Words are inadequate

It's that time of year, when the migratory jazzfish ventures east for beach and WisCon trips.

Sunday, 5/12: Wake up too early to catch a train to Seattle. Quick lunch with Ederlyn. Fly out of SeaTac at 2 PM and into Reagan National at 10 PM. Late dinner with Alison. Crash at my parents' place.

Monday, 5/13: No plans other than retrieving a car from Enterprise.

Tuesday, 5/14: Indeterminate hanging-out with Jenn during the day; otherwise, no plans.

Wednesday, 5/15: Working from work during the day; no evening plans.

Thursday, 5/16: Working from work. Cat Vacuuming in Ballston. uilos gets in to BWI at 6:30 and will somehow magically appear in Ballston.

Friday, 5/17: Working from work. Evening plans unknown; may include dinner with work, dinner at Teaism in DC, or Twelfth Night ALL THE WAY OUT IN ELLICOTT FREAKING CITY ON A FRIDAY NIGHT ARE YOU KIDDING ME. (Probably not that last one, alas.) Possibly returning car unless I do that Satyrday morning.

And then off to most of a week at the beach with the Arlington Board Gamers, a Friday flight from Norfolk to Madison for WisCon, and home on Monday and collapsing on Tuesday.

So, hey. If you're in the DC area and want to hang out next week, ping me. Also if you're going to be at WisCon, of course.

My in-laws descended upon my house from Tuesday evening through Sunday morning. If you have ever wondered whether it is a good idea to have your high-maintenance in-laws stay with you at your workplace for several days while you're recovering from a nasty cough, I am here to tell you it is not. uilos occupied them during the day as best she could; this mostly involved the three of them leaving around ten to go do something touristy and coming back around two. To their credit they didn't actively try to disturb me during my workday. It's the passive disturbances that got to me: not being able to pace without running into someone unexpected, noises in the kitchen (right behind my workspace), all that.

I am starting to feel more human again. Key being 'starting.' Spent most of yesterday in a fog. Arguably I shouldn't have tried to go running yesterday morning as my lungs may not be up to it yet. Bleh. Stupid body, work better.

Things I would like to do this weekend include 'beta comments for thanate' and 'cut Bookwyrms by 2/3 so it's under the thousand-word flash fiction wordcount limit, where I think it and editors will be happier.' Also 'have pancakes for breakfast' and possibly 'get out to gaming for the first time in a couple of weeks.' I think (think) I'm good for more than 'stare at laptop screen / tv screen / Device screen / book,' at least for a few hours.

Very little throws one off one's stride like an unexpected illness. Stupid sick.

E's been coughing and staring blankly for the past week. Thought I'd dodged it but Tuesday night I started having less and less brain. Today (well, last night) it's been sinuses dripping and coughing and all that fun stuff. So of course it's started raining again. Dragged self to urgent care; doc says it's viral; dragged self home.

This is not at all coherent; I'm noting it mostly as a reminder that I got sick again.

Stupid sick.

Hal Duncan, Vellum

The prologue is absolutely amazing: a fractured narrative of a university student who tracks down a book that may or not have been written by God. Highly atmospheric, chock-full of conspiracies and esoterica. Excellent.

Shame the rest of the book didn't continue in that vein. Instead we get a compelling enough retelling of a Sumerian myth and a lot of interesting stuff about names, and reality, and creatures that may be gods, or angels, or demons. Then it shifts gears into a retelling of Prometheus Bound in several different timelines, and at about that point I got fed up with having been badly misled by the prologue. Into the go-away pile.

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Walter Jon Williams, Dread Empire's Fall: The Sundering

Continuation of very good space opera; devoured in the space of about eight hours, with various breaks. Spoilers follow.

Midway through the book the two viewpoint characters, who have been smoldering at each other despite a communication screwup early in book 1, get together, and it is brilliant and incandescent and I loved it. Then they have another falling-out due to Secrets Being Kept and Not Speaking To Each Other, and spend the rest of the book blaming each other and obsessing. Which, argh. It keeps them from being in the same place for the rest of the series, and it is perfectly realistic, and if I never see this particular plot device again I will die happy. I just want to shake them both.

