Reading

Entry tags:

state of the world

Morning Anxiety

I woke up to my alarm this morning and to crushing anxiety. This is a probably sign of anticipatory stress toward the start of the semester as I have not had this all summer because it was summer. The anxiety was not directly related to work. Instead it was a deep feely of dread and inadequacy around the fact that I am sleep-walking my way through this administration. It's a growing fear I have that living in the US is to be considered complicit with the current administration and all its inhumane policies. It's a little like how people don't spend time thinking about the Germans who lived in Nazi Germany and were not Nazis. There was indeed a resistance in Germany, but the average German was not part of that. There is resistance in the US, but I'm not really part of that. In essence, I lay in bed with a crippling feeling of dread due to my failure and fear to act.

The good news is that I know this anxiety is partly a menopause symptom so I waited it out. I also consciously thought that I have the power to act and I am not totally helpless. Even if it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, it can matter for my conscience and self-respect.

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

2025 52 Card Project: Week 32: Fringe

This past week's Year of Adventure event was to attend two Minnesota Fringe Festival shows as a guest of

naomikritzer and her husband Ed. If you're not familiar with the Fringe Festival, it's a week in which local theater venues and actors (amateur and professional) put on forty or fifty of shows over the course of about a week, some written entirely for the occasion. The festival has been running for years.

We saw "The Book of Mordor," (Lord of the Rings crossed with The Book of Mormon) and a parody of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," entitled "Our Zombie Town." We went out to dinner together between the two shows.

I've attended a couple of Fringe shows previously with Fiona, but it has been years. I enjoyed both performances.

I have never seen The Book of Mormon, but from what I know about the story, the crossover worked surprisingly well. There were funny bits of stage business, and the performance was satisfying.

As for the other show, I've been in Our Town myself, and I enjoyed this parody. Some parts were ragged, but the final image (the people of the town sitting in separate chairs, each glued to their phones, their faces illuminated only by the phone light) has stuck with me since I've seen the show. It's a perfect parody of the last act (in which people in the chairs represented the dead in the graveyard) and a sly response to what has always seemed to me to be the most important line in the last act of the original: "Let's look at one another!"

Good theater makes you think as well as laugh, and that final image will stick with me.

Image description: Top: Promotional picture for Fringe show 'Our Zombie Town,' a parody of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Four people stare as if hypnotized at their phones, ignoring the viewer, their faces lit by the phone screen. Semi-transparent stage lights are overlaid over this picture, giving the picture a greenish cast. Bottom: Promotional picture for Fringe Show 'The Book of Mordor' (Frodo holds up the ring on a chain). Center: a Fringe 2025 button. Right a Fringe line flag.

Fringe

32 Fringe

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Entry tags:

running

Great Long Run

It's 6 weeks until the Berlin Marathon on 21 September. Today's long run was on the shorter side (20km or 12 miles) but had race pace practice in it so this made it a hard run. Last week I bonked on my long run of 25km (around 15 miles) and could barely grind out 15km (9 miles). I was so discouraged, but in consultation with my coach, it looks like I was dehydrated from the entire week, much of which was spent sweating and walking around in the hot humid 90 degree days of Williamsburg, Virginia.

This weeks run was 4km warm up + 2 sets of 7km at race pace with a 1km easy in between and 1km cool-down. I was a bit lazy getting started and only got to the track around 10am. It was sunny and there is really no shade at the track. It might sound silly to run this at a track, but it's a way to get in flat running in this hilly area and the Berlin racecourse is known for being very flat. Temps were in the low 70s and climbing to 80, so this was going to be a challenge. I ripped through the first 7km set and actually went to hard at the end as I was imagining the final kilometer of the marathon and pushing through.

I took a water break between sets and also to take salt tablets. The salt is necessary to balance out the water I was drinking because I am a salty sweater. I did the second 7km slightly faster than the first overall, but in fairness, I did take two water, so it was not continuous like the first. However, I held on to the pace I was aiming for and despite the sun and heat, I did not feel overwhelmed. In fact, it felt like there was a bubble around me shielding me from the heat of the sun. That bubble might have been the breeze blowing the whole time, which is so cooling.

I feel really good albeit tired after this run. It was the kind of confidence building run that I needed to get under my belt.

Entry tags:

Hugo homework and Murderbot TV show

I'm trying to clear the decks of fannish stuff before Worldcon (next week!!), so here's the last of the Hugo homework:

I did manage to finish half the Hugo novellas before the voting deadline.

