serakit

So one of the neat things Luna Station Quarterly does is they do author interviews with people who've been in the latest issue for their blog. Mine is up today! You can read it here. I talked a bit more about the genesis of the story and the writing process, and offered a few hints at what might have happened after the story ended.

Hey all! I have another semipro publication to add to my list: my short story "Gentle Ways to Kill a Dragon" is in this month's issue of Luna Station Quarterly.

You can read it for free at the link; I will append content warnings for rape and suicide. This is one of the first stories I wrote once I decided to start taking my career seriously and it's had kind of a long journey to getting published. I'm happy it found a home and that people will see it, because I do rather like it. It was born from my distaste with stories where the character has the big epiphany and finally talks about their trauma and then they're just... fine and completely past it; I wanted to write one where that doesn't happen.

It's time for my semiweekly rant about Friday's episode of Left Right and Center!

Though it's a very specific, very narrow rant this time, since the whole focus was Afghanistan, which I don't know a ton about and therefore can't get too outraged about inaccuracies for. But oh how I hate Elizabeth Bruenig.

Why was I listening to it, you ask, since I've not listened to it because of her before? Well, the right panelist was Megan McArdle and I do like her. I don't often agree with her, but there's always a sense that she came to her positions via actually thinking about them and that she's aware that the reality of governing involves actually building towards something. And she's not shy about where she disagrees with current Republican leadership. (The best weeks are when Megan McArdle and Christine Emba are on together; they work at the same newspaper and play off each other really well.)

Anyway, it's just one very specific moment I want to complain about now: Bruenig using the Afghan Army not fighting the Taliban as an example of Afghanis not loving freedom like we do. Because if they loved freedom they'd have fought. When it was pointed out to her that the Taliban's victory was basically inevitable and they decided they wanted to live to see their families again, she responded in so many words "See, that's not wanting freedom."

And I just... how is this woman still considered left?

Ars Technica has an article about... germ theory denialists.

And yes, sure, looking at the content it seems like it should be the same people who shop at Goop and we've known about their existence for a while, but the Goop people tend to be more New Age. I've interacted with a decent number of the New Age laying-on-of-hands people (because going about in the Wiccan community you can't really avoid meeting these people), and in my experience most of them actually don't deny the existence of germs. They add toxins on, and have very bad theories about the cause of things not obviously caused by germs, like chronic illnesses and cancer, but while they'll go for "naturally antibiotic plants" over "Big Pharma," they admit germs exist. Because you can sell people fancy charged garlic right alongside the toxin cleanses, if people believe both are a thing, and you make more money.

But the outright promotion of germ theory denial as a major subculture is new.

I got a beginner's Linux system administration book out of the library!

...it includes this in the introduction: "We assume you are already familiar with Microsoft Windows servers at a power user level or better. We assume that you are familiar with the terms (and some concepts) necessary to run a small-to-medium-sized Windows Network."

So at that point you're no longer a beginner. Their excuse is essentially "But y'see, you're a beginner at Linux." I'm pretty sure the principles of running a network are not so different from OS to OS that you're starting completely from scratch when learning a new one. And they don't think you are either, because they're assuming you have a lot of transferable knowledge. So not a beginner.

Then again, it also opens the introduction by quoting Linus Torvalds' introductory newsgroup post about Linux from 1991 which apparently included the phrase "when men were men and wrote their own device drivers," which tells you something about their angle right there.

This book is likely headed back to the library and I will skim our shelves for a more sensible one and probably wind up ordering from elsewhere.

Getting Mathfriend to look at the shelf and pull down suspect cookbooks instead of just looking at suspect ones I select yields a great many cookbooks that are definitely suspect on closer examination-- like the Irish cuisine book that appears to have taken all of its recipes from Irish country clubs and therefore looks nothing like what I think of when I think of Irish food. "Roasted Chicken Breasts with Smoked Salmon and Avocado Sauce" isn't... Irish. And it's a bit more dinner-party than I'd ever make myself. The book on Irish pub food looks much better and there are a few recipes in it that are just waiting for me to get the appropriate cut in the meat share. But then that one was acquired by one of the previous occupants of my second apartment, deliberately, and she just never got around to using it and left it behind when she moved out. I liberated a number of cookbooks when we all moved out of that apartment.

In addition to the bizarre Irish country club book, books deaccessioned today include a homemade pickles book which hasn't got anything I can eat, a "party nuts" book (which isn't useful because however associated with praline pecans I might have become, I'm not actually a big nut person-- it's just benign_cremator really loves pecans and praline is good for occasions that don't warrant a full-on pecan pie), the book with the low-fat cottage cheese cheesecake, and a tea book which has very few recipes at all and is mostly a lengthy look at different types of tea.

I've wound up, in weeding, making the distinction of "books I acquired on purpose" and "books I did not acquire on purpose." Now, the ones that weren't on purpose are still usually ones I purchased, but they were at a library sale where books were a dollar and I was trying really hard to build my cookbook collection. Or I found them in a Little Free Library. Or liberated what was left behind after roommates moved out. The ones that were acquired on purpose I sought out deliberately, them or something like them. Sometimes acquisition was still serendipitous, but I was looking for Specific Thing when I bought them. Sentimental value is a third category-- I will likely never use Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, but it was my mother's, so I keep it.

And then you get books like Cooking with Mr. Latte, which is less a cookbook than Sex and the City with food instead of shoes (with Mr. Latte being the Mr. Big equivalent, though Mr. Latte is much better at... any sort of human interaction... than Big), but it amuses me.

