The scene: benign_cremator is instituting a temporary stopgap measure on my doorknob to stop it trapping me inside. (The doorknob is constructed with rivets so he can't just tighten the spring to fix it.)
Me: (jokingly) "Are you reversing the polarity?"
Him: "Yes, actually."
Me: "Wait, seriously?"
Him: "Well, not of the neutron flow, but in general, yes."
Me: (jokingly) "Are you reversing the polarity?"
Him: "Yes, actually."
Me: "Wait, seriously?"
Him: "Well, not of the neutron flow, but in general, yes."
The Grand Ballad Tradition
Jul. 20th, 2022 11:54 pmAnother pointer to something neat: I've discovered Medlife Crisis, because my Nebula subscription continues to be worth it (seriously-- this is the one streaming service I'm actually paying for and it's basically like if informational YouTube were curated for the most interesting people and eliminated commercials), and in their discussion of cult doctor followings and the problems thereof, they reference this magnificent song by Henrik Widegren about Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon who lied about his revolutionary trachea replacement technique which slowly killed several people and when some doctors finally said "hey this is killing people" they were questioned as to how they got hold of the medical records and threatened with firing. (As befits a song about fatal trachea transplants there some ick bits in there and of course it's talking about death.)
Go listen to the song, and also check out Medlife Crisis-- they exist on YouTube as well, so if you don't have a Nebula subscription you can still find them.
Go listen to the song, and also check out Medlife Crisis-- they exist on YouTube as well, so if you don't have a Nebula subscription you can still find them.
Songs for the Time
Jul. 6th, 2022 12:10 pmAs we come past Fourth of July and into this season of chaos, Lucy Wainwright Roche's song Fifth of July feels more relevant than ever. I encourage you to click through and give it a listen!
I have a story in the latest issue of Cossmass Infinities. It's called "Love Letters" and it is an epistolary meditation on suicide and romance: the story is the protagonist's letters to her boyfriend after she responded to his proposal by fleeing the planet to go wandering around the solar system. It's a very quiet, thoughtful story, since she's trying to find herself and we're seeing the world through her eyes.
The digital issue is only $3.99 and you don't just get my story; you get a bunch of other amazing stories too!
(Also, while I know SFWA changed their criteria, I spent too long around the old criteria for "it's my third pro sale" to not have a certain magic to it.)
The digital issue is only $3.99 and you don't just get my story; you get a bunch of other amazing stories too!
(Also, while I know SFWA changed their criteria, I spent too long around the old criteria for "it's my third pro sale" to not have a certain magic to it.)
I have often said I do not like musicians, as such. I like individual songs, and in most cases I don't like the majority of the musician's catalog, just one or two songs. There are, of course, exceptions-- Heather Dale, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Taylor Swift... but they're the minority.
This is especially true of that breed of modern country that's all about Trucks'n'Girls'n'God'nBeer. It has produced the occasional song I like and a lot of songs that all sound exactly the same-- they're the songs that are about "And we drink alcohol and go to parties and make out."
What prompted this observation? Kenny Chesney has once again managed to produce a song that speaks for me: the magnificent "Everyone She Knows," which captures perfectly the life stage I'm presently in.
By all rights, Kenny Chesney should be one of the Beer Anthem People, based on a lot of the subject matter of his songs. He sings a lot about hitting the beach with a girl and getting drunk and has hits like "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems" and "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." But he started in the nineties and was singing these songs well before the Trucks'n'etc. music, so while he has done some Beer Anthem-ing, he often manages to avoid it even when he's singing on the usual Beer Anthem subjects.
He's not someone who necessarily falls into the "I like this musician" exception, since I have not heard many of his songs beyond the ones that were radio hits. And he was not the first one to resonate with me enough to notice the name attached to the song. (That honor goes to Faith Hill, whose music I blasted from my very first boom box in elementary school.) But he was certainly formative, in a way a lot of musicians are not. He managed to produce songs to delight and fascinate when I was young-- "Anything But Mine" and "Who You'd Be Today" were two of the first songs I purchased for the iPod shuffle I was given for my fourteenth birthday-- and then more recently he's had "Better Boat" and the previously mentioned "Everyone She Knows"... and "Better Boat" walked me through some absolutely hellish mental health episodes, because oh look the big manly country star is singing about talking about your mental struggles with your friends so I should remember that I can also do that.
So, yeah, go check out "Everyone She Knows"; it's pretty awesome.
This is especially true of that breed of modern country that's all about Trucks'n'Girls'n'God'nBeer. It has produced the occasional song I like and a lot of songs that all sound exactly the same-- they're the songs that are about "And we drink alcohol and go to parties and make out."
What prompted this observation? Kenny Chesney has once again managed to produce a song that speaks for me: the magnificent "Everyone She Knows," which captures perfectly the life stage I'm presently in.
By all rights, Kenny Chesney should be one of the Beer Anthem People, based on a lot of the subject matter of his songs. He sings a lot about hitting the beach with a girl and getting drunk and has hits like "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems" and "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." But he started in the nineties and was singing these songs well before the Trucks'n'etc. music, so while he has done some Beer Anthem-ing, he often manages to avoid it even when he's singing on the usual Beer Anthem subjects.
He's not someone who necessarily falls into the "I like this musician" exception, since I have not heard many of his songs beyond the ones that were radio hits. And he was not the first one to resonate with me enough to notice the name attached to the song. (That honor goes to Faith Hill, whose music I blasted from my very first boom box in elementary school.) But he was certainly formative, in a way a lot of musicians are not. He managed to produce songs to delight and fascinate when I was young-- "Anything But Mine" and "Who You'd Be Today" were two of the first songs I purchased for the iPod shuffle I was given for my fourteenth birthday-- and then more recently he's had "Better Boat" and the previously mentioned "Everyone She Knows"... and "Better Boat" walked me through some absolutely hellish mental health episodes, because oh look the big manly country star is singing about talking about your mental struggles with your friends so I should remember that I can also do that.
