i_am_zan | Reading

Not really a Great Big Transit Adventure this time because I wimped out and cabbed down. Possible rain, possible subway tsuris, and in the event, College blocked off for filming who knows what. Cost me a bit more than usual because I had no fives and because Construction bloody everywhere. Anyway, one crown and one filling later, I set out towards University as the film crews packed up their vans. There were one or two small problems like the machine not accepting my bank card when I went to top up my Presto pass but then doing it, and the gates not wanting to open for my card but then doing it. 4:30 is the start of rush hour and yes the car was packed but the hell with it, I put the brakes on my rollator and sat on that. Again, knew better than to try for the e-w subway and hoped the Dupont station's elevators were working, because I knew two of the escalators weren't. But no problems there either. No bus scheduled for another 22 minutes, but there's the Shoppers handy so got my mailing envelopes. Eventually, because guy at the head of the line was requiring all sorts of things, and the clerk apologized to me for the wait. Mind, with People These Days (signs everywhere saying harassment will not be tolerated, meaning people have been harassing) this may now be standard operating procedure.

So I headed back towards home, hungry because my mouth was still frozen and she said not to eat for another two hours. Got to Bathurst and decided, since I'm awash with money just now (tax refund arrived yesterday) to get me party sandwiches at yuppie Summerhill market. And OMG have the prices gone up. $25 for a box with minimal salmon pinwheels. I got the $16 common or garden variety which was still too much and nothing out of the ordinary. However they're soft, if tasteless, so that was dinner. But shall not be going back there anytime soon, and not just because of the prices. Place was full of yuppie moms and their impervious offspring, both of them being the only people in the world. Also a store that has to hire a security guard is not anywhere I want to be.

flemmings

I was looking out the study window at the newly popped cherry buds waving in the evening breeze against a blue van Gogh sky when a movement down on NND's lawn caught my eye. It was a rabbit. I have no idea where it came from or, for that matter, how it survived the neighbourhood raccoons and coyotes, but there it is, nibbling the grass. Granted, there was a rabbit down at the corner two years ago, but... that was two years ago and there are a *lot* of fences between me and the corner. Ah well. A mystery for the ages.

Last week Good Neighbour Chris' cat was out on its long leash, enjoying the air after a winter of being cooped up. But it had got its leash wrapped around the water shutoff on the grassy strip between myself and NND, and freaked out when I came to unwind him. In the process of going round and round the shutoff on an ever shortening leash, it managed to decapitate three daffodils, which are now sitting in a jar in my kitchen. The shutoff is supposed to be flush with the ground but isn't, and is supposed to be my shutoff and isn't either. Mine is under the paving stones of NND's front path. NND will be moving out in August because the owner has sold the house and I'm trying not to fret about what will move in instead. I am Old and do not like things changing around me. There will be renovations as well, which may be minor or may be a whole new third storey like Prof Islamic Studies had to deal with for a year and change. Must be Zen about this.

Had an ebook come in, The Hymn to Dionysus. Got two chapters in and sent it back because Bad Vibes. Nothing good can come of Dionysus even in a retelling and frankly I just don't trust Natasha Pulley to make him palatable. When They Burned the Butterfly may be oogey in its own way but it's a Singaporean oogey and I can deal with that.

lebateleur

Games: This was a busy weekend for games. We spent ::mumblemumble:: hours playing a session of Eldritch Horror, and actually managed to vanquish the Ancient One 💪 so the sleep deprivation winning entailed was ultimately worth it. Twenty-four hours later at a gathering at Favorite Indian Buffet, we decided to reconvene to spend another ::mumblemumble:: hours playing Wyrmspan.

Both games are great fun. I like Eldritch Horror even more than Arkham Horror, I think because its whole-of-globe canvas just feels like the appropriate setting for 1920s pulp/supernatural horror to my brain. And while both Wingspan and Wyrmspan are both gorgeous and I love birds, I really love fantasy dragons, so I'm an easy mark for the latter. Nor did it hurt that I'm currently reading Novik's Buried Deep (and am about to start Brennan's Onyx Court) and so would have had dragons on the brain even if there weren't a few Temeraire-verse stories in the anthology.

