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If you thought Dark Science High was the only manga AU spinoff I was cooking, you thought wrong!
The post DC Minis #30 – Dark Sorcery (Part 1) appeared first on Dresden Codak.
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kaberettReading. gingerschnapps remarked, pre-event, that Daggerbound (T. Kingfisher) had been released, which I had somehow missed (somehow here meaning "because it wasn't announced via the Patreon???"), so this week while I have mostly been Lying Very Still with Very Little Brain I have reread Swordheart and consumed Daggerbound. They are extremely World of the White Rat books; I had a correspondingly good time.
Watching. This afternoon we had an episode of Farscape while I was bleaching A. It was extremely an episode of Farscape (2.11, Look at the Princess part 1).
Playing. We finished our second play-through of Tukoni: Forest Keepers; I successfully acquired the rarest achievement sans spoilers; but we still had two hidden achievements left. We have now spoiled ourselves for them and will be going back to complete them at... Some Point.
A is away for a bit next week so I have downloaded my own copy of Color Bus Trip so we can bus together long-distance without anyone having to engage in screen-sharing bullshit.
Cooking. Most of my cooking of note has absolutely been today, but let the record show:
The experimental (veggie) sausage/fennel/lemon/bay/onion pasta Accompaniment did not alas work out as well as I was hoping and I am not sure what I could tweak to make it be More What I Wanted next time, other than drowning it in significantly more olive oil.
Eating. SQUASH from the ALLOTMENT good GRIEF. Raspberry and redcurrant jam ditto! The last of the Excellent Bonus Field Cake (one of my team spent IC currency on a huge box of baked goods; the Linzer cookie situations were excellent and we finally got around to the sticky toffee apple pudding).
Exploring. ... to make a hollow laughing...
Growing. Have I made it to the plot? lol. But the patio tomatoes and the lemongrass survived, and the poblano chilli merrily continues to ripen its various fruit, and having fed it the Trinidad Perfume is abruptly putting out many more flowers!
jducoeurAnd I just-this-minute finished Alison Bechdel's latest book, Spent, so let's talk about that briefly.
As far as I can tell, Bechdel only writes books that are at least somewhat autobiographical -- it's what she made her name for (with Fun Home), and this is the fourth book I have from her that is at least kinda-sorta about herself.
(Even Dykes to Watch Our For was, as far as I could ever tell, about the folks in her crowd, with a protagonist who was a thinly-veiled version of herself.)
In this case, the "kinda-sorta" is carrying some weight. It's about a writer named Alison Bechdel, who runs a goat farm in Vermont with her partner Holly, and who is famous for her graphic novel Death and Taxidermy (which is about her father the taxidermist, who went to jail and then ironically died from poisoning by a reptile); the book has been made into a major television series, and she is wrestling with the complications from that.
And now the folks who know Bechdel and Fun Home are going, "Wait -- what?"
Spent is an impressively meta novel: a full-length musing on capitalism and its effect on community, as told through the lens of an Alison who is conspicuously not quite the Alison of our world, who is trying to write a book (podcast? TV show?) called $um, which is to be a full-length musing on capitalism and its effect on community.
Like most of her books, don't expect crisp structure: it has a fairly broad cast of characters, all painted as messy real people dealing with life. The many plot threads wander along, not all with tidy resolutions. And like all of her books, it's all told with a dry and always self-deprecating humor.
But also like all of her books, it's about something: in this case, the weird ways in which the modern world warps us. There's a pervasive anti-capitalist theme, but she mostly avoids preaching directly. Some of the characters preach (usually in appropriate ways), but the story doesn't shy away from the messiness of the subject, and how hard it is to avoid getting sucked into the "must make All the Money" mindset. Book-Alison is notably hypocritcal on the topic, and that annoys her no end.
Personally, I liked this one more than anything since Fun Home itself: by taking a step away from real life, she enables herself to really have fun with the characters (who I assume are all adapted from actual friends of hers). The theme is more direct than in something like her real autobiography The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and she probes at it in lots of different directions.
And at times, she gets to just roll her eyes at how dumb life can be. (The book ends with the viewing party for the truly idiotic series ending of the TV Death and Taxidermy.)
Good stuff -- it's not going to dislodge Fun Home as her best book, but it's a solidly excellent, fun, thought-provoking read. If you like her other work, odds are you'll like this one quite a bit.
jducoeurI finished Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents a couple of weeks ago.
