Linnet

I haven't been in a posting mood lately but I have been reading a lot.

The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells (books 1-6)

I ate these like potato chips. Fast-paced action scenes mercifully low on jargon (I saw a reviewer complain about a big gun being described as a "big gun") interspersed with the titular character learning how to do things like not have a panic attack when someone makes eye contact.

Note: entries 5 and 6 feel out of order to the point that I would recommend swapping their reading order, which I don't generally do! 5 is a full novel and takes place chronologically after 6, which is back to the novella format and doesn't really shed new light on anything in 5- it really feels like a publishing oddity, like 6 was in the chamber and ready to roll continuing with the existing format before a new publishing deal was signed.

Recommended: Yes

The Expert System's Brother / The Expert System's Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The character voice on these is deliberately sort of... folkloreish? This is a scifi setting, but the people in it no longer understand the technology that got them to where they are.

Book 2 was still good but I felt like it dragged- I got tired of reading "stone-things" so often- and the questions it sets up have answers that are obvious a little too early in to be entirely engaging.

Recommended: Book 1 yes, book 2 probably if you enjoyed the first

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

Part of the proud tradition of Sherlock Holmes AU fanfiction and up-front about it (the closing author's note is essentially "y'all heard about fanfic? this started off as a wingfic") and very fun. I enjoyed how it drops you into the setting that's largely familiar and then just drops in bits of information about the setting as asides from a POV character that takes for granted this all is common knowledge.

Recommended: Yes, with the caveat that a main character is trans in a setting where that's a point of significant conflict and I don't really know if their internal thoughts really land. Most of the book isn't focused on this, but it starts coming up in the later half / third.

Widdershins (Whyborne & Griffin book 1) by Jordan L Hawk

I gave this a go because I'd heard tell of fun depictions of archaeology in a supernatural setting later into the series but this left me a little meh. Very standard Lovecraft mythos cultist plot mashed together kind of gracelessly with stock M/M romance tropes. None of the characters really landed for me and I wasn't engaged with the romance, so it felt like half of this just wasn't for me, and the half I was there for fell kinda flat too. Maybe it hits its stride later into the series, but I don't think I'll find out.

Recommended: Nah. Maybe if you're more into M/M 

The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang

This is a very cool setting that I don't know how to describe on a Sunday morning! Sorry.

Recommended: Yes

The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey

Honest to god I thought this was the first Lackey I'd read, and then I looked through my library and discovered I had read the entire Arrows trilogy and retained none of it. This is... maybe not a step up, but a step sideways from that. It feels like this is very much a mid-series book in a long-running series. It kind of chugs, frankly, with a lot of "the conclusion of this thread is obvious and I'm not really enjoying the journey there". Some of that may be that I don't enjoy siege stories much, and this is a tonally weird rollercoaster between grim sieges and descriptions of how the enemy loves to torture and kill people, and then decadent massage scenes. (What is it with older fantasy and its propensity for ~sexual healing~?)

I can see how some of Lackey's work would have been influential on queer people looking for the slightest scrap of content in the desert, but I don't think this has aged well. A mage making an entire species of sentient beings and playing keep-away with their reproductive rights, but they all decide it's okay and they love him anyway because he did it For Their Own Good: hoo boy.

Recommended: If you're deliberately going through older popular fantasy books? Sure. For enjoyment, no.

I ended up browsing BJD sites a few days ago and found some neat ones that seemed worth keeping track of! I don't think I'll ever get into BJDs as a hobby (entirely too expensive for me) but there's still some cool artistry there.

Pipos Charlotte

As I write this I am just now noticing that she has little paw pads on her palms. Those would really pop if they were painted a little! I like that her head looks good with or without a wig- I wonder how posable her ears are? They look like they can slide up and down a bit.

DikaDoll Dobbie

This one's really cute! I think I want her to have more eyebrows, but I appreciate that her whole Thing seems to be that she's nice and going to serve you food.

( cut - doll nudity )

I just finished reading through Gulp, by Mary Roach. Overall a fun read. I thought some of the descriptions of the people interviewed were occasionally unkind, if evocative, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. Maybe it's just not that I'm not used to reading things like this that involve people who are uh, contemporary?

As for the actual gut stuff it seemed like a solidly researched pop science book. Some things I'm still rolling around in my head:

• the panel of human tasters, for cat food (in spite of the fact that our tastes are entirely different)
• the unfortunate window into cat food practices in general
• the extent to which we still don't know what we're doing with the gut microbiome, and human microbiota in general (ear wax transplants!)

Where the heck does air come from? Science does not yet know.

... at least in Creatures. I wanted to add a page for Air to the wiki, because that seems like a reasonable, straightforward thing to add, but evidently not because these games are somehow still so poorly documented. I need to sleep, but what I've sussed out so far at least in regards to C3/DS:

• Air is a chemical present in Creatures 2 and Creatures 3
• Air is emitted into a creature's system by a chemoemitter gene. (What governs when this fires or not?)
• Creatures have an involuntary reaction to drown when Air goes below a certain threshold
• Wait, there are different Tissue types. What do those do? I can't find any info.
• Receptors attach to a locus, optionally in a specific tissue, in an organ. It looks like specific tissue is only an option for the Creature or Brain organs. "Current organ" has no associated tissue options; presumably it's implicit that the receptor is in the lung-meat or whatever if you use this option.
• From experience playing the game I know the presence of breathable air must be governed by the room type (there are two water types, salt and fresh) but what exactly governs when this impacts a creature?
• I don't do much with aquatics. Maybe pull some up and see if they get the drowning bubbles in air?

