enemyofperfect | Reading

I wasn't planning anything for

3weeks4dreamwidth, but then I realized today is my account creation anniversary! I've been on Dreamwidth for 17 years, since the second day of open beta.

Occasionally I am in the position of explaining to people what Dreamwidth is, and I usually say it's an indie social media site with no ads or algorithm. I feel like sometimes people don't know what I mean by that, or have a hard time wrapping their minds around how it can possibly exist. Like what do you mean, it doesn't exploit you for profit? It lets you look at things you have chosen to look at without cramming trending topics and promoted content down your throat?? You visit it every day because you enjoy it, not because it is designed to manipulate you into feeling addicted to it??? Increasingly over the past 17 years I have felt like a lot of people experience a very different internet than I do, and if I had to experience that internet I probably wouldn't go online much.

Thank you all for being here and creating a space where the internet is still thoughtful and human and fun.

rachelmanija

A modern take on La Ronde: a novel in the form of twelve short stories linked by airplane trips. Each has a main character who meets the main character of the next story. A pilot has a brief fling with a journalist in Brazil; the journalist flies to Toronto to interview a writer; the writer flies to Seattle where she meets two of her fans; one of the fans flies to Hong Kong, and so forth.

The blurb says each meeting causes a ripple effect as they change each other's lives, but that's not actually what happens in many of them. Some are minor chance encounters, some are present at a crucial moment in someone else's life but don't directly affect it, and some are important encounters but those are the ones where the people have pre-existing relationships. Most of the characters are disconnected, discontented, and lonely, despite the literal connections they have in a six degrees of separation way; the only character who seems happy and is focused on the people they love is about to get hit with a terrible tragedy that's someone else's traffic delay.

As we go from person to person, we get to see the characters from different angles, and understand things about them that others don't. The pilot, who in his story was wondering what would have happened if his younger sister hadn't died in a childhood accent, asks his one night stand how old she is. She says 33, which is the age his sister would have been. But she has no idea of any of this, and when he doesn't reply she thinks he's fallen asleep.

There's an impressively diverse set of locales and characters, sketched-in but real-feeling; I knew we were in Delhi before it was stated just from the description of the air. The emotional tenor is a bit distanced and chilly. Overall it reminded me of Raymond Carver, but with less striking prose.

Szalay won last year's Booker Prize for Flesh, a novel which sounds really unappealing.

umadoshi

May is sweeping in with a significant downpour here, although at least it doesn't feel as chilly as the last couple of days did.

Out of curiosity, yesterday I opened my Scrivener file of Guardian fic and did a rough tally of the various WIPs, which have mostly not been touched since the start of the pandemic. (There are three subfiles of scraps written on my phone in, I think, 2022, 2023, and 2024, which collectively add up to not much. There isn't one for last year, which I guess tells a story on its own.) It all adds up to something like 60,000 words, which is...better? worse?...than I expected. "Better" in the sense that if I never get back to any of them--and I'm open to surprise, but it's been so many years--it's not a terrible number of words to let fall away, even if there are things in there that I'm sad to not have finished, especially the pieces that were meant to link up with the incomplete story cycle that five of the six fics I posted belong to. :/

(I'm also a bit curious about what a similar tally of unposted Newsflesh bits and pieces would add up to, but that's scattered among multiple Scrivener files, all of them divided into multiple sections, so it'd be more of a pain.)

Yesterday and today are days off from Dayjob to work on Yona (ohmyheart), and I'm getting back to that as soon as I finish this post...while also having a first listen to Tori's new album, In Times of Dragons. So that's an odd combination, but I want to just...feel the vibe of the album without trying to immerse myself in it, given my track record of her last several. (All of which I relistened to recently for the first time in a long while, and I like the sound in general, but still had no luck bonding lyrically.)

Glancing back and forth to the lyrics is not going to help with work focus, but oh well. I need to know what she's singing. (Toriphoria already has the lyrics up, fortunately.)

Interview quote following the lyrics for "Veins":

You’re actually hearing it as I heard it for the first time. It was recorded as I wrote it, a direct “download” from the muses. I tried to record it again afterward and could never replicate it. I was sitting with arranger John Philip Shenale, the tape was running, and that was the moment. Just like when I recorded the song “Marianne” back in 1996. Some things only happen once.

Current Mood: moody
Current Music: Tori Amos - Ode to Minnesota

rionaleonhart

Had a lovely walk with my mum in Richmond Park; it was a beautifully sunny day. We saw deer! We saw a buzzard being hassled by a crow and then mobbed by smaller birds! We saw three cute little Canada goslings out for a swim with their parents! We saw a kestrel hovering, somehow flapping its wings rapidly while remaining perfectly still; I'd never seen one so close that I could spot the distinctive kestrel colouration before, and I was absolutely thrilled.

Then I caught up with a childhood friend I hadn't seen in thirteen years, which was also a pleasure! We reminisced about being small children obsessed with dragons and Pokémon and Neopets and Petz II, and I learnt a little about what's been going on in her life, which has - and I don't think this will surprise anyone who knew us as kids - been a lot wilder than mine.

Friend: I've been arrested multiple times.
Me: What for?
Friend: Getting into fights.
Me, mishearing: Genocide??

Actually, while I'm talking about the real world, here are a few notes I took on a visit to Paignton Zoo a couple of months ago!

- Just outside the zoo itself, I met the bravest robin in the world, a beautiful little round thing who let me get right up close.

- When a lion is grooming itself, it really does look just like a domestic cat. He was exactly like our cats Zuko and Dipper, only much bigger and considerably more capable of killing me.

- The toucan scraping its beak on branches was interesting to see! I also enjoyed the way wild sparrows would squeeze through the netting of the toucan enclosure to steal food and water.

- A baby king colubus monkey ran across the grass to its father and leapt into his arms, which was extremely cute.

- The cheetahs were out on patrol and looking magnificent! It was clear from the pattern of grass growth in their enclosure that they always followed the same routes when patrolling, which I thought was interesting.

- An army of baboons thundering into food-receiving position at feeding time is a hell of a sight. They were walking around in circles when they knew feeding time was close, which I found endearingly familiar; our cat Dipper rapidly revolves when he knows he's about to get fed.

- A meerkat spotted me looking into its enclosure and trotted up to me, hoping for food. It reared up on its hind legs and looked into my eyes, then leant forward to plant its little hand on the waist-high glass partition between us and looked imploringly up at me again. I was enchanted.

- flingos (this is what my four-year-old niece calls flamingos)

- When I was eating lunch out in the open, a robin sat on the arm of my bench and sang a beautiful little song about how much it wanted my sandwich.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

e

Reading

seventeen years!

Turbulence, by David Szalay

First-of-May mishmash: rain | Guardian WIPs tally | a first listen-in-progress (Tori's latest)

I Know What A Kestrel Looks Like Largely Because Of The Animals Of Farthing Wood.

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