More precisely, I finished the graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy, John Jennings, and David Brame, which is how I also read Parable of the Sower and Kindred -- yes, I'm a comics nerd.
So let's do a quick review of it -- really, of both the Parable books.
These novels are set in the US right around now. Given that they were written a couple of decades ago, they're uncomfortably right in some ways, although they put the lie to the common meme that we are living in the darkest timeline -- Butler posits one that is markedly worse in degree, if not always in kind.
It's a world where civil society has been gradually fracturing: not just red state vs blue state (which is only marginally a concern), more one where the poor are getting even poorer, with echoes of Great Depression Oklahoma. Outside the gated communities of the wealthy (who are somewhat deliberately ignorant of how bad it's getting out there), mass violence is getting downright common, with the small enclaves of the have-nots getting regularly raided and burned down.
Our primary protagonist is Lauren Oya Olamina. The one tiny bit of actual science fiction here is that, due to side-effects of the previous generation's medical procedures, Olamina was born a "sharer" -- she has an extreme and barely-controllable form of empathy, such that she feels intensely the joys and pains of anyone she can see.
The first book, Parable of the Sower, is the story of Olamina's upbringing -- raised in a somewhat healthy but moderately poor community, which is shattered by mob violence in her youth. She winds up out on the road (those strong Great Depression vibes), before eventually founding a small intentional community up north.
Along the way, she winds up becoming essentially a religious leader, founding the Earthseed. I confess, I adore Earthseed as a religion -- it speaks to me in many of the ways that classic Buddhism does. Its main tenet is literally that "God is Change": the world is ever-changing, that is the nature of the world, and we need to work with it. (Its other main tenet is that humanity must spread to the stars; I'll admit that Elon Musk has somewhat ruined that bit for me.)
Book two, Parable of the Talents, opens with Olamina in 2032, now just barely adult, leading the community of Acorn as it slowly grows, adopting new families. (Most of whom are fleeing violence elsewhere.) She has married the much-older (but generally good) man who owned the land, and things are good for a while -- but they can't entirely escape the growing darkness outside.
The second half of Talents winds up even darker than Sower, as the growing Christo-Fascism that has swept the US finally comes for them, killing some of the members of Acorn and enslaving others. (Olamina, like Butler, is black, and slavery is a common trope through her work.) The story winds up focusing on her very-literal fight for freedom, and her long search for the daughter who was ripped away from her.
Talents is narrated by that daughter, many years later, and suffice it to say her own feelings are complicated as hell. It's unambiguous from the outset that they don't get a straightforward happy ending together -- the reasons why are threaded through the book, an example of how parents can't count on a loving relationship with their children, despite their best intentions.
The story, overall, is brutal. It's an honest but harsh look at societal breakdown -- a bit of how that happens, but mostly just what it feels like on the ground as your world crumbles around you.
It's not entirely bleak, but it's a hard lesson on the necessity of the important things like family, community, mutual support and having some reason to carry on.
Olamina isn't presented as a model to simply emulate -- that's the brilliance of having her life narrated by her daughter Asha, whose dislike for her mother is quite visceral. That, in turn, is moderated by the fact that the book is mostly Olamina's own diary entries, interspersed with short passages from The Book of Earthseed -- as a result, you get a running counterpoint of Olamina's internal story with the way that it looks to her estranged daughter many years later.
The graphic novel treatment suits the story. It's not at all pretty -- the art is sharp, angular, a bit rough in a way that feels authentically Black (at least to my poorly-educated eye), but always expressive as all hell.
I suspect the text in there is at least somewhat abridged (graphic novel adaptations usually are), but I'm genuinely unsure: this is a pretty text-heavy GN, and not a quick read. I spent a couple of weeks on it, a bit at a time -- it's intense stuff, and not something I wanted to read at a sitting.
In summary, this is just about the furthest thing one can get from brain candy. It's a hard book, and is really not at all fun, but it's a rewarding read, the sort of story that leaves you feeling a bit better armored for the ways that things could go if the timeline really does turn even darker.
Highly recommended, in either the text or graphic novel form. But find a time when you can cope with reading about true darkness.
jducoeurOh, this looks neat: https://structural.chat.
This is the latest product from the Unison team (two of whom I knew from the Scala world back before they founded Unison).
