn't. "You don't understand, when you lose something for so long and finally get it back, you cherish it even more, like love and health, like your voice. When I became a Stiff, the first part of my body to go permanently stiff was--don't look at me like that, I mean my vocal cords. Rigor mortis set in, and I could only talk with hand signals. But the voice is a gift of gods, the cry of beasts, the chirping of birds, the rustle of the wind and the splash of waves of the sea, each with their own music. Besides, if I want to be with someone, I can actually tell her that I love her, and oh, Captain, has anyone ever told you they loved you? Ah...ah, judging by your face, that's a no.... doesn't matter, doesn't matter, there's still time, before you become a Stiff too... Don't hit me! Don't hit me!..."

Bingo: Translated, 5+ Short Stories, Author of Color, does One-Word Title count if there's a subtitle? "Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction."

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

felis

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magnetic_pole

May 2020

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where to find me

Page Summary

torachan - Daily Happiness
torachan - Weekly Reading
musesfool - Either life you choose will end in her arms
felis - Fixing and Fishing and Communication.
tielan - travel: Georgia - Kutaisi
torachan - Daily Happiness
torachan - 2026 Japan Trip Part 2 (4/4)
conuly - Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost
redbird - (no subject)
musesfool - But thy eternal summer shall not fade
primeideal - Various updates
topaz_eyes - Springtime calls her children til she lets them go at last.
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 24 April 2026
pennswoods - Reheating and Fangirling
torachan - Daily Happiness
torachan - 2026 Disneyland Trip #20 (4/22/26)
musesfool - fire creates its own weather
primeideal - (SFF Bingo): Sinopticon, translated and edited by Xueting Christine Ni
mark in dw_maintenance - Search maintenance
felis - Perfect Days - In Space!?

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