beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Today's weeding without reading:
The Communist Manifesto, Huxley's Doors of Perception, and Laing's Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.

I think I found Dad's college era...

there's a couple politics books about actual politics, but they'd be so massively out of date now, I'm not going to bother, even if one does say it's a classic. if it's that classic it'll be in penguin paperback still, and probably on archive.org a lot.

The handwriting book can also go. If I want to write fancy I'll install a fancy font.



I did find two (2) books that were definitely Dad's side Grandma's, with her name in from when she was younger. They're about a hundred years old and just about holding together, definitely well read. I won't get rid of them, but they're not reading copies if I want to keep them as objects. Still, hundred year old books I've vaguely heard of will be around somewhere.



Book weeding is weirdly weighty. Like, if it's just stuff I bought, it might remind me of the 90s or the last time I read it or something, but if it's from the inherited set, it's like meeting ancestors again unexpectedly. And then judging their libraries.

I can't keep all the books I inherited, I own two thousand books even after giving up on entire authors, I'll never read all these fact pile sort even if I keep them.

... that is so much easier to decide than to do.



but, slow and steady...

Today I found I have owned a book printed in 1872
Macaulay's Critical and Historical Essays
which is all online now
https://archive.org/stream/criticalhistor00maca#page/n6/mode/1up
it was Dad's, but I don't think I've ever opened it.
Now I have, I think the online editions will do for me, and my hardback with the tiny print can go to someone else who wants it. Mum reckons she knows just the shop. Mum has the knowing of charity shops.

Technically I have sorted through an entire box of books to see if I want it, but that's because the Macaulay had a box to itself.

It currently smells a bit funny. Which, by now, not a surprise. But someone else will like it anyway.

I wrote a thousand words! Actual fiction words, all in a row!

this very seldom happens.

I'm a bit annoyed with where I started. I invented a whole other system of gender, and now I seem to have invented very familiar sexism to go with it. ( Read more... )

On the other hand, in that thousand, I already have a culture of Alchemists who have college open days where tutors talk to each other in sign language cause they've blown themselves up too much. They have a building with big thick walls. And presumably firework factory roofs. And a hundred yards of clear space around them, because that's how big the effect gets, if an elixir blows.

It is not yet quite clear that the reason they try to kick her out right away is roughly like if a princess tried to sign up for mine clearance. I'll have to work that in to the next bit.


Maybe it'll get interesting.

Maybe I'll even finish it this time.

I dreamed me and half the MCU were stuck inside The Sims. ( Read more... )

It was interesting Loki being there and having his power split up between those he'd usually consider beneath him, a lower level of real. It's like how the player is a storyteller in these wide open games. It was being meta about the fragmentation of story in a gaming environment, which was kind of fascinating at the time.


But now I'm awake I feel vaguely like I should apologise to Loki and give it back, and quite a lot like I should try and write something today. After all, I haven't done what the power was given for, get whatever aggressive paranoid magic got aimed at our warrior out of him and back in the storyteller where it belongs...

X files books are gone gone gone.
Mum did a couple of rounds of taking things to charity shops, so the recently weeded box is all done bye bye.
So that's at least a foot of shelf for new things.

I'm sure they're perfectly good books, and somebody somewhere would want them, but I'm also sure I haven't so much as taken them off the shelf in over a decade, and if I want to know fortean stuff I'll look it up other places.

XF reminds me of the 90s so hard it's not fun to visit.
So.
Gone.

I've been thinking on my latest fantasy world, as per usual, and therefore making AU versions of assorted characters, mostly from the Flash. We've got STAR labs too, it's just doing magical research.

So I was thinking what the characters are there for.

( Read more... )

And to make the story go right now there's a !Wells, Bear, Hart, Cat and Ram. An overriding purpose, with an absolute opposition, a snarky one who cares what people think, someone who is mostly don't, and someone who is mostly can. But I don't want to put all the deciding in the same place as the Flash. Even though I can see exactly how I could.

I want to put me in there, making choices, weighing things up. Because there's never anyone on TV who thinks like I would.





Don't know if anyone would want to read that.

Guess if I ever wrote it I would find out.

Today I have
not done much.

I sorted through a box of xmas things I haven't used for a couple of years because I suspected I was allergic to them. I am now pretty sure I'm allergic to them. So those can go away.

I also decided I'm never going to get around to reading the wolf books, and won't be using them for werewolfs anyway, and am unlikely to write rangers who would need to know. So. Out.

The four fold way isn't even in my catalog and I can't muster the interest to read enough to see what species of woo it is, so, out.

this is progress, just, boring and small.


I shelved the best of sf and f collection that I've been meaning to review. I've been carrying it back and forth between rooms for weeks, I'm apparently not reviewing it. There was some good stuff, like Naomi Novik, and there was some less good stuff, and I whall move on and read other things.


Today I have mostly been reading Blue Beetle / Booster Good and feeling sad, because canon didn't leave much room for them. But there has been more canon since the Bery Bad Thing, and then the whole Rebirth thing happened, and maybe I should buy more canon and maybe it wouldn't be miserable? But mostly the fic even with happy endings is making me miserable, so possibly not.


That's the problem with the real OTPs, either canon gives them a happy ending but it's an ending so you're sad, or everything is awful always, which, you know, is a problem.

Ugh.



Um, I might also be grinding my gears on that whole thing where I'm going to be (older) pretty soon and everyone I went to school with is (older) too and look how much I haven't even done. Like, time travel stories are bad for me yet I keep thinking on them. But my life pisses me off because I can't see the branch points. Just like one long line to here. And here is just... me. And that feels like a thing.



Eh, I'll feel better after my birthday, I always do, it's just a couple weeks before it get all... thing.


Also the bit where I have no plan, no friends, and definitely no superhero team
but that's fiiiiiiiiine.



