Words are inadequate

Language, Languages, and Dialect in Aspects, an essay by Andrew 'Draco Concordans' Plotkin. I got to the line near the end of the essay where he reiterates the essay's secret title and I started laughing so hard I couldn't explain myself for about a minute, because GODDAMMIT MIKE.

Even if you've not read Aspects, if you've any interest in linguistics or conlangs ('constructed languages') I imagine it's a fascinating read. (And then you'll want to go read Aspects, but that's only proper. I'm itching for a reread myself.)

Also a shout-out to my ENGL1204 teacher, Dr Elizabeth Richey, who I believe was at Tech on loan from somewhere in South Carolina. She introduced me to Borges, without which I would not have cracked up nearly so much. As someone whose name I have forgotten (probably on Making Light) said, the real benefit of a classical education is that you get all the jokes.

Typically the places I've lived have garnered purely-functional descriptive names. Apartment Six, The Hellhole, LisaNeil's. (I referred to Adam et al's large apartment with too many footstools as The Ottoman Empire but I don't know that that ever caught on.)

And this obviously isn't The Condo, that's out in Grandview/Woodland and I've not lived there for well over three years.

Typically names for critters and devices come from my reading. The Crawling Chaos That Is Nyarlathotep and Kai Wren, Godslayer And Lord Demon. Keishi Mirabara Hamster, who like her namesake in The Fortunate Fall lived in a series of tubes. Laptops Tiresias and Taranis and Pelorios and now Patrise.

And right now I am reading Aspects.

As much as I might wish otherwise, this is not Strange House, nor am I Strange (merely strange, ha ha). It can be no more than a very temporary refuge for anyone else.

But ...

I doubt I would like Varic, Coron of Corvaric, but I do respect him, and admire him, and to some extent understand him. He doesn't entirely know himself, of course, though he certainly thinks he does. He certainly doesn't know other people as well as he thinks. Or maybe he does and he just doesn't quite know how to use that knowledge.

"What does 'Varic' mean?" she said.
"'A difficult place to land.' My home country has a very inhospitable coast."
--JMF, Aspects

Corvaric House? Corvaric Manor feels far too grand, except for those archways in the kitchen. Maybe just Corvaric.

(I've been pronouncing it accented second syllable, corVARRic, like Varic with 'cor' on the front. But perhaps it's meant to be accented first syllable, CORvuric. Hm.)

(Quercian isn't Latin, any more than Lystourel is nineteenth-century London or long-gone Lord Falchion is Arthur, and so I am saved from having to interpret "cor varic" as "a difficult heart to land in." However apropos it may be for Varic himself.)

After I found out that the movers weren't coming today I called Erin, who talked me down and through it. Which was very much appreciated. I'm glad I still have Erin.

Aspects exists. I just got an email saying that my ebook preorder has dropped, and my hard copy is en route. (Should be here mid-next-week, so, either it arrives while I'm in Niagara or I have a long-awaited book to read instead.) I am holding off on reading it in ebook; for some reason I want to read it in hard copy first. That seems important. Also I lack the brain and emotional resilience right now to read The Last Of Mike Ford. (mrissa has some impressions of it. I am very much looking forward to this.)

Back in I guess November, when Kelsey came to visit, Erin rediscovered and introduced me to Bengal Spice Tea. Cinnamon and cloves and yum. So now I have a tasty thing to drink in the evenings. And I have my travel hot-water-pot, and the travel mug that my ex-company sent me a couple of years ago when they handed out swag in lieu of paying bonuses. So I have tea.

Laundry two doors down is not the same as laundry in the apartment, but it's a sight better than "laundry at the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs" or "laundry a twelve-minute drive away," which were the last two places I lived. (Technically the last one was "laundry at the end of the hall, also costing $4/load payable only in loonies," which is why it was a twelve-minute drive away instead.)

I went out this evening and bought myself a chair for the porch and a tray-table-thing, so now I have some furniture. The bar stool is good for perching on but no good for actually trying to work or anything. And sitting on the floor was getting old.

On Thursday morning my electric razor popped open and I lost one of the blades. I could order more, and will, but like Aspects they'd get here next week at the earliest. I could buy a new razor but I did that once already, my spare razor is packed and I don't need a third one. I could use an actual bladed razor but that is just an invitation to a whole lot of blood. So I'm experimenting with beardedness. It itches less than last time, at least so far. I doubt I'll keep it but it's nice to change things up from time to time.

The Indian place around the corner does a decent korma. The poutine place over the skytrain (less than a half-mile walk, though coming back is up a Significant flight of stairs) still has a delicious buffalo chicken poutine. River Market exists and I'll get down there eventually and have some barbecue from Re-Up, the only good barbecue I've had north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I have pots and pans. Mya, who came by to check on the place once a week while I wasn't there, found a decent set on Craigslist and left them in the apartment. I've also got an assortment of utensils: cheap measuring cups and spoons, a couple of forks from takeout, some misc stuff from the thrift store. So I can make breakfasts at least, and whenever I go grocery shopping for real I'll be able to make a few other things as well.

