Stringers

 Chris Panatier's novel Stringers is a sci-fi novel with a protagonist who does not want to be a protagonist. It is written in a wry, modern tone that makes poop jokes and online references, and provides cover for Ben (the utterly normal person protagonist) to hide behind his feelings and avoid closely scrutinizing the world around him.

Have you ever wanted a protagonist who avoided scientific knowledge and thinking, even though he inexplicably has the ability to recall a lot of (true!) science facts? This is your guy. He and his stoner friend Patton get abducted by aliens and are gradually revealed to be unwitting participants in a huge, galaxy-spanning, civilization-obliterating scheme. Are they committing a heist? or the object of one? How many times can the book zoom out to a broader perspective, showing us how insignificant the views of a couple nobodies from Earth are? Or how consequential, given the actual reality of living in a universe where interstellar travel is possible (but not for human civilization, yet), faster-than-light travel is impossible (but there are ways to sneak around this barrier), and some aliens don't experience consciousness, memory, or existence in the same way as everyone else?

The sarcastic tone becomes self-reflective a few times --- for example, one of the antagonist/teammates who keeps finding a way to sneak into being crucial so that they don't get left behind, says in a rush of trying to depress everyone else (p 242-243):

"You know, there is an odd sensibility among some species --- one that you seem to share with humans for instance --- to see every person's story as an arc or a circle where, for some reason, they grow as life grinds them down, become wise and forgive. As if adversity is some kind of fertilizer for thesoul. It's like this fiction they put in their television shows --- now those are sick --- a million different angles an the theme that suffering si redemptive. Would you believe that some of them actually worship that idea?  Perverse, in my opinion. Yet there is a bias to only tell those stories, I think. People love a redemption story and so those are the ones we hear. ... I believe the opposite outcome is far more prevalent. Suffering begets suffering. ... Don't let happy myths about trial and redemption cloud the reality of the way things are. The Universe is life and death. Everything else is a nudge in one direction or the other. In the end, we only have ourselves."

I'd group this with John Dies at the End and If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. A fine whirl through a sci-fi adventure, fun in the moment, but I probably won't reread it and I decided to pass it along to a friend to read next.

This post's theme word is viscid (adj), "sticky, glutinous, slimy." The final sequences take place in a drug-addled state of viscid hallicinations and horrors.

KPop Demon Hunters (sing-along)

I'd recommend that you watch the animated musical KPop Demon Hunters in its sing-along version, with a room full of singing child fans (English lyrics good, Korean lyrics need practice). The movie follows a k-pop trio whose connection with their fans establishes/strengthens a worldwide mystical shield that prevents demons from encroaching on the earth and stealing souls. The tone is playful and modern, with many smash-cut jokes lasting less than a second, and modern social and technological references: everyone has a smartphone that can take video and livestream music, trends are observed to the minute, and the k-pop dramatic choreography is accurate to the point that I am certain actual choreographers are being referenced.

Stylized violence and camera movement made some parts feel like a video game. The fact that teenage girls in a band are ravenous all the time, and are valorously depicted for eating as much as possible and for taking breaks to just hang out, seemed like great messages. Family and friend connections were emphasized; romantic connections were deemphasized but still present. Numerous "plotholes" are visible in this world, but it's a cartoon! Maybe it's normal for mega-concerts to start halfway through the opening song, feature pyrotechnic shows which convincingly appear to include onstage murder and disintegration, and end after a single number. The in-world fans don't seem phased at all!

Overall: a great way to spend a sweltering evening indoors, avoiding mosquitos and wondering if any song would ever get a second verse.

This post's theme word is recumbentibus (n), "a knockdown blow." The twiggy teens delivered one recumbentibus after another while harmonising at the top of their lungs and, occasionally, rapping in Korean.

The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop

The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop is a documentary about modern board gaming.  It is a brief, tiny view into one specific hodgepodge handful of people who are enthusiastic about board gaming.

As an enthusiast myself, I spent the entire viewing experience wondering:

• how did the filmmakers pick this subset of people?
• how did the filmmakers pick this particular event (The World Series of Board Gaming tournament in Las Vegas)?
• why did the filmmakers ignore any number of other, more interesting filmic facets of this hobby?
• who was this made for?

