Dreamwidth Styles

Books
Nearly finished Evelyn Araluen's 2025 poetry book The Rot. It's very good. I keep thinking of people I know who would appreciate it, and wanting to shove the book at them and say "here, look". (sovay, you're one of them.) Depression, colonialism, girlhood, death, hauntology, Country, survival.

Listened to Margaret Killjoy's narration of Katherine Mansfield's short story 'A Cup of Tea'. Margaret gave a little context about the story afterwards, including that the main character was thought to be based on Mansfield's cousin, also a writer, whom Margaret herself hadn't heard of. I looked her up afterwards: Elizabeth von Arnim, and went WHUT, Elizabeth and her German Garden? I haven't actually read it, and am not sure how I knew about it, just that it was on my radar. Mansfield's story is simultaneously scalpel-sharp and more merciful than it might have been: the story doesn't attempt to puncture the protagonist's saviour fantasy, or allow it to go as wrong as it could have done, but does make clear in every detail how entirely it is a self-serving saviour fantasy, how entirely she's disregarding the needs, safety, boundaries, and basic consent of the woman she's trying to help. (I thought of the scene in chapter 6 of What Katy Did in which Katy and Clover kidnap an Irish child from her parents and lock her in their attic because they want to "adopt" her.)

Went to the library and borrowed the second Asterix book, having not really given Asterix a chance since I was too young to have any historical context (plus the only one we had in the house was missing several pages, possibly by my own actions at a far younger age.)

Comics
Really feeling for Dina in Dumbing of Age right now. The part about her and Becky is sad and believable, but the part that hit me right where I live was "now even my room is not my own. It's been... ransacked. Strangers have touched... everything." Same fucking autism. I would be out of my fucking mind.

Fandom
Working on my claim for Fanoa'ary, the next Lays server event.

Games
Redactle and Squardle with kaberett, cryptic crosswords with shehasathree.

Little puzzle games on my phone: Breakout 71 (breakout with many possible upgrades to unblock, with a lot of flexibility in possible builds) and Tessel, a tile game in which one rotates multicoloured tiles to match the colours, creating enclosed areas of a single colour. I tend to get way too engrossed in this kind of game and spend too long on it, so I like very much that neither of these two are gamified beyond "actually being a game": no ads, no freemium, no nudging to play at a particular time or for a particular length of time. They're very pausible.

Tech
No progress on desktop problems yet: I'm working on paying down some technical debt on my phones before I try more intensive desktop troubleshooting. In the meantime, no Hollow Knight for me.

Crafts
Finished framing/backing a cross-stitched item which I had intended to give bookgirlwa for her birthday in 2025. Now to wrap it up and send it to her.

No weaving progress yet.

Garden
Two ripe tomatoes (pear-shaped, cherry form factor.)

Cats
Suspicious scab on Ash's nose seems to be healing up okay. *touch wood*

Nature
After a week of more moderate summer weather, we're heading into another heat wave. I hate hot weather, and physically don't deal well with it, but my biggest concern here is fire. Some of the fires from the last heatwave are still burning. The politicians are fighting about the CFA's funding (and yeah, they've been underfunded for a long time and have ageing equipment and an ageing volunteer force, and due to the governments' (plural but including ours) inaction on climate change, the fires they're fighting are getting more numerous and more severe) and there's a distinct scent of manufactured grassroots blame for the Labor state government (and. Like. I don't like Jacinta Allan either! Her authoritarian leanings concern me. But that doesn't mean the opposition would be better, or that a lot of her critics aren't misogynistic or conspiracy-theorists in distinctly Sky News flavours.) Which political digression I find easier to think (grumble) about than the fires themselves. The people and animals harmed already, the likelihood of more and worse in the next week. (And also, personally: the stress of managing my own potential evacuation in a situation where the danger zone is all over the state, my brain's in a constant loop of "but other people have it worse" and it's too hot to think.)

Current Events
It's bad. It's all so bad.

Books
So far this year (since January 1) I've read Margaret Killjoy's The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, listened to the audiobook of Alexandra Rowland's Running Close to the Wind, am reading Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff, and started Evelyn Araluen's The Rot.

Games
Quoting my own complaint elsewhere: the worst part of Hollow Knight is the runbacks. Each time my desktop switches itself off I need to turn it on again, restore my browser tabs and do other "just booted" chores, see what troubleshooting data I can get now, check what steps I can take next, then start the game again to find out whether whatever I tried this time worked. Then two minutes later my computer crashes.

Have also been doing Redactle and Squardle with kaberett, and cryptic crosswords with shehasathree.

Tech
As you may gather from the previous section of this post, I am having technical difficulties. So it goes.

Crafts
No active progress yet, but the yarn I ordered arrived. This is for weaving with my mother's old knitter's loom which she gave me for my birthday last year.

Actually, no, I'll share the complaints I emitted while trying to decide what yarn to order (huge thanks to Iphys on the Lays server for sorting me out on this.)

( cut for length )

Garden
No ripe tomatoes yet, but they're still alive. Raspberry bush looking very sad indeed. Harvested a little bit of parsley and oregano for cooking purposes.

Cats
Didn't enjoy the hot weather last week. Neither did I.

Nature
Hot and windy. (This is an understatement. Last week there was a heatwave and my whole state, as well as those nearest it, was at either "extreme" or "catastrophic" fire danger. I was in one of the "extreme" parts, and unpleasantly aware that on the fire danger scale they use, "catastrophic" is 100 out of 100. Meaning, your area can be at 99 and yet not catastrophic.)

It cooled down after that, but summer is very much not over, and there are places all over the state that are still on fire.