issenllo | Reading

The first episode of Captivated, By You was fun! It's a slice-of-life anime taking place in an all-boys school. As you can guess from the title, there are BL vibes.

It's available on Crunchyroll. It's starting late in the season because there will be only 5 episodes.

siderea

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

oursin

Happy birthday,

kerrypolka!

yhlee

Watch on YouTube

Spinning at a spinning wheel - not a tutorial or demonstration of good spinning, and most of the wheel is out of frame so you can see the main ~action. I am still a beginner, and I think I foxed up some of the terminology. But my advisor was curious so I recorded this.

oursin

What I read

Finished Dragon Harvest.

Read the latest Literary Review.

Read Angela Thirkell, What Did It Mean? (The Barsetshire Novels Book 23) (1954), which, I depose, is the one where Ange, sighing and groaning, realised that she was going to have to write The One About The Coronation, like what everybody else was doing. (The title alludes to a cryptic prophecy by one of the local peasantry.) So there is a fair amount of phoning it in, but on the other hand, some Better Stuff than one might expect for that period of her output.

On the go

And it's back to Lanny: Upton Sinclair, A World to Win (Lanny Budd #7) (1946), in which WW2 is raging but so far, USA is not in it and Our Hero can still pootle about Europe under the guise of being an art expert while mingling in very elevated company indeed.

Up next

Once that is done, I should probably turn my attention to the very different WW2 experience of Nick Jenkins in the next one up for the Dance to the Music of Time book group, The Soldier's Art.

larryhammer

Our second car has reached the vehicle life-stage of junker. It’s 28 years old, sun-weathered with a paint job best described as “former,” but even if sold for (increasingly costly) parts it’s worth way less than the cost of repainting it. The roof is rusting, the upholstery is starting to fray, and a couple door latches don’t work from one side or another. Eaglet hates riding in it, partly from embarrassment (see: is twelve) but in all fairness, the never very strong a/c is now so anemic it doesn’t reach the back seat.

So, yeah, old, and honestly not a great car: a Geo Tracker, from the last year Geos were sold before its assets were split between Chevrolet and Suzuki, the companies that collaborated on the models. A cheap ride, from a line with a deserved reputation of being cheaply made. I describe it as a put-put class SUV. Locks and windows are fully manual, as is the conversion between 2- and 4-wheel drive (you have to get out to lock/unlock the wheels). When asked to maintain highway speed on an uphill with the a/c on, it can manage two out of three at best—but it got us through many roads where high clearance 4WH is a hard requirement. We did a lot of back-of-beyond camping out of that car.

Though not these days: it’s nowhere near large enough for three people + gear, and we don’t fully trust it for long distances anyway. Heck, the back row isn’t really big enough for a baby seat, thus the Subaru Forester bought the week before Eaglet’s arrival.

But the thing is, that Tracker still runs. The body is wearing out, but the driving is fine, around the city. We keep expecting it to break down any week now, but it hasn’t, nor has it ever needed repairs more serious than an oil or refrigerant leak. Certainly, our finances would appreciate it holding on for another couple years—and frankly, it just might. For a cheap-in-many-senses thing, it has done remarkably well.

Some sort of metaphoric point could be made from this, but I’ll let others codify exactly what.

---L.

Subject quote from Kiss, Prince and the Revolution.

lexin

My poor guests, on arrival at my house last Thursday pointed out what should have been obvious to me - that my freezer (it's a fridge/freezer) could not be closed and the drawers could not be opened. Ooops.

I therefore spent yesterday and today defrosting the freezer so that it will work again. I could, I suppose, have done it while I had guests, but didn't feel that appropriate, though I'm sure that Corylus, Rhakir and Peter wouldn't have minded. At least, not much.

So I now have a lovely, clean, working freezer - but no food to put in it, and two large bags of defrosted food, which couldn't be rescued and put in a cooler as the drawers didn't open.

It only goes to show that as housewives go, I'm a waste of space.

Current Location: Home (Bangor)
Crossposts: https://lexin.insanejournal.com/327020.html

selenak

At long last, the highlight and ending of my London theatre marathon, and it would be yours, too: On stage Marlowe/Shakespeare slash fiction! I had hoped this to be the case from the sexy poster and the short summary, and when I acquired the programm and read it, I knew it, because among the listed crew is one Katherine Hardman, Intimacy Coordinator, whose previous Intimacy Coordinating tasks included AMC’s Interview With the Vampire. Clearly a woman who coordinated Lestat/Louis, Louis/Armand, and Lestat/Armand in an actor and audience friendly way would be up to Kit/Will, thought I. Thank you, RSC. And Liz Duffy Adams, who wrote the play. And Daniel Evans, who directed it.

