[sticky entry] Sticky: Introduction post

Nov. 28th, 2020 03:58 pm
dolorosa_12: (Default)
My name is Ronni. I'm an Australian woman, in my forties, and live in the UK.

Elsewhere online, you can find me at:

Wordpress: [wordpress.com profile] dolorosa12 (long-form reviews)
Archive of Our Own: [archiveofourown.org profile] Dolorosa (fic)
Instagram: [instagram.com profile] ronnidolorosa (photos of nature, food, drink, books, people)
Goodreads: Dolorosa (book logging, mainly for my own records)

Please feel free to add me on any of these platforms. If I don't recognise your name (i.e. if it doesn't match your Dreamwidth name), I will not add you back unless you let me know who you are.

Friending policy

Feel free to subscribe and add as you like. I generally won't add people back unless they introduce themselves (or unless we met in a friending meme or similar), so please do feel free to say hello, either in the comments of this post, or elsewhere.

Transformative works policy

I give blanket permission for anyone to remix, translate, or create fanworks inspired by any of my fic, as long as my fic is acknowledged and linked to. There's no need to ask me for permission, although it would be great to have a link to anything you create.

Linking policy

Almost all of my posts are public, and please feel free to link these public posts (with attribution) on your own journal or Dreamwidth comms.

A bit about me )
dolorosa_12: (Default)
Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, femslash, het and slash, although I have a slight preference towards femslash, het, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read. You can also look at my Yuletide tag, which includes past letters, and recs posts of my previous gifts and other fic I've enjoyed in previous Yuletide colletions.

I have treating enabled on Ao3 and would be delighted to receive treats for any of my requests.

General likes )

DNWs )

Fandom-specific prompts:

Benjamin January mysteries — Barbara Hambly )

The Bone Season — Samantha Shannon )

Cupid and Psyche (Metamorphoses - Apuleius) )

Galax Arena series )

The Iliad - Homer )


Legendsong series )

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay )


The Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks )

Romanitas trilogy — Sophia McDougall )

Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin (Grimm) )

The Queens of Innis Lear — Tessa Gratton )

Sally Lockhart series )

Six of Crows series — Leigh Bardugo )

Space Demons trilogy )

Spinning Silver — Naomi Novik )

Sunshine — Robin McKinley )

Winternight series — Katherine Arden )

Tochmarc Étaíne )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.
dolorosa_12: (lavender)
As I mentioned in my previous post, Matthias was away for the weekend (his team didn't win, but a good time was had by all), and I basically spent the past two days doing exactly what I wanted. The weather was glorious and summery, and other than two hours in fitness classes in the gym yesterday in a studio where the air conditioning was broken (one of the other women in my class dubbed it 'bikram zumba,' and she was not wrong), everything was relaxing and good.

I went to the market, and bought flowers, and loads of fresh fruit and vegetables. I feasted on cherries and strawberries and asparagus and iced coffee, and cooked Singaporean food for tonight's dinner. I pottered around in the garden, and started a reread of Isobelle Carmody's post-apocalyptic YA series, in which a bunch of teenagers with X-Men style mutant abilities take on a totalitarian regime in a world nearly destroyed by nuclear catastrophe. (This was a huge favourite of mine as a child, but I haven't picked it to reread for some time. I still like it for nostalgia's sake, but I can see the flaws more clearly now.) I started this morning with a 1km swim at 8am when the pool opened, then picked up pastries at the bakery and sat watching the wood pigeons through the kitchen window. My laundry was thoroughly air-dried in the wind.

Next week is the start of a series of visitors arriving to stay with us, and various bits of national and international travel, so it was good to have those two days of rest, free of stress and mental clutter. Now Matthias is home, and the weekend is winding down.
dolorosa_12: (teen wolf)
Matthias is in Berlin, for reasons that will resonate if you’re a fan of specific sports teams (a character trait that passed me by), but is also just something straight out of an underdog Hollywood sports movie. He’s been a fan of his local football (soccer) team for his whole life — unless you know Germany and German football well you won’t have heard of the city or the team — which is generally pretty thankless. Comparably, they’re not a very good team, and yo-yo back and forth between the first, second and third divisions.

