#Tuesday again no problem

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 01/28/2025

is this little bulleted preview helpful or does it make people less likely to click the readmore? a question i could answer if i went back to college for marketing. not a question but a comment, this one has the biggest range of dates in published works out of all the tuesdayposts

listening: Make a Man Out of You (2023, Vienna Vienna)

reading: Third Man Out (1992, Richard Lipez writing as Richard Stevenson)

watching: Automatic Moving Company (1912, dir. Bosetti)

playing: Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery (2021, mobile/PC/Switch/Playstation, Silver Lining Studio)

making: cross stitch

listening

i was served an ad for a forthcoming single by the artist Vienna Vienna on instagram and promptly listened to all his shit. yet another banger for the SOMEBODY COME FUCK THIS (GAY) playlist.

ex-religious alt-rock, self-described "glimmer rock". he's signed to pete wentz of fall out boy's label, pete wentz is a surprisingly good interviewer? very minimal input from the actual interviewer lol

Boxes be damned, Vienna Vienna revels in his own iteration of alt-rock — a genre he’s deemed “glimmer rock.” The result is a cathartic exercise in self-actualization as much as it is about a literal “glimmer” of light. Vienna Vienna’s sound is melody-forward, built on a foundation of shimmering reverb, electric guitar riffs full of personality, and juicy hooks lathered in witty playfulness, and ultimately, empowerment. ... VIENNA VIENNA: At its core, glimmer rock is about shared catharsis and a loud fucking show, like a really loud show where you can really express yourself and let out whatever's been holding you back — while leaning into the theater of it all, being dramatic because it's fun and campy. It's a good time, and it's a healing thing to express emotions completely. And it’s a great opportunity, onstage, to present it as glimmer rock and share this idea that you're catching hold of a glimmer, this special light at the end of a tunnel. You can see yourself, you can feel yourself — while doing it very loudly.

-

reading

the actual physical experience of reading this book was very pleasant: curled up on the couch under the strawberry blanket while it was raining, listening to ethopian jazz. it was so nice to actually read an enjoyable book. i feel like i've been in a little bit of a rut.

NOT an erotica novel this time, just a fun little noir murder mystery with an outsider private detective!

Which powerful mystery man killed the gay activist for outing him? After an attempt is made on his life, Queer Nation activist John Rutka asks tough-as-nails gay private detective Don Strachey to provide him with protection. Why does someone want to kill him? The activist's efforts at outing closeted gay homophobes have earned him a multitude of enraged enemies who would just as soon see him dead. After Strachey refuses to help, the man's body is found savagely murdered in apparent retribution for his deeds. Now, because of this, the reluctant Strachey feels obligated to investigate. Third Man Out brings back one of the most popular gay heroes in mystery fiction, Don Strachey, a private investigator as hard-boiled as they come, along with his lover, Tim Callahan, in a topical and very entertaining mystery dealing with the ethical issues of outing.

Third Man Out by Richard Lipez writing as Richard Stevenson was originally published in 1992, and my 2007 reprint is a movie tie-in. 173p, a softcover of middling quality. the cover is much glossier than most of the gay and lesbian novels on my shelf. must be that hollywood money kicking around.

both a fun frontispiece and a very helpful author's note. haworth press started early with publishing LGBTQ+ academic studies, and they had both gay men's and lesbian fiction imprints. available on the internet archive, i'm fairly certain i bought this one up in ct before i moved.

no on-page or fade to black sex scenes: this is just a briskly plotted murder mystery, fourth in a sixteen-book and four-movie series. i will be searching out more of these books, most of which seem to be on the internet archive thank god.

i would call it a capable modern noir: deeply concerned with ways and means, hypocrisy, bribes, government corruption, and a bumbling homme fatale. the final scene is at an airport for christ's sake. this is also a rare LGBTQ+ book where it could never be a straight book: it is too entwined in ethical issues specific to the community. i feel like a lot of the more modern LGBTQ+ debut novels ive bounced off are those where the characters feel coincidentally gay, or genderswapped from a straight romance. not so here! i need to read more books by cranky old gay men who have already written a zillion books!

