Beyond Selidor

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 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.

I'm not doing snowflake_challenge this year, but the most recent prompt has been inspiring some wonderful responses on my reading page, so I thought I'd steal it for today's open thread:

What are some things that fandom has given you?

( My answer )

If you've already answered this question in your own journals due to snowflake_challenge, please feel free to link rather than rewriting the whole thing. And if you haven't answered this yet, please do tell me in the comments, if you have something to say.

I am back on Dreamwidth after two weeks' or so self-imposed internet blackout (as I warned was likely on my previous post). That meant no social media, no news websites, deleting Substack/etc emails from my inbox with subject lines left unread, no blogs, and no Dreamwidth — essentially no internet that wasn't essential for work, life admin, or communicating with loved ones.

It was essential for my mental health, and I feel a lot better for it.

I'm now slowly easing my way back in, with Dreamwidth being the first phase. (I'm not looking at real-time social media until December.) I'm planning to read back through entries from the past two days or so, but I'm not reading further back than that (and I will be skipping over any posts related to US politics or its global consequences, since my state of mind is still too fragile to handle it). If there's anything that happened (other than politics stuff) to which you want to draw my attention, please do feel free to link to the post in the comments (or if it's access-locked you can share via Dreamwidth messages).

Life without non-work internet has been a mixture of productive, relaxing, and strange. In bullet point form, the main things that happened:

I spent the last weekend in London for Matthias's birthday. We ate some great food, I met some of his work colleagues, and we went to two fantastic exhibitions (the Silk Road one at the British Museum, and the Medieval Women one at the British Library — both excellent, but so crowded).

I read a lot of books and watched a lot of TV.

I finished my Yuletide assignment and wrote one treat, with hopefully more treats finished soon.

Our boiler broke and leaked water all over our ceiling (it's in the loft of the house) for three weeks before the engineers were able to replace it. We had to keep going up into the loft via a very unstable ladder and bail out the leaks with buckets of water, and it was incredibly stressful.

I found being offline incredibly lonely. I mostly work from home, and Matthias generally doesn't get home until after 7pm, so often I will be on my own from 7am-7pm in the house with zero human interaction. I didn't realise the degree to which I relied on passive online presence for a sense of human connection until I cut it out completely, and found myself going out on lots of walks and running unnecessary errands to the bakery so as to have at least those tiny moments of interaction. It was weird.

I'm so glad to be back here with you all.

It's Friday. I have some nice things lined up this weekend, and only five more days of work for the year, which is an excellent feeling. Today, I've been thinking about all the wonderful online events I've attended recently.

I posted last weekend about having attended a series of panels and Q&As associated with the British Library's fantasy literature/film/etc exhibition from the comfort of my own living room. In addition, I went to a panel discussion on (geo)political, social and economic outlook for Kosovo, featuring experts and some opening remarks from the prime minister of the country — the event was in Pristina, but again I was able to watch it from home. And there's a Kate Elliott Q&A waiting on Youtube for me to watch, and a Zoom event with my favourite Ukrainian journalists coming up, and I watched a Zoom tutorial on how to make pancakes filled with poppyseeds and fried in butter during my lunchbreak, and so on and so on. You get the idea.

Obviously the concept of webinars and livestreams existed before the pandemic, but I feel that they really became mainstream during the first lockdowns, and have become established and accepted (I would almost say, in certain contexts, expected) modes of delivery. To my mind, this is a very good thing. Before this, if I'd wanted to attend most author events, at the least I would have had to travel to Cambridge, if not London, or have been barred from attending due to distance or time difference altogether (the number of north American events I've been able to attend now is staggering, and the willingness of Ukrainian journalists, activists, and people working in the culture sector to host online discussions in English is incredibly generous — I even participated in a couple of Zoom panel discussions with librarians working in an equivalent university setting in Kharkiv, and we all learnt a lot from each other). It just opened up the wider world in a way that is almost the opposite of what might have been expected in a time when large numbers of people were mandated to stay apart. It's definitely a change wrought by the pandemic that I'm very glad seems to have stuck.

What about you?

(Just a quick note to say that this is not the space to relitigate arguments about frustrations that masking, distancing, and isolating from others when ill did not survive after the point most governments declared the pandemic to be 'over'. Everyone knows how everyone on all sides of this issue feels, and I just don't feel it's a productive discussion to continue here. My prompting question is about positive changes that have been retained, so please stick to responses in that vein.)

A few hours ago today, as the result of diving down a particular internet rabbit hole, I was reminded of a song with which I'd been briefly obsessed, back during the years I was a PhD student and spent most of my days at home, alone, writing, listening to music — frequently the same songs on continuous repeat for hours. I don't own physical copies of music any more — I haven't owned a device that could play CDs for years, and I finally cleared out my 1990s CD collection from my mum's house when I was in Australia in April. I don't own digital copies either — I used to have an extensive digital library of uploaded CDs and playlists (about which, more later), but that vanished at some point when the hard drive of my current computer had to be replaced in 2014 — and I don't listen to stuff on Spotify either. So basically the way I listen to music now, and have done since 2014, is to go to Youtube, and search for the album, live set, song, or playlist, and play it.

Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.

These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.

Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.

Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).

I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.

I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.

I have, as usual, too many tabs open, so this post is an attempt to close them. I'm sharing a bunch of links, some for stuff on Dreamwidth, some elsewhere.

I appreciated this interview with Kate Elliott setting out the changes she's witnessed in the publishing industry across the three decades she's been a professional author.

I missed it this year (I don't like to start these kinds of things midway through), but the June Something is a fun set of posting prompts that I've been enjoying reading when they pop up in my feed, so I'll share the details in case anyone is interested.

sunshine_challenge is coming up for another year. I've taken part in the past, and may do so this year, although the timing coincides with my mum's annual visit. In any case, you can see all the prompts at the comm.

A couple of generous offers, spotted via various posts on my feed:

petra and others have offered to pay the OTW membership fees for anyone who isn't financially able to do so but would like to vote in the upcoming OTW Board elections. Details here.

theladyscribe is running a raffle to pay for a paid Dreamwidth account for the winner (or for someone else on the winner's behalf). Details here; the raffle closes on 24th June.

Finally, an old post by Amal El-Mohtar, a sort of unpacking of her thought processes behind her review of The Traitor Baru Cormorant (but really the thought processes that inform her entire way of engaging with works of fiction):

I’ve been watching conversations emerging — mostly on Twitter, mostly subtweeting, mostly in fits and starts — trying to categorize responses to the book according to some sort of ticky-box taxonomy of readers. I find this utterly repellent. Some people will suggest that only queer people have problems with the book, ergo it must write queer people’s lives poorly; others will counter with “well, Amal liked the book,” as if that could be the last word on the subject; still others will try to parse whether it’s my Brownness or my Queerness that has shaped my response, in pursuit of some sort of One True Response to the book.

[...]

But please, leave off trying to sort responses based on people’s identities. All that does is make queer people who disliked the book afraid of speaking up, queer people who did like the book worried about whether or not they’re sufficiently queer for the conversation, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. As if consensus is the default not to be deviated from instead of a thing that sometimes happens. There is no One True Opinion to be had. There’s only the one that’s right for you.

I don't share all of Amal El-Mohtar's marginalisations and identities, I've not read the book in question, but the things she articulates in that post get to the heart of the ways I try to approach fiction (orignal and transformative), and the conversations, people and communities that form around these works of fiction. I guess that's why the post has stayed with me all these years, and why it's something to which I keep returning.

I've got online platforms on the mind for various reasons — Twitter's speedrun towards oblivion, this griefbacon piece, Dreamwidth's 25th anniversary and the flurry of celebratory posts it's sparked, etc. For this reason, I decided to roll together a meme about my use of Dreamwidth, first spotted on misbegotten's blog, and this week's open thread prompt.

The prompt is this: if you feel so moved, answer the questions from this meme in your own journal, or respond to any of the individual questions in the comments on my post. Or just comment about anything you find interesting, timely, or worthy of note about online platforms, spaces or communities — being as general or as specific as you'd like.

( My answers to the meme questions )

I'm slowly recovering from my cold, helped by all my usual tricks: Burmese noodle soup with tamarind and lime, hot lemon, honey and ginger drink, sipped in front of the wood-burning stove, rest with books under the weighted blanket. I felt horrendous when I woke up this morning, but that seems to have gone away and my head feels clear.

I even managed to write nearly 1000 words of a Yuletide treat this morning! At the moment I have ideas for another two treats, one of which is almost certainly unlikely to hit the lower word count threshold for the main collection (and so will go in Madness), the other of which I will write only if I have time. So it's certainly an improvement on last year, where I managed only my assignment, but I'm doubtful I'll hit the heights of inspiration I reached for several years running where I wrote four or five fics per exchange. In any case, I'm pleased with this treat, and the words flowed faster than I expected.

I've finished two books this weekend, both of which were, in their way, about family, and its complicated, thorny web of expectation and obligation.

The first was The Red Scholar's Wake (Aliette de Bodard), which I've mentioned several times already. It's the latest in her Vietnamese-inspired spacefaring Xuya universe, and this novel involves a marriage of convenience between a sentient spaceship pirate leader, and a captive engineer who has certain technical skills of great use to the pirates. Various political tensions among the pirates, and across the galaxy more generally, must be navigated, and as with most of Aliette's fiction, there's a strong emphasis on the restoration of justice, motherhood, trauma recovery, and finding love and connection in the ruins of past relationships. There's also a lot of tea-making nerdery, and loving descriptions of Vietnamese food!