So, yeah, go check out "Everyone She Knows"; it's pretty awesome.
So many people going on about voting doesn't help and this is all the Democrats' fault. And.. voting is not sufficent, no; it is also necessary to get involved in other ways, whether that's going out to protest or sending money to an activism organization.
But otherwise we're back to what I've said before: if you don't vote, and they do, all you get is the other side voting and the other side in power. And our system is a lot of checks and balances; Democrats having a marginal majority does not mean they can magically do whatever they want. People saying "Biden should just issue an executive order dissolving the Supreme Court" are... fuzzy... on how the government actually works. Democrats aren't perfect but they're better than the Republicans, and for all the "both sides!" stuff (which is not any better a look on leftists than "neutrals," by the way), Democrats would not have done this, and they wouldn't have permitted it if they'd been in a position to stop it.
It's easier to burn something down than build something up. All the Republicans have to do is cause chaos. They need many fewer seats to do that, and they've been good at not having internecine warfare long enough to get just enough people to cause chaos. Democrats need a lot more of the government to do anything useful, because they need to build things up. I saw someone say that Biden should have packed the court and respond to being asked "how?" with "I DON'T CARE HOW." Which tells me a couple of things-- you're okay with living in a dictatorship as long as it's your dictatorship, and that you have absolutely no idea how government works.
"We're not donating to Democrats until legislation happens" is also another way to ensure legislation never happens, by the by. If they have no money to campaign then the Republicans get elected.
Going on about overthrowing the government is fun (if you're a certain type of person), but your revolution isn't a revolution until it's got a budget, a date, and actionable steps attached to it. Now, I think violent revolution is a bad idea-- there are specific historical reasons the American Revolution resulted in a functioning government that don't apply to most violent revolutions; we really need to teach the actual history of the French Revolution past the storming of the Bastille-- but if you're not going out and planning out exactly how you're going to do it, you're not doing anything useful, and you are doing active harm by promoting fatalism and convincing people there's no point in activism because they're not doing violent revolution. (And most people? Are not down with violent revolution.)
Do you really want a civil war? Do you? Have you thought about what that would actually mean? Likely death of anyone whose disability requires advanced medical care, for one. Quite a lot of other death, most of it of innocent civilians. Lots of rape, murder, looting, because those are things that happen in war zones, and your having a righteous cause will not prevent awful people from participating. And in the end, unless you can get a majority of people to agree your government is legitimate, probably a huge terrorism problem no matter who wins, and you're going to have to be brutally repressive if you want to hang on to power unless you have a majority. Which you won't.
Stop fantasizing about how you think the world should be and work with the world you have.
(Not that any of these people are going to listen, if they see this, because if they were the kind of people who were willing to listen to this speech they wouldn't be calling for civil war in the first place.)
But otherwise we're back to what I've said before: if you don't vote, and they do, all you get is the other side voting and the other side in power. And our system is a lot of checks and balances; Democrats having a marginal majority does not mean they can magically do whatever they want. People saying "Biden should just issue an executive order dissolving the Supreme Court" are... fuzzy... on how the government actually works. Democrats aren't perfect but they're better than the Republicans, and for all the "both sides!" stuff (which is not any better a look on leftists than "neutrals," by the way), Democrats would not have done this, and they wouldn't have permitted it if they'd been in a position to stop it.
It's easier to burn something down than build something up. All the Republicans have to do is cause chaos. They need many fewer seats to do that, and they've been good at not having internecine warfare long enough to get just enough people to cause chaos. Democrats need a lot more of the government to do anything useful, because they need to build things up. I saw someone say that Biden should have packed the court and respond to being asked "how?" with "I DON'T CARE HOW." Which tells me a couple of things-- you're okay with living in a dictatorship as long as it's your dictatorship, and that you have absolutely no idea how government works.
"We're not donating to Democrats until legislation happens" is also another way to ensure legislation never happens, by the by. If they have no money to campaign then the Republicans get elected.
Going on about overthrowing the government is fun (if you're a certain type of person), but your revolution isn't a revolution until it's got a budget, a date, and actionable steps attached to it. Now, I think violent revolution is a bad idea-- there are specific historical reasons the American Revolution resulted in a functioning government that don't apply to most violent revolutions; we really need to teach the actual history of the French Revolution past the storming of the Bastille-- but if you're not going out and planning out exactly how you're going to do it, you're not doing anything useful, and you are doing active harm by promoting fatalism and convincing people there's no point in activism because they're not doing violent revolution. (And most people? Are not down with violent revolution.)
Do you really want a civil war? Do you? Have you thought about what that would actually mean? Likely death of anyone whose disability requires advanced medical care, for one. Quite a lot of other death, most of it of innocent civilians. Lots of rape, murder, looting, because those are things that happen in war zones, and your having a righteous cause will not prevent awful people from participating. And in the end, unless you can get a majority of people to agree your government is legitimate, probably a huge terrorism problem no matter who wins, and you're going to have to be brutally repressive if you want to hang on to power unless you have a majority. Which you won't.
Stop fantasizing about how you think the world should be and work with the world you have.
(Not that any of these people are going to listen, if they see this, because if they were the kind of people who were willing to listen to this speech they wouldn't be calling for civil war in the first place.)
Diagnosis Collapse
Jun. 20th, 2022 03:52 pmSo there are very good reasons to collapse the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis into the autism spectrum as a whole-- but the "Asperger was a Nazi!" thing tends to ignore that the word "autism" was coined by someone who totally would have been a Nazi if he'd lived a bit longer: Eugen Bleuler.
