silverflight8 | Reading

Something you realize when researching games made by trans people is that in the early days of video games, there were a lot of trans women in the industry who hadn't transitioned yet. Much of the time, when I'm looking into a game from the 1970s or 1980s and see a woman's name listed in the credits online, that's not the name she was credited under when the game came out.

Such is the case with Cathryn Mataga, who created several games for Synapse Software under her former name in the early 1980s. She transitioned in the mid/late 1980s and moved into a more behind-the-scenes role, with extensive programming credits through the 1990s and 2000s, notably on the groundbreaking Neverwinter Nights (1991), the first graphical MMORPG.

But today I'm going to talk about Zeppelin (1983), a multidirectional shooter she developed at Synapse for Atari 8-bit systems.

zeppelin carrying a giant key flies through pixel caverns dodging enemy airships and shooting a hole in a vertical barrier

zeppelin carrying a giant key flies through pixel caverns dodging enemy airships and shooting a hole in a vertical barrier

This game is not to be confused with Zeppelin (1982) from Microvations, nor with Zeppelin Rescue (1983) from Intercept Software, nor with Zeppelin! (1994) from Ikarion Software. Those are all unrelated games, which I guess either reflect the dominance of zeppelins in the cultural zeitgeist of the late 20th century, or else the fact that it's easier to get a game to look right when you're piloting a vehicle that's kind of slow and cumbersome to operate.

( cut for length )

You can play Zeppelin in your browser on the Internet Archive. On the title screen you have to press F1 to start the game, and you use the numpad to control it. If you can. Playing with a joystick might be easier, but that's beyond my level of Atari emulation expertise.

onethinginaday_feed

https://onethinginafrenchday.podbean.com/e/le-visiteur-surprise-qui-faisait-un-long-voyage-heatwave-guest-in-the-garden/

Quand Mathilde nous a raconté cette histoire la semaine dernière au kung-fu, son invité était encore présent. Mais vous allez l'apprendre, l'invité est reparti. J'ai trouvé cette histoire tellement mignonne, j'étais donc ravie qu'elle accepte de vous la raconter aussi.

Nous étions installées, Mathilde et moi, dans les gradins du stade de Courbevoie pour l'enregistrement, lundi, à la tombée du jour.

Ça fait du bien dans un monde souvent cruel et dur d'entendre une histoire toute simple, celle d'un lien qui se crée entre un animal et un humain.

C'est aussi l'occasion d'écouter une autre manière de raconter les histoires, de découvrir un nouveau vocabulaire.

Aussi, si écouter ou lire c’est bien, alors remarquer, comprendre et cultiver son français, c’est mieux. Je vous invite à vous abonner à la lettre qui accompagne cet épisode destinée aux apprenants de français sur www.onethinginafrenchday.com

Dans la lettre qui accompagne cet épisode en particulier, nous reviendrons sur le texte de lundi : nous étudierons les temps des verbes conjugués d'un passage et nous répondrons à la question suivante : pourquoi autant de verbes sont-ils au présent alors que le texte raconte une histoire passée?

heatwave guest garden, homing pigeon France, pigeon voyageur, French daily life, real French conversation, authentic French, life in Paris, learn French podcast, spoken French, French stories, surprise visitor garden, racing pigeon story

https://onethinginafrenchday.podbean.com/e/le-visiteur-surprise-qui-faisait-un-long-voyage-heatwave-guest-in-the-garden/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3254/

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

https://xkcd.com/3254/

rachelmanija

In a country with Wild West vibes, young girls are often sold to brothels, to become sex slaves when they come of age. They are given magical tattoos of buds when they're bought. These tattoos slowly grow and blossom into flowers that the girls are nicknamed for. They cause excruciating pain when they're covered up, preventing the girls from fleeing and blending into the populace. But this isn't the only barrier to escape. The entire wilderness area is haunted by angry ghosts that can take physical form and rip you to shreds.

On Clementine's inaugural rape night, her would-be rapist nearly suffocates her, and she brains him with a lamp. As she would be executed for that, she, her older sister Aster who's been a sex slave for years already, and three other girls manage to escape the brothel and flee in search of a rumored woman who can remove the magic tattoos.

