silver

Komarr and A Civil Campaign: Lois McMaster Bujold

2026-03-03T04:35:03Z

I’m going to put my reviews of these two together because to me, although they’re very different in tone and in novel structure (and intent), the introduction of Ekaterin and the change in Miles’s life make them two halves of a heterogenous whole. I’m going to skip back and forth a bit.

( First, Komarr )

A Civil Campaign puts us back on Barrayar, with a full cast of characters from previous books.

( A Civil Campaign )

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sf supernatural monsters

2026-02-16T17:31:10Z

Something that I just don't usually do well with in sf/f is unnatural monsters presented in a scientific-ish context.

Admittedly I'm not into horror for horror, so I'm definitely missing a piece of the enjoyment that lets a fan of e.g. monstrous characters/enemies overlook other stuff - "OK the plot isn't great but I really liked the minotaur so it was worth the trade off!" which is definitely something I do for stuff that I care about, like interesting worldbuilding. Everyone's got their preferences and IMO it's not worth interrogating past that, sometimes you just like what you like. But the problem is the suspension of disbelief and the way that it breaks mine when sf tries to talk about horrifying supernatural monsters in a scientific context because then: WE HAVE BROUGHT IN BIOLOGY. (Oh no.)

I find a lot of horror wants to play off that fear that this monster is so much better than humans so we are helpless against it. OK. But unfortunately I cannot stop thinking about biology, and also, what underpins biology: energy. First, the biology part - there are lots of animals and not-animals here, today, in the past, that are better than humans on just about any axis. It's kind of what happens when you compare 1 species against, you know, several hundred millions of other species. There isn't really an apex of all apexes, there was no cosmic race to do that, and also no reason to do so. A species exists in a time and place and its unique constraints. Pretty much nothing is adapted to every conceivable environment - why should it be? And every species and individual makes trade offs because energy is not infinite. There are lots of advantages to being warm blooded like a human (being able to move! running from danger! actively capturing things!) but also lots of disadvantages (the number of calories you have to consume is staggeringly more than cold blooded, not to mention plants! you're limited by the productivity of the prey you eat!) There's not exactly a hard-and-fast rule that says anaerobic life forms are better at life than aerobic, I'm sorry. Each of them generally does extremely poorly in the wrong environment. As you add complexity you add to the number of ways things can go wrong, you add to the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure...It's always bothered me when the aliens are so much better for monstrous reasons just because Doylistically, that makes them scary. OK, but what does make them able to exist better than us in hard vacuum and in a hyperoxygenated environment like Earth? (Have you seen what oxygen does to stuff that has never been exposed to oxygen before? What it did to all the rocks that were present on the planet when it happened? The effects are still visible several billion years later. Have you thought about fire and why it does really well here and not elsewhere?) If they move faster than us, does that mean they need more energy? What about their joints? This is a part of my brain I am apparently unable to shut off if the context invites any kind of biological scrutiny. We are humans writing for other humans, we know our limitations imposed by biology and physics because obviously, we inhabit these bodies and have first-hand knowledge, which is unconsciously integrated into our art. When monsters are written this way, they appear to have no limits, and I find that weirdly frustrating. Not to mention the worldbuilding pretzel I find hard to respect when the monster is actually custom-designed to be extra scary or good at killing/destroying humans, when they did not know about humans - it's just too much Ah How Convenient, Humans Are The Center of the Universe (Negative Edition) to me. I'd respect it more if a monster was like "oh I have discovered Humans are a great snack, didn't know they existed!" rather than some cosmically horrifying this has always been out there to hunt you, a Very Important Organism from the Center of the Universe* statement. I don't think these concerns bother other people who like the genre, or use these concepts, it's just me. They wake up every ounce of my but actuallyyyy instincts and then I stop enjoying it as a book**.

I'm OK with totally magical (often in fantasy) monsters, since it just says OK, ignore all physical realities, this is something else. That's fine. I just can't with the halfsies position here.

(Indeed I did not enjoy Blindsight [I believe this is Peter Watts' exercise in despair], nor Into the Drowning Deep, nor right now, Leviathan Wakes.)