Really everyone involved with early autism research was varying degrees of terrible. So the people suggesting that the history of the word autism is so much better than the history of Asperger's come across as a little disingenuous, because it's not like Bleuler was any better than Asperger; he just didn't have the opportunity to participate in a genocide.
But Bleuler died in 1939 and his Wikipedia page's sole of mention any of this is in a single-sentence aside which compares his attitude towards his patients to Freud's (Bleuler, as far as I can tell, was significantly more active about his eugenicism than Freud was), so everyone's just like "Yup, autism! Not coined by Nazis as at all, not like Asperger Syndrome!"
Really everyone involved with early autism research was varying degrees of terrible. So the people suggesting that the history of the word autism is so much better than the history of Asperger's come across as a little disingenuous, because it's not like Bleuler was any better than Asperger; he just didn't have the opportunity to participate in a genocide.
But Bleuler died in 1939 and his Wikipedia page's sole of mention any of this is in a single-sentence aside which compares his attitude towards his patients to Freud's (Bleuler, as far as I can tell, was significantly more active about his eugenicism than Freud was), so everyone's just like "Yup, autism! Not coined by Nazis as at all, not like Asperger Syndrome!"
"Dancers Stand in Turnout"
Jun. 20th, 2022 02:51 amSo there's this tumblr post getting batted around the internet that uses permanent changes doing ballet makes on your body and no one batting an eye at "permanently changing your body is why you're supposed to start young" as metaphors for people kicking up a fuss about trans kids wanting to make permanent alterations to their body. Which is all very important trans messaging, but I am distracted by the idea that dancers stand in turnout naturally explicitly because dance makes permanent changes to their body.
I did not particularly like dance but I did start young-- I took ballet once a week from the earliest child classes (I do not actually remember beginning) to the year before I would have been old enough for the pointe classes, whereupon I stopped because tights were a sensory nightmare. But I only did it once a week and I stopped in middle school....
But do people who haven't danced really stand with their feet parallel to one another with their knees facing straight ahead of them? Because I find that position exceedingly uncomfortable, and I wouldn't have thought I'd done enough dance to actually affect my skeleton.
I did not particularly like dance but I did start young-- I took ballet once a week from the earliest child classes (I do not actually remember beginning) to the year before I would have been old enough for the pointe classes, whereupon I stopped because tights were a sensory nightmare. But I only did it once a week and I stopped in middle school....
But do people who haven't danced really stand with their feet parallel to one another with their knees facing straight ahead of them? Because I find that position exceedingly uncomfortable, and I wouldn't have thought I'd done enough dance to actually affect my skeleton.
Further experiments with Lemonade with Zest: Mathfriend came over and we made Honey Rose Lemonade-- lemonade made with honey simple syrup and some rosewater added. It needed a bit more rosewater than the recipe called for, but it was delicious. (And oh look, we finally did something with that bottle of rosewater I bought at the Market Basket.)
I highly recommend this cookbook, by the way. Mathfriend and I are probably going to spend the summer trying all the recipes in turn. Or at least the ones that don't call for things like raw egg whites. It has joined the ranks of the annotated cookbooks, and I'm sure it will become more heavily annotated as time goes on. (Someday I'll live somewhere where other people attempt to use my cookbooks and are puzzled by the messy cursive all over the interesting recipes.)
We also made what is rapidly becoming our go-to for when there is bacon in the house: oven bacon layered in a tortilla with potatoes and avocado, with lime juice squeezed over the top. It is SO GOOD.
I highly recommend this cookbook, by the way. Mathfriend and I are probably going to spend the summer trying all the recipes in turn. Or at least the ones that don't call for things like raw egg whites. It has joined the ranks of the annotated cookbooks, and I'm sure it will become more heavily annotated as time goes on. (Someday I'll live somewhere where other people attempt to use my cookbooks and are puzzled by the messy cursive all over the interesting recipes.)
We also made what is rapidly becoming our go-to for when there is bacon in the house: oven bacon layered in a tortilla with potatoes and avocado, with lime juice squeezed over the top. It is SO GOOD.
Music Theory
Jun. 13th, 2022 08:08 pmMy music theory background is haphazard at best, but given that it was also fairly extensive, I can do a good imitation of someone who has a firm grasp on music theory: I had beginning piano, intermediate violin, a school music class focused on writing and recording songs (in which I was not one of the favorites and so not given a ton of attention but I still absorbed some of it), some time in a very casual chorus... and all of this before high school.
The problem, of course, being that most of these things lasted for only a few years, and the only one to take into account where I was, individually, was piano. (Which was also the first one, and thus not in a position to cover the gaps of the others, and done when I was quite young and therefore did not go into a ton of detail.)
And so I've wound up in a situation where I can more or less describe what I'm missing but not come up with the keywords to research it. Namely the relationship of fretted instruments to melody. This was what kind of what tripped up my brief flirtation with the guitar-- it did not start with an explanation of the relationship of the frets to the sheet music, and with no grasp on "how to play a scale on this instrument" I completely lost my footing.
But in general, I can handle sheet music. I might handle it with tab, depending on the instrument (part of why I can do so much more on the mandolin than the harp is that harps are not really susceptible to tablature), but sheet music has a notation that corresponds to a particular note and length-- though admittedly note length, for me, is very much a function of practice; I do not have a great innate grasp of... anything that should normally involve a metronome.
Fretted instruments are not melody instruments and I do not have a good grasp on what they are. Because all of my sheet music is for the melody, and then there are names of chords written above the sheet music. I do not have sheet music that *contains* chords.
In mandolin class, we were taught chords and given chords but the way we learned the relationship of the chords to the singing was auditory-- we all played the songs as a large group, and sure, you had the chords written down in front of you next to the words, but the way you learned the real rhythm of when you were supposed to play each one was by listening to the group. So I have a bunch of songs that I can play-and-sing fine on the mandolin because I learned them in college, in the group, and a bunch of songs that I can't figure out how to do chords that sound right for and the melody sounds incredibly weird especially when paired with singing.