This year they are in the third division which is like only a few steps above being amateurs. But the third division also competes with the higher division teams for the cup (although normally in practice the lower division teams get knocked out early on by better teams), and this year, for some bizarre reason, his team beat the then-highest first division team in the cup quarter final. (To translate this to your own context, think of any competitive thing you can think of, and imagine a semi amateur person/team beating the best professional person/team in that event, that’s how unlikely this was.)

Everyone thought it was just a fluke, but then they won their semi final as well, so now they’re competing in the cup final in Berlin today. If they win this they get to compete at European level next year against all the more famous European teams you might have heard of, while still only being in the second division (since they were promoted due to also doing well within their third division competition, but you can’t be promoted from third to first division). It’s very unlikely they win today, but if they do, Matthias always said he would go to their first ever European game, no matter where it was (so, have fun going to Baku, I guess).

He's currently hanging out in Berlin with his sister and nephew, and waiting to meet up with their other friends, having travelled — since it was bizarrely cheaper and more convenient — via Poznan in Poland (where he stayed with another of our friends overnight) and an early train from Poznan to Berlin this morning.

Another nice thing that's happening alongside all this is that the local MP from their home region — knowing that lots of families would be in Berlin for the game — arranged to give a free tour of the German parliamentary building for a bunch of children who were there for the game, including our nephew.

The whole thing is quite surreal.
dolorosa_12: (bluebells)
I feel as if the weekend has somewhat run away from me, but, looking back, I do seem to have got a lot done.

Saturday was gloriously sunny, so once I returned from the gym, I spent quite a bit of the afternoon sitting out on the deck, finishing my book — Bread and War (Felicity Spector) — under the pear and cherry trees. The book is basically Spector travelling around Ukraine, eating lots of delicious food, served to her by remarkable people working in incredibly difficult circumstances ) Don't read this book when hungry, or you will find yourself craving vast piles of food!

On Saturday night, I laid the coffee table with lots of food on which to graze, and Matthias and I watched Eurovision. As I said previously, all our local friends who used to join us for watch parties have moved away, so it was just the two of us, although I had additional company in the form of the group chat of my friends from the Philip Pullman fan forum. Those of us taking part in the conversation were a true pan-European Eurovision crowd: a Welsh person in south Wales, a British person living in Switzerland (but in Geneva, not watching from the audience in Basel), a Finnish person in Helsinki, and two Australians living in England. We all universally agreed that the intermission mashup Käärijä/Baby Lasagne song was better than every competing song, and would have voted for it if we could!

Today, after a slow start, Matthias and I spontaneously decided to do a 5km circular walk, which includes the park by the cathedral, a long stretch by the river (where we saw vast numbers of water birds, and a herd of cows lying placidly in the grass), and then a winding journey through the suburban streets of the town. This at least helped me feel that I'd done some movement for the day.

After our return, I curled up in the living room and read my way through the [community profile] once_upon_fic collection. I didn't think I had the time to participate in this exchange this year, but I've enjoyed reading the contributions of others. I'll stick a few recs behind a cut.

Recs here )

I'll leave you with one final link: the rather cool news that the children's picture book written by one of my undergraduate friends from Australia has been selected for the Australian National Simultaneous Storytelling initiative, which is pretty amazing.
dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin crowd 2)
Back in the day (by which I mean over a decade ago, when Youtube's algorithm just showed you music it thought you might like if you were using it without being logged in, as opposed to shoving horrific far right podcasters and video essayists in your face, which is what it does now), I stumbled on [youtube.com profile] MrSuicideSheep's epic, four-part 'Taking You Higher' progressive house mix. I edited the final stages of my PhD to this music, wrote numerous job applications, and cleaned and cooked repeatedly with this on in the background. Many of the close to 100 systematic reviews for which I've done the database searches (a fiddly task that takes about half a day when it's easy, and multiple additional days longer when it's hard) were done to this soundtrack. I've discovered so much music I like through those mixes, and I'm very certain that multiple Dreamwidth posts have titles taken from some of the included songs.

