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uma vez um pupilo de Aristóteles disse
Jun. 13th, 2026 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proustbotI've encountered a run of good books recently, but all good things must come to an end (especially if one spends a lot of time downloading random books from Libby and the public library).
I started listening to The Beach at Summerly (a Cold War spy-thriller, fine, sure, I like spies) -- and then I had to stop after ten minutes, when the protagonist notes that she is a Wellesley history professor going off to teach her new course on women in Colonial America. In 1954.
Oh noooooo, I moaned. No, that's not possible. You wouldn't find U.S university courses on women's history until the 1960s at the very earliest. Gerda Lerner is considered the trailblazing founder of the subdiscipline, and she did not finish her PhD until 1966.
But even if you don't know or care about the relationship between the historical profession and second-wave feminism....Wellesley College has digitized their 1950s course catalogs, and it is incredibly easy to check what courses were being offered in 1954. Unsurprisingly, "Women in Colonial America" was not an option. (Unless it was offered during "315. Seminar," which looks like a catch-all upper-level course for whatever the assigned prof wanted to teach. But I doubt it! Wellesley did not start supporting faculty scholarship on feminist topics until the 1970s.)
I have bailed from the book, if only because making a mistake this dumb at the very beginning promises more dumb mistakes to come -- but since the protagonist is specifically gearing up to teach a lecture about the Salem Witch Trials in her anachronistic course, I predict it's all a clumsy set-up for mentioning Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which came out in 1953. But I'll never know! Because that audiobook is getting tossed back to the library!
I started listening to The Beach at Summerly (a Cold War spy-thriller, fine, sure, I like spies) -- and then I had to stop after ten minutes, when the protagonist notes that she is a Wellesley history professor going off to teach her new course on women in Colonial America. In 1954.
Oh noooooo, I moaned. No, that's not possible. You wouldn't find U.S university courses on women's history until the 1960s at the very earliest. Gerda Lerner is considered the trailblazing founder of the subdiscipline, and she did not finish her PhD until 1966.
But even if you don't know or care about the relationship between the historical profession and second-wave feminism....Wellesley College has digitized their 1950s course catalogs, and it is incredibly easy to check what courses were being offered in 1954. Unsurprisingly, "Women in Colonial America" was not an option. (Unless it was offered during "315. Seminar," which looks like a catch-all upper-level course for whatever the assigned prof wanted to teach. But I doubt it! Wellesley did not start supporting faculty scholarship on feminist topics until the 1970s.)
I have bailed from the book, if only because making a mistake this dumb at the very beginning promises more dumb mistakes to come -- but since the protagonist is specifically gearing up to teach a lecture about the Salem Witch Trials in her anachronistic course, I predict it's all a clumsy set-up for mentioning Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which came out in 1953. But I'll never know! Because that audiobook is getting tossed back to the library!
Ocarina of Time Remake + Deltarune
Jun. 13th, 2026 07:51 amrynlingMy actual canon opinion about the Ocarina of Time remake is that I'm happy it's going to exist. I suspect that Nintendo is trying to pivot away from the world of Breath of the Wild (which is going to be ten years old next March), and a remake of Ocarina of Time might be intended as a step in a new direction.
Even if it's not, I'm looking forward to seeing the dark fantasy elements of the game rendered in HD. I don't think it's a mere social media blip that, right after the announcement, everyone immediately started talking about what the remake is going to do with the ReDead zombies. I'm delighted that this specific nightmare fuel will now exist for a new generation.
But mainly? I've been losing my shit over the next chapter of Deltarune coming out at the end of the month. Last summer I had to put an almost physical effort into holding myself back from getting too involved with that world and those characters, but playing the game again from the beginning this week is making me feel like I'm losing my grip. And maybe that's not such a bad thing, you know?
I love writing creepy little stories about Ocarina of Time, and I bet I can write some really horrible and upsetting stories about Deltarune too. ❤️
Even if it's not, I'm looking forward to seeing the dark fantasy elements of the game rendered in HD. I don't think it's a mere social media blip that, right after the announcement, everyone immediately started talking about what the remake is going to do with the ReDead zombies. I'm delighted that this specific nightmare fuel will now exist for a new generation.