(I have also yet to figure out how to modulate the volume of my mandolin so I can sing audibly over the chords-- I learned to play this instrument in a group of thirty people who were all playing and singing at the top of their lungs.)
I feel like there has to be a written resource on this somewhere if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to be googling!
The problem, of course, being that most of these things lasted for only a few years, and the only one to take into account where I was, individually, was piano. (Which was also the first one, and thus not in a position to cover the gaps of the others, and done when I was quite young and therefore did not go into a ton of detail.)
And so I've wound up in a situation where I can more or less describe what I'm missing but not come up with the keywords to research it. Namely the relationship of fretted instruments to melody. This was what kind of what tripped up my brief flirtation with the guitar-- it did not start with an explanation of the relationship of the frets to the sheet music, and with no grasp on "how to play a scale on this instrument" I completely lost my footing.
But in general, I can handle sheet music. I might handle it with tab, depending on the instrument (part of why I can do so much more on the mandolin than the harp is that harps are not really susceptible to tablature), but sheet music has a notation that corresponds to a particular note and length-- though admittedly note length, for me, is very much a function of practice; I do not have a great innate grasp of... anything that should normally involve a metronome.
Fretted instruments are not melody instruments and I do not have a good grasp on what they are. Because all of my sheet music is for the melody, and then there are names of chords written above the sheet music. I do not have sheet music that *contains* chords.
In mandolin class, we were taught chords and given chords but the way we learned the relationship of the chords to the singing was auditory-- we all played the songs as a large group, and sure, you had the chords written down in front of you next to the words, but the way you learned the real rhythm of when you were supposed to play each one was by listening to the group. So I have a bunch of songs that I can play-and-sing fine on the mandolin because I learned them in college, in the group, and a bunch of songs that I can't figure out how to do chords that sound right for and the melody sounds incredibly weird especially when paired with singing.
(I have also yet to figure out how to modulate the volume of my mandolin so I can sing audibly over the chords-- I learned to play this instrument in a group of thirty people who were all playing and singing at the top of their lungs.)
I feel like there has to be a written resource on this somewhere if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to be googling!
Fretted Instruments
Jun. 2nd, 2022 08:47 pmThe thing about playing a fretted instrument is that you have to maintain your fingertip calluses. I am getting back into mine, which means I will have a week or so before I can seriously attempt practicing anything-- at the moment it's mostly "pull it out and fiddle with a few verses of things, put it away."
I'm going to try doing it more consistently for a longer period this time, because playing mandolin is professionally useful to me. Well, playing "an instrument" is professionally useful although I do think mandolin is probably more useful than harp. (Even my little travel harp is not a storytime instrument, although it's probably good for fascinating a kid once or twice.) Certainly I can get up to speed faster on the mandolin, given that I did that long enough and consistently enough that I don't lose much even over the long periods of time without-- it's just about getting back a small amount of muscle memory. (And at some point I'll try sheet music instead of tab.)
I don't have to be a brilliant mandolin player; I just need to hit a point where I can play some standard-issue nursery songs on it at speed, and then I will have a tiebreaker next time I'm up for a children's librarian job-- because the two things that are often tiebreakers are musical instrument and bilingualism, and getting to a usable level of mandolin is easier than getting to a usable level of French, although I am off and on working on that one too.
And I remain amused that this class I took on a whim mostly because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jducoeur had a mandolin available for me to borrow has now become the most immediately significant of all my college classes-- because even without learning much fingering or many details of melody (they were thirty-person-strong classes of mixed ability level--and in the case of one of the broader music classes, mixed instruments--so there was a level past which we did not get), the fact that I was consistently playing it for years meant it got into my mind and fingers in such a way that even with these long lapses I'm never starting from a place where I have to work to make it sound nice; it's all focus on technique. Or at least it will be once I get my calluses back.
I'm going to try doing it more consistently for a longer period this time, because playing mandolin is professionally useful to me. Well, playing "an instrument" is professionally useful although I do think mandolin is probably more useful than harp. (Even my little travel harp is not a storytime instrument, although it's probably good for fascinating a kid once or twice.) Certainly I can get up to speed faster on the mandolin, given that I did that long enough and consistently enough that I don't lose much even over the long periods of time without-- it's just about getting back a small amount of muscle memory. (And at some point I'll try sheet music instead of tab.)
I don't have to be a brilliant mandolin player; I just need to hit a point where I can play some standard-issue nursery songs on it at speed, and then I will have a tiebreaker next time I'm up for a children's librarian job-- because the two things that are often tiebreakers are musical instrument and bilingualism, and getting to a usable level of mandolin is easier than getting to a usable level of French, although I am off and on working on that one too.
And I remain amused that this class I took on a whim mostly because
jducoeur had a mandolin available for me to borrow has now become the most immediately significant of all my college classes-- because even without learning much fingering or many details of melody (they were thirty-person-strong classes of mixed ability level--and in the case of one of the broader music classes, mixed instruments--so there was a level past which we did not get), the fact that I was consistently playing it for years meant it got into my mind and fingers in such a way that even with these long lapses I'm never starting from a place where I have to work to make it sound nice; it's all focus on technique. Or at least it will be once I get my calluses back.You know, I grasp the concept of "we share food and utilities." This makes sense as a co-op.
Even panicky about whether I will find an apartment (yes, I know it's still on the early side, but last time I was doing this there were way more apartments by this time than there currently are), I am extremely wary of "we all contribute to a household bank account and that covers basically everything"-- like, they specify gas, toiletries, therapy co-pays, and medications as some of the things it covers, and all I can think is that this is not accessible, because it does not work the second you get someone in there who has ridiculous medical costs (like me) or ridiculous gasoline costs (also like me).