I follow the guy (I'm assuming gender based on the 'Mr' in the Youtube handle, but obviously I have no idea) on social media, and a few weeks back, he started teasing that Part 5 of this mix was coming soon — after a pause of nine years. When it dropped, the comments were full of rapturous gratitude from people who had clearly used the previous four parts as the soundtrack to their lives in much the same way as I had. They reminisced about the stages of the lives at which they were when the earlier parts had come out, and how far they had come (graduations, marriages, children, new jobs, moving cities or countries, etc) since then. It was just such a nice moment of warmth and community, with people coming together across continents and oceans to celebrate music that had meant so much to them, and rejoice in a new addition to that stream of sound that connected them all. In that space, in that moment, everyone put everything aside, and just united in the sheer, earnest love of music.

The new mix itself is 4.5 hours long!
dolorosa_12: (rainbow)
It's the best week of the year (as long as you ignore virtually everything else that's going on in the world): seven days of that indescribable mix of camp and earnest and songs and staging that have to be seen to be believed that is Eurovision. I love it.

This year has it all. We've got two beverage-themed comedy songs. We've got two songs about female orgasms belted out by two different divas (both of whom were asked to tone it down in various ways, and essentially passive aggressively shrugged and continued capering and gyrating on their giant gold climactically firework-shooting microphone prop/stage trapeze). Latvia sent a folk polyphony group of forest spirits whose entire song and aesthetic could have been lifted wholesale from pretty much any Cirque du Soleil stage band. The Polish singer last competed in Eurovision in the 1990s and has returned to sing in front of a fantasy backdrop (dragons and all) surrounded by a mixed gender group of backing dancers dressed in what I can only describe as centurian fetishwear, all wearing the highest stiletto heels imaginable.

Sweden sent a comedy band of Swedish-speaking Finns (inevitably singing about saunas). Germany sent two Austrians. Ireland sent a Norwegian, singing a dance tune about Laika the Soviet space dog (making this the second time by my count that a Norwegian singer/group submitted a Laika-themed dance song for Eurovision). San Marino sent one of the members of Eiffel 65.

Somehow all of this makes sense.

So, today's prompt is to use Eurovision as a starting point and talk about whatever takes your fancy. If you're watching this year, do you have any favourites or predictions? What are your favourite acts or moments from years gone by? If you're from a country that participates, does it get into the Eurovision spirit in any particular way (or does the whole thing pass by virtually ignored)? Do you have any preferred setting or format for watching? Etc.
dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin dancing feet)
This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.
dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin dancing feet)
You may recall that in my previous post about Saturday's Australian federal election, I said that after the 2022 election, our right wing parties, upon losing, refused to accept that they had done anything wrong, and responded essentially with 'are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong.'

They now appear to be doubling and tripling down on this after losing the following election.

The Guardian decided to engage in a bit of pointing and laughing at the spectacle of a bunch of ghastly Sky News talking heads blaming the voters for failing to embrace their toxic offerings. Andrew Bolt literally came right out and said it:

By 9.46pm the rightwing commentator had penned a piece on the Herald Sun blaming the Australian electorate for the Coalition loss.

“No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong,” Bolt wrote.

The reason for the loss? It was because the Liberal party “refused to fight the ‘culture wars’”.


And I'll just bask in the schadenfreude of the article's closing lines:

Former Labor minister Graham Richardson, who hasn’t lost his talent for the one-liner, said the Liberals have got to ask themselves where do we go now?

“We’ve tried Dutton - what else have we got? Well not much because if Angus Taylor is the answer, it’s a stupid question.”


