Reading

Back

I'm back, sort of. We did a week of vacation after WorldCon, then got sick on the last day, so I'm still recovering. Covid tests were negative, so I think it's just a bad cold. It probably wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't had to do a full day of travel from 6:00 am to 10:30 pm to get home.

More later, but one of my favorite things was the really wonderful piece that N.K. Jemisin wrote about me for the program book.

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Big thing I wanted to mention here: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

This is a 14 ebook Humble Bundle from Tor, (DRM-free as usual) and you can select a portion of the price to donate to World Central Kitchen.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman is always a good time, and her book How to Behave Badly in Elizabeth England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts is no exception to the rule. It does what it says on the tin, except for “Elizabethan England” read “England from the time of Elizabeth up to the Civil War (with brief excursions before and after),” but I suspect that the publishers believed, correctly, that their title would sell more books.

A fun fact: quoting Shakespeare would have been seen as proof of boorishness, as it showed that you spend time at the theaters down by the bear-baiting pits and the whorehouses, like a COMMONER. I also very much enjoyed the advice manual for young noblemen in service, which begged them to “try not to murder people.” You might think that goes without saying, but nope!

Jacqueline Woodson is also always a good time, although often in a mild to moderately heart-wrenching kind of way. Peace, Locomotion is an epistolary novel, told as a series of letters from a 12-year-old boy (nickname Locomotion) to his younger sister. They’re both in foster care following the death of their parents in a fire a few years ago. A book with sad moments but not overall a sad book; I particularly enjoyed Locomotion’s journey as a poet and his poetry. (There’s a companion novel-in-verse. Woodson is one of the few authors I trust with a novel-in-verse.)

Warning: you will walk out of this book with the song “Locomotion” stuck in your head.

Jane Langton is much more up and down than either Goodman or Woodson, but I’m happy to say Paper Chains is one of the ups. Evelyn has just started college, and the novel alternates between traditional narration and Evelyn’s never-to-be-sent letters to her PHIL 101 professor, on whom she has a swooning freshman crush. A good mix of college hijinks and intellectual discovery. Just kind of stops rather than having a real ending, but it works well for the story, which is very much about beginnings.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Gaskell’s Gothic Tales! We just had one of Gaskell’s trademarked “three people of three different faiths get together to deal with a problem, and it’s good for them all!” scenes. (Okay, I’ve only run across this twice in her work, once here and once in North and South, but it’s an unusual recurring theme.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it’s time for another Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’ve already read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. What should I read next?

Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

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books: newbery

Newbery Project Q&A

As the Newbery Project draws to a close, I’ve been preparing some posts about my reading, and I thought I’d start out by answering a few… well, I can’t exactly call them “frequently asked” questions, as the only one people have actually asked is the one about dead dogs. But, anyway, these are questions with important background information.

What is the Newbery Award, anyway?

Every year since 1922, a committee of librarians has selected “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” to receive the Newbery Award. The first prize winner gets the Newbery Medal, while the runner-ups have since the 1970s been called Newbery Honor books. It’s the most prestigious writing award for American children’s literature. (The counterpart award for illustration is the Caldecott.)

What’s the Newbery Project?

The Newbery Project started when I was about eleven and decided to read all the books that had won the Newbery Medal. (The Newbery is the highest award in American children’s literature. It was first awarded in 1922 and has been going strong ever since.) The project eventually fizzled out, as children’s projects do, but in my mid-twenties I resurrected it and completed it.

Then it occurred to me that I could extend the project to include all the Newbery Honor books, which is the name given to the books that are the runners-up to the big medal. A few years, there were no runners-up, and some years there were as many as eight. Most years there are three to five runners-up. I had read a pretty good number of them as a child, so I had about 240 Newbery Honors books left to read.

Two hundred and forty books! Who wants to read two hundred and forty books about dead dogs?

(For my non-American readers, the Newbery award is famous in America as the dead dog award, because there have been a few very famous winners featuring the tragic death of pets and/or best friends. Bridge to Terabithia may have been partially responsible for the fizzling of the first go-round of my Newbery project.)

Actually, the dead dogs are fairly recent. The first dead dog in a Newbery winner appeared in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller in 1957, but that was an outlier. Until 1970, pretty much everyone lives, both dogs and relatives. After 1970 it’s open season on friendly animals and sickly grandparents until the 2000s, at which point the Newbery awards focused more intently on dead relatives.

Two hundred and forty books is still nuts. Why did you do this to yourself?

Because I love children’s books and history, and it turns out that reading the Newbery books are a fantastic way to explore both. The Newbery committee has consistently selected a lot of historical fiction and historical nonfiction (especially biographies) since the beginning, and of course the earlier books are fascinating historical artifacts in their own right at this point.

