js_thrill | Reading

Today we have Million

I like this song a lot. It feels like we're moving into the era of Mountain Goats that feels more like home to me, even though we're pretty far from "songs I will routinely recognize and have heard previously" so it's more about just the sound becoming more familiar and the vibes feeling right. This song is from around when Darnielle moved to Iowa, but it is not my favorite song about Iowa, which was written by Dar Williams:

Watch on YouTube

Current Music: Million — The Mountain Goats

pauraque

This short memoir follows Jones' early life growing up as a gay Black kid in 1990s Texas, through his college years and young adulthood struggling with feelings of unbelonging and uncertain identity.

The core of the book is his relationship with his mother, who died of heart disease when he was 26. She was an iconoclast, breaking with her family's conservative Christianity to become a Buddhist, and insisted on doing things her own way, including raising her son on her own. The dynamic between them is complex; he loves and respects her, and in many ways they're close and protective of each other, yet he doesn't feel truly seen by her. His sexuality is part of the barrier—she doesn't reject him, but is resistant to talking about it—and I also got a sense of her as a person who held others at arm's length because intimacy scared her.

But Jones is not too afraid to write about his most vulnerable, self-destructive, and howlingly painful moments. ( cut for content: gay bashing ) It doesn't read like he's being too harsh on himself, and it doesn't read like he's trying to make himself look good. It reads like he's found a narrative arc in what really happened rather than editing events into artificial tidiness.

Jones is primarily a poet, and the book's emotional clarity and concise lyricism bears that out. The material is heavy, but I didn't find it depressing. Rather, I felt that the fact that he's now able to write so honestly about what he's been through demonstrates that he's achieved what he's been longing for: knowing and sharing who he really is. He doesn't need to spell out that this happened for him, because when you read the book you're holding the evidence of it in your hands.

js_thrill

Today's song is Heights

Watch on YouTube

This isn't as discordant as Blood Royal was, but there is something that feels intentionally jarring about some of the music here. I don't dislike the song, but it took a bit to get accustomed to that element of it. Darnielle's annotations are entirely about his curiosity about the narrator, which is a return to a theme that I've noted many previous times in my notes. It's not just about the elliptical nature of his storytelling, but about the way in which these partial stories are presented as things he is merely glimpsing through a telescope or uncovering. There are determinate answers to all our questions about the narrator. There is a complete story there, and yet somehow, Darnielle only has fragmentary access to it.

In some ways, it is easier for me to get my mind around the less appealing—and more dismissive—Mamet view of fiction, as propounded in an SF Gate interview:

M.L.: There's a scene in "Oleanna" in which the woman says "I never told anybody this" — and then gets interrupted by the phone ringing. What was she about to say?

MAMET: Aha! Well, we don't know, do we?

M.L.: Well, / don't know. You don't either?

MAMET: No.

M.L.: I thought, in my naive way, that you're supposed to know as you're writing the line —

MAMET: Nope. (Laughing) We never got that far. We in the audience have to believe that she's about to make an extraordinary confession. What that confession is we don't get to find out.

M.L.: But you don't know —

MAMET: The woman doesn't actually exist, Mick. She's a bunch of black scribbles on a blank page.

M.L.: But when you're thinking about it as you're writing the play you're not really thinking about scribbles on a blank page. You are thinking of some kind of person, I would think.

MAMET: No. Black scribbles on a white page, that's all it is.

So, like, for Mamet, there are no answers that aren't on the page, but that's because all there is is words on the page. And I can get my head around that view, but I don't like that view. For Darnielle, the words on the page are all we know about the characters and the story, but somehow those words succeeded at singling out a fully defined and realized character and world, that has (unknowable) answers to all the questions we might ask. Which is a more appealing view of what happens, but also a much more perplexing one.

Current Music: Heights — The Mountain Goats

sholio

I watched this over the last couple of days. (8 30-minute episodes on D+.) It's really unusual - not like anything else in Marvel's backlist. Somehow it felt like it belonged to a different era, like the type of superhero show that might've been made in the 70s or 80s. It's a comedy-drama-satire about two out of work actors trying to get a role on the superhero movie Wonder Man, which (in universe) is a remake of a cult hit show from a few decades ago. And that's about 90% of the plot. There is SOME other stuff going on which provides a superhero-related throughline for the movie, namely

spoilers for things revealed in the first couple of episodes

one of the actors (the protagonist) actually does have superpowers and is hiding it because in the MCU, super-powered individuals have to carry insane amounts of liability insurance to work in Hollywood and no production would hire him; and the other is spying for the government. So obviously both of these things provide the show's main sources of will they? won't they? who'll find out? tension.

