juushika

2025/077: Fire from Heaven — Mary Renault

'Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’ The rose-red on the hilltops changed to gold. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, I am not afraid. It was better than music or his mother’s love; it was the life of the gods. No grief could touch him, no hatred harm him. Things looked bright and clear, as to the stooping eagle. He felt sharp as an arrow, and full of light. [p. 120]

This first volume of Renault's 'Alexander' trilogy covers the life of Alexander the Great from childhood (he's four years old in the first chapter) to the death of his father, King Philip of Macedon.( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

osprey_archer

One nice thing about the Newbery project is that I learn so much about places that I previously knew nothing about. For instance, until I read Elizabeth Miller’s Pran of Albania, I knew nothing about Albania except the sworn mountain virgins, women who swear to remain virgins and hitherto go dressed as men with a rifle slung across their back.

(Miller, searching for a reference point her readers will understand, once describes them as “nuns,” which inevitably made me think of demon-fighting nuns from anime. Nuns! With guns!)

For a while it looked like this book wasn’t going to have any sworn mountain virgins, but I should have had more faith in the 1930s Newberies to go charging right into whatever Gender is available to their plucky heroines. Of course there are sworn mountain virgins in this book! Indeed, Pran herself is a sworn mountain virgin for five whole chapters!

Then she realizes that the man she is betrothed to IS in fact the boy she has a crush on and decides that after all she wouldn’t mind getting married, because at the end of the day it’s still the 1930s and the toys have to go back in the box at the end. But before that, she uses her sworn mountain virgin status to speak at a council meeting (only men and old women and sworn mountain virgins can speak) in favor of continuing the truce that has temporarily put a halt to the law of blood feud.

The truce is in place because the mountain tribes of Albania had to band together to fight off a Slav invasion earlier in the year. During this war, Pran had an epiphany about the futility and ugliness of all war, and her later speech against the blood feud is a step on the long, long pathway toward getting rid of war entirely.

Now, to be honest, I normally groan over children’s books with the message War Is Bad, simply because I’ve read so many of them at this point. Yes, yes, war is bad, tell me something I don’t know. But it worked for me here, I think because Miller is not simply parroting received wisdom but sharing her own passionate, personal conviction, in a literary world where children’s books will argue other sides of the question.

In Miller’s Pran of Albania and Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, war is bad. But Herbert Best’s Garram the Hunter is an argument that war preparedness is necessary for any people who means to remain free. In Julia Davis Adams’ Vaino: A Boy of New Finland, the people of Finland win their freedom through a war that is dangerous and frightening but above all necessary, a point she makes again in Mountains Are Free, a retelling of the tale of William Tell.

You don’t know what you’re going to get, and it means that whatever you end up getting is interesting. There’s a lot to be said for cultivating the unexpected.

rionaleonhart

More of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy! There is so much plot happening right now. I've finished the Eva route, and I'm currently on the route in which Shouma calls us all to the classroom we originally woke up in in order to talk about his memories.

( Notes on The Hundred Line. )

The experience of playing The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy feels a lot like playing a game, going 'well, I enjoyed that, but I feel there was more to be explored,' and then heading to AO3 and reading every fic that's been written for it. It's absolutely bizarre. I'm really enjoying it.

tamaranth

03APR25: Red Notice (Thurber, 2021) -- Netflix
( Read more... )
04APR25: 4 Authors @ Waterstones
( Read more... )
05APR25: The Score (Oliver Cotton) -- Theatre Royal, Haymarket
( Read more... )
09APR25: The Sixteen, Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich
( Read more... )
10APR25: A Man Called Otto (Forster, 2022) -- Netflix
( Read more... )
17-21APR25: Reconnect (Eastercon), Belfast
( Read more... )
28APR25: The Return (Pasolini, 2024) -- Greenwich PictureHouse
( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

futureworththinking_feed

Posted by Damien P. Williams

https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/?p=6406

There’s a new open-access book of collected essays called Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity, and I happen to have an essay in it. The collection is made of contributions from participants in the October 2024 “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” panels and workshops put on by Jess Reia, MC Forelle, and Yingchong Wang, and I’ve included my essay here, for you. That said, I highly recommend checking out the rest of the book, because all the contributions are fantastic.

