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Happy birthday,

Entry tags:

dark souls,
games

"If you like Dark Souls, it's hard to shut up about Dark Souls"

For anyone who may be Dark Souls-curious, here is a very long video essay of which I've only watched part (because I'm trying to limit spoilers) and of which I mainly want to rec part -- the first 30 mins or so, where the essayist discusses something that the mythology about the game’s supposed uber-difficulty tends to obscure, namely the gorgeous, generous array of different tools and options that it gives you for engaging with its difficulties, and how it tries to teach you to use them:

Watch on YouTube

I think this is some of the stuff that prompted me to declaim “Dark Souls loves me and wants me to be happy.”

The game is difficult, it is intended to be difficult (and I still don't know if, for me, it will at some point be insuperably difficult), and progressing and learning through difficulty and failure is the core gameplay loop. As mentioned, it took me a total of seven hours to beat the most recent boss, the Capra Demon. I am currently camped out in the Depths, where I intermittently fall through holes and get cursed by basilisks. I recently got invaded for the first time, by a player who watched as I ran directly under a slime and got enveloped, facepalmed*, and then waited politely while I extricated myself before murdering me**.

And yet my major feeling at this particular moment is of being spoiled (in the pampered sense, not the knowledge sense): I have too many good weapons to try (my beloved halberd, now upgraded to +7, a Balder Side Sword -- a rare and coveted drop -- and a Black Knight Sword)! I'm having to actively try not to over-level! I have so many upgrade materials! I have the world's largest stockpile of charcoal pine resin (purchased on my endless boss runs back to the Capra Demon, so I'd spend any souls I was carrying and not distract myself with losing or trying to retrieve them) so I can make my weapons burst into flame any time I want! I have opened the latest incredibly-convenient shortcut! There's a handy new merchant just before the next boss! I am holding an armful of presents and Dark Souls keeps trying to pile more on top!

{*I went off immediately afterwards to Google "dark souls how to facepalm”, but it looks like you have to join the Forest Hunter covenant to learn that emote and I have other plans. Still tempted, though.}

{**I had expected to loathe being invaded — and had initially planned to play offline mainly to avoid that, but did not for reasons which need to be a different post — but in the event, it was brief, non-inconveniencing, and actually pretty funny.}

Entry tags:

music,
ríomhphost

hello rabbitholes

The Kpop Demon Hunters situation has progressed past "watch a second time", through "listen to soundtrack on repeat" and is now at "find and listen to as many covers and remixes of my favourite tracks as I can".

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recs:murderbot

Murderbot fic recs part 2: Longer iddy h/c & plotty fic [9 fics]

Okay, I couldn't really think what else to call this, because this is mostly just recent fics that I want to roll around in like a kitten in catnip. This fandom has tons of gloriously iddy h/c, casefic, longfic, and plotty WIPs, both of the AU and non-AU variety. So this is some of what's been delighting me lately. All of these are complete unless otherwise noted.

(Also see bookverse short gen in the last post, if you missed it.)

One of the still unfinished WIPs I've been following with enjoyment is this:

Robbing the Hood by

Rilleshka (gen, AU, currently 11 chapters/68K and still updating) - A SPACE PIRATE AU, really well thought out and probably the kind of thing that will sprawl onwards for a long time without any particular resolution, but I'm just enjoying the ride. It's canon divergent rather than a total AU; early in its post-governor-module life, Murderbot ends up on a ship that's attacked by raiders, the crews of both ships are wiped out, and now MB is alone with the grieving bot pilot of the raider ship, and the two embark on a freelance piracy career for survival, eventually ending up falling headfirst into semi-accidentally rescuing human trafficking victims. (The bot pilot is an OC, not ART - ART's around, but essentially this AU is following the widening spiral of various changes that take place due to MB not being around to e.g. help PreservationAux or Tapan's group.)

