ashlyme | Reading

For MerMay,

leecetheartist did me the great honor of using me as a model for a glittering mermaid.

After the hectic bloom of mid-week summer, the weather has crashed back into overcast, rain, and intermittently raw chill. The Bradford pear directly in front of my office window has been hedged around with sawhorses declaring it a threat to public safety and scheduled for removal next week. I was photographing its delicately clustering blossoms just a few weeks ago. It's full of green leaves. It hasn't been antisocial to me.

asakiyume sent me Thao & The Get Down Stay Down's "Temple" (2020).

Current Music: Quinquis, "Morwreg"

asakiyume

I came across this great story elsewhere on the interwebs, an 89-year-old guy in Puchong (near Kuala Lumpur), Malaysia, who's set up reading stations in a public park. He also has helped libraries in Thailand and China. (Article here.)

There's also a short video linked in the article, which is great, because you can hear Mr Lee in his own words:

"I think Malaysia should follow China, where every village has one library. That's good."**

I was thinking of Little Free Libraries in this country. I think they're a great idea in places where there's foot traffic, where many different people might stop by and look over the books. I sometimes see them, though, in places where I wonder what traffic they'll get. On winding country roads with rather large houses situated far back from the roads on ample, gracious properties. And at the roadside, a little free library. But who's going to be walking by? I guess maybe the neighbors? But there's just not the same thickness of people.

Also, this guy thinks of himself as lending the books, not giving them away. He doesn't mind if you keep the book a month, six months, a year, and in fact he probably isn't going to be upset if a book doesn't come back, but the *idea* is that it will come back--and that means that the borrower has more connection with the site, and there's a sense of mutual responsibility. Plus the story says that people like to come and chat with him.

There can be more than one pattern! Little Free Libraries have a kind of spy-drop-box vibe. Ships passing in the night, taking books, maybe leaving books. That can be fun too. But I like the actual social interaction involved in what Mr Lee is doing.

Do any of you oversee a Little Free Library or frequent one (or more than one)? What's your experience been?

**Not exactly his words, which are Malaysian-English word order and has some special words I didn't catch, but that's how they're glossed and mainly what he said.

Current Music: Totó la Momposina: Dueña de los jardines

rydra_wong

https://www.transsolidarityalliance.com/mass-lobby-2026

As explained at: https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/lobbying-parliament/

A mass lobby is when a large number of people contact their MPs and members of the Lords in advance and arrange to meet with them at Parliament all on the same day.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance are one of the groups who've been absolutely kicking ass in the last year.

They also now have a crowdfunder if anyone wants to donate:

https://www.zeffy.com/en-GB/donation-form/fund-the-work-of-the-trans-solidarity-alliance

muccamukk

Olivia Rodrigo - the cure (Official Music Video)

Watch on YouTube

I don't actually go here, but I like the song a lot, and the music video is cleverly done. Contains quite a bit of medical stuff, but all the blood is made of yarn.

sovay

In other news of media of predictable interest to me, I had no idea that Cannes just premiered a queer romance set in a theatrical troupe on the Western Front of World War I. To this review, yes, concert parties of the trenches could indeed have flutes and clarinets and all manner of professional entertainment on account of the quantity of professional talent behind the lines if not on the front of them. I'm curious about the historical tunes alone. I know much less about Belgian soldiers' songs and sketches than I do about their British or Canadian counterparts. Local arthouses had better come through on this one.

Current Music: Wilson & Swarbrick, "The Ballad of Jack McLaren"

skygiants

So the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, where I volunteer, is scraping the bottom of their bond fund. If you have a few pennies to toss, now would be a really exceptional time.

(I personally have been scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of best talent show this town has ever seen might be helpful to the overall cause, so I guess if there's anything you've ever wanted to see me do or post about particularly that might work as a fundraising incentive, let me know???)

sovay

Thanks to the escalation in their heartbreakingly necessary work of bonding out people kidnapped and imprisoned by ICE and helping with their legal fees and families, the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network has depleted its bond fund in record time since the start of the year. There is no shortage of detainees in our profitably carceral system and no one in need should have more locks across their path. You got a sixpence you want, they are taking donations. It's actually Shavuos at the moment, but it is always a good time to open the door to the stranger.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Planting Tomatoes"

muccamukk

I've been piling these up since early April? I think most of them are still topical.

Tech Issues:
Archive of Our Own: Spambot Comments on AO3.
News post with a good summary of all the kinds of spambot comments showing up lately, and what to do if you get one. Slightly depressing, but also helpful.