I don't like my situation at all, but it is not the worst situation I've been in.

As of today The Dragon Waiting is back in print. It's got a lovely introduction by Scott Lynch, in which he draws the obvious-in-retrospect comparison above. (I think it was Brian Eno who said that only around a hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but all of them went on to start their own band.)

As a reminder, rydra_wong has a better review of the book than I have ever been able to put together. Also skygiants has accurately and hilariously broken down the book's structure.

Also it turns out that one can get Josephine Tey ebooks for a buck apiece, which means that (once I get through The Black Count) I will be reading The Daughter Of Time and then rereading TDW for the nth time, just to see how the one plays off the other.

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 4

I draw a mental line straight through Issola. You'd think that divide would be more reasonably put between Orca and Dragon, when the Vlad books got picked up by Tor, but no. In my head Dragon is the last of the Ace books and Dzur is the first of the Tor books, or something. I blame [SPOILER].

Also, I appreciate that Viscount is at least up-front about being composed of bound book-fragments. This does make writing about each individual volume both a) difficult and b) useless. However.

( Issola, Paths, Lord, Sethra )

What are you reading?

The March North, by Graydon Saunders. The beautiful thing about these is that there's always more than I saw last time. In this case, the context of having read the sequel sheds a great deal of light on a number of conversational asides and worldbuilding choices.

I mean, there's also the Captain's massively understated sense of humour, understated to the point that I am not entirely convinced it exists at all. ("Do that, and it's a tossup whether the [Army] or Parliament hang you. One specific time, it was both, because neither was willing to not do it themselves.") The flashes of gorgeously descriptive prose. The fundamental /decency/ of the Commonweal as a society. The occasional heartbreaking passage. The giant firebreathing warsheep named Eustace, covered in "a grey stiff wirelike substance" because of course Eustace has steel wool. The almost total lack of gendered identifiers.

So good. I'd love to do a review but I don't think I'm capable of distilling what it is that makes these so awesome.

What did you just finish reading?

I needed to see how much of myself I recognised in a particular character / situation, so I found it necessary to reread The Last Hot Time by John M. Ford. (Such hardship.) Answer: less than I'd expected, but more than I would have expected had I thought about it a bit more.

This is such a weird book. It's much less about the "plot," and more about the world and the main character's ... growth and relationships? Something like that. This time through I noticed how little space the antagonist actually takes up in the book. It's kind of impressive. And still Danny's loneliness and damage and deliberate isolation get me every single time.

In some indescribable way I think of Last Hot Time as a companion piece to Growing Up Weightless. Weightless ends at a much darker and more bittersweet place; LHT breaks me open no less despite its wonderfully satisfying ending.

What do you think you'll read next?

A Succession Of Bad Days and Safely You Deliver, and then I have no idea.

0) ... and still insists he reads of ghosts.

1) One amusing in retrospect bit I didn't mention earlier: when I arrived at the train station in Toronto (after an unpleasant redeye flight featuring loud drunk bachelor-partiers, and a wholly pleasant ride on the new no-longer-$38 train from the airport to the train station) I attempted to present my passport so I could pick up my ticket and ... opened to a picture of uilos. Apparently our passports got switched for the wrong wallets the last time we travelled (down to the used bookstores with Steph in December). Luckily I had my own Nexus card and my own PR card, and the train folks were happy enough to take the Nexus card, but it made for a somewhat tense ride down.

E FedExed me my passport so I could get on a plane to go home. I could *probably* have worked it out with just the Nexus card, but I had used the passport to buy the ticket, and better safe than stranded in Buffalo.

2) Speaking of, home from the Gathering as of eleven-thirty last night. Still tired, still heavily overpeopled. I didn't take care of myself as well as I could have this year; the weather was miserable for the first half of the week and for whatever reason once it nicened up I still didn't go outside and wander. Something to bear in mind for next year.

3) More on this later, but: consider this another plug for Graydon Saunders's Commonweal novels (available in ebook from the Google Play store). Reread the first (The March North) and read the first third or so of the second (A Succession of Bad Days) over the week. Comparisons with the work of Mr Ford are not inapt. The bone-deep understanding of trauma and healing and loneliness and identity is still there in Graydon's work, it's just even further down than in The Dragon Waiting. Or maybe I just haven't reread these enough times for it to be obvious to me.

4) It seems I have a strong predilection for flawed characters in difficult situations who are trying their damnedest. I have no further use for stories about terrible people being terrible, and I think this means I should let the Joe Abercrombie books go.

4a) Losing people you’re responsible for hurts. If it didn’t, the Line wouldn’t give you a warrant of commission.

If it stops, they take the warrant away.

--Graydon Saunders, "The March North"

5) I am returning the nameless new laptop. A week with Taranis has convinced me that I don't need to spend an exorbitant sum of money on a new machine, not yet and likely not for another couple of years. I *do* need a battery replacement and could do with a clean reinstall, but that can wait for the weekend.

Chaos has returned from being nuked. He spent most of the first day sleeping, and since then he's basically back to normal. It's good to have the right number of cats again. He goes back for a checkup in a month, and again sometime after that, but other than that he's done for awhile.

