Update Time

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:46 am
mergatrude: a gang gang cockatoo eating red berries. underneath is "mergatrude" in red text (merg_gang gang)
[personal profile] mergatrude
Reading: Maybe it's a winter-based desire for comfort reads, but if it's not Murderbot or Rivers of London, it's not holding my attention right now. I have read the first chapter of The iron will of Genie Lo, which is now staring mournfully at me from the corner of my desk, after having had it's loan renewed for the second time. /o\ I did start listening to Robbery Under Arms - a classic Australian novel about bushranger Captain Starlight - and while it's fascinating it's very "If I'd just done the sensible thing at this point then I wouldn't be in jail waiting to hang", which gets a little repetitive. I'm still waiting on </>Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, the second book in the Edinburgh Nights series by T.L. Huchu, which my account tells me I requested as a purchase 12 months ago. The first book in the series was very good!

Watching: Dude has been making me watch Stranger Things. It's not usually my kind of thing, but I quite enjoyed season 2 when we watched it...over a year ago? We watched the first ep of season 3 a week ago and I said, "Who are these people and why are they like that?" so we skipped to the finale, which was satisfactory. The first couple of eps of season 4 are verging on too much horror for me, despite the arrival of Eddie.

Now he is making me watch ALL the Thor movies, including the bonus material. The first one is a fun romp. The second one wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. The Thor/Loki moments were golden, and Stellan Skarsgård is great. I felt sorry for Christopher Eccleston, as I think they cut his best moments. The next two will be rewatches.

Gaming: I bought a copy of Rayman Origins on GOG and have been happily slogging my way through the Jibberish Jungle. I'm stalled out on my other games as I seem to keep making the same mistakes. I guess what I need is to put more of my limited time into them. :-/

Other stuff: I have five different knitting projects sitting around. I should maybe finish the baby cardigan before my grand-nephew outgrows it, which means my friend's shawl will probably be ready for next winter. I have done a tiny bit of spinning, just to test what my shoulder can handle, but it's a test project in some boring leftover fibre so I'm not strongly motivated to work on it. I'm about half way through a jigsaw of a village on Santorini, which is a lovely warm contrast to the weather.

Life stuff: Work is quieter, as exams are over and results for the semester have been approved. We can take a little bit of a breather before getting ready for next semester. At home, we're planning to replace our ducted gas heating with reverse cycle air conditioning. It also means decommissioning our evaporative cooling which I'm not really happy about, but we need to cut our gas usage and this seems to be the only option. We're hoping to get a bit of rain this week.

self-censorship

Jun. 27th, 2025 02:02 pm
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
[personal profile] rivkat

no good, very bad thing: for the first time ever, I carefully concealed my Star of David scrunchie to do an interview in case it became a distraction. I try hard not to self-censor, but ...


media post: murderbot

Jun. 22nd, 2025 05:28 pm
seascribble: the view of boba fett's codpiece and smoking blaster from if you were on the ground (Default)
[personal profile] seascribble
Spoilers for everything.  I have over-all been enjoying it still! Learned that it was conceived as a 6 episode show but Apple ordered 10, which definitely explains some things.

Shipping feelings: I have read a lot of good, weird stuff about Gurathin and Murderbot being autistic and strange at each other in various ways involving wirefucking, gunport fingering, and Fucking For Science. As the author of that last one says, "aroace murderbot truthers do not @ me. you know already that god likes you best," I think there's a world where MB can be like "ew put my mouth that I use to talk on a human?" and also be kinky without obliterating the character we get in the books.

Also have read a bunch of good stuff about ART and Murderbot: this amazing one where ART writes Murderbot a sex act code and it's weird and they talk and I just found the vibes and the voices and the way the topic was approached to be perfectly in character. 

And this one which fucking REWROTE MY BRAIN CHEMISTRY, half the TL has already rec'd it because I've been screaming about it to anybody who opens a DM with me, the fucking INTIMACY, the tenderness, the most relatable piece of media since the actual books. The voices and interaction are perfect, the feelings are perfect, the nonsexual kink and sensory overload and praise kink ("ART said, Your recent security performance continues to meet expectations. I couldn’t deal with that either,") are perfect, it's all perfect, go read it. 