404 Media: A 'Self-Doxing' Rave Helps Trans People Stay Safe Online.
I got a laugh out of deciding to run this on Trans Day of Visibility. Good for them. (ETA: Some resources in the comments, for anyone who wants to look into/clean up their information online.)

ZD Net: Your Kindle's not obsolete, it just needs a jailbreak - and I'll show you how it's done.
I have not tried this, just saw it going around for older Kindles which Amazon is no longer supporting (to the point where they'll stop operating).

The Tyee: How Companies Hijack AI Chatbots.
The title is a bit click baity, but I was interested in this new and exciting way of polluting the information ecosystem! What if you fed deliberately bad information into LLMs so that chatbots would advertise for you?

Canadian Politics:
Trans Canada Tour.
We’re on a mission to rekindle hope, rebuild Canada’s queer movement, and change hearts and minds across the country.
This may be coming to a town near you? If it's not, and you're a queer organiser, maybe it could be. I've been low-key trying to see if anyone here is interested, but no luck so far.

The Tyee: RCMP Seeks to Quash Discrimination Ruling by Human Rights Tribunal.
The RCMP's constant insistence that they definitely plan to do better in the future, but they're not going to tell us how, or let anyone investigate them. I'm sure that will work better this time!

The Narwhal: Malfunctioning Canadian LNG terminal burned more gas than estimated 2024 global record.
Oh look. It's clean energy!

CBC: 'Monumental': B.C. attorney general, advocates hail Supreme Court ruling on intimate partner violence.
I'm really glad this went through, and sorry that lady had to fight for so long to get relief.

Video Essays:

tongue-in-cheek-books: Shrapnel: Ambient Homophobia and the F-Slur in MM Romance (39 minutes).
A very gentle explanation to people who didn't grow up with normative homophobia in male spaces, about how the damage done by anti-queer language isn't always done by one bad person directing slurs at our hero. I thought it was a really clear example of something I've been poking at for a while. He uses hockey romances in his examples, but makes it clear he's not trying to attack the authors or the fans.

ophie-dokie: Sabrina Carpenter's Gender Theater, The Male Gaze, and You (46 minutes).
The discourse continues. I really liked the section about "I Kissed a Girl" and assuming people's sexuality. I remember a lot more problems from people accusing women of being "performative" than I do "performative" people being an actual problem. But mileage may have varied.

Schmowd3r: PI Investigates the Neil Gaiman Substack Situation (3 hours and 46 minutes).
I appreciated this as a breakdown of what's in the substack, which is such a Gish gallop that it's difficult to get through. I had somehow missed the experimental "jazz" for example. I also appreciate how he didn't include a lot of the graphic details about the assaults, which made it a bit easier to listen to than a lot of recaps of the situation. (This video has unfortunately started drama with another YouTuber. *sighs*)

Cute Things:

sixbeforelunch: fandom hugs.
Icons from various Stargate, Star Trek and DC properties. Extremely cute.

OnIcePerspectives: Starr Andrews reprises "Whip My Hair" by Willow Smith (Video: 3 minutes).
It's really fun to see this again!

Emily Fairfax, Ph.D: Beavers and Wildfire.
Includes a stop-motion video and several diagrams explaining how beaver habitat protects vegetation from wildfires, and also charts!

CowlitzIndianTribe: Cowlitz Beaver Kit Cam Live.
Live stream of a mother beaver and her four kits. I think they're going to be rewilded in the next couple weeks, so worth checking out while it's still running. Scroll back a bit and find a time when she comes back into the lodge: the kits make the cutest noises. Also, she sometimes just grabs one of the kits, pins it down and licks it for a while.

moon_custafer

My contract runs out today. I was hoping they'd extend it, like they did for my predecessor, who worked here eight months and only left because she had a better offer elsewhere; but they're merging two offices and making my position redundant. Pity, I liked it pretty well here, and I'd just figured out a way to improve my efficiency on the one really busy day of each month, and was looking forward to trying it out next time it came around.

I've asked the temp agency if they've got anything else for me, and reapplied for EI. The latter should reactivate my claim, which I think still has a couple of months coverage. I have to apply as if it's a whole new claim, but last time I did this (last July or thereabouts, after my "new job" let me go after the first week) they reactivated the old one pretty smoothly and quickly, so I'm hoping there are still live humans at Employment Canada who'll understand the situation.

My only real dread at the moment is that Andrew will go into an anxiety spiral when he hears the news-- it's not his fault, he can't help it, but I low-key hate how whenever a problem comes up I have to worry about his reaction on top of the problem and my own emotions.