By far the most interesting character in the book is Violet, the brothel bully, spoiled brat, and magical opium addict who is the only one who knows where to find the woman who will be their salvation, if she actually exists. As they flee across the haunted wilderness, they're pursued by magical slavecatchers, are joined by a boy, and meet some rebels. Clementine has a romance with the boy, two of the girls have a romance together, and Violet and Aster have intense feelings which hopefully go somewhere in the sequel.

This novel has an extremely cool setting and unusual worldbuilding. I love ensemble casts and wilderness traveling. I expected to adore this, but while I did enjoy reading it, I didn't love it. I had been under the impression that the girls all had different magical powers, which is my own fault for misreading the blurb, but I was disappointed that they don't have any, except that Clementine can talk to ghosts a bit. More importantly, only Aster and Violet, plus Clementine to some degree, get any real characterization. I was interested in them enough that I'll read the sequel, but the book overall felt like it should have been fantastic but ended up merely good.

Content notes: There is a very violent, graphic rape attempt in chapter one. That's it for that but the repercussions of years of sexual abuse are felt throughout the novel.

sholio

I picked up "The Living City" by Des Fitzgerald at the bookstore a few weeks ago because it sounded interesting - the book's core premise is that trying to make cities "greener" (in the sense of more trees, more connection to nature, more intentional planning of green spaces within urban spaces, etc) is antithetical to the purpose of a city. So I wanted to see what he had to say about that.

The answer is: very little. This is essentially a book-length manifesto about how the entire concept of a green city is rooted in early-20th-century racism and fascism. There are some interesting ideas in here, but for a book whose entire premise is that trying to change cities into something else is wrong, bad, and also fascist, there's a surprising lack of actual positivity about cities as they currently exist. He just doesn't like the concept of planned cities, and especially city planning with the intent of introducing more nature into cities, based on the idea that green spaces are a more natural human environment. But he rarely brings up existing cities except to talk about how much he hates them, specifically. Paris? Awful. Copenhagen? Worst city he's ever been in. New York? Soulless grid. There's one chapter that opens with several pages dissing on Melbourne, Australia, for wanting to preserve its self-image as "a genteel outpost of European colonialism" because the residents are upset about all their trees dying in a drought. He doesn't seem to hate London as a whole (I GUESS) but mostly talks about it in the context of "fuck these specific neighborhoods in particular."

In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country. The worst thing about making cities greener is that it makes them more like the country. He refers to the part of Ireland he grew up in as "a bog" which he was glad to escape. The country is also terrible and the last thing cities want to do is be more like the country.

The truly baffling thing about this book is that it contains exactly zero content about the main thing I picked it up for: to find out what alternative he's proposing. Trees and other green spaces have obvious benefits that even he makes a nod to every now and then (cooling things down, trapping water, supporting wildlife, beneficial effects on the mental health of their residents, etc), plus most people who live in cities like them, and I was wondering what he was going to propose as an alternative, and he just - doesn't! What I knew from reading the blurb on the back of the book - that he feels cities are meant to be chaotic, grimy, full of machines and people but lacking in plants - is exactly as much as I know after reading 2/3 of the book. I guess I was expecting a paean to how cities in their modern chaos are flawed but great, and instead I got a book about how cities are almost uniformly terrible, but planned, green cities and the country are even worse, and also planting trees is a fascist tool to pacify the working class.

I didn't really DNF on purpose, so much as I put it down because I was reading other things and just never picked it back up again because the more time that went by without dealing with this guy's relentless negativity, the less I wanted to go back to it. So I guess it's a DNF.

pauraque

This is part 3 of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now. [Part 1, part 2.] With this meeting we hit a slump of stories that no one really liked, which is too bad, because due to scheduling issues we may not be able to meet again for a bit. Hopefully when we return we'll find some stories that are more to our taste.

