Beyond Selidor

It's boiling hot, I'm already half in holiday mode (although I have two more days of work left before going on leave), and I've just read a book which made such baffling narrative decisions that I think I'm going to have to write a separate post about it.

Let's answer the penultimate two fandom meme questions.

( Days 17-18 )

( The other days )

This weekend, I have swum a total of 3.5km in two days. I made the decision to book swimming sessions at the outdoor pool in Cambridge on both days — knowing that the weather would be really hot — and I am very pleased that I did so.

I had been planning to swim my normal 1km on Saturday and then stop, but I got to that point and felt I might as well swim another 500m, so I did. And then today my feeling was that if I'd managed 1.5km I may as well just push through to 2km, especially since it was so hot and I was in no hurry to get out of the water. I've never swum 2km in one go in my entire life, and I'm kind of shocked at how easy it was, especially since I haven't really done any swimming since August last year.

(For those to whom such things are meaningful and relevant, I swim freestyle, and the pool is 90m in length.)

Onwards to the fandom meme.

( Days 11-13 )

( The other days )

Before I sink my teeth into the next few fandom meme questions, I'll throw a couple of links in your general direction.

The first is a recording of the book launch for Ava Reid's debut novel, The Wolf and the Woodsman. This book is a secondary-world fantasy that draws on Jewish mythology (most obviously the story of Esther, but there are other strands as well) and Hungarian folklore and history, very much in the vein of Novik's Spinning Silver, and the novels of Rena Rossner, and I love it intensely. The book launch is a panel discussion between RF Kuang, Alix E. Harrow, and Ava Reid, and ranges in topics from nationalism and twentieth-century history to revolution, empire, and academia. Harrow's fiction has never worked for me, and I admire, rather than love, Kuang's books, but all three panellists are excellent as conversationalists, and the whole thing is well worth watching.

The second link is wildly different in tone: a humorous article in The Guardian about a bizarre photo of the NSW premier supposedly watching TV. What I didn't realise until reading this article was that apparently enough photos of 'Australian politicians awkwardly watching TV in strange ways' exist that it's become a mockable — and meme-able — genre. (Enough so that jrhennessy has compiled a Twitter thread of greatest hits of such photos, although some are UK politicians rather than Australians.)

( Days 7-8 )

( The other days )

Via nyctanthes and a couple of others in my circle, I discovered this fun set of fandom-related questions created by squidgiepdx. The idea is that you answer one question a day for the first twenty days of June, and that's obviously not going to happen in my case, so instead I will answer them in batches until I've done the lot.

I should also preface this by saying that a lot of the questions apply to an approach to fandom that's very different to my own — for various reasons I gravitate towards tiny fandoms, and once I'm fannish about something those feelings never switch off, so 'being in fandom' for me tends to be a) a solitary activity and b) a permanent state of being in which new fandoms are added, but they never replace old fandoms.

( Days 1-3 )

( The other days )