dreaming in billboards, as [personal profile] kass says

Jun. 29th, 2025 09:29 am
fox: a child's soap bubble floating in the air (fragile and beautiful)
[personal profile] fox

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

idle contemplations

Jun. 27th, 2025 12:56 pm
watersword: Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann from the epilogue of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, & the word "elizabeth" (Pirates of the Caribbean: epilogue)
[personal profile] watersword

Very pleased at how fast my ankle's been healing; it barely hurts at all except when I flex my toes, and I assume that will get better next week. Ice and rest doing their job as advertised! The knee is — I don't want to say getting worse, that's not true, but as the scab gets thicker and more attached to the skin, it feels more uncomfortable to move my knee through flexion/extension, and that is not fun. Botheration.

I have a dark feeling I should get PT after this; I can feel my gait getting fucked up by having both legs injured in different ways. A new adulting experience, and I already do not like it because it will involve insurance. Maybe I'll call the EAP and make them give me a to-do list or something.

While lying in bed and icing my ankle, I have re-read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Fledgling; I know we've talked about it before, but wow it gets more and more noticeable how she just doesn't think of queerness as related to desire. The stuff she's interested in about gender and sexuality forces her to acknowledge the existence of same-sex sexual interactions, but nothing about them is ever anyone's first choice or pleasurable except in the ways her worldbuilding allows her to impose on the characters.

I am idly fantasizing about a shopping app that lets me:

  1. manually add items from a variety of independent vendors (i.e., not Amazon);
  2. once a month (or whatever time period I set), checks if any of the items on the list are on sale;
  3. if it finds an item on sale, it stops going through the list and purchases that item, removing it from the list;
  4. if nothing is on sale, it picks a random item from the list, purchases it, and removes it from the list;
  5. repeat next month.

Note: steps 2-5 do not involve me making decisions or receiving alerts.

Things to Get Me [referral link] is perfect at #1. Google Shopping kind of does #2 but only kind of. The rest of it, I'm fairly sure it doesn't exist and I understand why, I can easily see where this could go very wrong, but I want it for myself and I'm mad that either I gotta build it (no) or outsource to a human. Further botheration.

two, two, two reviews in one

Jun. 25th, 2025 03:21 pm
fox: little cartoon self (doll)
[personal profile] fox

In the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.

Copper Script )

All of Us Murderers )

Both titles: A+ would recommend.

lolsob

Jun. 23rd, 2025 08:16 pm
watersword: Parker running across a roof with the words "tick tick tick (boom)" (Leverage: tick tick tick (boom))
[personal profile] watersword

I tripped coming back from the garden after watering and skinned the hell out my left knee and twisted my right ankle, plus minor scrapes on my palms. Ow.

Hobbled home, rinsed everything off (because of course I had some dirt on me from wrestling the garden hose and whatnot), smeared on antibacterial ointment, iced both joints (not super successfully), taped bandaids to my knee, and ordered delivery of a bento box. Now I need to put on enough clothes to get downstairs to receive said delivery, and get back up the stairs to eat. Ow ow OW.

This was a perfectly pleasant heatwave until then! I got the window unit into my bedroom window yesterday, have been eating popsicles and drinking various flavored waters, and made summer rolls last night. I was going to make peanut noodles. But no. Did I mention OW?

fox: a child's soap bubble floating in the air (fragile and beautiful)
[personal profile] fox

When my mother moved into assisted living last summer, we got her a landline phone with big buttons and six presets where you can put pictures to make it super easy to tell who it is you're calling. Alas, the pictures are hard for her to make out because the contrast isn't great at that size, so I turned them over and just printed everyone's initials, black on white, easiest thing. Her brother, her sister, her um-friend, and her cousin all have different initials, no problem. My brother and I have the same first initial so all our lives we've been designated on family calendars and things by our first and middle initials together.

She can't remember our middle names.

genarti: a handpainted cup made of white pottery, decorated with teal brushstrokes into which a design of wheat or grass has been carved in white ([art] playing with clay)
[personal profile] genarti
I posted a while ago about how I'd been really getting into pottery this year. That remains true, and shows no signs of stopping. It's just so fun! I still take a 3-hour class once a week at a member-owned studio near me; I think wistfully about spending more time on it too, but for various reasons including but not limited to the busyness of my life in general, that dedicated weekly slot is what works right now.

Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.

I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.

And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.

So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.

About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )

patience in a garden plot

Jun. 21st, 2025 11:01 pm
watersword: A steel bridge and a wooden pier near turquoise water. (Stock: pier and bridge)
[personal profile] watersword

Got a Cake Batter cone (working my way through the non-coffee-flavors at my local ice cream shop) and walked over to the garden; I am very pleased to report that the rhubarb has come up, and so has the parsley and the cosmos and the sweet alyssum! Could there be 100% more of all of these plants, considering how many seeds I put in? Yes. But: I created plants! The basil is going to be so happy over the next week of heatwave. The peas are doing great and I am going nuts over the lack of watermelon, hopefully they will also rejoice in the heat.

And then I stuck a couple of coreopsis in the front garden, which I impulse-bought this morning at the farmer's market, not even a little sorry. Other impulse purchases today included a bag of basil (PESTO) and a container of corn salsa, which I will add to fish-stick tacos.

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