Stitching up the circuit board
Mar. 24th, 2024 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today is the first time this year that I have dared to hang my laundry out on the line in the garden — and I was delighted to discover (as I can see into the gardens of all the houses in our row of terraces) that almost every single neighbour had chosen to do the same. It's such a sign of the changing of the seasons, and it lifts my spirits every time.
After going to the gym on Saturday morning, and wrangling the landscapers who are continuing to work on our back garden, I spent the afternoon and evening in Cambridge with Matthias. The place was its usual chaotic weekend zoo; the centre of town was packed to the hilt both with tourists and with swarms of postgraduate students processing through the streets in gowns on their way to graduate, then spilling out into every restaurant, cafe and bar to celebrate with their families. Thankfully, Matthias and I had booked ahead in advance, and had an excellent dinner at the new high(ish)-end Japanese restaurant in town, enjoying sharing platters of sushi and sashimi, and cocktails.
We headed back to Ely fairly early on (hilariously, one shouty group of women on a hen party returning from London spilled off the train at Cambridge, to be replaced by another shouty group of women on a hen party returning from Cambridge, like some kind of one in-one out policy), and swung by our favourite cafe/bar for a nightcap, chatting to the women who run the place and slowly winding down.
Today, I've mostly been cooking, reading, doing laundry and so on, although I also managed to do quite a bit of work on my![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
once_upon_fic assignment, and feel I've navigated my way through the thorns with which my recipient's prompts initially presented me. It should be much smoother going from now on.
It's been a good and varied reading week: some old favourites, this very good short story, which I saw recommended in a Dreamwidth friend's locked post as something doing something incredibly clever with the experience of being an immigrant (as an immigrant myself, I agree emphatically: this is exactly what it's like).
I also finished one new-to-me book, More Perfect (Temi Oh), a near-future dystopian novel which retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a setting in which human beings are physically and mentally connected to the internet (and to each other) through neural implants, to the extent that no one with such implants is able to experience the mental privacy of their own minds. Obviously, this extreme surveillance state seems normal (and even desirable) to people who have never experienced anything different, and the book is in some ways the dawning realisation that their safe, interconnected utopia is a horrifying dystopia in which individual freedom is impossible and the sense of community which people's permanently connected minds promises is nothing but a sham.
The book does some things very well: Oh's depiction of the experiences of the children and grandchildren of immigrants (the immense pressure to succeed, the weight of expectation), and allusions to real-world British political events (there is a moment in which a group of people is watching the results of a contentious referedum be counted, with the slow realisation that their side has lost that is so visceral and painful to read as someone who lived through Brexit that I found it almost physically excruciating) are pitch perfect, as is the near-future technology and the logical societal consequences of its widespread adoption. However, some aspects of the worldbuilding didn't work for me: the constant references to present-day pop culture (the notion that teenagers in the 2040s and 2050s would all be familiar with Harry Potter or Beyonce struck me as unlikely), and the trope in which a public, worldwide revelation of the truth of people's oppression is enough to trigger a peaceful revolution and usher in a new dawn of civil liberties and democracy (beloved of 21st-century dystopian YA, naive at best in my opinion, especially given the current power of disinformation in our own times). I suppose in essence I recommend the book, with some serious reservations.
I'll close this post with a link I came across viavriddy: Cybersafety and Privacy (Particularly in Online Fandom) by thebiballerina, with lots of sensible tips. It's a good reminder that we owe no one in any context (whether online, in person at work, or in person in social settings) full access to every facet of our lives, and keeping some of those boundaries intact is a good idea from a practial, personal safety perspective.
It feels as if Sunday is almost over, but there are still a few more hours of daylight (and laundry-drying), and time to finish my current book, eat a quick dinner, and then head off with Matthias to watch The Holdovers at the community cinema, which will be a nice, cosy way in which to close the weekend. I hope you've all also been having an enjoyable couple of days.
