Reading

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podcasts

podcast friday

Hi I am very tired.

Give a listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's entire last few weeks, which has been about the alter-globalization movement, but especially to this week's episodes, "Bread and Puppet: The Dawn of Giant Protest Puppets." (Part I | Part II). This is one of my special interests, stemming from how I used to teach at a puppetry camp, and I've actually been lucky enough to visit Bread and Puppet in Vermont on a road trip, albeit not quite lucky enough to see one of their shows. I am always in favour of more theatricality in activism and these episodes trace the evolution of one particular brand of theatricality that I'm especially a fan of.

I bet you will be surprised to learn that the personal stories of the two founders of the theatre are also especially interesting. Also, since Jamie Loftus is the guest, there is a tragic hot dog connection.

Current Music: The Dropkick Murphys, "Who'll Stand with Us?"

Through crime and crusade, our labor it's been stolen

Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography and worried me.

Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.

I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.

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community: thursday recs

Thursday Recs

Bringing Thursday Recs in a little bit early today 👀

Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Manga (Anime) series info?

I'm writing a story where my main character stops his friend, a dad to a 13-ish year old boy, from purchasing some ~~anime~~ manga books because the main character knows the book series is too adult (sex, violence, both) for a 13 year old. The main character then recommends a different series because the story line is more appropriate for the age of the teen.

The story is the relationship between the main character and the dad, so this is a small piece of the larger story. But I know absolutely nothing about anime (or manga, obviously!) and would appreciate some recommendations of titles that would fit those categories.

Thanks!

ETA: I'm looking for currently available titles and perhaps where they are best purchased (a bookstore, a comic book store, a specialty shop, online?)

ETA2: I'm looking US-centric here.

Weather's cooled down a bit, that's nice

Moonpie's foot looks better, we didn't end up having to take her for an x-ray at all.

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( Read more... )

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Daft Punk - Georgio by Moroder

We're over the halfway line - Late June 02025

Let's begin this entry with One Hundred reasons Not To Die, which starts with oranges and moves through the ways that communities come together in the face of disasters and help each other. Which stands in stark contrast to the ways that having more wealth than could possibly be earned or expended in one lifetime (at least, not without seriously screwing over everyone and everything you can) has altered the way that the richest think of how they should be allowed to rule without fetters, that their ideas are always the smartest, and the rest of us should be beholden to them for everything so that we can't stop them or tell them no.

Ask most people who go through a university program where there's at least some amount of sport, and they'll tell you that the sports parts of the university are almost always the things that get the most money and what they want the fastest. A non-tenured professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder doesn't make nearly as much as the football head coach, and very little of the money that the football program makes ever finds its way back to the academics, nor does it seem that the football program (or other programs) can be decalred to be self-sufficient and their budget allocations moved over to other places that could desperately use it, like salaries for those doing the teaching. This is the perpetual issue with universities that have well-known athletics programs - they bring in a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of that revenue then gets spent improving the athletics portions and the rest of the university is left to figure out how to get their own funding. (My university was at least fairly explicit that a lot of the revenue from their "revenue-generating" sports is used to ensure scolarships and other materials for the "non-revenue-generating sports," which means that the football program often provides the operating budget for much of the women's sports available at the university, which is not a terrible thing to do with that cash. It also helps that it was a university with a fair number of alumnae who have gone on to prestigious jobs, so there's a lot of regular donations and endowments that they can use for capital and operating expenses. They still don't pay everyone on the teaching side enough, though.)

Harvard University employed someone to find descendants of slaves who had a history with Harvard's founders and prominent people. For doing the job admirably, thoroughly, and well, Harvard fired him, because he was finding far too many people with the associations than what the university wanted to acknowledge. They were willing to peek beneath the hood, but not to fully look at what was found there.

( International Affairs, Domestic Fascism, and the occasional piece of good news )

Out of this post, McSweeney's says "Happy Father's Day, fools" with a post about just what it takes to be a dad.

And the need to remember that you don't know the gender of the person in front of you unless they've told you, which means a lot of habits that people have about gendering people based on things that don't actually say what their gender is need to be unlearned, both in person and in things like describing the contents of photos or other archival content.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

(no subject)

1. Texted my brother today, we're at least in agreement on most television shows. We both loved The Bear to little bitty pieces, and agree with The Atlantic Review which states as it's heading, Thank God for The Bear, this is the television show we all needed. "I can forgive The Bear almost anything, because it’s one of the few shows on television now still willing to wrangle with the mess of being human—with what it means to try to live differently."

The Bear was renewed for a fifth season. Yay.