This AU does something that very often doesn't work for me, where the found family consists of mostly different people in this 'verse, including OCs and people who never met in canon. (The first one they rescue is a pre-ART Tarik, left to die after he's injured on a death squad mission.) But it really works for me! The AU takes the time to build up the various AU relationships, and it's rich with worldbuilding on the state of piracy in the Murderbot universe, including a gloriously OTT pirate base and some other interesting locations.

The author also has this wonderfully harrowing (complete) fic from last year:

Undefinable Boundaries (gen, 26K, post-canon)
Murderbot is killed on a mission, but that's not the end; its friends, including ART, Three, and PresAux, try to bring it back and rebuild it. Just incredibly wrenching and painful and sweet, and it does have a happy ending.

Moving on, these are pretty much all Murderbot & Gurathin-centric with lots of h/c. This one just dropped today:

Over Imperfect Bones by

lookninjas (gen, 8K)
A full on idfest of the "trauma-bonded characters refuse to be more than few feet from each other" trope. Something *really* bad happened to MB, we don't know what for a while, but it can't see or speak or move, except one hand, and it will not let go of Gurathin's hand; we don't find out why for a while either. The way this slowly drops the details of what happened to them and lets the reader read between the lines to what everyone isn't talking about is really well done. There's also some nice stuff with ART, Mensah, and Ratthi.

This one is more thriller/plotty action rather than h/c:

Distress Call by

e_va (gen, 9K)
Murderbot wakes up in a cargo container, unable to move, and the only person it can get in touch with is Gurathin, who appears to be on the ship with it. Lots of nice action/spy stuff with bonding and mutual worry.

( A few more plotty and hurt/comforty gen )

Entry tags:

recs:murderbot

Murderbot fic recs part 1: Bookverse Short Gen [9 fics]

See also my Murderbot recs from May over at

recthething, when I was first getting into it (all bookverse).

So I've been wallowing around in all the good fic in this fandom lately, and I'm finally getting around to posting some recs here. I'll start off with something pretty basic: bookverse gen featuring a variety of characters.

( 9 short bookverse genfics )

Entry tags:

exchange:justmarried

Just Married

The

justmarriedexchange revealed today, and I adore my gift!

Precipice (Biggles/EvS, 3300 wds)
Takes a Holiday AU in which things go very differently after Erich goes looking for Biggles when he's hiding in the attic. Incredibly sensual, wonderful character voices and a great sense of their mingled attraction and enmity/distrust; it's tense and sexy and just exactly what I want from them at this point in canon. The author's notes hint at a possible sequel, which I would LOVE and - no pressure! - hope that it does happen someday. <3

🍾🥂 About 24⅔ years of good fucking riddance

Goodbye to bad rubbish BJ, who could make simple things like Madonna being active in the music industry longer than most people of our generation being aware of, plus she didn't look in her early 40s at the time, into some kind of sinister conspiracy theory situation.

You were an absolute jackass, and I honestly don't care if you're alive or not except that I might need to avoid you.

Thanks to Votania and Darkside, who helped me realize what a bad friend BJ was, never mind as a prospective life partner and spouse. Bleck.

This random thought brought to me by the death of Charles Entertainment Kirk, which would probably have been making BJ's circles flail in panic, and hearing a Madonna song on the Doof. (A back episode, we didn't have a SunDoof that I'm aware of.)

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Five Things about Working the Night Shift

Buzzfeed had a listicle in my newsfeed this evening, "People Who Work Night Shifts Are Sharing Things "Day Shifters" Don't Understand About Their World, And As A Day Shifter, I'm Intrigued". I'm a sucker for Buzzfeed listicles (lists of pithy responses in Reddit threads that are turned into articles) and I worked second shift for three summers years ago, so I figured, Hey, I'll play! Here are Five Things of mine:

1) Second Shift requires some adaptation. The second, or "swing", shifts I worked were 5pm-midnight, 5-11pm, or 4pm-midnight. The exact hours varied by job and year to year within one of the jobs (the company changed its hours). Working second shift puts you out of sync with the rest of society, though not as badly as third shift. That's because I could still manage daytime hours for appointments, shopping, etc... though it did take more careful planning and some adaptation. For example, if I wanted to go out for "dinner" at a restaurant, it was at 3:30pm before work. My effective dinner, after getting off work, was almost always some cooked straight out of the freezer at home at 1-2am. Virtually nothing was open after midnight, nor even really after 10pm, in the places I lived.

