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Ashanty notes!
Oct. 14th, 2025 06:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressHad a _really_ lovely weekend with SamSam's family. Highlights:
*Nine of us biked to the beach together, me taking the tail with my giant ass-cargo bike. The roads were mostly dirt, sand, and gravel, it was a terrible choice, I had a wonderful time. Seeing the ocean was real good and I liked also watching the hermit crabs run around in the tide pool --there were so many!
*Later four of us biked to the cranberry bog to pick berries. This would've worked better had we not gradually realized that every batch of berries was comorbid with a small little section of poison ivy. We rinsed our hands and managed to all avoid getting rashes, but then we had to decide what to do with the berries we had already gathered. Sam was first to get rid of theirs, and tossed them into the pond. YES GOOD SUCH GREAT NOISES, the rest of us immediately followed.
*Ben and I managed to drag four total beginners through ringing Erin on bodies. Ringing on bodies is _the best_ and I had forgotten how much easier it is to do with dancers, and that's so good. I took some notes about how to do it, so hopefully that will go better in the future. I still have not yet internalized what direction to set up/start plain hunt though (we walked the wrong way to begin and had to switch the orientation of the set)
*Elanor and different-Ben wrote a little fifteen minute play for us all to perform. I believe there was only one person who was consistently in the audience, the rest of us all kept running up and down to/from the stage for our parts. There was one table-read and zero rehearsals. My script got caught in the curtain while it was opening so I had to awkwardly lean behind me to look at my scene-partner's. It was very stupid and delightful! It felt _excessively_ Melendy (honestly, a lot of the weekend did, and now I'm craving rereading a bunch of those).
*After, Steve taught us a game at a pool table that involved trying to roll the cue ball (by hand) to hit the single other ball before that other one stopped moving. Once you got them to hit, it was the next person's turn to grab the cue ball from wherever it was, and send it off. We played largely non-competitive and got eight of us going in a little cycle for a while. Extremely satisfying game!
*I played Crokinole yesterday morning with Sam. I'm _rubbish_ at it, but it's a very tactilely satisfying game so now I want to play more. I wonder if I can become a secret crokinole sharp using common household items?
*Thom and Liz bundled me and Laurel off after dinner on Saturday to Plan Their Wedding Dance. It was very cute to be in that space with people I love and doing something I have a lot of expertise in *and* bouncing that expertise off someone else with a lot of expertise. I think it'll be a nice little dance! There's gonna be a small group of Scottish dances for people who know what they're doing first, and it was _extremely_ funny for Thom to name dances, me or Laurel to go "wait how's that one go?" and Liz to immediately start singing the tune, which is not...*not* how they go, but is absolutely not what either of the callers were requesting.
There's probably more, but that's the big things I can remember this morning. Now it's time to head to work and do some of the grading I completely neglected.
~Sor
MOOP!
*Nine of us biked to the beach together, me taking the tail with my giant ass-cargo bike. The roads were mostly dirt, sand, and gravel, it was a terrible choice, I had a wonderful time. Seeing the ocean was real good and I liked also watching the hermit crabs run around in the tide pool --there were so many!
*Later four of us biked to the cranberry bog to pick berries. This would've worked better had we not gradually realized that every batch of berries was comorbid with a small little section of poison ivy. We rinsed our hands and managed to all avoid getting rashes, but then we had to decide what to do with the berries we had already gathered. Sam was first to get rid of theirs, and tossed them into the pond. YES GOOD SUCH GREAT NOISES, the rest of us immediately followed.
*Ben and I managed to drag four total beginners through ringing Erin on bodies. Ringing on bodies is _the best_ and I had forgotten how much easier it is to do with dancers, and that's so good. I took some notes about how to do it, so hopefully that will go better in the future. I still have not yet internalized what direction to set up/start plain hunt though (we walked the wrong way to begin and had to switch the orientation of the set)
*Elanor and different-Ben wrote a little fifteen minute play for us all to perform. I believe there was only one person who was consistently in the audience, the rest of us all kept running up and down to/from the stage for our parts. There was one table-read and zero rehearsals. My script got caught in the curtain while it was opening so I had to awkwardly lean behind me to look at my scene-partner's. It was very stupid and delightful! It felt _excessively_ Melendy (honestly, a lot of the weekend did, and now I'm craving rereading a bunch of those).
*After, Steve taught us a game at a pool table that involved trying to roll the cue ball (by hand) to hit the single other ball before that other one stopped moving. Once you got them to hit, it was the next person's turn to grab the cue ball from wherever it was, and send it off. We played largely non-competitive and got eight of us going in a little cycle for a while. Extremely satisfying game!
*I played Crokinole yesterday morning with Sam. I'm _rubbish_ at it, but it's a very tactilely satisfying game so now I want to play more. I wonder if I can become a secret crokinole sharp using common household items?
*Thom and Liz bundled me and Laurel off after dinner on Saturday to Plan Their Wedding Dance. It was very cute to be in that space with people I love and doing something I have a lot of expertise in *and* bouncing that expertise off someone else with a lot of expertise. I think it'll be a nice little dance! There's gonna be a small group of Scottish dances for people who know what they're doing first, and it was _extremely_ funny for Thom to name dances, me or Laurel to go "wait how's that one go?" and Liz to immediately start singing the tune, which is not...*not* how they go, but is absolutely not what either of the callers were requesting.