This work was co-sponsored by: The Karsh Institute Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, The Environmental Institute, and The School of Data Science, all at UVA. The videos for both days of the “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” talks are now available, and you can find them at the Karsh Institute website, and also below, before the text of my essay.

All in all, I think these these are some really great conversations on “AI” and environmental justice. They cover “AI”‘s extremely material practical aspects, the deeply philosophical aspects, and the necessary and fundamental connections between the two, and these are crucial discussions to be having, especially right now.

Hope you dig it.

Watch on YouTube

Reimagining “AI’s” Environmental and Sociotechnical Materialities
Damien P. Williams
UNC Charlotte

There are numerous assumptions bundled into the current thinking around what “artificial intelligence” does and is, and around whether we should even be using it and, if so, how. Those pushing “AI” adoption tend to presuppose it necessarily will be good for something— that it will be useful and solve some problem— without ever defining exactly what that problem might be. Often, we see that there are these pushes towards paradigms of efficiency and ease of work and “rote” tasks being taken off our hands without anyone ever asking the fundamental follow-up question of “…okay but does it actually do any of that?” Relatedly, it’s often assumed that “artificial intelligence” will become or will make other things “better” in nebulous some way if only we just keep pushing, just keep building, just keep moving towards the next model of it. If we keep doing that, then eventually, we’re assured, “in just ten years,” “AI” will turn into the version of itself that will solve all our problems. But this notion that in ten years, “AI” will be embedded in everything and will be inescapable and perfect is something we’ve been hearing for the past 50 years.

This recurrent technosocial paradigm of “AI Summer” and “AI Winter” exists for a reason; these hype-cycles pushing towards automation, neural nets, big data, or algorithms over and over again represent externalities which must be addressed in a deeper way through questions like, “What are the values of the people who push ‘AI’s’ ‘inevitability,’ and what are their actual goals?” Because, while people might think they mean the same things when they say “AI,” or are indicating the same kinds of needs to be met, in truth, we’re very often talking past each other. Without a clear understanding of what it is we each and all actually think of as the “good” of “AI” technology— without confronting that question in a very direct and intentional way— different groups will just keep pushing in different directions, and whoever has the predominant access to and control over the levers of power wins the right to define the problems that “AI” seeks to address. But in many cases, those are problems they and their vision of “AI” helped to create.

Current estimates hold that water consumption increased ~34% in areas where Microsoft and Google placed datacenters for search and “AI,” and that every email’s worth of text you have an LLM “AI” write consumes a pint of water. Put another way, imagine if every time you composed 150 of your own words, you had to just take out a 16 oz water bottle, fill it up, and dump it in the trash. We’re not just talking about water for cooling servers, either. In thermal power plants, you need water to turn into steam to run turbines, and then to cool the systems which do that, as well. So the more energy needed, the more water used in production and cooling. And while many highlight that some systems only use this water once and then release it, even that is a process and a period of capturing that water, both removing the water from use, and potentially trapping and killing organisms living in it. Additionally, the water returned after the “once through” process has a significantly higher temperature than when it started. It should be said that the numbers in this discussion are estimates based on known figures for chip performance, electricity production, and whatever data’s been wrenched from “AI” corporations. They’re estimated because these companies do not release their actual resource consumption numbers.

Further, the data centers that support “AI” are oftentimes built in communities that are already resource scarce, and pulling water from or putting emissions into these communities ensures that “AI’s” harms are necessarily disproportionately enacted on the people who can least afford to bear them. Rather than rulemakers just paying lip-service to people’s grievances, logging them in a repository somewhere, and making whatever rules they intended to make to begin with, both the creation and regulation of “AI” must be directed by those whom it’s most likely to harm. But while marginalized communities absolutely must have meaningful input when it comes to technologies which will be wielded against them, there also has to be a centralized response in the form of some standard-setting body. And, recursively, that standard-setting body will have to be meaningfully responsive to the needs of those most likely to be harmed if said regulations and standards go wrong.

