Same as it ever was

Aug. 15th, 2025 04:18 pm
cupcake_goth: (Vampire Governess)
[personal profile] cupcake_goth
I swear to god, every other year for the Vampire Masquerade ball I decide the vision for my outfit isn't working and end up changing what I'm doing roughly four weeks before the event. This time I am hedging my bets and ordered this coat in both black and white. The white version has already arrived, and I'm incredibly impressed with it. It;'s good quality fabric and construction; the only downsides are plastic buttons (which I knew I would be changing) and no pockets (which the Madwoman in the Attic will fix.)

My new outfit visions:

- All white with touches of red (lace jabot, red beaded "blood" on the cuffs of the sleeves, headdress with red roses and flowers)

OR

- All black with touches of pink. (jabot, hat w/ pink feathers and roses)

I feel confident either way. I'd really like to do the white outfit, because not only will it stand out, but it'll be a nice nod to the Mardi Gras outfits that Louis, Lestat, and Claudia wore in the final episode of season 1.

---

I need to go back through my VMB entries here and see if I can find out when I started emceeing the event. I know it was after 2011, but the exact year? No idea.

(no subject)

Aug. 14th, 2025 12:42 pm
skygiants: a figure in white and a figure in red stand in a courtyard in front of a looming cathedral (cour des miracles)
[personal profile] skygiants
Last week I was on vacation at Beth's family cottage, which normally would mean that I'd be reading a battered paperback. HOWEVER instead I was racing to finish Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets due to the unfortunate fact of it being triply overdue at the library.

A useful and worthwhile book; a compelling and depressing book; not, perhaps, an ideal vacation book, but so it goes. The book is composed of oral histories conducted by Alexievich in the years between 1991 and 2012 with various inhabitants of the Former Soviet Union. Alexievich is particularly interested in suicides, and several of the interviews/chapters circulate around people who knew or were close to people who took their own lives after the fall of communism; several others focus on people who were living in areas of the former Soviet Union where the end of the USSR led immediately to ethnic or nationalistic violence.

Many of the oral histories follow a pattern that goes

a. [recounting of an absolutely horrific personal-infrastructural tragedy or example of human cruelty that happened under Stalin]
b. but at least we had ideals
c. And Now We Have This Fucking Capitalism Instead And It's Not A Good Trade

and many others go

a. under socialism in [location] they said we were all brothers and I believed it
b. and suddenly overnight that changed and I will be forever haunted by the things I've seen since

Alexievich recounts the oral histories more or less as if they're dramatic/poetic monologues -- usually monologues of despair -- removing herself and the circumstances under which they were conducted almost entirely, except for a very occasional and startling interjection to make a point. (One oral history, of the horrific-things-happened-but-we-believed variety, is intermittently interrupted by anekdoty from the interviewee's son; Alexievich comments that no matter what she asked him, he only ever responded with a joke.) Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style. As a literary conceit, it's very effective, but I found myself wishing sometimes that it was a little less literary. It's rare that I read a nonfiction book and want the author to be putting more of themself into the narrative, rather than less, but I wanted to know what questions she was asking. That said, for various reasons, I'm considering buying a copy.

Week notes: August 4-August 10 2025

Aug. 10th, 2025 10:57 am
soricel: (Default)
[personal profile] soricel
Teaching:

NA, though I did send off a proposal/description of a new writing workshop series at the artsy personal development NGO. It's "urban wildlife themed." I'm ambivalent about it, and about my continued participation in the NGO in general, but ehh, I think I'll go for it. 

Learning:

Kinda slacked off on my geography and Romanian practice this week, but got in a little bit of each. Also missed another somatic movement workshop, but watched the recording the next day. Actually got a little emotional doing it, but then I've been a little emotional all week I guess. Can't say I "learned" much in particular, but I feel like doing things like these workshops has helped me cultivate some skills I found very useful during this visit to my parents.' Or maybe not, I don't know!

Listening:

Not much really until this weekend, when I've been coming back to that Wicca Phase self-titled. Comfort music, I have to admit, and also pretty transportative, which is nice when I'm sitting in an airport feeling grossed out and overtired/overstimulated/etc.

