Ezra, an Ojibwe teenager, has to flee Minneapolis when the home of the racist teenager who bullied him burns down, and he becomes the prime suspect. He goes to Canada to run traplines with his grandfather.

Where Wolves Don't Die is mostly a coming of age story; the thriller/mystery element is present but minor. It was recommended to me "Like an Ojibwe Hatchet," which definitely captures a lot of the vibe though it's about learning in community and family rather than isolation. Ezra goes from boy to man while he learns the old ways with his grandfather, who he loves. It's engrossing and moving. I liked that Ezra actively wants to stay with and learn from his grandfather rather than resisting it and having to come around.

Content notes: Hunting and trapping is central to the story.

Over ten years ago I researched and read articles looking for the right e-reader app for my phone, got attached to one called FBReader, and paid a tiny fee to upgrade it. I have configured my own font families, sizes, and colors; can adjust the screen brightness in the page; and can advance pages with the volume button. I am attached to the library views as well, although they're not ideal. I've used it to read every ebook I've read in that time — I convert them to epubs — and thousands of works of fanfiction. I won't put up with proprietary interfaces; they get in the way so much that I'd rather not read the book in question, or read it on paper.

But it's started to give me trouble! A few times last year I had to delete books that would freeze the app every time they were opened, but I attributed this to file corruption or a bug. But now it's happened several times in a row with several different books. I'm afraid I will have to look for a replacement! And I dread that.

I can't embark on a project like that until I finally get around to backing up my last two years' worth of photos. And I can't do that until I repartition my laptop harddrive, which will require reinstalling Linux Mint. I have stored all my files in a separate storage partition for like twenty years, so nothing but ADHD can account for the fact that I forgot to create one the last time I upgraded the laptop OS.

An epistolatory novel about the friendship between an American Jew, Max, and a German, Martin. As Hitler rises to power, their relationship sours, in some expected ways and some less expected, as their characters are revealed.

Very short, very powerful, very technically skilled, a quick easy read with an unexpected and unforgettable outcome. Seriously, don't click on spoilers if there's any chance you'll read the book. That being said, I read it because Naomi Kritzer told me the whole story and it was still great. Thanks for the rec!

The book was published in 1939 under a male-sounding pseudonym, but the style feels almost modern and the themes feel incredibly modern. There's an afterword about what inspired the book, which which is worth reading. Taylor had some German friends who seemed like kind, wonderful people, who became fervent Nazis and abandoned their Jewish friends. In a question so many of us are asking now, she wondered, What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?

( Read more... )

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov & Anya
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: moreloveforjm_ on instagram
Why this piece is awesome: Extremely cute - the boys cuddling in bed, with Anya the dog!
Link: on instagram, and on tumblr

This spooky ghost story has a central pairing that I feel like I may have requested as an original work: Widow/Female Fake Psychic/Ghost of a Female Bog Body.

My Darling Dreadful Thing is set in the Netherlands in the 1950s, which is a selling point all by itself as I love unusual settings. Roos is a young woman whose abusive fake psychic mother forces her to participate in her fake seances. But though Roos does not communicate with the spirits sought by the desperate, grieving customers, she actually does have a spirit companion, a bog body whom Roos has bound to her and named Ruth.

Roos is delighted when Agnes, a biracial (Indonesian/Dutch) widow, takes her as a companion and spirits her away to her neglected Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is otherwise occupied only by Agnes's sister-in-law, Willamine, who is dying of tuberculosis, and has a marvellously bizarre Gothic history. Roos falls hard in love with Agnes, with whom she has a surprising amount in common.

But this whole story is being told in retrospect, as a series of interviews Roos is having with a psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she's mentally fit to stand trial for murder. Something very bad happened at the mansion...

( Read more... )

Very enjoyable, very gothic, very atmospheric. I'm excited to read van Veen's other two books. I looked her up to see if she's actually from the Netherlands (yes) and learned that she's one of a set of non-identical triplet sisters! I don't think I've ever read a book by a triplet before.

All icons are HERE at little_mermaid. ♥️

Note: This post will only be open for a few weeks … after that it will be locked to members only, so please feel free to join/subscribe if you like my work. Thank you.