There's probably more, but that's the big things I can remember this morning. Now it's time to head to work and do some of the grading I completely neglected.
~Sor
MOOP!
Automatic Noodle
Oct. 13th, 2025 04:21 pmpsocopteraAutomatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz, 2025 SF novella. Delightful story about robots opening a restaurant and finding safety, purpose, and community after war. Cheerfully trans-coded (there's a casual lunch-break top surgery, and some celebratory balloons that just happen to be blue, pink, and white), not in an allegorical way but more like a team-colors kind of way. Deals with indenture and the risk of enslavement but in a much less bleak way than Terraformers, like, the post-war world here is still new and unsettled and developing, it didn't feel like a world where inequality and injustice were just inevitable forever. And I have no idea if Newitz ever thought about other geographical parallels for the drastically reduced populations of small city-nations on western coasts trying to rebuild from the rubble of wars of survival with the more powerful nation hemming them in to the east, but that unspoken "it could happen here" made it more powerful, and I appreciated this book's vision of peace that manages to hold and a flourishing rebuilding, whether for near-future San Francisco or anywhere else. Very much recommended.
Katabasis
Oct. 13th, 2025 02:20 pmpsocopteraKatabasis, RF Kuang, 2025 fantasy novel about magic grad school and Hell. I was really into this at the start and then at some point in the middle it started to lose me and never quite got me back. If you are looking for 2025 adult fantasy takes on the magic school trope I would recommend The Incandescent over this one, although this one might land better if you're particularly a Dante fan, I couldn't say. (I know only the basics and have never read it.) Heads up for animal harm, child harm, and suicidality.
A bunch more behind the cut, discussing my three (maybe three and a half) problems with the book. ( Read more... )
A bunch more behind the cut, discussing my three (maybe three and a half) problems with the book. ( Read more... )
Splatter
Oct. 13th, 2025 11:50 amflexagonIt's a sleepy sleepy Monday, which it probably is for a lot of people because a) it's a holiday and b) we are having a nor'easter here, which means rainfall. Many cozy feelings are thereby created.
Weird number of postponements and rejections this week:
Some other happenings:
It's a lot, right? The time I used to spend on "work" has exploded into a lot of smaller things, and I know that what is important can get lost in here's the pile of random shit that happened. But if nothing else, this is true to my experience too. I think life is good. I miss my squirrel, who's been away for two weekends running, but that will end soon.
Weird number of postponements and rejections this week:
- Major News Outlet said no to my first crossword puzzle submission, although they did it in the nicest way possible. Not a form letter. They gave real feedback about what they liked and didn't, and encouraged me to try again. Joke's on them, another is already in their queue and I have two more in progress with different collaborators. One of which made a ton of progress this week!
- I was supposed to meet with my financial advisor. It got postponed, but in preparation for that I did my numbers for the year so far and looked harder, especially, at my latest six months of spending. Insert some annoyance, here, with my budgeting program... but I fixed things up until I believe the data, and the good news is that I'm spending less this year than I have any year since 2021. Even with all the circus lessons. This stands in contrast to the returns from the market so far, which don't feel real or make sense to me at all.
- I was supposed to close on my stupid new condo tomorrow. Guess what got delayed again. This time it's most proximally the town's fault. *shrug* At least other people (Unit 2 buyers in the same building) are providing urgency on it now; they can wake me up when the sale is actually happening.
Some other happenings:
- It's been... six months since I retired? I think I'm planning to do a 6-month update post on LinkedIn, but my biggest lesson is that six months aren't enough. I never expected it to be, but now I know it's not, and that's conceptually a little worrisome. The larger milieu of politics, finance and tech seems messed up, and apparently all I can manage is dropping out and playing dead.
- My neighbor suddenly got rid of all the ivy that used to cover our front yard! I knew she wanted to pull it back from the house, but didn't realize she was going to remove ALL of it until it was already done. I was startled. But I also remembered telling her to do what she wanted in the front, and the time (at my last address) that I was trimming hedges only to have the older woman upstairs yell at me in the street. So I simply expressed mild surprise. Maybe it was time for a change anyway.
- I had coffee with my walkover coach, who is pregnant with a donor egg, and talked her through some of how it went with me and Birdie and E&V. I need to do more follow-up on that since, weirdly, E is going to be in town next week, and probably my coach would rather talk to the egg recipient than the donor.
- Went climbing with jadia, which was super fun except when I confidently failed the belay test by engaging my circus rope-pulling circuits (in circus you NEVER let go of a rope entirely but it is considered OK for it to slide through one's hands; in rock climbing it's the opposite; and both endeavors consider it a significant safety concern). This spun off a conversation on a Discord server I'm on, in which apparently belay technique maybe has also changed in the last 10 years, but my particular cross-wiring was almost certainly circus. We were prepared to fall back to the auto-belay routes which were really fun, and I also got to be belayed on a nasty no-hands-section climb that made my legs all shaky.
- More social: dinner with a bunch of Zillianaires, which... was honestly pretty exhausting. Overall positive, but way out in the boonies in a house that made me slightly twitchy.
- Backbend progress -- both a contortion class and a walkover class in which I did New Things and my body graciously put up with it. I've been working out twice a day, most days this week, which is on the high side.... but there's a lot of joy happening and I'm not injured, so I got a tub of creatine and am going to carry on as long as coach availability is this good. There'll be downtime later.
