This post covers the rest of last year since November 30th, and all of 2024 so far.
BooksFinished listening to
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on audiobook. Michael Jayston, the narrator, was very good. The level of textually confirmed queerness was higher than I expected. Possibly I should have had higher expectations, considering the Cambridge Five, but this is an extremely popular mainstream thriller written in 1974, so my expectations were low in that regard.
Listened to Martha Wells'
System Collapse on audiobook. Very happy with how she's developing the theme of creativity as resistance.
Finished reading Victoria Goddard's
The Hands of the Emperor and immediately started
The Return of Fitzroy Angursell. Re
Hands of the Emperor, I liked it very much and also have a lot of nits to pick and larger objections. The plot runs along the author's id, and my id doesn't run on the same rails as that, although it does stop at many of the same stations. If I'd had exactly the same id as Victoria Goddard, maybe I would have felt less friction every time the plot swerved frantically to avoid "Kip has to ask anyone he cares about for something important to him, using his words" or "Kip faces real opposition from a reasonable person who disagrees with him about his work" to land safely in "the plot contrives to reveal what Kip wanted to his loved ones without his having to tell them, so that they can give it to him and apologise for not having already known in a cathartic scene" or "Kip's political opponents all either acknowledge his superiority in every aspect of their work, or are deservedly utterly destroyed for being evil people in a cathartic scene."
I
really want someone to write the fics (plural) that do for Cliopher and Artorin what
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lannamichaels does for Aral and Miles Vorkosigan. Aral in particular. I love Cliopher and Artorin, I
ship Cliopher and Artorin, but they really do have it coming. (Spoilery side note for something that happens late in the novel:
( cut ))
For more cogent criticism of this book, please see
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skygiants here and
raven here. (Reading these made me reflect further on how the emphasis on Kip's skill at practising his cultural traditions
in solitude, while completely isolated from other members of his culture kind of misses the point of... a culture? Especially what's described (in the sense of "tell", if not the sense of "show") as being a very collectivist culture.)
I started reading the sequel[*]
The Return of Fitzroy Angursell after that, because fuck it, it's actually very compelling idfic and I want to read the next Cliopher book. The blurb contains spoilers from something not yet revealed in
The Hands of the Emperor, so maybe don't read the blurb if you don't want a fairly large -- if heavily foreshadowed -- reveal.
[* Victoria Goddard is very prolific, and there are many branching stories in the same world, including two direct sequels to
The Hands of the Emperor. This is the one the author herself recommended reading before the other one,
At the Feet of the Sun, which is from Cliopher's point of view again.]
As I write this am 94% through the ebook of
The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, and just got to the resolution of the main emotional conflict of the plot. You'll never guess what it is. (spoilers)
( cut ) That aside, it is a third of the length of THOTE, and much less angsty (not that it's
not angsty, but the viewpoint character has much more of a sense of humour, and so does the plot, which tries to be picaresque but keeps blunting its own edges.)
Started listening to the audiobook of Shelley Parker-Chan's
He Who Drowned The World. I'm not really feeling it, but I'm continuing. I'm enjoying Zhu's and Ouyang's plot threads less than in the previous book. Ouyang because without Esen the misery is unrelenting, and Zhu because while she's more likeable than in the first part of the previous book, I'm convinced that the plot is leading to her being forced to choose between forfeiting her ambition and sparing Ma's life, and... I don't think she'll spare Ma's life. On the other hand, I'm enjoying Baoxiang's parts more than before, even though they're still extremely grimdark. At least he's having some fun with it?
ComicsDumbing of Age and
Questionable Content are fun at the moment.
ZinesRead
Full of Shit by Max Graves, a short, very painful horror zine.
Fanworksrydra_wong MADE A PROPHET MOODBOARD TOO!It's considerably less silly than mine, Funshine notwithstanding. She made it... some time ago, but as mentioned above, I haven't done one of these posts since the end of November.
GamesEarly Christmas present: an Anbernic RG35XX! Some notes:
- ergnomically, it's less comfortable than the Retro FC Plus. Same layout, but heavier, and that's makes a difference. I'm looking into the aftermarket grip things.
- pre-installed games: many,
many of them, for many,
many different consoles. No SMB: presumably Nintendo got to them. I've been playing
Arkanoid and
Bubble Bobble. The former (NES version) is fine except that the backgrounds are too busy, which is a problem with the original game, not the console. The latter (in its Game Boy version) has a flicker problem which I think means I just need to adjust the emulator's settings.
- OS: Anbernic's stock OS for the RG35XX is pretty nice. The defaults are comfortable, and there are options to change the theme etc too. They also preinstalled the open source alternative, Black Seraph's GarlicOS, which is extremely customisable. I gave it a try, and... well, maybe after I customise it a
lot. And scale the steep learning curve. Garlic's controls are very counterintuitive, and have a tendency to react to button presses from before the next screen displays, making you select options you didn't intend to without knowing what they are. And it seems less stable than stock, e.g. there's a bug where there's no way to exit a game without hitting "reset". I looked that up, and apparently you just need to upgrade Garlic to fix it. But mostly it's the buttons, and how ugly the default backgrounds are. (The bootloader images are mostly fine. The icon themes are alright, but not with those backgrounds they aren't. Other backgrounds exist, though, and of course one can make one's own - I just haven't had a play with it yet.) The way it's organised
is an improvement on stock, though.
- The exciting part, though, is how hackable/tweakable it is by design. As mentioned, it came already dual-booting the custom firmware. Unlike the Retro FC Plus (which ran off its chip on board, aka
THE BLOB) the RG35XX's system lives on an sd card. Even in stock, you can easily access the file structure. There is also a slot for a second sd card. You can put MP3s on it and use it as an MP3 player. You can put PDFs of the game manuals on it (remember when games came with manuals?) You can put more games on it. (This is in fact the point.) I'm looking forward to checking out the ROM hacking scene.
LinksFoodImprovised "Singapore noodles" using two minute noodles, a carrot, some broccoli, turmeric, cracked black pepper, cumin, salt, peanut oil, chilli sesame oil, and a little soy sauce. Obviously that is not the correct ingredients or method for making Singapore noodles, but it worked out exactly how I hoped anyway. Switching to actual curry powder in place of the other spices produced a slightly different, also good, effect. This is now in my regular dinner rotation. Cooking rice and vegetables in it instead of stirring noodles through it made it no longer taste any thing like Singapore noodles, but was still good.
GardenTying up tomatoes and trying to keep up with the mowing.
WeatherStormy.
CatsWaiting right now for me to give them their before bed treat.
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cyoa_xchange. The relationship is Maia/Csethiro, Maia/Csevet, or Maia/Csethiro/Csevet, depending on the choices you make.