Movies: The anime fan-subset of the Geek BBQers wrapped up our Rebuild of Evangelion (re)watch. As one of the viewers who watched the original anime back in the day but had not seen any of the remakes before, I was not quite sure what to expect (and still have vivid memories of watching a bunch of very upset and equally committed otaku protesting the release of 2.0 at the movie theater across the street from my workplace in Kyoto). I enjoyed it! It was definitely a nostalgia trip but also interesting to watch knowing 1000 percent more about Japan's domestic experience of WWII versus viewing it through the lens of adolescent angst (Everything is so hard and no one understands me!) We tackled Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time during this session, meaning I was wholly out to sea as to what would happen in many places. But it felt like the new stuff dovetailed really well with the original, the new additions were fun, and (without spoiling anything) there was a lot about it that I felt improved on the original while still keeping its patented "psychological turmoil as interpreted through Christian mysticism by someone who did not grow up Christian"-weirdness vibe.

Music: We saw Carpenter Brut and Health at the "Okay but not great" concert venue. Carpenter Brut was fabulous We got our tickets months ago when the show was first announced and were bemused to learn that it had sold out in the meantime. As a result, we did not arrive early and did not have great sightlines on the stage for the first half of Carpenter Brut's set. But honestly? There was not much to be seen anyway, given that Carpenter Brut is primarily an auditory experience. And it was an experience: his music is eerie and foreboding enough on a set of earbuds or speakers. In a proper venue it is wicked.

Health was a bit of surprise. I mainly knew them as "the guy that remixed that Crystal Castles track" and was surprised to learn that "that guy" was actually an entire band, and that said band has been around for about 20 years. We'd assumed, judging from the venue info and the tickets, that Carpenter Brut was the headliner (as did most of the crowd, who took off after Carpenter Brut's set ended) but upon realizing that Health was actually the main acted, said "Eh, we already paid for it" and decided to stick around. Their guitarist's cringe high school jock jokes aside, they're actually pretty good. Their vocalist sounds like the forlorn lovechild of maynard keenan and Brian Molko, and their music is clearly pretty heavily inspired by APC, NIN, and the like. Having only heard it once I have no real opinion on theme or lyrics, but I would certainly listen to it again.

Podcasts/Articles: Too many to mention them all, but I did revisit Patrick Radden Keefe's A Teen's Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld while I wait for my hold on London Falling to come in. (Guys, Keefe is one of my favorite nonfiction authors and I lust after this book. Luckily, I'm only about #17003 on 35 copies! 😒)

Roleplaying: Having Put Together A Crew^(TM) from the star players of our various D&D homebrew and official campaigns, the GC held a pretty excellent Session Zero for a new Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign. I am playing a fey swarmmaster druid, who I'm envisioning as a sort of fish-out-of-water by virtue of the fact that as a few amongst a bunch of human children in the feywild, she's the only one who 1) knows what's going on, but 2) doesn't know how out of their element any of the others are.

Television: AEW continues to be an absolute delight. My heart and soul increasingly belong to Thekla, who is about as close to an IRL incarnation of Karlach as I think this timeline can get. Her Collision match with Alex Windsor was fire. Pac versus Lio Rush was a verrrrry close second; I love how good Pac was at playing the straight man to Rush's Smeagol-brand creepiness, which made me an instafan. (Seriously, it's the best wrestling creepiness since Velveteen Dream. Also, Pac continues to be criminally underrated and underused.) Mina Shirakawa and Hikaru Shida's Japanese smacktalk is fabulous. Nick Wayne made Mox look both fast and not boring 😂, Brody King continues to dominate, MJF continues to be the consummate heel, and FTR and Stokely will always crack me up. This is an absolute match and storyline golden era, and not even the unnecessary reintroduction of Jericho can spoil it.

Video Games: It's been a dry period for me for video gaming, but I am casually spectating as the GC plays his way through Metaphor, which, hysterically, he keeps inadvertently referring to as "Persona", and which, hysterically, everyone still knows what he's talking about.

これで以上です。

flemmings

For various reasons, largely having to do with the persistent rain of this rainy April, I have revived Project Tiddly, and went one better by ordering delivery of my vodka and cooler. Having gone out to the super this afternoon and having cleaned the gunk of spring off the walker's wheels, I had no desire to do it all again. Equally all I want to eat is cake and have in fact eaten cake every day this past week thanks to a McCains Deep and Delicious vanilla frozen cake. And very nice it was too. Vegetables simply don't do it for me anymore. I can't move in the mornings anyway so can't get downstairs to weigh myself so the damage will go unnoticed and unrecorded.