To non-board-gaming audiences, this "documentary" doesn't really explain anything about board gaming. To board gaming audiences, this "documentary" is myopic and overly generalized, without getting into anything fun. (Why show someone boringly assembling pieces of a prototype game, but NOT show them explaining the prototype? Why avoid talking about Essen, or PAX Unplugged, or live-action roleplaying? How can you NOT mention Warhammer when talking about wargames? Why do you only interview adults and grown-ups, not families with young kids? Why interview several board game creators extensively about their love for games in general, but NOT discuss game publishing or marketing for their games in particular? Why let the issue of racism and audience be raised, but refuse to investigate it?)

My general takeaways were a sense of dissatisfaction, and the observation that absolutely some filmmaker got paid a paycheck to make this, and I'm so glad that they did. Their choices made little sense to me: they did not assemble a coherent story to follow; they did not attempt to interview a broad and representative range of people; they did not explore the details of the games or why the games are so interesting; they also did not explore the personalities! of! the! interviewees! or why we, the audience, should be interested in them. They did follow people into a variety of different lighting settings and across several costume and location changes.

Ultimately, this was a fluff project which successfully got me to (1) spend social time at someone else's house, and (2) watch some Amazon Prime inserted ad content. I would not recommend this documentary, going to hang out at a friend's house is free and comes without ads.

This post's theme word is canescent (adj), "turning gray or white; becoming hoary." While writing this post, I rapidly aged, and ended up canescent and waving a cane to get these pesky neighborhood filmmakers off my lawn!

Jack's wife

I was out walking with my dog, hurrying as the weather became more ominous and blustery. We aim to be home before the rain!

Oncoming pedestrian: (indicating overcast skies) "You'd better head home!"

Me: "Yeah, we're more than halfway there on this walk!"

Him: (pointing to my dog, me, and the block behind us) "No, you're not. You're Jack's wife."

Me: "Nope."

Him: (beat)

Me: "Have a good evening!"

This post's theme word is "pettifog" (v. tr.), "to quibble over trivial matters." I have no idea who Jack is, but let's not pettifog about his marital status.

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. (Previously 2017, 2019, 2024.)

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

• 5 min
• week
• a week
• maybe a week
• 10 days
• 2 weeks
• since I started, the longest stretch was ~1 month
• 3 months
• until ~5 years of my life
• 6 years
• first ~6 years of my life
• until I was 7: 7 years
• 9 years before I was 9.
• first 11 years of my life
• not long enough

"5 min" is worrisome: what about sleep?

I also note that the "first X years of life" answers haven't really changed over about a decade of asking this question, so more recently-born students are not being raised entirely by computer.

This post's theme word is runagate (n), "a person who has run away" or "a wanderer". The runagate's internet availability was limited until they obtained roaming data capablities.

What would you like to try, just one time?

 I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What would you like to try, just one time?

Popular answers: skydiving, flying a plane, paragliding, bungee jumping. Also some people want to try hiking or backpacking just once (or climbing Mount Everest).

One driving a train. One getting a tattoo. One dunking a basketball. One simply "humanity courses".

And of course, the eternal favorite, "I don't know."

This post's theme word is pandiculate (v), "to stretch oneself." Shake off your nap, pandiculate, and seize the day!

Parasite

Parasite is a 2019 movie that most people watched during lockdown. I ambiently understood that it was a widely acclaimed movie, that it was tense/funny, that it featured some social commentary, and that it was somehow relevant to a worldwide pandemic and lockdown, but overall I managed not to watch Parasite until this week.

The film starts with a con family --- daughter, son, mother, father --- who incrementally replace the staff of a richer family (same 4-person composition). This is a little funny, a little devious, and brings attention to class inequities. The poor family is willing to work and has a lot of skills (forging documents to be qualified as a tutor, providing elementary-school art therapy/instruction, driving skills, cooking), but nevertheless rigid social structures mean that they must cheat in order to have their skills pay off and help their lives to improve. They literally live in the lowest point in the city, at the end of a street, where neighbors regularly piss against their front windows and the entire city's sewage overflows and floods their apartment in a rainstorm. By contrast, the wealthy family live at higher elevation, have very few apparent skills, and are shown using their money to make their lives easy and low-effort. If this was set in England, the upstairs/downstairs dichotomy would be the strong social commentary; I am not conversant enough with Korean social conventions to dissect everything going on here. The first half of the movie arranges these details for the viewer to do a sort of self-assembly of a social commentary on which family is truly the parasite.