But mainly? I've been losing my shit over the next chapter of Deltarune coming out at the end of the month. Last summer I had to put an almost physical effort into holding myself back from getting too involved with that world and those characters, but playing the game again from the beginning this week is making me feel like I'm losing my grip. And maybe that's not such a bad thing, you know?
I love writing creepy little stories about Ocarina of Time, and I bet I can write some really horrible and upsetting stories about Deltarune too. ❤️
una muñeca hinchable digital
Jun. 12th, 2026 12:01 amproustbotThe Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings: Enhanced Edition (2011/2012, PC) -- Geralt of Rivia saves the king from an assassin, and then he loses the king to another assassin, and now it's time to go on the lam!
I played The Witcher in 2023 and found it bad but interesting. Its sequel is much more polished, competent, and comprehensible so far. I don't know that I like it -- the combat is unfun, the grimdark tone is frequently overwrought, Geralt continues to be the most charisma-less character I've ever encountered in a video game -- but I am once again finding all of its flaws to be interesting and ambitious. (It is startling to think that this game was released two months after Dragon Age II; I love Dragon Age II but The Witcher 2 easily eats its lunch in terms of scope, execution, and creativity.) I'm about five hours into the game and early-ish in Chapter 1. My brother informs that this is where he abandoned the game when he tried to play it, years ago. However, I am made of sterner stuff, and there's nothing I love more than checking off lil sidequests on my journal's to-do list. (Also, I am surviving most of my fights thanks to the Internet's wise advice to roll constantly during combat.)
Now I must mull over whether I will permit Vernon Roche or Iorveth to take me to prom.
Chill With You: Lo-Fi Story (2025, PC) -- A "sound novel" combining everyone's favorite things: Pomodoro timers, Lofi Girl, body doubling, anime girlfriends, quarter-life crises, and parallel universes.
( So this is a 'sound novel' because you're watching a young woman slowly come to incredibly banal self-realizations about herself? )
I played The Witcher in 2023 and found it bad but interesting. Its sequel is much more polished, competent, and comprehensible so far. I don't know that I like it -- the combat is unfun, the grimdark tone is frequently overwrought, Geralt continues to be the most charisma-less character I've ever encountered in a video game -- but I am once again finding all of its flaws to be interesting and ambitious. (It is startling to think that this game was released two months after Dragon Age II; I love Dragon Age II but The Witcher 2 easily eats its lunch in terms of scope, execution, and creativity.) I'm about five hours into the game and early-ish in Chapter 1. My brother informs that this is where he abandoned the game when he tried to play it, years ago. However, I am made of sterner stuff, and there's nothing I love more than checking off lil sidequests on my journal's to-do list. (Also, I am surviving most of my fights thanks to the Internet's wise advice to roll constantly during combat.)
Now I must mull over whether I will permit Vernon Roche or Iorveth to take me to prom.
Chill With You: Lo-Fi Story (2025, PC) -- A "sound novel" combining everyone's favorite things: Pomodoro timers, Lofi Girl, body doubling, anime girlfriends, quarter-life crises, and parallel universes.
( So this is a 'sound novel' because you're watching a young woman slowly come to incredibly banal self-realizations about herself? )
o caracol dentro do meu ouvido
Jun. 11th, 2026 12:48 pmproustbotThe result of having leftover pickling brine is that I spend a lot of time prowling my kitchen, looking at my pantry and my fridge, and thinking, Can I pickle that?
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024) -- On the edge of a decomposing empire built (literally) with the bones of Lovecraftian sea monsters, a brilliant-but-eccentric detective and her stern young assistant investigate the murder of several imperial engineers responsible for maintaining the sea walls vital for survival.
This was superb. I really enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, but the strengths of those books (incredible characters enmeshed in satisfyingly baroque conspiracies and bureaucracies) are slightly hobbled by their weaknesses (dumb cosmic villains that clumsily symbolize Big Concepts). There is another Big Symbolic Concept at the heart of The Tainted Cup -- an empire designed to fight monsters is equally monstrous, if not more so -- but that theme is much more effectively and confidently rendered here than in the earlier books. The world of Ana and Din is creepy, oppressive, abusive, exploitative, miserable, moldering, full of mutations and decay; their commitment to preserving that world against an even worse alternative is both touching and terrible. You know, like how it is for any imperial citizen. As a current resident of a rapidly crumbling empire, I can empathize.
