Beyond Selidor

I was delighted to get a notification a couple of days ago that a new related work had been made of one of my fics. Even better, on closer inspection, I realised that peaked was the person to have created the podfic!

It's an adaptation of one of my Six of Crows fics, and has a fancy piece of cover art and everything.

[Podfic] Caught inside every open eye (24 words) by rasp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Characters: Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3
Summary:

'My days of clambering up buildings and sneaking around rooftops as part of some dangerous and complicated heist sparked by your secretive and cryptic whims are long over!'

Inej and Kaz work together on one last job.

Podfic of Caught inside every open eye by Dolorosa.

I feel as if the weekend has somewhat run away from me, but, looking back, I do seem to have got a lot done.

Saturday was gloriously sunny, so once I returned from the gym, I spent quite a bit of the afternoon sitting out on the deck, finishing my book — Bread and War (Felicity Spector) — under the pear and cherry trees. ( The book is basically Spector travelling around Ukraine, eating lots of delicious food, served to her by remarkable people working in incredibly difficult circumstances ) Don't read this book when hungry, or you will find yourself craving vast piles of food!

On Saturday night, I laid the coffee table with lots of food on which to graze, and Matthias and I watched Eurovision. As I said previously, all our local friends who used to join us for watch parties have moved away, so it was just the two of us, although I had additional company in the form of the group chat of my friends from the Philip Pullman fan forum. Those of us taking part in the conversation were a true pan-European Eurovision crowd: a Welsh person in south Wales, a British person living in Switzerland (but in Geneva, not watching from the audience in Basel), a Finnish person in Helsinki, and two Australians living in England. We all universally agreed that the intermission mashup Käärijä/Baby Lasagne song was better than every competing song, and would have voted for it if we could!

Today, after a slow start, Matthias and I spontaneously decided to do a 5km circular walk, which includes the park by the cathedral, a long stretch by the river (where we saw vast numbers of water birds, and a herd of cows lying placidly in the grass), and then a winding journey through the suburban streets of the town. This at least helped me feel that I'd done some movement for the day.

After our return, I curled up in the living room and read my way through the once_upon_fic collection. I didn't think I had the time to participate in this exchange this year, but I've enjoyed reading the contributions of others. I'll stick a few recs behind a cut.

( Recs here )

I'll leave you with one final link: the rather cool news that the children's picture book written by one of my undergraduate friends from Australia has been selected for the Australian National Simultaneous Storytelling initiative, which is pretty amazing.

You may recall that in my previous post about Saturday's Australian federal election, I said that after the 2022 election, our right wing parties, upon losing, refused to accept that they had done anything wrong, and responded essentially with 'are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong.'

They now appear to be doubling and tripling down on this after losing the following election.

The Guardian decided to engage in a bit of pointing and laughing at the spectacle of a bunch of ghastly Sky News talking heads blaming the voters for failing to embrace their toxic offerings. Andrew Bolt literally came right out and said it:

By 9.46pm the rightwing commentator had penned a piece on the Herald Sun blaming the Australian electorate for the Coalition loss.

“No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong,” Bolt wrote.

The reason for the loss? It was because the Liberal party “refused to fight the ‘culture wars’”.

And I'll just bask in the schadenfreude of the article's closing lines:

Former Labor minister Graham Richardson, who hasn’t lost his talent for the one-liner, said the Liberals have got to ask themselves where do we go now?

“We’ve tried Dutton - what else have we got? Well not much because if Angus Taylor is the answer, it’s a stupid question.”

The comments section is full of people boggling at the inability of Sky's brains trust to read the room.

I have a backlog of links, I have about half an hour free, so I thought I'd make a linkpost.

Japan built a 3D-printed train station in six hours, and it was pretty cool.

A Rebecca Solnit essay which sums up a phenomenon that I've been describing for several years as '(geo)political abuse apologism.'

Marie Le Conte writes up her worst experiences living in shared rented flats, and while I've had some interesting sharehouse experiences, this whole thing is making me very relieved that I never, ever had to share with strangers in London.

A look back at the stealth influence of Robyn's 'Dancing on My Own,' fifteen years on. (It's not even my favourite song from Body Talk, that's how good that album is.)

Every year, since I first saw author Amal El-Mohtar talking about it in her newsletter, I've said I was going to make lilac syrup, and every year I've failed to do so. This article talks about the spring when suddenly lilac syrup became a craze that swept the internet.

Several of these articles were free to me to read, but may end up being paywalled for you, and if so, I apologise.

Edited to add:


3weeks4dreamwidth is celebrating Dreamwidth's anniversary!
Come join in for fun, memes, activities, and more ♥

I've been hoarding links over the past week — mainly via the same two sources, which are blogs of meaty-but-light-touch, longform criticism, pop cultural commentary, and book reviews — the kind of stuff that's what I most miss about the old-school, pre-social media internet, and which I was delighted to discover still exists, if not in quite the same volume or prevalence.

First up, two reviews specifically of Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and more broadly commenting on the 'cosy' SFF trend. I'm not sure I'd be quite so firm in my conclusions (sometimes, you just want to read gentle, low-stakes fiction, and that's okay), but I thought both made some interesting, and persuasive points. Review number one is by Liz Bourke, and review number two is by Wesley Osam.

Also by Osam, this post on extractive AI, and a review of Tone (Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno), which is another reminder that I really do need to read through Samatar's entire bibliography.