Apart from that frustration, still very good.

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Eden of the East

Anime. Picked this up awhile ago because the back cover copy looked promising: conspiracies, amnesia, all that good stuff. Two episodes in and it is a romance between two irritating people with random conspiracy stuff thrown in at times. Based on the Wikipedia summary it will continue to irritate me for another nine episodes as the conspiracy stuff gets more random. Bah. Into the go-away pile.

The Principles, by Joi Ito, summarised by Bruce Sterling. Oddly, I am linking to this to argue with it.

"Resilience over strength" and "Risk over safety" are the same sentiment: try a bunch of things that might not work, because the ones that do are going to be amazing. Old news.

"Systems over objects," "Compasses over maps," and "Learning over education" also all say the same thing, which I'd sum up as "flexibility." Don't prepare yourself for the thing you're dealing with; prepare yourself for the kind of thing you're dealing with, so that when it changes you can still deal with it. "Pull over push" belongs in this category as well. Then "Practice over theory" directly contradicts this advice. I'd guess Ito means that one to be situational, as a case where being flexible means accepting that this is what works for this thing and not caring about the changes.

"Disobedience over compliance" is genuinely subversive, which is why it's been popping up and getting stamped down again for most of human history.

The only thing that's at all new or interesting is "Emergence over authority." The idea that it's possible for a zillion uninformed people to make a pretty good decision is one I've not entirely gotten my head around. This is the core of Monte Carlo simulations, which play a very good game of go, and of democracy in general.

I suppose everyone has to rediscover individuality and anarchism for themselves. I'd just wish they'd stop treating it as some brilliant new idea that only they have the vision to see.

Weekend already, sheesh. Some weeks.

Last weekend was ... I was going to say 'quiet' but that's not true at all, it just wasn't in any way stressful. Satyrday there were games in New West followed by some Rock Banding. I stumbled through vocals on a handful of tracks (including Werewolves of London, which according to semilocal J-- sounds like Sweet Home Alabama, argh) and acquitted myself somewhat better on guitar, and we convinced uilos to sing "Eye of the Tiger" and "Carry On My Wayward Son," which she did quite well. Good times all around.

Sunday we drove down to Seattle to see Tylan (sounds like Thailand and not Dylan, which is not what I'd expected), and also to spend some time with Karawynn and Jak. Karawynn cooked the only broccoli I have ever been able to eat (lightly pan-fried with a ton of garlic and some red pepper flakes), and Jak made the best creme brulee I have ever had the good fortune to get my mouth around; between that and just getting to hang out for a couple of hours it was an excellent trip even without the concert. The show itself was good but not great. I get the sense that Ty's still finding her feet in doing solo shows. She played mostly stuff from her solo album, with a handful of her Girlyman songs ("The House Song," "The Person You Want," one or two others). Still well worth the seeing.

Last night we saw a cheery Britpop band called Veronica Falls and their opener, a SF grrlpunk band called Brilliant Colors. I still have "Teenage" stuck in my head. Good times, and since both bands had two CDs and they were $10 each, we have a bunch of new music for the drive down to Seattle today.

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Sometime during last week I utterly devoured book 1 of Walter Jon Williams's space opera epic Dread Empire's Fall. Very good stuff if you're looking for space opera. It's... how did Jo put it? "The empire is ruled by the truth of the Praxis, which forbids things likely to lead to boring singularities (no AI, no nanotech, no uploading, no immortality, etc.) while promoting things likely to lead to space-opera (spaceships, space navies, space stations, conquest of aliens, aristocracy, exploration of wormholes etc.)." Pretty much. It's 400 pp in paperback; roughly the first 250 pp are buildup and worldbuilding (very good buildup and entertaining worldbuilding!). Then there's an extremely tense 30pp where the rebellion gets underway, and the book is off and rolling. The only reason I haven't plowed straight through the other two is that they're in transit from Chapters. Recommended.

What are you reading?