The comments section is full of people boggling at the inability of Sky's brains trust to read the room.
dolorosa_12: (garden pond)
This past weekend was a long weekend in England, and Matthias and I went down to Devon to visit our friends C and L, and their two small daughters (aged four and six). We've been friends for a very long time; Matthias and L were best men at each other's respective weddings, and Matthias is godfather to their older daughter, but for various reasons, we haven't seen each other in person for a very long time. Thankfully, things worked out, such that we were able to stay with them from Friday evening until Monday afternoon.

It was a lovely few days. The weather cooperated (not always a given in that part of the world), and we spent a lot of time wandering around in pretty National Trust gardens, fruitlessly assisting the daughters as they waved a metal detector over the sand at a beach (although they had more luck filling buckets with shells), and answering endless questions that started with the word 'why'. It's actually relatively easy to find activities that suit both adults and small children, provided you're able to go outdoors, and this past weekend worked out well in that regard. (The two girls are very good walkers, particularly as their parents have a sneaky trick on any walk of giving the children a bucket each, and asking them to collect the ten 'most interesting things' they find on the walk.)

It was not exactly restful (I was exhausted every night), but I had a wonderful time. You'll get a feel for things via this photoset — golden sun, lush green vegetation, clouds hanging like cotton wool in the blue sky.
dolorosa_12: (teen wolf)
This is quite possibly the longest I've gone after the result of an election in one of my countries is known before writing up a post in response. This time, it was for good reasons: I was away visiting friends over the weekend (about which more in a later post), and, after a fretfully sleepless night of anxiety about the result, I woke up on Saturday morning UK time to find that my fellow Australian citizens had done me proud.

This is the first election since I turned eighteen in which I was not eligible to vote; I lost the right due to living overseas for too long, so I contributed literally nothing to the outcome.

Non-Australians wanting further context about our electoral system can read my post from the last election in 2022, which goes into more detail about all these things, but the crucial and decisive factors to my mind are: a) mandatory voting and b) preferential (ranked choice) voting, which lead to more moderate politics, and make it impossible for a party to win by appealling to a narrow base and assuming low turnout will do the rest for them. (I can only remember a single election in my lifetime that was won on what I'd term culture war issues.) I'm happy to answer further questions about Australian democracy, political parties, etc in the comments if you're interested.

In 2022, we voted in a Labor government on a razor thin majority after a decade of centre-right conservative government. I commented at the time that our centre-right parties (they always campaign and govern as a two-party coalition, and do not field candidates in 'each other's' electorates) had a choice: do some soul-searching, work out what went wrong, and try to course-correct in three years' time, or the opposite, which I termed as follows:

'Are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong'


I'm pleased to report that they did the latter, and, after a few tense months where it appeared this might have paid off, it became apparant that Australians do not currently want culture warring right-wing populism, and responded by reelecting Labor in an absolutely massive landslide. Peter Dutton, the creepy, far-right culture-warring opposition leader made history, but not in the way he wanted: he became the first opposition leader in Australia to lose his seat in an election. (The schadenfreude on Australian politics social media was absolutely off the charts.)

The two of my sisters who are adults are what we'd term in Australia 'true believers': die-hard Labor supporters, party members who spent this election as volunteers for their local Labor candidates' campaigns. Sister #1 was even briefly asked to stand as the candidate, but ultimately ruled it out, instead throwing her efforts behind the woman who did stand, in an unwinnable electorate where it was important to have someone from Labor on the ballot to make it harder for the conservative candidate to win against the 'teal' independent who was standing. Sister #2 appears to have run the social media accounts for her own Labor MP who was facing a very tough uphill battle for reelection which was ultimately successful. Both sisters are, as you can imagine, absolutely ecstatic.

The very first piece of legislation the reelected Labor government is going to pass will reduce student debts by 20 per cent.

I can't claim to have contributed anything to this result, but I've been floating on air for the past four days as a consequence.

I'll close this post with a few commentary pieces whose analysis teases out some of the issues that were in play this election.

Annabel Crabb on Dutton's toxicity with female voters

Crabb again, on the failure of culture wars to affect the result

The Murdoch press no longer has the power to sway voters

Edited to add two articles about the lengths to which the Australian electoral commission will go to ensure all voters have their ballots, and have no difficulties voting: one and two.