Then the movie takes a sharp turn.

The movie starts revealing the displaced previous housekeeper's misfortune as a collateral victim of the scam, but pulling on this thread unravels an insane byzantine set of scams and counter-scams all precariously stacked into a house of cards which the main family has disrupted with their up-and-coming scam. Suddenly the movie jumps the rails --- it's still funny, it's still social commentary, but also it is unexpectedly dark, psychological, tense, and ominously, threateningly violent. I did not anticipate any of these twists and was surprised, delighted, horrified, and on the edge of my seat. Many details from the beginning of the movie are revealed to have secondary and tertiary meanings, with layers of significance that the viewer has to unpeel. The end of the movie is unsettling, possibly a hypothetical, possibly reality, and everything remains a loose end. The story is unsatisfying, like stepping off the end of a staircase where you expected one more step.

This was great. The accolades are completely deserved. There are layers here for people who want to think about meaning, layers of filmmaking and angles, layers of which shots were reality and which were memory and which were imagined, layers of lies and scams and trying to get ahead while society wants everyone to stay in their assigned place, even if that place sucks.

I highly recommend Parasite, but I don't think I'll watch it again (the tension and violence were unexpected and visceral).

This post's theme word is cumberground (n), "a useless person." Every character seemed at first to be a cumberground but later showed their skill in their particular niche.

Tanpopo

Tanpopo is a 1985 live-action Japanese film. It consists of a series of vignettes, interwoven with one continuous plotline, all focused on food. The production, consumption, and culture around food are a focus, but each little story has its own twist on food and often makes fun of people who take food too seriously or who aren't having fun with it.

This was cute and weird and unexpected. I got invited to a neighbor's for movie night and this was the movie, with no context-setting at all. I was delighted to attempt to understand some Japanese (women: fully intelligible, children: adorable, gruff men: incomprehensible) and baffled at some of the sudden turns and juxtapositions of different vignettes. Learning western manners but slurping like crazy! Cooking an omelette on the run from a security guard! A Rocky-like training montage for kitchen skills! The egg yolk eroticism came out of left field!

A good movie to watch after dinner (should be avoided when hungry). Provides an interesting take on Every Single Important Aspect In Producing And Consuming A Bowl Of Shoyu Ramen.

This post's theme word is 俺 (ore), a first-person pronoun meaning "I" but specifically when wanting to convey "I (gruff and arrogant prick)". Truly other languages' grammars give a wonderful expressibility that I wish English would borrow more often! 

GOTV dog costume parade

Get out the vote. Dog. Costume. Parade.

It's a language that allows unlimited adjacent nouns, apparently.

All dogs tolerated the costumes for the duration. Some dogs were friendlier than others. My dog had best eyebrows (as usual). Many photos were taken (not by me).

This post's theme word is festucine (adj), "of a pale yellow or straw-like color." The festucine retriever was named Layla?

Dark skies support child development

There is local context which justifies this lawn sign, but I prefer to consider it as an intrusion from Welcome to Nightvale:

This post's theme word is kerf (n), "a notch, cut, or slit made by a cutting tool" or "the width of such a cut". Through a kerf in the clouds, darkness intruded on the light-polluted suburb.

Endless to-do lists

It doesn't feel cosmically fair that I can work all day on getting stuff done and arrive home, tired, to have my phone remind me that I haven't actually finished enough tasks today. And yet yesterday, when I effortfully tried to finish the tasks my phone reminded me of, I ended the day with an inbox full of reminders of the things I hadn't done yet. This is a Kafkaesque whack-a-mole where no amount of work, poured into the gaping maw, can sate its hunger. Someone needs to rake the yard. Someone needs to cook dinner. Someone needs to fill out insurance paperwork.

I am calming myself with breathing exercises and philosophical musings on how I might prefer alternate modes of living. My car insurance is reminding me I haven't installed their spyware on my phone yet, and that is a task that I immediately failed. I soothe myself with the tasks released on the wind like dandelion seeds. The buck does not stop with me, and I watch assigned busywork responsibility slip from my fingers.