Reading:

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. Part of me kinda felt like this book should've been twice as long. It felt like there were plot threads that just never really came together. I mean, they don't have to come together, and honestly plot isn't really what I like best about KSR's books--it's his unsentimental focus on mostly principled but slightly flawed people doing grinding, frustrating, fraught work, often within super fraught bureaucracies, to make Things slightly less shitty. Contrast with:

Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler. Read this on the plane. I kind of thought it was gonna be a 2016-era dive into "alt-right rabbitholes" and whatnot, with lots of predictable things to say about alienation and algorithms etc. There was a bit of that, but mostly it was about familiar Millennial novel preoccupations with authenticity, identity, purpose, etc...what I kinda refer to in my head as the Perennial Theme of the Realist Novel: the Impossibility of Knowing Oneself or Others. The usual cynicism/grudging sense of obligation to engage with politics/activism/etc. despite feeling like it's all pretty pointless and gross to do so, especially if you're privileged in all the ways that narrators in these novels always are. (That's the part I had in mind when I thought of contrasting it with the KSR book). But also some stuff about "expat life" (ugh I hate that term) that I found sadly/amusingly relatable despite the fact that my circumstances are much different from the narrator's. There was one passage in particular, about enduring conversations about U.S. politics/healthcare by smug and gleeful interlocutors, that rang especially true.

Oh, and something else I noticed: so I've been trying to de-Google my life, not using social media etc., and I feel like people--well, men--who have similar relationships to the internet/social media, are often, as in this novel, presented as creeps and weirdos with Something to Hide or I guess at best (here I'm thinking of the boyfriend in Dave Eggers' The Circle) as sort of two-dimensional, eccentric curmudgeons. Not sure what to make of this, though I noted an impulse as I read to like, create/resurrect Facebook and Instagram accounts and thus prove (to...?) my normalcy, or at least to establish some greater sense of imagined belonging to/solidarity with the vast majority of the human race.

(Also ugh I feel like I'm writing this post in the voice of the narrator from this book and I don't like it...)

Anyway, since I was in the land of my childhood these past two weeks, I felt a compulsion to revisit some old X-Men comics. I read (re-read? Can't remember) some of the classic Chris Claremont stuff: God Loves, Man Kills and Days of Future Past. I kinda forgot how political these comics were, in their ham-fisted way. I also liked how soft Nightcrawler and Colossus were. Fun to read.

Watching:

Nothing really.

Writing:

A couple RP posts. I know last week I said I was feeling kinda burnt out on them, but I think I was just in a mood. They're fun.

Other:


This was week two back home with my parents. Not gonna get into it here but despite some challenges, it was really pleasant and peaceful and I'm really grateful for this time with them.
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
Old Fairview: White Lake Observatory

Mile 12.1 (4.4) – Half a mile further along, the access to White Lake Observatory turns right. (White Lake itself is the alkali pond opposite the Twin Lakes turnoff.)

Because of their electrical systems, which interfere with the operation of the radio-telescope, cars are not allowed on the road to the radio telescope. The big dish itself towers above the other installations, listening eternally to signals from outer space. The maze of poles and overhead wiring back towards Oliver are another form of radio-telescope, which pick up very long radio waves. The observatory is well worth walking the three-tenths mile; what's happening is completely incomprehensible to the layman, but fascinating nonetheless.

(1975/77)

* * * * * *

This observatory still exists, under the rather grander name of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. It is, so the government website tells me, "an internationally renowned facility for radio astronomy and leading-edge instrumentation." Until just now, I had no idea that it existed.

DRAO is still, naturally, a radio-quiet site, which must be more difficult these days than in 1975.

Dave Stewart, author of Okanagan Backroads, is quite right about its fascination. I am absolutely a lay person, and yet statements like this are weirdly thrilling: "The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is Canada's largest radio telescope. ... CHIME has no moving parts, but the Earth's rotation allows the telescope to map all of Canada's visible sky every day. CHIME was designed to survey atomic hydrogen from the largest volume of the Universe to date." No real idea why that would be important to do (feel free to explain!), but I'm glad it's happening here.

They have a Perseids viewing party next week!

