Another journal

I think one can do pinned here? Or "sticky"?? Anyway, I just went and cleaned up some weird code that the linkback from my WP plugin was doing and figured that I should note: more often than not, what you see here is just mirroring my blog-blog! But I do reply to comments here, obvi, the posts just *originate* mostly from another place.

In the spirit of putting some useful things right up top, here's a the intro from my Tumblr, where I am the most active:

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I go by B most often and if you are wondering how to pronounce my handle/name, this post right here has visual and aural examples, thanks to a wonderful podficcer ask.

I’m all over the internet because I’ve been here a long time, see my link page for the regular places. Tarot card stickers can be found here!

I’m also on AO3 as bzedan as well because the fact that I’m very googlable has yet to be a problem with work.

I recently got (thank you, Chase) a cool USB stick, so I used it to finally move some of last year’s files off the ol’ tablet. Please first, look at this.

Amazing. Anyway, I need to do a blog post and I have doodles that maybe didn’t make it anywhere else (though I think most did?) but they for sure didn’t make it here, so here’s a dump of images.

Mouseworld but make it The Locked Tomb? Don’t mind if I do. Ummm, I think was from this tumblr post. The Flinstones birds are from an illustration for one of the collected zine versions of my newsletter. I think I did the style justice.

Don’t remember why for this one! Shrimp!!

Have you heard the good news about Worm In A Rock God? A great comic that you can read here (and on Bluesky), don’t be put off, the opening pages are empty on purpose.

I won’t stop thinking this is one of the funnier memes/edits I’ve done. See. it’s about how Lancelot was basically a fandom self-insert character. Like how Gopher from the Disney Winnie The Pooh wasn’t in the books. I use “like Gopher” a lot in reference to characters who are added into stories when they change mediums. It’s been funny to me for 30 years.

Anyway! That is it. Everything else is around or was an illustration for something or was a niche meme made for a single person. Oh! Actually, have an emoji I made for the family discord to close it out.

I have spent most of this week doing fiddly things that are very boring and haven’t gathered a moment to blogpost this week so! Tab cleanout it is also because god I need to just do that as well.

xkcd 2501 generator, what it says on the tin. Make your own of the oft-memed panel about experts over estimating how much the general public knows about a specific topic.
status: shared, shared on family discord

Discord Chat Exporter on GitHub by Tyrrrz, because I do like the concept of archiving. However, this is one of those things that looks jussssst complex enough I feel defeated before even trying. I think GitHub in general makes me feel that way. Nonetheless!
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Tegerio on Patreon. I had encountered a comic panel I liked by JW Kennedy over on Bluesky and looked them up to find more. I found the Patreon and on my phone the whole thing (which is 18+) was blurred so the tab had been living open until I remembered to look at it on the computer where I’m signed in. From there I found a Tumblr archive of a webcomic, which I’m now following and fingers crossed I remember to start reading the backlog of it.
status: followed links, followed Tumblr

A Little Nightcap, at Cooper Hewitt. A friend had sent me a post about this embroidered cap and I poked around in the notes to learn more about it and would like to maybe replicate it some day? Love this comment on it regarding the “caterpillars” that accompany the rainbows and clouds the cap is covered with:

Those are not caterpillars. Why must we always assume the most pleasant option and have a narrative; especially when it is abundantly clear they are house centipedes. We live with them now, and folks certainly lived with them then, and oftentimes things are ornamental without a reason, other than familiarity. Caterpillars, do not hve antennae, nor junctured legs. It is a lovely and interesting piece. Thank you for sharing it.

status: moved to REF: Fibre & Sewing

50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbor, a zine I encountered on Bluesky and immediately lost the source of. Wait! Because the tab had just been open forever I was able to browse back and it’s from Million Experiments. It’s one of those lists of things that vary in seriousness and usefulness but does get the brain moving. MOSTLY though what I keep thinking of is that Mister Rogers Neighborhood is available on Hoopla on Binge Pass, which means you can log on with your library card and check watch for a week. I am enjoying it, it’s nice and calming and familiar and also hopeful, which is vital I think nowadays.
status: saved zine to archive