2) Second shift can be busy... or quiet. In one job I worked, a call center, the whole department was staffed during second shift, meaning there were a few dozen employees plus 2-3 managers. Second shift there entailed constant, steady work. Though the rest of the company was dark at those hours... so breaks in the lunch room or outside the front door were alwasy eerily quiet. At the other job I worked I was there as part of a 24x7 rotation in case something went wrong. And since I was the only person there for most of my shift, either it was something basic I could diagnose and repair on my own, or I documented and left it for the fully staffed M-F 8-5 crew.

3) You can't come home and go straight to bed. One of the biggest things people misunderstand about working second shift is thinking, "Oh, it's just 'til 11 or 12, that's like a slightly late evening." NO IT'S NOT! It's not "just like a slightly late evening" because when you get off shift and arrive home at midnight or almost 1am, you can't just go straight to bed. You're up. You've been working. You need a few hours to wind down before you can sleep! I was routinely going to bed at 3 in the morning. Sometimes, if I got involved in reading a book after work, I'd be up until 6am.

4) Switching shifts is hard. The third year I worked second shifts, I did that 3-4 nights a week and also had 1-2 days of first shift on the weekends. Switching 1st to 2nd wasn't hard, but going from 2nd to 1st always messed up my schedule. I'm glad I was young when I did that.

5) I was warned off working third shifts. Not that I ever considered shift work after summer jobs in college, but one of the third-shifters at the 24x7 place I worked was a quiet warning. There were two guys who worked the 11pm-9am shift, Ross and Gene. Ross had only been doing it for a year or two; he was hard up in a slow economy, and the work paid well. But Gene had always been working third shift. He looked to be 60... but one night during our shift overlap he and I were discussing his plan to go back to college to finish his degree, and I learned he was only 40. The man clearly looked 60! Everyone around the office whispered, "Yeah, you age fast working third shift!"

went to a book discussion

Today was the quarterly meeting of our mythopoeic book discussion group. Most of us were there in person. One attendee came in by zoom from 2000 miles away. Another came in person from 2000 miles away. She was visiting.

Our topic was Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I reported something I found it has in common with The Lord of the Rings, which is: that the movie is very pretty, but the book is far better. I would peg it as my third favorite of all DWJ novels, #2 being Archer's Goon and #1 Fire and Hemlock. One thing we liked about it is that the lead character is a very old lady, which is rather unusual, even though she's not really a very old lady but is under a spell. One thing we did not like about the movie is that it robs Sophie, for that is her name, of her agency, which is one reason why it's so boring but the book isn't.

One other thing making the book interesting that's absent from the movie is the mind-expanding glimpse of what is at least putatively our world from the viewpoint of an alternative fantasy world.

In the course of more general discussion about books we've read lately, I came across a new wrinkle in pronunciation. I'm used to Stephen Colbert pronouncing Gollum (gaul-um) as if it were golem (go-lem). But here somebody was pronouncing golem as if it were Gollum. The two words have of course nothing to do with each other. Gollum is an intensely human (for a sufficient definition of human), intensely tragic figure who has fallen into a personal hell through his own greed, and is trying to get out but never quite succeeds. A golem is a mindless robotic servant creature made of clay. They're nothing alike. Attempts to find a connection via folk etymology, which is postulating sources by what a word happens to sound like to the hearer, are an inane form of literary analysis.

I opined that some movie which I'm not going to name was passingly enjoyable to watch, but the supernatural part of the plot did not hang together. Others said that people like it that way. I had my doubts to this, but instead merely said that "I consider a dislike of incoherent and inconsistent magic systems to be a feature, not a bug."