Will I probably inquire further? Yes, because the apartment market is shaping up to be tight. Will I have a lot of questions about how their finances work? Also yes.
And of course I am ever bearing in mind that even in a tight market there are some rabbit holes not worth going down and I will watch their answers to my questions accordingly.
Even panicky about whether I will find an apartment (yes, I know it's still on the early side, but last time I was doing this there were way more apartments by this time than there currently are), I am extremely wary of "we all contribute to a household bank account and that covers basically everything"-- like, they specify gas, toiletries, therapy co-pays, and medications as some of the things it covers, and all I can think is that this is not accessible, because it does not work the second you get someone in there who has ridiculous medical costs (like me) or ridiculous gasoline costs (also like me).
Will I probably inquire further? Yes, because the apartment market is shaping up to be tight. Will I have a lot of questions about how their finances work? Also yes.
And of course I am ever bearing in mind that even in a tight market there are some rabbit holes not worth going down and I will watch their answers to my questions accordingly.
Fanfic Plots
May. 28th, 2022 09:41 amI feel like a Firefly AU where Simon was the one sent to the Academy and River was the one to rescue him should be a really, really obvious one-- you've got plenty of opportunity for hurt/comfort with Kaylee and Simon, you've got opportunities to explore what River would have been like without the psychic-torture thing, you've got opportunities to explore Simon and River's dynamic from a new angle... there are so many things you can do with this!
And yet NO ONE seems to have written it!
(I am not going to write this one-- I can't write Firefly and make the group dynamics work; the characters don't live in my head in that way.)
And yet NO ONE seems to have written it!
(I am not going to write this one-- I can't write Firefly and make the group dynamics work; the characters don't live in my head in that way.)
Dracula Daily: Seward
May. 26th, 2022 09:43 amSo today's actual letter was just the equivalent of Arthur sending a thumbs-up emoji agreeing to the proposed "let's go out drinking" plan, but I want to address something I'm seeing a lot of in discussions of the book.
This book is from the nineteenth century. There's a lot of casual racism and misogyny and not just in Seward's entry. It's been there the whole time.
There is also a lot that would have had very different valence at the time: Mina planning to actively assist her husband with his soliciting and learning shorthand and typing actually makes her fairly up-to-date and modern for the time, for example.
So why are people suddenly fixated on Seward as the root of all evil? He... asked his patient about his delusions rather more than is good for the patient and immediately realizes it and goes "I shouldn't have done that." And for the time, his method was actually super progressive, since he's running an asylum where you deal with the patients by talking to them and they're fed regularly and kept clean. (Remember this book was published just ten years after Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Madhouse and they hadn't made a ton of progress in that time.) Yeah, it's not great that this is what was considered progressive at the time, but all the characters are of the time they were written in, and it makes zero sense to be like "Yeah, Quincey P Morris!" when being rich in Texas at the time probably meant someone did a lot of terrible things to your workers to get that way while going "Seward is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU!"
Yes, I've seen a few people who are just like "All of these characters are terrible people" at which point I'm like "Well no one's forcing you to read along" and those people are at least consistent in their worldviews, but it is ridiculous to be singling Seward out when you're going on about how xenophobic Jonathan Harker is adorable and wonderful or probably-a-robber-baron Quincey P. Morris is amazing and funny.
It is a novel that was written in the 1800s. Literary analysis of the times is one thing, but if you're just going to apply modern standards to a century-old book and go on about how terrible the characters are, why are you reading it at all?
(Oh, right, the same reason all the purity-culture warriors do this; someone might be having Insufficiently Woke Fun and that MUST BE STOPPED.)
This book is from the nineteenth century. There's a lot of casual racism and misogyny and not just in Seward's entry. It's been there the whole time.
There is also a lot that would have had very different valence at the time: Mina planning to actively assist her husband with his soliciting and learning shorthand and typing actually makes her fairly up-to-date and modern for the time, for example.
So why are people suddenly fixated on Seward as the root of all evil? He... asked his patient about his delusions rather more than is good for the patient and immediately realizes it and goes "I shouldn't have done that." And for the time, his method was actually super progressive, since he's running an asylum where you deal with the patients by talking to them and they're fed regularly and kept clean. (Remember this book was published just ten years after Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Madhouse and they hadn't made a ton of progress in that time.) Yeah, it's not great that this is what was considered progressive at the time, but all the characters are of the time they were written in, and it makes zero sense to be like "Yeah, Quincey P Morris!" when being rich in Texas at the time probably meant someone did a lot of terrible things to your workers to get that way while going "Seward is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU!"
Yes, I've seen a few people who are just like "All of these characters are terrible people" at which point I'm like "Well no one's forcing you to read along" and those people are at least consistent in their worldviews, but it is ridiculous to be singling Seward out when you're going on about how xenophobic Jonathan Harker is adorable and wonderful or probably-a-robber-baron Quincey P. Morris is amazing and funny.
It is a novel that was written in the 1800s. Literary analysis of the times is one thing, but if you're just going to apply modern standards to a century-old book and go on about how terrible the characters are, why are you reading it at all?
(Oh, right, the same reason all the purity-culture warriors do this; someone might be having Insufficiently Woke Fun and that MUST BE STOPPED.)
Dracula Daily: Texans and also RENFIELD
May. 25th, 2022 07:12 amLucy is proto-poly. So now here's another AU which lots of Tumblr seems to want (and that I would love), in which the main cast is entirely a polycule.
Also Lucy is super sweet and kind and adorable; it is a crime the way she gets portrayed in adaptations. She's got three suitors and they're all perfect gentlemen with her. So far this book actually portrays its women really well, between Lucy and Mina being best friends despite having such very different lives, and Lucy being a little flighty but still portrayed as very kind and good, and the suitors all taking their rejection quite gracefully and affirming their desire to stay friends... the relationships in this book are so sweet! (Also people were pointing out that even when writing about her three proposals in the same day to Mina, she still manages to be low-key sapphic with Mina, which is also true. I want the everyone-is-in-a-polycule version of this story where you have Lucy's husband and her two boyfriends and her girlfriend and then her girlfriend's husband.)
