readerjane

Just a shot in the dark, but...

2023-08-23T12:30:28Z

Does anyone have a Bluesky invite code they'd be willing to send me?

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Mastodon frustration

2022-12-17T18:57:23Z

I'm trying to get onto my Mastodon account at the desktop, so I can send an invite code to a friend.

The logon in Chrome (on my desktop) doesn't recognize my username/password. When I registered at Mastodon, I put them into a secure file because I can never remember. I'm absolutely sure they're the ones I signed up with... but nope. Logon not accepted. And the "Forgot my password" link doesn't recognize my email address. I tried several other email addresses that I **might** have used, just in case, but no joy.

I'm still logged into the Mastadon app on my phone, so obviously my account is still active. But when I try to change my password on that phone app, it won't let me pick the new password. It's recommending a new, super-strong, super-long password which I could live with if I had to, but I can't read the whole thing and I can't copy it, so how the flip would I use that super-strong password to log in on my desktop? Argh.

There doesn't seem to be any way to generate and send an invite code via the phone app.

ETA 12/20/2022 Yay, Mastodon has decided it likes me after all! I'm guessing the fact that the desktop website wasn't taking my password must have been a glitch, possibly due to the heavy traffic of new users. Because I certainly never succeeded in changing it.

BTW, at Mastodon I am readerjane@Wandering.Shop

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Password Rant

2021-07-16T14:35:46Z

I've been going through and updating passwords, as you do.

( Read more... )

I absolutely loathe sites that play mind games like this. Feh.

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The right spot on the toolbar

2021-07-11T18:49:36Z

I live in a cloud of distraction, sort of like Charles Schultz's Pigpen lives in a cloud of dust. It's not ever going to go away.

( Read more... )

Strategizing doesn't keep me from forgetting things. But it greatly reduces the frequency, enough that when I catch myself having missed a step, it's a "whoops, fix it" instead of an "aRRRRGghghgh, why does this keep happening?!?".

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Song for the Solstice

2020-12-22T00:10:01Z

We spent the autumn
stroking
toward the bottom of the quarry,
thinking –
Can't be too much deeper,
any colder, all that darker.
Proving
there was always
lower still to go.

We reached the nadir.
Bracing
our feet against the bedrock
we shoved –
Desperately determined,
kicking, shooting
struggling skyward
toward the light we know.

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Knitting repentance

2020-09-27T19:41:20Z

There's a thing when I'm knitting a garment, where I make a little mistake, and decide it's not worth unpicking several rows just to fix it. And then maybe another little mistake, or a bigger one. And then I reach the point where I admit that the best thing to do is to rip it all out and start over, but hey! That gives me the opportunity to change one of the decisions I made early on, which I wasn't so sure about at the time.

I've reached that point with the current pair of socks. I'm learning how to knit socks on circular needles instead of double-pointed needles, and to make them two at a time. The upside is, the socks will come out exactly the same number of rows, because you knit the front side of Sock A, then the front of Sock B, then the back of Sock B and finally the back of Sock A. No worries about unmatched sizing. Another plus, I don't need to own two sets of the same size needle.

Downside is, it's an unfamiliar method and sometimes I'm not sure how to handle a step like turning the heels.

But since the main point of the exercise is to relax, watch fun vids, and enjoy myself (with owning a pair of hand=tailored socks being a side benefit), starting all over again is perfectly fine.

Repentance means turning around and going a different direction. It's something I rarely have the privilege of at work because time is at such a premium; discovering a fundamental error can mean giving up on the way you wanted a project to turn out and compromising for something less, just to be done on time.

That's what makes it such a relief, even a luxury, to be able to start all over.

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Turning point

2020-09-23T01:14:28Z

For some reason I hadn't noticed (or more likely, had forgotten) that Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays were on the equinox. The midpoint of a journey. Where the arc changes its curve. A place where the traveler could turn around, but they didn't.

I like that idea. (Thanks, Maia!)

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What I'm reading

2019-09-29T16:23:35Z

( Fuming about iOS )

Anyway.

Through that wonderful practice of Favorites crawling (find an author, enjoy lots of good stories, then go through that author's own favorites or bookmarks to find others), I've discovered Dira Sudis, and her Vorkosigan series The World That You Need, which is a Cordelia/Aral/Jole series apparently written *before* Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. That makes me want to go back and check the scant breadcrumbs Bujold left on Jole himself, to see what thread Dira Sudis pulled on. Or maybe, her seeming prescience is due to the fact that, for any possible combination between characters, there is someone somewhere who ships them.

The writing is lovely, dark and deep.

So grateful for authors with skill and passion, for the interwebs which lets us find them, and for handheld technology, no matter how fiddly.