I lived behind masks for much of my early life, and what this does to people’s psyches interests and frightens me. I think one reason I loved John LeCarre’s early spy novels was that his protagonists led double lives out of patriotism and not for reasons of shame or social embarrassment. Of course, it was more complicated than that for LeCarre’s characters, just as it’s not all bad for closeted gay people. Leading secret lives sometimes has a kind of romance to it too. But overall the closet is self-destructive.

this book is snappy: it manages to jam a lot of stuff in 178 pages. the dialogue between don and his partner timmy is particularly good: they feel like a real couple who loves each other to death but also gets frustrated, have inside jokes, have a routine and are there for each other.

very dryly funny in general and about the general albany NY region. i have spent so many thanksgivings out that way bc my favorite roommate's parents live there and i have heard so many of the exact same complaints from her and her parents lmao

-

watching

using up some kanopy credits on a series of early short film and early remakes of early short film. Automatic Moving Company (1912, dir. Bosetti) is the remake i prefer bc i think the stop-motion is better-- there's a bounciness and verve to it. crazy how the only real "tell" of scale is the straw

-

playing

THE most chobani hopepunk commerical game i have ever played, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery (2021, Silver Lining Studio out of Taiwan, originally a mobile game) is free until thurs morning CST on epic.

Guide brush strokes and solve a variety of puzzles to help an aspiring artist complete her masterpiece amid her brusque neighbor’s gaze and his pesky cat. As her painting starts to take shape, uncover an emotional tale of chance and artistry revealed behind unrelated yet familiar moments.

i didn't like this hand-animated two-hour point and click adventure game very much. it's cute and it's pretty but the storytelling is very muddy. i don't think their outsourced translation service (probably through Akapura, their publisher) did them any favors. all of the dialogue and flavor text is like that, so it's good they leaned into a lot of dialogue-less cutscenes.

this interview with one of the artists reveals they had a eight-person team, which seems kind of large for something that started out as a mobile game? it also has some helpful info about what they were going for.

What led you to become a Game Developer / Marketer? This decision came down on a simple question, which also motivated us to develop games in the first place. What would I rather do in a 90 minutes break? After collecting all the opinions on this topic from members at that time, we decided to combine three shared activities that we like to do during the break: see a movie, read a novel, and play a game. We want to make games that would let players have it all. ... Stories are the heart of our games. Behind the Frame is a narrative-driven game with escape room coating. Aside from the main storyline, which we hope would touch the players, we also have some breakthroughs on the display of the game scene. We adopted 2D 360°panorama for the presentation of several main scenes.

i do think the uniqueness of the 2D 360 panorama and pulling that tech from virtual museum and house tours does serve them well. they really only had to build out two areas, and the rest is traditional flat visual-novel scenes. however, this mechanic also really hurt their storytelling, bc such care is taken with the little clickable info boxes about many of the things in the apartment that it's really jarring when it jumps to a weird magical time nonsense thing? there is such a persistence of your actions on the world and the ability for outside factors to change your apartment (cat walking through paint, etc), and everything is very modern including the clothes, so it's never clear what's a flashback and what isn't. when you get to the end, the original framing device of amnesia just makes it seem like the protagonist is suffering from alzheimer's. i think something so focused on memory chose a very strange framing device, but unfortunately the framing device is The Whole Game.

i think they accomplished their goal (escape room with fun but not challenging puzzles you can finish in two lunch breaks). i love a short, self-contained story, but i think $15-$30 full-price is kind of steep for something with very little replay value. ported to steam and playstation, which is pretty good for a mobile game. can't be mad at a small team making at least their money back, the hand animated cutscenes were very pretty, i just wish the actual narrative was clearer

-

making

the first and last time this little wall hanging project will appear, bc instead of farm animals i am going to put some very doxxable items for a friend's birthday. got this cross stitch book as part of an 8/$1 sale bc i liked some of the alphabets and did not really expect to stitch anything else out of it but hey! sometimes you need some frames that look like they came ripped out of a 90s wendys fast food restaurant interior

[crownorclover]

TUESDAY AGAIN NO PROBLEM

(original)

[dimension20stuff]

happy worlds beyond number tuesday to those who celebrate

[twerkyvulture]

It's Terrible Tyrannosaurus Tuesday

[canis-goofus]

doggust again? no problem

[weirdwyvern]

got to episode 17 and saw the title "Rohan Kishibe's Adventure," had a visceral response in the form of creating this meme

[honeyedheartss]

I haven't seen him in months. gotta do everything myself around here

[bogkeep]

Haiz Birthday In A Week...