And because I wouldn't be me if I weren't bringing the gross: here's some fic where Iris masturbates with Perihelion's help and it gets its robot rocks off on acoustics. It's the highest quality what if you jerked off with your sibling and your sibling was a giant sentient space ship fic out there, I'm convinced. 

(no subject)

Jun. 24th, 2025 12:03 pm
mergatrude: a skein, a ball and a swatch of home spun and dyed blue yarn (Default)
[personal profile] mergatrude
An Iranian Journey

Someone posted this on tumblr and I wanted to share it with you. We're all just people trying to live our lives despite the whims of our rulers.

Nonfiction

Jun. 23rd, 2025 01:08 pm
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
[personal profile] rivkat
Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945: China fought imperial/Axis Japan, mostly alone (though far from unified), for a long time. A useful reminder that the US saw things through its own lens and that its positive and negative beliefs about Chiang Kai-Shek, in particular, were based on American perspectives distant from actual events.

Gregg Mitman, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia: Interesting story of imperialist ambition and forced labor in a place marked by previous American intervention; a little too focused on reminding the reader that the author knows that the views he’s explaining/quoting are super racist, but still informative.

Alexandra Edwards, Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom: fun read )

Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins: Wide-ranging argument that claims about prehistory are always distorted and distorting mirrors of the present, shaped by current obsessions. (Obligatory Beforeigners prompt: that show does a great job of sending up our expectations about people from the past.) This includes considering some groups more “primitive” than others, and seeing migrants as a “flood” of undifferentiated humanity. One really interesting example: Depictions of Neandertals used to show them as both brown and expressionless; then they got expressions at the same time they got whiteness, and their disappearance became warnings about white genocide from another set of African invaders.

J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World: Challenges the common narratives of European military superiority in the early modern world (as opposed to by the 19th century, where there really was an advantage)—guns weren’t very good and the Europeans didn’t bring very many to their fights outside of Europe. Likewise, the supposed advantages of military drill were largely not present in the Europeans who did go outside Europe, often as privately funded ventures. Europeans dominated the seas, but Asian and African empires were powerful on land and basically didn’t care very much; Europeans often retreated or relied on allies who exploited them right back. An interesting read. More generally, argues that it’s often hard-to-impossible for leaders to figure out “what worked” in the context of state action; many states that lose wars and are otherwise dysfunctional nevertheless survive a really long time (see, e.g., the current US), while “good” choices are no guarantee of success. In Africa, many people believed in “bulletproofing” spells through the 20th century; when such spells failed, it was because (they said) of failures by the user, like inchastity, or the stronger magic of opponents. And our own beliefs about the sources of success are just as motivated.

Emily Tamkin, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities: There are a lot of ways to be an American Jew. That’s really the book.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (tr. Annette Lavers & Richard Howard): A bunch of close readings of various French cultural objects, from wrestling to a controversy over whether a young girl really wrote a book of poetry. Now the method is commonplace, but Barthes was a major reason why.

Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution: Mostly we think about how the Weimar Republic ended, but this book is about how it began and why leftists/democratic Germans thought there was some hope. Also a nice reminder that thinking about Germans as “rule-followers” is not all that helpful in explaining large historical events, since they did overthrow their governments and also engaged in plenty of extralegal violence.

Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York: Mostly about La Guardia, whose progressive commitments made him a Republican in the Tammany Hall era, and who allied with FDR to promote progressivism around the country. He led a NYC that generated a huge percentage of the country’s wealth but also had a solid middle class, and during the Great Depression used government funds to do big things (and small ones) in a way we haven’t really seen since.

Charan Ranganath, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters: Accessible overview of what we know about memory, including the power of place, chunking information, and music and other mnemonics. Also, testing yourself is better than just rereading information—learning through mistakes is a more durable way of learning.

Cynthia Enloe, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War: War does things specifically to women, including the added unpaid labor to keep the home fires burning, while “even patriotic men won’t fight for nothing.” Women farmers who lack formal title to land are especially vulnerable. Women are often told that their concerns need to wait to defeat the bad guys—for example, Algerian women insurgents “internalized three mutually reinforcing gendered beliefs handed down by the male leaders: first, the solidarity that was necessary to defeat the French required unbroken discipline; second, protesting any intra-movement gender unfairness only bolstered the colonial oppressors and thus was a betrayal of the liberationist cause; third, women who willingly fulfilled their feminized assigned wartime gendered roles were laying the foundation for a post-colonial nation that would be authentically Algerian.” And, surprise, things didn’t get better in the post-colonial nation. Quoting Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas: “Defending women’s rights ‘now’ – this now being any historical moment – is always a betrayal of the people, of the revolution, of Islam, of national identity, of cultural roots . . .”