I'm admittedly in the minority? (not on the Bear, it's very popular). As apparently is my brother. Perhaps we're related after all? Neither of us could get into or liked Severance (which is insanely popular with thirty and twenty-somethings), we're on the fence with Murderbot, and so-so on Foundation, it's pretty overwrought, although very pretty overall.

He asked about the Buffy Reboot, and I regaled him with my knowledge on it - then realized, damn, I'm like a frigging info-dump on some things, aren't I? Hope it's not too annoying?

2. Crazy Org is being amusingly and charmingly passive aggressive towards our current political situation, and in some ways aggressive when it needs to be. (It took the DOJ to court and won.) As I told my brother, say what you will about Crazy Org - it's a tough old agency, and much like the city it resides in - it can stand up in a fight, and mostly win.

This was how it ended an email regarding the upcoming fourth of July holiday:

"A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), The Declaration of Independence

Current Music: Marmozets, "Major System Error"

You think one plus seven seven seven makes two

I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to

rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.

"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.

Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.

Bleeding

Ugh

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A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

***

Link

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Ideas to block the current bill

There are 17 medical professionals in the current House of Representatives. 11 are Republicans. Trying to argue on most issues with the bill is difficult with such a tight deadline, but the one item most people -- including Congressional Representatives -- are reacting to negatively is the closure of Rural and Regional hospitals. This should be a negative for all of the Republicans, but the ones who understand what lack of medical provision can do should be especially ripe to listen, perhaps even be persuaded.

I live in Georgia. Rich McCormick is Georgia District 6, and I live in District 1. But he's more likely to respond to someone from the same state, especially if he has Senate or Gubernatorial ambitions in the future.

The list I found is through The Patients Action Network. If you are in a District with one of these Republican representatives, particularly if they specialize in Emergency or Family medicine, start calling and/or emailing. If you are in the same state, email them and let them know you have a long memory if they're thinking of statewide offices.

In the meantime, send support to the few Republicans in the House who have already voted against it and continue to oppose it. At the very least, let's make them miss their deadline for vacation.

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Yeah, I think this is my Hugo best novel pick. It was really good, really timely, fucking gross, and gave me nightmares. It's very much a confluence all of Tchaikovsky's quirks—rather darkly funny narrator, alien minds, and the particular type of resolution he goes for. All of those things happen to work for me quite a bit. This one reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Vandermeer but less nihilistic and I liked the characters more.

Currently reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was the only novel on the Hugo list where I'd never heard of the author or the book. I'm loving it so far though. It's a murder mystery set in a city where only engineered seawalls stop the things from Attack on Titan from demolishing the place every wet season. A noble is murdered in a mansion (not his mansion) via a tree growing through his body. The person charged with investigating the murder is an old autistic woman who doesn't leave her house so she gets a young man to be her eyes and ears. The murder mystery structure makes it rather different from not just this batch of nominees but the other award lists in general, which is also intriguing.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of 2000s middle-grade/YA novels with I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You by Ally Carter, the first book in the Gallagher Girls series, set at an all-girls boarding school for TEEN SPIES. As you can imagine, this was my jam in middle school; however, my primary emotion on re-reading this book as an adult was second-hand embarrassment, since main character Cammie (a superspy nepo baby, whose mom is the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women and whose dad died tragically on a top-secret mission) mostly puts the lessons learned in her Covert Operations class - that one man's trash is another's treasure trove of the first guy's secrets, how to build and maintain a cover story, etc. - to practical, if ill-advised, use by... stalking some cute normie boy and then sneaking out to go on dates with him. (I know, I know, this is a YA novel, but COMPLETE waste of an elite spy education, if you ask me.) The climactic sequence where Cammie and friends take their CoveOps practical final - a late-night heist, of course - was fun, though.

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Jeremy Greer

Of all the things to be grieving right now, this is a weird personal parasocial one. You have been warned.

( Jeremy Greer )

§rf§

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Everything you wanted to know about the Big Ugly Bill and were afraid to ask?

1. I feel I need to explain in detail how a Bill becomes a Law in the United States. Since a lot of people think now that the Senate passed the Big Beautiful (more like Butt-Ugly) Bill - it will now go to the House and voila, signed into Law. Uh, no, this is not how it works, folks.

But wait, another lawyer did it for me! To the tune of I'm only a Bill, just a little old bill...via School House Rock, which oversimplified it.

How A Bill Becomes a Law by Anne P. Mitchell

First and foremost: In order for a bill to be sent to the president to be signed into law the House and the Senate MUST pass *identical* versions of the bill! This is what we are seeing happen right now with the budget bill, the House originally passed their version and sent it to the Senate. The Senate made massive changes to it, then voted on that changed version just now, so now it goes back to the House. If the House makes ANY changes, then it goes back to the Senate for them to either vote on or make additional changes.