§rf§

Source: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/nrc-facilities/dominion-radio-astrophysical-observatory-research-facility

Well that was exciting

Aug. 6th, 2025 05:09 pm
cupcake_goth: (Leeches)
[personal profile] cupcake_goth

Up front: I’m fine, everything is ok. I went to the ER last night. I had sudden excruciating abdominal pain that caused muscle spasms that made it feel like my ribs were going to snap. Nothing showed up on a CT and X-ray, so they gave me a bunch of meds for acid and other stomach issues. 

Because of all this, I learned that morphine doesn’t really do anything for me, and I am big mad about that. Especially because last night was the first time I described my pain level as a 10. Even with my ridiculously high pain tolerance, I was writhing in pain and wanted to be knocked out.

I’M FINE. We have no idea what caused this, but I’m fine.


(no subject)

Aug. 5th, 2025 09:25 pm
skygiants: Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender peers through an eyeglass (*peers*)
[personal profile] skygiants
I think I did The Tainted Cup a bit of a disservice in reading it For the Hugo Awards. It's a very competent book that is hitting all its beats at being both Fantasy Novel and Mystery Novel -- the world is detailed and well-realized (if a bit Attack on Titan-ish) and the plot hangs together in a sensible and logical way. In every way it is doing its job. Unfortunately in my heart I never want to give awards to things that are doing their job competently, I want to give awards to things that are trying to do something weird and interesting and ambitious even if they don't entirely succeed at it, so I kept squinting at The Tainted Cup like 'are you going to get weirder?' and the answer was, no! It continued working very reasonably through its fantasy mystery plot in an interesting and well-realized world!

The Tainted Cup follows Din Kol, a young man who has been magically altered to have perfect memory recall in order to act as an assistant to a highly-placed investigator, Eccentric Detective Ana Dolabra. [personal profile] genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike, which I have to take her word for since I've never experienced any Nero Wolfe; anyway, I admit her Eccentric Behavior did not always really land for me, but I can't deny it's in the Tradition and I do like Din, who's very polite.

This dynamic duo live in an Empire that is constantly under threat from Extremely Large Beasts that live outside the Big Wall and wreak massive destruction whenever they breach it. The existence of and need to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts justifies the rule of the Empire; the center of government exists in the center of the country and then people live in sort of concentric rings of safety around it, with the least safe of course being the area right next to the Big Wall. In order to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts, the Empire is constantly pushing forward experimental magical bioresearch projects that do things like 'alter people to have perfect memories' or 'grow very large and scary vines very very fast.'

When an important nobleman turns up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very very fast through his entire body, this is an interesting little murder problem. When a bunch of other people also turn up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very fast through their entire bodies -- in a way that also causes the vines to damage the structural integrity of the Big Wall -- this immediately becomes a large and scary murder problem which Din and Ana have to truck out to the absolute least safe bit of the country to try and solve.

As you can hopefully tell from this summary, the logic of the mystery and the logic of the world are very well-integrated with each other. The beats make sense as they land, and at every point you're given enough information to go 'ah, this clicks perfectly with what I already know about this world, and now I've learned a little more.' It's a good fantasy-mystery novel! I would like to see more fantasy-mystery that does this sort of thing well! The murder by exploding vines is very creepy!

I don't think it's a particularly spectacular novel for character -- there are Din and Ana, and there are a bunch of people who are required to make the mystery go, and there's a sort of flash-in-the-pan love-interest-shaped fellow for Din -- and I don't think it's much of a novel of ideas. Which absolutely not all books need to be, and which would not have been looking for it to be, had it not been multiply award-nominated. But that brings us right back around to the beginning of this post again.

(no subject)

Aug. 4th, 2025 11:10 pm
skygiants: C-ko the shadow girl from Revolutionary Girl Utena in prince drag (someday my prince will come)
[personal profile] skygiants
You know how sometimes a show is more or less made for you in a lab, but also you watch the actual plot and you have some notes, and you're not actually sure it's good, per se, but also it was made for you in a lab?

Anyway, we just finished watching Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the Kim Tae Ri vehicle about 1950s Korean all-female theater troupes in which the entire plot revolves around aspiring young lesbians competing to see who's going to be the Prince of the Theater.

Please admire these official portraits of the main cast:



Jeongnyeon! Our Heroine. Baby butch. Massive protagonist energy. FORBIDDEN to sing by her mother, who has some kind of tragic lesbian performance backstory, despite that she has the BEST VOICE in a GENERATION. In episode four someone tries to make her sing full femme with no genderplay and she revolts on live television.