That's all I've got so far.

I felt like having a hot sweet drink last night, but I've been really overdoing hot chocolate lately and I'm bored with trying to dress it up, so I thought I'd experiment a bit.

"What if custard, but as a beverage?" I asked myself. A cursory search revealed that this was not exactly a revolutionary concept, but it did mostly turn up Southern Christmas recipes that seemed to fall into a couple categories: recipes to feed 12, with booze in them, or recipes that were "healthy" and did not have heavy cream. I decided to just wing it instead since I only wanted to make about two servings. Here's what I ended up doing.

Custard, But You Drink It

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 tbsp granulated sugar
• nutmeg, freshly grated, to taste (I used something in the ballpark of 1/4 tsp, with a little extra sprinkled on at the end)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 egg, beaten

1. Combine the milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, and grated nutmeg in a saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
2. While the mixture heats, in a small bowl lightly beat the whole egg.
3. When the mixture has come to a simmer, temper the egg by adding in 1/4 cup of mixture, 1 tbsp at a time, stirring continuously.
4. Strain the egg mixture into the pan with the rest of the mix and cook a further 5 or so minutes over medium heat, stirring continuously, until it's thickened up a bit.
5. Let it cool a little and decant into two cups or mugs - whatever you'd use for hot chocolate.

Makes two servings.

Things I'd change: It was 9 pm and I did not feel like separating an egg. It turned out fine, but I probably should have gone ahead and separated the egg and just used the yolk. Straining the egg into the mix was sort of sloppy and produced a drink that was mostly free of lumps, but not ideal. If I did this again I'd use an egg yolk, temper it, and strain the mix at the end of cooking, like you normally would with custard.

The flavor profile was also very simple and I felt it could have used a little something. Realistically whatever would work in custard normally would work well here. Maybe a little orange peel and cinnamon?

This year in particular, I've been doing a little editing on the Creatures Wiki, as well as working to thoroughly save some of the remaining Creatures fansites to the Internet Archive. (Their crawler stumbles a bit on pages with lots of little zip downloads or small images and tends to produce incomplete archives.)

I've been thinking about why I'm finding this compelling, and why archival efforts in general matter to me. Where's the line between an archive and a kind of digital hoarding? Does any of this stuff actually matter? I think individually these elements- defunct fansites, game mods, the little stories people told about a game and the way they told them- might seem (or be!) trivial, but in aggregate they can tell a picture about the ways people interacted with media and each other. Even the last 10 years the way we all use the internet has changed drastically, and building an archive of things like this can help provide context. That's what I get out of archives and historical efforts, I think: context for the ways people behaved, and how they were different from the ways they behave now, and the ways that they're still the same.

It's a pretty trivial example, but one thing I ran into recently that amazed me was the set of newsgroup posts you can find through this page. Someone trolls a community for months on end, with a slight focus on an individual. That specific individual eventually makes a post about how they got the troll "arrested for copyright violations", and they turned out to be a 15-year-old loser, and they were for some reason present at their arrest and humiliation, and that they've vanquished them and they'll never trouble the community again.

From an outside perspective (and from personal experience of existing, once, in communities of tweens online, where everyone made shit up constantly) it is incredibly obvious that the "troll" was an always has been an alias of the person who supposedly "had them arrested"- but nobody catches this??? The entire thread is just person after person congratulating them. It's honestly astonishing. Was this a uniquely gullible population? In newsgroups in the year 1998, had no one realized you could just go online and lie whenever you felt like it?

Anyway, that's why archival efforts are important: because you can bump into teen drama from the year 1998 and feel like you've made contact with an ancient civilization.

I've tried to make a C3/DS metaroom background a few times (okay, a lot of times) through the years but I've always bounced off it, either due to a lack of skill, lack of any concept or scope issues. I thought I'd work on a really simple one as a weekend project / proof-of-concept kind of thing, since I think I'm at a point where this is a thing I can actually do.


Concept sketch: MS paint doodle. Rough concept of a Japanese-style garden with a big cool tree as the focal point. Honestly wouldn't be a very interesting room to use in-game, but that's not the point here.
( Read more... )

This is really neat. imgur user 6502b posted build pictures for their IBM 1401 miniatures. Here's just a couple shots from their album:






Here's thread one, focused on the computer(?). Check out the detail on those tiny tiny pins...!

And here's thread two, focused on the console.

I added a little page to my neocities site for my notes on the glyphs in Rain World. Also, Rain World is really cool! I've found it unplayable personally but I've been watching gameplay of it again and it really does have a compellingly complex ecosystem. It unfortunately just hits a difficulty level where I lose any patience with actually playing it.

I've been thinking about social media and how I interact with it recently. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the current generation / manifestation of social media: Twitter is the big one because, well, it's the only one I've really been on for the last decade. It portrays itself as a social site but really, it's an advertising platform trojan-horsing people in. People just want to post fun cat pics and they're having all their marketable info harvested. (Or fabricated.) This is without even getting into the complete, disastrous breakdown of useful spaces for discussion that its aggressive Algorithm-based representation of content represents. Every tweet is Content from which Engagement must be harvested, and that means deliberately serving it to people who didn't opt-in to seeing it. Which is why people have been complaining about seeing other people's horny Likes for like, years.

... anyway, that's all to say: maybe it'd be good to get away from that a bit! I've made good steps at really reducing my time spent on Twitter and Tumblr in the last year or two, but I think it'd be nice to take that freed-up time and try to do something constructive with it. I made a neocities site the other day, and I think blogging might tie in nicely with what I'm going for.