The back of the book alludes to Holmes and Watson, but I was surprised and delighted as I read to realize that a completely different detective duo was the inspiration for Ana and Din: Nero Wolfe (stay-at-home savant with a terrible personality) and Archie Goodwin (cynical first-person narrator who does all the dogsbody legwork). But the final piece of the characterization did not click into place until the author's note at the end of the book, where Bennett acknowledges his eventual model for Ana was actually Hannibal Lecter. She is a much more vivacious and collegial character than Lecter, but even so: I see the vision! (And given that comparison, and knowing nothing about the rest of the series, I'm going to make the blind guess that her mysterious "alteration" has something to do with being mentally merged with either a Leviathan or its dissected brain -- presumably the brain of whatever lies at the fortified center of the empire, whatever the rest of the invading Leviathans are so desperate to reach that they keep breaching the sea walls, year after year.)
UPDATE: In thinking more about The Tainted Cup, I thought, Was all the this-empire-actually-sucks stuff tooooo heavy-handed? But I have just encountered a Hot Take in the wild about the book that apparently missed all that and complained that the characters never questioned the fundamental badness of their society. And, uh. Well. I'm not sure we're intended to 100% agree with the Hannibal Lecter character, dear reader.
Genshin Impact (2020-, PC) -- Found the "Phantasmal Pals" event pretty slight, but I respect all the jokey references and cameos.
( The gag about Paimon being forcibly enrolled in graduate school by Alhaitham will never get old )
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024) -- On the edge of a decomposing empire built (literally) with the bones of Lovecraftian sea monsters, a brilliant-but-eccentric detective and her stern young assistant investigate the murder of several imperial engineers responsible for maintaining the sea walls vital for survival.
This was superb. I really enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, but the strengths of those books (incredible characters enmeshed in satisfyingly baroque conspiracies and bureaucracies) are slightly hobbled by their weaknesses (dumb cosmic villains that clumsily symbolize Big Concepts). There is another Big Symbolic Concept at the heart of The Tainted Cup -- an empire designed to fight monsters is equally monstrous, if not more so -- but that theme is much more effectively and confidently rendered here than in the earlier books. The world of Ana and Din is creepy, oppressive, abusive, exploitative, miserable, moldering, full of mutations and decay; their commitment to preserving that world against an even worse alternative is both touching and terrible. You know, like how it is for any imperial citizen. As a current resident of a rapidly crumbling empire, I can empathize.
The back of the book alludes to Holmes and Watson, but I was surprised and delighted as I read to realize that a completely different detective duo was the inspiration for Ana and Din: Nero Wolfe (stay-at-home savant with a terrible personality) and Archie Goodwin (cynical first-person narrator who does all the dogsbody legwork). But the final piece of the characterization did not click into place until the author's note at the end of the book, where Bennett acknowledges his eventual model for Ana was actually Hannibal Lecter. She is a much more vivacious and collegial character than Lecter, but even so: I see the vision! (And given that comparison, and knowing nothing about the rest of the series, I'm going to make the blind guess that her mysterious "alteration" has something to do with being mentally merged with either a Leviathan or its dissected brain -- presumably the brain of whatever lies at the fortified center of the empire, whatever the rest of the invading Leviathans are so desperate to reach that they keep breaching the sea walls, year after year.)
UPDATE: In thinking more about The Tainted Cup, I thought, Was all the this-empire-actually-sucks stuff tooooo heavy-handed? But I have just encountered a Hot Take in the wild about the book that apparently missed all that and complained that the characters never questioned the fundamental badness of their society. And, uh. Well. I'm not sure we're intended to 100% agree with the Hannibal Lecter character, dear reader.
Genshin Impact (2020-, PC) -- Found the "Phantasmal Pals" event pretty slight, but I respect all the jokey references and cameos.
( The gag about Paimon being forcibly enrolled in graduate school by Alhaitham will never get old )
I am not going to discount the value of zaniness in corporate finance
Jun. 10th, 2026 11:55 pmproustbotBam! I have been dragging my feet on a small-but-annoying work project for the past month, so tonight I set a timer and cracked open a Coke Zero and powered my way through a complete draft. Now I'll let it marinate for 24 hours, do final edits, and send it off. And I'll be free from ever thinking about it again! (Until I get proofs back.)