Moon Okyeong, the established theater prince!! beloved of every baby lesbian in 1950s Korea!! fishes Jeongnyeon out of the sticks and inspires her to join the troupe in the hopes of molding her into a COMPETITOR who can CURE Moon Okyeong's TRAGIC ENNUI and SCHRODINGER'S MORPHINE ADDICTION with the power of HOMOEROTIC RIVALRY.



Seo Hyerang, the theater's most important femme. Moon Okyeong's toxic partner who does not approve of Okyeong experiencing homoerotic protege/rival emotions.



Heo Yeongsoo! My favorite. Jeongnyeon's OWN baby butch rival that she made HERSELF in the classic rival mode, a stiff and reserved rich girl with Family Issues whose Haughty Pride covers a Profound Passion for Theater, who only really comes alive when she gets to go onstage in full drag and play a prince or a villain. A real Mr. Darcy of a lesbian.

Jeongnyeon and Yeongsoo also have their own same-age femme whom they're constantly competing to perform with who for some reason does not get lead actress billing or one of these cool character portraits even though she is to all intents and purposes the female lead ... anyway here she is, she's extremely cute but needs to pick up some skills in communication



The experience of actually watching the show is a a bit of a roller coaster ... like one episode you're watching Jeongnyeon make the worst decisions that a human has ever made in their life, and the next episode you're just sitting back enjoying the experience of Theater Lesbians Practice The Big Villain Seduction Scene In Every Possible Casting Variation, and the next episode everyone is getting together to do the big performance when apparently nobody has ever practiced their actual blocking together before and you're like "why are you like this. surely a theater troupe cannot run this way" and then the next episode Moon Okyeong is looking simply unbelievably good in a suit.

Honestly most of the time even when something annoying was happening there was some lesbian looking good in an Outfit, so even at the times I was suffering I did not suffer! And most of the time I was not suffering, because a truth about me is I love absurd Method Theater Drama where people are constantly going out to Find their Characters and saying to each other 'show me ... your interpretation of the Foolish General! The one only you could bring!' My many years of reading Skip Beat! have prepared me perfectly for this experience.

[nb: when I say lesbians, nobody is doing anything more than tender embraces or fraught handholding on screen, and nobody is saying 'I am a lesbian', but like they are very unambiguously lesbians. The entire plot is powered by lesbian drama. Every two episodes or so a man shows up to do something like 'embezzle money' or 'vaguely menace' and then exits again.]

Do I think the ending is fully satisfying? No. Will I be requesting it for Yuletide? DESPERATELY. I hope they keep letting Kim Tae Ri play intense lesbians forever.

(Also, if anyone knows where to find scanlations of the webtoon it's based on, I am Extremely Interested in reading them ...)

(no subject)

Aug. 4th, 2025 02:49 pm
soricel: (Default)
[personal profile] soricel
I've been sort of dipping in and out of Sarah Faith Gottesdiener's Moon Book, and since the waxing gibbous phase we're in now is apparently a time for "showing others your evolution in a more public sphere," I thought I'd share some thoughts based on some of the journal prompts in the book. 

I'm brand new to moon stuff, but I've learned that the waxing moon is associated with growth, abundance, and taking action, among other things. The waxing gibbous moon, in particular, is associated with bounty and beauty. So I thought I'd reflect on the journal prompt about what "abundance" looks like for me, focusing on what I'm thinking of as "creative abundance," because I've been feeling some creativity-related anxiety and uncertainty these days.

So when I think of "creative abundance," here's what comes to mind:

1.) Having a project that focuses my attention and requires lots of time and energy...but doesn't feel like a total drag or slog.

2.) A feeling of pleasure in the act of working on the project, and an occasional, satisfied feeling of pleasant surprise: like, ooh, that was a cool sentence!

3.) Getting encouraging/appreciative feedback. And a very little goes a really long way!

4.) Feeling like I'm attuned to lots of inspiration, or stuff that feeds the project somehow...as opposed to the overwhelming and kinda sweaty feeling of compulsive consumption of stuff I feel compelled to imitate/replicate.