Wyndham’s Theatre: Born With Teeth

Incidentally, the posters hadn’t said who would play whom, but I just assumed Ncuti Gatwa would be gay atheist spy Marlowe, and Edward Bluemel Shakespeare, and indeed this proved to be the case. Since this play is a two hander, meaning only two actors show up and are on stage the entire time, it needs a combination of great acting and hotness, and they both delivered.

( Come live with me and be my love… )

In conclusion: loved the play, loved the actors, loved the production, and am travelling back to Munich in a state of fannish delight.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: Heathrow

tielan

In theory I like the idea of

crossworks exchange: crossover two fandoms.

In practicality...I just know I won't get anything I like, or something along the lines of what I'd like to write.

*sighs and passes*

--

I haven't really written (or re-written) any more of the novel. Still struggling with the rewrite and the fear that the story just isn't interesting enough.

Wondering if I should switch over to Queen Of The Night (vampire urban fantasy) or over to the ElVeeHu universe - Elves, Vampires, and Humans, oh my!

I don't think I quite have the ElVeeHu plot quite sorted out, other than the romance.

That's usually the problem. I know how the relationship sorts out, but I feel like the plot needs more oomph.

--

Trying to improve on my bus-pass of Just Married. I know there's something missing in the denouement, I just have to find it.

*squints at her pages*

And I ended up on the pinch-hit list. Not entirely surprising, I guess.

siderea

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

oursin

Happy birthday,

gmh and

ravurian!

cyphomandra

Favourite of the month was Runt, both book and film.

Looking glass sound, Catriona Ward.
Four thousand weeks, Oliver Burkeman
Old school, Gordon Korman
Game changer, Rachel Reid
Head of the lower school, Dorothea Moore
Bye forever I guess, Jodi Meadows
Traces of two pasts, Kazushige Nojima
Runt, Craig Silvey
Walking to Aldabaran, Adrian Tchaikovsky
The angel of the crows, Katherine Addison
Galatea, Madeleine Miller
Illegal contact, Santino Hassell
Women and children first: the fiction of two world wars, Mary Cadogan
How to draw a secret, Cindy Chang

Looking glass sound, Catriona Ward. Wilder goes back to the Maine coast he spent his childhood at to write the story of him and his friends and a serial killer, one teenage summer. The memoir he originally started writing at college was stolen by his mysterious roommate and published as a fictional success - this is his chance to finally set the record straight. But who is telling the truth? Evocative writing, great setting and effectively creepy but I am picky about twists and in the end this piled on one too many and I lost touch with the characters.

Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals, Oliver Burkeman. Friendly pep-talk by the Guardian column writer about not maximising productivity and instead doing more with your life by embracing finitude. My sister loves this; I liked it but did feel it went on a bit.

Old school, Gordon Korman. Dexter has lived in his grandmother’s retirement community since he was six, and been cheerfully homeschooled by her and the other residents; suddenly he has to attend school. Desperate to leave, he nevertheless can’t help intervening when he sees a few things that need fixing… Rotating pov, community-building; it’s fun, not a top-tier Korman but still enjoyable.

Game changer, Amy Aislin. I see I wrote “sappy, no tension, I have concerns about food safety” but not the author, who turned out to be a bit tricky to track down as there’s also a het sports romance with a baker called The Game Changer and if you search for m/m hockey it’s all Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series. This one has a hockey player in his last year with a chance at the NHL who employs a hot personal assistant who is trying to get a fledgling cake jar business going and is desperate for cash. See previous comments plus add a bit about lack of professionalism in employer/employee relationships.

Head of the lower school, Dorothea Moore. Girl from large poor family (father presumed dead in the war, am sure you can guess at least part of the ending) wins scholarship to prestigious school, whose pupils are largely appalled at the prospect of a scholarship girl from a council school. Moore is rather fond of action so this also involves a lot of hair-raising dashes through the fens, spies, floods etc, in addition to various japes at school. Joey makes a lot of mistakes, some of which ring truer than others (she overhears a cousin disdaining her presence and makes a rapid exit from her aunt’s house, intending to walk the six miles back to school and send a postcard later, rather than stay feeling unwanted) but her heart is obviously in the right place and she is also English (Joey starts the book in Scotland but this appears to be temporary), so she wastes no time in uncovering conspiracies, learning Morse, revealing spies etc. There is a cute Belgian refugée, an evil French-Swiss chemistry professor, and a bit where one of the teachers comes back to school after an illness and Joey remarks: “she might have died of that loathly ‘flu; lots of people have,” which actually struck me more than all the declarations of national pride.

