serakit

A con report! Which is the only one I've had since last year's Mystery Hunt report. Depending on COVID numbers I may get myself a really good mask for Readercon and make sure I step outside every time I take it off, whether for breaks or to eat or drink, because oh how I miss conventions.

Mystery Hunt was in person this year, although only something like a quarter of the participants chose to attend in person. One consequence of the pandemic is much better support for remote teams, and much better support on our team for having a lot of remote solvers even when there's a core on campus.

This was also my first Mystery Hunt where I had neither Friday nor the following Tuesday off (usually I have both), which I will remedy next year because I want to be there for the beginning and also Hunt is exhausting-- though normally I have more time to recover because normally the coin is found on Sunday, HQ closes, and continued solving becomes somewhat more desultory and I start paying a lot less attention. Then again, if I had to miss the beginning, this was probably one of the better years for it. (More on that later.) 

On a personal level, this was one of my less active hunts. I went into it already fairly drained and most of the early puzzles did not match my skills and background knowledge, although I did contribute words gained from a list of cluephrases. I very much wish Zamboni had been unlocked earlier when I still had brain-- having encyclopedic knowledge of the Zoombinis on which the puzzle was based, I had very solid ideas of where to start just at a glance; I just didn't have enough ability to think to follow through. But since the team skipped solving it altogether as low priority for progress, Mathfriend and I will have fun solving it together once the Hunt archive for the year goes live.

Which brings me to something I had been vaguely aware of but have now had brought home to me: only puzzlehunting once a year and not having a lot of familiarity with the basic forms of puzzlehunts limits my ability to contribute unless something crashes into my subject knowledge. There are a lot of basic forms puzzles can take and I don't know most of them-- but I was able to get a lot from Zamboni just by glancing at it, because I know every inch of that game. If I want to get better I need to practice more frequently, to at least learn the general forms. (Would I have gotten stuck on extraction if I'd had enough brain to do the puzzle? Absolutely, 100%. But I could have gotten much farther on it than I generally can on my own.)

Which brings me to the Hunt itself. I have... issues with this year's structure, which judging by the comments on Puzzlvaria were shared by a lot of the participants. The first and most glaring is that nothing seems to have been learned from last year, when the gating of a huge swath of the Hunt behind the Fruitaround resulted in quite a lot of time with nothing else open for many teams, leaving everyone staring at a puzzle they couldn't quite get past. In general, any kind of gating is a bad thing, because any team might get stuck on any given puzzle. Unless a team is close to completing the entire hunt, there should always be a variety of open puzzles. A lot of people were unhappy with Fruitaround and it was much discussed afterwards. This year the problem seemed to have increased rather than decreased, as there were several successive gates and in general things were slow to unlock... and the beginning was incredibly difficult. In general, you want to increase your difficulty as the hunt goes on, and you want to put your most interesting puzzles and round structures in the midgame.

They seem to have put the interesting round structures (and also the scavenger hunt, which... why?) at the end, much later than they should be. To give you an idea of how badly off their estimations of the difficulty level were, HQ was scheduled to close at 6 on Sunday. With the traditional "or until the coin is found, whichever is later," but the expectation is that someone will win the hunt by midday Sunday, some of the other top teams will have the chance to finish, and then HQ will close. "Whichever is the later" isn't really... supposed to come into play. Hunt was finished at 7:23 AM on Monday. Granted, if MIT had permitted people to stay all night as in days of old, this would likely have been a few hours earlier (since while solving can continue remotely while campus is closed, final runaround can't), but that's still way longer than it should take.

And I say that as part of a team that's fairly large and is usually in the higher echelons of the leaderboard. There is a trend in Hunt that's been noticeable even in the few years I've been solving, that it tends to increase in size with each year, landing you in a position where the team sizes have to rise to keep up, which seriously disadvantages the smaller student teams.... who are the ones actually associated with MIT. Puzzlehunting as a genre is getting larger and more complex as more people get into it and run things from it, which is fine, but I really do think Mystery Hunt needs a decrease in size and complexity to keep it fun and interesting.

Okay, this is unlikely to ever actually become a handed-down family recipe because I'm unlikely to ever be in a position to have children.

But Mathfriend observed a couple of nights ago that it's interesting how quickly we've codified what we were making for dinner into an "our thing."

Because this was very much not set out as a "let's cook a thing and it will be special and wonderful." This started out with "There's something called 'jowl bacon' in the monthly add-on specials section of the meat share" and he immediately jumped to "That's delicious! I mean, I've never had it, but the cheek is always a very good cut on any animal." So despite an annoyingly high price-per-pound (my add-on choices tend to fall in the "cheaper because scraps and offal" category), I bought some for us to play with.

What we produced with it was largely his doing and very improvised based on what was on hand or could be easily purchased, because that was during the era in which I had absolutely zero spare spoons for planning ahead. The bacon, fried potatoes, avocado, scallions, and a little bit of lime juice squeezed over it, all wrapped in a tortilla. It was very good and I decided we should do it again. So we did. And then we did it a third time.