It's a lot, right? The time I used to spend on "work" has exploded into a lot of smaller things, and I know that what is important can get lost in here's the pile of random shit that happened. But if nothing else, this is true to my experience too. I think life is good. I miss my squirrel, who's been away for two weekends running, but that will end soon.
(no subject)
Oct. 10th, 2025 11:12 pmsorcyressI am at Pinew-wait no I'm not. But I am on Long Pond! Which is pretty fucking good! I like being in the woods even when they are not quite perfectly ~my~ woods. Also, let's be real, of the crowd of people here, half of them are the camp folks I would most want to be hanging with, and the other half are people who are beloved by the first half. It's good!
Getting here was AN ADVENTURE. It was also slightly more of an adventure than it should've been, because I foolishly trusted SamSam to give me accurate directions to camp. To be fair, they were accurate, they just included a part that they hadn't actually traveled on before and it was...uh...I was not excited to have been the guinea pig for that. It was a "no trespassing" private little back trail that was not wide, mostly rocks, and the parts that weren't rocks was sand. About 80% of it might've been fun if I was riding it on my regular bike without a load.
I was riding my xtracycle, fully packed and loaded. I wasn't, like, at weight capacity or anything, but I did fill the volume pretty well. It's a nice bike but also _no_ it is _absolutely not_ a mountain bike. Yikes.
But the rest of the trip! The paved roads were wonderful! The hills were...okay, the hills were not wonderful *but* except for the being illegally in the woods, I did ace the ride. No walking up anything, no feet on the ground while in motion.
It's certainly the heaviest trip I've done in a long time. Probably since the time I went bike-camping with jere7my? Which I think was in the year I got my new bike which was probably......2012? I should probably go on loaded-bike trips more often, but like, that's part of the point of having a cargo bike! Especially having a cargo bike and the mbta!
Got here near the end of folks eating dinner and joined in and have spent the rest of the evening talking and laughing and drawing in my sketchbook while other people knit (sooooo much knitting happening!). It's very pleasant! I am having a pleasing adventure.
(We'll figure out the getting home bonus challenges when it's actually Monday and I can see how bad the nor'easter actually is) .
So that's my weekend set. Hope y'all are having nice plans as well.
~Sor
MOOP!
Getting here was AN ADVENTURE. It was also slightly more of an adventure than it should've been, because I foolishly trusted SamSam to give me accurate directions to camp. To be fair, they were accurate, they just included a part that they hadn't actually traveled on before and it was...uh...I was not excited to have been the guinea pig for that. It was a "no trespassing" private little back trail that was not wide, mostly rocks, and the parts that weren't rocks was sand. About 80% of it might've been fun if I was riding it on my regular bike without a load.
I was riding my xtracycle, fully packed and loaded. I wasn't, like, at weight capacity or anything, but I did fill the volume pretty well. It's a nice bike but also _no_ it is _absolutely not_ a mountain bike. Yikes.
But the rest of the trip! The paved roads were wonderful! The hills were...okay, the hills were not wonderful *but* except for the being illegally in the woods, I did ace the ride. No walking up anything, no feet on the ground while in motion.
It's certainly the heaviest trip I've done in a long time. Probably since the time I went bike-camping with jere7my? Which I think was in the year I got my new bike which was probably......2012? I should probably go on loaded-bike trips more often, but like, that's part of the point of having a cargo bike! Especially having a cargo bike and the mbta!
Got here near the end of folks eating dinner and joined in and have spent the rest of the evening talking and laughing and drawing in my sketchbook while other people knit (sooooo much knitting happening!). It's very pleasant! I am having a pleasing adventure.
(We'll figure out the getting home bonus challenges when it's actually Monday and I can see how bad the nor'easter actually is) .
So that's my weekend set. Hope y'all are having nice plans as well.
~Sor
MOOP!
Three sentences about the past week
Oct. 9th, 2025 04:34 pmirilythBliiiiiiip.
Oof, I sort of knew that I hadn't been writing every night, but somehow a week slipped by. There's been a bunch of havoc at work, just more stuff than usual not working like it should. I played some pokego (but not as much as I needed to in order to hit Level 50 by next Tuesday, so that's probably not happening at this point, I guess we'll see). Did a bunch more driving with Juniper, including some highway time, which I continue to find surprising despite having been right there in the car at the time. :^ ) Didn't go to the Eggplant Party, in favor of pokego and general exhaustion. Got a bunch of XP on Tuesday and Wednesday, but still not enough to be on track to hit Level 50, but I guess we'll see.
A mind is an excellent thing to waste
Oct. 8th, 2025 08:41 pmsorcyressWork was a lot because work was always a lot. Bonus lots for today: did some graphic design on the performance task so people are able to hand it out tomorrow. Sent the big NEML email to all the coworkers and began gathering data there. Ran a circle for the department meeting, because when my boss does it, she skips over a bunch because she doesn't take it seriously.
So between all that, and normal work stuff, I was slammed right up until the bell rang, and then we had an hour of department meeting (solidly okay) and an hour of Geometry team meeting (quite good, very productive) and then Clayton and I (plus bonus Rachel) had like half an hour of talking about grand ideas for making the curriculum better and then I threw everyone out of my room because it was 4:30 and aaah.
