yhlee: a stylized fox's head and the Roman numeral IX (nine / 9) (hxx ninefox)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 7th, 2025 03:33 pm)
Perhaps overly ambitious for a project, but I'm doing this as a fun hobby fidget with no expectation it'll turn out "well." (In real-life, this is fiber-based trolling.)



I started this a few years ago but life got busy.

(Technical details posted elsewhere to [community profile] prototypediablerie.)
mrissa: (Default)
([personal profile] mrissa Sep. 7th, 2025 02:14 pm)
 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend, as you will find out if you read to the end and see that I am in the acknowledgments for the honestly light and easy work of being Brandon's pal.

Good news for those of you who wait until a series is complete to read it: this is the second book in a duology! So you can just pick up Catalyst and Castoff and read them together, if you haven't yet. I'm going to try not to spoiler the first book too much, which is going to leave me vague, because this is definitely my favorite kind of sequel: the kind where the consequences follow on hard and fast from the first book. Happily for those with shaky memories, there's a quick summary at the beginning of this one.

So there are airships! There are strange vast somewhat personified forces! There are people working out their relationships in the face of personal and social change! It's that lovely kind of fantasy novel that almost might be a science fiction novel in its concern with human interactions with truly alien intelligences. I love that kind. I want more of that basically always. And if it can come with airship adventures alongside the ponderings of the nature of intelligence and caring about others, even better. Very glad this is about to make it out into the world so I can talk to more people about these books.

anne: (awesomesox)
([personal profile] anne Sep. 7th, 2025 01:45 pm)
I've been fandoms-in-law with kpop for decades, but KPop Demon Hunters pushed me over the edge into the rabbit hole. So far my kpop buds have told me about EXO, Stray Kids, Ateez, and Mamamoo. Other suggestions very welcome--Athénaïs, I'm looking at you, obviously!

My current favorite subgenre is "Youtube vocal coaches losing their everlovin minds about Ejae belting an A5 and ad-libbing a D6."

technical singing wonk alert: those are notes that opera singers hit, except for the belted A5, which is...I'm not sure even Mariah Carey ever did that. D6 is one step higher than you hear in Allegri's Miserere. tl;dr Ejae should have been a household name a long time ago and I hope she gets a recording contract if she wants one.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 7th, 2025 09:51 am)


I figure if I'm spinning anyway, I may as well entertain myself by spinning my own silk thread (largely the white on the left, mulberry/bombyx, with a random foray into the darker yellow on the left, eri silk) for needle lace.

(Ignore the red/yellow nonsense on the bobbin, which is sari silk; I was too lazy to reel it off because my bobbin situation is hilariously dire.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
([personal profile] jazzfish Sep. 6th, 2025 09:26 am)
This is taking longer than expected.

Gorges du Tarn and Aigues-Mortes )

Next: Marseille, ochre, and sculpture.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 6th, 2025 05:10 am)
At this point, because life is too short, I block on sight people I see recommending anything by/to do with the serial racist TERF harasser Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Zen Cho's summary), who now writes as "Maria Ying" (with someone else)? (WinterFox, Requires Hate, whatever the hell other pseudonyms and/or monikers). There's a chance current readers/recommenders/etc. have no idea and just haven't heard, but like I said, life is too short, so why give any more time of day than "nope, blocking" to someone running around reccing a harasser?

(I was in her targeting crosshairs but fortunately only in a glancing fashion, unlike people I know whom she harassed in pretty awful ways, in an ongoing pattern of behavior.)
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
([personal profile] jazzfish Sep. 5th, 2025 10:03 am)
I started rereading Pattern Recognition (my favourite of William Gibson's books) because I remembered and agreed with his theory about jet lag:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

I love the prose, the immediacy of the present-tense narration that still manages to feel at one remove from any character's interior life, including Cayce Pollard. I love the depiction of the early oughts, the internet where forum posts and text are the primary interfaces, where permanent connectivity is available but unevenly distributed and never assumed, where "video" has to be uploaded to obscure corners of sites.

I was startled to find, in a reminiscence about London in the snow, a perfect depiction of my experience of Paris:
Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

But every time -- every time -- I read this book, I get caught off guard by the absolutely stupid joke that he spends literally a third of the book setting up. Voytek and Hobbs and Ngemi are, in their own ways and for their own reasons, collectors and connoisseurs of old computing equipment; when we meet them they are attempting to sell a trunkload of Curta calculators so that Voytek can buy a bunch of ZX/81 Spectra. The money has finally come through but there is a hiccup:
"Yes," says Ngemi, with quiet pride, "but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang."

GODDAMMIT GIBSON.
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yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 4th, 2025 06:34 pm)
Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!