How To Stop Jumping Ship, one of multiple posts about fixing the Internet Problem I’ve seen lately. This one feels less um, “I know how to fix it let’s start by building things anew” than others I’ve seen (and could be just being a bitch about, I haven’t brought myself to read more than the pull quotes yet but I’m a bit :grimace: about it, maybe because that particular post is on Substack which is ah, hm. Anyway, I am here with my blog, which is mirrored on Dreamwidth (hello, if you are reading this there), I have a newsletter, I dunno. I know this isn’t a cute/cool retro style blog, but it’s mine. Did you know my oldest real post is from 2008 I guess. I think I imported my LJ over here, once upon a time, but damned if I know what posts are what.
status: added the blogring to my Links page, moved a link from post about IRC to REF: Web & Computer

Please wish strength at me as if I keep my shit on track I can finish this boring task this weekend.

My best friend is wonderful in many ways, and one of those was is that she tells me what to make him for presents. Birthdays are the important ones. Last year I wrote a story for her Fallout ghoul OC and this year I looked at my list of suggestions and decided to make him a little hand puppet. As a kid he’d had a little pig puppet with an aloha shirt that was fun to remove, and she liked to make the voice for it. The suggestion given me was to make a puppet for his fursona and! it was also a nice way to fill another square on Fibre Arts Bingo: “Make something with the waste/leftovers of other projects.”

First, please appreciate the cuteness of puppet Molly. She has a floral shirt that can be removed (like her inspiration), and a very simple denim vest. I’ve made a lot of puppets before (though not all were as involved as the owlbear puppet), but the simplicity of a hand puppet is a real delight.

Like I do, I looked at what patterns were around for what I wanted to make then quickly drafted out my own. At this point I’ve made enough plushies and whatnot to be able to eyeball shapes, so it came together pretty quickly.

Now, this square was using scraps from old projects and the faux fur used for most of the body was most of the last scraps of faux fur purchased to make my best friend’s cat a sky bison costume for the Korra finale, which was ah. Well over 10 years ago. More of the scrap was used a couple of years ago to make her a stuffed animal (a minotaur that is not quite this fursona, but spiritually similar).

With Joann Fabrics gone, frankly I don’t know where I will get faux fur in the future (I’ll figure it out, but no rush), so I had to use what I had on hand. Which was luckily enough! Not quite enough to do the body, which was done in cotton flannel, but the inside of faux fur feels gross to the hand, so that worked out fine.

It went together easily enough! Her clothing is more scraps: the shirt was made from some hippie dress or top from who knows when that has had patches and pieces cut out enough there’s not much left, the vest from one of the scraps I keep whenever jeans become jean shorts. To be fair, this square and the “stash only” feel a little like cheats because I generally only work from stash any more, because we live in a small space (the bulk of the stash acquired in different living situations). The overall goal this year is to reduce the stash as much as I can, turning things into objects and clothing.

This though, this was a real joyous use of scraps. I love knowing that this was made with pieces from something I made for a cat my best friend and I both loved, in celebration of a show that felt (and was) so important to us and to seeing queer relationships on TV. So much time between then and now! And our friendship the bridge across it.

I ended up reading a bit less this month (well, in book numbers, not page numbers) thanks to Flash Fiction February. That said I also am trying to be better about having more than one book checked out on Libby at a time. I get nervous is all, what if I don’t finish the first book while I have the second book checked out, ugh, it’s there hovering, waiting. But Libby has changed it’s delay options, so rather than pushing things back to a date a week, two weeks, some months from now you can only suspend a hold and then unsuspend it when you’re ready. I have, ah, several books suspended right now (most of which are non-fiction because I’m slow at reading them and like to pace them between fiction).

Anyway, here’s the roundup and stats for February.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

What a grody, gorgeous, viciously verdant book. The story drips thick and rich through a rotting, sprouting world of opera and overthrown regimes, as the characters twine relentlessly to their fates.

