oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 9th, 2025 05:03 pm)

August is supposed to be this winding-down/wound-down month, right?

Well, for reasons which I concede are not particularly seasonal, the last week or so has been a bit of a flurry.

Getting next volume of The Ongoing Saga ready for publication in near future.

My tech person having issues with the website: it transpired that they had been upgrading some software which had had knock-on effects, but this involved a lot of three-way emailing about what was going on.

And I decided, for Reasons, to start putting together my talk for conference at end of September (rather than leave it until later I'd rather at least rough it out now and leave it to percolate) and this has so been the thing where the writing is the process and I am now actually feeling that I might have something a bit more original than I thought, and it has more of a shape to it. But the thing with this was that I kept having Ideas and going and adding bits and moving bits around, and realising I needed to go and Look Stuff Up, rather than just collate bits from my notes, so it was more of a vortex than I'd anticipated, and still ongoing.

Plus, the new physio exercises for hip/lower back and incorporating them into the routine, and, er, something or other was causing flareup of the Old Trouble, so there was working around that.

(Also, flurry of spam/phishing emails claiming to be 'support tickets' with deeply implausible references and origins.)

muccamukk: Maria gestures wildly. (Avengers: I have a point!)
([personal profile] muccamukk Aug. 9th, 2025 07:34 am)
Ben + Johnny + Sex Pollen = fic.

Which, surprisingly, I haven't seen in any version, though it's probably on LJ or something.
hannah: (On the pier - fooish_icons)
([personal profile] hannah Aug. 8th, 2025 10:10 pm)
Walking down the stairs to the subway platform, a group of what I assume are tourists are standing right at the bottom, talking and not moving. The train's pulling in and I don't have time to think: I tap my knuckles against the back of the one right in front of me like I'm knocking on a door.

Amazingly, it works perfectly.

What also worked perfectly was twice tonight, getting into the station and to the platform within a minute of the train pulling in, where I walked down or walked up and it's arriving just as I am. It's now something where I have to stop saying it never happens and go to saying it almost never happens. Because it's now happened at least once.
muccamukk: Steve standing with his arms folded, looking disapproving. (Avengers: Judgy Arms)
([personal profile] muccamukk Aug. 8th, 2025 02:28 pm)
As a follow up to bitching about this in the last post, I thought I'd look and see where I was with watching some of these. The movies are in order they came out. The TV shows are sorta just stuck in there for the year they started, rather than breaking them up by season. I'm too lazy to look up the details of exactly when they aired (especially as I don't even remember some of these existed). I'm only including live action films and tv shows. Long list is long )
muccamukk: Supergirl determinedly flying forward. Text: "Here we go again!" (DC: Here We Go Again)
([personal profile] muccamukk Aug. 8th, 2025 01:34 pm)

Going to the Movies!

(Success Rate: 1.5 out of 4)

In May, we tried to go to Sinners at Local Theatre #1, only to find none of their caption machines were working.

In June, we didn't bother trying.

In July, we tried to go to Superman at Local Theatre #2, only to find that they didn't have caption machines at all. In 2025.

Later in July, while visiting my parents, we went to their Local Theatre to see Superman, only to have multiple caption machines crap out part way through the movie, leaving Nenya to finish it on their speech to text app (an imperfect experience).

This week, I went back to Local Theatre #1 and asked in person if the caption machines were now working (they neither answer the phone, nor call people back if you leave a message). Being assured they were, we booked tickets to The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first caption machine Nenya got didn't even turn on, but the next one made it through the whole entire movie! Diversity win! (Or something.)

Actual movie thoughts aren't that deep, but it's superhero films, so...

Superman (2025)

So I'm more of a Marvel Girl, though I did like the first Wonder Woman movie and Blue Beetle, but Nenya grew up on the Christopher Reeve movies, and this had been advertised as More Like That, so we decided to give it a go.

It was really fun! I thought the casting was great, and I'm really enjoying the "superheroes' lives are inherently ridiculous" vibe we're currently going with. Also: death to origin stories! It was really nice to see the Justice League International gang (lol), and have a Superman who was doing the Big Blue Boyscout thing in earnest. (I thought [youtube.com profile] Princess_Weekes' video Quentin Tarantino Accidentally Broke Superman had great insights about why people got on the wrong track with the character.) It was silly and had heart, and didn't have joyless desaturation, and I'm here for all of this.

Will happily come back for the Supergirl movie, and am even more invested in season two of Peacemaker.


The Fantastic Four: The First Steps (2025)

I really liked the retro-futurist aesthetic, and was happy they didn't combine them with 1960s inequalities. Also: space! I haven't seen any of the cast in a whole lot, but thought they were great for the roles. Pascal was fully on point as Reed, and managed to capture his pathos without diving head first into manpain, and I really liked Reed/Sue here. I just like his face, also. They toned down Johnny's womanising into a low-key romance that actually worked for me, though even putting Natasha Lyonne in it didn't make Ben's crush that interesting (mostly because we got 2.5 minutes of time with that plot). Given all the natalism in the air, I'm a bit twitchy about movies focused around babies, but I liked that they didn't even consider that Sue couldn't go on the mission while eight months pregnant. I will riot if we don't get Valeria, though.