*Pretty sure we're in a backwater actually

** Actually I also don't appreciate, this time from a narrative perspective, the way many of those also do a late-book shift into re-examining the horrifying bits as Actually This is Beautiful, which I find both twee and irritating. THIS IS JUST NOT FOR ME

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Rules that make photography easier for me

2026-02-08T04:47:01Z

1. Don't be precious about photos.
2. If it's blurry and it's not required for ID or proof, delete.
3. If it's so similar to the previous photo as to be identical, then it doesn't matter which duplicate you delete. Delete either.
4. It's not analog photography, if you want more than one copy of the photo, cloning the entire photo is easy in Lightroom.
4.a. In bird photography you don't end up editing photos in an artistic way so you never end up cloning photos anyway.
5. Editing the same pose over and over is tiring. You just need one or maybe two.
6. No matter how much energy you pour into trying to save bad photos (too dark, grainy) there is a limit to how good they'll look. Set a reasonable standard and move on. Not everything can be saved.
7. Taking less photos in the field means less culling later, so be reasonably conservative in taking photos. I want to spend more time outside birding, and less time indoors editing.
8. It's better to have photos edited than to take 1,000 potentially good photos that never get uploaded or shared.
9. You never go back to old photos to re-edit them. Keeping the raw files is fine but seriously you never go back to re-edit.
10. Mental overwhelm is the surest way to giving up. If you've taken too many photos in one day that it feels daunting to go through all of them in one batch, divide them into folders by location. (You can always regroup them in a folder after). If that's still too much, halve or quarter or however much is required, into their own folders. (You can always regroup...) You must have achievable, reasonable intermediate goals to persist.
11. If it's sharp when it's cropped then it's sharp. Stop zooming to 300% and freaking out it's not sharp.

Round 1: cull any obviously bad photo - blurry without interest, too dark, obvious dupes, bird no longer in frame, accidental photos of the ground etc.
Round 2: delete dupes, this photo came earlier in the stream and was okay but I have better photos after and it's not showing any unique behaviour that I should keep
Round 3: pick out from the rest which I should spend time editing

I took probably several thousand photos last year and edited almost 700 of them, uploading them to ebird. I took my camera out 59 days. A lot of these rules really helped me, because editing photos takes a lot of decision making energy. I decided I needed to basically reduce the mental load with some rules instead of basically starting afresh with every single photo. Coming home from a week's trip with two thousand photos is both showing restraint on my part and also completely overwhelming, and also, I'm not cutting down my other hobbies to spend all my time in front of a screen!

This is the highest rated image I have on ebird last year:

Snow bunting :)

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January reading is not going so well

2026-01-31T23:15:12Z

Ratings out of 5

Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer - 0.5 stars
Divine Rivals - Rebecca Ross - 1.5 stars
Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr Crippen - Hallie Rubenhold - DNF ugh
On Basilisk Station - David Weber - 2.25 stars
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith - 4 stars (phew)
My Inconvenient Duke - Loretta Chase - 2.25 stars
Tooth and Claw - Jo Walton - 3.25 stars (recovering)

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in other news - Big Fat Quiz

2026-01-01T23:41:55Z

For a few holidays now, my brother and I curl up on the couch and watch/try to do Big Fat Quiz of the year, the one hosted by Jimmy Carr in the UK. As we are not British, have never lived there, and are reading the news in small chunks, we are VERY BAD at this quiz. Even though it's a comedy show, we always do worse than all the rest of the teams, like getting 10/50 points kind of bad. The hardest questions are the ones about minor British political gaffes (no idea, though one year I did learn of the Rishi Sunak Sky TV thing) and, hardestof all, the See What You Say segments, where you have to guess a piece of news based on sounding out about 10 pictures. Usually they feature celebrity faces and if you don't know that's George So-and-So then you are just stuck. But I am pleased to report for the first time ever this year we have managed to place 3rd!!! out of 4. We beat 2025's Roisin & Katherine! BY ONE POINT!!

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extra book goal 2025: Lois McMaster Bujold & Jane Austen

2025-12-31T22:06:48Z

I didn't set out to do this, but I accidentally ended up reading the majority of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels this year. I read all 16 Vorkosigan novels plus all the short stories (though not Dreamweaver's Dilemma since it's not really canon). I also read both Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. With the exception of one novel (Gentleman Jole & the Red Queen), I had fun reading everything, and overall her work has given me so much joy and happiness this year.

It was also the 250th birthday of Jane Austen on December 16th. In consequence I also read all of her novels, including two I had not read before: Emma and Lady Susan. I enjoyed them all to varying degrees, and hopefully will get round to more written down thoughts, but what struck me most is the difference in how I felt about Mansfield Park. I first read it around age 16, and I hated it so much. In the intervening time I think I also merged it with some of my feelings from Jane Eyre (which I do like) and the scenes from Lowood. But this time many of the elements like Fanny Price's meekness did not bother me nearly so much, and I did enjoy a lot of it. I think it's a combination of being prepared, a much higher tolerance of maddening characters, and also a taste for difficult female protagonists.

