6/10/26
dang i have not blogged in a while. oops. what the fuck have i been doing?
reading
it's never quite actually felt like "actual" reading, because i read quite a bit of it in threads on twitter (and later bluesky), but Katie Aki's mammoth Wasteland Pony Express novel is wrapping up after like six years of serialization and crowdsourcing the main character's action in polls. we've been talking a bit on her discord server about how much of an effect we, the readers, have had on the story, and the answer is fairly complicated. there are definitely things that could have gone differently, better or worse, but a lot of the direction of the story was never under our control. which, personally, i think is pretty great, voting on what our little cowgirl paper doll does is fun, but i'm actually a lot more interested in the fucked up shit in Katie's brain than i am in my own whims! now that it's just about complete (there's still an epilogue coming) it feels a lot easier to tell people to read it (though still a pretty hard sell on account of being something like 600,000 words!), so now i'm telling you: go read this thing it's incredible! it's got non-dystopian post-apocalypse, an illiterate cowgirl letter carrier, a one-armed busty saloon girl (not as much of her as i'd like, personally!! #JusticeForVenus), a glamorous high-femme damsel who may or may not be in distress, prophetic nuns, a cannibal (reformed) assassin, an isolated community of pearl-divers, religious trauma, boot-humping and armpit stuff, and more! someday soon it might even have a better name than the very utilitarian "Wasteland Pony Express"!
on paper, i've been reading my pal Ladz' The Fealty of Monsters (ebook, hardcopy) and liking it a lot! i struggled with the last book of theirs i read, The Cradle of Eternal Night (ebook, hardcopy), and was worried that i might just not be into my friend's writing. but it turns out Cradle just had a lot of elements that didn't quite work for me, while Fealty does. i swear after i finish this one i'm going to read Moby-Dick. Alex Reed read a passage from it in the latest deep-dive into the songs on Seeming's latest album that was just so gorgeous that i realized i can't keep putting it off.
i've also been reading dear friend (and fellow Emily) Emily Wynne's latest novel, I Find Myself in Light, which she's been serializing here. i loved her first two, Princess of the Pomegranate Moon (ebook, hardcopy) and Tales of Elsinore (ebook, hardcopy), and this one is making me absolutely feral. it definitely feels like a departure from the swords & sorcery she's published previously, but i don't think it's as much of one as you might think at first glance.
#SportsDyke
last year someone on my bsky feed, i have no recollection of who, retweeted something about the new Women's Elite Rugby league, namely that there is a Boston team, and they are called the Banshees, and how could i resist a name like that? even better, it turns out they don't actually play in Boston, but down here in Quincy, like a mile from where i live! so i guess now i'm a rugby fan, and i know what things like "fly half" and "loosehead prop" and "8" mean, and honestly it still feels kinda weird to suddenly be into sports, but all in all i'm enjoying the experience. i have a lot of local friends that are into our PWHL team, the Fleet, and it seems inevitable that my partner and i will get into them too, but their games are much further away and more expensive so it's not quite as compelling, tbh.
unfortunately, WER used to be relatively inclusive as sports leagues go (and from what i've gathered, rugby culture prides itself on being a sport for everyone), but this year abruptly kicked out the handful of trans women who played for them, citing a similar rules change from the larger USA Rugby league, but actually going much further. as i understand it, USA Rugby assumes players to be eligible to play, but allows for that eligibility to be challenged, while WER simply removed players before any challenges were brought. there's a petition calling on them to reverse this, and many, many players at the games we've attended this season have been sporting trans flag colored accessories, so i don't think it's going over very well for anyone except the people with the money at the top of the league. fingers crossed we're all successful in pushing back against this, it would be great to see a win on the trans rights front one of these days!
birds
before the last rugby game we went to, our friends took me down to the herring run in Weymouth to see the birds (and the herring). it was pretty incredible. there were probably at least a hundred cormorants chilling in the river, along with a handful of night herons and one great blue heron. i'd seen great blue herons before but only by themselves, seeing it in comparison to the much more compact night herons made me realize that the "great" in their name is not about them being good birds (though they are), but because they're fucking huge. along with some assorted more common birds (gulls, swifts, robins, starlings), there was also an oriole that we could hear really clearly, but couldn't get eyes on, which was a bummer.