Every few meat share deliveries, I will say "it's been too long since we've done this" and get another one, and it's become the big special meal we do together. (While there's generally a substantial delay between adding one to my share and the share delivery, and sometimes they're sold out, I generally try to add one anytime something very good or very bad happens.)

And after he observed he'd been making it up as he went that first time, I wound up thinking about it, "is this how heirloom recipes get started? Two people messing around in a kitchen and deciding something is good and we're going to keep doing it?"

I'm actually getting rid of one this time.

I had high hopes for Baking by Flavor when I bought it, and I really wanted to like it, and then I realized that we have intended to bake things from it probably four or five times now and never quite managed it in large part because of how annoyingly the recipes are written. There's a lot of things that are separate recipes of the "now add one recipe of X, page whatever" that really shouldn't be separate recipes and a lot of odd steps, and I've never actually managed following one all the way through enough to figure out what I'd need to bake it.

On looking at the table of contents we realized it has no recipes that are really unique to it; they're all for fairly common standard things that I almost certainly have better-written elsewhere in the collection (at the very least in How to Bake Everything), so this one goes away.

Paring down the collection is going slowly, but it's going.

I'm not sure if being able to completely screw up the recipe and still have the pie turn out fine is a sign that I'm good enough at baking to recover from doing stupid things or further evidence that baking is significantly more forgiving of screwups than commonly believed.

See, the reason I do not halve recipes is that I tend to forget halfway through that I'm halving them, especially when I do things like bribe R to keep me company while baking with the promise of pie and therefore get distracted by chatting. I didn't want to make two pies again, so I attempted halving the crust recipe. And this is how I wound up with a pie crust that has half the flour and the normal amount of everything else, which I did not realize until I was rolling it out and trying to figure out why the texture was weird.

I kept rolling it out and used it anyway, figuring it would probably still be fine, because this was also a deep-dish pie made with whole cranberries instead of chopped ones and more cranberries than the recipe actually called for, and no nuts, meaning that it was going to take way longer than the recipe suggested to cook all the way through. (I think the recipe would be optimistic even if I were doing this with a normal pie, honestly.) Plenty of time for the crust to bake. The pie's a bit gooey in the center, but it still tastes perfectly fine and it's got a pretty sugar crust on top. The crust itself is a bit more like shortbread and very rich, but also still tastes fine.

And I need to clean the floor of the oven later because by now I really should know better than to bake anything involving whole cranberries without putting a baking sheet under it, but that's unrelated.

The SESTA and FOSTA people are having another go, this time called the Kids Online Safety Act. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining it much better than I could, but essentially it's a censorship bill requiring all websites that might possibly be used by minors to remove any information that could be construed as promoting self-harm, substance use disorder, or eating disorders.

And we all know who's enforcing those things, and what it will be used to do. Never give the government any power you're not okay with the other side having when they're in power. (I'm not even okay with my side having this power, honestly. I don't trust anyone with that power. I frequently spend time thinking "would I still find this old and outdated if I didn't hate the viewpoint being espoused? Is it old and outdated even though it's saying things I agree with?" about every nonfiction book passing through my hands. Most people who are not librarians don't do that. Heck, too many people who are librarians don't do that, at least on social justice issues.)

To make the censorship worse, it allows/requires quite sweeping identity verification for websites so they can ensure their content isn't being looked at by minors, with a plan to make a hard-wired government-run identity verification system to allow anyone to use any internet beyond the parentally-controlled government one.

This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but even with a reasonable court we wouldn't want to have the immense loss of existing internet that we'd have while waiting for it to wind its way through the courts, and the current court can't actually be relied upon to make the correct ruling here.

Incidentally, it was unanimously passed out of the committee and one of the people on that committee was Markey, so we MA people can't rely on the idea that our senators have better sense. Call your damn senators.

I dislike the entire concept of Dear Evan Hansen and refuse to watch it or listen to most of it, but the song "Anybody Have a Map?" is brilliant and I love it.

I want the version of this musical where Connor survives his suicide attempt but people still assume the letter was written by him and that there's a secret close friendship between Connor and Evan, and thus Evan finds himself thrust into Connor's orbit so he has friends supporting him in this troubled time. They agree to collude in pretending there is one because Evan likes the attention/focus this gets him and Connor wants them to let him out of the psych hospital and thinks this will happen faster if he has evidence of a supportive friendship. Somewhere along the way the pretend friendship turns to real friendship.

Like, seriously, that musical I would probably enjoy.

I love The Great Gatsby. I have always loved it, right from when I first read it in the seventh grade, in a way I don't think any of the other twelve-year-olds reading it alongside me did. At the time, I think, it was the language more than anything, because I certainly didn't really understand the story. But Fitzgerald was a master at actual sentence-level prose, and the romance of it all caught at me even without totally understanding it. Because it is a romance, in the end, even if it ends with everyone unhappy; it's just that it's really a romance between Nick and Gatsby.