1.T.Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night -- I did not read the first novella with this protagonist and setting, but while the events of it were mentioned a few times, and it looked like the Angus and Patience relationship had come from there, I didn't feel like I was missing anything by skipping it. Alex Easton is a fun narrator; ( and that was my favorite thing about the book (non-spoilery) )

2. Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hill -- I usually love the Singing Hills novellas; the one I merely liked, up until now, had been When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, which I found too simple after the beautiful intricacy of Empress of Salt and Fortune. I expect I will be ranking The Brides of High Hill above 'Tiger' and below the others, although I do think it's actually doing something interesting, and doing it well. It's just that one of the things it's doing well is again basically horror. (Why is everything on the ballot basically horror this year? The zeitgeist, I guess, but I wish there were more variety...) It's not JUST straightforward horror, although the climax of the book descends into it, and I found the last part the least interesting. ( spoilers )

3. Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction -- Here is another excellent example of a novella doing very well what it had set out to do, which was not at all what I wanted to read about. There is a lot of graphic description of slaughtered elephants and also humans stomped into pulp by avenging mammoths (and also some references to human-on-human violence, for good measure), which are neither things I want to read about, like, at all. In fact, I was going to nope out after the extended description of elephants slaughtered by poachers, but then there was a POV change, and at one point, fairly early on, I read something in the dialogue of the Russian poachers that was a perfect rendition in English of something an actual Russian would say, and I got intrigued by that aspect of the novella, which is what kept me reading. ( More, with spoilers )

Hugos: Tusks, Brides, Feasts > Butcher -- but I'd be perfectly happy for either 'Tusks' or 'Brides' to win.

**

I, uh, did not finish any of the novels, but I did read all of them at least a little bit: 4 in time to rank them on the Hugo ballot, and two after the fact, figuring I should at least have an opinion on them by the time the Hugo Ceremony happens. So these are not proper write-ups -- I'll do proper ones for anything I end up finishing -- but this is my thoughts ( on the novels going into the Hugos )

I also voted for: ( miscellaneous categories )

*

Flow -- I have had a weird trajectory leading up to watching this movie. ( Under here ) And it was fine?

( Mostly complaints, to be honest (non-spoilery) )

Anyway, I had no trouble at all voting Wild Robot above Flow (hadn't seen any of the other nominated long-form things). I hope Wild Robot wins the Hugo, and I would have preferred ifit had won the animated Oscar, too.

*

This is not strictly speaking Hugo homework, but it is Worlcon homework, because Martha Wells is a GOH and there's a bunch of Murderbot-the-show content I'm anticipating, so I wanted to make sure I had watched the show before attending (well, and also before my free months of AppleTV that I got when I bought my new iPhone ran out). This actually also required me to start using my new computer ahead of schedule, because the old one couldn't handle AppleTV, lol.

Murderbot (TV) -- As planned, I binged it in two stints, with just a night of sleep in-between, 7.5 episodes on Friday night and 2.5 with my morning tea on Saturday. The cliffhanger endings of the episodes are effectively positioned, to be sure! On the whole, I liked it quite a bit, as its own thing and also as an adaptation. I did not LOVE it, but I also did not love All Systems Red -- Artificial Condition was when I actually started feeling fannish about the series and really enjoying it (mostly but not exclusively because of ART). ( More, with spoilers for the show, no spoilers for books beyond ASR )

I know that a second season has been confirmed, and as Artificial Condition is my favorite of the novellas, I'm really curious to see what they do with it. ( Vague spoilers for the books ) Anyway, I'm excited to see what they do with it!

A couple of links from catching up on other people's thoughts (mostly

sholio's :)

- official Sanctuary Moon credits (without the glitches/distortions) that Apple uploaded to YouTube
- Fanvid: I Lived by

sholio, ensemble, T
- Ficlet by

sholio in which Murderbot participates in Sanctuary Moon forums (along with *spoiler*)

Entry tags:

2025 52 Card Project: Week 31: Smoke

The weather was so perfect last weekend. Not too humid. No rain. No clouds. Temperature in the upper seventies.

And we couldn't be outside enjoying any of it because smoke from the Canadian wildfires filled the air with choking haze, giving us the second-worst air quality in the entire world. I spent the weekend inside, huddled up close to my HEPA air purifier, furiously resenting that I couldn't be out enjoying my front porch.

The headline in the local paper pretty much summed it up: we're sick of this.

Image description: Background: an urban landscape, barely discernible through a thick layer of smoke. Text reads: 'This summer has been hot, smoky, soggy. Minnesotans are sick of it. Slightly more than half of days since mid-May have featured heavy rain, high heat, bad air or some combination in the Twin Cities. Twin Cities summer weather has dealt miserable conditions.' Below is a graph indicating days with poor weather conditions. Bottom Center: an Oransi air purifier.

Smoke

31 Smoke

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.