The soft animal of my body wants only to exercise, go on dog adventures, and solve math puzzles. I am epsilon close to an optimally good life, but like Xeno I will not ever... quite... get... there.

This post's theme word is wrackful (adj), "ruinous." The completionist mindset is wrackful, woeful, and wretched.

Fall break (day 5)

An uphill slog. I set a timer to ring every 30 minutes so that I kept moving between tasks and not getting stuck on any time sink. More tasks got done, phone calls answered, service people scheduled, emails queued to send on Monday morning. Baked cookies for the end of the week.

End of day email tally: personal 108 (argh), work 70.

This post's theme word is euryphagous (adj), "eating many foods." Euryphagous humans live with dogs whose diets are quite the opposite.

Fall break (day 4)

Diverting waste often involves sorting it at the point of disposal. I've seen 5 genres of numbered of plastic, the Japanese burnable/non burnable unrecyclables, and of course there is the waste/recyclable/composting trifecta. But specific situations call for specific solutions. I had never seen a pizza-box specific waste receptacle before.

pizza boxes, recycling, waste

... but now I have. I can only guess that this on-campus location is particularly susceptible to pizza consumption.

Grading, calling the insurance company, dog agility class, dog bath + blowdry. Drafted some work documents. Bemoaned the state of emails and my laggard queue for friendly snail mail.

End of day email tally: personal 65, work 68.

This post's theme word is agnoiology (n), "the study of ignorance or the investigation of the unknowable." Improving my pedagogy is an exercise in agnoiology.

Fall break (day 3)

More home maintenance, this time with a helping dose of "let's not flood or incinerate the basement by delayed repairs." I'm on-track to meet my rowing goal for October. Did more laundry (trying to churn up all the lingering summer clothes for storage) and got reminded that my closet storage system relies on some clothing being in the laundry at all times. I probably need to cull disfavored clothes to reclaim closet space. Paid some bills. Haircut. Very long dog walk, in the dark, contributing to the Ika fitness campaign.

Halloween decorations abound. Neighborhood favorite lawn flamingos have dressed up as the Cheshire cat and Alice:

"flamingo" is a fairly inaccurate translation of "velociraptor"

End of day email tally: personal 55, work 68.

This post's theme word is ablute (v), "to wash or bathe a part of the body." One must carefully ablute after a haircut to eliminate all the tiny offcut hair pieces.

Fall break (day 2)

Grading (typical pastime). Cleaned the floors, did more laundry. Executed a closet update: summer clothes into storage, winter clothes out of storage, all-season clothes folded and sorted by color. Did not actually finish any task, so it's a bit demoralizing to end the day and not be able to cross off any item from my Grand To-Do List for Fall Break.

End of day email tally: personal 83, work 73.

This post's theme word is agon (n), "conflict, contest, or struggle." Ignoring the siren song of the unreplied inbox message is a continuous agon.

Fall break (day 1)

It's not really a break, of course. The power was out at the office, so I stayed home and dissassembled a heat pump. Then cleaned it with a toothbrush. Party time over fall break!

Very little actual work got done, but a lot of bureaucratic and maintenance tasks were accomplished. Laundry. Cooking a big pile of escarole. Rainy dog walks. Waiting on phone tree queues for customer service agents. Tickets closed.

End of day email tally: personal 87, work 81.

This post's theme word is verisimilar (adj), "having the appearance of truth or reality." The verisimilar dream meant that I actually cleaned the heat pump twice today.

Starter Villain

John Scalzi's Starter Villain is a sweet standalone fiction novel. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck everyman, currently feeling sad about his divorce and scraping by with substitute teaching. When his longtime-estranged uncle dies, he hears about it first on the news and then in a very real way when his uncle's estate reaches out to ask him to host the funeral... and then sucks him into the wacky, fast-moving world of a series of comedy and action-adventure tropes. It turns out that his uncle was a supervillain, and he stands to inherit a vast empire of cool/profitable/evil(?) companies.

Scalzi is excellent at writing zippy dialog and action scenes. This book was an easy and fun read (it distracted me from three days of migraines). I'd recommend it as summer beach reading, particularly for cat lovers.

