Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Susan’s Salon: 2021 September 26/27

🇩🇪🗳

Please use the comment section to just chat about whatever you want. Susan’s Salon is posted early Monday (Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is still Sunday in most other countries). It’s fine to be sad, worried, vaccinated, unvaccinated-yet, angry or maybe even happy (or all of those things at once).

Please feel free to post what you like (either troubling news or pleasant distractions) in the comments for this open thread. [However, no cranky conflicts between each other in the comments.] Links, videos, cat pictures 🐈 etc are fine! Whatever you like and be nice to one another 😇

camestrosfelapton

55 responses to “Susan’s Salon: 2021 September 26/27”

  1. Sitting at a Punk-festival with angry punk, happy punk and artsy punk. After having some kind of monkey punk, we are now into the folk music punk with some seriously good stuff. Still restrictions until next week, so we are just maybe 100 persons today with maybe double yesterday. We spent the morning watching Ghost Shark to get into a ridiculous mood.

    This week I got help putting my new outdoor fireplace together, so this week I’m going to enjoy sitting outside, working by the fire. Sir Scrittles and Nevyn continues to put dead mice in my bed to show how good providers they are.

    No new reading, just old stuff.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. Been a nice week, if a really busy one. Read four books of varying degrees of enjoyability (Django Wexler’s Blood of the Chosen, Claire Winn’s City of Shattered Light, Lindsay Ellis’ Truth of the Divine, and Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf). Also posted on my blog my Best Novelette rankings.

    But I’ve been obsessed with and in love with the new Star Wars Visions anthology that just dropped on Disney +. Watched them in Japanese with english subs (although the subs are more the english dialogue subtitled), which was a throwback to when I was a teen watching anime subs, and oh my god is it so much great stuff in such a variety of ways. Really fell in love most of all with The Village Bride, but they’re all tremendous and I highly recommend them if you missed them.

    Liked by 4 people

      • So I assume you’ve read Axion’s End if you’re asking (if not, I reviewed it here: https://garik16.blogspot.com/2020/06/scififantasy-book-review-axioms-end-by.html), and well I have mixed feelings. The book’s understanding of US politics is still a mess, but both the human and alien parts of the story deal strongly with themes and issues of personhood and rights. On the other hand, the relationship between the main protagonist and the main alien she interacts with essentially turns abusive and the main character deals with depression and suicide attempts that I don’t think Ellis really reckons well with – at least in terms of dealing with the fact that the relationship is abusive.

        I’ll probably be back for the trilogy ender to see if it’s resolved there, but I don’t have as much faith as I once did that Ellis will pull it off.

        Liked by 1 person

        • Hmmm!

          Thanks, yeah, read the first one. It was a very flawed book — but it kept me turning the pages, so I’ve been thinking about reading #2. But — abusive relationship? ehhhh……

          Like

          • Not physically to be clear, but well….when one half of a relationship clearly refuses to stop putting care for another alien, who probably doesn’t want it, over the human half of the relationship and there’s no reckoning for same (and due to issues involving their bond at the end of book 1), I found it crossed the line.

            Liked by 1 person

    • Hey garik, I’m getting ready to read Catalyst Gate, but it’s been almost a year since I read Chaos Vector. I remember the plot details of Velocity Weapon fairly well, but not so much for CV, and the references in the synopsis for the final novel are only ringing vague bells. I was looking for a good plot summary online, but the best I could find was your review which does contain some helpful spoilers. I was wondering, did you keep detailed notes on Chaos Vector? And if so, would you be willing to share them with me? Because I’m not really wanting to re-read the 600-page book just so I can read the 600-page sequel.

      Like

  3. Dropped White Cat (tentatively named Snowdrop, but my wife and I are still debating it) off at the TNR place this morning. Trapping went easy other than her banging her face into the cage last night. Fortunately she was quiet once we put the cage in the bathroom. Picking her up in 45 minutes. Then it’s one to two days of confinement depending on gender (I think of her as female, but we don’t know for sure).
    Watched Simon Pegg’s “Paul” which has some fun moments but some that had me scratching my head (Lorenzo’s Oil jokes?). Enjoyed The Coneheads (both watched for my book on alien visitor films much better).
    Read The Andromeda Strain, which proves that “tell don’t show” can be the basis for a long-running writing career. The movie’s decision to switch out one of the men for Kate Reid was inspired.
    Weather is lovely, though due to watching Plush Dog since his pulled muscle, I don’t get out as much as I’d like. He is doing much better though — we’re hopeful it’ll only be another week and he can come off cage rest.