I wondered why I could never get Substack to load on my tablet. Discover it's because the upstarts tablet, bought in 2017 and retured to factory settings in 2021, refuses to load certain programs and apps like Kobo and Substack while the downstairs one is just fine with them. A nuisance, but nothing to be done about it. The upstairs tablet holds a charge much longer than the downstairs one, which is perpetually running out of battery. Like now, for instance, after I recharged it last night and this afternoon.

However, see that my nephew has at last cashed the wedding cheque I sent him a month ago, so that niggle is settled.

flemmings

I spent large chunks of today cutting down garbage trees both front and back. I don't know what they are but I want them gone. The gardener was supposed to have removed them three years ago, but garbage trees are like cockroaches. One is never rid of them. A machete would have come in handy but the nameless tool with a serrated blade did well enough. I've cut the garage ones back to the root knot but have neither the strength nor the inclination to dig those out. I will try the effect of bleach instead. After which I was hacking away at the overgrown vines on the fence by the garage when SND's fiancé stopped me. He says there are birds nesting in the thicket, so I had to stop. Apparently by the end of May they'll have hatched and then he says he'll cut back the branches for me. He was out with my tree branch lopper, which he managed to assemble for me, cutting the cherry branches on the other side of his yard, the one belonging to Good Neighbour Chris.

I did manage to cut some of the dead and dried vines off the fence closer to the house, but my back was in conniptions by that point. Came inside and stretched, and shortly thereafter tackled the things growing in the front yard. This was much antsier because the footing in front is so uneven, what with the invasive species Eglish ivy. I begin to think boat shoes ie my New Balances, are maybe not the best footware for this, though I can't think what is. Something lighter and flatter that registers the ground underfoot better. But again, sawed down some quite thick stems leaving only the root knots, handy for tripping over should you be wading about my front lawn. Then took out some of the dead wood from the hedge, and finally sawed through the branches of the very dead pine in the corner of the planter. Sawing all this wood to an acceptable length for the garbage guys and tying it up as you're supposed to will be a pain, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I expect to be crippled tomorrow and might try for a massage. Can only hope this counts as exercise and calorie burning.

flemmings

Lessee. Finished Thoughts Contingent on a Blithe Spirit, a Dr. Priestley, The Terracotta Bride, and a fast reread of After the Funeral because I'd totally forgotten Who Done It as well as Who Was Done in the first place. This is very pleasant. Evidently I do forget Agatha Christies because in turning out my shelves I discovered a paperback copy of The Clocks, which I could have sworn I never read in my life.

But mostly I've been beavering through Murder After Christmas, a seriously batshit version of English country house Golden Age mysteries. It has one of those seriously batshit English families that one usually finds in places like Wodehouse where genre stops you from taking them as anything but comedic. I'm not sure if the author, one Rupert Latimer, intended this to be comedic because the rest is fairly deadpan serious. The twists in the plot made my head spin, as they did the inspecting Inspector. I'm still going But wouldn't his third wife's family still inherit? But no, because evidently his first wife was still alive when he married his third? But she couldn't have been because didn't he remarry his first wife when the second one died so he couldn't have married the third until she was dead but wait... I don't want to have to reread this to find out but it's seriously going to bug me if I don't. Also am not champing at the bit to start When They Burned the Butterfly which sounds like a downer.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

flemmings

So evidently any caffeine after 4 pm results in a nuit blanche. In spite of early-for-me rising yesterday, I was wide awake past midnight. Gave it darkness and beanbags and the old college try, but no luck. After an hour I gave up, turned on the light, and read Zen Cho's The Terracotta Bride until a quarter to four. Turned off light, eventually drifted off, and was awake at nine. And awake awake. So today has been something of a bust with every joint aching into the bargain. I miss the days when I could fall asleep just reading in bed. This I suppose is how the insomnia of old age works for me.

Reading on through the Phaedo, I am not impressed by Socrates' argument that everything arises from its opposite and that life must come from death.

Now to her lap the incestuous Earth
The son she bore has ta'en
And other sons she brings to birth
But not my friend again.