And, finally, one link and another, which provide context for the title of this post, and my 2022 election post as well.

A massive round of applause for all Australian voters.
dolorosa_12: (city lights)
I have a backlog of links, I have about half an hour free, so I thought I'd make a linkpost.

Japan built a 3D-printed train station in six hours, and it was pretty cool.

A Rebecca Solnit essay which sums up a phenomenon that I've been describing for several years as '(geo)political abuse apologism.'

Marie Le Conte writes up her worst experiences living in shared rented flats, and while I've had some interesting sharehouse experiences, this whole thing is making me very relieved that I never, ever had to share with strangers in London.

A look back at the stealth influence of Robyn's 'Dancing on My Own,' fifteen years on. (It's not even my favourite song from Body Talk, that's how good that album is.)

Every year, since I first saw author Amal El-Mohtar talking about it in her newsletter, I've said I was going to make lilac syrup, and every year I've failed to do so. This article talks about the spring when suddenly lilac syrup became a craze that swept the internet.

Several of these articles were free to me to read, but may end up being paywalled for you, and if so, I apologise.

Edited to add:


[community profile] 3weeks4dreamwidth is celebrating Dreamwidth's anniversary!
Come join in for fun, memes, activities, and more ♥
dolorosa_12: (persephone lore olympus)
There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing [instagram.com profile] oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.
dolorosa_12: (space)
It's a public holiday, and the better part of a four-day weekend stretches blissfully ahead of me. I'm not in Cambridge at work, and therefore I'm able to pick up these Friday open threads again. Today's prompt is inspired by all the post-apocalyptic science fiction I've been reading recently (about which more in a later post). And the question is:

What is your favourite example of technology of the future that you've encountered in a science fiction novel/film/TV series/etc, and which seemed ridiculously dated by the time you'd encountered it.

Mine is an example which warms my librarian heart, from Victor Kelleher's The Beast of Heaven. This is a novel set in the distant future after a nuclear apocalypse has wiped out almost all life on Earth. The remaining people keep (an imperfect) knowledge of past human civilisation alive due to the fact that one person takes on a semi-sacerdotal role (part priest, part keeper of history and lore, part bardic reciter of this history and lore) due to being trained in the ability to read. And where are these surviving historical records to be found? In the advanced, ubiquitous, certain-to-survive-nuclear-apocalypse format of ... microfilm!

I find this delightful. It was already charmingly retro when I first read the book for my secondary school English class in 1999, and it's even more so with every year.

What about you?
dolorosa_12: (summer sunglasses)
This weekend has been absolutely glorious, albeit somewhat tiring. The sky is cloudless and cornflower blue, the breeze is warm and gentle, and Matthias and I have made the first efforts towards getting the garden into shape this year. I planted poppies, marigolds and cornflowers in the raised beds, he mowed the lawn for the first time since late autumn, and we both sealed the deck with two layers of oil — messy, tedious work that made my legs ache, but that I'll appreciate later on. Here's a photoset of various blossoming fruit trees and other flowers in our garden.

Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.

Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!

Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).

I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.

The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.

The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).
dolorosa_12: (garden pond)
Today it's so windy that one of the sheets I have hanging out to dry has blown off the line repeatedly. Although this is somewhat frustrating, the combination of the heat and the wind suggests this laundry will be dry in several hours. Everything is sunlit and floral, and accompanied by a chorus of birdsong, which feels audibly more present than at other times of the year. Yesterday I got my first hot cross bun from the bakery down the road: a highlight of the year which (unlike supermarkets, which start selling hot cross buns practically on 26th December) is possible only for about two or three weeks in the lead-up to Easter.

It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff from [personal profile] peaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.

This week's reading )

Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.
dolorosa_12: (seedlings)
I've been hoarding links over the past week — mainly via the same two sources, which are blogs of meaty-but-light-touch, longform criticism, pop cultural commentary, and book reviews — the kind of stuff that's what I most miss about the old-school, pre-social media internet, and which I was delighted to discover still exists, if not in quite the same volume or prevalence.