After going to the gym on Saturday morning, and wrangling the landscapers who are continuing to work on our back garden, I spent the afternoon and evening in Cambridge with Matthias. The place was its usual chaotic weekend zoo; the centre of town was packed to the hilt both with tourists and with swarms of postgraduate students processing through the streets in gowns on their way to graduate, then spilling out into every restaurant, cafe and bar to celebrate with their families. Thankfully, Matthias and I had booked ahead in advance, and had an excellent dinner at the new high(ish)-end Japanese restaurant in town, enjoying sharing platters of sushi and sashimi, and cocktails.
We headed back to Ely fairly early on (hilariously, one shouty group of women on a hen party returning from London spilled off the train at Cambridge, to be replaced by another shouty group of women on a hen party returning from Cambridge, like some kind of one in-one out policy), and swung by our favourite cafe/bar for a nightcap, chatting to the women who run the place and slowly winding down.
Today, I've mostly been cooking, reading, doing laundry and so on, although I also managed to do quite a bit of work on my
once_upon_fic assignment, and feel I've navigated my way through the thorns with which my recipient's prompts initially presented me. It should be much smoother going from now on. It's been a good and varied reading week: some old favourites, this very good short story, which I saw recommended in a Dreamwidth friend's locked post as something doing something incredibly clever with the experience of being an immigrant (as an immigrant myself, I agree emphatically: this is exactly what it's like).
I also finished one new-to-me book, More Perfect (Temi Oh), a near-future dystopian novel which retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a setting in which human beings are physically and mentally connected to the internet (and to each other) through neural implants, to the extent that no one with such implants is able to experience the mental privacy of their own minds. Obviously, this extreme surveillance state seems normal (and even desirable) to people who have never experienced anything different, and the book is in some ways the dawning realisation that their safe, interconnected utopia is a horrifying dystopia in which individual freedom is impossible and the sense of community which people's permanently connected minds promises is nothing but a sham.
The book does some things very well: Oh's depiction of the experiences of the children and grandchildren of immigrants (the immense pressure to succeed, the weight of expectation), and allusions to real-world British political events (there is a moment in which a group of people is watching the results of a contentious referedum be counted, with the slow realisation that their side has lost that is so visceral and painful to read as someone who lived through Brexit that I found it almost physically excruciating) are pitch perfect, as is the near-future technology and the logical societal consequences of its widespread adoption. However, some aspects of the worldbuilding didn't work for me: the constant references to present-day pop culture (the notion that teenagers in the 2040s and 2050s would all be familiar with Harry Potter or Beyonce struck me as unlikely), and the trope in which a public, worldwide revelation of the truth of people's oppression is enough to trigger a peaceful revolution and usher in a new dawn of civil liberties and democracy (beloved of 21st-century dystopian YA, naive at best in my opinion, especially given the current power of disinformation in our own times). I suppose in essence I recommend the book, with some serious reservations.
I'll close this post with a link I came across via
vriddy: Cybersafety and Privacy (Particularly in Online Fandom) by thebiballerina, with lots of sensible tips. It's a good reminder that we owe no one in any context (whether online, in person at work, or in person in social settings) full access to every facet of our lives, and keeping some of those boundaries intact is a good idea from a practial, personal safety perspective. It feels as if Sunday is almost over, but there are still a few more hours of daylight (and laundry-drying), and time to finish my current book, eat a quick dinner, and then head off with Matthias to watch The Holdovers at the community cinema, which will be a nice, cosy way in which to close the weekend. I hope you've all also been having an enjoyable couple of days.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-24 03:54 pm (UTC)I guess my assumption is that the longer Rowling goes on and the more unhinged she becomes, the more likely it will be that people will at least have heard something. She's starting to dabble in Holocaust denial now, so I'm afraid we may be very far from the bottom of the depths she can sink to and the full impact on her public image and her work's legacy.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-24 04:49 pm (UTC)