Are there any overarching themes among the Newbery books?

Beyond history in general, the Newbery awards are particularly interested in American history and more generally the construction of American identity. There’s also an ongoing interest in the history of liberty, the latter of which means, for instance, that two separate William Tell retellings have won Newbery Honors.

There’s also a strong and ongoing interest throughout the history of the award in tales of children from around the world. This reflects both children’s tastes (before children’s literature became its own category, travel narratives were a recognized favorite reading material for children), but also a reflection of the ideal of the “Republic of Childhood,” popularized in American literature by Mary Mapes Dodge in St. Nicholas Magazine, which argues that children in all times and all places are similar to and interested in each other, purely by virtue of their shared childhood.

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I have been having fun doing whatever I feel like doing

I took a week off from work. Honestly, I really needed it. It's been nice to do whatever I wanted. So... here's what I did this week!

Monday and Tuesday: I took a 2-day first aid course! I've never done any kind of first aid training, and have wanted to for years; it's been consistently on my resolutions list for like a decade. Previous job kept saying they'd pay for it and then pulling out of the deal before anything was formalized. Anyway, I decided to Just Do It. Very glad I did! I learned some super interesting things! Hopefully will never have to use any of it, but ya never know. :V

Wednesday: I took care of some Obnoxious Adult Tasks, following up on that thing I had to deal with last month when I had to get up at 5:45 AM to phone a call centre before work*. Since I didn't have to go to work, I didn't have to get up at ass o'clock to do this followup call! :V I also did some reading, had coffee with my parents, went for a massage, and cooked some curry.

Thursday: Tried out a new cake recipe - this one my mom found on youtube: Italian Lemon Cream Cake. I was originally supposed to make it for her birthday, but it was too hot to use the oven that week. Anyway, the recipe is all right. Mom really loved it, but I think it needs a few tweaks. Going to use either full-fat Greek yogourt or sour cream next time; the cake part needs some zest and possibly 4 tbsp lemon juice rather than 3; and the pan that I use will require 40-45 minutes in the oven. It's a nice recipe overall though, and I'm glad I gave it a try.

Friday: Took care of a few chores, then went down by the river to do some plein air painting. Had a good time! Not so sure about what I painted, but eh, I'm still figuring it out. (The techniques I was trying this time were probably better for acrylic tbh). Saw some birds and some chipmunks, got a sunburn, enjoyed chilling out and doing nothing much. Picked up some stuff at the library while I was at it, since that was nearby. Aaand watched a movie in the evening. (Film was The Woman in the Yard. The trailer was interesting but the movie was not. It was solidly meh.)

Saturday (Today): Did some chores. Intended to meet up with someone for coffee, but they cancelled on me, so instead I went home and worked on my IIBB fic. I'm like 1/3rd of the way through the line edits now, and feeling very so-so about this story, but at least it's getting done. In the evening, chilled out with some wine and watched C'è ancora domani|There's Still Tomorrow, which was an interesting and somewhat artsy film set in postwar Italy; it didn't feel heavy even though it was exploring some heavy themes such as sexism and domestic abuse (and probably also some historical issues that I would need more context for - politics were very present in the background). I'm still digesting it. Beautifully shot movie btw, worth a look if you enjoy cinematography.

I've been having a very good time doing really nothing much. I truly wish I did not have to go back to work on Monday, but. Well. It is what it is. :V

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Book Review: The Golden Compass

littlerhymes and I have for years tossed around the possibility of a buddy reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I have resisted because I hated The Amber Spyglass so much. However, I finally cracked and we reread The Golden Compass, and it turns out that it’s just as flawless as I remembered it. How? How is it so good? Nothing should be ALLOWED to be this good, particularly not something that is going to go on to have disappointing sequels.

First of all, the worldbuilding is just so good. The daemons are a stroke of genius: what child DOESN’T want to have an adorable companion animal who is with you at all times and adores you and also changes shape until you reach puberty, at which point it will assume a shape that reveals your True Nature? And of course we all imagine having cool daemons who are cats or foxes or hawks or whatnot, not boring dog daemons like servants have.

(Pullman: not a dog person.)

But the daemons are only one part of Pullman’s deliciously crafted world. Over the course of the story Lyra moves through a variety of different environments, the stately masculine luxury of Jordan College in Oxford and the homey gyptians boats and the wildness of the North, and they all feel real and well-developed and lived in, with little hints thrown in about life in other parts of the world (like Lee Scoresby’s Texas) that make you feel that here indeed there is a whole world that extends in all directions, and Lyra is just moving through a small part of it.