First up, two reviews specifically of Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and more broadly commenting on the 'cosy' SFF trend. I'm not sure I'd be quite so firm in my conclusions (sometimes, you just want to read gentle, low-stakes fiction, and that's okay), but I thought both made some interesting, and persuasive points. Review number one is by Liz Bourke, and review number two is by Wesley Osam.

Also by Osam, this post on extractive AI, and a review of Tone (Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno), which is another reminder that I really do need to read through Samatar's entire bibliography.

If any of you contributed to the Kyiv Independent's fundraiser for small local media outlets in Ukraine (in the wake of the US government's freezing of international aid; I posted about this a few months back), you might be interested to know the results of your contributions: there's an update on the Gofundme page outlining all the fantastic things the three organisations (in the frontline regions of Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv) have been able to achieve thanks to the donations.

I've also just really been appreciating Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which helps me continue to feel like I'm not losing my mind in this terrible, unmoored world, but I assume that anyone who vaguely shares my politics is already aware of it.
dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
Four shows finished this month, as always a mixture of quality and genre.

  • Escaping Utopia, a documentary about the New Zealand-based Gloriavale fundamentalist Christian cult. Like almost all cults, the arc of this one's existence (founded in the 1960s by idealists seeking utopian communal living, a beacon for vulnerable drifters, the inevitable sharp turn towards physical and sexual abuse and financial exploitation) is familiar, with the usual threats against those wishing to leave that they will be blocked from any contact with their families. The documentary truly succeeds in the emphasis it places on the network of people — both ex-cult members, and univolved individuals (such as the middle-aged couple who live in the farm next door) — working diligently to help convince people to leave Gloriavale, and provide safe haven once they've made the decision to do so. I found their dedication to this long, difficult task truly impressive.


  • Towards Zero, a three-part adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. I haven't seen the original, but judging from comments by people who have, it took massive liberties, to the detriment of the story. While the basic shape of the narrative — a murder takes place in a stately home on the southwest coast of England, with a collection of guests who each have plausible motives for being the murderer — is solid enough, some of the characterisation felt unearned or implausible, as if it had been carried over from a preexisting series of books/shows about the same characters and audiences were expected to have seen/read them. All in all, not a strong adaptation in my opinion.


  • Dope Girls, a miniseries set in the seedy underbelly of London's Soho in the aftermath of World War I, with various bar owners, nightclub dancers, gang leaders, and corrupt police struggling to get by, and to navigate the labyrinthine interpersonal politics of their circumscribed world. The magnitude of the post-war death and trauma hovers, unacknowledged, over all proceedings. To me, this felt as if it occupied the overlapping centre of the Venn diagram of Peaky Blinders and Babylon Berlin, while never quite reaching the heights of either. It was still very enjoyable, however.


  • Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries about a 13-year-old boy accused of a classmate's murder. I'm always dubious going into something with so much hype, but in this case, the hype is well and truly justified — this is an early contender for my best TV show of the year. Each of the show's four episodes consists of a single shot, and they follow the progress of the case into three institutional settings (police station when the boy is arrested and charged, secondary school where the police attempt to interview classmates and teachers, secure facility where the boy is held before trial and interviewed by a psychologist) and one domestic (the boy's family home and local town, where his parents and older sister are trying to deal with the fallout of the accusation). It reminded me a bit of Line of Duty, in that there is a lot of focus and detail on institutional rules and procedures, and it's very tightly focused on a small handful of characters, with the plot and emotional developments moved along by verbose, almost theatre-style, dialogue-heavy interactions. Spoilers ) The writing is exquisitely good, and the cast is fantastic, in particular the child actor playing the accused teenage boy — everything hinges on him, and the success or failure of this kind of show was dependent on the strength of the actor in this role, which he plays with extraordinary talent and perception. I cannot recommend this series highly enough, although it's not a cheerful topic.
  • dolorosa_12: (bluebells)
    This weekend was a long weekend, as I was on leave on Thursday and Friday — booked ages ago in order to make use of Matthias's birthday present to me. (My birthday is in December close to Christmas, at which point all I did in celebration was go out to dinner in London the night before we travelled to Germany for Christmas with my in-laws; having the 'main' celebration several months later was very deliberate.)