Boy-o, what a delight this was. It’s thick and visceral and lived-in. It just makes me want to use squishy descriptive words about it. It also does some things with structure that I didn’t catch right off, so I don’t want to say too much, but I’d loved Leech and now I guess Ennes is just on my list of To Watch For. This felt like a good companion to Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide, so if you like one or the other, there’s a rec for you.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Whew what a book! So many shadowed layers, thickly and deliciously spread with an inhabited world and the mess of people in it. The plot doesn’t twist so much as turn like a winding snake, a winding ribbon to an ending.

This had been on my to-read and I’d then forgotten but then a pal’s review (and a better review than this) reminded me about it and I dropped it in the hold queue. Weirdly?? Reminds me a little of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler but maybe just parts of it, maybe just the journey of it, the papers and the periods of being lost, the structural play. It’s certainly a better book than IOAWNAT, to me at least.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The layers of this book fold together like beautiful cloth wrapping, from novel-in-a-novel to interviews to the main tale. It kept me turning and unwrapping the story drawn in by lush descriptions of family and food and life. You want to call the ending the bow on it but it was instead the thing hidden by all those layers and I don’t! feel it was quite what I wanted or expected to find.

Notable about this book, I paired it with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward in the latest newsletter reading recommendations and I’ll just copy what I said there:

I recently read two books in a row that had the same thing going on. Not the story or the style or anything, but both were awesome rides the full way through, doing some neat things with how a story is shaped, but then the ending didn’t hit for me as solidly as I needed it to. Which does not! Mean they’re not worth reading. It was actually really interesting to interrogate myself on why the endings didn’t work for me the way I wanted. Maybe (probably) they’ll do better for you.

I can’t hate a book for not sticking the landing, not if they do it the best they can. I don’t know how either of these books should have ended but the endings here work! And I enjoyed the ride, so I can’t complain (well, I can, but you know).

Here’s the pretty gradient of the month’s covers:

There’s Legendary Children again, this time it was as audio, a joy. The other book in this lot was Kate Elliot’s The Nameless Land, the concluding book of the Witch Roads duology. As sometimes happens, the second book didn’t do it for me as the first did. Still glad for it, well-written, good conclusion etc., etc., but I can’t pick out which ingredient (longing? world building? quests?) I found so tasty in the first book that was missing here.

It was a bit of a lot of a week, hence the weekly blogpost coming on a Sunday rather than in the week. February was itself a bit much, as doing Flash Fiction February often does–even when I’m writing some every day otherwise I’m not writing a complete thing and setting aside an hour to write it then share first lines and, new this year, share with the Storytelling Collective discord and read other people’s flash.

I do a weekly accounting of what is done on which projects over on Patreon and Comradery, so I’m trying not to do the same here but like, more thoughtfully examine how this year’s Flash Fiction February went. But, yeah, first some stats.

Average wordcount was 598, which is very solidly flash fiction, goldilocks zone for me here. Three works were in the 300 word range and three were in the 800 word range, but none dipped to 200 or up to 900. Lol, it looks like I even got one *exactly* at 500 words, amazing.

Total wordcount 16,747, which is just an nice big number to look at. Like, check that out! That’s like a fourth? Of how long a novel is. Wild.

Of course, I track genres and whatnot, have every year (parly it’s to make sure I’m getting a nice assortment in the inevitable collection. Here’s the genre count:

More fantasy than anything this year, but with “Normal World” close behind?! I did a lot of everyday types of vignettes this go-round. I also hit up some genres/story worlds I have build in previous Flash Fiction February challenges. I’ve already got one gathered as an eventual fix-up story, sitting on ice for now, but I think I’m going to end up with another, based on the sub-genre stats.

