Long Weekend Catch Up

Tansi nitotemwak!

It's canada day here, so that means technically this is still a weekend Catch Up. And yeah. Colonial freedom holidays are weird because it's like cool this place I live in just replicated a different colonial order, which is still terrible to many oppressed or outside the acceptable norm type people, and oh there's fireworks. It's weird in a different and uncomfortable way than National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (September 30) or National Indigenous Peoples Day (June 21) are.

Also this Catch Up is a little late because my internet has been wonky. Either due to the squirrels, magpies or human error (lawns are stupid), our internet has been cutting out all weekend. Maybe all three of us contributed to injuring the internet cable. I really hope we didn't mow or weed-whack over it. I would be incredibly miffed if that were the case.

Anyways, onto the Catch Up!

Never Stop Blowing Up!

Never Stop Blowing Up started last week. This group of players seem really neat so far-it's Jacob's first time, and Alex is back again! Ally and Izzy are leaning so hard into their characters, and Rekha is always a delight. This is a really neat spin on an isekai genre-only this time it's action movies. I've been enjoying it so far.

Interview With A Vampire season 2

I love that Louis has the energy of a tiny, wet, flea infested, abandoned, kitten trapped in a garbage can yet continues to pull men like Lestat or Armand. I got pretty far into the Vampire Chronicles as an angsty, gothy, teenager so it's been neat seeing how the showrunners adapt stuff, and knowing things like the relationships between the vampires vs how the story is being told. It's cool, I understand why most of the changes have happened, and I'm enjoying more modern vampires.

This has been one of the better screen adaptations from source material (Fallout is the other one) I've liked so far.

Smartypants

This is the most deranged presentation from Smartypants yet. I just like. There are so many points where I thought Paul could stop and be like this is it but he never stops. It is incomprehensible. I am Trapp in this presentation. This link doesn't have the question period (which is a shame) but if you're able to find it, it dials up the unhinged more.

What I've Been Reading

We harvested the potatoes and turned backyard tool sheds and cold corners of basements into root cellars. We identified houses to work as shelters during cold snaps without power—there were two other gravity furnaces, two houses with super-efficient heat pumps, and a couple of well-insulated homes with gas furnaces so we’d only need to power the blower. Shelter houses also needed enough space inside for visitors and owners who weren’t dicks. (I love my neighbourhood, but we do have our share of dicks.) Shelter houses got a turbine if they didn’t already have one, and Gloria sent around this group she and Lem had trained to caulk all the windows and build a vestibule so that when people came in all the heat didn’t go rushing out. Susan made decorative WELCOME banners the shelter houses could hang out so everyone would remember which ones they were.

"A Year Without Sunshine" by Naomi Kritzer over at Uncanny Magazine is a little bit long, however it makes good use of it's length. This is so good. Not saccharine, teeth rotting sweet good but someone brought you a coffee when it's raining and you're going through it good. I have several Susans in my life (at one point in the pandemic we were a Susan), so seeing a short story where Susan is a valued member of the community, she contributes in a skills teaching way, and people can't imagine sacrificing her.

I just really love this story. I don't know why it resonated so hard for me this week. Maybe because the news has been so overwhelmingly bad lately, and I needed to read something where people care. That people are more intrinsically willing to grow communities of care with each. I loved this story. I read it. I cried. I read it again, I cried some more. I hope you read this.

There’s that skeleton manning the ship inside my brain again, telling me I’m a dumbass. My inner critic, who, when I address directly and with compassion, I find is actually just really fucking scared, trying to protect me, trying to stop me from getting hurt or rejected. So, he tells me I am a piece of shit who shouldn’t try. And to this, I say, hey man…I know you’re scared. But what have we got to lose? Who fucking cares?

I have a free subscription to Audrey Farnsworth's substack Episodes because I think she's funny and neat to read. Her post from last week really got to me too. (This week has been a lot lit seminar wise) I don't want to sound like a broken record but things are fucking weird, and it seems the new torment nexus is always being made, so why not now?

McGhee’s Twitter bio used to say something about how literary and genre fiction ought to touch tongues more often, and I think about that, too: About the science fiction and fantasy that appears in the other section of bookstore, about all the SFF writers overlooked by the mainstream even as their prose is crystalline, elegant, looping, rich, just stunning. We build so many walls for ourselves about what we do and don’t do, read and don’t read.

A beautiful essay by Molly Templeton over at Reactor about the beauty in not understanding books. There are so many books I read or have read that I don't fully understand right away because I am just one person. I don't know everything. I don't have to know everything. But I can appreciate so many different parts of the narrative the author brings me along with. Just because I might not [ever] understand it doesn't mean I can't savour a sentence or feel a new unfamiliar, exciting place (that I don't know) at the same time.

"Small" Mammal Update

Potema is a small weather forecasting network. This summer (thankfully) has been pretty chilly and wet, so for her she's been having some long mornings. This means she hasn't been able to charge her solar batteries or do landscaping as much as she wants to. She's very close to having a romantic, goth girl summer and I cannot wait to hear her contribution to the field of horror/science fiction.

What I've Been Working On

So you know when you're watching the two worst people you know fight, and there's no actual winner when one of them manages to subdue the other? And you want to walk away. Or pray for an asteroid to hit so that either will not be able to be resurrected and this suffering will stop? Or you begin actually considering all of your friends were right and you should have changed focus areas because they're tired of these two fighting and they don't even know them?

That's how my lit seminar is going. I have absolutely no horse in this race, I've got no dog in this fight, I just want to get an acceptable mark and think about which Aesop fable or Grimm's fairy-tale this was supposed to represent. I do not want to academically joust about how hard literary writers have it when all of the literary writers I have read for this course seem to be a bunch of insecure, delusional bullies insisting they are both smarter and dumber than everyone else.

Most of my writing time is now dedicated to rewriting everything I have to do in the course. It is a lot. It is demoralizing. It is liberating in a totally unexpected way.

I have written one short story, that isn't totally terrible (to me). And I am very pleased with revising it. So maybe after I hand it in (terrible) I'll share it here (huzzah). Or see if I can submit somewhere and maybe people might read it there (delusional).

Thank you for reading. Especially as I get into the back end of my lit seminar. Your reading this means so much to me.

I hope your July begins well, friend.