Mathfriend is suspicious of my "make your own mass-produced treats like hostess cupcakes" book (he spent a while trying to figure out what "Chikn in a Biskit" was), and I'm less attached to it now that we've established I can eat a lot of the things I was trying to figure out how to replace (and in general as my ability to create my own sweets has improved, mass-produced sweets have gotten less attractive), but I'm still going to try it first. That was one of the most on-purpose books in my collection.

We did try the cheesecake recipe from Wintersweet. I don't know how it tastes yet because you have to chill them for eight hours and before I do that I want the baking dish cool enough that I'm not worried about it exploding from thermal stress because stupid pyrex. I did finally acquire cake flour and superfine sugar-- Wegman's came through-- so I can now begin to contemplate recipes from Baking by Flavor. And I lost my white whole wheat flour to pantry moths. This does not appear to have spread to anything else, the contaminated flour has been removed from the house entirely, and tomorrow I must away to TAGS for more plastic containers.

Meanwhile, what I am eating tonight? Ramen with frozen spinach and frozen homemade meatballs. This is why I have ramen and meatballs-- because when you've spent a few hours making a cheesecake who wants to go make dinner?

Hey, look, I'm in a charity anthology!

Totally Tubular Terrors: A Collection of 1980s Themed Horror Tales which you can purchase here on Amazon.

The genesis of this anthology is kind of a funny story. Remember the probably-a-scam anthology advertising its expensive workshops in its rejection letter that I was complaining about a while back? A bunch of us in some of the locally-based horror writers' organizations realized we had a bunch of stories, written by people who we all know can write well, all on one very specific theme.

So we decided we'd put together a self-published anthology (Jenna Moquin took charge of organizing the practical parts and we are all very grateful to her) and donate the proceeds to charity.

It is, as you can see from the title, 1980s themed horror stories. Mine is a particularly librarian nightmare, featuring a librarian walking through a burned-out library and having to deal with... well, you'll see what she has to deal with. Things haunt dead stacks, I'm just saying.

Left, Right, and Center has changed up the panel again and so I'm back to listening to it. And they've currently got Megan McArdle, who is my favorite of their regular rotation of Republicans-- she's the only one who can consistently make me go "Yes, that is a point someone should consider." I don't often agree with her proposed solutions to these things, but I think about the points she raises.

And I do listen to this show because I want the weekly reminder that there are a lot of opinions in the country, many of which are people who don't agree with me.

That said, the show is fast shaping up into one that generally does badly on science. Hardly unusual for journalism-- even actual science journalism often gets science very, very wrong-- but it is a scientific fact that vaccines do not make the risk profile of COVID into something similar to the flu, which the center panelist (the center!) claimed in so many words in this week's episode. The correct policy response to the risk profile of COVID is a reasonable thing to debate (I tend to support stronger restrictions than anyone on the panel does) and thinking we should just pay the costs as a society of straight-up returning to normal is... well, terrible, but it's a political opinion... but it's disingenuous to base that on false descriptions of the science, especially with delta. And saying just blanket saying vaccines make it safe for kids to return to school and people saying otherwise is just hysteria is also ignoring a number of objective scientific facts-- kids can't be vaccinated yet and we know even vaccinated people can spread delta, so how, exactly, do you think vaccines are a silver bullet here?

If you want to make an argument that the risks of lost school are worse than the risks of COVID, well, there've been a number of people making that argument-- some of them even using actual research into mitigation strategies--but you need to acknowledge the base-level science and start from the correct premises.

"We're not seeing a lot of deaths from delta" is also disingenuous, because deaths are a lagging indicator. If there's no spike in a couple of months, then you can say it's not causing a ton of increased deaths.

See, the problem with mixing fandoms is that I know of no one else who's aware enough of library science, country music, and filk traditions to appreciate that I have filked Toby Keith's "Drunk Americans" as "Drunk Librarians."

I actually did this a while ago; I was just reminded of it tonight-- and of the fact that despite having done it a while ago I haven't really shown anyone as yet.

(I'm not going to tack on my frustrated rant about the sorts of songs Toby Keith chooses to use his songwriting talent to create, but know that it exists.)

The actual purpose of a meat share is to introduce me to strange cuts of meat I have never experienced before.

In this particular instance, an "eye round roast." Now, I have never made any roast outside of a crock pot (and only a couple there), but I had trouble finding a good crock pot recipe for it and in any case I wanted it to retain enough structural integrity that I could easily slice it into sandwich meat. That meant making it in the oven. (The beef tongue, however, will be made in a crock pot. I am not quite brave enough to attempt something that finicky in an oven.)

I found a very simple, straightforward recipe online and then promptly substituted almost half the spice mix because of what we were out of. (And thyme and onion powder have now been added to the grocery list.) It was surprisingly easy-- rub olive oil on roast, rub spices on roast, stick in oven, remember to turn oven temp down after fifteen minutes. And then make the ritual obeisance to the smoke gods by standing under the smoke alarm waving a magazine until the oven temp has been turned down. (I didn't burn anything; our smoke alarm is just Like That-- but since I don't do a lot of roasts, I'm used to "frying things sets it off but using the oven is safe" and so didn't put the box fan in the window... and this turns out not to be the case if you're doing high-temp meat.)

It's maybe a little well done, but I think it came out pretty well. I am going to slice it up and freeze some of it as sandwich meat-- I want sandwich meat, and one of my rules for myself with the meat share was that if I was doing this that was all the meat I cooked; there would be no meat in the weekly grocery run. Since they don't have deli as an add-on, this means I have to get creative. And some of it is dinner tonight with mashed sweet potatoes.

My primary food source is still boxed processed things, but this is at least forcing me to periodically eat food that didn't come out of a box. And it tastes good.