Also, the plot moves along at a good clip. Pullman accomplishes all this rich, lush worldbuilding so economically, because we’re only ever spending a few chapters in one place before we rush on. I remember the Jordan College section going on forever! But it’s just the first four chapters or so, and then Mrs. Coulter whisks Lyra off into high society, another section that I remember lasting forever (in a good way, I should add; I remember these sections lasting forever because I never wanted them to end), but it’s only a couple of chapters before Lyra’s on the run, having realized that Mrs. Coulter is the head of the dreaded Gobblers who have been kidnapping children for who knows what nefarious end?

And from that point on, the action never lets up. She’s on the gyptian boats, she’s going north with the gyptians to save the kidnapped children, she becomes lifelong friends with an armored bear by telling him where to find his stolen armor, and and and one event after another, yet the pace is not breathless, each event gets just enough time to develop its full impact (the scene where Lyra learns what the Gobblers are doing!) and then we move on.

Excellent worldbuilding, excellent plotting, and amazing characterization, too. Lyra is such a fantastic heroine: lively, cunning, a natural leader, rough around the edges and yet with a great compassion underneath. Her daemon Pantalaimon is a perfect foil, cautious if Lyra is taking needless risks, but indomitably brave in the face of struggles that daunt even the usually fearless Lyra.

But it’s not just Lyra. The secondary characters are so well-drawn too, and as with Jordan College and Mrs. Coulter’s flat, I was often surprised how swiftly their sections passed. For instance, Serafina Pekkala only shows up in one chapter! (Of course, she’s talked about far earlier than that.) She’s so vivid in my memory that I was sure it was more than that. Farder Coram, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel: the book is packed with startlingly vivid characters who have stuck with me for years.

I was, I must confess, hoping just a little to see signs of the flaws that would become so apparent in the later books in the trilogy. But no, whatever went wrong went wrong later on. The Golden Compass is pretty close to flawless. Perhaps its only error lies in ending on a sentence that any sequel would be hard-pressed to live up to. What book could possibly capture the possibility inherent in “she walked into the sky”?

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Book Review: The Fairy Circus

I saved Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus for the final book in the Newbery project because I had a suspicion that it would be a high note to go out on, and I was 100% correct.

At the beginning of the book, the fairies witness a human circus when it sets up on their field. Enchanted, the fairies decide that they simply MUST have a circus of their own, and the rest of the book is about how the fairies through a circus with the help of the woodland creatures.

The spiders spin a trapeze and a tightrope! The chipmunks are the tigers, but they keep forgetting to be properly fierce! The squirrels are the lions (carefully bunching their squirrels around their heads for manes) and they are SO fierce that they spring on the lion tamer, who flies away just in time! Thrillingly terrified, the fairies “went flitting over the arena looking for anything a little less exciting than lions. They even sat down at the farther end of the arena and let themselves be amused by the clowns! They had been as scared as all that!”

The fairy queen shows up, and the fairies have a grand parade in her honor, with tortoises as elephants and mice as horses. And the whole circus is illuminated by fireflies. And… and… and…

An enchanting book. Perfect for fans of Borrowers-type stories about tiny people (in this case tiny people with wings!) making use of the materials at hand to make their own tiny world.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My second-to-last Newbery book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, which is also my second Newbery George Washington biography, which should tell you everything you need to know about the importance of American history in the Newberys. (Maybe that should be a Newbery post in itself.) I don’t actually remember the other one that well, but I’m fairly sure that it didn’t feature George Washington’s tragic doomed lifelove for the already-married Sally Fairfax nearly as prominently, or possibly indeed at all, as I was quite surprised to hear about it in this book.

(Eaton’s Daughter of the Seine also dwelt on Madame Roland’s tragic doomed love for a man not her husband, so this may just have been an Eaton thing. Admittedly, there was no tragic doomed love in her Gandhi biography, except perhaps Gandhi’s unrequited yearning for a united India?)

I also finished Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. I really enjoyed the ancient Roman Britain stories in the middle of the book: truly they are so Sutcliff! Or rather, Sutcliff is so Kipling!

But then the last story is Kipling’s attempt to create an inclusive vision of England by making the Jewish people an integral part of the story of the Magna Carta, by having a Jewish moneylender force the king to terms by refusing to lend him any more money, and “by refusing to lend him any more money” I mean our hero actually tosses an entire gold treasure into the sea.

I believe that Kipling is trying to be anti-anti-Semitic here, but he also has the moneylender character describe sitting under a table as a child listening to Jewish moneylenders decide which king shall rise and which shall fall, so, like, maybe he needed to workshop this one a bit.