And so, we have to ask our questions: Who is most harmed by current uses of “AI”? What does the energy footprint of a data center actually look like? How much water and fossil fuel does it take to run “AI’s” servers and their computations? What are their carbon and waste heat emissions? Because the more we dig down on this, the more we truly confront the next questions: Should we be doing “AI” differently? What would it take to build “AI” in a different way? What would it take to power “AI” in a truly renewable way? And what and whom do we even want “AI” to be for? If it helps, you can try to think of what it as a game:

First major “AI” firm to use only renewable energy sources, an open source and radical consent model for the collection and use of training data, and a community partnership regulatory process which centers and heeds the needs of the most marginalized, wins.

Suggested Citation:
Williams, Damien P. “Reimagining ‘AI’s’ Environmental and Sociotechnical Materialities,” appearing in Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity, Reia, J., Forelle, MC and Wang, Y. eds. Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, University of Virginia. 2025. https://doi.org/10.18130/03df-zn30.

https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/?p=6406

osprey_archer

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

tamaranth

2025/076: Knave of Diamonds — Laurie R King

I'd planned this. (I plan everything, so you can bet I'd worked on how to do this.) (Not, mind you, that I'd entirely decided just how much to tell her.) (And about whom.) [loc. 602]

I was an avid reader of Laurie R King's Mary Russell books (in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes marries a young woman of considerable talents) -- my enthusiasm waned around Pirate King, and though I've read and enjoyed several novels in the series since then, there are definitely others I've missed. No matter! This, the nineteenth novel in the series, more or less stands alone (though there are clear and rather intriguing references to earlier books) and I found it engaging and fun, though (again) Russell and Holmes are separated for a good part of the novel.

The year is 1926. Mary has just returned from a wedding in France (cue a lot of namedropping: Hemingway, 'Scotty' Fitzgerald, Picasso...) when she's visited by her long-lost Uncle Jake, who she hasn't seen since before her parents died. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

juushika

Title: The Complete Brambly Hedge
Author: Jill Barklem
Published: HarperCollins Children, 2011 (1980-1994)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 534,960
Text Number: 1959-6
Read Because: personal enjoyment, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: The lavishly illustrated domestic lives of the mice of Brambly Hedge. With one exception, I've already forgotten every plot; it's mice going through the motions of a conservative ideal of British country living, who cares. The exception is The Secret Staircase, which is The Secret Garden: Indoor Mouse edition, private and mysterious and immensely transporting. But plots be damned; the vibes are off the charts. The art is deliciously detailed, with clutter that overwhelms the border of each image and captivating cutaway interiors that are simultaneously vast and minute. I Spy meets Huygen and Poortvliet's Gnomes. I want to crawl into the pages and live there forever, which is the intent, of course, but succeeds even without the gloss of nostalgia, as I never knew these as a kid.

swan_tower

How the hell do you use a shimmer ink in a fountain pen without it clogging up the moment you look away?

I have tried this precisely once, and the results were so bad that for the first time in my life, I purged the ink out of a pen rather than using it up. I don't know if the answer is "the pen you used is clog-prone" (Pilot Vanishing Point; I haven't had issues with non-shimmer inks) or "only ink with shimmer if you're intending to write a bunch immediately, because six hours later it will be causing problems" or "use a dip pen" or what, but it seems like other people are able to use shimmer inks more successfully. Is there something I'm missing?

swan_tower

Fountain pen users! Please speak to me of your favorite red inks. I have a few Pilot samples, but they're all more in a magenta or orange-red direction; none of them feel quite like a true, vivid red to me. It seems like a basic color I ought to have (especially when editing a novel, where I'm marking up a print manuscript), but rather than buying a bunch of samples, I'd like to hear what other people prefer.

osprey_archer

After Is Underground,

littlerhymes and I approached Cold Shoulder Road with trepidation. However, I am happy to report that our concerns were unwarranted. In this book, Joan Aiken returns to form with an adventure story that is gristly but mostly in a way that is fun for the reader, like the Edward Gorey covers that grace many books in this series.

(Except for a very minor character who she kills at the end for no apparent reason except to remind us that she can. Spoiler redacted didn’t deserve that fate!)

