DW Runners

Hello from Colorado, which is on fire :( We are not actually near any of the big fires, but we are getting smoke in the mornings from two of them, which means that several times in the past few weeks we've had to get up at 3 am and close the windows and turn on the air purifier. Anyway:

What I've recently read:

The Astrobiology Immersion Program by startingatmidnight, short-novel-length (~50K) Project Hail Mary gen, I think petra recommended it. AU in which on the way back to Erid, Rocky and Ryland Grace bodyswap. I love bodyswap as a trope and it's especially rich when the bodies are alien to each other. I thought it was a little long, and the handwaving a little handwavy, though the ultimate "why" resolution was super interesting, and I really liked that the story continues through to the consequences on Erid.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, which is a sort of literary dark-humor western, with a really fun narrative voice. Charlie and Eli Sisters are Bad Men With Guns who wield them for a mysterious mogul called the Commodore. Except Eli's got a sensitive side, and he's starting to wonder why he's killing people for money when he could just settle down and run a trading post somewhere. My favorite part, oddly, was the throughline of Eli being completely unable to hold onto any money; if he doesn't give it away out of soft-heartedness as soon as he gets it, it's stolen, and I was delighted every time it happened.

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, which was a recommendation from merit - I couldn't resist the premise of a woman waking up with amnesia and learning, through letters written from her former self, that she's a high-up bureaucrat in a secret organization of people with supernatural powers who deal with supernatural crimes and threats to the country. Sort of like Rivers of London but with Ghostbusters-level humor. ETA: and now I am reminded of another reason I really liked this: the main character, Myfanwy Thomas, discovers (somewhat to her surprise) that she is frighteningly competent at her job. Also there is a fantastic female character with whom I ship her (and there is fic). Anyway, lots of fun, and I'm now reading the second book in this series, Stiletto.

What I've recently watched:

S4 of Dark Winds, which unfortunately had quite a bit of action in LA - not that I have anything against LA, it's just it's not the familiar Four Corners scenery. As soon as they (metaphorically) hung a German on the wall I was expecting it to fire (metaphorically) Karl May, and I was not disappointed.

We've just watched the first episode of S2 of the live-action One Piece. I love how goofy it is!

How to fake it in society, KJ Charles
We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead
The husbands, Holly Gramazio
Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie (re-read)
The ark
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie
Till we have faces, CS Lewis


How to Fake it In Society, KJ Charles. Titus is a humble shopkeeper who makes paints for artists, who ends up marrying a wealthy woman on her deathbed in order to ensure that her relative (who may well have had something to do with there being a deathbed the first place) is disinherited; struggling with his sudden elevation, he is thrilled when Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de la Motte, a fashionable French escaped aristocrat with a Mysterious Past offers to help him make his way in society. But Nico is a con man barely a step ahead of some very nasty gangsters, and while he hoped to salvage himself with Titus’ money, his new feelings for Titus make it impossible to admit the truth… This is fine. It’s competently put together and I like the paint details but something about this pairing didn’t quite fire for me, the ending tipped a little too far into farce complete with one too many pantomime villains, and basically I think KJ likes con artists and scammers a lot more than I do.

We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead. Solid, painful documentation of the casualties of Canada’s approach to (men’s) hockey, from juniors to professionals, emphasising the gate-keepers who could (but don’t) change their approach. Pretty awful subject material, with all the sexual assault, misogyny, bullying, homophobia and hazing that you’d expect; it’s about culture, and about those who enforce it, but also those who chose to look away or not look deeper, and how much damage reverberates through the system.

The husbands, Holly Gramazio. Lauren, single, is met one night at the door of her flat by her (previously unknown) husband Michael. When he pops up to the attic to change a lightbulb, another husband comes back down; and, every time Lauren gets one up into the attic, she gets another one back, while with each new husband her own life and those of her close friends also change. It’s a great set-up and it rattles along (what if one of the husbands is awful? What if they move away from the flat?) for the first half before running off the rails a bit in the second. Lauren meets a husband to whom the same thing is happening (also, unlike Lauren, he’s about 50:50 whether he ends up with husbands or wives), which was great, but then things go wrong with a husband Lauren loses whom she wanted to keep, and in response Lauren does some pretty terrible things and it’s hard to know how terrible the author thinks they are. I see the author is a game designer, but the book is pitched as “how to choose when there are so many options” dating app rom com rather than “if I treat other people as NPCs how can I do this ethically, especially if I can just reset everything”, which is what I would have liked her to explore more.


Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie

Evil is Poirot staying in a sunny seaside house in Devon when the alluring Arlena, who is having an affair with another woman’s husband, gets herself strangled, and Sittaford is a standalone murder in a snowstorm that took place at the exact time as a group of related people were having a seance and the table spelled out MURDER and the name of the victim. I liked the ideas behind the solution of Evil while not finding them entirely convincing; Sittaford is solider in that respect, but neither are top-tier.

The ark, Haruo Yuki (trans. Jim Rion, who does the Uketsu books). A group of friends exploring the wilderness find a strange abandoned bunker; when they go down into it, an earthquake traps them. The only way out would require one of them to stay behind and face certain death. Helpfully, someone then commits murder; if they can work out who it was, they can force that person to stay behind, although this assumes a) they cooperate and b) whoever it is stops killing more people…

I did like the atmosphere in this, although it could have done with more pace and a lot less “we’re being murdered so let’s split up and go to places individually”. The characters aren’t that well-developed, but there is at least depth to some of them, and the final twist is satisfyingly dark.

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis One of those books I’ve always meant to read but never got around to before (I think I first read about it in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which means it’s been at least 30 years of good intentions. The Cupid and Psyche myth, retold from Orual’s (Psyche’s older half-sister) point of view, with and gosh Orual is a fascinating protagonist, flawed and believable, and a product of her society even when she breaks from it (I note that Joy Davidman was at the very least the first reader on this and at most a co-author). The way Orual’s realisation of how her (selfish) love for others has hurt them reverberates.

So next/this year I'm assigned to Wimbledon, a kind of apprenticeship or internship where hopefully I will learn how to actually do the job of a rabbi as a whole, rather than individual pieces of it. They have asked me to write an article introducing myself for their magazine. And I'm really struggling to write something not boring; what I have reads like a list of the places I've lived, worked and volunteered with the Jewish community, like a very pedestrian covering letter. So, if you were a member of a synagogue and there was a new intern about to join, what would you want to know about them? I've included the (slightly redacted) draft below the cut.

( this is boring even to me and I'm the subject )

One of my next year teachers has set us for our pre-class homework over the summer "read a book". Like, literally pick up a book and read it. Presumably there's a point to this, I was planning to read some books anyway, but I assume there's more to it than just ticking the box to say, yup, I read a book. Suggestions welcome! If an eminent professor of Bible told you to read a book, what would you pick? I know the prof is an SF fan, she's trying to start a theological SF reading group.

(Paris) Pride was cancelled. So was Solidays, but not the Top 14 finale or any of the football fanzones, afaik. Call this "interesting", I guess.

Been having a lot of Floor Time lately, which is when I lie down on the floor where the air is cooler to nap and/or listen to podcasts. Which means I have now caught up with This Podcast Will Kill You, a podcast mostly about diseases and their history/biology/etc.

The following was sent in a group chat:



And I'm feeling very attacked right now.

As mentioned previously, on my final day in Cyprus I went sightseeing with two (not entirely) random Brasilians.

( Pictures under the Cut )

Hullo, Dreamwidth. Long time, no post. For anyone I haven't seen on Bluesky: I'm alive, obviously(?). Same job, same house, same dog + another one. Minor (MINOR) plant obsession. (This is a lie. It's not minor.) Instead of outside like the gardens of yore, it's now inside. I'm making excellent progress toward living in a personal jungle.

Which means I now am fundamentally required to produce plant photos under the cut.

( Not all of them but it should give you and idea of how my house is evolving into part plant )

These pictures are slightly out of date - I've rearranged a few things, started propagating cuttings from a couple of plants not shown, and added a pilea. This is... probably more than half of them. Surely? No, I'll not be checking. Especially since my favorite plant store lured me in with a freebie giveaway and discounts.


Alt: A cardboard lid/tray with young plants sitting on a chair. A hanging plant sits on the chair next to it. The plants include a philodendron, a rhipsalis, a peperomia, a dracaena, and an oak leaf cissus. The hanging plant is a lipstick plant that was on clearance and needs a little TLC.

The rhipsalis, cissus, and the freebie that I forget what it is are all destined to be hanging plants, which is what I'm ostensibly in the market for. The dracaena, philodendron, peperomia, and clearance lipstick plant are because I was unsupervised in a plant store.