incensaw | Reading

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

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Link

conuly

Watch on YouTube

conuly

Clicky!

Also, I meant to say re: the utilities that you are all the best and I absolutely love you :)

(Still need to call National Grid and still don't wanna.)

conuly

and applied for a shitton of jobs. The worst they can do is call me a dipshit, and they probably wouldn't do that to my face. I think? Seems like a waste of time to call somebody up and say "You're terrible, how could you think we'd consider you?"

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conuly

And what if I had simply passed you by,
your false skins gathering light in a basket,
those skins of unpolished copper,
would you have lived more greatly?

Now you are free of that metallic coating,
a broken hull of parchment,
the dried petals of a lily—
those who have not loved you
will not know differently.

But you are green fading into yellow—
how deceptive you have been.

Once I played the cithara,
fingers chafing against each note.
Once I worked the loom,
cast the shuttle through the warp.
Once I scrubbed the tiles
deep in the tub of Alejandro.
Now I try to deciper you.

Beyond the village, within a cloud
of wild cacao and tamarind,
they chant your tale, how you,
most common of your kind,
make the great warrior-men cry
but a woman can unravel you.

****

Link

conuly

Why is she like this.

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conuly

Jenn's plan to self-set-up her own balanced billing + a random screwup with autopay that she didn't realize until we were in the hole + having to help a friend get out of an abusive relationship = omg.

I'm pretty sure that they legally can't actually shut us off until May 15th, and once we get the tax refund we can pay the entire past due bills... but there's no promise we will get that refund by that date, and I would be surprised if we do. I don't want to go a week without lights and hot water, or a fridge and stove.

I'm reasonably certain that if we pay even half the past due now, we can talk them into waiting for that refund. The entire total is something like $6k... I'm a little scared to look again, honestly. I just sorta glanced at the bills in horror.

I've got paypal and venmo, which is posted here, or if you can't see that and can and want to help out you can PM me. We can absolutely pay back (or forward!) as soon as that refund comes in. I know how much the refund is, it will cover these bills.

(I've also been sitting on posting this for a few days, so I better get it out before I chicken out again!)

conuly

That's insane for NYC April, right?

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conuly

I believe it is a brown thrasher. Google says they're not frequent feeder birds, but they like mealworms and I put out dried mealworms, so that'd do it.

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conuly

Again, if anybody has more info, please share!

conuly

Some information here at Bluesky

If anybody has more links, please share!

conuly

And I gotta say, it really is pissing me off that only only do they not use the same translation all down the list, but they don't even consistently say which translations they're using. I don't even care which translation they use, but the stylistic whiplash is enough to give anybody a headache.

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conuly

(It was every bit as ridiculous as I thought it would be.)

And that led me to this thread and the corresponding subthread where he really just gets into it with me, for no fucking reason, on the subject of "no mass produced book series marketed towards children would depict homosexuality in 1997-2007. No publisher would take it on".

This is a factually untrue statement, and I have the booklists to prove it. I'm not saying these books were necessarily available to every kid who might reasonably have wanted to read them, but to say they didn't exist at all? I bought some of them from Scholastic book forms! Bruce Coville? He's a big name! The Skull of Truth came out in 1997! Norma Klein? She's a big name! People absolutely heard of her who read realistic YA fiction. Francesca Lia Block? I never read her, but I had heard about her, I knew people who read her books, I knew her books touched on homosexuality. But here he is, arguing with me about it! Why are we arguing about something so absurd?

At least I figured out why this is bugging me, and if I get another reply I will tell him. When he claims that these books did not exist, that no mainstream publisher would have printed any of them, that no mainstream bookseller would have stocked them in the children's or teens sections, he's buying into the bullshit queerphobic narrative that before X date, everything was hunky-dory and those people either a. didn't exist or b. were happily closeted.

In the a version of this narrative, things were better then, and it is all this publicity that makes people think they're LGBTQ. In the b version, things are immeasurably better now and all those LGBTQ people should just stfu already and be grateful. And key to either version is erasing the proof that it's just not true*.

And part of that proof is juvenile fiction published by mainstream publishers in the dark days of the 20th century that involve LGBTQ themes.

FFS, it's like another flavor of "Women didn't write sci-fi until yesterday" and yes we did. Don't fucking devalue their very real difficulties in getting published and staying published by saying they didn't exist at all.

(And if you're about to tell me that I grew up in a socially progressive part of the country, I know! But according to his claims, so did he, with a liberal family and a bookseller uncle to boot. If he never heard of a single YA book with LGBTQ themes at that age, I imagine that must be because he didn't ask anybody or look very hard. I didn't ask anybody or look very hard either, and I still bumped into them just, like, on the shelves! Neither of us was growing up in a Fundiegelical hellhole, so.)

Note: I would've asked him if he'd ever heard of Heather Has Two Mommies, but that turns out to have been printed by an indie publisher after all. I never woulda thunkit after all the press it got!

* It is measurably better now in some aspects. The important thing is that the past does not just get uniformly more queerphobic the further back you go, and in a way that maps perfectly onto modern bigotry.

conuly

It's certainly too late for his really adult siblings to escape that toxic hellscape that is their family, and even if they did they're not likely to become substantially better people as a result, but he's E's age, I think. So every once in a while I remember I'm rooting for him to just get out. Young adults can change a lot the first few years of being adults.