Anyway. Is Twite and her cousin Arun have made their way back to Arun’s hometown, where Arun will be briefly reunited with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen ever since he ran away from the Silent Sect because he couldn’t stand not being allowed to sing or talk. They arrive at the family home in Cold Shoulder Road… and find it empty! Arun’s mother has disappeared! And the Silent Sect has been taken over by a charismatic leader by the name of Dominic de la Twite…

Later in the book Is and Arun learn a song, the substance of which is that “When Twites are good, they are very very good, but when they are bad they are horrid.” Old Domino, as Is calls him, is definitely on the horrid side. He also appears to have command of at least an unconscious form of the thought speech that Is discovered in Is Underground, which he uses to mind-whammy Arun into submission until Is drags him away.

Other typical Aiken touches:

A down-trodden but plucky orphan

The Admiral’s giant pet spider Rosamunde

The Admiral’s dupli-gyro (bicycle), which he likes to ride while flying a kite

The system of caverns beneath the Admiral’s house where Is and Arun find three large vats of treasure.

(The Admiral is doing a lot of work to bring the quirkiness to this book.)

And of course the reappearance of Is’s cat Figgin, who occasionally appears in danger but pulls through at the end, which almost made me forgive Aiken for killing spoiler redacted. (But not quite.)

Next book, we’re returning to Dido! We had the briefest mention of her when the downtrodden but plucky orphan brushed minds with her across the sea, as Dido has been Sir On a Vacation to Nantucket for the previous two books. Does this mean that Dido is going to carry the thought speech forward into the last two books of the series? To be honest I’m not madly keen on the thought speech, so I kind of hope not, but we’ll see.

tamaranth

2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumb an apocalypse can spawn. [loc. 1990]

Third in the series that began with Dogs of War and continued with Bear Head. The time is about two centuries after the events of Bear Head, and three generations after the fall of the Old ('the world that once was') due to failure of the global information network, in a 'deluge of artificially-generated false testimony' exarcerbated by climate disaster. Human existence on Earth is now rather dystopian, as a group of Martians discover when they respond to a distress call.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful

donut_donut posting in

little_details

Hi! I'm writing a novel that takes place in the French Pyrenees (modern day), and I'm trying to figure out what plants to place in this fictional garden.

More info:
The novel takes place at a villa owned by a middle-aged bohemian lady who moved there from Paris maybe a decade ago. Gardening is her hobby. In the back of the house is a potager (vegetable garden), and I've got that covered. But the front of the house has a flower garden, and I don't know so much about that.

It doesn't need to be plants that are native to the region, but it has to be plausible that they would be available and could thrive there. It's summertime (late July-August), and I would like there to be flowers, because we often see her pruning the old blooms. I assume rose bushes would work, but I would love some other options to work with. I've been picturing something like hydrangeas or rhodedendrons, but I don't know how common they are in this environment.

Some kind of ornamental tree would also be nice, for a character cry under. A flowering tree or large bush would be nice but not necessary.

She has somewhat offbeat tastes, so anything off the beaten track would be great, but it has to make sense for the climate.

Thank you!

rionaleonhart

Look, we all knew I was going to write this fic. Of course I was going to write this fic. Here is the inevitable fic.

Because Takemaru is a stickler for the rules, there's some discussion of the age of consent in this fic. I have no idea what the age of consent in the Tokyo Residential Complex would be, but I've set it at sixteen based on the current age of consent in Japan. I don't think these characters have canonical ages, but, if I'm mistaken and anyone in the 'over sixteen' group is canonically under sixteen, please assume they've been aged up; Takemaru's going to be so upset otherwise.

Title: All That's Left
Fandom: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Rating: 15
Pairing: everyone/everyone (present at this point in the timeline), more or less, with particular emphasis on Takumi/everyone.
Wordcount: 3,700
Summary: Darumi rolls onto her back, looking up at the ceiling. “I guess we could all fuck instead.”
Notes: Set after day 95.

( All That's Left )

osprey_archer

I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.

The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.

But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.

In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.

I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.

tamaranth

2025/074: A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece — Philip Matyszak

...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]

Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm

oracne

After a glitch with my Apple account, their very helpful (!) customer service got me fixed up and I managed to sneak in the first episode of Murderbot before dress rehearsal, and the second one when I got home. I just finished it and am ready for more. It's a good adaptation. I never feel like adaptations replace books because there's no way to capture narrative voice in the same way in a visual medium, but there are other advantages books don't have. I love seeing actors interpret characters; it's a sort of fanfiction. The actors are all great.