The second book was Not Good For Maidens (Tori Bovalino), a YA retelling of Christina Rosetti's 'Goblin Market' that ended up being perfect for the gloomy, stormy weather. It reminded me a bit of Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy — books set in a slantwise version of England where magic presses up against the everyday world, in which certain families fight an endless supernatural battle, and in which a tangled web of lies and family secrets finally become revealed, causing hurt and chaos. Unlike Rees Brennan's trilogy, however, there's no humour and wisecracking — Bovalino's characters don't wield words as a shield and a weapon. It was an interesting choice to make one of the two point-of-view characters asexual, given the book's inspiration, although I wish Bovalino had made more of that — I feel that this should either have meant that the goblin market held no allure for this character, or that it tempted her more explicitly with desires that weren't sexual.

I'll close things off with a few links that have crossed my path on Dreamwidth over the past few days.

vriddy has gathered together a great batch of links relating to social media platforms and our relationships with them.

Via firecat, a New Yorker interview with Rian Johnson. (The New Yorker sets limits on how many articles you can read per month without a subscription, so it may ask for a login or payment if you have read multiple New Yorker articles already this month.) Johnson has long been one of my favourite Hollywood writer-directors — The Last Jedi was by far and away my favourite of the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy films (and it's probably my second-favourite contemporary Star Wars media after Andor), his pastiche films (high school film noir Brick, and cosy mystery Knives Out) are great fun, I'm looking forward to Glass Onion, and even his films that don't really work for me are interesting failures (Looper).

I don't know how many people for whom this is of interest, but if you sign up for Holly Black's newsletter, you get bonus Folk of the Air material — a PDF of letters from Cardan to Jude during the time she was exiled from Faerie.

I decided at last to sign up for fandomtrees, and I'll be sure to share my sign-up once the mod has approved it. I'm now going to spend the next couple of hours poking around other people's sign-ups and seeing if there is anything I can fill. All in all, I've had a surprisingly productive weekend!

I've got salted caramel fudge from the Christmas market, and a cup of smokey tea, and it's been a very satisfying weekend.

I've spent much of my time doing nothing but writing — I've now got a complete draft of my Yuletide assignment fic, which I'm going to sit on for a couple of days before getting stuck into editing. At this point, therefore, it looks likely that I'll be able to complete at least two of the three treats I've been planning since I first browsed the letters app.

I also finally broke my reading drought with House of Hunger (Alexis Henderson), a melodramatic gothic novel loosely drawn from the real-world historical figure of Elizabeth Báthory. (When I say 'loosely,' I mean that the setting has been changed from early modern Hungary to a sort of featureless generic industrial fantasylandia, and that all nobility in the world are literal vampires, with an entire social ecosystem of exploitation set up to meet their need for blood.) It was exactly the ludicrous sort of thing I wanted to read on a cold, dark November afternoon, so it suited me perfectly.

I know I promised a roundup of links to all the various new newsletters to which I have subscribed, but it's going to have to wait. I have, however, put together something of a linkpost, as my number of currently open tabs really needs to decrease!

I've heard that some people have fled Twitter for Dreamwidth, and, as always, there's a lot of (hopefully) helpful advice floating around about how to get the most out of our little community here:

Via several people in my circle, galadhir's post about how to get established on Dreamwidth, and a Twitter exodus friending meme hosted by xancredible.

I enjoyed this interview with Ada Palmer — it teased out some interesting elements about the Terra Ignota series, and the things that motivate and intrigue Palmer as a writer, academic, reader and fan. (It also unintentionally reinforced several of my frustrations with the Utopians in the Terra Ignota series — or perhaps more specifically the reception of them by readers — but that's nothing new.)

The fandomtrees fest is happening again this year, with signups running until 7th December. If you want a fairly low pressure fanworks fest, I'd highly recommend it, and you've still got a few weeks before making a firm decision.

One of the newsletters to which I recently subscribed was Griefbacon, on the recommendation of Amal El-Mohtar. The most recent post (issue?), An Incomplete List of Things That Twitter Was showed me that I had made the right decision. I can't relate to a lot of the specifics listed in the post, but the overall sentiment resonates.

I really enjoyed this collection of Hebrew and Arabic poems by Jewish women living in Al Andalus (note that they appear at the second half of a longer newsletter post; the first half is all about reproductive rights in the United States, so if you prefer not to read about that, you'll need to scroll down to the second half of the page)

My mum sent me this incredible video of a huge hailstorm in Sydney, in slow motion.

My stocks of both links and fudge are running low, so I'll leave things here, finishing my tea and watching the birds flitting around the back garden.

The news that Elon Musk has finally bought Twitter unleashed a torrent of doom, panic, and shitposting. It also resulted in a lot of separate discussions about previously abandoned platforms, and the reasons for their successes and failures. This got me thinking about my own preferences, and inspired this week's prompting question:

What would your ideal online platform be like?

( My answer )