Haven't read my way through the papers yet, but the (very reasonable-sounding) theory seems to be that LLMs are actually a pretty lousy way to build chatbots -- they're achingly slow, non-deterministic, and dangerous from a security POV.
They've instead come up with a non-"AI" technology that provides a similar look-and-feel, but is lightning-fast and deterministic, so it works Just Plain Better.
Very cool, and very much a product for our times. I look forward to digging into how it works...
kaberett... is the part where the Site Of Worst Pain has been alternating between hips + wrists on the one (as it were) hand, and ankles + shoulders on the other.
I have also reestablished that I really, really shouldn't plan to do Any Things At All the day after a vaccination, good grief.
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The post DC Minis #29 – Further Humiliation appeared first on Dresden Codak.
jducoeurThis is a fine example of my concerns about the dangers of AI.
Many people freak out about "the bots are going to take over the world!" I'm dubious -- that's panicking about a scenario that doesn't have a clear road to get there.
This, on the other hand -- AI accidentally sparking a war that could potentially go nuclear -- has been the more-valid worry for literally 40 years, and the DoD seems to be speeding straight towards it.
(Can you say Torment Nexus, boys and girls?)
I've been saying over and over this year that somebody needs to remake the movie WarGames. (Details here if you haven't seen it.) It's dated in many ways, but the high concept was prescient, and we're living in it now...
kaberettOtherwise today has been largely wrangling Lost Objects and also Laundry; in service of the former I have also dug out the point-and-shoot digital camera I got shortly after moving to London, with the intention of establishing whether the Object Photographs it produces are significantly better than the phone camera...
sidereakaberettGot home from event on Monday evening. Spent most of Tuesday asleep. Spent most of Wednesday asleep. Diligently did not Do Exercise on either of those two days. Did not spend today mostly asleep but did spend a bunch of it so absolutely Flattened that the Internal Wailing about why do I even botherrrrrr was... loud.
Turned out! it was a migraine! and I do with my thinking brain know that I would be more tired and sore if I had in fact not spent those two days mostly asleep (and today mostly horizontal). It is also a really useful reminder of how easy it is, still, to tip me over into Absolutely Not, Everything Too Hard, No More Walking. But! Also!
(Following application of prochlorperazine I did actually manage to lie on my back and wiggle my limbs some. The outdoors was nice; I am regretting not having put the catnip on, however...)
kaberettReading. There was An Event, and unsurprisingly I did not alas finish Proto before it went back to the library. There is a Significant queue for it, and it's £4.99 in ebook, so I am contemplating simply buying a copy of my own so I can have the maps that begin each chapter up on the laptop and the actual words on my ereader...
Playing. ... Color Bus Trip continues.
Admin: the LRP.
Cooking. Very little, on account of Being In A Field.
Eating. Realised! I could get the crêpe place! to make me a savoury crêpe I wanted to eat! and promptly had two of them within twelve hours (plus the sweet one I originally went for with dinner).
What were my other highlights. Hmm. The Quaker Protein Porridge pots were remarkably acceptable, to the point that I was a bit sad when they ran out (having had Oats Without Sugar I was feeling surly about going back to the Added Sugar). Blackberries out of the hedgerows (not my favourite flavour thereof). Yuley's has changed the pizza bases they're using and I think I prefer the new ones?
Making & mending. Restrung a bracelet for a friend/team member! After my first several failed attempts to tie a knot with Stretch Magic I did a lot more pre-stretching, and now they seem to be holding! (And there's two of them, and two lengths of the cord holding the beads, so hopefully if catastrophic failure ensues it will do so slowly enough that none of the beads vanish...)
l33tminion
sidereadresden_codak_comic_feed - DC Minis #30 – Dark Sorcery (Part 1)kaberett - tada for the weekjducoeur - Bonus review: _Spent_jducoeur - Review: _Parable of the Talents_jducoeur - Structural Chat -- a better chatbot?kaberett - weirdest vaccine side effect this time arounddresden_codak_comic_feed - Dark Science #190 – The Extropian Shuffledresden_codak_comic_feed - DC Minis #29 – Further Humiliationjducoeur - The only winning move is not to play...kaberett - vaccine getsiderea - Technical difficulites [me, tech]kaberett - embodiment: still so much workkaberett - I continue mostly very sleepykaberett - vital functionskaberett - helped make an event go <3l33tminion - Coyote Timesiderea - Cyclospora update [pest, US]timeasmymeasure