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Boots I have bought in the quest for warm and dry feet

2025-12-14T01:35:00Z

1. Merrell moab hiking boots. Great, just not waterproof. Indeed, they wet through if I walk through heavy dew, which I do extremely frequently (daily, when I'm going hard birding in warmer weather). Didn't have to break them in, I love Merrell. Good condition.
2. Xtratuf rainboots. Fell apart within a few months catastrophically - cracks from ordinary walking that ran completely through the material which made them not waterproof. Threw them away. So sad because they were very easy to get on, very comfortable, and a fun rubber-ducky yellow.
3. Rubber boots from Hunter. Pretty OK condition but about 20% they're fine, 80% they make my feet hurt so much I cannot walk. Can't really break them in because rubber doesn't, and it's been more than a year of wearing them on and off. Almost got frostbite in them once despite wearing heavy socks and those toe warmer pads. The outside is flawless though and they are a gorgeous red colour, and being rubber they are waterproof.
4. Bean boots (unlined) in the classic rubber lower, leather upper. I just bought these. So far breaking in nicely. Kind of tough to get them on but it's improving/I'm getting better at it. The tongue is fully sewn to the upper (for waterproofing), so it can't swing fully out, and it doubles over where it's sewn, but I'm not actually getting any pain when walking around in them. I think I trust them enough to go on a few hours' hiking now.

And now since it's winter I really want another pair of lined/fleece boots. I've managed to get by, good lord, the past decade or more without snow boots, because I feel like it just doesn't snow much since I moved east. I almost never have to step over snow drifts or break trails, and I just wear sneakers. But I spend a lot of time outside and every year or so I do have an occasional outdoor day that IS very cold on the feet, and I have to flee when I feel frostbite setting in...

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Marvel things I have watched

2025-08-11T23:04:00Z

Marvel things I have watched:

( things I have watched )

( babbling )

If you would like to do this meme yourself and don't want to undo all my formatting:

Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).

Phase One:
Iron Man (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Thor (2011)
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
The Avengers (2012)

Phase Two:
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV 2013–2020)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Ant-Man (2015)
Daredevil (TV 2015–2018)
Agent Carter (TV 2015–2016)
Jessica Jones (TV 2015–2019)

Phase Three:
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Luke Cage (TV 2016–2018)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
Iron Fist (TV 2017–2018)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
The Defenders (TV 2017)
The Punisher (TV 2017–2019)
Inhumans (TV 2017)
Runaways (TV 2017–2019)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Black Panther (2018)
Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018–2019)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Captain Marvel (2019)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Phase Four:
Black Widow (2021)
WandaVision (TV 2021)
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Eternals (2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Loki (TV 2021-2023)
Hawkeye (TV 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Moon Knight (TV 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Ms. Marvel (TV 2022)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (TV 2022)

Phase Five:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Secret Invasion (TV 2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
The Marvels (2023)
Echo (TV 2024)
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Agatha All Along (TV 2024)
Daredevil: Born Again (TV 2025-2026)
Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Thunderbolts (2025)
Ironheart (TV 2025)

Phase Six:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Wonder Man (TV 2025)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Vision Quest (TV 2026)
Avengers: Doomsday (2026)
Avengers: Secret Wars (2027)

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Vorkosigan Saga - Memory - Lois McMaster Bujold

2025-07-13T21:03:13Z

In a series where I love almost every book, it’s usually hard to pick a favourite, but Memory is unquestionably my favourite. It’s just emotionally so satisfying, the culmination the emotional investment as well as character development in the past 10 books. It’s so, so good!

( Memory )

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Vorkosigan Saga - Mirror Dance - Lois McMaster Bujold

2025-06-30T00:57:11Z

Immediately starting the entry with spoilers, so it all goes under the cut.

( Mirror Dance )

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Vorkosigan Saga - Brothers in Arms - Lois McMaster Bujold

2025-04-21T02:32:21Z

This is one of the earlier novels that Bujold wrote, and it shows a bit in the prose, but not in the plotting. I think it’s much like Cetaganda in the premise – off-world adventure, Miles refuses to tell his superiors about what he’s doing (oh Miles). The setting of Earth I feel fairly neutral about. London isn’t that interesting, but neither is it a detriment. They’re more like Beta in terms of not letting people carry around deadly weapons, and their tube system is still very good (hooray!) Or maybe I overstate Barrayar’s allowance of lethal weapons – Miles is after all not a civilian and on his home turf.