"Snake of Light" by Loki Liddle (2021)

( A man runs into trouble with some toughs at a bar, but he has powers they didn't bargain for. )

"Your Own Aborigine" by Adam Thompson (2021)

( A law is passed that Aboriginal people can't receive welfare unless they're 'sponsored' by a white Australian. )

"Five Minutes" by John Morrissey (2022)

( An editor working on an Aboriginal folktale collection tries to write a SF story about an alien race returning for a weapons cache they hid under Australia billions of years ago. )

"When From" by Merryanna Salem (2022)

( A woman is recruited for a secret time travel project to research Australian history for a movie studio. )

sholio

I admit that I watched this mainly out of (morbid?) curiosity about what Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man would be like. Mostly I think it was about what you'd expect that to be like.

( Spider-Noir - just the first episode )

redsaturn posting in

icons

15 Red Velvet "Feel my Rhythm" Icons

here @

redsaturn

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

possibilityleft

Hard to believe it's already June, except the weather is convincing me.

*****

( books! )

pauamma posting in

dw_dev

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

pauraque

Happy Pride Month! In June I'll be reviewing media by trans and nonbinary creators.

Alan L. Hart (1890-1962) was one of the first trans men in the US to have gender-affirming surgery. He was a doctor himself and had an illustrious career in which he made major breakthroughs in our understanding of tuberculosis, and particularly the use of X-rays to diagnose it. He was also a successful fiction writer, publishing several short stories and four novels that drew on his experiences as a physician, which were well-received for their insights into the daily struggles and petty egos of the medical world.

His second novel, 1936's The Undaunted, follows Dr. Richard Cameron, who returns to civilian medical practice after serving in the Great War. He becomes fascinated by pernicious anemia, a condition that at the time has no known cause and no cure. He discovers an effective treatment, but to get his findings published and recognized he has to deal with lack of research funding, uncooperative patients, jealous rival doctors, egomaniacal laboratory heads, and greedy pharmaceutical companies. (Are we sure this was written 90 years ago?) Intertwined with his career are two important relationships: his love interest Judith, a university librarian whom he struggles to connect with because he's been hurt before, and his friend Dr. Sandy Farquhar, a radiologist who lives in fear of being outed as gay.

( cut for length )

Hart's books were out of print for decades, but his first two novels, Doctor Mallory and The Undaunted, were recently brought back into print by Propeller Books and are available through Bookshop.org. Funnily enough, Propeller's interest is not in early trans authors, but rather in Pacific Northwest authors—Hart practiced medicine in Oregon for some time, and both books are at least partly set there. Whatever works!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3253/

While weather control is typically thought of as a superpower, the unconscious ability of astronomers and astrophotographers to summon clouds is more properly classified as a curse.

https://xkcd.com/3253/

onethinginaday_feed

https://onethinginafrenchday.podbean.com/e/dans-le-merveilleux-jardin-de-claude-monet-a-giverny-monets-garden-in-giverny/

Oui, visiter le jardin de Claude Monet et sa maison vaut le détour ! Le jardin est merveilleux et les étangs recouverts de nénuphars évoquent les Nymphéas. Ça fait forcément quelque chose et cet endroit reste en mémoire. C'est un univers à part entière.

Dans cet épisode, je vous raconte notre visite de la maison de Monet avec un couple d'amis italiens. Et puis, au détour d'une fleur, j'ai entendu une conversation. Aller à Giverny, c'est aussi une activité sociale ! On y va pour prendre des poses et discuter sur l'art !

Dans la lettre qui accompagne cet épisode, il y aura : des photos, des repères culturels et des tournures de phrase utiles (on n'y fait pas toujours attention, pourtant ce sont elles qui rendent le français naturel!). www.onethinginafrenchday.com

Dans cet épisode, vous entendez le rythme naturel d'un récit parlé. Vous travaillerez aussi l'intonation narrative. Le tout dans un registre courant, celui du français de tous les jours — ni soutenu, ni familier — celui qu'on entend dans la vraie vie, à Paris, au détour d'une conversation dans un jardin.

https://onethinginafrenchday.podbean.com/e/dans-le-merveilleux-jardin-de-claude-monet-a-giverny-monets-garden-in-giverny/

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

snickfic

PLEASE NOTE: several of my keyboard keys are going out intermittently, so I’m going to suck at responding to comments for a while. 😩😩😩

Backrooms (2026). A furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an entrance in the store basement to a seemingly endless series of uncanny office rooms.

