serakit

I have a story up in the current issue of The Future Fire. Mine is "Make of Me a Comet" and it's about what the art scene does to a person when you're chasing fame too hard, and what it's like being the very ordinary and somewhat worried friend of someone whose passions are that driving.

Also they have had it illustrated. I did not realize "first illustrated story" was a milestone I was getting this year-- indeed I did not realize it was a milestone I wanted-- but I'm so delighted with the result! Cécile Matthey has done a magnificent job.

This one is free to read, no paywalls to be found, so go check it out!

Well, okay, I'm not sure con report is the best phrasing. But as another Mystery Hunt has drawn to a close, I wish to report back!

This was a GINORMOUS hunt. So many puzzles. So many rounds. SO MUCH PUZZLE. Honestly, I think we did very well to do as well as we did, particularly considering we were approximately twenty people smaller than last year.

I was all excited when it turned out to be book themed, because here we have headed into my subject area, and then it turned out that I did not need to actually use my subject knowledge at all and I was sad. And then I was indignant when we cured the Very Hungry Caterpillar, in the form of a Voracious Bookwyrm, by feeding it a berry. The whole problem in the book was that it was eating things like berries when it shouldn't have been; it felt better after eating one nice green leaf! I know, I know, they wanted the Newbery pun--they gave it a "New Berry".

Also there was a special guest appearance from Weird Al in one of the story videos, as the delegate from Recipeoria who was trying to sell us on a Calculated Whisk. (A whisk with a calculator attached to it to help you count the number of stirs.)

My main contribution, as in previous years, was on the not-puzzle puzzles: "Make a Eurovision pastiche video with an original song and send it in." "Be awake at 10AM to be the team's delegate to the multi-team Exquisite Corpses Discord event." "Assemble the permitted items for a Benedictine monk and then write and sing a Gregorian chant about a puzzle from a previous year's hunt and send that in." Since we're doing this from home, it becomes a game of "So how many strange objects can Kit just pull out of her closet for props?" (The Eurovision one featured my first use of a corset I bought at the last Arisia I attended that I have not gotten to wear since because the place I wore such things was... Arisia.)

I did not participate in the "make a Star Trek episode between 3 and 5 minutes" one, but the people who did came out with a hilarious video featuring a reference to classic (originating well before my time) Mystery Hunt running gag Escape From Zyzzlvaria. (Incidentally, after four years in the Hunt I am finally starting to just get the in-jokes-- things like Zyzzlvaria and the fact that you're meant to pronounce those airplane emojis and who the major names are in the puzzle construction community.)

That being said, I now have enough awareness of how puzzlehunts in general work and the basic types of puzzles that I can offer meaningful contributions occasionally. This is still novel enough that Mathfriend, also on the team, wound up receiving excited gchat messages to the effect of "I CONTRIBUTED something!" every time I made a contribution. My standard-issue Saturday night meltdown appears to be more connected to the brain work than the "being in a crowded room of other people on no sleep" aspect, since the Hunt being virtual had no effect on it; it still appeared right on schedule. I'm going to try to see if I can practice some elements of puzzling throughout the year, even if that winds up being "I do some crosswords." (I work in a library. There are a lot of things around to photocopy crosswords out of.)

I do have-- as I think a lot of people will-- some quibbles with the Hunt structure, namely the massive bottleneck at the beginning. One of the things about structuring a good hunt is that while the final meta should require a certain amount of completion, you should never have only one puzzle open unless it is the last puzzle. We lost quite a lot of time to being very, very stuck on an early meta, unable to progress further because until we unlocked it we would get no more puzzles. They went into what they were trying to accomplish with this at wrap-up, and I get what the deal was: while I've never been on a team that doesn't have "even if we don't pull off finishing we should at least see the whole thing" as a goal, smaller teams do not do this-- there were, apparently, people who never got out of the first round-- and they wanted to give them a nice intermediate goal, something achievable for them, with its own mini runaround. Which is a great idea! Except it creates this bottleneck for the larger teams. Everyone gets stuck on something, but if you happen to be the one who gets stuck on this one specific puzzle, you can't advance at all until you get unstuck... meanwhile anyone who got stuck on something else but not there has a lengthy period of time to get so far ahead you can never catch up. And depending on how thoroughly you get stuck, you might not be able to see the rest of the hunt at all.