But I managed to keep going, and then I prepped my lessons for tomorrow and ran several billion copies (more NEML stuff) and left the building by about 6:15 or so. Was home at 7:30ish, checked in with Ezri, sent a plan to Tuesday, and flopped into the bed to play a bit of Necrodance just to do _something_ mindless with my day.
(being Mindful all the time forever sucks. I am trying to do more of it because a lot of my mindless is the kind where I can't transition out of it again, and despite what the hypnokink people would have you think, it's not as sexy when you're a mindless phone-games machine. But being real aware and Mindful of what I am doing and trying to make conscious choices about it is differently hard.)
Then, pleasant shock (see above paragraph), I actually transitioned out of Necrodance around the time I told Tues I would, and did some brainwork and then turned the phone off for a POWER HOUR. Dishes, dinner, wash hair were the three goals. They were all completed? This is wild and I don't know how to cope.
The next plan is to again check in with Tuesday --I like having partners who I can mutually do things with, even when we are far apart-- and then Iunno. Rest? Sounds fake.
~Sor
MOOP!
So between all that, and normal work stuff, I was slammed right up until the bell rang, and then we had an hour of department meeting (solidly okay) and an hour of Geometry team meeting (quite good, very productive) and then Clayton and I (plus bonus Rachel) had like half an hour of talking about grand ideas for making the curriculum better and then I threw everyone out of my room because it was 4:30 and aaah.
But I managed to keep going, and then I prepped my lessons for tomorrow and ran several billion copies (more NEML stuff) and left the building by about 6:15 or so. Was home at 7:30ish, checked in with Ezri, sent a plan to Tuesday, and flopped into the bed to play a bit of Necrodance just to do _something_ mindless with my day.
(being Mindful all the time forever sucks. I am trying to do more of it because a lot of my mindless is the kind where I can't transition out of it again, and despite what the hypnokink people would have you think, it's not as sexy when you're a mindless phone-games machine. But being real aware and Mindful of what I am doing and trying to make conscious choices about it is differently hard.)
Then, pleasant shock (see above paragraph), I actually transitioned out of Necrodance around the time I told Tues I would, and did some brainwork and then turned the phone off for a POWER HOUR. Dishes, dinner, wash hair were the three goals. They were all completed? This is wild and I don't know how to cope.
The next plan is to again check in with Tuesday --I like having partners who I can mutually do things with, even when we are far apart-- and then Iunno. Rest? Sounds fake.
~Sor
MOOP!
Put the phone down, kiddo
Oct. 8th, 2025 01:10 amsorcyressToday was...sorta good?
Work was pretty okay. It's become evident that, of the eight prep periods I am supposed to get each week, I'm realistically gonna get like...three. Not counting my brain crashing and needing a break. So. That's a lot.
Things are generally pretty good even with that! Like, I really like all the things I'm doing at work. It's just another example of the thing I figured out a year or two ago: teaching is a job where you can't become faster as you get better. Like, nearly everything that involves being a good/better teacher is something that involves more time. Deeper connections with students. More thoughtful grading. That kind of thing. I can get faster at grading, but I can't really get faster at guiding a student through socratic questioning until they can reach an understanding themself.
So yeah, work is gonna be a ton this year, and I'm just...gonna cope, I guess? It is what it's.
And then I had therapy, and therapy was kinda good? Before therapy was crap, before therapy I just went into total slug mode on my phone playing stupid phone games. Far too much of that. I was filling Jenn in on all the things I managed yesterday, and at one point she was being mildly astonished at HOW MUCH I'd gotten done. Well yeah, sez I. I didn't play phonegames yesterday, and it's incredible how many more hours are in the day when you don't spend them on phonegames.
After therapy, I did a little more scraps of prep for tomorrow (including the extremely essential "go run your copies _now_" because let's be real, if I try to save that for the morning, I will find eighty people scrobbling around the school to try and find the single working copier in the building. It's like a fun new scavenger hunt every week!
But I did also spend some time fucking around with my phone UX. Actually poked at the widgets menu and found a few things I will probably like. Resorted and gathered my apps --I am not quite able to bear just deleting the phone games, even if that seems like it might need to be the answer for some of them. But putting them in a different folder, in a different place, seeing if that helps...yeah.
And I poked at Habitica briefly, and realized it might be the thing I am looking for in terms of "ugh, need a todo app". We'll try it again for a bit, see what happens. Worst case scenario, nothing useful, and that's just baseline.
On the way home, I found my buddy Thrantar walking to Bluesy, and we walked a block or two together. That would've been it, except just when we were about to split and go our separate ways, we instead found a folk music jam that's apparently been happening on the regular just out on the bike path. I am very fond of this, I am very fond of my weird little town. We stood a good long while and listened to music and chatted about life --I am happy both for the getting to listen to music and for the broader getting to reconnect with someone from my past. It's real good!
(and I briefly chatted with one of the people who seems to be organizing it and when she said a wistful "oh I wish we could have dancing sometimes too" went "UM I KNOW A GUY (it's me, I'm the guy)" and that would be really keen if it worked out in the long run. I would enjoy having occasional ceilidh calling on my way home from work!)
Home again eventually. Played video games and chatted with friends and ate good dinner and played a lot more video games. This is...this is only semi-useful, but honestly, any video game that takes the laptop is probably better for my brainpan than the ones that use the phone. It's almost a win?