Which kind of brings me to the mid-credits scene. Spoilers for where this fits in the MCU? )

(Looking at AO3, it seems like people are into Eddie Munson Johnny het, either with the Silver Surfer or with Y/N. Though there is also some team!fic with woobie!Johnny. There's like two Ben/Johnny fic, which is surprising as they had a nice vibe in this, and it used to be the big ship. I'd also like more Reed!whump than I found, but early days.)


Department of "But It's Still Weird that It Happened Twice"

Mild spoilers for both films )

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 8th, 2025 09:42 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] chickenfeet!
hannah: (On the pier - fooish_icons)
([personal profile] hannah Aug. 7th, 2025 11:11 pm)
Leaving for Brooklyn a little early today fully knowing I didn't need to be at the client's house until a little later than usual left me able to walk around a bit and explore the neighborhood. Mostly walking under an elevated subway platform and peeking at the flowers and butterflies in a large fenced-off industrial lot that's largely been left to its own devices for the last few years. I didn't go down to the Gowanus Canal, and any temptation to do so was tossed aside when I realized it smelled like a fertile beach at low tide. Then I decided to savor the smell of a beach at low tide for a while and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I wandered through a nursery and made my way over to a sandwich shop that doubles as a grocery and picked up some spicy jarred peppers, then went across the street and had an ill-advised espresso. I found a used record store that made the hard call to stop at cassette tapes, and spent a little while watching a pair of crows up in an old leafy tree. I don't think I'd want to make the move out there, and moments like crows up a tree make me consider it as a charming fancy.
I've been knitting and watching shows, which has led me to try to find stuff that's good to watch while crafting, especially things on Kanopy.

I was going to do a bunch of these in a post, but the first got long, so stand by for further knitting show thoughts.

North and South (2004)

(I haven't read the book, though I keep meaning to get into Elizabeth Gaskell, who is recommended when you run out of George Eliot.)

A star crossed romance between Daniela Denby-Ashe as an impoverished daughter of an auto-defrocked churchman from Hampshire, and Richard Armitage as a self-made cotton mill owner in Lancashire "Darkshire"* (amazing name, thank you, Mrs Gaskell). He's in the middle of putting down a strike, and she's in the middle of being appalled by the violence of literally everything that's happening. The main attachment between them seems to be that they are both stunningly beautiful, and appear even more attractive when they are sad. Which they are a lot.

So... he's a strike-breaking mill owner in 1855, who sets the army on his workers? (Which they are careful not to show in detail because it might distract us from how very beautiful Richard Armitage is when he's sad.) Absolutely no one talks about where all the cotton's coming from, other than "America."† He does, later in the show, come to be more sympathetic to the workers, and start actually talking to them and shit, but the strikebreaking is a lot to get past. If you're likely to spend much of the show humming "The Internationale," then maybe give this a skip. If you don't mind/can ignore that, the pining is excellent, and the actors are very beautiful.

Quality as knitting show: 4/5, would knit to this again.

End Notes )

Okay, I suppose that maybe the model is 'Disney princess' rather than any princess in history ever, but even then, don't they display a certain degree of agency?

This is A Thing where apparently women display princessiness by performatively giving up agency - sitting in restaurants with castdown eyes being ordered for, not speaking until spoken to - also certain forms of helplessness which suggest they actually need a team of Ladies of the Bedchamber fighting over whose hereditary right it is to put on their stockings and whose to lace their stays....

This boggles the mind of someone raised in an actual monarchy in which there were two princesses around who did not, actually, model docility - I don't think Princess Margaret conceding to the strictures of the day and Giving Up The Man She Loved because he was divorced really qualifies as she'd been going around with him, as far as I can recall WITHOUT A CHAPERONE for some time.

Historian is obliged to point out that for centuries princesses - apart from bearing necessary heirs - quite often had to undertake regnal tasks, either as consort or regent, or at least aid in the general work of Being Royal, even if they did not actually take the throne themselves. Note here conference paper I heard on the preference for female regents in medieval Europe when there was a minor heir.

If you're going to Be a Princess, perhaps do not take Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst as your model, though on another hand, why not? Girl-Bossing It to the Max!

but we commend Princess Sophia Duleep Singh to your attention.

Observe also the daughters of Queen Victoria: e.g. Princess Alice, who married Louis, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was known for her commitment to philanthropic work, interested in nursing, met and befriended Florence Nightingale, and also set up military hospitals; Princess Louise who attended the The National Art Training School and designed a full-size statue of her mother as well as a memorial sculpture for the Boer War. No meek sitting about for them.

(I will cop to have read Alot of historical novels in my misspent youth very much contradicting the notion that princessing was sitting still and being silent.)