    The present was an overnight stay at this extremely nice spa hotel in the Cotswolds. This is very much not the sort of place at which we can afford to stay as a regular thing, but as a one-off to celebrate a big birthday, it was a fantastic treat. The package we got included breakfast the next day, and a tasting menu dinner.

    We travelled by train to London, and then onward to Moreton-in-Marsh on Thursday, where we were collected by a very chatty Hungarian taxi driver, who drove us through a series of picturesque villages to the hotel, which was itself on the edge of another picturesque village. It was the sort of place that had log fires in almost every public space, copies of Country Life and House and Garden in the rooms, and a room specifically to store muddy riding boots, which possibly tells you everything you need to know about the normal clientele. We arrived around 3pm, and then checked into our room, which had a bottle of champagne on ice for us. I spent the afternoon in the spa (which had an infinity pool, outdoor hot tub, sauna, steam room, and ice shower), and lounging around in the room in a robe, drinking champagne, before getting ready for dinner.

    This was an absolutely exquisite experience. They limit the tasting menu dinners to 12 guests at a time, and it starts with cocktails and canapes in one of the lounges, after which point everyone is taken into a little private kitchen, where they are seated in a horseshoe-shaped bench around the chefs' working area. We watched them prepare the food, and listened to them explain the courses, all of which were delicious. In such a setting you of course get to know your fellow diners, and by the end it felt as if we were all guests at the same dinner party, rather than four separate groups, even if I didn't feel that I had much in common with any of them. I also just really appreciate experiencing the work of people who are talented and creative and at the peak of their profession — cooking as an art and a craft.

    We left on Friday after breakfast, spending a bit of time wandering around Moreton-in-Marsh. I had remarked to Matthias the previous day that I could absolutely guarantee there would be posters up somewhere in the town in support of some form of NIMBY-ish campaign, and the town did not disappoint: rows of posters proclaiming that the town was opposed to 'overdevelopment.' (So not even any specific target of their ire, just against development in general. Absolute Peak Picturesque English Village.)

    We finished Friday with a few hours in London, during which time I picked up new leaf tea and coffee from my favourite little shop in Soho, and had a light dinner at [instagram.com profile] kinkally, a Georgian restaurant I'd been meaning to try for ages (highly recommended).

    Saturday was spent doing usual Saturday things, and today we were out for our monthly walk with the walking group: a muddy trek from Soham to Wicken and back again, during which time we saw many blossoming flowers and little dogs, and were accompanied by a melodious soundtrack of birdsong. It rained a bit, but not as much as I'd feared. I do love these Sunday walks — being outside, with people, for a few hours is incredibly good for the soul — but they do basically eat up all the day, and tire me out in a way that is disproportionate to their actual difficulty and distance.

    I have read some interesting books this week, but I'm already feeling quite mentally tired, so I'll try to save them for another post.
    dolorosa_12: (bluebells)
    This Saturday, the sky unfolded in a curve of clear blue, dotted with fluffy clouds and lit with golden light, and I felt no irritation at having woken at 5.30am for no reason. I hung the laundry outside, then headed off for my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then into Cambridge to get my hair cut, as mentioned in my previous post, and to refill all my spice jars at the organic food shop that does refills. I was happy to be able to bypass the centre of town; both the hairdresser and the organic shop are in clusters of shops in mainly residential areas, as opposed to the chaotic historic centre, which is always heaving with tourists on the weekend.

    Today has been colder and more grey, although there were still pockets of sunshine; Matthias and I walked along the river past all the houseboats (one of which was home to one of the biggest, fluffiest dogs I've ever seen, lounging on the deck like a placid white rug), then up into the market, where we bought fresh pasta for lunch. It was still pretty cold when sitting still, so we basically stayed out long enough to finish eating, then headed home. Now we're both curled up in our armchairs in the living room, reading and resting and generally gathering our breath before the new working week.