    Liked by 4 people

    • Update: Cat is now in the bathroom in the trap, with a towel and pee pads under it. Release in the morning.
      He and Wisp have been getting a little more confrontational. We’ll see if neutering chills him out.

      Liked by 2 people

    • I haven’t reread The Andromeda Strain since my teens and I’m morbidly curious just to see if it was really as ridiculously expository and data-obsessed as I remember. I feel like at one point there was literally a full page that was just a computer printout of a fake bar graph of pH readings or something, and the scene of the POV character just interacting with a series of computer prompts to get through a security checkpoint and health screening was like “then the computer said to do such-and-such, so he did” at least half a dozen times over.

      The weird thing is… when I first read that, at maybe age 11, I LOVED it. Couldn’t get enough of the data dumps and “wouldn’t it be cool if you had a computer that could do voice recognition, even badly” type stuff. I think it was my first exposure to the basic fictional device of “this is a true story that was covered up, and to make it sound more documentary-like, we’ll throw in a lot of pointless details and digressions” and I was a total sucker for it— to such a degree that, very embarrassingly, at first I thought it literally *was* a true story and asked my mom if she knew about it.

      I like the movie— Robert Wise and Nelson Gidding also worked together on The Haunting, which was based on a far better book but one with somewhat similar challenges, in that both novels were highly dependent on a particular narrative voice and very constrained in terms of setting and character development, and both films managed to streamline them into something that worked as a feature film while still keeping some of the originals’ distinctive tone. Wise’s old-school Hollywood technique was so solid that whenever he did something a little odder, like the split-screen stark horror imagery in The Andromeda Strain or the way dialogue scenes are edited in The Haunting to isolate Julie Harris, it really stood out.

      Liked by 1 person

      • That was one of my favorite books too when I was about that age, though I don’t think I ever thought it was true rather than fictional. I do remember noticing one of the scientists misusing “galaxy” for “star system” and being quite puzzled by that.

        Like

        • Yeah, whenever Crichton had to venture out of the medical field into areas that he hadn’t focused on in school, you could really tell.

          In spite of its defects as prose, it’d probably still hold up as my favorite of his books – the ultra-nerdy ultra-dry style gives it a distinctive feel, there’s some real horror in it and it strikes a good balance between “use enough scientific hand-waving to make it feel sciencey and get you involved in the investigation” and “this is a thing we can’t possibly understand.” In a different vein, another favorite (though maybe just because I read it at an impressionable age) was one of his pseudonymous thrillers, Binary, which combined fairly competent crime-procedural stuff with some of the more gruesome and disturbing “what it’s like to die in this particular way” prose I’ve seen. Both are also (IIRC) fairly free of his crankish political editorializing.

          Like

          • I agree his nerdy style works much better here than his later books — reading Congo, it was hard to believe how much his info dumps slowed down such a classic pulp premise (a lost city with a fortune in diamonds guarded by genetically engineered man-apes!).

            Like

          • As far as his science goes, I couldn’t buy the leap by which they realize radiation will make it multiply because it feeds on any substrate or however it went.

            Like

  4. I’m reading all of Natasha Pulley, a course of action I highly recommend. Start with Watchmaker of Filgree street (though I didn’t). These are wonderful books — steampunk, sort of.

    It’s still hitting the low 90s almost every day here in Arkansas, but starting to cool down, finally.

    Paul Weimer did a lovely review of the first book in my Escape Velocity series, over at Nerds of a Feather:

    http://www.nerds-feather.com/2021/09/microreview-book-fault-lines-by-kelly.html

    Liked by 3 people

    • delagar: I’m reading all of Natasha Pulley, a course of action I highly recommend. Start with Watchmaker of Filgree street (though I didn’t). These are wonderful books — steampunk, sort of.

      I thought Watchmaker was well-written, but was really upset by the fact that the main relationship is an abusive one, with no acknowledgment of that by any of the characters. It put me off reading further in the series.

      Like

        • delagar commented: Can you tell me more? I don’t recall an abusive relationship.

          These are things I wrote about the book at the time (it’s been 6 years since I read it):

          Mori is a conscienceless sociopath who constantly uses emotional manipulation to control Thaniel.