But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.

I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.

I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.

( Some actual spoilers )

It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.

landofnowhere

The Man Who Came to Dinner, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Play readaloud. 1939 farce about the worst houseguest ever. Should not be taken too seriously but was fun to read out loud!

Chroniques du Pays des Mères, Élisabeth Vonarburg. I am behind schedule on reading this, have only gotten through a bit since last time. But we're seeing more of the world!

js_thrill

February 18th: The Only Thing I Know
February 19th: Duke Ellington
February 20th: Against Agamemnon
February 21st: Full Flower
February 22nd: Orange Ball of Pain
February 23rd: Blood Royal
February 24th: Going to Scotland

Of thew first four tracks, I am mainly going to write about Against Agamemnon. I liked the first two pretty well, but don't have much to say about them. Against Agamemnon has both the Mountain Goats sound that I like, and the annotations do a nice job of situating the classical reference (Sophocles's Ajax, in which the titular figure is tricked into thinking he has slain his foes but has only been battling sheep, and kills himself from the embarrassment, and Darnielle's reflection on how he is not that tragic figure, but only by dint of maturing a bit more than Ajax got a chance to.

Orange Ball of Pain is fine, especially compared to Blood Royal, which is doing discordant things that are really not working for me. Going to Scotland feels too cutesy, I think, but it may just be that I am trying to catch up on 8 songs at one go. If I had done this song by itself, I'd probably have liked it just fine.

February 25th: Going to Reykjavik

Watch on YouTube

Okay, this is a song I genuinely am enjoying. Serendipity that it is the last song, and it sort of confirms my judgment that Going to Scotland was too cutesy. I still probably would have liked it better if it was on its own. But this song is landing very well, even as the eighth song of the day.

I am glad I am not a music reviewer. Sometimes I have the thought that I like reading books, wouldn't it be great to get paid to read books, but then I think about what that job would actually be and I realize I am very lucky that I am not a professional book reviewer or slush reader or anything like that.

Current Music: Going to Reykjavik — The Mountain Goats

pauraque

This is part two of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. (Part one is here.)

"Sanford and Sun" by Dawolu Jabari Anderson (2015)

( Sun Ra makes a guest appearance on the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. )

"A Song for You" by Jennifer Marie Brissett (2015)

( A girl finds the disembodied head of a singing android who lived out the legend of Orpheus during wartime. )

"Tender" by Sofia Samatar (2015)

( A woman who wrecked her life as a human undergoes a cyborg transformation so she can monitor a radioactive waste disposal site. )

"The Malady of Need" by Kiini Ibura Salaam (2016)

( This is the second time I've read this story and I still don't know what happens in it. )

redbird

I have just been out for a walk, a day after the blizzard: bright blue sky, temperature around freezing, and most but not all of the sidewalks have been cleared, so I walked down the middle of the street for a bit. The turkey flock that hangs out on Egremont Road is now up to at least 12 birds, two of which were sitting on a railing. [We got 16-18 inches of snow, I think--the official number from the airport is 16.5, which is significant, but a lot less than this storm dumped on some places.]

lydamorehouse

Ramadan has just started and my Signal group is having trouble finding enough protectors to fill evening slots. My Food Communists are talking about a $40,000 shortfall that may end their ability to feed people in hiding. March 1 is looming for people who haven't been able to pay rent and are facing evictions. Yet, local politicians are declaring victory and telling people it's time to "go shopping."

Meanwhile, ICE is still being tracked throughout Saint Paul (and presumably Minneapolis, but I don't have access to those Rapid Response groups). Reports that I've seen seem to indicate that the majority of the activity has moved out to the less well organized smaller towns and suburbs. Though the "sexy" part of the resistance--the gas in the streets, the violent confrontations--has dried up, the danger to our immigrant communities is far from over. There is zero sense that ICE is actually leaving. They have switched to quieter, more subtle tactics. They've gone further afield. But make no mistake, they are very much still here.

