I guess I cannot do the necessary suspension of disbelief/price of admission be in Workplace Fandoms anymore because what I've osmosised of The Pitt Season 2 is a lot of "should characters X, Y, and Z forgive Character A who was abusive and also stole patient medications and -- this part I'm unclear on but it sounds likely -- also practiced medicine in an ER while under the influence? It's very important question on if his apologies were good enough or if people should forgive him or be his friend again" and I'm like "that person should be fired from the hospital, this is not a buddy sitcom where they're all over at each other's apartments and dating each other and their warm opinions of each other matter, this is an emergency room, they are coworkers in a high-pressure high-stakes environment, not friends, he should be fired and they should never see him again and get to decide if they want to invite him to their bookclubs or poker nights or whatever, but the question of 'should they forgive him, has he done enough' is irrelevant because he should lose his medical license."
At the weekend, I happened to be further up the Clyde at the right time to see the bow of a new Naval frigate being transported up the river to the shipyard where the warships are assembled. I didn't know what kind of ship it was for at first, I learned that later online.
Glasgow has a great city center, rather walkable and with the subway for longer hops. Next to Central Station is a fancy building some decades older than the converted Victorian mill that I live in. At least, there was, until a vape store somehow caught fire. Now there are cordoned-off streets, the smell of smoke, and a considerable number of sad, shocked people and even more rather inconvenienced ones.
I have no love for vape stores in the first place, I tend to avoid patronizing establishments that expand their range to vapes. Given vapes' propensity to catch fire in waste processing centers, etc., goodness knows who thought it a good idea to allow a vape shop to locate next to a critical transportation hub in a historic landmark whose construction substantially predates fire safety codes. Perhaps we shall find out, with luck when I am not feeling grumpy and vengeful.
My commute may be quite unaffected: when I pass close to that area, I'm in a subway tunnel on my way to Queen Street, the other main railway station; I hope that tomorrow's train to Edinburgh isn't overly crowded by passengers displaced from Central which won't be open yet.
I refueled our car this evening, I figured that gas prices aren't dropping anytime soon. In probably 2003 I tried holding off filling the car with gas, back when I drove an old Ford Crown Victoria (with around a seventy litre fuel tank), but eventually I had to give in and pay the higher prices. At least, with mostly just driving around the city in our hybrid in the near term, today's gas should last us for a good while.
Last week, there was an announcement that the office heating and cooling system was being temperamental, that it needed a new part, and the new part was expected to arrive by Thursday this week. The way it was phrased, it sounded like the problem was excess warmth, not cold.
Coming in this morning, there was this wave of chill air the moment you opened a door into our office space. I was wearing a relatively warm jumper as an extra layer in the morning in order to be warm on the way, not intending to wear it in the office at all, but in the end it stayed on well into the afternoon. The heating is off or on a lower setting at the weekend, and had apparently failed to come on at all this morning. Monday mornings are often cooler anyway until the heating gets properly underway, but this was really colder than usual.
So it sounds like arctic layers are not needed for tomorrow, but it's probably best to be ready for all scenarios: that it's cold, that it's OK, or that it's warm.
This is a bundle of material for Age of Ambition, an RPG about a fantasy world trying to modernize and adapt to technology and rapid social and political changes following an alien invasion:
I'm not familiar with the rules system, but it looks reasonably playable and layout is good. If you get the complete bundle you're getting a lot for your money including numerous worldbooks and adventures, and the setting is novel enough that players ought to find it interesting.
I promised Krissy that I would not buy any new guitars in 2025, and that was a promise I mostly kept (I did buy one guitar, but it was for her). However, it is now 2026, and last month I turned in two full-length books, and I thought therefore it might be okay to treat myself. That said, I pretty much have every guitar I might ever need, in most of the the major body shapes, so if I was going to get any more of them, they needed to fill a niche that was not otherwise occupied.
And, well, guess what? I found two stringed instruments that fit the bill! What a surprise! And as a bonus, neither is technically a guitar.
Small one first: This is an Ohana O’Nino sopranissimo ukulele, “sopranissimo” being a size down from the soprano uke, which is typically understood to be the smallest ukulele that one might usually find. The O’Nino here is seventeen inches long from stem to stern, and is absolutely dinky in the hand. Nevertheless, it’s an actual musical instrument, not a toy, and if you have small and/or nimble enough fingers, plays perfectly well. It’s not going to be anyone’s primary ukulele (I have my concert-sized Fender Fullerton Jazzmaster for that), but if you’re traveling — and I often am — and want to take along a physical music instrument — which I sometimes do! — then this is very much the travel-sized uke to tote around.