What I’m Reading Now

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened to an audiobook version of this a few years ago and really didn’t like it, but had a suspicion that it might be due to the narrator’s gravelly monotone, so I bought a copy and am reading it with my two eyes and now I’m loving it! An important reminder that an audiobook reader can make or break a book.

I just finished the Almanac portion of the book, which are just monthly musings on plants and animals in the environs of the sandy farm Leopold owned in Wisconsin. It makes me want to write a Hummingbird Cottage almanac. Maybe I’ll do monthly posts next year starting in January.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been intending to read Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat ever since I read Max in the House of Spies, but despite the fact that I’ve loved the other two MacIntyre books I read, I keep putting it off and off and off. Why is it sometimes so hard to read a book that you really do want to read?

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Book Review: The Sabbath World

Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time is a book braided from three strands. The first and smallest strand is about Shulevitz’s evolving relationship with the Sabbath over the course of her life, which would probably get tedious at greater length but as it is adds an interesting personal through-line to the book.

The second and largest strand is a history of the Sabbath, which is full of fascinating historical facts. For instance: did you know that Sabbatarian can mean either “Christian who believes in a very strict Sunday Sabbath,” or “Christian who practices the Saturday Sabbath and maybe also takes on other Jewish practices and eventually becomes Jewish in all but name because for centuries it was illegal in many European countries for Christians to convert to Judaism”? I love it. I hate it. Why can a word mean two things that are not exactly opposites but nonetheless completely different?

The third strand features Shulevitz’s musings on the potential for the idea of the Sabbath to help cure modern society’s diseased relationship with time, which is the weakest part of the book. The problem is that Shulevitz is attracted to the Sabbath, but also exhausted at the very idea of keeping it properly, which is a dynamic that could create an interesting dialectic but mostly dissolves into wishy-washiness.

Now, to be fair, I also find the Sabbath intriguing but quail at the idea of doing it properly. NO Starbucks? Well, you see, the Starbucks workers ALSO need a day of rest. Granted, but: NO STARBUCKS?? So I can’t blame Shulevitz for also being of two minds. But it seems like something of a cop-out to say, “The Sabbath is enticing! But scary! And probably impossible in the modern global context anyway, so we don’t need to take the idea really seriously. But maybe just meditating on the idea of it will help heal our relationship with time?”

Again being fair, Shulevitz had the great handicap of writing this book a decade before the pandemic, so had not witnessed modern global society making massive structural changes virtually overnight. But since I have, I have to roll my eyes at anyone who half-heartedly suggests a social change only to dismiss it in the same breath as impossible. Well of course it’s impossible if that’s all the enthusiasm you can muster! A few people who kinda care a little do not world-historical changes make.

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Crossing the Finish Line of the Newbery Project

Drumroll, please! On Saturday morning, I took Dorothy Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus along on my morning Starbucks run. I finished the book, and with it I have completed the Newbery project!

I spent the rest of the day in a whirlwind of festivity: a trip to the downtown library and downtown farmers market (with side trips to the card store, the artist’s gallery, and the bookstore), took a nap, went to the other library and to my favorite bookstore Von’s, and then returned home to throw myself a little tea party where I ate an entire salted caramel fudge mini-pie from the farmers market and read my new library book, Rachel Bertsche’s The Kids Are in Bed: Finding Time for Yourself in the Chaos of Parenting.

I read this partly because I’ve been a fan of Bertsche’s since her MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend, and partly because I enjoying parenting books, which is perhaps rather odd in a non-parent. Also this is really a parenting book but a book about how to find time for yourself in and around parenting. One tip I think is probably useful for anyone: Bertsche suggests making a short list of things you like to do, so that if you find yourself with some unexpected free time you can actually use it doing something you enjoy and find rejuvenating, rather than doing chores and/or mindlessly scrolling your most depressing social media feed.

And then I was off to one final bookstore for the evening! A wonderful day.

I still have reviews to write of my last couple of Newbery books, and then some wrap-up posts about the whole project. Right now I’ve got posts about the Newberys by the Decade, Nonsense Books in the Newbery, and SFF in the Newbery, and I’m planning that long-teased post about The Problem of Tomboys (actually probably two posts, one about the 1930s and one about the rest).

Are there any other Newbery posts people would be interested in seeing?

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Misc +++

Man, I have been absolutely flat out lately. Here are some things I've done between the weekend and now:

+ On Saturday, I drove down to Anzac to attend an event. The local pride group was having a ~beach day~ at an outfit that does private lakeside events. It was my first time driving so far - I've never driven outside town, and this place is about 55km away. It's been about 25 years since I was last at Gregoire Lake, and I've never been to Anzac, and I kept thinking I'd get lost (and I did get lost once I actually got to Anzac, but I found the lakeside place eventually!).