Now I am up too late again, and I need to get up early, or at least, get up very much on time and get straight to work so I can finish some of the prep stuff. This is a conceivable plan, I suppose.
Tomorrow's big goal might be to wash my hair? Also maybe have an internet date with Tuesday. Both of those would be really good things to get done.
I love you, and hope y'all are well.
~Sor
MOOP!
Work was pretty okay. It's become evident that, of the eight prep periods I am supposed to get each week, I'm realistically gonna get like...three. Not counting my brain crashing and needing a break. So. That's a lot.
Things are generally pretty good even with that! Like, I really like all the things I'm doing at work. It's just another example of the thing I figured out a year or two ago: teaching is a job where you can't become faster as you get better. Like, nearly everything that involves being a good/better teacher is something that involves more time. Deeper connections with students. More thoughtful grading. That kind of thing. I can get faster at grading, but I can't really get faster at guiding a student through socratic questioning until they can reach an understanding themself.
So yeah, work is gonna be a ton this year, and I'm just...gonna cope, I guess? It is what it's.
And then I had therapy, and therapy was kinda good? Before therapy was crap, before therapy I just went into total slug mode on my phone playing stupid phone games. Far too much of that. I was filling Jenn in on all the things I managed yesterday, and at one point she was being mildly astonished at HOW MUCH I'd gotten done. Well yeah, sez I. I didn't play phonegames yesterday, and it's incredible how many more hours are in the day when you don't spend them on phonegames.
After therapy, I did a little more scraps of prep for tomorrow (including the extremely essential "go run your copies _now_" because let's be real, if I try to save that for the morning, I will find eighty people scrobbling around the school to try and find the single working copier in the building. It's like a fun new scavenger hunt every week!
But I did also spend some time fucking around with my phone UX. Actually poked at the widgets menu and found a few things I will probably like. Resorted and gathered my apps --I am not quite able to bear just deleting the phone games, even if that seems like it might need to be the answer for some of them. But putting them in a different folder, in a different place, seeing if that helps...yeah.
And I poked at Habitica briefly, and realized it might be the thing I am looking for in terms of "ugh, need a todo app". We'll try it again for a bit, see what happens. Worst case scenario, nothing useful, and that's just baseline.
On the way home, I found my buddy Thrantar walking to Bluesy, and we walked a block or two together. That would've been it, except just when we were about to split and go our separate ways, we instead found a folk music jam that's apparently been happening on the regular just out on the bike path. I am very fond of this, I am very fond of my weird little town. We stood a good long while and listened to music and chatted about life --I am happy both for the getting to listen to music and for the broader getting to reconnect with someone from my past. It's real good!
(and I briefly chatted with one of the people who seems to be organizing it and when she said a wistful "oh I wish we could have dancing sometimes too" went "UM I KNOW A GUY (it's me, I'm the guy)" and that would be really keen if it worked out in the long run. I would enjoy having occasional ceilidh calling on my way home from work!)
Home again eventually. Played video games and chatted with friends and ate good dinner and played a lot more video games. This is...this is only semi-useful, but honestly, any video game that takes the laptop is probably better for my brainpan than the ones that use the phone. It's almost a win?
Now I am up too late again, and I need to get up early, or at least, get up very much on time and get straight to work so I can finish some of the prep stuff. This is a conceivable plan, I suppose.
Tomorrow's big goal might be to wash my hair? Also maybe have an internet date with Tuesday. Both of those would be really good things to get done.
I love you, and hope y'all are well.
~Sor
MOOP!
Gaming, zines, handstands, so much good stuff
Oct. 6th, 2025 03:55 pmflexagonAnother week in (what is rapidly shaping up into) the best year of my life. I want to do more every day than I can do... but a lot of that is "more nothing!" or "more video game", with only a few days actually packed too full of things like lessons and social time. So, not actually very stressful. It shows up, though, in things like yet another Monday post from me when I theoretically summarize the week on Sundays. :)
Creative stuff: I have a good start on a new crossword puzzle, a collaboration with someone new to me. She's also a female techie, and she gave me the gentle nudge I needed to install a Python environment and get some scripting working in order to find good theme words. I'm fairly sure the concept is original, so if we can just fill the grid cleanly I have a good feeling about it.
Spousal goodness:heisenbug has a diagnosis for his hurt shoulder, as well as a new video out on YouTube! I feel a certain need to take advantage of our COBRA'd health insurance while we still have it, and the shoulder had gotten pretty bad. Luckily, it's frozen shoulder and probably won't require surgery.
My squirrel was away in NYC this weekend and I somehow had a great weekend anyway; I filled it up with a zine fest, and taking outdoor handstand photos for October (thank youapfelsingail for the fine camera work), and hanging with a work-friend (who gave me a lot of cat food and litter because her cat just died). We went thrifting, too, and I managed to sell five or six pieces and buy a nice new dress with the proceeds, for a net reduction in clothing.
I had a surprisingly good talk with my mom. She and I and Birdie are all 24 years apart, and Birdie is 24, which means... I am the same age my mom was when she left my dad, and Birdie is just barely older than I was when I donated eggs in support of her conception. These are strange thoughts, strange truths to sit with. My mom thinks that her husband, my step dad, is basically dying and that it's all borrowed time right now. But we also talked about: hey, we're both awfully grown-up by now, shouldn't we just be friends at this point? So that was nice. And somewhat increases the odds of a trip to Oregon in the next few months.