The second huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Although maybe not a sleeper to those paying attention, because this movie is adapted from a wildly popular series of CGI Youtube shorts by teenager Kane Parsons, who also directed this movie at the age of 20. The last I saw was that its opening weekend receipts might beat The Mandalorian and Grogu’s from last weekend, which is just incredible. (LOL Disney.) The word is that this is getting huge number of middle and high schoolers into the theater. I know my local theater has been nearly sold out, and I saw it in a nearly full theater. It’s wild, honestly; I’m not used to going to movies that other people want to see, too!

Anyway, this movie is maybe the purest expression of Vibes™ that I’ve encountered in a horror movie in a long time. The horror here is: what if empty rooms? What if the 90s? (This is also a period movie, by which I mean it’s set in 1990.) But most importantly: what if empty rooms that are apparently infinite and don’t make any sense? The comparison used in the film is “What if you described a dog to someone who’d never seen a dog, and then you asked them to draw it?” Stairways go nowhere and carpeted ramps lead to tiny, Alice in Wonderland scale doors with three doorknobs. Furniture is stuck in walls and floors. And everything is very bright and very yellow.

What this movie does not do is clutter up all those vibes with, say… a plot. That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve seen too many horror movies that feel the need to pull some bullshit plot out at the last minute to justify their existence, and Backrooms is confident enough to eschew all of that. It does have a narrative structure as we follow first furniture vendor Clark and later his therapist around the treacherous backrooms, learning things about them (or at least making conjectures which are never confirmed or denied by the film itself). Some people die, because of course you can’t have a labyrinth without a monster or two. There aren’t even many jump scares, though the whole atmosphere of wrongness is so intense that I spent the whole movie clutching my blanket very tightly.

--

Saccharine (2026). A med student (Hana, played by Midori Francis) starts taking a weight loss pill made from human ashes and becomes haunted by the ghost of the person she's consuming.

Francis is absolutely the star of the show here and does a great job portraying Hana's insecurities. I also really enjoyed Danielle Macdonald as her friend and fellow med student Josie. The movie also has a clear cinematic vision for how it tells its story.

As for the themes, I don’t feel fully qualified to make a judgement one way or the other, but here are some thoughts.

( spoilers and a BUNCH of stuff about weight loss and fatphobia )

pauraque

four finches eat from a seed feeder, three brown and streaky all over, one yellow with black and white wings

Three Pine Siskins and an American Goldfinch (lower left). Pine Siskins are heavily striped little finches with sharply pointed bills and a yellow wash on the wings that can be quite faint, like the highlighter was running out of ink. It's somewhat visible on the upper two birds in this picture.

( more birds [11 photos] )

( not birds [5 photos] )

hamsterwoman

Hugo homework continues. I'm posting about it real time on the sync read post, but also posting here as I finish things I consider stand-alone books (novellas and longer) and complete categories:

8. Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots – I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, and I’m still not entirely sure what I think. There is some lovely prose, some of which I found self-indulgent, and some of which I found overly poetic – not in a purple prose way, but in a way where I thought it would’ve genuinely worked better for me in a poem than a novella – but some of it was just good, too, and I think the prose was a positive for me on the whole. The grammar puns – or, not puns, but whatever you’d call it when it’s played straight – grammar word games, I guess? – were mostly a miss for me, though. Like, they’re clever, but they punctured my suspension of disbelief rather than enhancing my reading experience, and felt kind of superfluous and, IDK, smug?

I like the bones of the story, though. ( Spoilers )

Of the two sibling-centric, dealing with the fey novellas that are on the ballot this year, I definitely prefer The Summer War – it’s more relevant to my interests and also has more going on – The River Has Roots is a short novella (which I did not realize, because the ebook in the voter packet is padded out with an excerpt and long acknowledgements – and some lovely woodcut-type art, which I did enjoy – and the story itself (including the illustrations) is only 90 of the 130 pages), but it feels slight even for its real length – a fair bit of it is songs and repetition. But I reasonably enjoyed this one, too, even though I did have to force myself not to skim some of the more self-indulgently descriptive sections.

**

OK, so, I’m going to take the fact that I’ve read 4 different novellas since starting the T.Kingfisher one as a sign that I should maybe try reading other things in other categories rather than trying to force myself through that one. And I thought the easiest way to… well, ease myself into full-length novels would be to start with the C.B.Lee Lodestar nominee.