The Village Players have an event this weekend, and he'd actually offered, of his own accord, to come along to it with me even if it meant dealing with the stairs at the location. I don't know if he was still going to do that (they're forecasting rain), but we'll see what happens if this doesn't knock him for too much of a loop.

sovay

Hestia is sleeping against my knees. Earlier in the night she hopped onto the bed where I was reading, trampled my ankles, and curled herself into a gravitational field of black fur. At dinner she stretched forth her delicate paw and clobbered as her rightful prey a portion of

spatch's haddock. Out of this week's three doctors' appointments, one was objectively encouraging and I am acting toward its future which I cannot yet believe in. I have so many moving parts to keep track of. I feel like eighteen and a half plates in the air. In lieu of room in my life for real convalescence, I am reading a lot in the evenings, accompanied by cat, which is where she came in.

Current Music: Erase Errata, "How to Tell Yourself from a Television"

rydra_wong

I am very very wrecked (because of something I did on purpose which I hope was useful, but which I did knowing that it would burn all my spoons and crash me for several days).

If anyone would like to distract me by asking me questions about things I enjoy rambling about (see my DW for recent topics, as well as the perennial ones), PLEASE do so, I would be deeply grateful.

moon_custafer

Just got a call at work from a woman who said, “This is kind of a strange question” and then asked if the company I’m currently with was in the same building as the [name] law firm. I asked “Are they immigration lawyers? There’s an immigration-law office on the third floor here.”

She confirmed that that was indeed the firm she was asking about, and explained she’d been wondering if they were legit and had decided that a good starting point would be to check if their listed address was genuine.

sovay

The green salt smell of the sea and the tidal marshes flooded in as soon as I rolled down the windows on Route 133. On impulse and antidote to my surfeit of doctors' appointments this week,

spatch drove me out to Gloucester this afternoon. The clouds were stacked over the water like cyanotypes. We looped the dunes of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company and clattered through the industrial green trusses of the Tobin which currently seem to have been mummy-swaddled in tarps and chopsticks and filled out our summer's alphabet of states during slow traffic on Route 1. The Causeway discovered it had run out of fried smelts right after it had rung me up for an order and offered me fried cod cheeks instead, sweet solid dollops of whitefish which I ate across the picnic table from Rob and his steak-sized baked haddock at Stage Fort Park where local teenagers were sunbathing to music atop Tablet Rock. From the Avalonian granite of Half Moon Beach, we watched a duffel-green trawler chug in past the automated blinks of Eastern Point and Ten Pound Lights, one tower as red-and-white as a buoy, the other black-and-white as the common eiders bobbing across the glaze-blue bands of the waves. We saw cormorants in flight and fishing. We saw gulls balanced like balsa wood on the summering air. I tore my hand on some barnacles and the wind snarled my hair from all directions. When the light started to drain off toward sunset, we left by Route 127 just to see what its coastal views looked like when not obliterated by thunder-sheet rain and meandered somewhat after Manchester-by-the-Sea such that I remember admiring the whale-blue mural of a wave Hokusai-bubbling across the side of the Swampscott Department of Public Works and hoping that Prides Crossing is besieged in June. The neat white crescent of the moon came out in the ink-washed after-sunset and presently we collected ice cream from a slammed CB Scoops. I am not yet done with doctors for the week and this was an even more restoring break than walking by the Charles or North Point Park. My CD of Quinquis' eor (2025) arrived in the mail.

Current Music: Quinquis, "Blaz an holen (feat. Cerys Hafana)"

skygiants

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.

gwynnega

This weekend I'll be participating in WisCon Online! I miss in-person WisCon, but I'm very much looking forward to this. Here is the programming I'm on:

Frankensteins and Their Monsters
Online Zoom Room 4 • Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction • Sat 7:00 PM–8:15 PM CDT
Prompted by Guillermo del Toro recent adaptation of Frankenstein let's talk about the adaptation history of the original text! How do the adaptations deal with the horrors of creation, revenge, and isolation? How do they feed each other, so that a Frankenstein adaptation adapts both the novel and the Universal monster? And what does it do to Frankenstein and the wretch to make them recurring characters on TV shows?
S.M. Hallow, Gwynne Garfinkle, Sophia Babai, Mod: Anika Dane

Embodiment, Planets, Health, Earth
Online Zoom Room 5 • Readings • Sat 8:30 PM–9:45 PM CDT
Speculative Poetry: on ecopoetics, disability, embodied ways of knowing.
Anonymous, Petra Kuppers, Gwynne Garfinkle