Transit

So, yesterday, the wheelchair ramp on the Rt 8 bus I was on developed a bug. Or the system that detects if it is deployed did. The ramp retracted correctly but the bus thought it had not, and would not move.

Ha ha! I pick my routes to maximize alternatives in case of break-downs. I just disembarked and talked over to the LRT. Which, I discovered, was having a minor service delay.

My contingency plans can handle two delays, but not three. Good for me there were just the two. It did mean I was only a little early for work.

On the way home, just after I disembarked from the LRT, an SUV cut the LRT off so the SUV could reach the parking lot ten seconds earlier. If the train had not stopped, I'd have had to stick around, both as a witness and because the accident would blocked the sidewalk between me and the stop I needed to get to.

Less than five minutes after the LRT near-miss, three SUVs tried to turn into the same lane at the same time. I don't think they hit each other but there was a short discussion between the drivers before they all left. I'd have had to stick around for that as well, because it would have blocked the route my bus uses.

Entry tags:

Why so Sanguine about this Layoff?

I've been pretty sanguine about the layoffs at my company this past week. I'm surprised how sanguine I've been about it. That makes me wonder, why am I so sanguine, this time? And yes, it's "this time" because this isn't the first layoff we've had this year. We had one in January that also impacted my team heavily. And while there were none in 2024, there were two in 2023 and one in 2022.

I think an obvious dimension of the answer for why I'm so sanguine is that, after all of these rounds of layoffs, I've become numb to it. Each one of them has hit my department, along with others. Each one has resulted in the dismissal of decent workers who were getting the job done, along with some who weren't. It's always when good people get whacked that I take it harder. This time there were more good people whacked, as a proportion of those dismissed, than last time. That tells me I should be taking it harder. And that's where the numbing effect comes in.

It's possible I'll be less sanguine about this layoff as take more time to think about it. The effects of January's layoff got worse and worse for weeks as flawed planning and execution became clearer and smart, capable people chose to quit because they lost faith in Management. (In the tech industry we call the latter brightsizing, a play on words against the euphemism "right-sizing" that Corporate America created to put a positive spin on the term "downsizing".) Within two weeks every seasoned manager in my department quit.

Indeed I already see reason for growing alarm over this layoff. This layoff hit the sales team hard. Cutting sales people is a pretty extreme thing in business. Sales people generate the revenue! I mean, cutting development staff has consequences, too, but those consequences often take 12-18 months to materialize. Cutting sales staff means a hit to the company's numbers next quarter.

And it's not like Management was just "trimming the fat". We were already running lean. When you make significant cuts to a team that's lean, you're not just trimming fat— or excess capacity. You're trimming muscle. You're dismissing good people who were doing work that counted. And the people left can't just "pick up the slack". They weren't slacking.

Management even acknowledges that they cut people doing real work. They've told us to think in the coming days and weeks about what we won't do because it's just not high priority enough. And while they've phrased that with empathetic words and intonation, and framed it to imply that we individual contributors have agency, it's starting to stink like 5 day old fish.... Why are they asking us to figure out what work gets cut? That should have been part of their strategy in planning the layoff!

Entry tags:

a blast from my past

Some of my earliest publications (mostly poetry) were in feminist magazines that I subscribed to in the 1980s-'90s and read cover to cover every month--for example, Sojourner, off our backs, and Bridges. It was always a thrill to be included in these journals.

Another magazine I submitted to at that time was Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics. It was a wonderful journal; I still have some back issues. I sent them a short fiction piece called "Women's Studies" for their Education issue; an excerpt from an unpublished novel, it was inspired by a life-changing women's studies class I took in my senior year of high school. I had a vague recollection that they had accepted it but for some reason didn't end up publishing it. To my surprise, last night I stumbled upon this page from Rutgers University; they hold Heresies' archives, which includes my unpublished story! The Scope and Contents note reads: "Fiction, 'Women's Studies.' Three versions of the manuscript, tracking sheet, and correspondence. The story was accepted for publication, but did not appear in the final issue." I'm weirdly delighted. (This reminds me that at some point I really should try and find a library to archive my papers.)