    This week I reread a truly ridiculous number of 1990s Australian YA novels, about which I won't bore you (if you're truly interested in the full list you can see them at my Goodreads account), as well as a fantastic pair of novellas.

    The first was The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar, a writer I've always felt was criminally underrated. Rather than try to sum up my own thoughts, I'm just going to link to this interview Samatar gave at the time of the book's publication, which gives a clear idea of what it's about and her intentions in writing it. In general, I've been spending a lot of time with Samatar and her thoughts, working my way through the conversations and essays linked on her website. I remember reading this piece from 2017 when she left social media entirely; returning to it in 2025 I'm struck even more forcefully by her perception and foresight.

    The second novella, The River Has Roots is described as a novel by its author Amal El-Mohtar, but given the print edition only runs to 110 pages or so, with lots of illustrations, I really don't feel that's entirely accurate. This is a book that I knew would be incredibly Relevant to My Interests on the strength of its description (a retelling and reclamation of the Two Sisters strand of folk songs), an impression that was confirmed when I actually read the book. It's hard to think of another instance in which so many of my favourite things are all pressed together within the covers of a single slim book: reclaimed, female-centric folk tales, weird bargains with supernatural beings, fairy otherworlds lying beside and above and underneath and within our own world, magic that is also song and is also riddles and is also language, and stories that put relationships between sisters, and relationships between women and bodies of water at their heart. I loved it to bits, and you couldn't have written anything more closely to my own specifications for the perfect story if you'd tried.

    Beyond books, it's been a weekend for films. On Friday night, I watched the Netflix documentary about Avicii, whose story was the typical music industry tragedy: an immensely talented individual, thrust into international superstardom (and astronomical financial success) at a very young age, unable to cope with it, given zero help from management or record label (since what he needed, of course, was to pause working and pause touring, and everyone was making too much money from his output to risk putting a stop to it), turning to the inevitable alcoholism and opioid addiction to keep going, until he couldn't keep going any more. The arc of such stories is, of course, more obvious in hindsight.

    Finally, last night Matthias and I watched Benedetta, an extremely male-gazey French-language film about lesbian nuns, and the turmoil and drama of life in their convent during a period when the bubonic plague was at its height. The film was allegedly drawing on real historical events and figures, but if so I can only assume it took great poetic license. I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

    And that's been the shape of my weekend so far.
    dolorosa_12: (champagne)
    I went into Cambridge after lunch today in order to get my hair cut, and witnessed quite possibly two of the peakest of Peak Saturday Train Experience™ ever. Bear in mind that this all happened within a roughly fifteen-minute period.

    1. A group of tipsy young women, wandering around my carriage in confusion, carrying a bottle of sparkling rosé and plastic cups, trying to find their friends (so the whole group could break open the wine), who were allegedly on the same train. The confusion arose because a) this was the final carriage and b) the women had supposedly already walked the entire length of the train.

    2. A group of young men who got on at Waterbeach, cracked open cans of lager, and attempted to drink their entire cans before arriving at Cambridge station (five minutes from Waterbeach). While this was going on, they talked with great earnestness and detail about a) what they were going to buy to preload before arriving at the pub (they finally settled on buying rum and Coke) and b) which pub they were going to go to (they finally settled on one of the roughest pubs in Cambridge, about which they also reminisced with great fondness about an altercation with the police they had had previously at the same pub).

    None of this was in any way obnoxious, and I found it almost endearing. I hope both groups went on to have enjoyable Saturdays.

    (The final alcohol-related event in the trifecta was the group of women — two middle-aged friends, and the young adult daughter of one of them — who showed up at the hairdresser to get their hair dyed and cut around 4pm with a bottle of prosecco that they'd bought at the nearby petrol station. As I was finishing up, they poured glasses for themselves, and my hairdresser — clearly this was going to be their Saturday evening out.)

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