( Here is How a Bill Becomes a Law )

The process gives me hope. It did have a lot gutted from it. Also the Senate added 800 billion to the national debt. Meanwhile various States are in the process of passing laws to withhold federal taxes, since the federal government is not representing them in a fair and reasonable manner.

2. What is in the Big Butt-Ugly Bill aka the Big Beautiful Bill that the Senate Passed? (Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder apparently?)

Here's What got in and What got cut from the Big Butt-Ugly Bill

It went from 1000 pages to 940 pages.

In the bill: ( what stayed in the Bill )

On the Medicaid Cuts, what got in and got cut out of the bill:
( Read more... )

What is left out of the bill or was cut:

Public land sales
( what they were trying to do and why it was cut )

Excise tax on wind and solar, State AI provisions (The Senate stripped a provision barring states from regulating artificial intelligence (AI). )

For a more precise and total breakdown? Go HERE - The link is NY Times article via remove pay wall.

This tells you exactly what the Senate removed from the bill, changed, altered and left in and why.

Note they removed everything that wasn't budgetary related and broke the rules.

Example?

Measure to limit court contempt powers

The parliamentarian rejected a measure in the bill that would have made it harder for courts to enforce lawsuits against the Trump administration. The measure targeted preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued by federal judges against Trump’s executive orders and other directives. MacDonough argued that limiting courts’ ability to hold Trump in contempt violates Senate rules.

Go HERE for complete list of no-gos that can't be in the Bill at all

Note, it's still a controversial bill.

3. Want a way to help either in the US or out of the US?

We The People Defend provides information on how.

It's a non-profit site that provides emails with contact information, and instructions on how to go about contacting Senators, White House, Congress, Etc.

You don't have to do everything or anything at all. There's no pressure. But it helps explain how the law works and how to help change what is going on in a pro-active way.

So far, folks have managed to change a lot of things by doing this, so it is working.

If however, you are too pissed off like myself to rationally call and explain in a calm manner, you might want to hang back for a bit or do something else?

4. [ETA: Folks? Be mindful of my blood pressure and please knock off the defeatist talk or keep it out of my journal. I get we're all worried, scared and angry. But it does nobody any good, including you. And I honestly have enough troubles sleeping as it is. I'm on medication for anxiety. So be mindful and keep it to yourselves?]

Actually, Jay Kuo states all of this better than I can - so I'm reposting his words below:

"Folks, some real talk.
( Read more... )

What he said.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Home-for-now

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Social Media Note: Hey.Cafe

Just a reminder that Hey.Cafe exists. It's Canadian-based and Canadian-owned. It's an alternative to Twitter and the rest - however well-behaved they are - just in case.

My account is here:

https://hey.cafe/@dewline

Yes, I plan to try Gander as well once it opens up.

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other people's books

Books read, June 2025

Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.

The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what's become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who's going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the "Seven Wonders," and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say "basically" because it's deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it's one of them.)

I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who's responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there's a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation -- for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: hopeful

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Canada Day 158

As ever...

Entry tags:

books

Recent reading

Following a conversation with

sovay about formative mermaid media, spent the evening re-reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler - a 2003 middle-grade novel about a girl who discovers she can turn into a mermaid - to see how it holds up as a recommendation for a young reader 20+ years (oof) later. Emily's mermaid adventures include but are not limited to befriending another tweenage mermaid, exploring a sunken ship, and discovering that her long-lost father is a merman and sneaking into the underwater prison (!) where he's been languishing for the past 12 years (!!) for breaking the law against fraternization with humans (!!!). (Also, that her mom's memory of their relationship was wiped (!!!!) and their family friend the creepy lighthouse keeper has been an agent for the anti-human-fraternization king of the merfolk the whole time. (!!!!!)) So, yeah, the plot is kind of bananas, but it's charming and, most importantly, the descriptions of how cool it would be to swim in the ocean as a mermaid and explore kelp forests and sunken ships, etc., are great. Verdict: it holds up! I don't think I'd noticed as a kid how many of the throwaway minor (human) characters had punny or otherwise nautical names like "Sandra Castle" and "Mrs. Brig"; I definitely had never realized that the author is British and therefore the book presumably takes place in England rather than, like, Florida (as I'd pictured as a kid) or Maine (as I imagined it this time).

Made some progress in the Dune audiobook over the weekend; I'm through Book One (of three). Unfortunately, so far Book Two has mostly involved Paul being rude about his mom not being able to follow along with whatever Space Jesus logic-connections-as-revelation thing he has going on, which I'm finding less interesting than the Space Medici politics and backstabbing of the first third.