But I'm also someone who couldn't enjoy Hunt at all without being on a large team. This is fun and awesome, but a large part of why it's fun and awesome is that with such a large team I can contribute to the things that fall into my very limited skillset without getting stuck on the things that fall outside of it... and this is also part of why I was unhappy about it, because a bunch of puzzles that looked like they fit into my limited skillset were finally unlocked right when I was going to bed, too exhausted to puzzle and needing to be up for the morning game of Exquisite Corpses, when on a hunt with a reasonable unlock mechanism I'd have gotten to do those puzzles.

Teammate won, which means they're running the next hunt. I don't know them at all but everyone seems REALLY EXCITED, so I will look forward to it! And hope that next year we're back at MIT. I am sort of doubtful about whether that will be reality, but we live in hope.

Proposed ecommerce law in our data-breachy world: you are not allowed to require customers store credit card information and you must make credit card storage both optional and opt-in-- none of this get to checkout and send a "by clicking continue you are consenting to have us store your credit card" nonsense.

At some point I really need to figure out whether Umair Haque is reliable or paranoid.

I mean, he's not communicating things in an effective way whether or not he's reliable-- "Omicron merging with MERS is inevitable and that will cause complete societal breakdowns" with great detail about how there will be mass graves in every town and borders will close forever and the fascists will take control is going to terrify people inclined to believe that and make anyone not inclined to believe that dismiss him as crazy out of hand-- but he hasn't yet talked about any subject where I've sifted through enough data on my own to have a decent perspective on the likelihood of his doomsday scenarios.

On thinking about this specific thing, I tend to think "take number of fatalities attached to COVID so far and assume a mortality rate of SARS or MERS" is lacking nuance-- as ineffective as our governments have been, something with that many fatalities among young healthy people would produce stronger containment responses, because you wouldn't have the "oh, it's only hitting old people and the immunocompromised; it's not killing anyone who matters" effect. And we've established that if you actually put effort in you can flatten the curve for even the things with a high R0-- and vaccinations have proven somewhat effective against death even with new variants, so I think even in a recombinant scenario while you'd have more deaths, you wouldn't have the same fatality rates as MERS, at least among the vaccinated.

But I keep stumbling across these doomsday essays that are much more doomy than anything anyone else is saying and then going "Oh, it's Umair Haque" and I still haven't worked out if he's visionary or alarmist.

I've been experimenting with Adventures with Chocolate, a book I very nearly gave away because everything in it calls for heavy cream-- but then we discovered that lactose works, and suddenly there was a whole world open to me again, and now I'm glad I kept it, because there are a ton of things I want to make in it.

I was going to make the Jaggery and White Chocolate Thyme Muffins, but while I bought panela (which is very close to jaggery but they actually have it in the grocery store) I failed to buy white chocolate or thyme, so that's going to have to wait.

Instead, Mathfriend came over and we made truffles. Just plain muscovado truffles to start with, to get us used to the process and what's involved. I had much darker chocolate than the recipe called for, so even though we cut it with what semisweet chocolate was on hand, they are *very* dark, darker than I prefer, to the point where I'd give them tobenign_cremator if they didn't have cream in them.

I was looking through the cookbook and kept finding truffle variations that interest me-- there's a tea-based truffle that I'm very interested in. Now I just need something sufficiently decaf to make into a truffle. (And then I remarked that it's possible I am going on a truffle kick and we're going to be making a bunch of truffles, to which Mathfriend deadpanned "Oh, how terrible.")

So a while back, siderea discovered the existence of r/collapse on Reddit and posted about it with the warning that it was a "memetic hazard": something with the potential to seriously screw up your brainspace if you read it too much. I stayed out of it for a while and then eventually poked my head in just to skim, whereupon I went "What? This is mostly similar to Sharon Astyk's Facebook feed, just somewhat more scattered and less useful, and I look at that every day... oh. Oh."