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/21/2025

hey it's fucking snowing here in houston texas! what the fuck!

listening: toes by the glass animals

reading: the steerswoman series by rosemary kirstein, and the gay and lesbian erotica book of the week, candidate by tracey richardson

watching: various david attenborough documentaries

playing: brief genshin impact report

making: banana bread

listening

glass animals' toes: my best friend's husband and i were chatting about music my best friend introduced us to, and my god there's been so much! i remember back in 2018 i did not expect to like them bc we had wildly diverging indie rock tastes at the time, but they really do scratch something in my brain. very good writing music, bc each album has such a tightly curated vibe and the words are recognizable english but so poetic as to be mostly nonsense. this song is loosely about The Island of Dr Moreau. my best friend has described this song as "like listening to crayons melt"

I'm a man, I'm a twisted fool My hands are twisted too Five fingers, two black hooves I'm a man, don't spin me a lie Got toes, and I can smile I'm crooked but upright

a song for very few blorbos but when it hits for a blorbo it Hits yanno

-

reading

im having a brain time that is favorable to reading many books in one week. we're going to start with some i loved and then go to the gay and lesbian erotica, which i did not love and did not finish.

talking about which post led me to this series would give you an enormous spoiler for the book. we're going to yoink the Setting from wikipedia:

A Steerswoman is a traveling scholar, required to answer any question asked of them, as long as the asker answers truthfully in return. Anyone refusing to answer a Steerswoman's question is placed under a ban, and no Steerswoman will answer their questions in future. Only wizards do not respect the Steerswomen, maintaining intense secrecy around their magic. Kirstein's work is often characterized as science fantasy. Jo Walton describes the Steerswoman series as "not only science fiction, but more science fictional than anything else."[1] Cory Doctorow says of The Steerswoman, "even the book's genre is a riddle that you'll have enormous great fun solving."[2] The Steerswoman series addresses themes of technological development, inter-species interaction, and distribution of knowledge.[4]

i ADORED these. i did basically nothing for two days except apply to jobs and read these books. these are physics brain books. these are Science Fiction with the capitals on books. the first chapter has someone derive a bit of orbital mechanics from first principles by making logical inferences from a chart she drew in the dirt about distribution of certain jewels. despite that, it's never boring! sometimes the steerswoman Rowan will puzzle over something for several chapters before something finally clicks for both you and her. the books are one big nested riddle, and you have all the pieces from the beginning! it just looks so strange from Rowan's eyes that you don't figure it out until she does! and even when you figure out one bit you just have more questions!!! and despite knowing a huge spoiler going in, part of it really blindsided me! it was a very clever bit of writing! good job rosemary!!!

and now for the gay and lesbian erotica book, which again has a 3.8 on goodreads and again i have no idea why. published in 2008 by Bella Press in a very indifferent perfect-bound ~250p softcover with the most creasable cover imaginable, our author Tracey Richardson is a Canadian writing about an American presidential candidate. from what i read, the political speeches were the best part of the book. this was genuinely groundbreaking and revolutionary in 2008 for a Democratic presidential candidate to openly support the LGBTQ+ community! i think Tracey put a more progressive veneer on some of JFK's speeches but that's okay they still hit! that man did have some talented staff members and a great stage presence!

i tortured my best friend by reading snippets of this aloud and removing her toddler daughter from various mischief as she cooked, and we got really stuck on the presidential candidate Jane's age. she is forty three. she is a medical doctor. she lost her husband ten years ago when she had her own private medical practice at THIRTY THREE. she left for a year to do Doctors Without Borders, started a nonprofit in America about healthcare access, and is now a second term senator. this had my bestie and i doing back of the envelope math and we can only conclude she never slept or went on vacation.

i have many beefs with this book, both petty and with regards to construction. my best friend got extremely peeved at the description of someone's accent as "a well heeled eastern seaboard accent". WHAT the fuck does that mean. WHERE on the eastern seaboard??? the standard American Newscaster Accent is faintly midwestern. did they have a sort of bland tidewater politician faint drawl? who knows! this canadian author cannot tell us :(

Tracey is a big fan of dropping details very late. eg we only find out on page 8 after a lot of dialogue that love interest/Secret Service agent Alex has a southern accent. Five pages into a party scene we find out she’s wearing a hawaiian shirt. i had to go back and reread the entire party scene with that in mind. on page 42 we find out Alex is an Olympic gold medal hockey player in the first year women were allowed to play Olympic hockey. earlier in the book we see her playing hockey for funsies with her rec league and we also go over her dossier in detail with Jane. either place would have been a great place to bring this up!!!

this book is also very reverent of the office of usa politicians in a way i find strange for a canadian. and for alex, a somewhat jaded civil servant. alex!!! she’s just a rich nepo baby and has good stage presence!!!! stop falling for it!!!

as a bisexual, novels about straight widows turning lesbian really bother me sometimes. this was one of the ones that really bothered me. it's kind of insane how little bisexual fiction there is compared to the strongly represented pan and poly communities. this was 2008 though so pansexuality wasn't really as mainstream, i don't remember hearing much about it until i went to college in western massachusetts in 2013.

i had to stop reading this book bc it hit me with the following:

these are both cis women. does she have an infection??????? is she okay???? the book is not going to get better from here. books rarely start out bad and then improve. i have only a limited amount of time here on god's green earth and i want to read the thirteenth volume of witch hat atelier instead. gentle reader, i hope you understand.