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: American history retold from a Native perspective, where interactions with/fears of Indians led to many of the most consequential decisions, and Native lands were used to solve (and create) conflicts among white settlers.

Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl : How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves: Read more... )

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message: Short but not very worthwhile book about Coates navel-gazing and then traveling to Israel and seeing that Palestinians are subject to apartheid.

Thomas Hager, Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia: While he was being a Nazi, Ford was also trying to take over Muscle Shoals for a dam that would make electricity for another huge factory/town. This is the story of how he failed because a Senator didn’t want to privatize this public resource.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World: What is the role of records in imperialism? Under what circumstances do imperialists rely on records that purport to be about the colonized people, versus not needing to do so? Often their choices were based on inter-imperialist conflicts—sometimes the East India Company benefited from saying it was relying on Indian laws, and sometimes London wanted different things.

Thomas C. Schelling The Strategy of Conflict: Sometimes when you read a classic, it doesn’t offer much because its insights have been the building blocks for what came after. So too here—if you know any game theory, then very little here will be new (and there’s a lot of math) but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t vital. Also notable: we’ve come around again to deterring (or not) the Russians.

Random brain worm OTD

Jun. 22nd, 2025 12:01 pm
mergatrude: a humanoid figure in grey armour against a blue tinted 'space' background (murderbot)
[personal profile] mergatrude
And now if 'ere by chance I put
My fingers into glue
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe

Anyone who recognises this without using a search engine has my admiration, because it took me the best part of half an hour to remember enough lines to trigger recognition. ;-)

In the 'random drive-by rec' category...

I need to preface this by saying that The Murderbot Diaries are currently so important to me that I generally avoid fanfic. The canon is precious and I don't want it to get blurry with other people's stories, no matter how good they are (generally, I'm happy to roll around in the giant sandbox we made out of media). That said, the following fic beautifully laid out some things that it made my eyes leak a little. Bonus awesome fanart linked at the end.

rogue condition (8092 words) by shamoosh
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Non-Sexual Kink, Overstimulation, Post-Book 7: System Collapse, the rewards of being loved, 2 bots 1 hardware, once again it's only EMOTIONALLY horny, konmari the governor module, fuck it we’ll do it live school of kink negotiation, Sharing a Body
Series: Part 2 of sandbox environment
Summary:

You can’t be this stupid, ART said, which was insulting but also relieving, because it never talked to me that way during the trauma treatment. Maybe this wouldn’t turn into a BARF after all. Turn off your governor module, you idiot. It’s giving you brain worms.



It was -7C here this morning. I made sure to wear gloves when hanging out the washing. Hope you're all doing okay. ♥

Vegetable gardening!

Jun. 21st, 2025 07:15 pm
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
[personal profile] luzula
I went around and took a few pictures of what we're growing! We had a long dry spell in the spring, which had me worried that there would be drought, but since then we've have some proper rainy weather, which is good. The dry spell made a dent in the slug population, so we've mostly escaped any serious damage (and the ducks do their part, as well). Now it’s sunny again, and most of our vegetables are doing quite well, although there are a few failures, of course.

Lots of photos under the cut )

Fiction

Jun. 20th, 2025 05:48 pm
rivkat: Rivka as Wonder Woman (Default)
[personal profile] rivkat
Sarah Langan, Pam Kowolski Is a Monster!: self-obsessed in the apocalypse )

Stephen King, Never Flinch:Holly Gibney )

Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: piracy and magic )

Olivie Blake, Gifted and Talented: for fans of Succession )

Ai Jiang, A Palace Near the Wind: Natural Engines: marriage and conquest )

John Scalzi, When the Moon Hits Your Eye: moon made of cheese )

M. L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven: white women's guilt )

Emily Tesh, The Incandescent: magic school administrator!  )

Murderbot episode 7 reaction post

Jun. 20th, 2025 10:14 am
oneiriad: (Default)
[personal profile] oneiriad
One advantage of having a cold - watching Murderbot in the morning.