There are even smaller ukes available, but those do start being in the “is this a musical instrument for ants” category of things. I’ll stop with a sopranissimo.
Almost literally on the other end of the scale we have the Eastwood BG 64 Baritone Guitarlin. The one type of guitar I did not have in my collection was a baritone guitar (which adds an additional four frets to the guitar on the low end, allowing for a lower/heavier/twangier sound). This particular baritone is one of an esoteric variant of guitar known as a “guitarlin,” in which the guitar adds frets on the high end to be able to access notes that one would only usually find on a mandolin. So, basically, this instrument goes from baritone to mandolin over 35 frets, which is, to be clear, an absolutely ridiculous number of frets to have on a single instrument. I can already see the serious guitarists out there despairing about the intonation in the mando frets, but those people are no fun.
I was traveling when my guitarlin arrived and I haven’t yet been able to play around with it yet, but here’s a short video of the guy who helped design it fooling about with it:
(And yes, I got the one with the tremolo, because of course I did.)
Between these two instruments my collector itch has been scratched for a bit, and I look forward to messing around with both in the upcoming months. I won’t say I won’t get any other guitars ever, but at this point it’s getting more difficult to find where the gaps are in what I have, so I do imagine my acquisitions will slow down rather a bit. Let’s hope, anyway. I’m running out of room in the house for them. Although I guess I do have a whole church, don’t I. Hmmm.
Ugh, daylight savings, why are we still doing this???
Anyway, I got up at my usual workday time instead of sleeping in so I could get the onions in the slow cooker, and I did both the "soak onions in cold water in the fridge for 15 minutes" and wore the stupid onion goggles, and still by the 4th onion my eyes were extremely unhappy with me. *hands* Thankfully I only had 6 onions total, so it all got done, and for dinner I made French onion pasta as planned, and now I have dinner for 3 more days as well. I do love this pasta dish - and I always use bucatini, which is one of my favorite pasta shapes, so it was pleasing all around. Every time I make it after not having made in a while, I'm like, why don't I make this more often!? and then I remember the onion-slicing and how annoying it is. Anyway, definitely recommended for a delicious and easy dinner (except for the onion-slicing). I also made bacon so I have lunch for the week also.
I meant to mention this yesterday and forgot, but The Mountain Goats collaborated with Mary Chapin Carpenter to cover World Party: Put the Message in the Box (don't worry if you only recognize one or two of those names - the song is good!).
*
Current Mood:sleepy
Current Music:Put the Message in the Box - Mary Chapin Carpenter & the Mountain Goats
Part of trying to use Dreamwidth more is realizing all the things I haven't shared here. Such as: As of December, after 16 years in Canada, I am now a Canadian Citizen!
I had a celebratory citizenship/birthday party last night, surrounded by the family and community I've joined/built here in Canada and it was so lovely and affirming and energizing in exactly the way I needed right now.
I'm going to be in France, The UK, Belgium, and Germany in May and June!
I'm quite sure I know many people in at least some of these places and I'd love to see as many of you as I can make happen!
As I noted to Ian just now, seeing things is great and awesome and absolutely something I want to do, but the highlight of travel for me is seeing people, especially ones I've known for ages but never met in person.
Tentative schedule currently is:
- arrive in Paris the morning of May 26th - May 26-June 5 - various locations in France including but not necessarily limited to Paris and Limoges. - plane from somewhere in France to Birmingham the morning of the 5th of June. - June 5-7 VidUKon in Birmingham - June 7-??? - various locations in the UK including London and Portsmouth, other options depending on people and travel options. - ??? - Train from London to Brussels - 2 days later - sleeper from Brussels to Berlin - ??? (tbd quite soon) - fly home from Berlin.
I'll be buying my flight home in the next couple days, at which point all the dates between Birmingham and Berlin will firm up at least a bit.
This is going to be my first time in Europe since I lived in Berlin for three months in 2000. I've never been to France. I've never been to Belgium. The last time I was in England was a high school trip in 1997. It's all both incredibly exciting and kind of terrifying.
Also, while I've done some solo travelling in the US and Canada, both my previous trips to Europe I was always travelling with at least one other person. So that adds an extra layer of nerves.