ETA: Settings | Notifications | Books app | OFF. Heh.

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What I'm reading

2019-09-02T12:54:21Z

I've been reading alll the Witcher fics in Astolat's catalog.

Next up (or soon, anyway) will be reading the original novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. This will be the second time I've found a new canon by way of fanfic, the first being when LightGetsIn's story A Temporary Inability To Go Either Up Or Down lead me to Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the experiences compare. I'm a little nervous that Sapkowski's canon will disappoint me. Astolat is such a strong writer, and this time I've read ten fic stories, not one, so I'm pretty invested in her take on the characters. And yet, the fact that someone whose own writing I enjoy so much, liked the Witcher world enough to spend that much time playing in its sandbox, must speak well of the canon, no?

I'm eager, though, to see how many of my guesses about the shape of canon turn out to be true. It will be like listening to someone describe a country that's unfamiliar to me, then traveling there and seeing it for myself. Wow, I love reading.

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What I'm reading

2019-08-22T17:26:26Z

It's been awhile.

Yesterday I finished The Serpent Seas, book 2 of Martha Wells' Raksura series. An interesting exploration of why we distrust people whom we've other-ed, and when our desire not to other may cause us to trust someone more than that individual merits.

Woo, Wells is definitely in the "chase 'em up a tree, throw rocks" category. The level of disaster-chain was exhausting at times.

Also, how fun is it seeing a male character resist being damseled? Very fun indeed.

My other recent read was Broken Wings by Allegra Grey and Emily Sloan. This is something I normally wouldn't have read, as it's firmly in the romance-without-crossover category, and the formulaic nature of the romance genre usually makes me feel as if the stakes are too low to be interesting.

The romantic hero is a member of a motorcycle club, and the fact that every club member and club member's SO has a gang name as well as their given name, added to the very large cast of characters, would have made me give up if it hadn't been that AG is a personal friend, and I remembered from our Plum fanfic days how vibrantly she can write.

I was glad I kept going, because once I'd found my footing I started seeing how perceptive the hero could be, and how inventive the heroine's survival skills would get. A good read, and now that the authors have conquered that debut-novel mountain, I'll be watching for more to come from them.

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What I'm reading

2019-07-15T19:53:11Z

Today I finished Mishell Baker's Borderline, the first in her Arcadia Project series.

This is promising. There are some wobbles in the form of ungainly info-dumps, but Baker has presented her protagonist with a mysteriously vague job offer, so there's reasonable cause for Millie's prospective coworkers to be explaining things to her. And since Millie hasn't yet signed the employment contract, there's cause for them to be a bit mysterious with her as well.

I'd have liked more outlines for how Fae culture works with its Seelie and Unseelie courts. But Millie has plenty to deal with already: both physical and mental disabilities plus dwindling savings mean she has to focus on survival, and since this is a series, there will be plenty of time to fill in the wider worldbuilding later.

I can't go into detail on the real-world-analogue character, nor the trope that had me sputtering with laughter, without spoiling, so I won't. This one is definitely in the follow-up category.

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What I'm reading

2019-07-12T17:55:22Z

Finished The Goblin Emperor, and yes, it was just as satisfying as the beginning.

Except for one minor detail which is totally my fault: I'd thought the sequel was already out. Went looking for it, only to realize that Katherine Addison is still writing it. Damn. I wish I'd figured that out before I reached the end of book 1.

There was a danger of this book becoming a pity parade: protagonist is exiled to a remote outpost, loses his mom, is dumped into a role he's not prepared for, hated by most, experiences an assassination attempt. But Addison is deft enough to thread that process. Maia loses his temper occasionally, but perceives in the reactions of his subjects how afraid they are of an emperor's anger. He's isolated, but learns to cultivate what relationships are available to him, even while acknowledging which ones aren't. He feels the weight of responsibility, while learning the boundaries of his helplessness.

Still looking forward to book 2 in this universe.

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Yesterday I had a meltdown.

2019-07-04T16:45:36Z

( Read more... )
I'm tired. I'm tired of having to fight for the right to concentrate. I'm tired of having to say "I don't have time for that," and having requestors go right on insisting. I miss being able to immerse myself in a puzzle and keep at it until it's done. I'm tired of being tired.

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What I'm reading, special holiday edition

2019-07-04T12:37:20Z

I've recently started Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor.

This is a rags-to-riches story where the mixed-race child of the emperor's fourth wife is suddenly elevated to power when his father and elder brothers are all killed in an airship crash.