In other critter news, at least one of the local seagull nests has hatched and now has tiny fuzzy velociraptors. Also, there's a beaver living on one of the small islands in Lost Lagoon, or at least there was a couple of weeks ago. I haven't seen it since but dawn's been coming well before I get out to run.

What else... reread The Hobbit last week. Also rewatched the Rankin/Bass animated film, which manages to tell just about the entire story in under an hour and a half. It's got some decent voice acting (John Huston as Gandalf! Richard 'Have Gun Will Travel' Boone as Smaug!) and is very pretty. The character designs in particular are basically spot on, with the exception of the oddly green and twisted Wood-Elves. I'd known for ages that Rankin/Bass collaborated with a Japanese animation studio on a number of projects, including Hobbit and Last Unicorn; what I hadn't realised until Misty mentioned it is that that specific studio went on to become Ghibli, of Totoro fame.

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It's Cheap, But Is It Overpriced?: "If this car wasn't disappointing, it wouldn't be anything at all."

Bill Watterson returns to the comics page: "The idea I proposed was that instead of having me get hit on the head, I would pretend that Pearls was being drawn by a precocious second grader who thought my art was crap. I named her 'Libby,' which I then shorted to 'Lib.' (Hint, hint: It’s almost 'Bill' backwards.)" See also the Washington Post story, with quotes from Watterson, and Andy Ihnatko on why Watterson was/is such a big deal.

Well, this is awful. National Zoo's Invertebrate Exhibit To Close June 22. I loved the invertebrate exhibit and am very sad to see it go.

In happier zoo-related news, Cat And Lynx Become Inseparable Friends: "According to the local people, the calico was homeless and happened to find food in the lynx's enclosure. ... The zoo adopted the cat so that she and her lynx friend could live together."

Four circles that don't intersect. As advertised. Ow.

The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal, subtitled And How It Foretold The 2008 Financial Crisis: "Who would have been foolhardy enough to encourage a flailing railroad to buy up everything it could get its hands on and enter a protracted legal battle with the City of New York? Pretty much the entire American banking establishment, as it turned out."

All Our Propagation: A Play for Instruments by John M. Ford.

50 People On 'The Most Intellectual Joke I Know': I am of course partial to #13 but many of the rest are good as well.

#15: Q: Who does Polyphemus hate more than Odysseus?
A: Nobody!

Book of Lamentations: "Something has gone terribly wrong in the world; we are living the wrong life, a life without any real fulfillment. The newly published DSM-5 is a classic dsytopian novel in this mold." In which the DSM-V is reviewed.

As my tweet has gone viral both on tumblr and twitter...: "...I'm getting disturbed by how more than a few guys have responded by telling me that this tactic wouldn’t stop them, or that it would encourage them to hit on women more." ARGH ARGH ARGH the tags for the linked post are the best available expression of my headdeskery.

And the thing is, the guys saying 'haha that won't stop me' are saying that because they're getting a response, and any response is sufficient reason for them to keep going. (No response is sufficient reason for them to step it up.) There's no way for the target to 'win,' to get left alone. These aren't people who have any interest in her desires. It's the same dynamic as kids' teasing/bullying, and if these self-proclaimed grade-school-social-outcast geeks had any modicum of self-reflection they'd be deeply ashamed of themselves.

10 reasons you should stop being so irrationally upset about your hair being repeatedly set on fire: "3. Because Webster’s Dictionary defines 'fire' as 'a state, process, or instance of combustion in which fuel or other material is ignited and combined with oxygen, giving off light, heat, and flame.' I see neither light, heat, nor flame, but merely a progressive singeing, reddening of the scalp, and a sulfurous smell. Your hair is therefore not on fire by any definition of 'fire' of which I am aware."

Extinct tree grows anew from ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists: "For the next four decades, the ancient seeds were kept in a drawer at Tel Aviv's Bar-Ilan University. But then, in 2005, botanical researcher Elaine Solowey decided to plant one and see what, if anything, would sprout."

Robbing Banks for the CIA: "'Hey, I got this job for you where you're going to get paid 25K,' Carolina Villegas wrote. 'Doing what?' Torres asked. 'Robbing banks,' she texted. Torres started laughing. 'Is this a joke?' he wondered. Soon Villegas was on the phone explaining that it was a government job. And it was legal." (Spoiler: it wasn't actually legal.)

Priority Mail Large Flat Rate Board Game Box: "Fits two average-sized board games." I <3 the USPS.

Some thoughts on the state of screenwriting in 2013, or, why I have next to no desire to write a screenplay despite my love of dialogue: "If you want someone else to pay to make your screenplay into a movie, you must learn to work within commercially acceptable forms, otherwise you are of no use to Hollywood and they will not hire you."

New Metro subway cars signal the end of an era: "Eventually -- in the 2040s, probably -- the last remaining brown-striped aluminum subway car in the nation's capital will disappear." Also note that many of the cars from the original batch in the 1970s are still in service, which is both amazing (built to last!) and terrifying (built to 1970s safety standards!).