Spring for sure

Managed to sit out reading on the patio for several hours this afternoon, long enough to finish the Weber, though the 66 page dramatis personae meant I hit the end unexpectedly early (there may also have been half a bottle of chardonnay involved). Didn't even need a jumper on. I need more of this.

Discovered the wheelchair cushion works pretty well on other seats too (it's not a great wheelchair cushion, but it's better than most anything else in the house).

The daffs are just about finished, and the blossom on the nectarine is past it's peak, but looked pretty good while it was there. Waiting to see if the cherry will flower this year, it's already got a full set of leaves, and there's a few wallflowers and grape hyacinths out. No sign of the squirrels, though I've seen them about on other days, but there was a chorus of various birds singing their little hearts out, clearly it's nesting time. Fairly sure there were a couple of blackbirds, but definitely other stuff mixed in there.

Manifestly a mess....

 Tweeting last night about fact the Greens released their manifesto with accessible versions, had one of their candidates replying telling me he was on the manifesto working group, and disability had been a priority, but they had chosen to launch without the accessible versions. I advised him to stop digging, the hole was deep enough already. Meanwhile I'm damned if I know whether the Tory or Labour manifestos have accessible versions because their websites are as clear as mud. Labour's is particularly a mess and clearly wasn't subject to an access audit. They have lots of options to 'create your own manifesto', likely in an attempt to profile you at the constituency level - it insists on full postcode, and the option to download the full manifesto is tucked away at the bottom as the very last of about thirty options. I barely found it, God help anyone trying to get through with a screen reader. (I don't think UKIP or the Lib Dems have launched yet).

Highlights so far, the Tories are now officially fat shaming in their manifesto, they threaten to cut the benefits of anyone disabled and obese if they 'refuse recommended treatment', with the clear implication that anyone who does is a lazy scrounger. The idea of compelled treatment is bad enough, but obesity in disability is generally the result of disability, not vice versa, which means the Tories are deliberately instigating disability hate as a manifesto policy. Meanwhile they want to repeal the Human Rights Act, which is of course how we defend ourselves against things like compelled treatment. Labour, meanwhile, is proposing a massive overhaul of Social Care, but carefully doesn't mention the fact the Independent Living Fund is being shut down in two months, that the funding for that won't be ring-fenced when it transfers to Local Authorities, and that there is no transition plan to cover ILF users between then and the start of the new system in however many years time. Meanwhile they're hellbent on keeping the WCA, never mind what we think of it.

Oh, and yesterday the Tory candidate in Cambridge tried to argue people with mental health issues should wear coloured wristbands to identify them to police etc. Another political party tried that once, but re-implementing Nazi policies isn't usually considered an electoral positive.

Sampled

Just read the kindle sample for Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory. OMG, the narrative voice is gorgeous. Steampunk Seattle, the turn of the century Underground, with the narrator an, ahem, seamstress.

We’d just settled in with after-dinner tea and biscuits when there was a crash down the ladder out front and the sound of somebody crying like her leg was broke. Given the loudness of the thump, I reckoned that might not be too far from the truth of it.

Crispin and Miss Francina gave each other The Look, and while Beatrice put the ribbon in her book they both got up and moved toward the front door. Crispin I already said about, and the thing about Miss Francina is that Miss Francina’s got a pecker under her dress. But that ain’t nothing but God’s rude joke. She’s one of us girls every way that matters, and handy for a bouncer besides.

I followed along just behind them, and so did Effie. We’re the sturdiest girls, and Effie can shoot well enough that Madame Damnable lets her keep a gun in her room. Miss Bethel hides a pump shotgun under the bar, too, but she was upstairs in bed already, so while Crispin was unlocking the door I went over and got it, working the breech to make sure it was loaded.

But at nearly £10 I'll be waiting for the price to drop when the paperback appears..

And in other Kindle news, it looks like the entire rest of Seanan McGuire's Toby Day books are out on the 5th. This is going to be expensive (especially as they're pricing them significantly over £7).

If I finish Feet of Clay today, I'll either pick up something cheaper of Bear's (I'm well behind in reading her stuff)  or go for Seanan's Velveteen vs the Multiverse.

And now to get a drink and head out to the garden.

(ETA corrected the name to Karen Memory, d'oh!)