Last night I went to a Singing Resistance meeting for an action that took place this morning. I managed to miss this morning's action because my GPS decided that it wanted to autocorrect Street to Avenue! VERY DIFFERENT, GPS! In fact, a very important distinction!!! So, I ended up getting lost in downtown Minneapolis long enough to miss the gathering time. But, what was interesting to me is that these Singing Actions have, in the past, brought thousands of people into the streets. Famously, they sang songs encouraging ICE agents to defect outside of some of the hotels hosting them. The action today was for rent relief and trying to get the city officials to consider a temporary rent moritorium, something they were very willing to do during COVID, but which they seem less willing to do for Black and brown folks (shocking, I know!) At any rate, I went to the pre-planning/song rehersal last night with

rachelmanija who is visiting right now and... it wasn't an empty church, but it also wasn't standing room only. The organizers kept saying, "I think more people will join us tomorrow." Well, I wasn't able to. I sure hope other people did. Otherwise, it's going to be pretty sparse. They will not fill City Hall, like they hoped.

But, this seems to be part of a trend. I'd noticed the day after it was announced that ICE was pulling out, my Food Communists was almost ghostly. Plenty of bags of groceries still needed filling, but the number of volunteers that showed up to do the work was less than half of the normal amount. More people have showed up since, but we are nowhere near our previous number. It seems to be the regulars and the die-hards again--although thankfully the Veterans for Peace are still guarding the doors for us.

I ran into some neighbors yesterday when I was walking home from the Communists and they were returning from a daily protest. They also noticed a significant lack of bodies. People were still there, but the crowd was thinner. It's worrying because we are all still very much holding our breaths.

I guess people are buying into the idea that we won and that it's all over. I mean, I would very much like that to be true? I'm just not sure it is and it's disheartening to see that the energy could not, in fact, be maintained. Maybe people are just taking a breather. I hope that's the case.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a novella with a whole range of aliens with different language features, wildly different environments, etc. Several of my friends just stopped reading this review to go pre-order or request that their library do so. You are correct, if that is the sort of thing you like, this sure is that thing.

What it does less successfully, I think, is the twist ending. I feel like this is a book that is for people who like science fiction about aliens, but for me, as soon as I knew the premise, I knew the ending, and I was correct. So if you're reading for the aliens, come on in; if you're reading for a clever twist you did not see coming, this is not that novella, that is not where Huang spent time and energy.

nineweaving

Our Narnia lamp-posts look sheer magic in the snow.

Though I do worry about this tree. It hope it springs back.

Still, its leaves of snow are lovely.

How much snow did you get? And was there hot chocolate?

Nine

pauraque

This early PC platformer is of no small historical interest, as it was the first game released by everybody's favorite totally uncontroversial and non-resented game publishing company, Electronic Arts. Like most of their titles then and now, it wasn't developed in-house; Michael Abbott and Matthew Alexander get the design and programming credit for this one.

grid of construction scaffolding with gaps and chains hanging down to climb

grid of construction scaffolding with gaps and chains hanging down to climb

But you don't need to me to tell you the illustrious history of EA (or, as it was briefly called at its inception, "Amazin' Software"—and I can't tell you how disappointed I am that we don't live in the timeline where they kept that name). I guess you also don't technically need me to tell you about this ridiculous game and my memories of playing it while being unable to identify most of the characters and objects it contains, but I'm going to go ahead anyway.

In Hard Hat Mack you play as a construction worker. I did understand that much. In the first level you have to collect pieces of a beam and use them to fill in the gaps, and then grab a wandering jackhammer to hammer them into place. ( This is where my understanding of the game began to break down; I thought the jackhammer was a tornado. )

Hard Hat Mack is... well, it sure is a game. You can find it on abandonware sites, but I couldn't really get it to run well on any version or emulator I tried. The DOS version (which I had as a kid) runs too fast in DOSBox by default, but when I reduced the clock speed I found that it lagged badly when multiple objects were moving, which made the second level pretty much unplayable. We probably shouldn't hold our breaths for EA to offer a re-release, and maybe that's for the best.

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

My daughter “Melody” is in the midst of the terrible twos. Five or more meltdowns per day over normal frustrations/limits are typical. Recently, my mother-in-law, “Darlene” took Melody and my 6-year-old son out to run errands, and true to form, Melody had a blow-up. It was how Darlene handled it that has me seeing red. She told Melody that she was leaving her in the store and that she could find her own way home, and left her screaming on the floor! She then moved off with my son, out of my daughter’s view, and waited for several minutes before coming back for her. I only learned of this later when my son told me what happened.