This is the fifth year I’ve done Flash Fiction February, and it’s neat to look at the work I’ve made with it (here’s a link to the pieces I’ve shared here) and the work I’ve done beyond it and see the growth in storytelling but also to feel how it has helped keep the muscle flexible to write when I can and if I need to. What I realised it also has done, something I hadn’t realised until I was in a group of other people doing it, was teaching useful brevity. A lot of folks seemed to have trouble reigning it in to the standard flash fiction word count of under 1,000 words. Not to say short is better, but it’s a cool strength to build, to learn when to accept a vignette or a scene as a whole and valuable thing.

I mean, I also thrive in writing under restrictions, so this is kind of where I live.

Not to say I am amazing at it all, at the start of the month I was *certain* I’d be able to keep working on my longer writing project while also doing FFF, which immediately proved itself untrue. That is fine! I almost didn’t get the monthly newsletter done in time but I did, hooray. I ended up only being one day behind, which might be the best I’ve done as far as skipping days? And I did stuff this month, went out to museums and worked on other projects.

I think, it’s just nice to find ways to prove to yourself you can do a thing. I have done a thing! Hooray for the fifth FFF completed to me.

I was cleaning up tabs today, not in a way that would result in a satisfying tab cleanout post, but because once more I’d opened up my browser in the morning and encountered a bunch of things open about a topic I’d apparently looked up before going to bed. I do this, finding a series of rabbit holes to burrow down when I’m between reading books or otherwise just looking for a lower-investment bit of reading.

This round was about sumptuary laws–opened because I’d looked up something briefly while working on a Flash Fiction February entry. It’s silly to be looking stuff up when I’m trying to keep each day’s time below 45 minutes (I’m averaging about 30), but the laws around patent theatres that restricted speaking roles were part of the mix that created pantomime and well, I got distracted.

Previously to that, I woke up one day and found my phone browser was full of things on the St. Francis Dam disaster and the California Water Wars. That made sense as I’d rewatched Chinatown in the background while working on something.

Anyway, I do this a lot. The most notable was the time I found a bunch of tabs open on Punch and Judy. Why? No idea.

I made a post about this on Tumblr, because two years later (and an innumerable mornings finding gluts of tabs open on pantomime, or clowns, or commedia dell’arte) I had checked out The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian by Andrew McConnell Stott.

I’ve since become the kind of person who notes that actually it was Grimaldi’s son, JS, who inspired the character in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers that was the tinder on which the fuel of “scary clown” fire fed. I will bring up how Regency theatre was still so close to its riotous history that many stages still had spikes on the edge of the stage from previous generation’s crowd control.

You know they had a sea battle shows, in the theatre? We wild out on the Romans filling the colosseum with water but damn, they were doing it too, and had dogs starring in the shows.

So, I’ve become The Clown Guy. The kind of person who wakes up in the morning sometimes and opens their browser and sees they’d been searching for “clown schools near me,” who has a dedicated tag on Tumblr for clown vibes reblogs. Noting, btw, that apparently I started populating the tag in March, 2022. What the hell happened in March 2022 that had me looking up Punch and Judy and posting clowns.

And who knows when that will happen again, I wake up one day and find the detritus of a previous night’s search, within it a kernel of a new obsession. Well. Such is life.

This year I’m trying some things around my reading habits. Chase and I are listening to non-fiction audio books (often ones that one of us have read in text previously) while hanging out in the same room. I have a little bit (a lot bit) of trouble hearing and following audio so it’s partly to help me build that muscle, but it’s also the only way for us to read a book at the same pace, as I read at an unfair speed. Also, Chase’s mom sent me a lovely stack of barely-read mid century mass market paperbacks that I am doling out to myself at the pace of one a month. They’re so pleasant to hold! What a perfect object they are.

Let’s look at what the top-level stats were for me in January.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Lorenzo Marquez, Tom Fitzgerald

I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race right when it came out, trying to get this new streaming thing working on my laptop. This book is such a deftly handled thing, weaving queer history with the show and adding context to all the things that have made Drag Race what it is. Sure, I knew a lot of it but there were bits of queer history new to me, new movies to seek out and people to learn about. And every time T&L touched on a subject or era and I thought “oh, they better mention [x],” they did. Like any history spanning a wide range of time, it can’t go into full depth on any one thing, but the depth they manage to go into is very good. It’s made to read while pausing to look up and learn or watch more, a brilliant jumping-off point for anyone, no matter how much or little they know.