Things about this month, just for context:

One week on three different work schedules

One week on a hellish 5:30-1:30 morning newsletter schedule that actively makes me ill and wrecked my ability to either do anything or recover

Finishing up my big vintage Coach feature, which I'm so excited about and want to devote deep-work time to, but!!!!

Closing + packing + arranging contractors (yesterday: floor refinishers; today: guy who checks out the heater; tomorrow: painting?!!! with friends, though, yay!)

Dog care as Gingko gets increasingly anxious about the apartment being taken apart

Election coverage at work!!!!! Mega projects, late af night on Tuesday!!

WTF is happening with bsky blowing up finally spotting antisemitism and still not handling it well at all

Oh gosh, right, my formerly dislocated left elbow hurts more

My period is coming and I am always hungry and exhausted.

I can't tell if I'm farther along in packing than I should be or way, way behind. But the rooms are getting less full, the boxes are filling up, the things I'm listing on the Buy Nothing group are being claimed, and if I swing this, I won't have to move again until I damn well choose it. (This move, while welcome in many ways, is because the guy who owns this condo told me a year ago that he wanted to sell this spring, so.)

I'm sure there was more to say. I have to donate my books somewhere that will give me cash and not just store credit, because wow, dangerous. I have to set some timers to just get things in boxes, because we're running out of time to thoughtfully sort things. I have to start work in two minutes. I cannot wait for life to be routine and boring again!

I don't have a lot of toys from my childhood with me here in Finland, just a few stuffed toys that were made by my mom. This doll is the first thing my mom made for me: a Cabbage Patch replacement. (I wanted a Cabbage Patch as a toddler, but my mom made me this doll instead, which was even better - she was so beautiful to me, and my mom hand painted her eyes!) This doll has been lying flopped over in a basket on top of a bookshelf for a few years, and she caught my eye as I was going to bed one day a few weeks ago and I started thinking that it's a pity that a work of art that my mom worked so hard to make isn't being played with.

It's possible there will be a toddler in the family I could give her to in the next few years. But in the meantime I felt sad about her, dusty and poorly dressed, so I examined her and knitted her a little outfit.



The doll needs washed as well, but I want to wait for summer. Her body is light pink cotton that has gotten rather grimy, but her face isn't machine washable. My mom says I can take off her head and wash the body in the washing machine; and I wouldn't want to do that until it's warm outside, and sunny, so it would dry as quickly as possible. The face definitely needs washed too, so I'm going to have to try to spot wash it.

All three of these wee garments took me only about 6 days to make, and they're made of leftover scraps (the striped shirt and the yellow cardigan) and a bit of cheap sock yarn (the jungle green pants). But I got that feeling of excited accomplishment with a finished project three times! They have the details of bigger garments, and they're so cute and tiny, even more so than making sweaters for small children.

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Content Notes/Warnings: implied nudity, but this version's not explicit.
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: realcardiac on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: These are season 1 shower scene portraits, but with female Hollander and Rozanov. It's the first rule 63 version of them I've seen where the likenesses are convincing. Femme Ilya is especially compelling.
Link: Shower scene, backup link here

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

Wax informed me that it was definitely coming out too small and would need to be started over, so this morning I spent several hours unraveling it after I finished weaving in the ends on the Bumblebee Breton (#2).

The three skeins rolled together into one yarn ball are the size of a baby's head, according to Wax. (Close enough I guess.)

I have 61 Heated Rivalry icons to share. In the post you can find:
- 32 Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
- 15 Ilya Rozanov
- 11 Shane Hollander
- 2 Svetlana Vetrova
- 1 Scott Hunter/Kip Grady

Preview:


Here @ love_sacrificed

The state of triplet sweaters when last checked on was that I finished #1 (a traditional Guernsey using PetiteKnit's Storm pattern in navy blue dk-weight Norwegian wool Sandnes Peer Gynt). Then I took over #2 (a mariniere using PetiteKnit's Marseille pattern in yellow stripes on black in dk Drops Merino Extra Fine) from waxjism, who had already knitted the body, and knitted the hem ribbing and sleeves and the neck ribbing while Wax started #3 (a traditional cabled Aran in forest green heather Peer Gynt). Wax got halfway up the body of #3 before stalling out in the cold snap while I knitted a little bit on a pair wool shorts for myself before giving up knitting in the cold as well.