Socrates believes in a soul, an ego, that simply cycles through the cycles while I semi-Buddhistically think that's nonsense. There is no I in Buddhism-- though how then do people remember 'their' past lives? However I'm with Stoppard's Guildenstern: Death is not anything. Death is not. It's the absence of presence, nothing more. A gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.

flemmings

The tree guys are out back clearing branches from the cherry and piling the resultant brush out in front for the chipper. The whole street in front of SND, me, and NND was empty this morning which, as the guy said, never happens. Indeed, whenever I've had a delivery, for sure someone slides into all the available spots. When I last did this in 2020, they wanted me to reserve space for the chipper and when I did, said it wasn't long enough. That, plus price, is why I went with a different firm this time. Still can't watch the guy doing his thing high in the branches. Partly because imagination of disaster me sees branches breaking under him (yes of course he's clipped and carbined), partly because My tree, my tree, my poor tree denuded even before the blossoms have begun. However they've taken down any branch that comes even close to the wires, so no worry about high winds bringing stuff down. High winds love to strip twigs from the front yard trees so yeah, I have a thing about trees and wires.

Their email said I was second on their list today and they'd be here around lunchtime and lunchtime can be anything around twelve. Even if I know that work never ever finishes early I still felt it necessary to be up and exercised and fed by 11, so no rolling back to sleep when I woke at 9. Curtailed sleep and allergies have kept me logey all day, helped by ordering in a banh mi and Vietnamese coffee for lunch. Guys showed up at 1:45 and lunch showed up at 1:50. Is bright and cold and blowy today, after yesterday's 'four seasons in 24 hours.' I went out in winter jacket for the grey autumnal morning temps, had to take it off when the sun came out and warmed the world up, came home to snow showers followed by thunder and monsoon rain. One really doesn't need this kind of drama, you know.

It's actually not 'how terribly strange to be seventy' or even seventy-something. It's realizing that stuff one remembers perfectly well happened sixty years ago. Lots of people don't even live to sixty. That's the weird part.

tropicsbear

I was cleaning up some of the older tabs on my phone when I came across this. I’m pretty sure someone on my reading list shared this way back when, but I can’t remember who did.

The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly

Simply read my name three times into any mirror or other reflective surface and I will return her to you for the extremely reasonable tithe of nine (9) years of your life.

Lowkey tempted to write something for Queen Jaref/Constance Connelly. Unsure if I want to follow the epistolary format or not 🤔

flemmings

Evidently walking 7000 steps leads to, conservatively, eleven hours of sleep, if we suppose it took me over an hour to fall asleep, which I don't think it did. So I finally woke up well after noon and forewent my usual exercises to have breakfast instead. But did them afterwards because heavy rain meant no going out. So I am stretched and no less limber than usual.

Succeeded in one long postponed task, which was sweeping the basement stairs, something I've probably never done since returningfrom Japan thirty years ago. But six years back when next door was moving stuff into my basement my s-i-l cleaned the place up and my did it make a difference. So I've known I should do it but I've never been happy on the stairs since tripping on them last year. However, did get them swept off, with my backyard broom because basement dust is nasty, and need only bring a dustpan and garbage bag down to dispose of the piles. Which will do when I rescue the laundry I did today after it dries in the furnace's heat. Furnace is still not on because temps won't drop until the wee hours, but have bumped the thermostat up to 15 so I won't freeze in those same wee hours.

tropicsbear

⚠️ Series warnings (but not discussed in this entry): Implied past sexual assault; non-sexual and sexual nudity; non-explicit consensual sex; body horror; blood; gore

Personal rating 9/10

Growing impatient, the shogun orders a second group made up of Yamada Asaemon and Iwagakure ninjas to go to Shinsenkyou and find out what happened to the vanguard party. Meanwhile, on the island, the remaining vanguard party members finally regroup and try to figure out their next steps.