( Brothers in Arms )

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Vorkosigan Saga - Cetaganda, Labyrinth, The Borders of Infinity - Lois McMaster Bujold

2025-04-16T01:38:27Z

Continuing through Cetaganda and two short stories:

( Cetaganda )

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Vorkosigan Saga - The Warrior's Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game - LM Bujold

2025-04-13T03:32:53Z

I think I'll do this chronologically!

( The Warrior's Apprentice )

( The Mountains of Mourning )

( The Vor Game )

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Vorkosigan Saga - Shards of Honor/Barrayar - Lois McMaster Bujold

2025-04-06T02:53:27Z

I would first like to say, I should have read these YEARS AGO, I only read Shards, and somehow didn't go on. But now I have read everything except Ethan of Athos/Falling Free. My friend C proposed The Warrior's Apprentice for one of my small book clubs back in January. C is not only very thoughtful about figuring out whether so-and-so might like a book, she and I overlap in book tastes the most of anyone I know, with only one or two exceptions (only really notable because of how rare this is). She just scored 58 on the 100 formative novels list I posted, ha. Flist, I lost my mind. I feel like I've been thinking about these books, and/or flat out reading non-stop, for about two or three months. I pulled my other small book club into reading these, too, since both C and the third person love the series, and I sat down at book club and monologued like a villain (from my copious notes) about all the things I liked.

While I'm babbling about the series as a whole - I guess I'll do a full summary afterwards - I read a lot of the commentary on Reactor formerly Tordotcom, which start here: https://reactormag.com/tag/vorkosigan-saga/?sort=newest¤tPage=17

Jo Walton does a post per book plus a couple character posts, and I really like her analysis. Well worth reading, and the link above starts from her summation. She did finish up the whole thing prior to Gentleman Jole & the Red Queen (the only book I do not like) and she doesn't have a post about that novel, but her posts are insightful, enjoyable, and very, very worth reading. Reactor also has Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer do a full read-through. Her posts are the vast majority of the posts about Vorkosigan on the site, and...well, I have reached a level where I am scrounging for any kind of discussion/commentary, but in many places I disagreed with her take, felt she went on not just unnecessary but dumb tangents, and sometimes she was flat out factually wrong, even about facts she had just read. I am a little irritated by that; forgivable in whole-novel/series summations, but surely you can recall the fact from the chapter you just read. Also - this offends me most, I think - she flies through Mirror Dance's juiciest and most important parts by just doing chapters 9-17 in one post, then 18-33 in a second. Other works like 'Winterfair Gifts' short story she did in three separate posts, and C-M simply elides all the yes painful, yes difficult, but really good stuff in Mirror Dance, one of the best of the series. So it offends me. There is both interesting comments and stupid comments in the re-read as well.

With that being said! Shards of Honor and Barrayar!

( Shards of Honor )

( Barrayar )

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100 books that most influenced me

2025-04-05T19:53:12Z

https://www.listchallenges.com/books-that-influenced-silver/

100 books that most influenced me personally. How many have you read?

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Vorkosigan saga

2025-02-17T05:05:42Z

I'm so incredibly late to reading this and very much should have read it so much sooner, but it's been eating my brain. I read Shards of Honour years ago and enjoyed it, but was stymied by the knowledge that most of the series is about Miles - I generally hate it when book sequels go to the next gen, so I never pursued the further books. I really should have, because it turns out I really like them! I really like space opera/military SF in general, and these are just so good.

I'm in a bunch of book clubs and for one of them we decided to read The Warrior's Apprentice, based on C's recommendation on where we should start. So I read it. And I loved it. A few days later I was getting dinner with another friend in another book club (I have too many book clubs) and was telling K about how much I enjoyed The Warrior's Apprentice & The Vor Game, the next in sequence, and K was like "oh, I love those books!". K is in another book club with C with me, so when we met, we discussed the actual book we had chosen, and then devoted the rest of the time to Vorkosigan. The next meeting is going to be "whatever book I can get to", with K saying she'd like to discuss Memory, but only if I can make it there. Both C and K have read them all, so we tentatively set Memory as a goal, and this book club may temporarily just turn into us discussing Vorkosigan until I suppose I read all of them. As of Feb 15, I am absolutely going to make it to Memory, as I've just finished Mirror Dance. Though I need to force myself to take a break. I finished The Warrior's Apprentice on January 18th, and since then I have read Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Labyrinth, Borders of Infinity, Shards of Honour (having forgotten all the plot from my first reading, this felt just like a new book), Barrayar, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. I took a break in the middle in various places to try to read other books, but it was kind of difficult because I just wanted to keep going with Vorkosigan. I have copies of a bunch of omnibus editions, which also makes it so easy to just keep going.

