(no subject)

Today's dream, in amongst the stuff about a goddess calling a magical girl to fight the evil of vegan cat food:

Ewan McGregor, Jaeger designer

Except these kaiju weren't coming up out of the ocean, they were dropping in across the world from above. The portals were opening mostly below where aircraft were flying (especially once the problem was known) but quite a long way up in the air. We had a worldwide monitoring system set up, probably a satellite network, looking for the particular energies released by a portal opening.

But we seemed to be having a quiet phase.

... engineers with a quiet phase kind of scattered to their own pet projects. I was printing out really intricate soaps in the 3D printer. I liked the one which looked like a grenade with ammo belts wrapped around it like knotwork. They all had my fellow engineers' names on them, like little presents. But they weren't especially appreciated, mostly ending up in a big jar in the corner.

So I looked at the raw data instead of waiting for something to hit red alert.

There were weather patterns that were hitting orange, but never quite going red. And they were weirdly symmetrical patterns. Some of the older ones had three little storms around a big storm center, but now there were five, in a very precise circle. And then while I was looking the exact same weather pattern happened on two continents at once.

So I yelled a lot and we started brainstorming how to figure if we had some kind of stealth kaiju invasion. Except obviously stealth kaiju as a concept kinda doesn't work. And these weather patterns were really big, to only be delivering something nobody had noticed.

I decided we needed swarm drones with lots of cameras and energy surge detectors and GPS, spread over a big area. Everyone kind of stared at me while I slapped together existing designs and swapped them out to get something small enough, chattering on about optimisation. We could drop them from airplanes and saturate an area. They'd all be pretty low res but if we tracked their position precisely enough we could paste the data together to get a much higher res look than the satellites tended to give us, especially under weather. We could use the algorithm I'd put together to predict roulette balls.

So then I went out to buy the largest jar of superballs.
Just, quest for the giant jar.

And then it went all vegan cat food.

But I liked the part where we were hanging out designing jaegers and having really intense end of the world relationships expressed via decorative soap. And sex.

Dratted false advertising

I picked up a book. There's a female character on the front cover. Also on the back cover, leading a rebellion.

She shows up on page 260. And thus far she is not leading a rebellion, she is mostly crying about her dead father and wishing she was a man.

I mean they live in magic world so if she was literally wishing she was a man then cool, we could have a trans man, that would be new and interesting.
But no.
She's crying because the only way she can be useful in her culture is to give birth to a boy.


It is a fantasy book. There are multiple sentient species ffs. Why would you duplicate sexism so bad?



The first third of the book starred a man, killed his wife to motivate him, then killed him.
The second third starred a man, killed his sister to motivate him, then spent most of the time focused on the bad guy to show us he was really really bad and also bad and incompetent but he still bad.
Now the last third of the book, ish, starting on page 260, does not so much star a woman as show her, cause it keeps going back to focus on the surviving men. To be fair it did kill her father to motivate her. Apparently that's the author's one trick.



If I wanted to read a boy book would I pick up the one with a woman on the cover? No!

Idiots did the cover.



I shall finish reading the book but I'll put it in the To Go bag straight away.
... I'd put the name in here but I'm not sure I remember it right, it was pretty generic.
*sigh*