When I confronted my mother-in-law, she claimed her method was helpful because Melody behaved afterward. And she said Melody was “never in any danger” because she kept her in sight at all times. After this, I no longer feel safe with Darlene going places with the kids without my husband present or me. Sadly, my husband is no help. He agrees that this was a good “lesson” in behaving for our daughter and that his mother used to do it to him and his sister when they were kids! Please tell me I’m right in telling Darlene her days of taking the kids solo are over.
—Pissed

( Read more... )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Carolyn: I know you love dogs, but in a reasonable way, so I figure you’re a good person to ask. Is there a “normal” amount of pets for someone to have? I never had dogs or cats growing up and didn’t want them in our home when our children were young.

All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.

I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.

Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?

( Read more... )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife, “Lourdes” and I have a 2-year-old daughter, “Mackenzie.” Mackenzie was a difficult baby (long crying spells, difficult to soothe, hypersensitive to sound, fussy about solid food, etc.), and my wife has a low threshold for frustration. So most of Mackenzie’s care fell to me since Lourdes said she “couldn’t deal with it.” The result has been that our daughter is closer to me than she is to her mother. Well, Lourdes said something disturbing regarding our daughter recently.

Mackenzie had a meltdown when my wife tried to get her dressed for daycare, so Lourdes told me I needed to do it because of her theory that our daughter “hates her” and “the feeling is mutual.” Mackenzie has a routine of putting her clothes on in a specific order. Lourdes is aware of it, but wanted to do it her way, which set her off. Mackenzie has her quirks, and if you work with her (her daycare providers follow them and have reported no issues), everything is fine. The trouble is that my wife is accustomed to people doing things her way, and she does not react well when her expectations are not met. I’m seriously concerned about her relationship with Mackenzie, especially because right after her mother tasked me with dressing her that day, she said, “Mommy is mean.” Lourdes balked when I suggested counseling. How am I supposed to resolve this?

—Daughter Division

( Read more... )

sholio

Cannot BELIEVE I still have an SPN icon!

Anyway ... I first started making fanvids for fun in 2002, but I began posting them on LJ in 2006, and since 2026 is therefore my 20th anniversary of posting the first one (#what) and I've been wanting to get more of them on AO3, I decided to make that a project for this year!

So here's my 2006 one and only Supernatural vid, Life is a Highway.

This isn't the first one I put online, but of the 2006 vids I think it's probably one of my favorites and a good one to start with. Contains clips up to late season one because that's all I'd watched at that point and most of what was available. Here's the original LJ-imported-to-DW post. Please enjoy this dive into ~~an alternate reality~~ a moment in time when season one of Supernatural was literally All There Was.

Some notes if you'd rather read them afterwards

Obviously at this point all I have is the exported file rather than the original vidding files (as this was at least 5 computers ago) so 2006 quality is what you're getting, including some slight wonkiness with jerky video and slightly odd cropping (I was screencapturing the video, which explains both the slight borders that occasionally appear - I got a lot better at cropping later - and a few instances of jerkiness as my 2006 computer struggled to render the video). The credits also include my original 2000s-era LJ name, which some of you may remember.

IIRC, I was making these earliest vids on a really old copy of Adobe Premiere that I had absconded with from my college computer lab in the 1990s.

Watch on Vimeo

Also posted on AO3.

If you want a 12 Mb download in 2006 quality, you can download it here!

Also, an interesting bit of context on the 20th anniversary vidding project - I discovered recently that I uploaded a bunch (most? all?) of my older vids to Vimeo in 2016 on the private setting, so apparently I was planning a *10th* anniversary vidding project, but got derailed somehow. What is time.

redbird

While I was dealing with trying to figure out whether I could see my psychiatrist, and what it would cost if so, I got an email from medicare.gov about the Medicare Advantage "open enrollment" period: anyone who enrolled in a Medicare Advantage (part C) plan at the end of the previous year can change to a different Medicare Advantage plan between January 1 and March 31st. I decided that it would be worth it to get into a PPO instead of the HMO I had somehow signed up for, even though it means I'll be starting over on the annual out-of-pocket maximums for prescription drugs and for medical care generally. I put the application in this afternoon, and was told the process might take 10 days, but I also think it's supposed to be effective the first day of the month after I requested the change. My confirmation email from Medicare says the plan will notify me after they verify my information and confirm my enrollment, so I will wait and see.