This post's theme word is pecksniff (n), "a person who pretends to have high moral principles." The convocation of villains featured many pecksniffs.

The Tusks of Extinction

Ray Nayler's novella The Tusks of Extinction follows the consciousness of a scientist fighting elephant poaching, in her life before and after getting her brain scanned, archived, and eventually downloaded into an un-extincted mammoth. She is given the task of imparting mammoth culture to lab-grown mammoths cultured from recovered ancient DNA.

This was short and fairly bitter in outlook. The humans in the story are driven by capitalism, by environmental and social collapse, and by a lack of options. I'd describe this as a dark near-future science fiction, and I wouldn't recommend this to myself, although I can see why this joined my reading queue: the author also wrote a book about conscious cephalopods, The Mountain in the Sea.

The novella contained many tightly-written and resonant observations on the human condition. This excerpt (pages 95-96) reminded me of the kind of academic navel-gazing involved in grad school:

When Damira had been here last, she had simply been herself. But now, it felt like there were two of her---one sitting with her mother, eating in silence. And another watching them eat. As if she had stepped out of her own life. ... 

Damira realized what it was in that moment, as her fork scraped the bottom of her bowl. It was an effect of education. She was looking at everything. Analyzing it. Processing it. Her life wasn't just how things were anymore---it was only one possible way for things to be. And there were other possibilities, now. She had ceased to be trapped here, in this stuffy room. Ceased to be trapped inside her life, yes, but she had also ceased to be able to live her life without analyzing it. Without taking everything apart to look inside. 

Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.

This post's theme word is abulia (n), "the inability to make decisions." The goal of an education is to encourage both outward curiosity and introspection, but to stop short of intellectualized abulia. 

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines  tells a deliciously convoluted and self-referential set of nested stories. The first layer of story takes place in 1902, on the site of a girls' boarding school. Subsequent layers happen in the same location but in modern times, when the property seems cursed as several people (historical and modern) have died mysterious deaths. Are they explicable? Is this a novel where magic is real? The author plays coyly with the reader about this in a very clever way.

The author also winks at the modern reader throughout. On page 111,

In the language of the day, Mrs. Brookhants was a young widow and Miss Trills was her devoted companion. Her very, very dear friend. Her confidante. 

Her bestie.* 

*But, like, with benefits.

Bonus layers come from the modern plotline, which features a modern novelist writing about the girls of 1902, and then some modern actors caught up in their own re-enactment of pieces of the novel's retelling of history, while also ensnared in their own mysteries in the old building and on the grounds, and caught up in the layers of storytelling and fabrication that they are subject to and producing themselves. There is a historical book associated with the original deaths, a modern book retelling the historical deaths, and the very book you hold in your hands. The brain spins. The modern actors are caught up in performing the historical actions, often even off-camera as they hand off the book and tell each other secrets and sneak around the boarding school buildings. This is a mystery book where the characters have cell phones with battery life, internet connection, and live social media, and the mystery manages to persist!

The creepiness and uncertainty about danger elevated this novel from a cleverly-constructed meta-question-raising book, to an unstoppable single-sitting-read. It's 617 pages long, so this consumed an entire day. I probably couldn't read it again, because I'm not a fan of creepiness and also now I know how the novel chooses to resolve the various mysteries, weird occurrences, deaths, and bizarre behavior.

Weird and recommended.

This post's theme word is "gifnotized", as on page 82:

That's the GIF, the whole thing--- Harper grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and... forever. This particular incarnation had 23,266 notes. It also had a string of attached commentary. 

"Hello?" Harper said.

Merrit had been momentarily gifnotized. She pulled out of it and said...

Other Ever Afters

Melanie Gillman's Other Ever Afters is a cute collection of graphic short stories. Maybe fables? They are not as heavy-handed as traditional fables, and they center feelings and belonging. The back copy describes the book as "original, feminist, queer fairy tales" but the queerness is a light touch because they are fairy tales, so the important bits are things like "there is a giant outside our village" and "the goose-keeper lives outside the castle". The drawings are bright and softly round-edged and lovely.

It's overall cute, and a quick little collection of stories.

This post's theme word is pussivant (v. intr.), "to meddle, fuss, move around busily." The villagers pussivanted around the square in an attempt to find the yearly sacrificial maiden.