Life.

I was just clicking around for character clothes
and
there are people who spend £500 on a t-shirt.

a t-shirt.

I mean, I'd clicked through to Harrods, looking for a particular style of leather jacket
but still
£500.


I hardly dare look what they spend on actual jackets.

It probably costs what I'd consider car prices.

There are Too Many laptops.
I want to play sims and maybe do a art with a pen and maybe install scrivener or some fancy writing thing.
... I don't know what I want to do with a laptop.
i want a tool i can do things with, and then to go figure out what i want to do.
I mean I like playing wims but many (many) games make me travel sick so i don't even know what i'd play.

I don't want a glowing gamers laptop. it looks possessed.
and i kind of don't want one called envy. envy is not a good thing.

i like the ones that can go all different angles and pretend to be a tablet.
but i also care about typing.

i don't know.

too many.

and lists of different Best ones do not agree with each other at all at all.

boo.

:-)
three people plus me and driver were there today.
we played Munchkin. i think we all had fun? i brought it because I have not done any new sf things since last sf group and expected to run out of conversation, but once it was on the table, we played it from the start.
so now i have two weeks to get my brain full for conversation again.
and the other people are all planning to be here then, so, cool.

I always worry I will be off topic but people wouldn't join in if they didn't want to.

so that was nice evening :-)

I don't know why I woke up at 5 with a weirdly urgent need to figure out AD&D mages followers, but, that happened.

Turns out mages don't get followers. So that should have been simples.

But it does say they can have just a few henchmen or apprentices, which seems more like what I was thinking on anyway. ( Read more... )

GURPS doesn't limit you, if you want to buy contacts or allies or ally groups. Buy as many as you have character points for. But as ever the blank page ability to do anything doesn't give you much framework to think which specific thing, so, I poked rules I haven't used since long ago.

DnD assumptions for things like distribution of magery or how many characters are above level zero are interesting too, but mostly so I can argue with their math.



GURPS social advantages stay with your publicly perceived identity, and list the example of a demon possessed Duke, who keeps all their kudos as long as nobody knows.

Which is pretty much what Eobard did to Wells.

He also gets his physical stats and advantages.

But I'm always interested in what he did and did not get mentally and emotionally. How much of Wells got copied over? Was he faking everything or did he get memories too? Sometimes I think canon is clear one way or the other and then I remember Eo is a lying liar who lies. Plus time traveller memories both do and do not change with the changes to the timeline, which has to get super unstable if you're from a future that's in doubt. There's a lot of plausible Eo!Wells and Eobards who have really good reasons for being unstable or distinctly different from other moments of themselves.

GURPS rules are a lot more tuneable and have favors and patrons and contacts and allies and acknowledge that your adventuring party looks like it counts but doesn't, basically because free will. NPCs can be bought super loyal, PCs can do their own thing. So the game mechanics of henchmen don't translate to stories because they're all the same level of free willed once a single writer gets hold of them.

But it's still sort of handy to turn relationships over and see what game mechanics fall out.




... still, probably more handy to have got more sleep.

Cleaner Day continues well
with slight block where the dishwasher isn't being replaced until Friday
so basically every plate and knife and cup I own is having to wait its turn.

Everywhere else shall be clean, so, that'll do.

I think I've followed too many tumblrs again, because I spend too many hours mindlessly paging through roughly the same content a bazillion times.
( Read more... )

There is so much stuff I've accumulated, and I could choose any of it.
Pretty cool.
But then I just kind of sit here and read the internet and feel blank.

which is a much nicer problem to have than the problems of earlier years, where i was blank with far emptier walls to stare at.



ah well. vacuum cleanering done for the day, i'll go decide what to do.

Huff is one of my favourite authors, and while she has got better since 1991 when the copyright page says this was written, this is still a good book, and a good intro to a great couple of series.

And I get into quite a bit of detail under the cut, so, plenty spoilers.

( Read more... )

I was asked a couple days ago "Is it a book about vampires, a book about detectives, or a book About Heterosexuals?"

I think it's a book about recognising monsters, how not to be one, and the dangerous waters of trying not to date one.

The reader knows more than the characters, and the detective work chugs along until Vicki knows enough to recognise the answer when it's handed to her. Not Sherlock Holmes style, but not just surviving until you know who is hunting you either. Her friends and contacts shape the story, mostly by letting her at data only the police have, without stopping her doing things the police wouldn't do. But also just by knowing the community and being known. The ways she does and does not have backup and support are key.

Henry is not heterosexual, he's bi, so, there's a lot more variety of goings on in the fade to black than might otherwise be. Vicki is on some levels doing the choose between two guys, police and vampire, and we've seen that one before, or possibly since, given the 1991 copyright. But they're both actually interesting, and they both have significant flaws as partners, in the same specific areas of conflict and using people. As does Vicki.

It's kind of about vampires, in that it's about not being the monster, and needing people, and the ways choices can start from any side of the supernatural spectrum and still end up good or evil.

Everybody's hungry, for a lot of different things, and pursuing those needs can hurt others, or build connections that save them.

The supernatural stuff just enhances that basic truth, it doesn't predetermine anything. Good guy vampires just have to work harder at it, as do evil humans.

And the supernatural scale amplifier does one of my favourite things, it makes a metaphor of the scale of challenge faced by disabled people. Vicki Nelson is a disabled woman facing challenges bigger than anyone can handle alone, but by the end of the book she does handle them, her specific visual impairment and her supernatural situation both. And without miracle cures. She just finds a way to play to her strengths.





This review got very long and rambly and I could spend a lot more attention on a lot of different bits of it. I feel like calling this a first draft and doing actual essay with quotes and stuff.

But I also feel like reading the next book, so. Here's the rough version.