We’re now listening to the audio book of this, which Tom and Lorenzo read, and the east coast “a” of Tom’s light accent delights me constantly. A delight. I made a Letterboxed list of the movies they mention in the book, even in passing. Most are available on Kanopy!

A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn

A tense cold-war thriller that also offers up the science-fictional monstrous. Non-stop pacing with a well done written version of not showing the monster to make it scarier, it’s a neat and tidy book that is like a bit of eldritch horror in a spy novel coating.

This is a snappy, spooky little book that does some very deft things. It has a good aftertaste, if that makes sense, not like you’re thinking of it often after so much as it has a nice little shiver in your memory.

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

Ooh, a good and creepy hungry house story.

Lol, not a lot in that review. But that’s what this book is! It’s one of those books of an era that feels hinged around a specific family dynamic that isn’t as much the norm today. That said, a person having a deep and unexamined hole in her life and self that makes them vulnerable to devil’s bargain trickery is eternal.

Here’s your pretty gradient of all the covers from this month.

Another title of note this month was Non-Stop, which I picked up because the cover I saw in a 70’s Sci Fi Art newsletter intrigued me. It has a banger of a twist. And The Light Eaters, have you heard the good word of Light Eaters? I will get everyone I know to read it at some point. I think it adds a really beautiful dimension to looking at the world and the wealth of growing things in it.

Been a bit since I did one of these! That’s mostly because I’ve been up on my browsing, good job me. And anyway, mostly these kinds of posts are good for me ensuring I keep my weekly blogging habit and I’ve been managing that okay. This week though, not so much, lol. Find all these link dumps on the tag “tab cleanout.”

The World of Playing Cards, a very cool and in-depth resource that “documents playing cards across cultures and centuries, from early handmade cards to industrial production, and from games of chance and skill to education, advertising, political satire, magic and fortune-telling.” I stumbled across it while looking up something about court cards and was delighted.

status: moved to REF: Assorted

The George Quaintance Blog, curated by Ken Furtado and John Waybright. I always love single-subject blogs, and I found this one while looking up more on Quaintence and the physique paintings he was known for after he was mentioned in a book I was reading. There’s a book as well, which I dropped in it’s own bookmark folder.

status: shared

Of Yuppies and Yippies and Hippies, over at the English Language & Usage stack exchange. Chase and I were trying to pin down in our memories what exactly a “yippie” was, and encountered this pretty in-depth history of the word and how it grew from hippies and morphed into yuppies. And also if it’s a portmanteau or not. Then, because it’s a stack exchange, there’s even more detail about related words.

In addition to the historical threads that ScotM identifies in his excellent answer, several other -pies formations that were current in the 1960s and 1970s may have contributed to the adoption of yuppies as shorthand for members of the sociological category “young urban professionals.” To wit: preppies, bippies, blippies, dippies, and trippies

status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Understanding AI: Facts, Myths & Protecting Your Work, over at TrueReft, stuck in an open tab so I could check some of the settings it mentions. It’s a nice little rundown of the basics, if you want some good bullet points for explaining why GenAI gives you the ick.

status: read and closed

“Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, Now,” an imposed (ready-to-print) zine from It’s Going Down (who have a post with a lot of other new media projects covering current social movements and news here). These quotes from the intro sum it up:

We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own — well, it isn’t.

Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism—yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning.

status: saved to my zine distribution folders

Okey dokey, that’s the lot, my tabs are tidied, and I’ve blogged for another week.

Over on Tumblr I encountered a great fibre arts bingo post, The past couple of years I’ve tried to be better about integrating successfully (starting and finishing) the multitude of fibre craft I work in back into my life. Often I glom onto a particular type of craft for a period (embroidery, that time I sewed along at home a Project Runway season, etc) and after the burst of obsession the method is sort of folded into daily life.