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skygiants

For many years I have been saying 'I must reread the Narnia books,' a thing I somehow have not done in the seventeen or so years I've been actively keeping track of my reading habits. I said this in the late 2000s when the new movies were coming out, and I said it again a couple years ago when I read Til We Have Faces for the first time, and then I said it several times over the past few months while I was rewatching all the 1980s BBC Narnia adaptations with local friends, and then last week my friend was doing a blitz reread of the whole series for a con panel and I had finally said it enough times that I decided to join her instead of just talking about it.

For background: yes, the Narnia books were some of my favorite books when I was a child; they're the first books I actively remember reading on my own, that made me go 'ah! this thing, reading, is worth doing, and not just a dull task set to me by adults!' (This goes to show how memory is imperfect: my parents say that the first book that they remember me reading, before Narnia, was The Borrowers. But they also say that I then went immediately looking for Borrowers behind light sockets which perhaps is why I do not remember reading it first.)

I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus. This did not really put me off Narnia or Aslan -- I had a lion named Aslan that was my favorite stuffed animal all through my childhood -- but I did have a vague sense As A Jewish Child that it was sort of embarrassing for everyone concerned, including the lion, C.S. Lewis, and me. My favorites were Silver Chair, Horse And His Boy, and Magician's Nephew. I reread The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe often simply because it was the first one; Prince Caspian didn't leave much of an impression on me and I only really liked Dawn Treader for Eustace's dragon sequence; The Last Battle filled me with deep secondhand embarrassment.

Rereading, I discover that I had great taste; Silver Chair simply stays winning! The experience of reading the first three Pevensie books is a constant hunt for little crumbs of individuality and personality in the Pevensie children beyond their Situations and how willing they are to listen to advice from Big Lion; Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me. For all the various -isms of Horse And His Boy, it feels really clear that Lewis leveled up in writing Character somewhere between Dawn Treader and Silver Chair; Shasta and Aravis and the horses and Polly and Diggory all just have a lot more chances to bonk against each other in interesting ways and show off who they are than the Pevensies ever do.

However! I also had bad taste. I did not appreciate Caspian as it ought to have been appreciated. Now, on my reread, it's by far my favorite of the Pevensie-forward texts -- and partly I suppose that, as a child, I could not fully have been expected to appreciate the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all. It's good! The Pevensies also just get to do more on their own and use more of their own actual skills than they do in either The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where they're mostly led around by the nose, or Dawn Treader, where they're mostly just having a nice boat trip. Just a soupcon of Robinsoniad in your Narnia, as a treat.

I also came away with the impression that Dawn Treader -- which really is primarily about Eustace and Reepicheep -- would be a better book if either Edmund or Lucy had gone on that trip but not both of them. The problem with Dawn Treader is that Edmund/Lucy/Caspian all kind of blob together in a cohort of being Just Sort Of Embarrassed By Eustace -- Edmund and Caspian particularly -- and don't get a lot to individuate them or give them Problems. Edmund and Caspian's dialogue is frequently almost interchangeable. But an Edmund who has Lucy's trials at the magician's tower and has to deal more with his existing/leftover issues from the first book is more interesting, and a Lucy who is stuck more in the middle of Caspian and Eustace without Edmund to over-balance the stakes is more interesting. I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....

Other miscellaneous observations:

- obviously I am aware of the Susan Problem but man, reading for Susan and Lucy through the later books it is clear how much the gradual tilting of the scales to Lucy Good/Susan Bad does a disservice to both characters. This is especially noticeable IMO in Horse And His Boy; it makes no sense for Lucy to go to war with a bow while Susan stays behind in context of anything we know about those characters from Lion and Caspian, it is so purely an exercise in Lucy Is The Designated Cool Girl Now. Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves

- it is very very funny that every King or Queen of Narnia talks like Shakespeare except for Caspian, who talks, as noted above, like a British schoolboy. My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --

- if you are on Bluesky you may have already seen me make this joke but it is so funny to be rolling along in Narnia pub order and have C.S. Lewis come careening back in for Magician's Nephew like 'WAIT! STOP!! I forgot to mention earlier but Jadis? She is hot. You know Lady Dimitrescu? yeah JUST like that. I just want to make sure we all know'

- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment

conuly

"Said gave".

As in "He said gave consent for the procedure" or "My professor said gave me an F".

A search for this was productive, if mildly frustrating - there's a lot of other reasons for those words to appear next to each other, but it definitely does seem to appear in the sense I saw more often than you'd expect for a speaker error.

You can see some examples at the following places:

Also, it does not matter if they said gave consent in the past for the same action. Consent is about the here-and-now.

An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients is said give consent (in writing) to do so. (This one is so odd I'm not sure it isn't an error.)

Nebraska's Matt Rhule said gave an update on the status of Dylan Raiola....