Bye forever I guess, Jodi Meadows. RL and online identities collide - 13 year old Ingrid stands up to her dominating and exploitative “friend” Rachel, and is ostracised; at least she has her online BFF and fellow MMORPG player Lauren, and, following a wrong number text, a new online acquaintance, Traveler. But maybe Traveler is closer than she thinks… This is a solid portrayal of friendships and first crushes, on and off-line, and the tensions between them, and the fandom (Ingrid and Lauren have a favourite author, and get to meet her) and gaming bits are all well done.

Traces of two pasts, Kazushige Nojima. Backstory for Tifa and Aerith. I like the Midgar slums bits for Tifa more than the Nibelheim bits (Barrett with baby Marlene!), and the Aerith half is less compelling when it tries to expand on what’s already shown in the game (Aerith’s trial in the Temple of the Ancients in the game is about 50x more powerful than anything here.

Runt, Craig Silvey. I saw the movie first and it’s one of those rare cases where both are excellent. The movie is a very faithful adaption of this story in which Annie, a farm girl in an Australian town where drought and an evil water baron have jeopardised everyone’s livelihoods, adopts Runt, a stray dog who turns out to have a startling talent for competitive agility. It’s funny and touching and satisfying; has an older lesbian get-together (Annie’s widowed gran and the retired indigenous Australian champion agility trainer).

Walking to Aldabaran, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Astronaut lost inside a wormhole maze on an alien artefact survives - somehow. Nicely compact creepiness with a Beowulf homage that reminds me once again that I have never read the original.

The angel of the crows, Katherine Addison. “Sherlock Holmes wingfic meets Jack the Ripper,” I’ve written, and unfortunately the angel bits feel as stuck on as the wings. I know Addison’s read a lot about the Ripper but most of this is retelling Sherlock Holmes classics with the supernatural shoehorned in. I liked her Watson slightly more than her Holmes, but the more that got revealed the more I found holes in the background worldbuilding.

Galatea, Madeleine Miller. Short story, really, of the “men are bad, especially in Greek myth,” genus, but I liked it and it didn’t irk me the way her The Song of Achilles did.

Illegal contact, Santino Hassell. I was looking for non hockey sports m/m and the author’s name seemed vaguely familiar, so I tried this. Then I checked afterwards and discovered where I’d seen the name was the disclosure that Santino Hassell, supposed bisexual former addict single father with cancer, was actually a Texas housewife who exploited gay teens, using their stories/texts etc in her fiction, and now I’m not even going to bother to review this.

Women and children first: the fiction of two world wars, Mary Cadogan. Opinionated but reasonably thorough, although I think Cadogan loses patience more quickly when dealing with anything outside GO (girlsown) fiction. The book I most liked the sound of from this, Munition Mary (published 1918, girl joins WWI munition factory, I suspect she probably uncovers at least one German spy and saves someone heroically)

How to draw a secret, Cindy Chang. Middle grade autobiographical graphic novel (yup, I snitch these from my kids). Cindy, a keen artist, is not allowed to tell anyone her father has moved back to Taiwan from the US; then an unexpected trip back reveals why he left, and why her family is no longer perfect. Nicely done and good at managing emotions realistically (I was also relieved the secret wasn’t child abuse).

yhlee

What I do when sick: more spinning.

Now that I can spin wool blends at all, next up: working on consistency.

skygiants

The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

( ungenerous readings below )

selenak

No, still not the Marlowe/Shakespeare one, that’s on tonight. Instead, two plays I had on my list as maybes, but not musts, hence only bought the tickets on the day and therefore cheaper. :)

Charing Cross Theatre: The Daughter of Time

By playwright named M. Kilburg Reedy, based on Josephine Tey’s novel of the same name which three quarters of a century ago stroke a mighty blow for Richard III in hte public imagination. Background here for people who haven’t read it: Josephine Tey wrote this as the last and most unusual of her series starring her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, who in the novel, which takes place then-contemporary to its publication in the late 1940s/early 1950s (pre Elizabeth II’s coronation at any rate, her father is still on the throne), fights off the boredom of many weeks in the hospital by getting interested in Richard IIII and deciding to solve the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. More Background: Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Scottish Author Elizabeth MacIntosh, who also was a playwright under the alias Gordon Daviot. Her most famous historical play was probably Richard of Bordeaux, about that other controversional Plantagenet royal named Richard, Richard II., which she wrote after having seen young John Gielgud play Shakespeareas Richard III. It was a smash hit and contributed to making John G a star. However, The Daughter of Time is a novel, by its very premise is confined to one hospital room and a lot of thinking about history, some of which, granted, presented via arguments with other people, but a lot also via thoughts and musings about text excerpts, and I was really curious how someone would manage to dramatize it in a way that works on stage.