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 7th, 2025 09:54 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] haloquin and [personal profile] wordweaverlynn!
musesfool: Mal (i will not speak to lie)
([personal profile] musesfool Aug. 6th, 2025 08:07 pm)
They are installing some fancy new app-based intercom system in my building, which I'm not particularly a fan of, but I dutifully downloaded the app as directed. They haven't told us when the new system is going to go live, or given us really any other instructions on how it works, but I hope I won't have to keep the ringer on because unless I'm expecting an important call, I Do Not Do That. I guess we'll see what happens!

*

Reading Wednesday!

What I've just finished
So a number of people have been talking about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I thought it was graphic novels, so I checked out a sample on Saturday. It's not comics, it's something called LitRPG, the trappings of which are a little tedious to me, but overall, it is pretty engrossing reading. I've finished the first 4 books of the series (out of 7) and I'm 2/3 of the way through book 5. It is about our eponymous protagonist Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, surviving a Hunger Games like set up after aliens invade earth. spoilers )

What I'm reading now
Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade. So far I find the setting more compelling than the last 2 books (though the train book was my least favorite in terms of settings) and I'm wondering how the rest of the book is going to go!

What I'm reading next
The last(?) 2 books in the series! I don't know for certain if #7 is the last book and I haven't wanted to google because I don't want to be spoiled. The series has taken some interesting turns I wasn't expecting and I enjoy that when it happens. Hopefully they can stick the landing!

*

What I read

Well, Presidential Agent kept me going for quite a while - boy, Upton Sinclair chucks a lot in - this one was particularly gripping.

I decided not to go straight on the next one - needing a break from the grim extension of Fascism over Europe - and therefore read Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed (2025), which was a considerable disappointment. What I'd read about it led me to expect something fresher, more original, sparkier - I found this meh and towards the cosy women's fiction end. We note that back in the 60s/70s women were trapped like woodcock in springes by getting pregnant prematurely and thus stuck in unwelcome marriages or finding themselves tied down, and the gen X/millenial narrative is Biological Clock is Ticking On, so the trajectory is a bit different. The other thing I noted is that, as with All Fours, I feel Lessing's 'To Room 19' is somewhere in the DNA and it's a bit like the Omelas revisionism thing?

On the go

I've been wondering about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky (White Space #3) (2025) and there was a very tasty deal on UK/European sites for the ebook - I found it a bit slow-starting but then we got the 'murder-mystery in enclosed setting' while a whole lot of other shit goes down.

Up next

New Literary Review.

Read a review of Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, which made these sound intriguing, and I read the preview sample on Kobo, and fell to the temptation of preordering. Should turn up this week.

Volume in which I have a chapter has arrived - I ought to at least riffle through the other contributions.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 6th, 2025 09:53 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] batrachian!
hannah: (Running - obsessiveicons)
([personal profile] hannah Aug. 5th, 2025 09:48 pm)
2.25 miles in 30 minutes and two seconds this afternoon, which is proof that steady, regular practice is boring until you see the results and have proof it's been working all along. And after, you feel better about doing more of it tomorrow.

Other minor accomplishments include figuring out a workaround to buy another movie ticket - the webpage with the movie listing and the link to buy a ticket wasn't working, but the page where I could buy the ticket by itself was still around, so I checked my browser history until I got it - and getting back to the ongoing original project after a couple of weeks away from it. I'm slowly planning the next project, and the fics to work on in between. A sense of ongoing momentum is always a good way to help get out of bed in the morning.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 5th, 2025 07:12 pm)

More monks behaving badly: Head of Shaolin Temple in China under investigation on suspicion of embezzlement: plus'violated Buddhist precepts by maintaining relationships with multiple women over a long period and fathering at least one child, according to a notice from the temple’s authority on its WeChat account'.

***

How unlike our own dear Cardinal Newman, St. John Henry Newman: The First Openly Gay Catholic Saint? (actually an older post, I think floating about again because he was recently declared A Doctor of the Church). Quite separately the other day I was thinking of Newman's Description of a Gentleman, and how certain recent converts fail to match up to this ideal (I think they would also - no names, no pack drill - be destroyed by early C20th convert Dr Letitia Fairfield, who unlike most of those in that category was leftwing and feminist and in a lot of respects not totally unlike sister Rebecca West for all their quarrels).

***

A nice article on Barbara Hepworth - A revelatory new view of Barbara Hepworth: The Fondation Maeght’s stunning show brings the British sculptor into dialogue with European modernists. '“If the ‘Winged Figure’ in Oxford Street gives people a sense of being airborne in rain and sunlight and nightlight I will be very happy,” Hepworth said.' Bless.

***

I feel this is Already Known, or perhaps not, because this sort of thing seems to keep needing being rediscovered, sigh: Darwinist feminism: Dismantling the myth of female sexual passivity: The arrival of researchers like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Amy Parish transformed not only the study of primates, but also our understanding of evolution, sexuality and gender roles in general.

***

Students make one of the most subversive and experimental women writers of the Romantic era accessible for all (and kudos for not mentioning what she is probably best known to history for, being Prinny's 'Perdita', that he was financially mean towards). Having read that bio of Mrs Barbauld, suspect Robinson also had the problem of Georgian dude-bros being critically condescending if not outright dismissive with knock-on effects for reputation.

.

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