9. C.B.Lee, Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe – Hm. My experience of this book was a fairly monotonic downward trend over its 450 pages (too many pages! It did not need so many pages), which is pretty disappointing but not entirely surprising. My history with C.B.Lee is that I read Not Your Sidekick and found it really cute, despite not finding it any sort of great literature, so those were the expectations I went into this book with, and I was on board with it when it was doing cute teenage hangouts (both romantic and platonic) and everyday family/community stuff – it’s still a bit twee and very Tumblr-earnest, but it is talking about things it knows about, and so it’s charming even when it is, you know, very average modern YA. But then it attempts to have a grand plot, which left me increasingly bored throughout the middle section, and then I got to the last quarter or so and found myself actively annoyed, because now the book was trying to be about world-shaping events and Big Themes and clever plans, and it’s just… not good at conveying any of those things, sorry XD ( More, with spoilers )

Anyway, overall, this started out cute but ended being quite disappointing. I’m not mad I read it, but I think I would be mad if it wins the Hugo… Ah well.

*

Taskmaster s21e08 – this series is going so fast! ( Spoilers )

This week’s podcast guest was Jason Mantzoukas, whom I think I enjoy less as the podcast guest than a lot of people, but who was nevertheless a breath of fresh air after John Kearns. He shared that ( spoilers! )

**

Taskmaster Oz s5e04 -- don't have much to say about Anisa's dress this time around, but I do love her glittery lipstick which looks like the ruby slippers. ( Spoilers )

sholio

A brief roundup of fic I've posted on AO3 in the last couple of weeks.

Cadence (Babylon 5, Londo/G'Kar, gennish ship)
Resulting from the realization that I haven't written hair-care kink for these characters before. Season 5.

Ate a Bug (Murderbot, gen)
For the Murderbot May Maladies prompt "swallowed a drone."

Treasure in the Deep (Babylon 5, Londo & G'Kar + others)
Gen (I guess) soulmate AU.

Eyes Wide Open (Falcon & Winter Soldier, sleep deprivation)
Finishing up a fic I started four years ago for a prompt/discussion on the old Winterbaron discord.

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silver

May 2026

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Page Summary

pauraque - Zeppelin (1983)
onethinginaday_feed - Le visiteur surprise qui faisait un long voyage (Heatwave Guest in the Garden)
xkcd_feed - Detector
rachelmanija - The Good Luck Girls, by Charlotte Nicole Davis
sholio - DNF report: The Living City
pauraque - This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 3]
sholio - Spider-Noir first episode (fairly negative)
redsaturn in icons - Red Velvet "Feel my Rhythm" Icons
denise in dw_maintenance - (no subject)
possibilityleft - Chanukah Guilt, The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan,Get Over It April Evans, 3 more & 1 DNF
pauamma in dw_dev - Question thread #151
pauraque - The Undaunted by Alan L. Hart (1936)
xkcd_feed - Sunbeam
onethinginaday_feed - Dans le merveilleux jardin de Claude Monet à Giverny (Monet's garden in Giverny)
denise in dw_maintenance - (no subject)
denise in dw_maintenance - (no subject)
snickfic - Movies: Backrooms, Saccharine
pauraque - pictures for May
hamsterwoman - Still more Hugo Homework and Taskmaster
sholio - Recent fic

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silver

Reading

Zeppelin (1983)

Le visiteur surprise qui faisait un long voyage (Heatwave Guest in the Garden)

Detector

The Good Luck Girls, by Charlotte Nicole Davis

DNF report: The Living City

This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 3]

Spider-Noir first episode (fairly negative)

Red Velvet "Feel my Rhythm" Icons

(no subject)

Chanukah Guilt, The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan,Get Over It April Evans, 3 more & 1 DNF

Question thread #151

The Undaunted by Alan L. Hart (1936)

Sunbeam

Dans le merveilleux jardin de Claude Monet à Giverny (Monet's garden in Giverny)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Movies: Backrooms, Saccharine

pictures for May

Still more Hugo Homework and Taskmaster

Recent fic

Profile

May 2026

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