( Cut for length and spoilers. )

Random stuff:

Can’t wait to see more of the additional landing party and their abilities. I find Isuzu and Shugen the most intriguing so far.
Jikka being excited to clock out and leave this island 😂 It’s me past 2:00 PM on a weekday.
Thank you, animators, for all the moments where Gantetsusai is just in fundoshi and the moments where he takes off his top so I get to see peekaboo glimpses of his hips/thighs because of his hakama. Thank you as well for Shugen’s biceps and Ran’s muscles.
Lowkey shipping Eizen/Shugen but not currently motivated to actively search for content.
Very glad I stumbled across the ちょびっと！じごくらく！ shorts on YouTube! They’re a goldmine for the type of trivia and/or fun facts that inspire fanworks. (Like, what do you mean Fuchi gives all the Yamada Asaemon nicknames because he sees them as family? 😭😭😭)
Honestly, Fuchi in general was so cute?? The way his ahoge flicked back-and-forth as he spilled Sagiri's crush, the way he got hyped about getting to study Tensen bodies and Gantetsusai’s new look, the way he kind of skip-hops in lieu of running omggg
I can’t find any news re: the air date for S03, but if we’re following the wait time between S01 and S02, we’ll get S03 (probably the final season since the manga’s done) in 2029.

flemmings

One of those fitness bros on Tiktok was banging on about 'Your first 5000 steps don't count! That's just you moving around in your day. It's the second 5000 that will make you fit!' Yeah well, we know who doesn't have an office job. Also who is not an arthritic seventy-something. 5000 steps is a good day for me, achieved today by going out for lunch in the 'one day only! sun' and continuing along Bloor to Wieners Home Hardware, where I purchased an air purifier and a 100 foot extension cord, and walked both back on the rollator. I have good intentions of trimming vines in the back garden and the hedge in the front, which will not happen soon because my back is killing me these days. Maybe when April is over?

(There was an interlude there where I went to get cash from the BoM's ATM, which returned my card and gave me a receipt but did not give me cash. And because it was Friday, there was a lineup to speak to a person. So I waited and watched one woman do something with what looked like her business's account books, and then did something else, and then had to pay some bills, and then needed something else done with her card. All the time in the world. But she finished at last and I rolled up to the desk and asked about my money. The clerk took my receipt, looked at it, and showed me the small print under my total, which said the machine could not complete the transaction so the withdrawal was cancelled. I felt like an idiot, of course, but now I know. And know not to try for money on a Friday when the machines are likely to run out of cash. Or run out of tens, a new option that I'd like to use except that mostly the ATMs will only offer me twenties and fives. Well, fifties if I want them but I don't. I want small bills for panhandlers and tips.)

But after a rest at home with beanbags and muscle relaxants I did another of my perennial To Do chores and washed the warmer of my two winter coats at the laundromat. Cold water and a smaller load let me get away with a mere 2.75; the larger machines start at $4 for a cold wash. You can't dry clean this coat but I doubt that washing got much of the grime off the sleeves. I tumble dried it on low, as instructed, but it will require hanging up to get completely dry. Which is fine-- winter's last blast will blast through some time tomorrow and I will need the heat on for a couple of nights.

After which I went out again to see if Fiesta had turkey rolls, which they didn't. Got some hummous to eat with veg and a couple of Pepsis to help with the sinus medication I have to take in the allergy season. All this came to a grand total of 7000 steps, so no, no second 5000 steps for me. Fitness bro can go pound sand.

flemmings

Oh happy day dep't. Fiesta has its bagels back. My email works again for my money woman and I have a chunk of change before the markets tank once more. Seriously, will no one rid me of this turbulent toddler? And greasy-haired Kegsbreath while we're at it.

My bank tells me when there's a withdrawal over $500, which is nice, but do they need to ping me the info at 2 a.m? Mind, I was actually up at that hour. Increasing my water intake has lost me some of the weight that vodka put on this winter, and I'm grateful, but even if I drink nothing after 8 p.m., once my body is in water-shedding mode it doesn't stop. So I'm back to those middle of the night bathroom trips which I thought were long behind me.

I have also discovered how one orders from amazon.jp. That odd country in the list, Club? That's Canada. So I could order the new 100 Demons from them but amazon.jp is still amazon.jp is still unmitigated highway robbery. The exchange rate is heavenly: a tankōbon comes in at $8. Once amazon has its weasley way, it will cost me $49 and change. Yeah, no, as they say in the Midwest. Must try to work out honto.jp's new buying system since they ditched the German company, and maybe then they'll be willing to sell me paperbacks again. In the meantime Finder Jean has offered to mail me a copy so I've ordered it from amazon to her address and hope it arrives there safely.

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i_am_zan

December 2011

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zan's ramblings

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