#tuesday again

[kittycouch]

[dimension20stuff]

happy worlds beyond number tuesday to those who celebrate

[kadiumz]

it's that time of the week again >:)

[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.

[only-tumbir-gifs]

[flaringgoosebumps]

You know what would be funny, what if the supernatural finale went exactly the same way up to the very end except on the streaming sites they added in, "heat of the moment" playing in the last frame where Sam and Dean are in heaven together. So we know...y'know

[auntierayeraye]

My Piggies, I want you to get me closer to god. For it is TUESDAY AGAIN, TRENTIE BABY!

[gildedxpleasure]

tuesday

[mkartzdraws]

Drew some emojis inspired by my dog, Louie 💖

[thebardgroupie]

[pishifuzul]

tgirl tummy

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again no problem 11/26/2024

i don't have a good anecdote this week, i have the flu. look at my cat

listening

ty @shinygoodrock for the rec! billy bragg's the marching song of the covert. i was startled by the british accent but briefly forgot the uk's been colonizing way longer than god's favorite country, the usa

so SO cheery and so catchy! samples When The Ants Go Marching In!

Here we come with our candy and our guns And our corporate muscle marches in behind us For freedom's just another word for nothing left to sell And if you want narcotics we can get you those as well

it reminds me a lot of this poster i have framed but not hung up yet, jesse purcell's "A.G.F.T.P.O.T.U.S.O.A. (A Gift From The People Of The United States Of America)" (getcher own print at the link through justseeds)

-

reading

my favorite tinned fish newsletter is back! i like this newsletter for its dry anecdotal voice, but i coincidentally have a tin of mackerel in tomato sauce in the pantry for mackintosh name reasons. seems like the best way to have it is fairly plain with some light seasonings. the author was a senior editor at vice and has been out of work for a bit since that site's collapse, so it's good to see him back doing silly free nonsense like his tinned fish newsletter

i had Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis on hold for nearly six months so it extra hurt when i didn't particularly care for it.

like, what a premise! a beautifully written blurb that got my attention! i think i got an ad for this one on instagram. either that or it was floating around on this site.

A sharp-witted, high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, evil wizards and a garlic festival - all at once. Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, K. J. Parker and Travis Baldree. It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something. It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is… you. Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed. But as he realizes that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be? Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks.

this is a debut novel based on a friendgroup's DnD campaign, and it does show a bit. maybe you have a friend who’s freshly into improv? it gets a little wrapped up in Doing Bits. at several points i did think “i could be reading terry pratchett right now instead of enduring this bit.”

the writing itself is solid on a technical level-- there's a good balance of dialogue to description, no word choices really slammed me in the face, it flowed pretty nicely and was a fast read. flounders a bit in the middle but does pick up speed, a middling-okay pacing. if this were not a debut novel and felt a little bit more done on purpose i would be interested in talking about how the frantic lunge from plot point to plot point mirrors our protag's internal sense of self.

i do not think this rises to the level of farce, or even pastiche. it is a darkly comedic but fairly straightforward fantasy. very light PG romance elements.

so much of it is concerned with perceptions/expectations/visual tropes and then the big baddie is simply a baddie with no further interrogation. like a lot A LOT of philosophical musings on the nature of evil and the expectations thereof creating self image and morality and has unionized goblins. everything else in this book is questioned. you can’t go halfway with a deconstruction or you’re just writing more of the genre you’re trying to deconstruct. there was a scene that really clicked satisfyingly in my brain with a female sorceress, where she goes basically everyone expects me to be a bitch and a whore so let's just cut to the chase and have fun being a bitch and a whore. this alternate viewpoint of misogyny making you evil does not successfully contrast with our protag's internal calibration and view of evil but damn if that isn't the experience of being a woman in stem.

the protagonist, gav, wakes up with No memories and thereby becomes Good. or at least Better. does rozakis feel that everyone is born good and your reactions to things happening to you shape your morality? there's a reveal that one of the murders amnesiac!gav is most torn up about didn't actually happen bc his staff faked it and smuggled her out. i think this seriously undercuts the moderate amount of thinking and soulsearching and figuring out how to atone for past actions he does previously. and then it doesn’t really address any of the problems it tangled with in favor of a movie ending. it did tread a bit into therapyspeak for me. fewer shades of gray than i would have liked.

this book is also extremely heterosexual for what i expect a modern comedy fantasy to be. it neatly sidesteps the gay=/= evil conundrum but it was startling to find our protagonist with not even a curious homosexual thought.

occasionally irritating, but it was funny, except when it had to unfold some plot and forgot about being funny. this was a perfectly pleasantly written debut novel but wasn’t quite what i wanted or expected. it tries a lot of things and it’s interesting to watch the rube goldberg machine of a plot work and fail in some parts, even if it really did not carry through on its central philosophy.

-

watching

breezing through a lot of stuff bc it's easier to sleep propped up on my couch arm than in my actual bed. i usually don’t long DNFs but has to remind myself never to try Quo Vadis again. my god is that a tiresome film. and not even pretty costumes or pretty set design for the first forty minutes. whereupon i bailed. all of these were first time watches, dunno why I haven’t been reaching for comfort movies lately

-

playing

genshin update knocking it out of the park and also really reminding me of link tearsofthekingdom. also introduces a really good bird you can possess and fly around with. lots of vertical sky/coastline exploration which is so so so fun. i have done most of the things in this update inside a week bc i don't think they anticipated unemployed people like mainlining it between applying for jobs.

this girl's village has background music that reminds me of classic american westerns like bernstein or copland? heavy billy the kid ballet vibes. the music in this update is SO good im excited to yell about it in an future week when they drop the next album.

-

making

still fallow baybee. currently incubating the influenza. no longer feverish thank u nyquil

[only-tumbir-gifs]

[sorreltail]

no space is apolitical

[auntierayeraye]

My Piggies, you are my perfect drugs and without you, everything falls apart.

Ooooooh, and I want you for it's TUESDAY AGAIN TRENTIE BABY!

[couch-house]

"Do you know why I named you Mr. Incredible? It's because you love your family :)" -- Was honestly expecting a scene like this toward the end, but maybe we didn't need THAT much emotional excess. Which is to say, it's so perfect. It's so good. Shadow da freaking hedgehog......