i've also managed to catch a glimpse for the first time of a couple of mockingbirds, a house finch (i love their little red faces! like they just feasted on the entrails of the unworthy!), and today while walking home from the grocery store, an eastern kingbird, which was a nice little delight!
playing
progress continues apace in Final Fantasy Tactics and Titanium Court. i've been going back to FFT a bit more lately, and have made it to the beginning of chapter 3. the back end of chapter 2 was pretty rough; i did not look ahead in a guide to see that i'd be stuck in a long sequence of battles and so started those without letting half my team return from the errands they were on. but my core group is getting pretty beefy! Titanium Court is still baffling and delightful, though i'm at a point where i have a lot of moderately complicated things that i need to do, but actually getting things to line up so those goals are achievable is a bit of a crapshoot, which is sometimes pretty frustrating! i restarted a battle like six times yesterday trying to find the balance between "not getting killed by the any of the bosses" and "not killing the bosses so they can do a thing together in the next level", and just couldn't find it, so now i will have to give that campaign another go. annoying!
the Mixtum Dogma reading group has taken a break from reading to start an RPG that Martiana devised, we're playing four churchmen who, sometime after the Council of Trent are sent to a backwater village to authenticate a potential relic. we've discovered that the town's domina has some upsettingly pagan leanings, and made several of the locals, including their priest, cry with the pointedness of our questions. Martiana's been keeping a log of our adventures, which so far is just one day, between our somewhat sporadic meeting times and how long we've managed to draw the sessions out (at the second one we didn't even finish the in-game day, but we should probably get a log of the first half up soon). it's been a ton of fun! i often struggle with role-playing these days (for some reason, i was a lot more interested in it before i transitioned? i wonder what that's about), but it's still been a ton of fun.
listening
i've been listening to CDs! almost. sort of. i knew i had a big box of old CDs in the garage somewhere, and a few weeks ago i finally managed to dig it up. many of them are things that i never got around to digitizing, and much of what was digitized was done back in the days when storage was a lot more expensive, so it was in varying quality of MP3. i've been ripping or re-ripping everything in FLAC, which is a nice improvement. i've found delights like one of the first goth compilations i ever bought, a lot of Christian Death (Rozz remains an extremely problematic fave, but i've been getting back into his work thanks to rereading Elana Lavin's essay on Figurative Theatre from the March Vladness competition), and Nirvana CDs i completely forgot i owned (have you ever heard of these guys? they're pretty good!).
crafting
i finished my Decadence blouse, just in time to wear at my partner's graduation this Friday from the fancy fellowship program they're taking to supplement the Master's degree they're also working on! i actually don't have any projects queued up right now, so i'm going back to do some edits on already completed ones: i love my Runo sweater but i ended up making it too long, and while it's supposed to be slouchy the neckhole is so wide i can't actually keep it on my shoulders even if i want to, so i'm going to have to remove the arms in order to redo the neck, and undo the cast-on to bring the waist up a little bit; my Sol tank top mostly fits great but somehow the shoulder straps ended up several inches too long so i'm undoing those and tinking a couple inches, and i might also undo the cast-on to shorten it ever so slightly too. it's frustrating to have to do all this, but if i'm going to take the time to make garments for myself i might as well make sure they actually fit like i want them to!
i've also finally finished my first collage from my pal Nat's collage kit Patreon. the first envelope arrived literally days before i ended up in the hospital needing to get my gallbladder removed, and recovering from that has really fucked up all my plans for doing stuff. i've now got three more envelopes of supplies to use, and have only looked through one of them; i'm trying to give myself the constraint of using only the materials from each month's kit, because i always work better when i'm able to have a narrower focus.
i'm not entirely happy with this piece, the glue i used caused a lot of wrinkles in the thin paper, and honestly the main conceit of the piece (people with flowers instead of heads) seems very basic to me; at best i think i'm just ripping off Yoko Taro, but tbh i don't think it even rises to that level. but you know what? i also don't care. this is the first collage i've done since grade school! it's ok if it's a bit basic and clumsily put together! the point of the thing was to do it, and do it i have!
damn this was a lot
hopefully i write sooner next time, so that i can write at slightly less length. cripes.