Sharon Astyk is a writer who I discovered when her essay on the importance of reading aloud whirred around the librarian community several years ago. When I realized she mostly wasn't writing much there I went looking around to see if she was writing somewhere else, and found that she has a lot of public posts on Facebook, both sharing useful articles and writing her own incisive essays. She's very realist and does not at all believe in pulling her punches, so the essays have gotten progressively more frightening about the state of the world... in large part because thus far she's been very on-point in terms of predicting things, which means I know I'm not looking at exaggerations.

And I've been at the very least skimming the headlines and often actually looking at a few of the articles she shares which taken all together put forth an apocalyptic picture. And I read her original essays.

I didn't make the connection between "memetic hazard" and "this stuff" until I actually went and peeked into r/collapse, at which point I realized that I've been looking at a whole bunch of stuff about the impending end of the world, which has indeed been having something of a deleterious effect on my mental health.

On sharing this revelation with Mathfriend it was suggested to me that I should perhaps not be looking at this Facebook feed every day.

So I found an essay called "Losing Friends to Twitter Brain?" and you should all go read it. I think it's a valuable way of defining your internet discussions. Because there's a certain brand of leftism that's very "OH YOU MUST FLOG YOURSELF" and it's very common in internet discussions. It's also not at all useful for any sort of practical anything. Essentially, the premise here is that you should not discuss on the internet anything that's not in concrete reality-- "anything you cannot poke with a stick." It notes that this doesn't prohibit political discourse. You can poke a letter writing campaign with a stick, after all. But it does force you to stop playing Oppression Olympics and the "You must perform marginalization to be allowed to have an opinion" game.

Incidentally, there's also something I found on Tumblr that I really appreciate which seems relevant here: "If your solution to some problem relies on 'If everyone would just…' then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."

It's one of the largest sources of "things you cannot poke with a stick." And I know this, because I used to try to get the anarchists and communists in my social circle to bring it down to stickness-- ie, elucidate for me how you were going to get from here to there, and what steps are you going to take to make sure it doesn't turn into the USSR. When I didn't get accused of being a bourgeois or lectured about how the USSR was just fine until America ruined it, the explanation always had some sort of "everyone just" in there, and any suggestion that everyone will not just was taken as a sign I was a tool of the capitalists.

(Or as I put it more succinctly a while ago: "If your revolution does not have a date, time, and budget attached to it, it's not a revolution," though this was a lot more entertaining when nobody had done that and I was just rolling my eyes at the "NO gradual change; ONLY socialist revolution" Tumblr children.)

Anytime a social justice thing starts trying to merge multiple axes of oppression into one already-existing word, you're treading in a danger zone.

Specifically, this book that I am currently reading is defining "whiteness" as "encompassing, not just what we mean when we say racially white, but also all that is heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class."

And... no. Words mean things. Words meaning things is the essence of communication. PoC can be heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class. White people can be none of those things and still have racial privilege. If you want a different word that means all those things, by all means, coin one.

But then, if you did that, you'd have to actually engage with the complexity of the thing and not just say that all of the ways the institution of the library is unjust come down to race. Which, by the by, I'm not denying that libraries often have problems with systemic racism! The profession is incredibly white, ALA keeps doing explicitly racist things, and we've done nothing as a profession to grapple with the history of segregation in libraries. (And while I come down very strongly on the intellectual freedom side, I also don't deny that there are people on that side, making those arguments loudly, who seem more interested in promoting unfortunate material than ensuring a broad spectrum of availability-- I just don't think the presence of those people automatically discredits intellectual freedom as a cause.) But if you want to discuss the things that are not race alongside the things that are race, you can't do it by just going "Ah, yes, everything is whiteness." That only works if you only want to discuss race. (Which is a perfectly valid thing to do in a book, but if you're trying to use that definition of whiteness, it's not what you're doing.)