Drinking part of a Coke Zero at the devil's hour is going to play havoc with my fragile sleep equilibrium, but oh well, it's worth the price.
In other news, I was hailed in the hallway this morning by someone from another division who saw me at a work function yesterday.
"I just wanted to say how much I always appreciate your outfits," he said.
I blinked at that before remembering that yesterday I had worn a dress that invariably gets random compliments from strangers. (I don't actually understand the power that this particular dress holds over people, but I guess it skates the line between "twee" and "wacky" in a way pleasing to the general public.) But it took me a moment to connect those dots, because today I was wearing my "Yes...Ha Ha Ha...Yes!" Sickos t-shirt, jeans, and grass-stained Hoka sneakers.
Drinking part of a Coke Zero at the devil's hour is going to play havoc with my fragile sleep equilibrium, but oh well, it's worth the price.
In other news, I was hailed in the hallway this morning by someone from another division who saw me at a work function yesterday.
"I just wanted to say how much I always appreciate your outfits," he said.
I blinked at that before remembering that yesterday I had worn a dress that invariably gets random compliments from strangers. (I don't actually understand the power that this particular dress holds over people, but I guess it skates the line between "twee" and "wacky" in a way pleasing to the general public.) But it took me a moment to connect those dots, because today I was wearing my "Yes...Ha Ha Ha...Yes!" Sickos t-shirt, jeans, and grass-stained Hoka sneakers.
Re: Anyway please go play Mina the Hollower
Jun. 10th, 2026 09:07 amrynlingBodybuilding and anime truly are the best combo
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVglrGzZjW/
Okay so listen. I know the Ganondorf in the Ocarina of Time remake is going to be an abomination. I have resigned myself to accept this fact. But also. It's possible that I might be feeling a hint of gleeful anticipation.
With that in mind, please enjoy this HD video of a bodybuilder doing classic Sailor Moon henshin poses.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVglrGzZjW/
Okay so listen. I know the Ganondorf in the Ocarina of Time remake is going to be an abomination. I have resigned myself to accept this fact. But also. It's possible that I might be feeling a hint of gleeful anticipation.
With that in mind, please enjoy this HD video of a bodybuilder doing classic Sailor Moon henshin poses.
Anyway please go play Mina the Hollower
Jun. 10th, 2026 07:24 amrynlingHey man, did you see the trailer for the Ocarina of Time remake yesterday morning? They sure didn’t show us much, did they. I hear you. The Unreal Engine 5 graphics they used are kind of generic and weird, let’s be honest. And a Switch 2 costs one wamillion dollars, which is wild. That’s not Nintendo’s fault, but nobody has that kind of money these days, you know?
So the great news is that there are all sorts of indie games created in the style of old Zelda titles that people upload to Steam and Itch.io, and a lot of them are totally free! It’s true that most of these games are garbage, but that’s where curators and reviewers like me come in to shift through the pile and promote good work – a lot of which is made by female, queer, and trans creators, as well as people outside the imperial center. And did I mention that a lot of these games are free, and that you can play them on whatever computer or laptop you already have?
But you’re saying that these reviews and promo posts aren’t interesting to you? That you don’t actually care about supporting indie devs or indie game reviews? You’re not going to share these posts on social media, or even drop a quick heart as a gesture of goodwill? You’re saying that you just wanted to show that you’re cool because you hate Nintendo, right.
Oh, okay then. That’s... that’s fine I guess.
So the great news is that there are all sorts of indie games created in the style of old Zelda titles that people upload to Steam and Itch.io, and a lot of them are totally free! It’s true that most of these games are garbage, but that’s where curators and reviewers like me come in to shift through the pile and promote good work – a lot of which is made by female, queer, and trans creators, as well as people outside the imperial center. And did I mention that a lot of these games are free, and that you can play them on whatever computer or laptop you already have?
But you’re saying that these reviews and promo posts aren’t interesting to you? That you don’t actually care about supporting indie devs or indie game reviews? You’re not going to share these posts on social media, or even drop a quick heart as a gesture of goodwill? You’re saying that you just wanted to show that you’re cool because you hate Nintendo, right.
Oh, okay then. That’s... that’s fine I guess.