regshoe | Reading

The Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network does a lot of vitally important work supporting immigrants in and around and from Massachusetts, including paying bond (the immigration detention equivalent of bail) to get people released from ICE detention. So much so, in fact, that after paying out over $1.5 million in 2026 alone (!!), they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for their bond fund. They urgently need more money to keep up this work. This is an all-volunteer organization -- I volunteer with them, and can vouch that aside from a tiny bit of overhead, every penny goes to helping immigrants.

I know times are tight and there are a million worthy causes around right now, but if you happen to have some spare funds you'd like to toss at a good cause, this is a really good one and a really good time to donate. Every little bit helps.

(And if you're not in a position to donate, no shame and no judgment.)

muccamukk

Olivia Rodrigo - the cure (Official Music Video)

Watch on YouTube

I don't actually go here, but I like the song a lot, and the music video is cleverly done. Contains quite a bit of medical stuff, but all the blood is made of yarn.

sovay

In other news of media of predictable interest to me, I had no idea that Cannes just premiered a queer romance set in a theatrical troupe on the Western Front of World War I. To this review, yes, concert parties of the trenches could indeed have flutes and clarinets and all manner of professional entertainment on account of the quantity of professional talent behind the lines if not on the front of them. I'm curious about the historical tunes alone. I know much less about Belgian soldiers' songs and sketches than I do about their British or Canadian counterparts. Local arthouses had better come through on this one.

Current Music: Wilson & Swarbrick, "The Ballad of Jack McLaren"

skygiants

So the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, where I volunteer, is scraping the bottom of their bond fund. If you have a few pennies to toss, now would be a really exceptional time.

(I personally have been scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of best talent show this town has ever seen might be helpful to the overall cause, so I guess if there's anything you've ever wanted to see me do or post about particularly that might work as a fundraising incentive, let me know???)

sovay

Thanks to the escalation in their heartbreakingly necessary work of bonding out people kidnapped and imprisoned by ICE and helping with their legal fees and families, the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network has depleted its bond fund in record time since the start of the year. There is no shortage of detainees in our profitably carceral system and no one in need should have more locks across their path. You got a sixpence you want, they are taking donations. It's actually Shavuos at the moment, but it is always a good time to open the door to the stranger.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Planting Tomatoes"

oursin

Anyway, I was dipping in again to the Violet Hunt Tales of the Uneasy and in 'The Operation' there is the backstory where a man's first wife -

had smoothed and made easy the path of divorce for the man she loved.... full of zeal to give him his freedom. It was hardly human, so the woman who had profited by her action thought, and certainly not very womanly. Florence could not imagine herself allowing a cold business-like lawyer to dictate her a letter bidding Joe come back to her herewith; a summons intended, of course, for ultimate publication. It disgusted Florence, this horrible business of sueing for restitution of conjugal rights!

Only a divorce-law nerd like moi would probably be able to decode this?

This was the cleanest way a woman could get quit of a husband pre 1923 - he had of course to be adulterous (or appear to have been) and refusing to restitute conjugal rights counted as desertion.

Otherwise she had to prove cruelty (which could include knowing infection with a loathsome disease) or that he was guilty of a sexual crime (rape, sodomy, incest....).

But in a situation where the man had, presumably, already run off with Another Woman, having to go through that legal rigmarole of asking him to come back so that he could refuse and be legally deserting does strike one as a very chagrining procedure.

philomytha

It's nearly my five-year Bigglesversary! And that means there has to be fic. My plans for actually finishing one of the fics I started practically five years ago to the day have not quite come off yet, so instead have this bit of ridiculousness that wandered into my head yesterday and wouldn't go away.

Title: Touch
Content: Biggles/EvS, a bit of EvS/Zorotov and Biggles/Marie, UST, resolved UST, 1000 words
Summary: months later, Erich could still feel each separate touch

( Touch )

dolorosa_12

The sun is shining, it's the start of a long weekend, and I can hear the teenage girls next door singing along enthusiastically to a medley of Disney songs. I feel — for the first time in a while — relaxed and happy, so long may that continue!

For today's open thread, I had the idea to do a modification of something we sometimes ask at work as a job interview activity (although obviously without that added pressure!): talk about one of your interests or hobbies, and why you like it. (If you want to make it really challenging, do it with the constraints we use in the job interviews: explain what it is as if to people who have never heard of this hobby/activity before, treat it like an elevator pitch where you have to 'sell' the benefits of this hobby, and do so with an extremely limited wordcount.)

Since I think it goes without saying that almost everyone here will recognise the value of a) social blogging, b) writing original fiction, fanfiction or both, and c) engaging fannishly with works of media, maybe pick a different hobby or interest?