The Dark World, by Henry Kuttner and (probably) C.L. Moore, because there was a free ebook, it was a strong influence on the early Amber books, and, most importantly, it takes little brain. It's... I am not sure if 'quite good' is appropriate, but it's very readable, in an overwrought kind of way.

What did you recently finish reading?

Lloyd Alexander's last book, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio. It may be Alexander's only first-person novel apart from the Vesper Holly books. The Alexandrine hero is not the kind of character who should be written in the first person. The book itself is deeply uneven, nowhere near as tightly plotted as Alexander's others, and draws on a folklore he's tapped once already, in the far superior First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha. Not recommended except for the completist (ahem).

Before that... I reread Donaldson's Mordant's Need duology, because I needed something brainless. I read the heck out of the first volume when I was much younger. I couldn't remember why I didn't do that with the second. Now I do: the second isn't nearly as good. Rather, it doesn't fulfil the promise of the first book. Still and all, they're imaginative fantasy, with nicely twisty plots and an intriguing method of magic.

What do you think you'll read next?

Damned if I know. Everything on the To Be Read shelf wants more brain than I feel like giving it, with the possible exception of Voice of the Whirlwind.

Boys don't read Girl Books and other lies my Society Told Me: "My brother read a lot. And as it happens, a fair number of the books he reads either a) are written by women b) have female protagonists, or c) center on 'girl' issues like 'family' and 'relationships.' This fact makes him the Miracle Boy Foretold By the Prophecy."

Confession time: I read Girl Books when I was a kid. I have clear memories of reading a bunch of Baby-Sitters Club books in fifth grade because they were there, and at a book fair one year I picked up a couple of D&D Romance Choose-Your-Own-Adventure things. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, about two imaginative girls whose friendship is sorely tested by Growing Up, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew there was something vaguely 'wrong' about reading them. I was always worried that someone would make fun of me for it, in a way that was somehow worse than the normal abuse I got for reading, or for reading genre. But I didn't let it stop me.

My choice of reading material may have been the one place in my childhood where I was unquestionably brave. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that books were something my parents didn't ever try to shame me about, or tell me that there was something else I'd like better and shouldn't I be reading that instead. (Tangent: current theory is that books were Play and thus not worth the effort of fighting over; it wasn't until Play started threatening to overshadow Work, in the form of saying I wanted to be a writer, that I got slapped down.)

I always thought I was just a weird kid for doing that. Nice to know I'm not, quite, the only one.

Cripes, is it Friday already? (No, not quite, I guess.) Work's been stupid busy all week. Probably was last week too, but I wasn't around for that part. Will write about the rest of Los Cabos later. Have some other stuff in the meantime.

Glass viruses. Beautiful.

Brink Back Postal Banking: "Americans should have a public option for simple banking that could shield them from the most predatory practices and extend saving options to all reaches of society." This... is an idea.

Teach the Controversy t-shirts: so much awesome.

YOU HAD ONE JOB!: like Failblog, but amusing.

The Game Over Tinies. "E is for Ecco, and he was delicious / F is for Frogger, who got too ambitious."

Should men be allowed to vote?: classic snark from Alice Duer Miller, an early twentieth-century suffragist.

Pad Thai: "In between surviving multiple point-blank-range assassination attempts and a failed kidnapping in which he emerged alive from the burning wreckage of a battleship his own air force had just bombed, Pibulsongkram decided that Thailand needed noodles that would advance the country's industry and economy."

We Found Our Son in the Subway: "The story spread like an urban myth: You're never going to believe what my friend's cousin's co-worker found in the subway."

Allan Calhamer, designer of Diplomacy, 1931-2013. No word on whether he was found with a knife in his back. In all seriousness, Dip is a game that I admire greatly, enjoy reading about, and will never, ever, play again. This is not a game to play with your friends unless you are tired of having friends.

The trouble with taking a vacation to write more is that being somewhere else doesn't magically make me not be me. Brain still fried, and not terribly interested in constructing coherent thoughts or stringing paragraphs together in a logical fashion. So here's a fragmented travelogue.

( Notes from a desert )