5.) Related: feeling a sense of "purity" of motivation/intention. Hard to explain, but like, a lack of "grasping" energy. Or put differently, maybe a sense of intrinsic motivation. Obviously intentions and motivations are never entirely "pure"/intrinsic, but I can tell when I'm driven to do a thing by my desire for attention/recognition/inclusion/the idea of the thing--a kind of scarcity mindset, I guess.

6.) A feeling of positive forward motion toward the goal of completion and contentedness. A lack of self-doubt/inner criticism, despite an awareness that there is no real "goal" or measurable "value" in the thing.

7.) The feeling of openness and possibility following completion. A sense that I can return to this well or continue exploring and there'll be more to find. Not in an extractivist/clearcut sort of way, but in the sense of feeling like there's something sustainable and regenerative about the energy of the project. And also, implicit in this, a sense of the need for rest, and an awareness that biodiversity/polyculture is better than monocropping...which is something my all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking doesn't always let me recognize or appreciate...

So even though the waxing phase is a time of action, I'm kinda feeling the need to rest and chill, at least on the creative front, even though part of me is fighting/judging that impulse. So I'm thinking now of different "actions" I can take and intentions I can set during this time, following some of the other suggestions in this chapter...

Week notes: July 28-August 3 2025

Aug. 3rd, 2025 07:52 pm
soricel: (Default)
[personal profile] soricel
Teaching:

NA

Learning:

A bit of geography and Romanian practice. Skipped this week's somatic movement workshop thing because I was traveling etc. 

Listening:

Nothing really...though I did catch a nice set of power-poppy/punky/indie + dream poppy stuff on the local college radio station while I was driving around one night.

Reading:


The Summer I Ate the Rich, by Maika and Maritza Moulite. Fine, but not what I was hoping so. Brielle is a teenage zombie, which apparently means she's pretty much just a normal teenager but with exceptionally flaky skin and a very strong (though I guess pretty easily controllable?) urge to consume raw flesh/fresh blood and whatnot. And also some kind of magic mind control powers when she makes people eat food she cooks that's prepared with the pulverized remains of dead people? I don't know, honestly, my brain has been really scrambled this week and I've been barely paying attention to this book as I've been reading it. I do appreciate the anti-rich people sentiment though.

Watching:

Whoa, nothing!

Writing:

Managed to write a couple RP posts this week, and my partners have been taking their time getting back to me, which is nice. Honestly I was pretty burnt out after writing that fic last week, and was kinda feeling like I wanted to take a writing break for a while. I still might, but I'm feeling a bit of guilt about leaving my two main RP partners hanging for too long...or realizing that maybe I want to quit. As much as I enjoy writing these RPs, I don't think I'd be too sad if either of my partners said they wanted to wrap 'em up. Maybe *I* should just say that if I feel that way, but I have a complex about being perceived as a flake...and for now, I do enjoy them enough to want to keep going. I just think I need to slow down the pace a little and maybe take some time off.

This week I started thinking about some other kinds of creative projects I could do...more visual art, maybe. I've also been toying with the idea of making a zine, but I honestly think I'm just into the *idea* of it. I kinda wanna get back to doing some junk journal/collage type stuff, which I love but haven't done in a while. 

Other:

I'm halfway through my yearly visit to my parents' place. Knock on wood, so far this visit has been one of the most pleasant ever, though of course the constant emotional navigation is challenging. We just got back from a couple days camping in lovely/grungy/crunchy Brattleboro Vermont. The camping was very sweet and enjoyable, and bebopping in town was nice for a bit, but I found myself pretty overstimulated a lot of the time even though it's a super small town. Also, even though the culture there is pretty "aligned with my values" or whatever, I found myself feeling more and more averse to the place as the weekend went on, and more and more grateful to just retire back to the campground and chill around the fire. But it was a nice time overall.

(no subject)

Aug. 3rd, 2025 11:14 am
skygiants: janeway in a white tuxedo (white tux)
[personal profile] skygiants
god have I really not posted about Voyager in a year and a half?? we are still very slowly watching Voyager! we are almost at the end of season six! but I am NOT posting about thirty episodes in a single post so, let's see, I left off with Latent Image, let's see what I remember about the rest of Season 5.

ExpandVoyager Season 5, Episodes 12-26 )

WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.

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