Anyway, Quincey P. Morris is very Texan.
Very, very Texan. Bram Stoker wants to be absolutely sure you know he is TEXAN. I know of no Americans who would be fooled. (I'm not even certain I believe the possibly-apocryphal story of someone getting stuck translating, at Pennsic, between the Texan gate volunteer and the English-from-England-received-pronunciation new arrival because their accents were so different as to be nigh-incomprehensible to each other, and that allegedly really happened.) One wonders if Bram Stoker had ever actually met any Texans, and if so whether they were messing with him.
(My own interaction with accents consists of the common neurodivergent thing colloquially known as "parrot ear." After I spend a certain length of time interacting with a specific regional accent or dialect-- particularly dialect-- I will just start adopting bits of it unconsciously when interacting with people who use it, which is fine right up until I run into someone who uses a dialect that's historically looked down on, and then they assume I'm making fun of them and the Extremely Woke crowd gets mad about cultural appropriation.)
And we finally meet Renfield, although very briefly and with no indication that he's relevant beyond the fact that he's the one Seward is talking about and this diary entry was considered relevant. Seward manages to actually be fairly profound about selfish versus selfless and how that alters the danger for the people around you. Usually it's observed heroically-- "Hero is driven by a GREAT CAUSE and thus can ignore physical privations!"-- but here we see it presented as a potential negative, in that Renfield's alleged delusions (which, as we shall see, are not delusions) will make him dangerous to people around him if he doesn't have any sense of caution borne of concern for his own safety.
By the by, how exactly does one keep a diary in phonograph?
Also I love that all the suitors are apparently good friends and Fought In The War together and are doing nothing so silly as fighting over a girl who has a perfect right to make her own opinions. (But also the poly energy continues. Like seriously, so much poly energy here.)
The number of people who have posted something to the effect of getting Jonathan Harker and Jonathan Sims confused is hilarious to me. And yes, I am probably going to write several versions of Jonathan Sims and Jonathan Harker overlapping.
I do grow concerned about our good friend Jonathan Harker, though. It has been some time since we've had a message from him, and his last messages were rather ominous.
Also Lucy is super sweet and kind and adorable; it is a crime the way she gets portrayed in adaptations. She's got three suitors and they're all perfect gentlemen with her. So far this book actually portrays its women really well, between Lucy and Mina being best friends despite having such very different lives, and Lucy being a little flighty but still portrayed as very kind and good, and the suitors all taking their rejection quite gracefully and affirming their desire to stay friends... the relationships in this book are so sweet! (Also people were pointing out that even when writing about her three proposals in the same day to Mina, she still manages to be low-key sapphic with Mina, which is also true. I want the everyone-is-in-a-polycule version of this story where you have Lucy's husband and her two boyfriends and her girlfriend and then her girlfriend's husband.)
Anyway, Quincey P. Morris is very Texan.
Very, very Texan. Bram Stoker wants to be absolutely sure you know he is TEXAN. I know of no Americans who would be fooled. (I'm not even certain I believe the possibly-apocryphal story of someone getting stuck translating, at Pennsic, between the Texan gate volunteer and the English-from-England-received-pronunciation new arrival because their accents were so different as to be nigh-incomprehensible to each other, and that allegedly really happened.) One wonders if Bram Stoker had ever actually met any Texans, and if so whether they were messing with him.
(My own interaction with accents consists of the common neurodivergent thing colloquially known as "parrot ear." After I spend a certain length of time interacting with a specific regional accent or dialect-- particularly dialect-- I will just start adopting bits of it unconsciously when interacting with people who use it, which is fine right up until I run into someone who uses a dialect that's historically looked down on, and then they assume I'm making fun of them and the Extremely Woke crowd gets mad about cultural appropriation.)
And we finally meet Renfield, although very briefly and with no indication that he's relevant beyond the fact that he's the one Seward is talking about and this diary entry was considered relevant. Seward manages to actually be fairly profound about selfish versus selfless and how that alters the danger for the people around you. Usually it's observed heroically-- "Hero is driven by a GREAT CAUSE and thus can ignore physical privations!"-- but here we see it presented as a potential negative, in that Renfield's alleged delusions (which, as we shall see, are not delusions) will make him dangerous to people around him if he doesn't have any sense of caution borne of concern for his own safety.
By the by, how exactly does one keep a diary in phonograph?
Also I love that all the suitors are apparently good friends and Fought In The War together and are doing nothing so silly as fighting over a girl who has a perfect right to make her own opinions. (But also the poly energy continues. Like seriously, so much poly energy here.)
The number of people who have posted something to the effect of getting Jonathan Harker and Jonathan Sims confused is hilarious to me. And yes, I am probably going to write several versions of Jonathan Sims and Jonathan Harker overlapping.
I do grow concerned about our good friend Jonathan Harker, though. It has been some time since we've had a message from him, and his last messages were rather ominous.
Dress Shopping
May. 24th, 2022 09:06 pmSo I need a dress that is:
1. Appropriate for outdoors in DC in August.
2. Appropriate for a fancy wedding
3. Covers enough skin to be tick-protective. (DC has the Lone Star tick.)
Anyone have suggestions as to where to obtain this bit of ephemera?
(I already have, if I can find them, knee-high purple boots worn to a previous fancy wedding, so that's a beginning.)
1. Appropriate for outdoors in DC in August.
2. Appropriate for a fancy wedding
3. Covers enough skin to be tick-protective. (DC has the Lone Star tick.)
Anyone have suggestions as to where to obtain this bit of ephemera?