I love Bright Lights, Big City because it is the same way-- I always used to explain that book as "It's Jay McInerney trying to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. The remarkable thing is that he succeeds at it." It captures a lot of the same feelings and the sentence-level prose is similarly magnificent. (I discovered the existence of Bright Lights, Big City from CSI: NY, where it's used as a thematic element in the episode "American Dreamers." Stella describes it as the story of life in the New York fast lane, and when Mac asks how it ends, she responds, "He gets out, before the city kills him.")

Which means I am absolutely glorying in this moment in which Gatsby is now out of copyright and everyone has decided to dig into the queer retellings, because there is so much there to play with and so many of the people playing with it are such brilliant writers. I don't have words for the way half these stories make me feel... which I know, I am a writer, I should be able to explain it, but as previously mentioned, all my formal creative writing training is plays. My stories are incredibly dialogue-heavy as a result. I generally describe things only as much as I need to for the audience to understand it. Everything is dialogue. So I don't have good description words for the feeling that goes with these stories (although as always there is a burning desire to be able to write like that someday), but they're so beautiful they make my heart hurt half the time, and even with reading them from the library and only buying the ones I want to keep close I'm going to wind up with a shelf full of Gatsby books.

See, the reason I have to actually try to read the books before adding them to the donate pile is that, particularly among the accidentally acquired books, I absolutely cannot tell whether they'll be worth my time or not without doing so. This is somewhat less true for fiction, or at least I have fewer compunctions about being like "I don't actually want to read this" about fiction, but nonfiction? This is the second book I've started recently thinking "I'll get a chapter or two in, become aware that it's really bad, and it'll go into the donate pile without much further effort" that has ended in "Okay actually this book is awesome and I'm going to keep it forever."

(This does sometimes go the other way; I thought Interviews with Southern Writers would be interesting and instead was so terribly boring that I did in fact only get a couple of chapters in before getting rid of it.)

This reaction is why I insist on reading them a bit first and also why my weeding project is going so slowly. But I own some magnificent gems. I still haven't read much in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry because it seems like it's going to be a quite challenging book and I want to devote my full attention to it-- it's about the process of taking the clarity you achieve in meditation back into the rest of your life, since most people can't go live in ascetic meditation forever, with a lot of interviews with people very devoted to their practices who had to find a balance. (I know that description kind of makes it sound like Eat Pray Love's marketing copy, but this book is an actual serious examination of the idea of balance.)

And now it's The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on their Art and Situation. It was published in 1980. The cover looks like it was published in 1980. None of these people are contemporary anymore and the only ones I've heard of are Joan Didion and Alice Walker. But the book seems to have tapped into a time-transcendant constant, because the essays themselves reflect on so many of the things I fear about my writing. In particular, there's a set of excerpts from the diaries of Michele Murray as she goes from being young and very hopeful about her career to trying to write around her children (and the expectations of a wife at the time) to trying very hard to get a book out before her death from cancer in 1974 that strike very close to my heart, given the family history that gives me high odds of dying young and the things that have prevented me from having much of a writing career so far.

I mean, yes, eight stories published in various places-- and it will be nine, there's another with a contract signed that will be out in 2024; it's called "A Bier of Bloody Roses" and I cannot wait for you all to see it--plus a podcast is more than a lot of people, even a lot of writers, get. (And if Nick Mamatas is to be believed, more than a number of Clarion graduates, even.) Certainly more than I imagined when I started out. But I want to do more than that. I want to be more than that.

And I appreciate knowing that there was another writer out there who spent a lot of time thinking and diarizing about these same things.

Apparently I need a new long-term plan for how to have financial success from writing, because Patreon has just laid off its entire in-house cybersecurity team and I'm not so much as creating an account on a site that doesn't grasp the concept of why the cybersecurity team is not where you cut costs.

And sure, with the upcoming new job I'm significantly less dependent on the notion of financial success from writing (there's no longer an element of rather desperate "get me away from this place!" involved), but I'd like to have it regardless, and "you liked my fanfic, purchase my original work" is less consistent than "you liked my fanfic, join my Patreon." Sure, there's Ko-Fi, but that's just a skin over PayPal, and therefore still shows you the real name of whoever has the account when money is actually sent... and PayPal does not permit pseudonymous money transfer, so I'd have to tolerate my legal name showing up to anyone who wants to send money. If I were willing to do that I wouldn't be bothering with the pen name.

I am annoyed. (My best option here is that public backlash is so strong Patreon reverses course on this, but that's not the most likely thing in the world; companies tend to get stubborn when they realize they have done something extremely stupid.)

Okay, so i know The Third Person is all kinds of praised and stuff and the world really, really needs more portrayals of plurals as something other than crazy-needs-to-be-locked up, but I'm almost halfway through and all I can think reading it is that her therapist is a terrible therapist.

And this is autobiographical, not fiction!