I'm liking the twisty maneuverings. I do find the protagonist Maia a little too wise for his years and life experience. Eighteen is still eighteen, for all that he has the advantage of having been raised by a compassionate mother (unlike his brothers who grew up in extreme privilege), and having been ruthlessly schooled by a majordomo who resented being assigned to a remote outpost. But I enjoy watching Maia's courtiers startle when he treats them like people instead of lackeys.

I'm not sure how deeply this story will delve into race. It's obvious that no one, including Maia, wanted him in power. He has internalized his country's scorn for his foreign appearance. Even the book's title underscores it. It will be interesting to see whether that racism remains a pervasive part of the background, or if Addison will turn her focus on it at some point.

It took awhile to get used to the name Maia for a boy. Had I been editor, I would have recommended changing that, since it could throw the reader out of the story during that crucial first plunge. But in compensation, I'm getting the joy of an author who has really put thought into the construction of her fantasy-world language. To read, "Michen-theileian", and *know* it means "smaller audience chamber" because one has already started putting the linguistic pieces together is satisfying. Male names in this culture end in -a, -is, and -et, so Maia: male.

And it makes me realize how much I've missed this: the thing one gets in really good SFF, being dumped into a different world where one must hunt for the edge and corner pieces, and slowly assemble a puzzle by trial and error, hypothesis and instinct. It's delightful.

Looking forward to the rest of this book and its sequel.

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What I'm reading

2019-06-16T21:34:13Z

This morning I finished The October Man, the new novella from Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

This feels like a hinge book. Until now the series has centered around Peter Grant, a London police officer, and his lieutenant Thomas Nightingale. October Man only has a brief mention of those characters, being told from the point of view of Peter's opposite number Tobias, a police officer in Germany.

Both are trained magical practitioners, the first new apprentices in their areas since WWII. In fact, the opening of TOM was a little disorienting because it wasn't until a couple sentences in that I realized it wasn't Peter's viewpoint I was reading. I suppose I should have noticed right away, since Peter's voice is pretty distinctive. But Tobias' voice is less so (possibly because Aaronovitch has left his own London environment?) In fact, Tobi feels to me like Peter Lite - a good guy, who knows what he's doing and knows his strengths and weaknesses, but with much less evident ties to the community he polices, to his family, and to his supervising officer. Which is a lot of what I read the series for.

But while this story itself felt a little flat, the things it's setting up are promising. New river goddesses are appearing, not just in the Thames river valley, but in Europe as well. More magical things are awakening. There seems to be significant leftover suspicion post-WWII between the magical branches in law enforcement in England and Germany (this is less surprising when you consider that several characters are very long-lived and remember that struggle clearly), but I'm wondering if they will need to band together to face some new threat.

I hope this is an appetizer for an exciting new course

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What I'm reading

2019-06-08T15:42:29Z

Finished The Lost Plot, Genevieve Cogman's fourth Invisible Library book, just this morning.

I'm enjoying this series more and more as I go along. The multiverse aspect plays out well, I think, as Irene visits the alternate Earths in search of rare books, trying to stabilize that temperate zone between order and chaos where human beings can flourish. In addition to the fun of "Now it's Imperial Russia! Now it's the roaring twenties!", we get to see the distinct dangers of worlds where either order or chaos is ascendant.

There are both worlds where women are discounted, and ones where a woman with absolute power is unremarkable.

Near the end of TLP, there's an extended scene where Irene must navigate the three-dimensional chess of a trial before a dragon queen, avoiding giving offense in a culture she's not familiar with, while maintaining the Library's neutrality. The push/pull of that delicate, dangerous conversation was marvelous.

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What I'm reading

2019-06-01T18:06:36Z

Finished reading Patricia Briggs' 11th werewolf book, Storm Cursed.

I think Briggs is running into the same problem Julian May did late in her Many-Colored Land series: that asymptote where you need the baddies to keep getting badder so the heroes have bigger challenges to overcome, but you haven't paced yourself, and how bad can a baddie possibly get?

I like these characters, especially Zee: the cranky old fae who taught Mercy auto maintenance. And I still enjoy watching Mercy navigate the uncomfortable status of an authority she doesn't want, gained through a patriarchal structure she doesn't endorse, over a dangerous family who didn't accept her but who has come to respect her grit and ingenuity.

It does feel like the series is running out of places to go, though. I'm wondering how many more installments before we get the Evil Twin Skippy episode. :-D

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What I'm reading

2019-05-25T17:51:33Z

This week I read Dangerous if Unbound, a Person of Interest fic by Astolat.

...and now I'm about to give POI another try with a whooooole different perspective. :-D

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What I'm reading

2019-05-19T12:13:35Z

This past week I discovered the fic writer astolat, after listening to an episode of the podcast Be The Serpent. So fun to find another strong writer!