Fortunately, I can afford to do this, rather than having to find new specialists who are in that stupid HMO's network, or spend large amounts to see my current doctors. (Switching now is expensive because I take one very expensive drug, the Kesimpta.)

pauraque

Opening in the days of the Harlem Renaissance, the first page of this novel states the culmination of its story: A door-to-door cosmetics salesman shot his eighteen-year-old mistress, and then the salesman's wife crashed the funeral to try to stab the girl's corpse. Why? The reader wants to know, and so do many of the characters. The book offers answers only indirectly, taking a sprawling path into the characters' pasts, where their families came from, and the intergenerational trauma of the slavery era that's still in living memory at this time.

The prose style of this book really worked for me and did a lot of the heavy lifting of drawing me into the story. It's lyrical and artistic without ever sacrificing readability. If there's a bit you don't understand, you will understand it in time, but first we have to go back to the beginning of another character's story and circle back around to connect to the main plot—and it does always connect. I think this is the meaning of the title; the book is not about jazz music, but it has the shape of jazz in the way it can state a melody, wander off and explore for a while until you've almost forgotten what song it is, and then return very satisfyingly before passing it off to another player in the ensemble.

I found this book in a free box and then it sat on my shelf for years (shout-out to

lebateleur, my read-books-we-already-own accountability buddy!). It has a lot of underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes from whoever had it before, pointing out themes of dehumanization, rehumanization, and the necessity of deep context for understanding. They underlined "Something else you have to figure in before you figure it out" and also wrote it in pen on the title page. On multiple pages they wrote "Jazzonia" in the margin, by which I assume they meant the Langston Hughes poem.

Jazzonia (1926)

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

redbird

Wikipedia has blacklisted the site archive.today a.k.a. archive.is, .li, .ph, .fo, .md, and .vn), because Wikipedia editors discovered that the pseudonymous owners of the site were altering some archived pages. The alterations inserted the name of a blogger that the pseudonymous person who runs archive.today has a grudge against, because the blogger speculated about their identity.

Wikipedia editors were already debating whether to blacklist the site, after discovering it was being used in a distributed denial-of-service attack against that same blogger. The argument for blacklisting the site was straightforward: archive.today captchas were running malicious code on people's computers. The argument against was that it would be difficult to replace hundreds of thousands of links, an argument that made sense only as long as the saved websites were considered trustworthy.

My decidedly non-expert hunch is that using the site to look at static content behind a paywall is probably safe unless the site asks you to complete a captcha.

landofnowhere

Ties that Bind, Ties that Break, Lensey Namioka. Found in a Little Free Library; I'd previously read the autiobiography of Namioka's mother Buwei Yang Chao, recommended by

osprey_archer, so I was curious to see how Namioka wrote historical fiction about her mother's generation. Our protagonist Ailin is very much not based on Buwei -- Buwei is the sort of person, where if you wrote her life as fiction, readers would not find it believable. (There is a minor character in the book who appears to be based on Buwei, and Namioka later wrote a sequel about her, but based on descriptions it sounds like it goes in a different direction.) Instead this is the sort of middle-grade historical novel that I ate up as a kid, and it is a well-written example of this, but as an adult I don't want the story to stop when the protagonist turns 19.

Chroniques du Pays des Mères, Élisabeth Vonarburg. Yep, you'll be getting updates on this every week, though I'll try to avoid spoilers (we are now almost halfway through). In this week's installment the protagonist starts college in the Big City, population 15,000, and so we get a bit of a fun school story, and also some comparative linguistics.

Profile

Lewis Powell

February 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Page Summary

js_thrill - This Year 365 songs: February 27th
pauraque - How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones (2019)
js_thrill - This Year 365 songs: February 26th
sholio - Wonder Man
landofnowhere - wednesday books are very brief takes
js_thrill - This Year 365 songs: February 18th-25th
pauraque - The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. andré m. carrington (2025) [part 2]
redbird - a nice walk, a day after the blizzard
lydamorehouse - Turning Away
mrissa - The Language of Liars, by S.L. Huang
nineweaving - "Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow ..."
pauraque - Hard Hat Mack (1983)
conuly in agonyaunt - (no subject)
conuly in agonyaunt - (no subject)
conuly in agonyaunt - (no subject)
sholio - Supernatural vid: Life is a Highway (the 20th anniversary vidding project)
redbird - Medicare advantage, again
pauraque - Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)
redbird - PSA: archive.today not trustworthy
landofnowhere - wednesday books about young women

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Feb. 28th, 2026 04:12 am