Currently Reading - 15-Apr-2015

Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

I talked about this a little last time, but finally finished it this evening, and of course it just kept on getting better. I'm not sure I'd ever realised how apt the title is. Of course it applies literally in the case of the golems, but also figuratively in the case of Nobby, so that's both sub-plots taken care of, but then Pratchett takes it up a level in the final denouement, revealing that it applies to literally everyone in the city, even the nobles who are convinced that they are the ones plotting to raise Nobby to the crown. And while I mentioned Cheery/Cheri's discomfort with the idea of a werewolf in the Watch, and how Pratchett plays with that by having her discuss it repeatedly with Angua, the actual werewolf, I'd forgotten or not noticed that he was playing a double game by then having Angua unconsciously express her own dislike of other species of undead (Pratchett is fairly unique in considering werewolves undead, though I can see where he's coming from, Angua has survived been fatally shot in the past). And yet again he delivers a plot that would be notably clever even for a dedicated author of locked room mysteries, one where it takes forever for the light to dawn on not just characters, but readers too. And that's without mentioning that he deftly waves the entire plot under our noses in a pair of appallingly clever bilingual puns in pretty much the first chapter. Damn, I'm going to miss having new Discworld books.

Like a Mighty Army, David Weber.
I mentioned this last time too, but I finally finished all 585 pages yesterday (not to mention the 66 page dramatis personae). My comments from last time stand, in fact even more so. We barely check-in with the chief bad-guys this time, whereas they've had a substantial chunk of the text in previous books, while there is precisely zero development in the something nasty lurking in the Temple crypts sub-plot.

What we do have is the unfolding of the military campaign in Southern Siddarmark in great detail, and to an extent it almost feels sordid because the good guys have so many advantages. Not only do they have real time reconnaissance against a mid-19th Century technology level opponent (though a very limited number of people who can access it), but they have thoroughly compromised the other guys' command and control loop by feeding them false information, and the bad guys (aka the Church) have completely underestimated how many of them there are (while still outnumbering them). The only thing that stops it being utter war-porn is that even when they can bring the bad guys to battle at times and places of their choosing, the good guys as still outnumbered many times over and even the final battle costs their forces engaged something like 50% casualties. As usual Weber does go out of his way to humanise the bad guys as good soldiers following orders, in this case via the Dohlarans and especially the Dohlaran General Sir Rainos Ahlverez*, but also sets an even more substantial portion as incompetents who deserve what's coming to them, here in the shape of the Desnairians, who are convinced in the inevitable triumph of the noble horseman, to the extent of not being able to even feed themselves, and specifically in their general, the Duke of Harless, who doesn't even get the courtesy of dying nobly in battle. The bad guys are also renamed the Army of Shiloh halfway through the book, which will have a specific resonance for American fans who are familiar with the American Civil War, but I'm not familiar enough with the operational details of the ACW to know whether the campaign has any real resonance with the historical Shiloh campaign.

There's also comparatively little naval activity in comparison to earlier books, the Charisians are now so dominant they can even deliberately challenge updated fortresses from their warships (historically the warship has always had major disadvantages in engaging shore batteries). There's one sequence with one of their new ironclads making the crossing to Siddarmark which is basically a storm story, and another with a new class of ironclad line-of-battle ship deliberately making itself a target for a fortress. Weber calls it a broadside ironclad, but broadside ironclads in our history were (semi-)steam-powered, as were the floating batteries that preceded them, while the Charisian Rottweiler class are sail-only, so I think he's actually come up with something new. And even with that level of advantage I did some lurking on his forums and he's talking about jumping them another 30 years forward to turn of the 20th Century armoured cruisers as the next step (all of which is his background in wargames design showing through, as it did in the Honor Harrington books, and especially the Starfire books, which were outright based on a game system he was at one time the developer for).

On the espionage front, there's more Inquisition brutality, though this time against their own people, and prompting Merlin to send a message in a particularly brutal manner, while there's another (and particularly nasty) Church-inspired act of terrorism, this time directed at teen-couple Irys and Hektor, which provides a handy excuse for a plot development that means by the end of the book Merlin is no longer the only person on Safehold to remember the Terran Federation. And at the very end of the book Aivah/Nynian throws everyone a complete curveball.

I like these, I really do, but they're a very specific taste, and absolutely not a series you can dive into the middle of.

* Possibly unfairly, it occurs to me that most of the non-Northern European names just happen to be on the side of the bad guys, while the good guys are all Anglo-Germanic or Celts, and for that matter the next book should show the Charisians taking on all one and a half million of the Asian Horde Imperial Harchongese Army.

I haven't actually read anything else in the sense of starting at page one, but I did skim extensive chunks of both How Firm a Foundation and War Maid's Choice to get me back up to speed with Weber's Safehold and War God's Own series. Comments from last time cover both fairly adequately.