Hub is reading through Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, which I read a lot of years ago, but I think Hub is actually going to read every single one of the... forty-some? novels. They're definitely creations of their time: written in the 1930's through 70's. I think the part I enjoyed was Wolfe's introversion and irascibility. He just wanted to stay in his brownstone, reading good books and eating good food and nursing his greenhouse full of orchids. He only did detection on his terms, and only as much as necessary to support his lifestyle.

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What I'm reading

2019-05-11T13:36:25Z

I've started The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. So far it's not grabbing me. I was intrigued by what seemed to be second-person POV at first. It wasn't second person, but an odd first-person narrative in which a regional god seems to be recounting another character's story to that character. Which could also be intriguing. (Has the other character lost his memory? Why does the god need to tell the other character the story of his life?) But there are long discursions into the god's own history that remind me of James Michener: a few pages of narrative, then we talk about how the tectonic plates in this region formed, then a few more pages of story, then back to the geological aeons. It's a lot to plow through.

Have been re-reading some favorite fic. I'll give TRT another try before deciding whether to finish.

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What I'm reading...

2019-05-04T12:24:03Z

Having thoroughly enjoyed Martha Wells' Murderbot series, I'm now trying her Raksura series, which starts with The Cloud Roads.

TCR has an isolated, alienated protagonist in common with Murderbot. I wonder if that's a theme for Wells? The abilities of species and of classes within the species seems a little hand-wavey, but I do like the characters very much, and that's more important to me, so all to the good.

I was charmed by the way, even though clutch-mates are given coordinated names, their relationships can still be mistaken. One might think the character named Branch was a sibling of Root, but it turns out Branch's sibling is actually River. It makes sense - in our world, one can't assume that one Smith is related to another.

Had a "Yikes, I think I know why the baddies have been able to track our hero" moment a few chapters ago. Now it's sounding more like I was wrong, but the actual reason might be even more horrifying. Time will tell...

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A study in beige

2019-04-28T23:12:34Z

I knit my own socks. Partly because I love having socks that fit me exactly right. (My feet are short and wide; I spent most of my life wearing socks that either dangled in the heel or toe, or were painfully tight.) Partly because I've learned how to make socks, and I like doing things I'm good at. And partly because I find knitting soothing.

It bugs me just a little that the knit pattern in the heels and toes, which are knit back and forth, doesn't quite match the arch and ankle, which are knit round and round. So I decided to do a study, making six swatches, to try to find a way to make those sections match exactly.

( images and descriptions )

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Cut tags from an external link

2019-04-27T18:47:18Z

A couple weeks ago I contacted DW help, hoping to find a way that I could preserve a cut-tag in my DW posts, for users who arrive at the post from outside DW. For instance, if I tweeted a link to my post: I wanted the person visiting from Twitter to have the option of seeing or not seeing a spoiler that I had hidden behind a cut tag.

Here is the suggestion I was given, which I shall test by hiding it... ( behind a cut tag ). How recursive!

ETA:I think it's working.

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What I'm reading

2019-04-27T13:17:13Z

This week I finished City of Stairs, the first in Robert Jackson Bennett's The Divine Cities series.

There's a lot going on in this story. The flip/flop of colonialism: a not!Europe that once oppressed not!India and is now being oppressed by its former colony. Gods who act in the world, but who can be killed, whose miracles disappear with them. A woman from a progressive culture, doing her undercover/diplomatic/investigatory job in the midst of a traditionalist culture.

What impressed me most (and I had to look back at the title page to verify the author was really a dude) was that the authority figures were female. Mayors, generals, ambassadors -- there are men with agency here, but most of the movers and shakers are women.

Also, the climactic fight against a kraken set on and under an ice-covered river absolutely rocked.

Looking forward to book 2.

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What I'm reading...

2019-04-19T22:13:41Z

...early Friday edition.

This week the menfolk and I finished Boneland, by Alan Garner.

It was a strange and unsatisfying story. Published in 2012, and so very different from the first two books from 1960 and 1963. Those two were children's fantasy: Boneyard is a grownup book where the main character is mentally ill. Whether the things he hears and sees are continuations of the magic events he experienced as a child, or hallucinations, is unclear. He does suffer from depression and anxiety, is obsessive, and very isolated.

I've only read small excerpts of Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, but the disorienting nature of Boneland made me think of those. Not only was the narrative confusing, but sometimes I couldn't tell who was speaking from one line of dialog to another. Son believes that some of the lines I attributed to Colin were actually spoken by an invisible character.

Anyway, it's done now. We're going to finish out the Temeraire series next, and then figure out what to read aloud after that.

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