( Picking things up, putting them down, and dancing to very cheesy music )

So, talk to me about your (non-fandom, non-writing, non-Dreamwidth) hobbies!

muccamukk

I've been piling these up since early April? I think most of them are still topical.

Tech Issues:
Archive of Our Own: Spambot Comments on AO3.
News post with a good summary of all the kinds of spambot comments showing up lately, and what to do if you get one. Slightly depressing, but also helpful.

404 Media: A 'Self-Doxing' Rave Helps Trans People Stay Safe Online.
I got a laugh out of deciding to run this on Trans Day of Visibility. Good for them. (ETA: Some resources in the comments, for anyone who wants to look into/clean up their information online.)

ZD Net: Your Kindle's not obsolete, it just needs a jailbreak - and I'll show you how it's done.
I have not tried this, just saw it going around for older Kindles which Amazon is no longer supporting (to the point where they'll stop operating).

The Tyee: How Companies Hijack AI Chatbots.
The title is a bit click baity, but I was interested in this new and exciting way of polluting the information ecosystem! What if you fed deliberately bad information into LLMs so that chatbots would advertise for you?

Canadian Politics:
Trans Canada Tour.
We’re on a mission to rekindle hope, rebuild Canada’s queer movement, and change hearts and minds across the country.
This may be coming to a town near you? If it's not, and you're a queer organiser, maybe it could be. I've been low-key trying to see if anyone here is interested, but no luck so far.

The Tyee: RCMP Seeks to Quash Discrimination Ruling by Human Rights Tribunal.
The RCMP's constant insistence that they definitely plan to do better in the future, but they're not going to tell us how, or let anyone investigate them. I'm sure that will work better this time!

The Narwhal: Malfunctioning Canadian LNG terminal burned more gas than estimated 2024 global record.
Oh look. It's clean energy!

CBC: 'Monumental': B.C. attorney general, advocates hail Supreme Court ruling on intimate partner violence.
I'm really glad this went through, and sorry that lady had to fight for so long to get relief.

Video Essays:

tongue-in-cheek-books: Shrapnel: Ambient Homophobia and the F-Slur in MM Romance (39 minutes).
A very gentle explanation to people who didn't grow up with normative homophobia in male spaces, about how the damage done by anti-queer language isn't always done by one bad person directing slurs at our hero. I thought it was a really clear example of something I've been poking at for a while. He uses hockey romances in his examples, but makes it clear he's not trying to attack the authors or the fans.

ophie-dokie: Sabrina Carpenter's Gender Theater, The Male Gaze, and You (46 minutes).
The discourse continues. I really liked the section about "I Kissed a Girl" and assuming people's sexuality. I remember a lot more problems from people accusing women of being "performative" than I do "performative" people being an actual problem. But mileage may have varied.

Schmowd3r: PI Investigates the Neil Gaiman Substack Situation (3 hours and 46 minutes).
I appreciated this as a breakdown of what's in the substack, which is such a Gish gallop that it's difficult to get through. I had somehow missed the experimental "jazz" for example. I also appreciate how he didn't include a lot of the graphic details about the assaults, which made it a bit easier to listen to than a lot of recaps of the situation. (This video has unfortunately started drama with another YouTuber. *sighs*)

Cute Things:

sixbeforelunch: fandom hugs.
Icons from various Stargate, Star Trek and DC properties. Extremely cute.

OnIcePerspectives: Starr Andrews reprises "Whip My Hair" by Willow Smith (Video: 3 minutes).
It's really fun to see this again!

Emily Fairfax, Ph.D: Beavers and Wildfire.
Includes a stop-motion video and several diagrams explaining how beaver habitat protects vegetation from wildfires, and also charts!

CowlitzIndianTribe: Cowlitz Beaver Kit Cam Live.
Live stream of a mother beaver and her four kits. I think they're going to be rewilded in the next couple weeks, so worth checking out while it's still running. Scroll back a bit and find a time when she comes back into the lodge: the kits make the cutest noises. Also, she sometimes just grabs one of the kits, pins it down and licks it for a while.

oursin

To clarify: what we did yesterday was the secular and bureaucratic equivalent of calling the banns.

This has to be done some while before the actual ceremony (although one has to present evidence that this is booked): presumably to allow time for the sibling of the mad previous partner one is keeping confined in the attic to travel from the Caribbean and burst in to interrupt it.

But many thanks for the congratulations!

sovay

Hestia is sleeping against my knees. Earlier in the night she hopped onto the bed where I was reading, trampled my ankles, and curled herself into a gravitational field of black fur. At dinner she stretched forth her delicate paw and clobbered as her rightful prey a portion of

spatch's haddock. Out of this week's three doctors' appointments, one was objectively encouraging and I am acting toward its future which I cannot yet believe in. I have so many moving parts to keep track of. I feel like eighteen and a half plates in the air. In lieu of room in my life for real convalescence, I am reading a lot in the evenings, accompanied by cat, which is where she came in.