This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)



This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 4th, 2025 02:11 am)
Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).
I am so, so behind on ::flaps hands:: everything...but that still hasn't stopped me from spending hours each day reading books, and then even more hours writing about them.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Chosen Queen – Sam Davey
This novel is an Arthurian retelling from Igraine's perspective. Boy, did I have Thoughts. ) But the utterly maddening thing is, 80 percent of this book was good enough that, when the next volume in Davey's "Pendragon Prophecy" comes out in a couple of years, I will probably read it despite knowing better.

Kindling The Celtic Spirit – Mara Freeman
Kindling The Celtic Spirit was published during the heyday of the shopping mall new age/occult publishing boom. In those pre-Wikipedia, pre-Internet dark ages, it and its ilk served a valuable purpose, making accessible information from niche, out of print, and otherwise inaccessible primary and secondary sources on Celtic folklore and belief from the proto-, early, and early modern historical periods, albeit mixed in with liberal amounts of neopagan accretions.

There's much less need for such things in our current existence of commercial ebook and ejournal publishing, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and museum and historic trust youtube documentaries, but there's something naively charming about the book's mix of academic fact and invented tradition and ritual. And while for some reason The Festival of Lughnasa has yet to be republished (unlike its brethren (Carmina Gadelica and The Silver Bough), there are plenty of references and and quotations from it here.


What I Am Currently Reading

Song Of The Huntress – Lucy Holland
I needed a palette cleanser after The Chosen Queen.


What I'm Reading Next

This week I acquired Sistersong by Lucy Holland and Buried Deep And Other Stories by Naomi Novik


これで以上です。
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https://www.science.org/content/article/ant-queen-lays-eggs-hatch-two-species

As one other commenter noted, it's got some interesting Raksura-like parallels! Cool!

Sent from my iPad

a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.



cf. [personal profile] telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic, [personal profile] telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 3rd, 2025 07:47 am)


Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!
mrissa: (Default)
([personal profile] mrissa Sep. 2nd, 2025 04:46 pm)
 Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. This is the most like Oliver Sacks of anything I've read since Oliver Sacks died, and one of the ways in which that's the case is that Anand is writing from her own experience as a neurologist but also as someone who has gone through relevant symptoms and has a particular perspective, so: in the tradition of Sacks rather than attempting to clone him. If you like "weird things brains do oh goodness" stories, this will be your jam, and it sure was mine. Also Anand is meticulous about gender: if there are relevant studies that talk about the occurrence of a particular condition among trans women as compared to cis women, cis men, or trans men (or etc. with other groups in the spotlight), she will note them as clearly and calmly as she would something about cis women, treating it all as part of our composite picture of how the brain works and what affects it. Highly recommended.

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. This book completely wrecked me. It's in some ways a gentle story about subtle and small-scale magic and about human relationships in our own structurally substantially unequal society. It's also about long-term grief where most stories that touch on grief are fairly short-term (months or 1-2 years) or muted somehow, and it's the only recent book I recall really delving into helping your parent with their grief while you, an adult, deal with your own differently-shaped grief for the same person. It's really beautifully done, I wanted to be doing nothing else but reading it once I started reading it, and also it was emotionally devastating in parts.

Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Sometimes I feel like the most confusing parts of history are not the really distant ones--who doesn't like a good Ea-Nasir joke--but the things that happened just before you arrived or as you're arriving. They're simultaneously foundational to a bunch of the world around you and happened while you weren't looking, in ways no one thinks to teach you formally. For me, born in 1978, the Iranian Revolution is one of those things, so when I spotted this on the library's new books table I picked it up immediately. This is a detailed history from someone who got to interview many of the Americans involved, and who is committed to not oversimplifying the benefits or detriments of the shah's reign. I could have wished for somewhat deeper Iranian history, though there was some, and stronger regional grounding, but also those things can be found elsewhere, it's all part of the process. The fact that there's an American flag on the cover of this book as well as an Iranian flag is not an accident. A book that was focusing on Iranian relations with for example France in this period would have a very different take.

Stephani Burgis, A Honeymoon of Grave Consequence. Discussed elsewhere.

Robert Darnton, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. This is a microhistory of booksellers and their job routes and wares in the pre-Revolutionary era. Of all of Darnton's books, I'd say this should be low on the list for people who are not deeply interested in the period, least of general interest. Luckily I am deeply interested in the period. So.

John M. Ford, From the End of the Twentieth Century. Reread. Satisfying in its own inimitable way. Those poor skazlorls.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. And the threads Karen was pulling out of the genre/literary conversation at the time were so different from the ones Mike did, I hadn't intended to read them in close proximity to compare and contrast but it was kind of fun when I landed there.

Gigi Griffis, And the Trees Stare Back. This is not my usual sort of thing--creepy YA with eventual explanation--except for one major factor: it's set in the lead-up to the Singing Revolution in Estonia. Really great integration of historical setting and speculative concept, bonded hard with the characters, loved it. Most of the historical fiction I read has me reading through the cracks of my fingers, wincing at what I know is coming but the characters do not. This was the opposite, I spent the entire book super-excited for them.

Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of the American Prairie. I am always disappointed to find out that I am already pretty expert in something, because I learn less that way. The American Prairie! Soil restoration, water conservation, habitats, farming...it turns out I already know quite a lot about this. Darn. If you don't, here's a good place to start.

John Lisle, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. Ooooof. This is another "I saw it on the library's new books shelf" read for this fortnight, and its portrayal of CIA misbehavior was...not a surprise, but having this amount of detail on one project was...not cheering.

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. If you internalized the idea that historians should be effaced as completely as possible from the writing of history, in the pretense that the history wrote itself really, this will not be the book for you. Ada Palmer is as major a factor in this book as Machiavelli or any of the Medicis. If, on the other hand, you enjoy Ada's classroom lecture voice, it comes through really clearly here. There are some places where I was clearly not her target audience--I honestly don't have a personal investment in what Machiavelli's personal religious stance was, so the chapter about why we want him to be an atheist was speaking to a "we" I am not in. Still, lots of interesting stuff here. Including, surprisingly, cantaloupes.

Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You. This is a thriller about social media influencers in the group that would have been called "Mommy bloggers" a generation ago, set in the Mountain West. It's very readable, and if you know anything about tradwife influencers you'll see lots of places where it's spot on. I think people who read a lot may find the twists less twisty, but it doesn't rely solely on twists for its appeal.

Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History. I haven't had a satisfying generational epic in a long time. This one spans Earth and Mars, with point of view characters in four generations and multiple points on their partially shared timeline. My preferences would have been for more of everything, more all around--for a generational epic this is comparatively slim--but still very readable.

Sophy Roberts, A Training School for Elephants: Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa. The subtitle calls this a curious episode. It is instead a staggeringly depressing demonstration of how colonialism was fractally horrible. Zoom in a little closer! more horrors! hooray! No. Not hooray. And Roberts is clearly not claiming it is a cause for celebration, but...well. For me this microhistory was more upsetting than illuminating. Maybe I should stop looking at the new books shelf at the library for a minute.

Jessie L. Weston, The Three Days' Tournament: A Study in Romance and Folk-Lore. Kindle. Comparison and contrast of different appearances of a particular legend throughout western/northwestern Europe and England. Nostalgic for me because I used to read a lot more of this sort of thing.

Darcie Wilde, A Purely Private Matter, And Dangerous to Know, A Lady Compromised, A Counterfeit Suitor, and The Secret of the Lady's Maid. This is not all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries there are, but it's all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries my library had. If you like the first one, they are consistent, and I think you could probably start anywhere and find the situation and characters adequately explained. Regency mysteries! Do you want some of those? here they are.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 2nd, 2025 11:46 am)
I had some leftover of a single I'd spun and decided to be cheap and DIY a loom to explore weaving it in a smol format. Still in progress but this will be going to [personal profile] eller. :3







Cardboard, polyurethane clear coat (to stiffen it up a bit. I used an X-acto knife and Japanese push drill because I had them around.
yhlee: pretty kitty (Cloud)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 1st, 2025 04:58 pm)


Still fussing with the settings on the wheel (especially how aggressive I want takeup). Cloud seems to think the e-spinner is purring.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 1st, 2025 12:46 pm)






Finished yarn! This one's going to [personal profile] niqaeli. Spun on an Ashford Traveller, plied on an EEW 6.1.
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
([personal profile] lebateleur Sep. 1st, 2025 11:43 am)
It sure is frustrating when the owl's periodic language path updates wipe the results of all your hard work off the board. I know the real goal is to maximize user's time-on-app vice the user's experience, but I don't see how resetting someone's progress from Unit 26 to Unit 6 would encourage them to spend more time engaging.

Chinese — Finished 1/10 of Rookie Unit 8; legendary through Rookie Unit 6
Dutch — Finished 1/5 of Explorer Unit 2; legendary through Rookie Unit 3
Gaelic — Finished 1/5 of Explorer Unit 13; legendary through the Explorer Unit 10
Hindi — Finished 4/5 of Unit 1; backburnered to focus on the letters with the GC
Indonesian — Finished 2/5 of Explorer Unit 12; legendary through 2/5 of Explorer Unit 11
Japanese — Finished Traveler Unit 24; legendary through Traveler Unit 21
Korean — Finished 1/5 of Rookie Unit 6; legendary through Rookie Unit 5
Latin — Finished 1/5 of Rookie Unit 6
Manx — Finished lesson 3 of the Loayr Gaelg 3 textbook
Welsh — Finished 1/5 of Rookie Unit 6; legendary through 1/5 of Rookie Unit 4

And, because, why not? Here's where things stood last month. )

これで以上です。
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