This both is great (I work in a lot of disciplines, I can’t focus on them all at once), and frustrating because I will feel like I’ve “forgotten” a thing, left it by the wayside. Which is silly. I feel like I never do fibre craft but in the past couple of years I’ve mended a coat with decorative embroidery, sewn multiple pairs of pants, crocheted a sweater. What is real though is I have so much craft stash. Too much. And I sort of would like to move *objects* next time we move, rather than raw material. So! Gotta integrate fibre arts into my more daily life, along with writing and whatnot.

A bingo card felt like a great way to do this and this square speared me directly:

Finish a WIP that’s been lingering for over a year.

Maybe you’ve seen me mention the t-shirt scrap quilt I’m working on, at some point over the past couple of years. I have saved many beloved t-shirts that were worn out or that we’d grown out of, or were from ancient eras that didn’t need to be remembered with clothing. Previously, I’ve turned t-shirts into yarn and made them into throw rugs. But some shirts aren’t well suited for that, or I want to preserve the images on them. So, why not a quilt?!

I can’t remember when I last worked on the quilt last so the first step was pulling the bag of it out and seeing where I was.

Turns out I had it mostly finished before being distracted and not finishing it. Like an asshole! I was annoyed but grateful. At least there was little left to do of my least favourite thing: piecing. NOT that I am piecing this nicely or neatly or with thoughtful pattern. Pieces are going together so they fit and make a final lap-blanket shape. That is all. I am not a precision crafter.

I made a list of what needed done next: finish the last couple of blocks and sew them together so they’d achieve lap-blanket size and shape, figure out what I was doing for the back, sew the sides together, bind it, quilt it.

Easy enough to finish the front. I’d, in the recent past, done a bit of a closet clean that had pulled aside a couple of t-shirts and those were all I needed to finish the blocks and get it blanket-sized.

I am a small enough person and I live in Southern California. I am cold all the time but acknowledge that sometimes all you need is a light blanket that is two layers of t-shirt. For the back I took some more boring shirts and just made big squares with them, sewed them together and called it good.

I hope you are enjoying the dimly lit shots, by the way. Anyway, I sewed the sides together, right sides out because I was going to bind it. Quilts are bound, I think? It felt right. I sewed together so much scrap and made about 200 inches of t-shirt scrap strip. Then. Then I had to cut 200 inches to a consistent width. Thankfully, there’s the thumb trick (using the first joint of the thumb as a ruler or guide when cutting or sewing).

Then it was ironing 200 inches, then sewing it all on, not that neatly. But the thing is, neatness literally doesn’t affect how cosy a blanket is. I know my skills and it has never been sewing on binding neatly. But then?! It was done, it is a blanket.

It’s still not technically a quilt as it is not yet quilted. But I was able to hunt down some quilting thread and start working on it. It’ll take a bit, because did you know (I knew, I knew this going in and yet), t-shirt fabric absolutely sucks to do this kind of stitching in? I’m also quilting it in a pictorial way. The final thing is going to be messy and imperfect and also wonderful. Memories of a life in this thing.

I can’t really check this space off the bingo card yet, but I nearly can. And I quilt a bit every night so it won’t take too much longer until this is done done done.

I think everyone has got their mail, so it’s time to share the card we sent out this year.

Some folks also got some zines of puzzles and mazes collected from the newsletter zines I’ve been making. We always try to add a little fun thing in with the cards (as I’ve explained before) and a couple of these puzzles I had a lot of fun with making and wanted to share. I’ve put both zines (one is all mazes, one has other kinds of puzzles) up on Itchio, for free to download.

I was despairing earlier in the winter about what the heck I’d do for the card, and had resigned myself to just doing another pretty landscape. But the oranges came a little early this year, putting those of us who live in the apartments a bit closer in competition with the squirrels who also like to eat the oranges (and mandarins). And also, when many daily joys feel like something you have to work to snatch when and where you can, a bit of a mood as well.

Crossposted to Patreon and Comradery.