My instructor said gave me an F

Dr. David Persse said gave an update on what wastewater showed

Poll #32990

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58

View Respondents

"Said gave"

View Answers

Totally unremarkable
0 (0.0%)

Somewhat interesting
8 (13.8%)

OMGWTF?
50 (86.2%)

Of course, there's always the possibility that these are all just disfluencies, but it doesn't seem likely...?

erinptah

January: “AI cannot even retrieve information accurately, and that there’s a fundamental limit to the technology’s capabilities. These models are often primed to be agreeable and helpful. They usually won’t bother correcting users’ assumptions, and will side with them instead. If chatbots are asked to generate a list of cases in support of some legal argument, for example, they are more predisposed to make up lawsuits than to respond with nothing.”

February: “Are these cookbooks written or reviewed by a dietitian or medical professional? Could a gastric bypass or cancer patient receive cooking instructions to make a meal contraindicated for their medical condition? If I were choosing for a library, I’d vet each one. With Hoopla, they are all there. Some might be excellent. Some might be dangerous.”

March: “Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.”

“Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases such as “it appears,” “it’s possible,” “might,” etc., or acknowledging knowledge gaps with statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” ChatGPT, for instance, incorrectly identified 134 articles, but signaled a lack of confidence just fifteen times out of its two hundred responses, and never declined to provide an answer.”

“ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said. ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown.”

“Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it’s been processed by the AI servers. Amazon’s made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on.”

“eBay have changed their terms of service and you’re automatically opted-in for your personal data to be used for AI development and training.” (With opt-out instructions.)

conuly

then they definitely didn't survive.

And sometimes they definitely did.

And sometimes it's not clear which, and omg the anxiety over this is stressing me out so much that I may need to stop reading if it's not cleared up soon. It's an unfinished fic, so I can't just skip to the end like I normally would, and I can't figure out how to ask "Listen, how are you doing this?" without sounding a bit demanding.

But I'm ridiculous stressed over this.

On the plus side, it's distracting me from how stressed I am about the real world, so there's that! Maybe I should keep reading anyway....

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conuly

So, at the end of the book, did they just decide to leave some other random world in the hands of a murderous adolescent? I guess they figured it was officially Not Their Problem, but all the same, that's some interesting decision making there! I mean, they did tell her that her lackeys were only pretending to carry out her orders, but all the same, it's hardly better.

Of course, these are the same grown men who decided to shove a magical spycam in said adolescent girl's bedroom mirror and then watch it themselves. However evil she is, that's still super skeevy. You can't tell me that was the best way to monitor her. It's the only thing in the book that can make me feel bad for Gwendolyn. Not very bad, but she does have the makings of a legitimate grievance here. A single legitimate grievance, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

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skygiants

There is a subgenre that I wouldn't have thought to describe as a whole subgenre until I read Kerstin Hall's Asunder and immediately thought 'like Deeplight!' and also 'like those Max Gladstone books!' and also come to think of it 'like The Archive Undying' -- second-world fantasy set in a society that's been shaped around gods, and now those gods are [quite recently] dead or gone or murdered, and everyone is trying to reckon with the shape of the world that they left behind. I like this sort of subgenre quite a bit because it lends itself to interesting complexity; people can have all kinds of different messy feelings about the divine, and about their destruction, and about whatever new powers have come in to fill the void they left, and it's rarely as straightforward as 'it was better before' or 'it's better now.'

Asunder is kind of a weird book and it passes through a lot as it goes; I'm not sure it structurally holds together, and the ending feels in some sense incomplete, but it leaves its world messy in ways I really enjoyed. Our Heroine Karys' country used to be under the charge of a set of variously powerful, variously petty localized divinities, who created much of the important infrastructure, and who all died about twenty years ago, resulting in a major conquest. People Feel Various Ways About This. Now Karys has contracted herself to a different kind of powerful and terrible [divinity?/cosmic horror?] in exchange for the ability to talk to the dead, which serves as her main source of income. The job on which we meet her, however, is immediately in the process of going horribly wrong, as the shipwreck she was investigating turns out to have been caused by a weird monster that traps her in a cavern, where she finds a gravely injured survivor, a young diplomat from a foreign empire. Then in the process of trying to help him escape with her she accidentally traps this whole diplomat inside her subconscious, and the rest of the book is a long strange road trip for the purpose of Getting Him Out Of There, complicated by:

- the various debts of obligation and favor that Karys is obliged to incur to sneak through and past various borders
- the scholar who decides to come along for the ride because she thinks Karys is not only cute but also the most interesting potential research subject she's ever met
- the small unhappy town that Karys ran away from as a child, and her childhood friend/ex-girlfriend?? who has some kind of connection to Karys' childhood god/ex-god??
- Karys' powerful and terrible patron, who has informed her that she is destined to be summoned to him soon for a Great Honor, which does not seem like a good thing at all at all
- the fact that everyone keeps telling Karys and her new passenger Ferain that if they don't Fix This Immediately one of them is inevitably going to have to kill the other for survival, which does not help with building the trust and cooperation that they need to develop in order to keep escaping from
- the weird monsters that are still persistently trying to chase them down

And meanwhile we, the readers, are picking up slowly on all the complicated past between these countries and these gods as we pass through it, and also on what's going on with Karys herself. ( spoilers )