Maybe I will also finally watch Ted Lasso. Severance sounds too depressing for me right now.

rionaleonhart

Went to karaoke on Sunday! (At an actual karaoke place, rather than singing at home.) As ever, it was a lot of fun. My song picks:

- Busted, 'What I Go to School For'. I always try to do something ludicrous for my first song; it takes some of the pressure off. Everyone joined in on this one!

- Ricky Martin, 'Livin' La Vida Loca'. It is, it turns out, absolutely impossible not to dance while singing this song.

- High School Musical 3, 'Can I Have This Dance'. This was a duet with Rei; Rei played Troy and I played Gabriella, with all the sincerity we could muster. 'That was so cute,' we were informed afterwards.

- I did a few duets with Rei, actually! The other two, very tonally different from each other, were 'I'll Make a Man Out of You' from Mulan (my pick; Rei at one point grabbed my shirt collar to inform me I was unsuited for the rage of war, which is admittedly true) and 'Turn Back Time' by Aqua (Rei's pick; it's such an interestingly atypical Aqua song!).

- The Offspring, 'The Kids Aren't Alright'. Fun, but a little overwhelming, especially as most of the room didn't know it, so I had to do the 'whoa's as well as the lines! I lost the thread and dropped a couple of lines in the second verse.

- Vengaboys, 'Boom Boom Boom Boom'. There's always one song that gets stuck in my head for days after a karaoke session, and this was the culprit this time. At one point the whole room rebelled and added another chorus in a break, having apparently decided there just weren't enough booms.

- Of Monsters and Men, 'King and Lionheart'. Unexpectedly, nobody else knew this song, so I found myself doing an unanticipated solo right at the top of my range! Extremely intimidating. It went well, though; people were really nice about this one!

- Lady Gaga, 'Paparazzi'. Everyone joined in on this one, which was fun, but it really strained my voice!

I also joined in on a few picks by other people: 'In the End' by Linkin Park, 'Lay All Your Love on Me' by ABBA and 'Shake It Out' by Florence and the Machine. ('Shake It Out' was also quite a strain on my voice, it turned out, but it's a great song!) We all sang along to 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' by ABBA, and the entire room made a spirited attempt at 'Dragostea Din Tei' by O-Zone, despite our general inability to speak Romanian.

I really enjoyed Rei's dancing during 'Rasputin' by Boney M. Rei also performed 'Never Had a Friend Like Me' from Aladdin, which looked absolutely exhausting.

One member of the party picked 'Carry On, Wayward Son' by Kansas, which got the kind of reaction it can only have in a room full of Supernatural fans. Playing that song is a great way to expose everyone in the vicinity who's ever had a feeling about a Winchester. Later, in a second personal attack on Supernatural fans, Rei performed 'Bad Moon Rising' by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

(We're contemplating a Supernatural rewatch. Feels like a bad idea. That's not going to stop us.)

siderea

Story has it that a thief was captured and hauled before the local ruler. "Give me one good reason I shouldn't have you put to death," the monarch said. The thief replied, "Your majesty, I can teach your finest horse to sing – if you give me a year to do it!" The court burst out in laughter at this, and the ruler, bemused, said, "Very well. You will be imprisoned in the royal stable besides my finest stallion, and in a year if he cannot sing, you will be put to death." So every day the prisoner sang to the horse. Eventually one of the stablehands sneered at the prisoner, "I don't see why you bother. Everyone knows horses can't sing. Your stupid gambit gained you nothing."

"To the contrary!" replied the prisoner with equanimity, "It gained me a whole year which I didn't have before. A lot can happen in a year. The king may die. The horse may die. I may die.

And maybe he horse will learn to sing."

I just got this email announcement from Patreon:

A big win for creators

We've got great news: you'll soon be able to earn from U.S. fans through the iOS app again, and the November 2025 subscription billing requirement deadline is no longer in effect.

Thanks to a recent U.S. court ruling, Apple must now allow apps to offer U.S. based users checkout options outside of Apple's in-app purchase system (which includes the 30% Apple fee)—something that was previously prohibited under Apple's App Store requirements.

[...]