Am I the only one who sees stuff like this and thinks it's the same road that gave us political lesbians and the radfems? Once you start trying to say that all oppression is caused by one oppression, you stop being able to discuss it in a way that acknowledges all the complexities. You stop being able to acknowledge the complexities at all.

I'd far rather see more specific language used, and more specific language is also less likely to alienate people who you want on your side. Someone reading this book who isn't already steeping in social justice discussion is going to see that and immediately dismiss anything that challenges them as more of the same. It's not a Discourse book; it's aimed at the kind of people who have never really considered that the profession might have a racism problem. Which means you can't write from an assumption that they're going to look at that stuff the way I look at it and go "Yup, Discourse is redefining words again" and then engage with the actual argument. They aren't; they're just going to set the book down. (Am I engaging with the actual argument? Yes, but I mostly agree with the actual argument, I don't find it in any way groundbreaking, new, or anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before, and the assumption that most people are keeping up with Discourse Talk is one of my buttons. Also I've just realized the political lesbians connection and I want y'all's thoughts on the subject.)

I've been thinking about awards lately, and I've come upon this question: what is the equivalent of the EGOT for speculative fiction?

If you're not familiar with the acronym, EGOT stands for "Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony," which has been achieved by just 16 people and is considered sort of the pinnacle of achievement in the music world, to have achieved at least one of each.

Obviously you start with the Hugos and the Nebulas, but there's sort of a question of what comes after that, because in SF you have the two extremely prestigious awards and then sort of a circle of slightly lower ones that are all on the same axis. And you're definitely not going to be able to do it without including some that are specific to science fiction or fantasy, because there just aren't that many awards open to both genres.

Contenders include: Locus awards, World Fantasy awards, Philip K. Dick awards, Clarke awards, Dragon awards (I know, I know, but the sheer size of the con has to be considered, and it's very clearly gotten out of the Puppies' control at this point), Campbell Memorial (name change upcoming, so whatever it becomes), and the Sturgeon award.

I have no problem considering awards for "published in a specific country" but awards that require you to live in or be from a specific country are out (this why we are not considering the Aurealis), as is anything limited to members of a particular minority group.

Maybe it's all of them and we just have a larger group? That would offset that you can accumulate several awards for the same novel in speculative fiction.

You know, I don't think I am a cake person. Cookies, sure. Brownies are great. Pies are magnificent. But I think there's a reason that I gravitate away from cakes when baking on my own. They're among the easiest thing to bake; as often as I'm exhausted when baking, you'd think I'd make them more often. But no; when I want to not put much effort in, I go for a very simple and unadorned brownie recipe.

What instigated a cake, then? I wanted to try out Baking by Flavor, and Mathfriend absolutely loves chocolate cake and lives with people who aren't super into it. (And he expresses preferences so rarely that I try to go along with it whenever he does.) Thus we made Heirloom Chocolate Cake, chosen from the many recipes in the "chocolate" section purely on the basis of requiring me to go hunt down the fewest ingredients.

The recipe is well-written. The instructions are clear and straightforward, although we did halve it because it was for a two-layer cake and I have only one cake pan. It's... fine? It's cake. We didn't leave it in quite long enough and so it collapsed a little in the center, but it's perfectly serviceable cake.

However, I think this does confirm once and for all that I am Not A Cake Person (though I do still want to try one of the ones like Mud Cake that has cream in it and see what that does to the texture).  Therefore we should try one of the brownie or pie or sticky bun recipes; there are a lot of tasty-looking recipes in there. Some of them are on the complicated side, but it's because they're complicated things, not because the cookbook is making them more complicated than they need to be.

I got what was allegedly precooked chunks of ham but it didn't look cooked and it didn't have the "ready to eat" label the hot dogs come with, so absent other ideas I just baked those in the oven. Next time-- assuming there is a next time; I think these might be a seasonal special-- I'm going to try to come up with a pie recipe before defrosting them.

It's too bad I can't have eggs and have yet to find a way to make custard I can eat, or I'd be really interested in For the Love of Pie's "Hay Custard Pie in a Chocolate Crust" for the sheer unusualness of the thing.