          Mori openly admits to having threatened to kill someone’s wife in order to leave Japan, openly admits to having manipulated Thaniel to get him to do what he wants, openly admits to having manipulated Grace to get Thaniel away from her, and does numerous other horrible things.

          I think the book is about two monsters, a huge monster and a smaller monster, and a really weak, easily-manipulable character. And I think that the book completely ignores that, paints both of those monsters and the weak person as being understandable and sympathetic. And I just couldn’t see them that way.

          I don’t think that the author recognizes that this sort of manipulation is abusive. I mean, at the end, when he throws the bolt into the air, Mori is saying “I’ve been generous and manipulated you into your current situation, but I can be a lot less generous and take everything away from you.” And that’s not in a clever way, it’s in a monstrously manipulative way.

          But I don’t think Pulley intends the reader to see it that way. I don’t think she intended it to be a horror novel – which is what it turns out to be.

          Like

  5. Retired!

    I have been mostly retired for a while, just doing bits of freelance stuff if they came along, and I decided I no longer need to tell myself that I can do that.

    I’m giving the one existing client lots of notice, but anyone else who, unlikely, calls in the next month will be told tat I’m retired, thanks for thinking of me.

    Liked by 3 people

  6. I find it funny that you have the german flag and the voting symbol in the header. We have a (not quite complete) picture of the result here, but what the next administration will be will take some time.
    (I exspect the complete result tomorrow but which partys will be in the next administration is a question that needs some talks)
    Whatever the result is, it won’t be horible, but not great either. (I think a lot of voters were making the decision what in their opinion the least worst choise was)

    But going towards books. I DNF a book a short time ago, sometimes characters can go to much on nerves. Exspecially if the writer wants to make them badass but they come of as weak and kind of unsympathic. I should have stopped the moment the (imho unnecessary and predictable) triggermoment came with bonusmurder, but I stopped the moment the maincharacter offered a kid a suicide pill, after the maincharacter promised to help and screwed everythink up. I am sure, that somethink will prevent the moment but I don’t care any longer. (Traitor’s Blade was the titel, not recomended from me)
    Better news, there is a book where I don’t care so much about the characters, but it is interesting as hell. If a fantasycrimestory is more your cup of tea then mine, Jade City (first book of I think a trilogy) is definitly worth a look. It is a very good book that is a pageturner, not quite finished there was a vote that got in my way today, but definitly worth a look.

    Like

    • I thought I should at least nod towards what is an important election but I don’t have a well informed opinion to say anything about it – other than I hope everything works out better than people expect.

      Like

    • Personally, I didn’t like any of the three would-be chancellors and voted what I considered the least evil option in the end, because there was no good choice here. Besides, the best and most stable option would be another great coalition, though both Armin Laschet and Olaf Scholz have excluded this and want to go for a less stable coalition with the Greens and the Liberal Party first. Even though any coalition involving both the Greens and the Liberals is notoriously instable.

      Anyway, it’s just a shitshow, following one of the nastiest election campaigns in recent memory.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Well congrats on finishing an election without electing a Donald Trump at the very least. I guess it will take awhile for the parties to work out what coalition will take power.

        Like

  7. We have moved from Alert Level 4 to 3, so more businesses are now allowed to open. The new COVID cases are all here in Auckland, and while numbers are low, it’s looking like a long crawl to zero cases. Depending on how things go, we might not get to zero cases this time. Meanwhile, the vaccination programme forges ahead. 80% of Aucklanders have now had at least one Pfizer dose (or are booked in for their first), and the rest of the country is not far behind. And there is much discussion on where the country goes next. A loosening of restrictions is in the strategy but we are watching closely countries like Denmark, and currently Singapore. Singapore with over 80% vaccination rate loosened restrictions but an increase in cases has led to restrictions being put back in place so as not to overwhelm their healthcare system. I expect that New Zealand, which has lower ICU capacity will have to tread very carefully.

    Am currently re-reading the Dune series (just the Frank Herbert ones). I’m looking forward to the Denis Villeneuve version, hopefully see it on the big screen.

    Speaking of remakes, finally watched the new Total Recall, which was a popcorn movie. I was amused to see in the opening few minutes that once again, New Zealand was left off the map.
    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-zealand-left-off-world-map

    This weekend marks 4 months since Fern died. I miss her every day. Constant reminders are everywhere, including our shared household accounts for streaming platforms, of things she started watching without me, or shows we watched together that we won’t continue watching together. So I watched the new season of “Sex Education” which is brilliant. We watched the first two seasons together. Season 3 I watched alone. Two of its main cast have genre credits (Gillian Anderson & Asa Butterfield) but I love it for its humanity & humour, it’s sex-positive & portrays a number of non-heteronormative characters with sensitivity.