I have so many feelings.

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cards!

2024-12-28T22:26:57Z

I am very behind, but anticipate creating and sending out cards by about end January. Let me know if you'd like one (and your address if it's been awhile). All comments are screened.

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a random growl about fashion

2024-12-03T04:00:02Z

One thing that both fascinates and annoys me about fashion and the perception of what is cool is the way fashion is related to ingroup/outgroup, exclusivity, signalling, etc. This intersects in a predictable but still weird way with money and the price of things. Which is a pretentious way of saying that the thing that you use as normal, workaday, cheap/reasonably priced things today, which you bought because they are reasonably priced for the usable value you get out of it, may blow up eventually into expensive fashion items in the future. Including for people who will never use the object for its original use! For me this is most evident in watches, which I approach from the outside and which have a jewelery/collector/wealth signalling aspect to (and which has very high ceilings in price + the actual time-telling is superseded for most people by other tools). Getting a watch that tells time accurately and is waterproof is fairly inexpensive. Quartz watches are very accurate and stay synced for a long time as long as you don't require GPS-levels of coordination, watch batteries are not expensive, mass manufacture drives down the price hugely, the materials can be strong, durable and waterproof quite cheaply. But there's expensive watches that are designed to look like or imitate what were once workaday timepieces, but because aviators/divers/whathaveyou in this era looked cool and manly, that's something to emulate visually today, at a much higher price point. It's a marketing thing, where you look beyond selling an object for the practical use (tell time) and sell an aspiration, or an object that props up the perception of yourself. Or look at fountain pens. Undoubtedly even when they were daily items, there were still some people who bought super expensive ones, but now the proportion of people who buy the high end kinds is much higher, because the bulk of the people who just wanted "cheap reliable writing implement" switched over to ballpoints. But fountain pens have this upper segment of people who are really, really, really into them, and are willing to fork over thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. There are very usable and nice fountain pens for under ten dollars, too. Some of the expensive ones look pretty much like any regular pen someone might have used in 1920, without being encrusted in diamonds or some other expensive material. Just emulation. It's the triple whammy for me: wanting to emulate something in the past, the emulation being fashion only, and paying very high prices for it.

It makes me wonder what things I own or do today which, given 50 or 100 years' distance and nostalgic (or historical) gloss, will look cool and historical. My binoculars which are expensive (but proportionate to their cost of manufacture)? The mirrorless camera - I mean, these days film cameras are now worshipped by a tiny fraction of people who are extremely into them, and are expensive to get, and I'm literally seeing this happen now with cheap digital point-and-shoots from the 2000s - will the shortcomings I currently find about it glamourized? What about my work, or the tools I use for them? The workhorse laptop which is sturdy but might become emblematic of $industryin2020s era nostalgic? Will people 100 years from now all get laser eye surgery and glasses become worn with clear glass to look like people like me? It's weird to think about!

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silverflight8 @ 2024-11-06T12:31:00

2024-11-06T17:32:07Z

I'm so upset and angry.

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book series

2024-11-02T03:52:59Z

A reading meme from hamsterwoman about authors you've read 5+ books of. Went through my ebook library but there's a lot of others I read in physical copy which I think I'm forgetting.

( Read more... )

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halfway through the year reading

2024-06-30T03:06:45Z

I have read 29 books so far, not counting re-reads.

Best Book You've Read So Far
This is difficult, but probably Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee. It's such a gem of a book, does really novel things, and despite the confusion caused by being plunged right into the action, does have all the information contained in the book, seeded here and there. Very satisfying.

Best Sequel You're Read So Far
Hm. Red Side Story was okay, but probably the prize goes to the two other novels in the Machineries of Empire series (Yoon Ha Lee). Sometimes when book 1 is very good, books 2/3 tend to be disappointing, but I really didn't feel that way. Well, OK, the ending to book 3 I kind of felt a little flat about, but then there was a short story that fixed that all up for me again ("Glass Cannon") :D

New release you haven't read yet, but want to
Lyorn, by Steven Brust. I really want to but I am currently in about 4 book clubs, which kind of happened accidentally, so I have a lot to read right now.