(I already have, if I can find them, knee-high purple boots worn to a previous fancy wedding, so that's a beginning.)
In Which Our Heroine Fails at Danishes
May. 17th, 2022 09:21 pmWe failed at making danishes and therefore made blintzes instead. Also Mathfiend is my favorite human and Wintersweet is my favorite cookbook.
This started last week with Mathfiend suggesting that we could make more interesting things if we planned far enough ahead that I could pick specific things up at the grocery store so we weren't bound to pantry staples. (Which, not coincidentally, decreases the randomness of what I bring home from the grocery store and increases the likelihood I will eat something regularly in the coming week; my resistance to wasting anything we've cooked together or that he's cooked for me tends to overcome the executive function problems I attach to meals.) I was flipping through How to Bake Everything when we were having this conversation, and landed on "Let's make cheese danishes!" (Sidenote: my internet osmosis is such that even though I do not watch and do not like Big Bang Theory, I cannot think of cheese danishes without thinking of this genuinely funny clip of Sheldon and Amy playing Counterfactuals.)
I did not read the recipe all the way through before purchasing the ingredients. This was a mistake.
Because as we went to start on it today we realized that it has several steps that are "Do thing. Chill for half an hour," and a rising step-- and I do not think failing to anticipate a lengthy rise on a dough with no yeast it in it was unreasonable of me. Mathfiend's weekly visit tends to last several hours, but not that long, especially when on a day when we didn't jump right into baking. (Yes, I did look at the estimated time. What I did not realize was that the estimated time for making danishes starts from the assumption that you have already made "1 Recipe Danish Dough," which is itself a prolonged multi-hour process. Once you've done that the actual danishes aren't unreasonable, and I do think time estimates in cookbooks should call out explicitly that it's going to be longer if you're starting from the very beginning if it calls for one of some other recipe in the book.)
That plan having failed, we turned to my cookbooks for a plan B that would include most or all of what I'd bought (cream cheese, ricotta, and a lemon) while also being modifiable to my food issues. Finding nothing in How to Bake Everything, I turned to my beloved standby Wintersweet, which has a cheese chapter.
By percentage, Wintersweet probably has the highest proportion of recipes I either make regularly or realistically see myself trying out of all my cookbooks-- especially impressive when you consider that half the chapters are focused around ingredients I straight-up can't have. Almost every recipe in it that I can eat (or can modify) is on the to-make list. It's not the one I use most often-- it's mostly a strictly focused dessert cookbook with a few forays into fondue-- but it is far and away my favorite. And it came through for me once again in the form of two recipes. First, a cheese danish recipe that is considerably less ridiculous than How to Bake Everything's but still takes some time, which we will be making next week since it was getting late by the time we found it, using the cream cheese. And a Ricotta Blintz recipe using the ricotta. Since you top it with whatever fruit jelly I can't have, we made vegan lemon curd to go on top, which is getting less tapioca starch next time but still tastes good even if it is very thick. (Mathfiend: "It's a little too sweet for me, which means you're probably going to love it." He was not wrong.)
This also took longer than it was meant to, mainly because I had a dizziness flare-- my first in a while; it's been a really long time since we had to modify our plans around that. This meant that while I managed to mix the crepe batter, we could not do the intended plan of me making the crepes while he made the filling and lemon curd, and he wound up making all of it. (Have I mentioned Mathfiend is my favorite human?) They are delicious and now I have breakfast for a few days.
I did manage to participate somewhat in cleanup, which is good, because this recipe uses a lot of dishes and I don't have a dishwasher. (Desired things in next apartment: larger kitchen with more flat surfaces and a dishwasher.)
This started last week with Mathfiend suggesting that we could make more interesting things if we planned far enough ahead that I could pick specific things up at the grocery store so we weren't bound to pantry staples. (Which, not coincidentally, decreases the randomness of what I bring home from the grocery store and increases the likelihood I will eat something regularly in the coming week; my resistance to wasting anything we've cooked together or that he's cooked for me tends to overcome the executive function problems I attach to meals.) I was flipping through How to Bake Everything when we were having this conversation, and landed on "Let's make cheese danishes!" (Sidenote: my internet osmosis is such that even though I do not watch and do not like Big Bang Theory, I cannot think of cheese danishes without thinking of this genuinely funny clip of Sheldon and Amy playing Counterfactuals.)
I did not read the recipe all the way through before purchasing the ingredients. This was a mistake.
Because as we went to start on it today we realized that it has several steps that are "Do thing. Chill for half an hour," and a rising step-- and I do not think failing to anticipate a lengthy rise on a dough with no yeast it in it was unreasonable of me. Mathfiend's weekly visit tends to last several hours, but not that long, especially when on a day when we didn't jump right into baking. (Yes, I did look at the estimated time. What I did not realize was that the estimated time for making danishes starts from the assumption that you have already made "1 Recipe Danish Dough," which is itself a prolonged multi-hour process. Once you've done that the actual danishes aren't unreasonable, and I do think time estimates in cookbooks should call out explicitly that it's going to be longer if you're starting from the very beginning if it calls for one of some other recipe in the book.)
That plan having failed, we turned to my cookbooks for a plan B that would include most or all of what I'd bought (cream cheese, ricotta, and a lemon) while also being modifiable to my food issues. Finding nothing in How to Bake Everything, I turned to my beloved standby Wintersweet, which has a cheese chapter.
By percentage, Wintersweet probably has the highest proportion of recipes I either make regularly or realistically see myself trying out of all my cookbooks-- especially impressive when you consider that half the chapters are focused around ingredients I straight-up can't have. Almost every recipe in it that I can eat (or can modify) is on the to-make list. It's not the one I use most often-- it's mostly a strictly focused dessert cookbook with a few forays into fondue-- but it is far and away my favorite. And it came through for me once again in the form of two recipes. First, a cheese danish recipe that is considerably less ridiculous than How to Bake Everything's but still takes some time, which we will be making next week since it was getting late by the time we found it, using the cream cheese. And a Ricotta Blintz recipe using the ricotta. Since you top it with whatever fruit jelly I can't have, we made vegan lemon curd to go on top, which is getting less tapioca starch next time but still tastes good even if it is very thick. (Mathfiend: "It's a little too sweet for me, which means you're probably going to love it." He was not wrong.)