I'm continuing to play Blue Prince, with occasional amused nudges frommotyl and a whole lot of obsessing over imaginary houses. In between runs I have been continuing to organize my real house. And my condo purchase, which has been in the corner facing the wall and thinking about its mistakes, seems to still be on for the 14th, so I may as well play as much as I can.
And as a final note -- it's freaking 85 degrees here in the Boston area on October 6th! What the hell! I would be excited for fall vibes if there were any. I would be excited to go cozy and fall into hibernation / soup / knitting / reading mode for winter if there were any hint of it. But here we are and the knitting must wait.
Creative stuff: I have a good start on a new crossword puzzle, a collaboration with someone new to me. She's also a female techie, and she gave me the gentle nudge I needed to install a Python environment and get some scripting working in order to find good theme words. I'm fairly sure the concept is original, so if we can just fill the grid cleanly I have a good feeling about it.
Spousal goodness:
heisenbug has a diagnosis for his hurt shoulder, as well as a new video out on YouTube! I feel a certain need to take advantage of our COBRA'd health insurance while we still have it, and the shoulder had gotten pretty bad. Luckily, it's frozen shoulder and probably won't require surgery.My squirrel was away in NYC this weekend and I somehow had a great weekend anyway; I filled it up with a zine fest, and taking outdoor handstand photos for October (thank you
apfelsingail for the fine camera work), and hanging with a work-friend (who gave me a lot of cat food and litter because her cat just died). We went thrifting, too, and I managed to sell five or six pieces and buy a nice new dress with the proceeds, for a net reduction in clothing.I had a surprisingly good talk with my mom. She and I and Birdie are all 24 years apart, and Birdie is 24, which means... I am the same age my mom was when she left my dad, and Birdie is just barely older than I was when I donated eggs in support of her conception. These are strange thoughts, strange truths to sit with. My mom thinks that her husband, my step dad, is basically dying and that it's all borrowed time right now. But we also talked about: hey, we're both awfully grown-up by now, shouldn't we just be friends at this point? So that was nice. And somewhat increases the odds of a trip to Oregon in the next few months.
I'm continuing to play Blue Prince, with occasional amused nudges from
motyl and a whole lot of obsessing over imaginary houses. In between runs I have been continuing to organize my real house. And my condo purchase, which has been in the corner facing the wall and thinking about its mistakes, seems to still be on for the 14th, so I may as well play as much as I can. And as a final note -- it's freaking 85 degrees here in the Boston area on October 6th! What the hell! I would be excited for fall vibes if there were any. I would be excited to go cozy and fall into hibernation / soup / knitting / reading mode for winter if there were any hint of it. But here we are and the knitting must wait.
The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen
Oct. 6th, 2025 10:28 ampsocopteraThe Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, KJ Charles, Regency romance novel. Longer and with a more complicated plot than the last couple things of hers I've read - I learned a bunch about different kinds of smuggling during the Napoleonic wars and also a part of England (Kent) I had basically never heard of (except that you can park two Jutes there for a bunch of turns of Britannia), which is very much what I personally want from a historical romance. I'm sure some people were like "there is too much smuggling, the smuggle/fuck ratio is off" but it worked great for me. Also some interesting complicated interpersonal dynamics between the leads (local/outsider, gentry/commoner, smuggler/lawful) giving them some real conflicts to work through. And one of them gets into naturalist observations and is excited about beetles and we got to hear a little bit about the beetles, which, like, icing on this already-delicious cake!
The opposite of fear is data
Oct. 4th, 2025 10:20 pmsorcyressGonna have to do the bullshit thing where I write down the things that I did today, because my shitbrain is pretty convinced I haven't done enough and I'm not actually gonna be able to defeat it with logic and data, but I can at least try.
So here's some things I did today:
*Went to bells! First time at bells since the weekend before my surgery, I think? So that's basically two months or so. I rang some stuff, pretty badly, because, as mentioned, haven't been in an age. It was nice to see some folks, and very nice to spend time at the end on the greenway in the warm weather chatting with Kyle.
*Also I got a bagel and said hello to Leo the BagelMonger who is a friend of mine and I was happy to see still exists and extremely happy to hear is taking his partner to go see the MONSTER TRUCKS tonight, that is so dope I am very jealous.
*After bellslunch, I went to the _library_ that is in the North End, because I'd never been, but Julia very kindly checked out a book for me ages ago (for surgery, because I was like seven billionth on the list for the ebook) and I needed to return it, and also I was bold and asked the librarians if I could also get a library card and they were very much "HELL YEAH!" and now I have a third library card in my wallet to go with the NESFA and Minuteman ones.
(I like that my brain briefly forgot what the system was called, attempted to combine Minuteman and Middlesex, and had a solid ten seconds of "it can't possibly be a Middleman library card, I would've noticed")
Anyways, my BPL card has lions on it, and then I walked a circuit of the library to look at its books and stuff and I found three books to check out and when I brought them to the desk, the nice librarian who helped me before was all "oh hey this one is really good!" about one of the ones I picked, so I got an A+ in libraries, which is a thing that is possible to do and reasonable to want.
*Got on the T, rode to Porter Square, went to Bicycle Belle, picked up my Xtracycle, now with bonus brakes on both the back *and* front wheels. Talked to the folks. Was admired by a random patron directly outside the bike store. I am kinda psyched for this nonsense, and extremely aaah but excited that I will get to take it on an ADVENTURE next weekend.