    I’ve also watched the last season of “Lucifer”. It grew into its own thing after initially starting off as a spin-off of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I wasn’t sure how they were going to pull it off, but I really enjoyed the last few episodes & thought they stuck the landing, which is not always easy to do.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I’m sorry to hear that you’re hurting. But I’m also glad that you have something to divert yourself with.

      As for Lucifer, that’s a very curious show for me. IMHO the female lead is a whiny waste of space and the male lead isn’t much of an actor, but the show is still very good at making me want to know what happens next. I haven’t watched the last season yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

      Liked by 1 person

      • I was a bit ambivalent when I started watching it, but the characters, especially the supporting ones (Mazikeen!) , were fun. The will they/won’t they of the the Detective & Lucifer got a bit tiresome by mid-series. But I kept watching & the characters do evolve over time. I also like that it has a lot of heart.

        Like

        • Yeah, I think the secondaries often save the show. Mazikeen is great, and Dennis Haysbert playing God put a big smile on my face. 🙂

          Like

  8. I think Sydney is emotionally fed up with everything now but at least vaccination rates are looking good. 80%+ of over 16s have had one dose and 60% at 2 doses in NSW. Case numbers are still high and unlike the lockdown in 2020, the virus spread into rural communities

    Liked by 1 person

    • “Emotionally Fed Up” is my next band name.

      I think everyone everywhere has had it with COVID. That seems to explain why even in places where cases numbers are still high (and creeping up), many people are going about their lives as though everything is normal. Even though it isn’t.

      Where I am in Auckland, we’ve had more lockdowns than the rest of the country, so there is definitely fatigue. But the bulk of people are still complying with restrictions, and want to stamp out this current outbreak. But more & more the media is reporting opinions from people who say that we need to open up & live with it which is not helpful. (That is in the strategy, but it relies on getting a high vaccination rate first, and before that is achieved, an elimination strategy is still in place)

      Even though we haven’t snuffed out the last chains of infection, we have succeeded in stopping infections spreading from Auckland to rural areas, or the rest of New Zealand. Or at least, we’ve done it well enough that outside of Auckland there are fewer restrictions.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. The first temp crown fell off, so I rushed right out and got another one.
    Which even more promptly fell off.
    I have some dental cement that I’m going to stick it on with AGAIN, and if that fails, then screw it.

    Got my shingles vax that knocked me down not as bad, but for longer than the Covid shot. Luckily I don’t get the next for 2-6 months and can thus work it into my schedule more, instead of getting it in a week I had Things To Do, the most needful of which I dragged myself to and the others fell by the wayside. Really should have gotten it *after* the flu shot. I’m still pooped. My arm will hate me, shingles, flu, Covid booster, shingles…

    Stamina not helped by bad air and 2 days without HEPA filter. Sunset on Sat. was “so this is what it’s like living on a planet with a red dwarf star you can look straight at”.

    EGG managed to scam Second Breakfast on Friday, yet was as hongry and whiiiiny as ever.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Well, it looks like my household is going to be expanding.

    Although I took in several of my mom’s old indoor cat colony after she died a couple of years ago, they were uniformly ooold cats — so I am currently down to three cats total. And we all know that three cats is just not enough. 😉 So I started looking around, thinking I’d get some feral cats to put in my barn. The first few people with suitable cats either flaked out or ignored me completely. But today a lady in Nashville has two semi-feral 5-month-old kittens, only she says they’re reaaaaaally sweet — so I’m going to keep them in the house for at least a few weeks and see if they want to become indoor pet cats. Which still leaves me with barn cat positions to fill. Insert rolling-eye emoji here. 😉

    AND I just started looking for a second livestock guardian dog — my Anatolian girl is five years old, and she’s got a bum knee, so she has slowed down quite a bit, and Dublin-the-Obnoxious-Doberman could use another dog to harass. I was thinking I might get one in December or so. But instead I might be getting one in just a couple of weeks, because nearly immediately after I started advertising that I would be looking for one in a couple of months, this lady in Louisiana, not even seeing my ad, posted her own ad saying she had *five* Anatolians who needed homes ASAP. And these dogs are *free* despite being (supposedly — We Shall See) purebred (they can easily cost upwards of $1000 as puppies). And her husband, a trucker, is going to drive one of them up to me from Louisiana in a couple of weeks. So, yeah, things seem to fall into my lap that way. (Some of you may remember that I got Dublin because about two weeks after my previous doberman died a lady called me out of the blue about a dobe she couldn’t control — which was Dublin.) It’s about to get busy around here!