+ The beach day itself was nice! The beach wasn't very beach-y, but the weather was good. I'm glad I remembered to bring a towel. I also brought my watercolour paints! And I sat there and painted and chit-chatted with some acquaintances. All in all, it was very nice, and I'm glad that I actually got up the nerve to go, because I'd been kind of 50/50 on it before that.

+ ...Anyway, I feel a lot more confident about my ability to, like, drive outside the city now, even if it was just brief. (And also it gave me some increased appreciation for T-sensei, because he comes all the way from Anzac to teach us, and wtf, that's such a long way to drive, especially in winter.)

+ As for watercolours, doing plein air stuff was fun and I'm so glad that my new palette works well - something with a cover is convenient for that, more portable than what I was using before. I did some works with plain watercolour, and others that also included watercolour pencils and gouache. I think I prefer the ones that include gouache over the plain watercolours - they're more vibrant. Though also I think I have a tendency to dilute too much and work too wet. IDK, I'm going to have to experiment a bit more.

+ On the Sunday I went to a talk about the various transphobic bills that are being implemented by the Alberta government. I took some notes and have some thoughts on it, but I want to make that its own post. Anyway, it was a good talk.

+ Worked a little on my IIBB fic. At this point it's just line editing. There's one separate scene I want to write and possibly post as a DVD extra, but that's unnecessary. Mostly I just reaaaallly want to get the line edits done because that deadline is looming, auuuugh. ...But this fic was written several years ago and I can't read it without thinking "ughhhh". It's pretty decent, but still, ughhhh. (I'm so sick of looking at it.)

+ But speaking of writing, someone recently posted one of the nicest comments I've ever received. It had something about appreciating that I trust the audience to pick up on subtlety. That felt really good.

+ Had my last physio appointment for now. I'm cleared to go back to judo in September. I'm looking forward to starting again, but I'm also going to have to try to take it easy on that arm. ...Honestly, I think last year, I may have been overdoing it. But it isn't so much that I want to do less judo as it is that I want to also have time and energy to do things that are not judo. IDK, going to have to figure out how to balance it better. Three classes per week might be too much for me.

+ Honestly, I've been feeling very flat out all week. It's like every day this week there has been something that needs to be done after work, some kind of chores or favours for other people or appointments or SOMETHING, and I honestly just want to kick back and read a goddamn book. But that will have to wait for a bit. :V Ah, well.

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Book Review: The Hidden Life of Trees

I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World (translated from German by Jane Billinghurst) as a sort of follow-up to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Although they are coming at the question from different angles, both books make the same point that plants are, like, alive??

On the one hand, this is something that I think most people vaguely know. But it’s still startling to discover the plants communicate with each other through their root systems, and can send sugars through those roots so effectively that other trees can keep a tree trunk alive for centuries after its crown has died.

But this only occurs in trees in naturally occurring forests. When humans dig trees up to transport them and plant them where we want them, we sever the root tips, and trees never recover the ability to interface with other roots - even if there are other trees available to commune with, which there often aren’t if a tree is planted, for instance, alongside a street.

This helps explain why trees along streets and trees in tree plantations tend to be, in tree terms, quite short-lived. Also, Wohlleben points out, the qualities that humans consider “good” in trees are usually not the qualities that are actually good for trees. For instance, humans like to see trees growing fast, and sometimes point at the quick rate of growth in spruce plantations as proof that these plantations are actually good for trees.

But in fact fast growth is dangerous for a tree, as it creates structural weaknesses that will often kill a tree when it’s around a hundred years old. For human foresters, this is fine, as that’s about as long as we let plantation trees grow anyway, but from a tree’s perspective, 100 years is not a long time at all.

In Wohlleben’s view, humans struggle to understand trees because their perspective is so alien to ours. They’re stationary. Their senses and methods of communication are so different from ours that we struggle to believe trees have senses at all. (“In Wohlleben’s analysis, it’s almost as if trees have feelings and character,” says the incredulous author of this Guardian article, apparently unable to grasp that Wohlleben is arguing that trees DO have feelings, no “almost” about it.)

And, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The modern industrial lifestyle depends on seeing not just trees but the entirety of the natural world as raw materials we can dispose of as we will. Now, of course we’re capable of accepting that trees have feelings and then blithely refusing to change our behavior on account of that fact: after all, we do this with other humans all the time. But why bother embracing extra cognitive dissonance? It’s just easier all around if we continue to see trees as technically animate but more or less inert objects.