Thorns

(One day early or thirteen days late, depending how you count.)

Books
Finished reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth. Despite how long it took me to read it, it was a good fantasy romance novel. If it weren't the middle novel in a trilogy with m/m couples for books one and three, I'd be reccing this one to nearly every f/f romance reader I know, actually. As it is, well, that recommendation stands if either you read m/m too or don't mind reading book two of a trilogy as a standalone when it really would work better as book two.

It's not a heist novel, but it pushed some of the same anxiety buttons for me that heist plots do, which is probably at least part of why it took me so long.

A thing I'd like to note: a lot of times when I read f/f romance by an author who mostly writes m/f or m/m, the f/f doesn't ring very convincing to me (same problem with m/f romance authors writing m/m.) This was Freya Marske's second published novel, so I don't know what she "usually" writes, but this did ring convincing. I believed that Violet was bi, and I believed in Maude's lesbian awakening, and I believed in their attraction to each other.

My paper copy of Cameron Reed's The Fortunate Fall arrived in the mail. I read it back in uni (borrowed from the Rowden White Library in the early 2000s) but hadn't owned it until now.

About midway through Jazz Money's how to make a basket, a 2021 book of poems in which Wiradjuri words grow up through the cracks of the English.

Started reading KJ Charles' Death in the Spires. (Waiting for the "in spires" pun to drop.)

Not books but literary analysis: I read Andrea Long Chu's 2022 article Hanya's Boys, on Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. I haven't read the novel itself, and don't think I want to. And I think Chu is very incisive and good at what she does. But also: wow, mean. Maybe the meanest literary review I've read in I don't know how long. Came away feeling defensive on Yanagihara's behalf as someone who has ever read even one whump fanfic.

Fandom
Prophet: rydra_wong posted her post-canon 'a word you've never understood'. I don't know that I can recommend it to people who haven't read Prophet (I can recommend they read Prophet and then read Rydra's fic) but if you have read the book and liked it and are someone who reads fanfic then I unreservedly recommend this fic. I've been looking forward to this one since Rydra started writing it (under extremely stressful writing conditions) and I'm so happy she did.

Comics
I cackled out loud (very loudly) at the (nsfw-ish) recent Dumbing of Age strip titled 'Fingering'. And then went "aww" in a sad way at the next page. Joyce and Dorothy are both going through some things, and afaik poor Joe has no idea.

Making
Made another linocut, this one a bookmark-shaped print of stacks of books. It came out nicely: I'm pleased. I like the idea of bookmark-shaped lino printing: it's a manageable size for a project, and produces objects I can use, or that I can give as gifts without worrying about giving clutter.

Tech
Felt the urge to spend some days spending more time changing my laptop's window manager configurations than talking to people. You know how it is. And it does look better than it did before, although somehow I changed the lockscreen without realising I'd done so, which was a bit of a shock when I locked the screen for the first time after that.

It was after I wrote that post (Tuesday last week, I think?) that my laptop's wifi card started disconnecting randomly while I was using it and needing the external wifi/radio switch[*] jiggled to reconnect it. Then it stopped reconnecting and I had a crash course in Linux kernel drivers for WWAN, WLAN, and Bluetooth, what rfkill does, the difference between soft-blocked and hard-blocked wifi, etc.

( cut for length )

Games
More Slay the Spire: still no infinity deck, but I got the 'Ooh, Donut' achievement for killing Donu with a Feed card. So that was satisfying.

Garden
I bought a little (less than one square metre) pop-up greenhouse tent thing, set it up outside, and planted the basil cutting there. A few days later I woke up and found that it was gone. Tent and all.

I have no idea what could cause that. Did I not put the stakes in deep enough? Did some basil-loving animal come into my back yard? ???

Weather
It's finally cold. Cold enough, in fact, that last week I purchased an electric foot warmer for those "oops, my toes are all corpse white" times. I'll keep looking for a less e-wasteful solution, but I'd like to still have toes by the time I come up with it.

Miscellaneous
Last week I had to get a routine blood test. I noticed that there was a case under the exam bed across the room from the chair I was in. I couldn't tell what instrument it was, it was a bit too broad and flat for a trumpet. Banjo, maybe? Ukulele? "Aha," I thought: "an opportunity to make small talk as the humans do!"

When it was my turn in the conversation to provide a line, I asked "What instrument do you play?"
"I actually don't play an instrument," the phlebotomist said. "It's funny that you thought I did..." and then followed my gaze to the case. "Oh! That's not an instrument. A patient gave me that. She was cleaning out and thought I might like it. It's actually an arm. A rubber one, for practising giving injections. She thought I could give it to the company, but they have their own training materials. I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Fancy dress, maybe?"