    In the meantime, I didn’t watch any video that I can remember at the moment.

    In genre reading, it took me all week to finish A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. Not that it was bad, it’s just that I was so immersed in the Anatolian groups on Facebook that I didn’t take time to listen much. This one sort of went up and down for me — first I thought it took awhile to really get started, then it was going along well, but then it started getting into hive-mind stuff, and I’m sort of over the evil-hive-aliens trope, but then it ended well after all. And I just love the 3-Seagrass character, who cracks me up constantly. So I liked it overall, and it ended up trying to say some worthwhile things about belonging and not belonging, and about the consequences of either continuing or trying to correct the flaws in your chosen in-group, but it was uneven.

    And now I’ve just started Million Dollar Demon by Kim Harrison, the latest in the Hollows UF series. It’s going along about as it should — an entertaining comfort read.

    And that’s all for this week!

    Liked by 2 people

  12. Vox Day is back on gab, so he’s clearly buried that hatchet with Andrew Torba. I wonder if that story will come out. Looks like it was about the time he got kicked off blogspot, so it might be just grabbing for any platform that would have him.

    Also, awww, it’s his 25th wedding anniversary today. His wife posted a cute wedding photo.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Yes, at some point Torba and Day must have put aside their differences but I can’t find any details. From what I can see, Day is using it mainly to draw traffic to his other projects.

      Frankly, I’m still astonished Gab survived – shows how deep the pockets are of those helping fund these kinds of projects.

      Like

      • It can be dated – he reappeared on gab, with no explanation, on June 14. Apart from one post on Jan 9 (relating to the Trump coup that he was expecting at the time), there is nothing between September 17, 2017 and June 14 2021.

        Liked by 2 people

  13. Watched Terminator: Dark Fate last night. Nice. Callbacks to previous films had some subtlety and depth. The “say, that’s a nice bike!” revisit brought a smile. The face-replacement CG jolted me at first. (This wasn’t in T2, was it?!) Quite effective otherwise. And is it just me, or could Sarah Connor be a close relative of Robert Forster’s bail bondsman, Max Cherry, in Jackie Brown? Maybe I’m just imagining.

    Other SF TV series – I’ve sampled all kinds of things during lockdown. Watched one ep each of Star Trek Discovery and Nightflyers, but I just couldn’t connect with either one, sadly. One of the Filial Units says I’m too picky. 🙂

    Other cat owners here, excellent! I like dogs and lurrve cats. We are currently owned by two of them.

    Liked by 2 people

    • We never intended to be cat owners, but my wife has a soft spot for helpless strays.
      No sign of Snowdrop coming back since her release. Which is okay if she’s found someone else to take her in, we just hope she’s well.

      Liked by 2 people

  14. Does anyone else kinda, sorta miss being able to drop in on the thoughts of the RWNJs occasionally and find out what nuttery is currently in vogue?

    Vox has been given his opportunity to sue Google out of existence. Jon d A is all YouTube videos and I just don’t have the time. John C W always has been and always will be incomprehensible and Sarah is too busy moving, in preparation for civil war mark 2, to write her usual drivel.

    Where can I go now for my mix of F & SF and mind bendingly weird right wing talking points?

    Liked by 1 person

    • I’d argue that you can have that by opening the pages of any newspaper. If the Republicans’ claims about medicine, voter fraud, CRT and climate change aren’t some sort of fantastic fiction, then I’ll eat a proverbial hat.

      Going to the online locations of those folks just encourages them, and seems a bit worrisome to me. Have you gotten yourself checked out lately? This may be the sign of a real issue. That’s why we have Cam, who acts as a curator of sorts, a task for which I thank them no end.

      Liked by 2 people

    • You’re in the only place I’ve ever needed. I get more than I want here, even. 🙂

      If you don’t need self-identified SF in it, like @my dog hannah said, the news is plenty. I try to avoid that as much as possible too.

      Like

Blog at WordPress.com.