Never-Too-Late Futures
Online Zoom Room 2 • The Craft and Business of Writing • Sun 4:00 PM–5:15 PM CDT
Publishing discourse loves "30 under 30," but many speculative fiction authors publish their first novel in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or later. This panel invites older debuts and late-blooming writers to talk about craft, career realities, disability and energy, caretaking, and ageism in the field. What pressures and freedoms come with starting "late," and what does a sustainable, politically engaged writing life look like beyond the hustle?
Esker Park, Catherine Lundoff, Mod: Andrea Hairston, Gwynne Garfinkle, Sam Wilket

moon_custafer

Forgot to mention that I finally watched “Rumpole and the Genuine Article.” Well-acted, and pretty well-adapted from the story*, but it runs up against the difficulty all shows have when the plot turns on a ‘work of genius’ painting, and time and budget prevent the props department from acquiring an actual Renoir or something. Now I need to watch The Christophers, another story about art and forgery and a blurry middle ground. This one stars Sir Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel:

* I was also disappointed we didn’t get to hear McKern and others drunkenly singing ‘Roses of Picardy’ in the third act.

sovay

My day was overwhelmingly composed of phone calls and the rest of my week is doctor-intensive, but the mail brought me the original felt-tip-and-acrylic painting which

moon_custafer had done earlier this month of the Morris dancers at their local May Day. It arrived safely from Canada. Friends who make art are the best.

Current Music: Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, "The Greatham Calling On Song"

muccamukk

G Flip & The Beaches: Lez Go! (Live)

Watch on YouTube

I already posted the lyric video for this, but it's even more fucking wholesome live. It really shows off Jordan's voice; she and G Flip sound amazing together.

sovay

Hestia sniffed my hands all over, but after some proprietary headbutting allowed herself to be petted with insistent slinks of her back and escalating purr. I had met two strange cats this evening at

skygiants and

genarti's.

We did not actually watch one of the several productions of As You Like It in

skygiants' possession, the notional goal of the hangout. We ate a bounty of deli from Mamaleh's—the bagel with chopped liver was successfully foraged despite the ravages of commencement weekend—and got as far as watching a 26-minute stop-motion Twelfth Night with a voice cast to die for, which turned out to be one of the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–94) adapted by Leon Garfield which I had been recommended last month. Then we were diverted by talking about books mostly of our childhoods and in the process I learned that prior to launching his nowadays much more famous career as a Nesbit-inspired children's fantasist, Edward Eager was a dramatist and lyricist responsible among other musical comedies for the Offenbach-in-English To Hell with Orpheus. It never seems to have made it to Broadway, but was one-shot premiered in 1953 by the irresistibly named St. John Terrell's Music Circus of Lambertville, NJ. I am captivated by this fact. I was also captivated by the strange cats, although Mina jinked out of any room I entered until very near the end of the evening, when she permitted me to stroke her very soft tuxedo-black head for about ten seconds before she headed for the refuge of the bedroom closet. So long as I didn't tower over him, Mr. Dash was more than content for me to attend to the covert white splash of his belly and his plush void back, although he seemed disappointed that leading me through the kitchen with a succession of soulful looks did not produce my feeding him. I had an out-of-season latke. It was an incredibly nice time.

genarti had made me a cup with the Uffington White Horse.

Current Music: Stars, "I Died So I Could Haunt You"

sovay

The trees were ghost-green in the water with the hard white shine of the LEDs, but

spatch photographed me in the stoplight.

WERS came out with the menacingly catchy drive of the Clash's "London Calling" (1979) while I was running an errand and it felt just a little unnecessarily Ballardian. Nothing else has happened to me particularly, but reading any kind of news feels like choking on the future. I can remember not being this sick, this poor, this pressed, which differentiates me not at all from most of the people I know. The exhaustion feels unreal and the last ten years like a sociological demonstration in the capacity of things always to be worse.

Current Music: The Clash, "London Calling"

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ashlyme

June 2025

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Page Summary

sovay - Pa vez o pellaat da vag, ha ma c'hoantaez c'hoazh?
asakiyume - little libraries
rydra_wong - UK people: new trans rights mass lobby 24th June
muccamukk - Music Friday
sovay - Take us roaming in the gloaming, your Ross rifle by your side
skygiants - (no subject)
sovay - You've got to live the life you're fighting for
muccamukk - Links List (Tech Issues, CanPol, Video Essays, Cute Things)
moon_custafer - Work Update
sovay - I spoke of crimes and of my friends in the same breath
rydra_wong - Ask me questions
moon_custafer - Quiet Day So Far
sovay - Neuial a ran dre ar ruzenn
skygiants - (no subject)
gwynnega - WisCon Online
moon_custafer - Art-related show update
sovay - We have come to dance this dance to please the company
muccamukk - Music Monday
sovay - Thousands of ghosts in the daylight
sovay - And I live by the river

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