Preservation culture: oversharing in fancy restaurants.

Gurathin - that doesn't sound very sweet, you know.

Snarky Murderbot. Earnest Murderbot. Awww.

Awww, Ratthi = puppy. SecUnit = great conversationalist.

Ah, Gurathin, you are so very paranoid.

Murderbot - not becoming a tree because it needs more media.

Oh look, another centipede - and a - uhm? Oh no.

Chekov's egg sacks?

Inferior model. Can't even handle a single centipede.

thursday reads and things

Jun. 19th, 2025 04:30 pm
isis: (vikings: lagertha)
[personal profile] isis
What I recently abandoned reading:

I got just over halfway through Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao before deciding that YA mecha is not my thing, even when it's a YA mecha AU of Chinese history. I think I'd rather read an actual historical novel or even nonfiction about Wu Zetian, who seems to have been an impressive-as-hell woman. (I will take recommendations!)

What I'm reading now:

Lamentation, the 6th Shardlake book by C. J. Sansom. (An actual historical novel! 😁)

What I recently finished watching:

S2 of Andor, which as I said, weirdly ironic to be watching as we grapple with our own ascendant Evil Empire. The pacing of this season was strange, big time-skips and characters that had seemed important in S1 (or in early episodes of S2) disappearing completely, or reappearing briefly only to be killed. I was expecting more about Mon Mothma's family, after all the screentime lavished on the wedding and her sort-of-blackmail situation. I was also expecting more of a resolution, though that's probably because I only vaguely remember Rogue One, so a lot of the breadcrumbs were, "wait, who was that again?" instead of, "aha!" for me. But I liked Kleya a whole lot, and also the snarky ex-Empire droid, and some of the spycraft bits were fun.

What I'm watching now:

We are giving American Primeval a try, despite it probably being on the violent/gory side for our tastes. We're two episodes in, and - I immediately recognized Shorty Bowlegs from the most recent season of Dark Winds! (Derek Hinkey, playing Red Feather.) Also, there is a local(ish) woman in it, Nanabah Grace from Cortez just down the road, who plays Kuttaambo'i. An article about her in the local newspaper was the way I first heard of this series, actually.

I'm enjoying the historical stuff; it's set during the Mormon War, which I actually researched a bit for my Yuletide fic, the premise of which was that the main reason that Deseret became an independent republic in the alt-history of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz was that President Buchanan backed down in the face of united Mormons and natives, as both religion and respect for the tribes were stronger in that universe's US. I also like seeing the Old West, even though it was all filmed in New Mexico pretending to be Wyoming, although I'm getting a bit tired of the washed-out sepia filter.

What I recently finished playing:

Okay, not quite finished, but I have completed the last major quest in Mass Effect: Andromeda, so it's basically over. (I mean, the credits rolled! Therefore, it's over!) I know that Andromeda is considered ME's poor stepchild, but - I really enjoyed it. The "major threat to the world as we know it!!1!!one!" of the main trilogy is such a staple plotline of video games like this that I appreciated the "survive, explore, and (hopefully) thrive in a NEW UNIVERSE (and also defeat the major threat to the world as we know it)" plotline for its novelty. I thought the structure of quests opening new planets and objectives in a rough but not strict order worked well, and I really liked that most (maybe all?) decisions are not hugely critical, so you don't doom yourself to a bad ending by choosing X instead of Y. I did check the wiki a few times when I was nervous about things, but pretty much none of these decisions made any real difference, which meant I was free to actually role-play as "what WOULD (me as) Sara Ryder do?" and I find that much more relaxing.

I wasn't quite completionist - I didn't do all the fetch quest type quests, and I didn't do one vault (Elaaden, which I might go back and do), but I did pretty much everything else. I liked the glyph puzzles, and I hated the Architects, ugh. I played mostly as what in the main trilogy would be Infiltrator (combat + tech). I romanced Liam (after a fling with Peebee). It was fun!

What I'm playing next:

I think I will try some shorter games; I got Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a while back because a friend recommended it, and Skabma - Snowfall from a recent deal, because it looked pretty. I might try Baldur's Gate 3 again - I never managed to get into it and found it frustrating and annoying. Eventually I plan to get Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and also probably Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I've heard good things about.
(Or sell me on your favorite adventure game!)

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exeterlinden

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