*Biked home and did nothing productive but did finish the back half of Late Eclipses. Yes, I am _extremely_ overdue for a booklog post. This is partly because I read fuckall this summer, which I feel bad about, and especially because I have been pissshit poor at actually keeping up with my booklog, which I also feel bad about. It's probably stupid to feel bad about the things that are not actual obligations and just stuff I do for myself _but also_ I'm the one I have to live with, so *shrug*.
*Eventually I took the laundry downstairs and ran two loads of it.
*I managed to clean up like...ten things total from my desk. This has not made an appreciable difference in the state of my desk, sigh.
*Tuesday is here, and I am happy for it, in between being very not-wanna about _everything_. Right now she is curled up next to me all sleepy and it's wonderful and feels really good and safe and happy. I wish my brain would shut the fuck up and let me be more happy about the world, but it's nice to at least have small joys.
*Oh yeah, I did finally do a whole bunch of fucking futureplanning, stuff needed for the four upcoming weekends of doing things (it's not quite four consecutive, I think it's two on, then a break, then two more). Ashanty/biking/camping, then MD and Rennfaire (Oct19), then nothing, then Liz and Thom's wedding, then Racheline and Patty's wedding. I was maybe gonna go to Northampton the weekend after that for a dance thing, but I think it would be extremely smart of me to _not_ do that, because jegus fuck, no, I need to be home slightly more than that.
(At some point I need to suss Thanksgiving).
*But yeah, that was like...multiple different emails and sorting tasks and stuff. I reserved a hotel room and bought train tickets and offered to share bedding with someone and aaah there are so many things. I have put a data point in my email spreadsheet tho, and putting data points into it is a good first step to actually like...interacting with the inbox0 project.
And I wrote my words, and I suppose that's a pretty good thing even if I'm just gonna go back and play more bullshit phone games in a second.
~Sor
MOOP!
So here's some things I did today:
*Went to bells! First time at bells since the weekend before my surgery, I think? So that's basically two months or so. I rang some stuff, pretty badly, because, as mentioned, haven't been in an age. It was nice to see some folks, and very nice to spend time at the end on the greenway in the warm weather chatting with Kyle.
*Also I got a bagel and said hello to Leo the BagelMonger who is a friend of mine and I was happy to see still exists and extremely happy to hear is taking his partner to go see the MONSTER TRUCKS tonight, that is so dope I am very jealous.
*After bellslunch, I went to the _library_ that is in the North End, because I'd never been, but Julia very kindly checked out a book for me ages ago (for surgery, because I was like seven billionth on the list for the ebook) and I needed to return it, and also I was bold and asked the librarians if I could also get a library card and they were very much "HELL YEAH!" and now I have a third library card in my wallet to go with the NESFA and Minuteman ones.
(I like that my brain briefly forgot what the system was called, attempted to combine Minuteman and Middlesex, and had a solid ten seconds of "it can't possibly be a Middleman library card, I would've noticed")
Anyways, my BPL card has lions on it, and then I walked a circuit of the library to look at its books and stuff and I found three books to check out and when I brought them to the desk, the nice librarian who helped me before was all "oh hey this one is really good!" about one of the ones I picked, so I got an A+ in libraries, which is a thing that is possible to do and reasonable to want.
*Got on the T, rode to Porter Square, went to Bicycle Belle, picked up my Xtracycle, now with bonus brakes on both the back *and* front wheels. Talked to the folks. Was admired by a random patron directly outside the bike store. I am kinda psyched for this nonsense, and extremely aaah but excited that I will get to take it on an ADVENTURE next weekend.
*Biked home and did nothing productive but did finish the back half of Late Eclipses. Yes, I am _extremely_ overdue for a booklog post. This is partly because I read fuckall this summer, which I feel bad about, and especially because I have been pissshit poor at actually keeping up with my booklog, which I also feel bad about. It's probably stupid to feel bad about the things that are not actual obligations and just stuff I do for myself _but also_ I'm the one I have to live with, so *shrug*.
*Eventually I took the laundry downstairs and ran two loads of it.
*I managed to clean up like...ten things total from my desk. This has not made an appreciable difference in the state of my desk, sigh.
*Tuesday is here, and I am happy for it, in between being very not-wanna about _everything_. Right now she is curled up next to me all sleepy and it's wonderful and feels really good and safe and happy. I wish my brain would shut the fuck up and let me be more happy about the world, but it's nice to at least have small joys.
*Oh yeah, I did finally do a whole bunch of fucking futureplanning, stuff needed for the four upcoming weekends of doing things (it's not quite four consecutive, I think it's two on, then a break, then two more). Ashanty/biking/camping, then MD and Rennfaire (Oct19), then nothing, then Liz and Thom's wedding, then Racheline and Patty's wedding. I was maybe gonna go to Northampton the weekend after that for a dance thing, but I think it would be extremely smart of me to _not_ do that, because jegus fuck, no, I need to be home slightly more than that.
(At some point I need to suss Thanksgiving).
*But yeah, that was like...multiple different emails and sorting tasks and stuff. I reserved a hotel room and bought train tickets and offered to share bedding with someone and aaah there are so many things. I have put a data point in my email spreadsheet tho, and putting data points into it is a good first step to actually like...interacting with the inbox0 project.