Current Music: Erase Errata, "How to Tell Yourself from a Television"

stonepicnicking_okapi

For No Clear Reason By Robert Creeley

I dreamt last night
the fright was over, that
the dust came, and then water,
and women and men, together
again, and all was quiet
in the dim moon’s light.

A paean of such patience—
laughing, laughing at me,
and the days extend over
the earth’s great cover,
grass, trees, and flower-
ing season, for no clear reason.

sanguinity

There was a fun list of number-themed writing prompts going around tumblr the other day. (69 words of smut, 101 words about a dog, etc.) A friend over there has an affection for the game-theory passage in my Hornblower novel, Until Death or England Do Us Part.* Wanting to know if I have any other mathematical ideas up my sleeve, they prompted:

Write a 314-word fic that contains a mathematical concept.

Well. It just so happens that there's a bit of mathematical trivia about Hornblower that has burning a hole in the back of my brain for YEARS. Namely: the canonical fact that Hornblower, alleged mathematical genius who sometimes makes his living off of gambling, believes in the Gambler's Fallacy. (gifset of the relevant scene in the episode "Loyalty", but be assured, it comes straight from the novel.)

It's never been a big enough thing to hang a whole story on, but a 314-word ficlet? No problem.

Gambler's Fallacy by sanguinity

Hornblower novels; Hornblower TV
Horatio Hornblower, William Bush
Mathematics, Ficlet

Hornblower may be the alleged genius, but Bush's mathematical instincts are as good as anyone's.

Once again, it pleased me to let Bush be correct about the math. I know canon makes much of Hornblower's mathematical brilliance and Bush being a mathematical also-ran, but I would like to point out: one of these gentlemen passed his lieutenant's exam, and the other one famously did not. Bush may not be mathematically gifted, but I argue that he is competent. So there.

--

* For a discussion of the game theory bit of "Until Death or England", please see my DVD commentary, On Game Theory and The Final Problem. As advertised, it also discusses Sherlock Holmes.

oursin

Or that's what it feels like, over the last just over a week.

There was going to the solicitors to sign our wills.

There was going over to coughingbear and hano's for a get-together (very nice to see people!)

There was deciding that maybe a knee support would be advantageous for the knee which has been being bit wonky of late so I ordered one Click and Collect from the local Argos. And it does seem to ameliorate the situation somewhat though I think I probably need to set about making a GP appointment about it, since it has not gone away in a few days as I hoped it would.

In other health matters have been being mildly hassled by my dental practice about booking a hygienist appointment, which, when I got round to, found they could not actually fit me in for for the next 4 weeks.

There was going to Book Launch for work by a long-term acquaintance in academic field, at rather elite venue in The City, a bit of a faff to get to, though part of that might have been getting off the bus at the wrong stop, though building works occluding street names did not help. Very few people I knew apart from Author, who was besieged by people wanting her to sign copies of The Book, but had nice chat with an editor who knew somewhat of My Earlier Work.

Yesterday I flopped at home apart from attending an online seminar (actually a substitution offered for the one I'd booked for last week which was cancelled, felt it would be civil to attend).

Today we boogeyed on down to the Register Office to Register Our Intention of Civil Partnership, at which they interrogate one not only about previous marriages etc but endeavour to ascertain whether one is Under Duress.

osprey_archer

I finished my 2017 Reading List, and while it might seem like the path of wisdom to complete my 2018 and 2019 reading lists before I start another… Well, I like to have a lot of reading lists going at once.

So without further ado! The 2020 reading list!

Laura Amy Schlitz - The Winter of the Dollhouse (Schlitz’s newest book. Very excited about this one!)

Elizabeth Goudge - The Valley of Song (per

sovay’s recommendation)

Vivien Alcock - not sure what to read next for Alcock. I’ve read everything from the local libraries, so whatever it is will come through ILL. Leaning toward The Sylvia Game just because I like the title.

William Dean Howells - An Imperative Duty

Roald Dahl - The Witches (I tried this book as a child and gave up because it was scary. Time to try again!)

Sveltana Alexievich - Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

Ruth Reichl - My Kitchen Year (I’m also tempted to try Reichl’s fiction. Has anyone read Delicious! or The Paris Novel?)

James Baldwin - The Evidence of Things Not Seen (pace

troisoiseaux's rec)

Gerald Durrell

Llinos Cathryn Thomas - All Is Bright (this is an Advent calendar book so I will of course be saving it for December)

E. F. Benson - Miss Mapp

Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Against Hope (this poor book has languished on my ILL list since FOREVER.)

Mary Renault - The Praise Singer

Charles Dickens - haven’t decided which one yet. Should I take another crack at Bleak House? Attempt The Pickwick Papers? Make the acquaintance of Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times?