This also took longer than it was meant to, mainly because I had a dizziness flare-- my first in a while; it's been a really long time since we had to modify our plans around that. This meant that while I managed to mix the crepe batter, we could not do the intended plan of me making the crepes while he made the filling and lemon curd, and he wound up making all of it. (Have I mentioned Mathfiend is my favorite human?) They are delicious and now I have breakfast for a few days.
I did manage to participate somewhat in cleanup, which is good, because this recipe uses a lot of dishes and I don't have a dishwasher. (Desired things in next apartment: larger kitchen with more flat surfaces and a dishwasher.)
Dracula Daily: Homoeroticism
May. 16th, 2022 03:07 pmOr just eroticism in general, really. There's the brides coming on to him-- and it's adorable that he's like "I am committed to writing everything down accurately but if I die and Mina finds this journal she might be hurt that I found the creepy vampire women attractive while I was half-asleep"; Jonathan is so in love with Mina-- there's Dracula being all "he is MINE," there's the fact that Dracula apparently undressed him and tucked him into bed...
I know people talk about this having been written because of Oscar Wilde, but the first time I read this I was a sheltered asexual middle schooler and just missed... apparently very large chunks of this book, because I do not remember the sexuality at all. (As a librarian aside, when we talk about how kids won't notice certain things in texts if they don't already know about them, this is what we mean. It all went right over my head so thoroughly I never noticed it. And a bit younger I might have put it down because I couldn't follow the surface plot. Yes, there are books that are flat-out not appropriate for kids, but for the stuff that some kids and not others might be ready for? They'll put it down if they're not.) (Also this can happen with adults as well. When Snow Lane was in all the mock Newbery discussions, a lot of people were like "it's a very gradual reveal just how messed up her family is" and then I read it and was like "No, it is blatant from the first page how messed up her family is; how are you all missing this?" But the early parts where the narration is still somewhat nonchalant about it all went completely over people's heads.)
The Count declaring "He is MINE" is going to fuel a thousand fanfics... though I've been checking AO3 since this started, and it's been a week and a half of increasingly ridiculous things, and there's not been that much of an increase in fic. Maybe we'll get more as the book gets more intense? (Yes, I know, fic takes time-- my little oneshot crossver cannot be finished and posted until we've hit the end of the Transylvania trip. But still.)
Also I think there's an excellent trans fanfic in the way Jonathan keeps trying to commune with the past ladies of the castle. "Oh, here I sit, where the maidens sat in the long ago" complete with very vivid imaginings of what it would have been like to be one of the maidens in the long ago, and his role-- at least in this part of the book-- is one that is played by the ingenue in most Gothics, right down to actually swooning into Dracula's arms in today's episode. Someone give me trans Jonathan fic!
I know people talk about this having been written because of Oscar Wilde, but the first time I read this I was a sheltered asexual middle schooler and just missed... apparently very large chunks of this book, because I do not remember the sexuality at all. (As a librarian aside, when we talk about how kids won't notice certain things in texts if they don't already know about them, this is what we mean. It all went right over my head so thoroughly I never noticed it. And a bit younger I might have put it down because I couldn't follow the surface plot. Yes, there are books that are flat-out not appropriate for kids, but for the stuff that some kids and not others might be ready for? They'll put it down if they're not.) (Also this can happen with adults as well. When Snow Lane was in all the mock Newbery discussions, a lot of people were like "it's a very gradual reveal just how messed up her family is" and then I read it and was like "No, it is blatant from the first page how messed up her family is; how are you all missing this?" But the early parts where the narration is still somewhat nonchalant about it all went completely over people's heads.)
The Count declaring "He is MINE" is going to fuel a thousand fanfics... though I've been checking AO3 since this started, and it's been a week and a half of increasingly ridiculous things, and there's not been that much of an increase in fic. Maybe we'll get more as the book gets more intense? (Yes, I know, fic takes time-- my little oneshot crossver cannot be finished and posted until we've hit the end of the Transylvania trip. But still.)
Also I think there's an excellent trans fanfic in the way Jonathan keeps trying to commune with the past ladies of the castle. "Oh, here I sit, where the maidens sat in the long ago" complete with very vivid imaginings of what it would have been like to be one of the maidens in the long ago, and his role-- at least in this part of the book-- is one that is played by the ingenue in most Gothics, right down to actually swooning into Dracula's arms in today's episode. Someone give me trans Jonathan fic!
Look, an Anthology!
May. 15th, 2022 05:56 pmI'm in an anthology! Forest Avenue Press put out a call for speculative stories by disabled writers, and I offered up what is possibly one of the most New England stories I've ever written, a dark fantasy about the things that lurk in cranberry bogs... and what happens when you start noticing that there are things lurking in the cranberry bogs. What happens when you ice skate on a cranberry bog with things lurking in it? (People I've mentioned this story to think I'm making that part up, but cranberry bog ice skating is in fact a thing people really do. I think it's less common now as cranberry farmers have gotten more concerned about liability-- but I did it as a child.)
The anthology doesn't have a title or a cover yet, but the table of contents has been announced here. Even just the story titles draw me in and makes me want to read everyone else's contributions, so I will definitely keep you updated as things progress.
The anthology doesn't have a title or a cover yet, but the table of contents has been announced here. Even just the story titles draw me in and makes me want to read everyone else's contributions, so I will definitely keep you updated as things progress.