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year
I am so bad at keeping up. Sherry Thomas just released the newest Lady Sherlock book, which I need to read!

Biggest disappointment
The Wolf Who Loved Me by Lydia Dare, which was somehow both disappointing on a romance level and on a werewolf level :(
Also the first 1/3 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the garbage anthropology that made me almost quit. The entire premise of the book is that our primate ancestors were too stupid, incurious, and feeble to ever become humans, that our humanity and qualities in ourselves that we prize come from outer space. Which as a human is just so insulting; plus over the years we have accumulated a lot of anthropological evidence showing that our species' flexibility, ability to learn, and care for others is actually very deeply rooted in our hominin past. I understand Clarke is making a point. His point is stupid.

Biggest surprise
I did not expect to like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld so much. I think if I had read this when I was fourteen, it would have briefly or maybe permanently become part of my personality. Even now I feel shaken a little.

Favorite new author
Hm, I've read two Loretta Chase novels and liked both, so probably her for now. Sometimes I find liking one book by an author kind of like striking gold once and not liking the rest (as much, or at all) so having two is always a good thing. I'm quite capable of liking one book by one author and then going on a wholesale tear through all their works - I am slowly reading all of Ngaio Marsh, though her books can be very uneven in quality - but sometimes it is worth it and sometimes it is not. Especially romance, occasionally it really is just one book that hits my buttons just right and all the rest of the back catalogue are meh.

Newest Fictional Crush
Shuos Jedao from Machineries of Empire, undoubtedly. He's just so good at things, and I am so weak to that.

Newest Favorite Character
Sybel from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Book That Made You Cry
I don't think any books so far.

Book That Made You Happy
So many of these books! Starter Villain by John Scalzi was a fun romp with cats. The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren was pretty sweet and funny.

What Books Do You Need to Read by the End of the Year?
I am 3/6th of the way through my Hugo Best Novel read this year, and am for once actually going to finish!! Other than that, I am pretty much just doing my usual, reading books for book clubs and trying to catch up on my TBR, pretty free-form.

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why birding hit me like a truck

2024-06-24T03:08:59Z

So I have about 5000 hobbies, and those hobbies get various amounts of energy from me at different times, and I do try to not fall head-first into new ones, especially if they start with a big outlay of cash - I just think that there's a difference between "knitting" and "I like buying supplies for knitting and being excited". Mostly there's just not enough time in the world. And I've been pretty nuts on some hobbies for a long time. But I feel like birding was almost in its own league, in that I encountered it at the right time and it absolutely mashed all my buttons.

I like hobbies that have a "discover something hidden" aspect to them. Letterboxing, Ingress, all appease this part of me. I love that birding can happen anywhere - nowhere on the planet is free from birds. You can be in the wildest and deepest part of the wilderness, you can be in Antarctica, you can be on deep pelagic waters or the most remote islands, you can be in a city or in the suburbs, there will be birds. Some places are better, of course, but it's an activity you can do anywhere. And people don't usually think that there will be birds in the city, and it's not the most biodiverse place ever (though there are some interesting caveats to this), so finding them is like finding little gems. Plus birding has a "chase after rarities" aspect, which I try not to do too much - but it's a hobby that has a lot of people who like to do it, and plenty of infrastructure built around it, like rare bird alerts.

I like travelling in general! I like seeing novel places, solo travel, urban exploration because I didn't learn to drive until very late. Before birding I would take a solo trip about once a year usually to Europe and just spend a week or two running about a country. I took trips via airplane but also by train, since Amtrak serves my area pretty well. I quite like public transit systems in general and have done a lot of travel via public transit. Especially once phone data became available, it's gotten very easy to do.

I like being out in nature! Honestly I have to stay indoors for a whole day I feel antsy. Let me tell you, I did not enjoy quarantining that one time I had covid. I love gardens. Before birding I also used to really enjoy going to various gardens - I went specifically to the moss gardens in Abbey Rockefeller Garden up in Maine, I've been to the Longwood Garden (the DuPont one) and many of the famous local ones nearby, the National Arboretum. When I stopped in LA to break up the Hawaii trip, I went to the Huntington Gardens, which were amazing, and I should have gone there twice instead of going to Universal, which I discovered was not for me. I like urban parks a lot, too. I live in a city and have to rent cars at frankly extortionate rates, so I still do a lot of birding in urban parks.