( Spoilers still aren’t sure whether truth is the daughter of time… )

The Other Palace: Saving Mozart.

It’s London, it’s theatre, there had to be at least one musical. In my case, a new one by Charli Eglington, which feels a bit like someone on Tumblr after watching Amadeus decided they wanted to write prequel fanfiction with a feminist slant, focused on the women. Which means that while we’re following Mozart’s life story from Wunderkind to early death, in the first half of the musical Nannerl has a claim to being the main character and in the second half Constanze. It’s about as historical as Amadeus (meaning it uses some facts with a lot of fictionalisiation), with a lot of laudable #JusticeforNannerl and #ConstanzeRules sentiment.

( How the women in his life saved Mozart )

All in all: not a must, but if you want a new musical where everyone sings soulfully in Steampunk Rokoko costumes, go for it.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: London

oursin

This has me thinking (for that is the way I roll) 'who is the novelist that this has escaped from?': Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture -

“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” said Lawrence. “If you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”

Could be a ponderous CP Snow tome, could be a Lodge or Bradbury send-up (Lodge of course already did academe/business collab, no?), or dear Sir Angus sniping acerbicly.

***

A more cheerful thing: Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour saved for nation

***

More on heritage and reconstructing the past: The museum where history keeps repeating itself:

The easiest mistake to make in historical re-enactment is to create an era that never quite existed, by playing too closely to period. At Beamish, there is a real thoughtfulness given to how every age is a sort of palimpsest.

However, it doesn't appear that the author of this piece (known to me) has actually ridden in a sedan-chair (where would you get the bearers, even if a museum would let you try out one?): Jolted and Jumbled: Riding in a Sedan Chair in the 18th Century

***

And Dept, Here Comes the Silly Season:

This strikes me as in the fine old spirit of Stephen Potter and GamesManShip/LifeManShip etc: The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek: One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist bro:

My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of.... The game works best when you choose something that is normally the prompt for a great deal of intellectual posturing, of talking in a loud, bored voice.... Don’t do this to anyone who will be hurt by it, as opposed to merely irritated.

(I think Potter's 'plonking' could be invoked here perhaps.)

Whereas this has escaped from the era of Ealing Comedy, surely? Daniel Jackson was just 14 when he and his friends saw a strip of forest between Serbia and Croatia, and decided to claim it. Now 20, he is the president of Verdis, but has been forced to live in exile:

[I]t seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis’s citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but “it’s a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved”.

We wonder how many of that 30% of the citizenry are girlfriends who have been signed up to the project....

philomytha

At the last minute I signed up for the hAPPy birthday flash exchange, where we celebrate

karanguni's fantastically useful exchange app by writing fic for people's past requests. And I have received two fantastic fics for past requests, one for a request made a long time ago that I instantly remembered and which reminded me all over again of why I love the fandom, and another for a more recent and very fun request. They are:

Reaper at the Festival, a lovely spooky DS9 Odo-centric Halloween story, and in plane sight, a triple drabble for the deeply ridiculous were-plane EvS plot bunny. Thank you to both anonymous authors!

oursin

Happy birthday,

wandra!

skygiants

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.

rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile,

genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of

genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

I Sit and Sew, Alice Dunbar Nelson

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

Alice Ruth Moore was born in 1875 in New Orleans to mixed-race parents, and is better known today as a journalist and activist than for her poetry and fiction, or for that matter for being a teacher. Her first husband was poet and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar (married 1898-1906, when he died, though she left him in 1902 for being abusive) and her third was journalist and activist Robert J. Nelson (married 1914-1935, when she died).

---L.

Subject quote from War Pigs, Black Sabbath.

Profile

issenllo

August 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Green Machine for Lefty by sarken

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 21st, 2025 05:44 pm

breadandbutterforyoursupper'sallyourmother'sGOT!

Reading

Navigation

Captivated, By You

Phone, again [me, tech]

(no subject)

spinning on a spinning wheel

Wednesday has been asked by SRS academic press to read a manuscript

“you don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on / i just need your body, baby, from dusk till dawn”

Update - some friends came to stay

London Theatre Finale: Born with Teeth

writing again

Admin: Patreon: What fresh hell #728, #729 [Patreon]

(no subject)

Books read, March

moar yarn

(no subject)

London Theatre Watching III

Assorted things

hAPPy birthday!

(no subject)

(no subject)

“day of judgement god is calling / on their knees the war pigs crawling”

Profile

August 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags