Reading

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worldcon schedule

At seven days post-Paxlovid, I am reasonably confident in saying that I'm going to be at Worldcon! I look forward to seeing some of you there.

Thursday, Aug 14th

Poetry Readings Thursday
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Room 445-446

Reading: Ursula Whitcher
3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Room 428

Interstellar Flight Press reading
7 PM
Seattle Beer Company, 1427 Western Ave

Friday, Aug 15th

Queering History
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room 423-424

Poetry in World-building
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Room 433-434

Saturday, Aug 16th

Science Non-Fiction (Poetry)
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room 447-448

Hugo Awards
8:30 PM
Ballroom 1, fifth floor

Sunday, Aug 17th

By the Numbers: Mathematics in Science Fiction
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Room 334

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just one thing

Just one thing: 10 August 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

loligo!

West wind

A walk up onto the Purbeck Hills to watch the west wind blowing...

( Read more... )

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: TWICE - Takedown (TWICE Ver.)

Entry tags:

/run/media/silveradept

/run/media/silveradept: KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

So, on the recommendation of many (including seeing things related to it popping up in my channels regularly, and a fair number of people who are apparently all-in for the main trio being a trio romantically), I watched KPop Demon Hunters.

Have some non-spoilery thoughts, in no particular order:

I wonder how ONCE feels about having gotten TWICE to be the group doing the movie credits version of one of the songs played in snippets throughout the movie.

Daniel Dae Kim and Ken Jeong make perfect sense for the roles they're cast in.

Speaking of voices, the one they cast for the greater-scope villain was delightfully correct, although the casting direction seems to have suggested that he move in the direction of "clipping syllables in an English-as-Second-Language" way. I don't want someone to speak in something that isn't comfortable to them, or to not sound like themselves, but it felt more like a conscious direction rather than someone's natural cadence to do it that way, and it made the greater-scope villain come off slightly more like a Bond villain being played for a bit of camp than as the greater-scope villain. Maybe I'm reading too much into the delivery, or maybe the intention was for this character to sound just slightly off from the rest of the cast.

The Netflix subtitlers managed not to figure out something that fansubbers of various Asian series have known for decades, and even those who subtitle K-Pop releases: how to properly subtitle songs. Which is a major strike against them for a movie that has an awful lot of singing! We didn't necessarily have to go full-on for the kind of karaoke-style, rainbow, motion-filled subtitles that fansubbers of anime and toku series got (get?) made fun of for using in their releases, but these subtitlers went in the direction of just putting the syllables of the words in the subtitles, or otherwise doing Revised Romanization of the spoken or sung Korean and leaving it at that. So there's no context to those lines, nor what they look like in Hangul (which you can see in one of the shots that is the behind-the-scenes for TWICE recording the song playing over the first part of the credits), nor a translation of what the Korean says into English (or whichever language you want as the subtitles.) Admittedly, it would be more offensive to just put [Korean] or [Speaking/Singing in a Global Language] for those sections, but only just. The purpose of the subtitling there is so that someone can follow along with the audio track and make sure they're not missing anything, and if the audio track includes singing in Korean or rapping in Korean, as it does in this movie, the subtitlers have a responsibility to render it comprehensibly. (Bets on whether Tumblr has a transcript of all the songs that renders them correctly and translates them correctly at this point?)

I'm very unhappy with the job the subtitlers did on this movie, and I think Netflix needs to release a revision to accurately reflect what happens in the movie.

I suspect there are more than a few things about the movie that I missed, because my understanding of symbology of both Korean cosmology and mythology and the intricacies of K-pop fandom isn't as complete as it should be to fully appreciate what's going on here. (I did at least understand the light sticks, banners, appearances on various shows and the part where the performers are basically on their public game anywhere the public might see them, which includes never ever wanting to say or do anything that would say there was a relationship between idols and anyone at all, including other idols. Not that it stops the fans from shipping them, either in their own groups or possibly with other groups that they're seen with or rivals with.) Most of my understanding of K-Pop comes from people like brithistorian and andersenmom, so thank you for your help and answering the silly questions that I've had over time.

I did appreciate the music through the decades montage at the beginning, and I'm not sure the average watcher will realize just how much Korean music is influenced by American styles of music through those eras, before the phenomenon that we know of as K-pop comes into existence. (And which exchanges/inherits a fair amount of its cues and norms with Japanese pop idol culture, such that we think of them as J-pop and K-pop, at least over here in my neck of cultural existence.)

Related to this, however, it looks like Sony Animation went with the same general style and animation timing that they used on the Spider-Verse movies at times while I was watching it. While, for Spider-Verse, the animation timing is a deliberate decision and works for the comic-book nature of the multiverse being portrayed, here, the dance sequences that should be smooth as butter in the animation, probably even with some extra key frames to make sure it all goes well, several of them hitched and were otherwise more jerky than I would have expected out of a studio trying to match the intricate choreography that can accompany K-pop. It's possible that these hitches and jerkiness were my Internet connection having hiccups or my computer having a hitch, but I don't think so. Others can tell me how smooth their watch was of the movie, but for the moment, I'm chalking this up to Sony Animation's house style and timing clashing with what you would want animated K-Pop to look like. (There were noticeably fewer hiccups in the action sequences, which is why I think I think it was a style decision rather than a slowdown, because action animation would be more likely to have degradation than the dance sequences, in my opinion.)

Yes, but what did you think about the plot?

It was a perfectly serviceable plot. You'll recognize all the beats if you watched the first Frozen movie, although it is harsher to the lesser-scope villain than most Disney films would be. This particular version of the movie leans heavier into the "Demon Hunters" part of the title, and I don't know if that was the right decision for the plot, because the plot sets up both a movie where action and stylish fighting, accompanied by singing, will determine the outcome (the direction they took) and a movie where the principal heroines and their principal opposition are in a for-all-the-marbles stakes idol game to be determined by who has the bigger fanbase after the agreed-upon final duel at the Idol Awards competition. That would have made the K-pop part of it much more important, and given them all the tools they needed to wage an epic battle across various releases, appearances, and the rest that wouldn't have to involve all that many attempts at direct sabotage or fighting between the two groups, even if there was an awful lot of things that could be excused as "special effects." I'm pretty sure if the writers had enough experience with how idol systems work and the less than savory elements of the companies and managers of the various idols, they could write a very good movie full of underhanded tactics, diss tracks, "accidental" social media leaks, and all the rest of it. I think focusing on the K-pop aspect would also make the internal divisions and the character conflicts in the protagonist trio work better, as each of them starts giving in to more of their worser aspects in trying to beat their rival team, and that would make the parts of the plot that are about secrets and lies work better, since the character hiding the biggest secret will have had the opportunity to see the very worst aspects of the team and believe such things are their actual selves, instead of their more restrained forms. (Which will also make the ultimate climax portion of the movie work better, as well, to make it much clearer why the protagonist team ends up where they do and the way they do before the final battle.)

Final thought: The movie could cut the gag about certain members of the trio having heart eyes and popcorn eyes about the prettiness of the pretty boys in the rival group. It doesn't actually contribute to the plot, and it makes the characters shallower in a way that doesn't suit them. They could certainly make commentary on the boys being eye candy, even supernaturally so, because that's how they're drawn to be, but the majority of the movie shows this trio as a focused, work-first, idol trio who want to enjoy their downtime, except for that one member who keeps pushing them to not take their breaks. They're not shown as flighty or otherwise susceptible to that kind of distraction, and they primarily work through it when it happens, so thy could just cut the gag entirely and replace it with something else that would work better. Like an offhand comment about how those boys are trying to get by on their looks, while they're getting by on great songs. And then eventually admit to themselves that the boys have catchy songs, too, but stay primarily focused on making their own, better songs to beat them, since they never really try to change their look to be more attractive to the fans than the pretty boys.