Last year, we let you know that all creators would need to switch to subscription billing by November 2025. This forced switch wasn't something we chose — it was the result of needing to comply with Apple's requirements at the time or risk the removal of Patreon's app from the App Store. While we've long believed subscription billing is the strongest long-term model for creators, forced compliance with Apple's mandates and deadlines was obviously not how we ever wanted to roll out changes to creators on Patreon.

We've stayed in close conversation with Apple and have continued advocating for a more flexible approach — one that gives creators more time and choice. As a result of the recent court ruling and changes on Apple's end, the November 2025 deadline is no longer in effect.

In other words, no, I don't have to convert away from the by-works funding model.

Yet again I have prevailed over adversity by means of my greatest superpower: spite procrastination.

Sucks to be a responsible Patreon creator who duly responded to the deadline by converting their account – Patreon doesn't let you revert that change – or by migrating off Patreon well in advance. Those folks kind of got screwed. I know that if I had bailed to some sort of lifeboat option, and possibly paid handsomely and compromised my personal security to do it, I would be really pissed off right about now.

mrissa

Sonja Arntzen and Ito Moriyuki, trans., The Sarashina Diary: A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan (by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume). This is brief but delightful. Its author is one of the most relatable historical figures I have ever encountered, book-obsessed and delighted by the written word.

Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. The modern world, the Korean-American experience, a dozen other things in a score of emotional ranges. Sometimes I find it interesting to contemplate which volumes of poetry resonate me and which with similar descriptions leave me cold. This one resonated.

Christopher Hale, A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia: Multiculturalism and Prosperity: The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers. A bit too much Singapore in the balance for my taste--I have no objection to Singapore, but if you're putting both Singapore and Malaysia on the cover, I want both. This is more a starting point than an ending point in the history of this region, but that's valuable too.

Reginald Hill, An Advancement of Learning, An April Shroud, Bones and Silence, Child's Play, A Clubbable Woman, Deadheads, Exit Lines, A Killing Kindness, A Pinch of Snuff, Recalled to Life, Ruling Passion, Underworld, and The Wood Beyond. Rereads. And here we come to the reason this is one of the easiest book posts I've written in ages: I'm 2/3ish of the way through rereading the Dalziel and Pascoe series, and I find them more or less where I left them--the early ones are fine, and now I'm into the part of the series that's quite good, with the best yet to come. Gosh I'm glad I read them out of order originally. The exception to finding them where I left them is that three times through is enough for me on A Pinch of Snuff, I do not expect to find it worth my time for a fourth go-round.

Natalie Shapero, Popular Longing. This is also poetry engaging with the current moment. Like the Franny Choi collection, it is frequently angry. For some reason it doesn't resonate for me nearly so well--I find it more grating in places but most often it's just that Shapero's gears and mine don't mesh. Ah well.

Tom Stoppard, Plays: 5 (Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood). Rereads. I'm passing this on to a young theater-lover in my life and read it on the way out. One masterwork, one mid-century adultery play (YAWN), two attempts at reckoning with colonialism very much from a colonizer viewpoint, and a spy thing that is less clever than he thinks about quantum mechanics. I have another copy of Arcadia, I'm not sorry I read the others, but I'm also not sorry to hand them on.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor writing as A. Merc Rustad, So You Want to Be a Robot. Reread. Remains varied, wrenching, and brilliant, one of the best debut collections of our generation, yay.

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May 2025

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Reading

2025/077: Fire from Heaven — Mary Renault

Book Review: Pran of Albania

I'm Feeling A Little Less Than Totes Chill Today.

Monthly culture, April 2025

Reimagining “AI’s” Environmental and Sociotechnical Materialities

Wednesday Reading Meme

2025/076: Knave of Diamonds — Laurie R King

Book Review: The Complete Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem

while I'm at it, another fountain pen question

Red ink recs?

Book Review: Cold Shoulder Road

2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Plants for Garden in the French Pyrenees

Fanfiction: All That's Left (The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Everyone/Everyone)

Picture Book Monday: A White Heron

2025/074: A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece — Philip Matyszak

MURDERBOT!!!

As The World Comes To An End, I'll Be Here To Hold Your Hand.

The Horse Has Learned to Sing [Patreon, me]

Books read, early May

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May 2025

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