I care about conservation and think birding is a good way to get people interested and to care. I think it's important to advocate for wildlife, that we are animals and we rely on the ecosystem just like every other living being does. Since I do so much urban birding I get approached often, and I've decided to use this avenue to try to get people to be more interested; I carry around bird stickers with info on the back for getting involved (in birding, in conservation) and hand them out to anyone who isn't a birder who comes to talk to me. Biology is so huge and there just aren't enough biologists out there, so one place citizen science can step up is here.

I love deep time/natural history. I really like the science and taxonomy end of birding too, and there's a deep, deep well to dive into there. I like human history too, I think it comes from an overall "but why?" and the past is (part of) the key to the present.

I love data. eBird makes this so easy, because it not only stores your sightings, complete with comments, media (photos/audio), time/date/location, distance walked, but also offers different ways to view it. You can see who has gone to the hotspot recently and seen which birds, how many times you've seen this species and where and when, how many birds you've seen this year, breakdowns by country, sub-country divisions, sub-sub country divisions, etc (in the US this is down to the county level). Bar charts of frequency of birds seen at your self-defined patch, over the course of a year, averaged across all the years you've been reporting. The ability to have all your data exported in csv, so other people who can code have also created additional ways to look at your data, plus just the joy of exporting it and then messing with it in Excel or program of choice.

There's even an art and creative component - you can write up your trips, make art featuring birds, photography, all that.

I like that you can do it a little or a lot, and you can scale it back or ramp it up any time you want. I am really good at doing a once-a-day-challenge, so I've been submitting a checklist a day, but some days are me going out morning, noon, and afternoon; other days are 3 minutes looking out my apartment window; and on really busy days I'll just log a super quick incidental checklist, where you don't really stop to try to observe all the birds, just note one at x location at y time. You can bird from your yard, or go to an urban park, or a wilderness, or the side of the road. I really like that it can be done by yourself or in groups. I bird a lot, so most of it is by myself, but I've joined some bird clubs and go on walks fairly regularly, or go with friends, both of which are great. You can choose what habitats you want to bird - I personally really like forests and grassland and some seaside and marsh, but I hate boats, so I just skip anything pelagic, and that's perfectly doable.

So yes. That is why I am nuts. Fortunately the full on madness is passing a bit now that spring migration has passed, and I'm doing other fun things in addition to birding, though honestly at least half of that is related to how the weather is horrible...I'm excited for it to be less hot and for shorebirds to start coming back south.

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packing list strategizing

2024-02-07T05:28:59Z

I quite like tinkering with and thinking about packing things for trips. I always like thinking about how to improve it too, it's very satisfying for some reason.

Good packing:
-> Overall very good!
-> Previous mistakes fixed this time:
* sandwich bags to bring lunch, insulated lunchbag
* flipflops (in fact flipflops are from Michigan 2023 when I didn't have any and had to grab some from Meijer's)
* snacks
* cable for USB to car
* sunglasses
-> Pretty much had all the stuff I needed or wanted, with room still to spare in suitcase and backpack
-> Packed some casual wear, which was really, really useful. I usually shower as soon as I get back from birding, because sweaty and also to tick check, wash them off, etc. But I don't want to get back into my dusty/sweaty/muddy stuff, nor my pyjamas right away. This time especially since there were family-style meals, I would get back in the afternoon or early evening, shower, and change into regular clothing. So glad I packed this, otherwise I'd have to wear hiking stuff intended for the next day. Will continue to pack some "sitting around" clothing.
-> 3 waterbottles, 1 collapsible, worked well for tiding me over while in SJO when I was unsure of water safety and did not have facilities to boil or sanitize. Recycle the metal one as it leaks every time I use it, though.
-> small IKEA blue tote surprisingly useful. Stored camera, binoculars, harness, daypack, and some other sundries well and made getting in and out of van with all my stuff easy. Compresses to nothing but provides lots of carry, will do in the future.
-> did not forget ANYTHING on plane, car, unlike last time (RIP my Kobo Clara 2E just six months old)