And I wrote my words, and I suppose that's a pretty good thing even if I'm just gonna go back and play more bullshit phone games in a second.
~Sor
MOOP!
Book Tour Starting Next Week
Oct. 3rd, 2025 05:00 pmmarthawellsI don't think I posted about this yet: https://us.macmillan.com/tours/martha-wells-queen-demon/
There's more info at that link, but here's a brief list of the tour stops and dates:
- Mon. Oct. 6 at 7:30pm: Brookline Booksmith with Holly Black, offsite at Arts at the Armory (Brookline, MA)
- Tues. Oct. 7 at 7pm: Politics & Prose (Union Market location) moderated by Leigha McReynolds (Washington DC)
- Wed. Oct. 8 at 7pm: The Strand, with Meg Elison (NYC, NY)
- Fri. Oct. 10 at 6pm: Let’s Play Books, with Chuck Wendig, offsite at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA)
- Tues. Oct. 14 at 7pm, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)
- Wed. Oct. 15 at 7pm, Iron Dog Books, with Nalo Hopkinson offsite at Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
- Thurs. Oct. 16 at 7pm, Powell's (Cedar Hill location) with Jenn Reese (Beaverton, OR)
- Mon. Oct. 20 at 7pm: Bookpeople, with Ehigbor Okosun (Austin, TX)
- Tue. Oct. 21 at 6:30pm: Murder by the Book (Houston, TX)
- Thurs. Oct. 23 at 6pm: Nowhere Bookshop (San Antonio, TX)
- Saturday Nov. 8-9 Texas Book Festival, Austin TX
- Sat. Nov. 15 at 2pm: Hyperbole Bookstore, offsite at Ringer Library (College Station, TX)
There's more info at that link, but here's a brief list of the tour stops and dates:
- Mon. Oct. 6 at 7:30pm: Brookline Booksmith with Holly Black, offsite at Arts at the Armory (Brookline, MA)
- Tues. Oct. 7 at 7pm: Politics & Prose (Union Market location) moderated by Leigha McReynolds (Washington DC)
- Wed. Oct. 8 at 7pm: The Strand, with Meg Elison (NYC, NY)
- Fri. Oct. 10 at 6pm: Let’s Play Books, with Chuck Wendig, offsite at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA)
- Tues. Oct. 14 at 7pm, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)
- Wed. Oct. 15 at 7pm, Iron Dog Books, with Nalo Hopkinson offsite at Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
- Thurs. Oct. 16 at 7pm, Powell's (Cedar Hill location) with Jenn Reese (Beaverton, OR)
- Mon. Oct. 20 at 7pm: Bookpeople, with Ehigbor Okosun (Austin, TX)
- Tue. Oct. 21 at 6:30pm: Murder by the Book (Houston, TX)
- Thurs. Oct. 23 at 6pm: Nowhere Bookshop (San Antonio, TX)
- Saturday Nov. 8-9 Texas Book Festival, Austin TX
- Sat. Nov. 15 at 2pm: Hyperbole Bookstore, offsite at Ringer Library (College Station, TX)
Queen Demon Playlist
Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:42 pmmarthawellsI did a playlist for Witch King (https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/627157.html) when it first came out in 2023, and now here's one for Queen Demon:
Seven Devils - Florence + Machine
Burning - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Bando - ANNA with MadMan and Gemitaiz
Bringing Murder to the Land - Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison
Bulletproof vs. Release Me - The Outfit
I Owe You Nothing - Seinabo Sey
W.I.T.C.H. - Devon Cole
Egun (theme from Manhunt) - Danielle Ponder
Warm - SG Lewis
Disease - Lady Gaga
Which Witch (Demo) - Florence + Machine
you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish
Bakunawa - Rudy Ibarra, with June Millington, Han Han, and Ouida.
Seven Devils - Florence + Machine
Burning - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Bando - ANNA with MadMan and Gemitaiz
Bringing Murder to the Land - Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison
Bulletproof vs. Release Me - The Outfit
I Owe You Nothing - Seinabo Sey
W.I.T.C.H. - Devon Cole
Egun (theme from Manhunt) - Danielle Ponder
Warm - SG Lewis
Disease - Lady Gaga
Which Witch (Demo) - Florence + Machine
you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish
Bakunawa - Rudy Ibarra, with June Millington, Han Han, and Ouida.
Three sentences about 2025-10-01
Oct. 2nd, 2025 09:26 amirilythLong day of work yesterday. We've had a couple of outages lately, none of them caused by anything my particular team was doing, but everyone has their hair kinda on fire, and it's stressful. I was working on something that I was trying to finish before I had to leave to take Quentin to Marshals Academy, and ran into an unexpected and confusing snag, and ended up going to pokego Raid Hour after dropping him off anyway, but then went back to the car and spent an hour on my laptop (which I'd brought for this purpose) trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't, and then worked more on it once I get home, which I finally did.
(Marshals Academy is the LARP Adventure Program thing for high-schoolers, which LAP recently extended to include eighth-graders. Quentin did it over the summer, and is now continuing into the school year; among other things, it qualifies him to serve as a CIT for the after-school middle-school LARP program that LAP runs, which he's excited about starting, even though approximately a quarter of the participants will be older than him. :^ ) It's cool to see him picking up a teacher/mentor/leader sort of role like this; he is not our crazy little baby any more.)