-

watching

again if i could log individual children's tv show episodes i would be winning letterboxd. i half-watched a lot of david attenborough docs in the background and fell asleep on a couch to his soothing voice. there are some fucked up little guys on this planet.

-

playing

good fucking riddance, even though this is basically a slap on the wrist. the multiple-step in-game currency exchanges in order to get the main in-game currency for pulling for characters is one of the more underhanded gacha systems. gambling is an ancient human activity, it is not instantly harmful or instantly addictive, and there will never be a good way to legislate it out of existence, but i do think some more predatory practices (like this one!) should be legislated.

nothing to report about actually playing genshin this week. a big yearly event approacheth, however. excited to bring you news of the new four-star character, a basket weaver

-

making

banana bread embarrassment. i hate my kitchen so fucking much. my fridge and oven both need to be replaced but will my landlord do that???? no. this oven is from 2007 and does not hold a consistent temp, which is fine if im roasting chicken thighs and it randomly spikes the temp and doesn't heat in one quadrant, but it makes it Very Difficult to bake. i think this was a combo of an inconsistent inner temp and forming a slightly burnt crust that did not want to pull out of the perhaps undergreased pans. fuck an aldi nonstick spray i guess. i SLATHERED that thing and it still had to be persuaded out of the pan.

i consistently forget that martha stewart consistently produces baked goods that are just a touch oilier than i like. you could lose a good two tablespoons of butter in this and not notice it much, i think. a very wet recipe. added in one orange's worth of zest bc i like it.

[irradiate-space]

Last Lunesday of the Week

Listening: Mostly going through my library on "random by album" (latest: FMAB, Alestorm) and the local dance/EDM mix radio station's archives.

Reading: Finished issue 1 of "Speculative North", an anthology that I received as a gift many years mack. Also finished What If 2, and shelved a Pope Francis cartoon bio and The Salmon of Doubt, a Doug Adams autobio from found documents on his posthumous hard drives. Not really a theme here beyond cleaning off my shelves.

Recent fun read was H. Beam Piper's The Cosmic Computer, which I found after finishing Little Fuzzy.

It's not a Heinlein story, but the way that Piper draws these frontier worlds feels like Heinlein's settings. But where Heinlein writes stories of things which are solved by individual action, Piper writes (n: 2) about stories which are solved by processes set in motion, and the orderly functioning of the dregs of bureaucracy. Piper believes that Government will function, in a way that is very different from anything else I've read lately besides glowfic.

Writing: Gearing up for NaNoWriMo with more Gundam Iliad prep work. Besides the cyberdeck project, I'm going to be starting a scene-by-scene flowchart of different takes on The Iliad.

Spite/Research: might be editing gundam.fandom.com to add a bunch of missing stuff for Johnny Ridden and some related things.

Watching: It was a two-shot weekend, so I binged Saga of Tanya The Evil on a rewatch. Now I have to go watch the movie.

Injuries: +1 flu shot, +1 COVID booster, +2 elbow needles, -4.5 vials of blood for routine bloodwork (half a tube wasted when the needle backed out accidentaly). Lost a fair-weather biking glove on my way back from the jab, so I'm out like $50 there.

Playing: More Tears of the Kingdom, trying to find more quest items and caves and wells, but not in any organized fashion. Doing this in an organized fashion would require getting one of the checklist apps or signing up for an app, which I do not want to do.

Crafting: On the recommendation of a friend, I've gone and acquired all the parts for making an Ikea Vindriktning into an IOT AQI logger. Should be interesting.

Gotta model some revisions for the next phase of my Pi cyberdeck project, but I'm having trouble getting that Rasbian to load phosh/phoc, which is very annoying. Maybe I should stop fucking around and just use GNOME. Once that's done, I still need to figure out I2C addressing.

Halloween approacheth; it's time to actually sit down and remodel my 2023 NASFiC costume into something that can be worn for more than 4h. Big messes of orange filament in my future; it may be time to build a printer enclosure.

[workshop94]

TUESDAY AGAIN NO FCKIN PROBLEM!

TUESDAY AGAIN NO PROBLEM

[weirdgirlvampire]

Surely another insane day of traveling will cure me

[lorileopard]

Espresso shots.. save me..

Espresso shots

Save me espresso shots

[joyousmistake]

i am the best at birthday cards

[haroldjaffe]

Also makes me think this (:

https://www.tumblr.com/chickensnack/93947404481/tuesday-again-no-problem