Entry tags:

Queer is fun!

The local pride has the best parade. They don't (can't!) close the arterial road we'd march down but we do get half of it. So we stay on the left side and oncoming traffic is on the right.

Pretty soon I noticed the chants whenever a bus was coming toward us. The most frequent bus on that road is the 192. So I heard (and soon happily joined in, enough that I nearly lost my voice by the end of a pretty short parade): "One nine two! Gay for you! One nine two! Gay for you!" Just nonsense, but it was fun. And we kept it up as long as it took for the bus to get past us.

Halfway through, we encountered a rail replacement bus, a common sight while Stockport station is closed. And pretty soon I heard (and yelled "Replacement bus! Gay for us! Replacement bus! Gay for us!"

At the end, we added a "One fifty! Gay for me!" and "One seven one! Queer is fun!"

Some of the bus drivers waved at us, some just stoically went about their job. But apparently everyone on the 171 was looking grumpy. I'm sad to see a bus I used to get to and from work being so unsupportive!

Current Mood: groggy

Entry tags:

weekly proof of life

Weekly proof of life: reading + foodstuffs

Reading:

scruloose and I finished listening to All Systems Red and are now maybe a third of the way into Artificial Condition.

Yesterday I finished The Hands of the Emperor, which I think I read some of every day and still took me something like a week and a half even though I continued to really enjoy it all the way through. (I did find myself wishing that some of the emotional arc with Kip and his family had been shorter; [ROT13] uvf pbzcyvpngrq srryvatf nobhg uvf snzvyl abg ng nyy tenfcvat jub ur jnf be jung ur npghnyyl qvq jrer inyvq, ohg gung jnf n YBG bs cntrf qribgrq gb znal vafgnaprf va n ebj bs ehaavat vagb lrg nabgure crefba jub qvqa'g trg vg naq jnf qvfzvffvir be vafhygvat, be fbzrbar jub QVQ xabj jub ur jnf naq univat na vagrenpgvba, naq va rvgure pnfr gurer jnf gura lrg nabgure yratgul qryvirel bs rkcynangvba, naq vg jnf whfg...n ybg.

After finishing that last night, I completely at random started reading We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida), about which I have no particular feelings at this time.

Eating/baking: ( fruit, baking, salad (HelloFresh), sadness about still not liking tomatoes )

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Flurry

August is supposed to be this winding-down/wound-down month, right?

Well, for reasons which I concede are not particularly seasonal, the last week or so has been a bit of a flurry.

Getting next volume of The Ongoing Saga ready for publication in near future.

My tech person having issues with the website: it transpired that they had been upgrading some software which had had knock-on effects, but this involved a lot of three-way emailing about what was going on.

And I decided, for Reasons, to start putting together my talk for conference at end of September (rather than leave it until later I'd rather at least rough it out now and leave it to percolate) and this has so been the thing where the writing is the process and I am now actually feeling that I might have something a bit more original than I thought, and it has more of a shape to it. But the thing with this was that I kept having Ideas and going and adding bits and moving bits around, and realising I needed to go and Look Stuff Up, rather than just collate bits from my notes, so it was more of a vortex than I'd anticipated, and still ongoing.

Plus, the new physio exercises for hip/lower back and incorporating them into the routine, and, er, something or other was causing flareup of the Old Trouble, so there was working around that.

(Also, flurry of spam/phishing emails claiming to be 'support tickets' with deeply implausible references and origins.)

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just One Thing (09 August 2025)

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Entry tags:

everygary everywhere all at once

Poltergary

When V was making breakfast and I was wandering around the kitchen checking what groceries we needed, they told me "Well, the spirit of Gary is causing mischief." They pointed out that the sheepskin they use on their dining room chair was on the floor.

They initially bought themselves one but the first time Gary encountered it he claimed it, and they couldn't bear to take it back so just bought another one.

He ended up with three over time.

We got rid of (most of) his along with his other things, but V does still have theirs of course, on that chair.

It probably fell on the floor when I was putting the chairs back after they'd been on top of the table so the dining room could be cleaned yesterday. But regardless, Gary is such a big presence still.

I miss him so much. I think about him every day.

victory of the day

Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."

-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.

So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)

(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)

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Super Boba Cafe # 1, by Nidhi Chanani

A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

Disclaimer

https://xkcd.com/3126/

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

https://xkcd.com/3126/

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I really, really would lay odds it does not say 'it's all more complicated'

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

Current Music: Martha, "1848, Yawning Discreetly"

Hope and anger in the ink and on the streets

It feels like such a cheaply sentimental connection that I must not have allowed myself to see it for years, but the first film of any lasting meaning that I saw after the dislocating and disposessing move from New Haven which marked the end of my academic career and with it the whole pattern of my life to date was A Canterbury Tale (1944), that touchstone of continuity and exile. I got up in the morning to watch it off TCM. It gave me déjà vu as if I remembered some of its strongest, strangest images, even though it seemed after the fact impossible that I should have had any previous chance to see it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger and I immediately set about tracking down as many of their films as were available in my country as I had never done with any filmmakers before—I could explain it as finding something to study after suddenly having for the first time in twenty-odd years nothing assigned, but then I could have dedicated myself to just about anything encountered in those three-ish weeks including for God's sake M*A*S*H. I had just written the most Christian poem of my Jewish life and so was perhaps more than ordinarily primed to accept Emeric's cathedral. I had forgotten that the only time in my life I was in Canterbury, I had written about its layers of time, Roman roads, the scars of the Blitz, I had linked it with the archaeological eternity of DWJ's Time City. I could have imprinted on any of the characters with their griefs and doubts of lovers and livelihoods and I went straight for Colpeper, the sticky-fingered magus in his panic of losing the past, his head so far up his home ground that he has not yet learned the lesson of diaspora, how to carry the tradition wherever you go, including into the future. I had heard it myself since childhood and never had to put it so much to the test. I loved the film at once and desperately and it still took me years to see how like time itself nothing can really be lost in it, the lifeline I called it without recognizing what it held out. I keep coming back to it, still excavating that bend in the road. It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

followfriday

Follow Friday 8-8-25

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

chickenfeet!

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just One Thing (08 August 2025)

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

More from Okanagan Backroads Volume One

Old Fairview: White Lake Observatory

Mile 12.1 (4.4) – Half a mile further along, the access to White Lake Observatory turns right. (White Lake itself is the alkali pond opposite the Twin Lakes turnoff.)

Because of their electrical systems, which interfere with the operation of the radio-telescope, cars are not allowed on the road to the radio telescope. The big dish itself towers above the other installations, listening eternally to signals from outer space. The maze of poles and overhead wiring back towards Oliver are another form of radio-telescope, which pick up very long radio waves. The observatory is well worth walking the three-tenths mile; what's happening is completely incomprehensible to the layman, but fascinating nonetheless.

(1975/77)

* * * * * *

This observatory still exists, under the rather grander name of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. It is, so the government website tells me, "an internationally renowned facility for radio astronomy and leading-edge instrumentation." Until just now, I had no idea that it existed.

DRAO is still, naturally, a radio-quiet site, which must be more difficult these days than in 1975.

Dave Stewart, author of Okanagan Backroads, is quite right about its fascination. I am absolutely a lay person, and yet statements like this are weirdly thrilling: "The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is Canada's largest radio telescope. ... CHIME has no moving parts, but the Earth's rotation allows the telescope to map all of Canada's visible sky every day. CHIME was designed to survey atomic hydrogen from the largest volume of the Universe to date." No real idea why that would be important to do (feel free to explain!), but I'm glad it's happening here.

They have a Perseids viewing party next week!

§rf§

Source: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/nrc-facilities/dominion-radio-astrophysical-observatory-research-facility

Redactle-related fact of the day

I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)