So, where should I go??? Who should I see??? How much can I vibrate out of my skin with nerves and excitement between now and the end of May???
A couple of days ago the New York Times published an essay from writer Jordan Coley called “How Selling Out Made Me a Better Artist,” in which Coley discovers that all the less-than-amazing pay copy he’d written over the years, from marketing to puff-piece articles and everything in-between, actually made his creative and/or more serious journalism work better, not worse. The still-lingering debate of “art vs commerce” weighs heavily in the piece, as do issues of class and race (Coley is black and comes from a working class background, unlike many of his Yale University contemporaries), and how they both impact how one make’s one’s way in a creative trade.
I encourage you read to read the piece (the link above is a gift link so you can read it at your leisure). I don’t know Coley, or have read enough of his work to say anything about it one way or the other. But I certainly remember my freelance writing years (roughly from 1998 to 2010, when the novel gig finally become remunerative enough that it made sense to focus on it primarily), and my willingness not to be proud about how I was making money, because I had bills to pay and a family to support, and there was no financial support system for me to fall back on. My experience with freelancing certainly resonates with his.
In fact, if I do have any judgements to make against anyone in the “art vs commerce” debate, it’s with the sort of person who would look down on anyone who has to work for a living while also trying to write/create things of significance. One, of course, it’s an immensely privileged position to take, and one that is increasingly at odds with the reality of making a living in the writing field, or in the arts generally. It’s never been a great time to be a professional writer, ever, but these days the field is being aggressively hollowed out both from above (newspaper/magazine/Web sites laying off staff positions) and below (“AI” being used, usually poorly, for a gigs that writers used to do). Anyone who looks down their nose at someone else’s hustle to exist, can, genuinely, go fuck themselves. Short of writing hateful material, here in this capitalist hellscape, a gig is a gig.
Two, and as Coley points out in his essay, the experience of the hustle is in itself fertile ground for writing. It makes you develop a range of writing tools you can employ elsewhere, it puts you in situations that you would not have otherwise been and allows you to mine those experiences for later writing, and it makes you get out in the world and see it from the point of view of people who might not have come into your orbit and situation. That includes any day job, not just ones related to the arts. As a writer, and as a creator, nothing one ever does, professionally or personally, needs to be wasted. It’s all fuel for the creative engine.
With all that said, I think it’s important not to construct a strawman opponent, just to burn it down with self-satisfaction. Coley’s battle with “art vs commerce” was more about his own internal battle than it was against the opprobium of others. I have run across a few snobs in my time who seemed to look down at people who had to work for a living, but it’s only been a few. The vast majority of the creative folks I know are entirely comfortable with the idea that you have to pay bills, and sometimes that means doing less than 100% creatively fulfilling work in order to keep the proverbial roof over one’s head. Whether that has to do with me mostly working in genre literature, which has always been the domain of jobbing writers, is a question to be answered some other time.
The point is the internal discussion of “am I wasting my life paying bills when I should be making art” is these days as much if not more often the issue, than any external question about how one is spending one’s time. For myself, I tended to resolve this question as such: The fact of the matter is I am only really ever creative a few hours a day, three or four hours tops, and often less than that. So why not spend that creative downtime, you know, making money? Concurrent to this, the stuff that I was doing to make that money were frequently things I could bat out fast and with facility, enough so that often my train of thought was “I can’t believe how much I’m getting paid to do this.” I wasn’t cheating anyone or ever turning in bad product. It was just, you know, easy. I was delighted to make easy money! I would do it again!
Anyway: If you’re a writer or creator, never be ashamed of what else you do. It’s 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as “selling out” has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely “selling out” in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don’t believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.
Short of that, get paid, have those experiences and develop new tools. All of it will be useful for the art you do care about. That’s not selling out. That’s learning, with compensation.
I have the audiobook and have listened to it many times.
I love the science, I love the characters, I love the problems that the characters have to face and the way these are tackled.
I'm not in the least surprised they're making a movie, and I'm going to see it as soon as it opens.
The plot is ingenious and unlike any other I've encountered. Earth's sun is losing energy - which means everyone on Earth will die as the world gets colder and colder. There is a limited time span in which to try and find out what is causing the problem and what, if anything can be done about it.
Everything goes in a single 'Hail Mary' project - the only thing that might, possibly might, find a solution.
If you haven't already read it, buy it. (Unless you read and hated 'The Martian', but I don't know anyone who did...)
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