Nobody knitted for a month or so. But all that time I knew I was going to have to unravel the neck ribbing on #2 and redo it, because it came out too tight/small.

After I ran out of wool for the shorts the other day, I unwillingly went back to the sweater. Knitting in black wool is very annoying because it's difficult to see the individual stitches. Yesterday I unraveled the collar and started over, getting through 17 rounds out of a planned 21, before I realized it was still too small and started over again. The third try is now at 18/21.

I need to order more wool for the shorts and some more needles and sock yarn and sock blockers.

We still haven't replaced the kitchen faucet, either. I asked Wax what she thought about ordering it a week and a half ago, and she said she could pick it up on her way home from work, but this hasn't happened yet.

A French children's book in translation from 1961, in which five children are trapped in a cottage by a landslide.

14-year-old Laurent's family is concerned that he spends all his time reading and doing chemistry experiments, and isn't engaging with other people. So they dispatch him to stay with his younger brother and sister in a cottage only occupied by a 14-year-old girl and her younger brother, who are alone because her mother is having surgery. The idea is that Laurent will have to take care of the other kids, and this will make him come out of his shell more. His parents do leave him the out of being able to pack up his siblings and return to Paris if he really hates it.

I am honestly not sure if it was even vaguely normal in 60s France for five kids ages 14-5 to stay alone in a remote mountain cottage for ten days, or if this was just a literary convention. Anyway, Laurent unsurprisingly hates it and packs up his siblings to leave. But while they're on the train platform with the other kids, he has a change of heart and they all head back to the cottage. But they stop in the cottage of a family friend, who is out at the time.

It gets buried in a landslide! They're all trapped in pitch darkness! In an only vaguely familiar house! They can't use the stove because it already nearly suffocated them with carbon monoxide! Their only air is from a narrow shaft leading to a giant canyon! There's very little food! No one knows they're in trouble because one of the kids wrote ten postcards dated for every day of the vacation, then arranged with the post office to send one per day!

The kids having to do everything in total darkness for most of the book is a really cool twist on this sort of "trapped in a space" book. (One of my favorite moments is when enough dirt slides away that some light gets in, and they see that they've been half-starved in pitch darkness with two huge hams and a lantern hanging from the ceiling.) It has some cozy elements - they're trapped with goats, which they can milk but which also get into everything and poop everywhere, and one goat gives birth to twin kids - but gets desperate quickly when Laurent gets an infected cut and the main milking goat drowns in a flooded cellar. But it all ends up okay when they first signal with Morse code in a mirror (in a nice touch of realism, it takes a long time for anyone to figure out the message as the kids get some of the letters wrong, including signaling OSO instead of SOS) and then make and set off gunpowder!

Not an enduring classic, but an entertaining read.

Gyre explores the tunnels of an alien world in a mechanical suit, her only connection to the outside world the voice of Em, her handler who she’s never met, who may or may not have her welfare in mind, and who definitely has boundary issues.

Gyre has less experience caving than she claimed, and caving is extremely difficult. There are sandworm-like creatures called Tunnelers that will kill multiple parties of cavers for unknown reasons, so cavers go in alone, unable to take off their suit for weeks on end, with their handler as their only link with the outside world. Em can literally take control of Gyre’s suit/body, can inject her with drugs, etc - and not only has little compunction about doing so, but won't tell Gyre what the actual purpose of the mission is.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This is a type of story I don’t see very often, in which there’s one main science fiction element – in this case, the mechanical caving suit – which is explored in depth and is essential to the story, and it’s also set on a (very lightly sketched-in) other planet. Generally the “one science fiction element” stories are set on Earth. Apart from the Tunnelers, this novel actually could take place on an Earth where the suit exists.

The Luminous Dead, like The Starving Saints, has a small cast of sapphic women and takes place almost entirely in the same claustrophobic space; if it was on TV, we’d call it a bottle episode. I normally like that sort of thing but unlike The Starving Saints, it outstays its welcome. It has about a novella’s worth of story, and while it’s very atmospheric and any given portion is well-written and interesting, considered alone, as a whole it’s very repetitive and over-long. I would mostly recommend it if you like complicated lesbians with bad boundaries.