Gene Stratton Porter - The Keeper of the Bees

oursin

Happy birthday,

lotesse and

nilchance!

sovay

The green salt smell of the sea and the tidal marshes flooded in as soon as I rolled down the windows on Route 133. On impulse and antidote to my surfeit of doctors' appointments this week,

spatch drove me out to Gloucester this afternoon. The clouds were stacked over the water like cyanotypes. We looped the dunes of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company and clattered through the industrial green trusses of the Tobin which currently seem to have been mummy-swaddled in tarps and chopsticks and filled out our summer's alphabet of states during slow traffic on Route 1. The Causeway discovered it had run out of fried smelts right after it had rung me up for an order and offered me fried cod cheeks instead, sweet solid dollops of whitefish which I ate across the picnic table from Rob and his steak-sized baked haddock at Stage Fort Park where local teenagers were sunbathing to music atop Tablet Rock. From the Avalonian granite of Half Moon Beach, we watched a duffel-green trawler chug in past the automated blinks of Eastern Point and Ten Pound Lights, one tower as red-and-white as a buoy, the other black-and-white as the common eiders bobbing across the glaze-blue bands of the waves. We saw cormorants in flight and fishing. We saw gulls balanced like balsa wood on the summering air. I tore my hand on some barnacles and the wind snarled my hair from all directions. When the light started to drain off toward sunset, we left by Route 127 just to see what its coastal views looked like when not obliterated by thunder-sheet rain and meandered somewhat after Manchester-by-the-Sea such that I remember admiring the whale-blue mural of a wave Hokusai-bubbling across the side of the Swampscott Department of Public Works and hoping that Prides Crossing is besieged in June. The neat white crescent of the moon came out in the ink-washed after-sunset and presently we collected ice cream from a slammed CB Scoops. I am not yet done with doctors for the week and this was an even more restoring break than walking by the Charles or North Point Park. My CD of Quinquis' eor (2025) arrived in the mail.

Current Music: Quinquis, "Blaz an holen (feat. Cerys Hafana)"

aurumcalendula

How to Fake it in Society by KJ Charles:

( Read more... )

I'm eyeing KJ Charles' forthcoming The League of Lost Souls, but considering a bunch of her recent traditionally published stuff has been misses for me, I might hold off pre-ordering unless I find out that it includes queer ladies (the The Chosen and the Beautiful comparison in the blurb makes me wonder about that).

Mr Collins in Love by Lee Welch:

( Read more... )

A Choice of Destinies by Melissa Scott:

( Read more... )

At The World's Mercy, Volume 2 by Ning Yuan (translated by Serena):

( Read more... )

skygiants

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.

oursin

What I read

John D MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee, #4) (1964) - pour me out a shot of that cheap whisky.

Change of pace - this was more, this was actually I wanted to be reading something like this, but this wasn't quite hitting the spot, nevertheless I continued and finished: Gail Godwin, A Southern Family (1987), bits of which I remembered and bits of which I didn't.

Have just finished Alba de Céspedes, There's No Turning Back (1938) - for in-person reading group. Young modern women in Rome in the late 1930s - they are modern in that they have left home to study, but they are living in an institute run by nuns (and not all of them are actually studying). A more complex picture of the lives of Italian women in the Fascist era than one perhaps supposed (though the education mostly seems to be with a view to teaching ho hum) - politics is all rather on the margins, though one of the women is Spanish and the situation in Spain affects her.

The latest Literary Review

On the go

Persuasion, for the bluesky daily chapter read-through.

Up next

About to embark on Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group.

And then, maybe, can get to Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World, just posthumously published by Aqueduct.

Profile

regshoe

Ye Jacobites By Name

May 2026

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Page Summary

genarti - quick signal boost for a local-to-me and worthy cause
muccamukk - Music Friday
sovay - Take us roaming in the gloaming, your Ross rifle by your side
skygiants - (no subject)
sovay - You've got to live the life you're fighting for
oursin - This is really, really niche
philomytha - Fic: Touch
dolorosa_12 - Friday open thread: hobbies
muccamukk - Links List (Tech Issues, CanPol, Video Essays, Cute Things)
oursin - Intention is not yet act
sovay - I spoke of crimes and of my friends in the same breath
stonepicnicking_okapi - Poet's Corner: For No Clear Reason by Robert Creeley
sanguinity - Hornblower Ficlet: Gambler's Fallacy
oursin - Being a busy running-around hedjog
osprey_archer - Revisiting My 2020 Reading List
oursin - (no subject)
sovay - Neuial a ran dre ar ruzenn
aurumcalendula - Some books I've been reading recently
skygiants - (no subject)
oursin - Wednesday the heron was visiting the pond again

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