Entry tags:

crafts: spinning

a 3-ply yarn

Current Mood: ecstatic

HALLOWEEEN

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Entry tags:

cooking,
recipes

Culinary

This week's bread: the Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), turned out nicely if perhaps a little coarser than the recipe anticipates (medium oatmeal has been for some reason a bit hard to come by).

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari), v nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, texture seemed a bit off, possibly the dough could have been a bit slacker?

Today's lunch: the roasted Mediterranean vegetable thing - whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, red bell pepper, baby peppers, baby courgettes and aubergine (v good), served with couscous + raisins.

Current Mood: sad

I need to write about Cassandra again

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Current Mood: nauseated

ugh

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The music's callin'

What went before: Coon Cat Happy Hour arrives just as I'm finishing up the new Chapter-by-Chapter. Tomorrow, I've got some planning, and some writing to do.

Everybody stay safe; I'll see you tomorrow.

Cookie break!

Sunday. Sunny and warm.

Breakfast was -- what was breakfast? Ah! I know -- banana and grape "fruit salad" whole grain toast with cream cheese. Lunch will be a sweet potato in one form or another. I'm favoring stir-fried with onion and garlic at the moment, and maybe the chicken I have left over.

I finished filling out the attendees form for the book fair, and was rewarded with a page offering up an email address, in case I had questions, which of course I had questions, so I wrote. And received a lightning response. I am relieved to learn that there will be strong young persons standing by at the site to help schlepp. Also, I may be accepted by the event's official retailer to be one of those present for whom they will graciously do the arithmetic, make the change, run the cards, and so forth. So I may not need to get a Stripe/Square. OTOH, p'rhaps I should. For Science. Or something. Oh. For Preparedness. Often more to the point than Science.

So, bottom line: It looks like the book fair is a Go, and now I need to bug poor Jason at Baen for table toppers, and post cards and ... stuff.

In cat news, I brought Firefly with me into the bedroom last night, and she tried to sleep on my ankles, but eventually retired to the top of the dresser, which -- at least she bore me company. Tali and Rook both checked in during the night, and I think Tali actually spent, like, twenty minutes up against my knee before Duty, or crunchies, Called.

Somewhat surprisingly, it's Tali who's decided that she can take on copilot duties.

I have a couple more letters to write, then lunch, then it's time to write. I get to write a Fun! Scene! as a reward for having finished the Chapter-by-Chapter yesterday.

Oh! My birthday present to my self was a purple earring keeper, which is sparkly and very nice, but it needed something. Turns out the something it needed was Minerva. Thanks BaltiCon!

How's everybody doing today?

Today's blog post title is from Steve Miller, "Swingtown"

So, the way I grew up I'm actually shockingly good at deep cleaning

I'm even not bad at decluttering, so long as it's okay to literally throw everything out. (They'll sooner or later send another copy of that late bill, don't worry! And you can always order another birth certificate, probably.)

But I'm not so good at routine maintenance. Does anybody have any already set up daily/weekly/monthly/periodically checklists for various areas of the house that they can recommend?

City Mapper

There’s a transit app called City Mapper, that I used to use. (For values of “used to” ending very emphatically this morning.) It showed a variety of transit routes based on where you were, comparing them with each other and with biking and walking. It plans a route based on the schedule and then uses GPS to say how far away the next buses are coming. Useful for “this bus is crowded, I’ll take the next one in 5 minutes” or “the next one won’t be for half an hour.”

This morning I got up early to get to Somerville because there were things I wanted to do in the attic before meeting people at 11. Thanks to City Mapper, I just wasted an hour trying to make a bus connection that does not exist. The bus is not going through that neighborhood today. That’s fine, I hope it’s enjoying itself at the block party on the other end of town, but I want the transit app to know where it is. It is not fit for purpose.