Bad packing:
-> USB cable for car connection did not work with phone case, had to take phone out of case constantly to use. Fortunately never dropped the phone while it was out of the case. How did I take the only cord which does not work with my case? All the other ones work.
-> forgot tretinoin
-> no sink stop for laundry
-> when doing underwear counting calculations, forgot I needed to treat the period underwear separately (long dry time, needs to be available for wearing suddenly and is not interchangeable with normal underwear), result: emergency underwear laundry the night before flight to SJO of regular underwear as I had come up short and would be doing brief stays, which are not ideal for drying laundry. With the A/C on I hoped they would dry easily, which they kinda did...but I realized late at night and woke early so yeah, slightly damp underwear time that finished drying on me. Not the worst thing in the world but not the greatest either.
-> what the heck happened to the grey/heather base layer???? Could not find it anywhere while packing to go the first leg, did I leave it elsewhere? Could still do with more shirts. Warm climates suck.
-> pack more sanitizing hand wipes
-> need thin hair-ties to do multiple braids. One braid is ok but doesn't always play well with hat.
-> need to carry more cash since electronic payment not as accepted there, and I forgot about bringing extra for tipping (because of some extra splits in the cost, and borrowing cash + repaying via e-transfer with a couple, I did kludge enough/actually more than enough cash to tip and pay in the end, but that was stressful)
-> pack gloves - forgot altitude means cold
-> pack a little note paper, was scribbling ID notes on napkins

Not sure:
-> packed two small tubes of toothpaste by accident but honestly this was all for the best, as the first tube ran out literally the day I left. I might have scrimped without the second tube, unnecessarily
-> did not need first aid kit except to help with a developing blister/callus, but need to look up and get a proper first-aid kit
-> tried to use a small plastic water bottle as an ice pack to keep things cold, but the mini-fridge was too weak to actually freeze the water into ice. Experiment postponed.
-> having rainboots was clunky but useful, still had lots of room so maybe bring second pair of sneakers next time in case rained out

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Scholomance - A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves - Naomi Novik

2023-07-03T03:47:50Z

I read A Deadly Education for book club, which was a good thing, because I probably would have DNF'd it about a quarter through otherwise. But by the end of the novel, which I consumed in one sitting, I thought "I'd like to read the sequels", downloaded them from the library, and they sat there for a few weeks. Last night I sat down with my kobo and thought I'd start The Last Graduate.

Reader, I read the Last Graduate through in one sitting, ending at 1:30am, internally screamed at the cliffhanger, and in a fit of madness actually started reading The Golden Enclaves for a few pages, because of that cliffhanger. The next day was a rainy Sunday and I woke up late and did nothing until 4:40pm when I finished The Golden Enclaves.

A Deadly Education starts with El, a student at the Scholomance, a massive deadly magical school. There are no adults or teachers, only the school itself; the school and the students are attacked daily by dangerous maleficaria, "mals", which are attracted to the young students' mana and relatively low power. Students are teleported in with very limited supplies and must survive 4 years before they can graduate, which involves running the gauntlet of mals to the doors. Despite the fatality rate of the school, which is around 50%, it is significantly better odds than growing up on the outside, so parents continue to send their children in.

El is a self-described loser in the school: she has no magical connections like the enclaver kids who have an assured ticket to a safe life after graduation, and she has no social skills or family connections to help her forge an alliance. She is also living with the terrible doom of a prophecy over head: specifically that she's destined to destroy all the world's safe havens, the enclaves. Her penchant for magic is for complete ultra-violent destruction, which only increases her fear.

Spoilery review follows of all three books follows. ( Spoilery review )

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nattering about travel luggage and many lessons I have learned about it

2023-06-20T03:37:20Z

I keep thinking about how I should post and somehow the topic that has floated up is...packing for trips??

For a bit I've been researching luggage and thinking about what I like about my set up and all that. I'm incapable of making large purchases without first wildly over-researching them and quadruple guessing if I need it and wavering between options, and then once I've decided, waiting like a spider for a deal on what I want, so I've accrued Thoughts on This Topic. Most of my trips are around 1 week to 2 weeks; previously I would mostly do urban cities with public transit, I visit family for several weeks sometimes, but now I also do a lot of birding-specific trips. I do sometimes do smaller trips, like a night or two. The frustration of using my stupid backpack, which I believe is something like 20ish litres in volume (North Face Vault for women) and is annoyingly small, droves me nuts. I have a roller bag for the longer trips, which is great, but it was nearly impossible to pack a weekend trip in the backpack, which is just absurd. I don't pack that much! It's just incredibly inefficient and tiny and I swear the instant you put a laptop in the sleeve - which I don't even travel with generally!! - the whole thing shrinks to about 5L of packing volume and feels super uncomfortable. Why did I buy this backpack? It was 2020 and I needed a backpack and couldn't try one on and it wasn't too crazy expensive, but I hate it. It is so uncomfortable to carry, even though it's not that big and not very heavy, because I just ordered online.

( many thoughts about luggage )

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