Vanishing world, mistraldespair, snow

I woke this morning to thick frost, and thick fog blanketing the fens, and had an atmospheric walk to the swimming pool at dawn. Everything is freezing, and there's a sense of the land being locked in a kind of frozen sleep. Matthias and I have three very busy weekends coming up, so we took advantage of this last bit of free time to do exactly what we wanted.

This has meant, as always, a good variety of activities — several times out at the gym/pool, daily yoga, take-away for dinner last night, a new-to-me Indonesian recipe for dinner tonight, a film on Saturday night, and lots of reading. We also did a little walk in the wintry sunshine today, looping down past the cathedral and along the river, pausing to look at the new exhibition in the local art gallery, and picking up Tibetan food from a market stall to eat while we had a couple of drinks in our favourite local bar/cafe. You can see a photoset on Instagram.

I've read two books this weekend: Foul Lady Fortune (Chloe Gong), a spin-off from her Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, and the first part of a multi-volume coffee table book history of the Caucasus (Christoph Baumer). The former moved the action into the early 1930s, dealing with the political turmoil in China as the Kuomintang and Communists tussled with each other and tried to cope with the looming threat of Japanese annexation. As a spy thriller, it's quite fun (if you ignore the implausibility of the fact that all the characters are teenagers), but I found myself frustrated by the fantasy elements, which felt unnecessary — it could have stood on its own as a work of historical fiction. It's also got some really distractingly glaring copy-editing errors. The second book is a very sweeping, broad-brush approach to the history of the region, starting in pre-historical times and concluding in the twelfth century, and my overall impression is that the people living in this part of the world seem to have been eternally cursed by their extremely unfortunate geographical location — always treated as some great power's 'buffer zone' or 'sphere of colonial influence.'

As I mentioned above, Matthias and I also watched a film last night — this time The Pale Blue Eye, which is a piece of gothic horror involving Edgar Allan Poe teaming up with a private detective to solve a series of grisly murders taking place at West Point military academy in the 1830s. The film has really bad reviews, but I actually thought it was quite fun, at least for the first 3/4 — there's an unfortunate twist at the end that felt really unnecessary. Bizarrely for a film set in the United States, the entire cast appears to be British.

I'll leave you with a handful of interesting links.

I enjoyed this interview with Sarah Michelle Gellar. I'd had no intention of watching Wolf Pack (because a) I bailed on Teen Wolf after three seasons and b) Jeff Davis), but this interview is testing my resolve!

vriddy always gathers fantastic collections of links relating to online platforms, fannish communities, and similar issues, and the latest batch is no different. I particularly appreciated this post by elwinfortuna about warning signs of fannish cults/scammers/grifters. I find it grimly dispiriting that not only can I think of at least five or six notorious people from back in the day to whom these warning signs apply, there are also several current fannish grifters of whose existence the post reminded me. Fandom's susceptibility to this sort of thing is depressingly eternal.

Because I don't want to end this post on such a low note, I will conclude by reminding everyone about once_upon_fic, which is still accepting nominations. If you like fairy tale/mythology/folklore retellings, this is the exchange for you!

I hope you've all been having nice weekends.