If any of you contributed to the Kyiv Independent's fundraiser for small local media outlets in Ukraine (in the wake of the US government's freezing of international aid; I posted about this a few months back), you might be interested to know the results of your contributions: there's an update on the Gofundme page outlining all the fantastic things the three organisations (in the frontline regions of Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv) have been able to achieve thanks to the donations.

I've also just really been appreciating Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which helps me continue to feel like I'm not losing my mind in this terrible, unmoored world, but I assume that anyone who vaguely shares my politics is already aware of it.

This Saturday, the sky unfolded in a curve of clear blue, dotted with fluffy clouds and lit with golden light, and I felt no irritation at having woken at 5.30am for no reason. I hung the laundry outside, then headed off for my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then into Cambridge to get my hair cut, as mentioned in my previous post, and to refill all my spice jars at the organic food shop that does refills. I was happy to be able to bypass the centre of town; both the hairdresser and the organic shop are in clusters of shops in mainly residential areas, as opposed to the chaotic historic centre, which is always heaving with tourists on the weekend.

Today has been colder and more grey, although there were still pockets of sunshine; Matthias and I walked along the river past all the houseboats (one of which was home to one of the biggest, fluffiest dogs I've ever seen, lounging on the deck like a placid white rug), then up into the market, where we bought fresh pasta for lunch. It was still pretty cold when sitting still, so we basically stayed out long enough to finish eating, then headed home. Now we're both curled up in our armchairs in the living room, reading and resting and generally gathering our breath before the new working week.

This week I reread a truly ridiculous number of 1990s Australian YA novels, about which I won't bore you (if you're truly interested in the full list you can see them at my Goodreads account), as well as a fantastic pair of novellas.

The first was The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar, a writer I've always felt was criminally underrated. Rather than try to sum up my own thoughts, I'm just going to link to this interview Samatar gave at the time of the book's publication, which gives a clear idea of what it's about and her intentions in writing it. In general, I've been spending a lot of time with Samatar and her thoughts, working my way through the conversations and essays linked on her website. I remember reading this piece from 2017 when she left social media entirely; returning to it in 2025 I'm struck even more forcefully by her perception and foresight.

The second novella, The River Has Roots is described as a novel by its author Amal El-Mohtar, but given the print edition only runs to 110 pages or so, with lots of illustrations, I really don't feel that's entirely accurate. This is a book that I knew would be incredibly Relevant to My Interests on the strength of its description (a retelling and reclamation of the Two Sisters strand of folk songs), an impression that was confirmed when I actually read the book. It's hard to think of another instance in which so many of my favourite things are all pressed together within the covers of a single slim book: reclaimed, female-centric folk tales, weird bargains with supernatural beings, fairy otherworlds lying beside and above and underneath and within our own world, magic that is also song and is also riddles and is also language, and stories that put relationships between sisters, and relationships between women and bodies of water at their heart. I loved it to bits, and you couldn't have written anything more closely to my own specifications for the perfect story if you'd tried.

Beyond books, it's been a weekend for films. On Friday night, I watched the Netflix documentary about Avicii, whose story was the typical music industry tragedy: an immensely talented individual, thrust into international superstardom (and astronomical financial success) at a very young age, unable to cope with it, given zero help from management or record label (since what he needed, of course, was to pause working and pause touring, and everyone was making too much money from his output to risk putting a stop to it), turning to the inevitable alcoholism and opioid addiction to keep going, until he couldn't keep going any more. The arc of such stories is, of course, more obvious in hindsight.

Finally, last night Matthias and I watched Benedetta, an extremely male-gazey French-language film about lesbian nuns, and the turmoil and drama of life in their convent during a period when the bubonic plague was at its height. The film was allegedly drawing on real historical events and figures, but if so I can only assume it took great poetic license. I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

And that's been the shape of my weekend so far.

That may as well be the theme of this weekend, for various reasons. On Saturday, I headed down to London for a demonstration in support of Ukraine. We marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the Russian one, and then had about an hour or so of speeches — the event was organised by Ukraine Solidary Campaign, so the speakers were Labour MPs, representatives of various unions (my union was there, but no one from it spoke), Ukrainian activists representing various civil society organisations, and a heart-wrenching speech from a young man who (aged 16) lived through 75 days of the siege of Mariupol before escaping.

Weirdly, given the dark place we are currently in in terms of European geopolitics, I felt a lot better after being part of this. My own rule of 'the antidote to despair is concrete action (especially involving physical movement, outside, with other people)' held true, and it was particularly helpful to listen to the specific things the MPs were saying in their speeches. I'm not good at estimating crowd sizes, but I'd say the numbers were probably in the thousands, which isn't massive, but isn't terrible. Most drivers (including buses) that passed us beeped in solidarity. It's no hardship to march in support of something that I'm fairly confident is a mainstream position across the whole UK; support for Ukraine is not a partisan issue here, apart from at the absolute extremes of left and right (even if our power — even at a political leadership level — to do anything about it is limited), so this was a protest to keep the fire alive, to lift spirits, and to remind Ukrainians that they are not alone. I saw another Dreamwidth friend mention in one of their posts that political action is like a muscle that you have to keep exercising, and I felt this was very much the case here. And it was cathartic to yell at the Russian embassy. Here's a photoset of placards (no faces, of course), plus vyshyvanka-clad dog.

I've already described the journey home in my previous post, so won't discuss that further here.

Today, I dragged my exhausted body off to the swimming pool, and dragged it through the water for 1km, and felt better for it. After a few hours back at home, our friends collected us for this month's walk with the walking group: 6km or so through the Norfolk fields outside the village of Hilgay. All our walks seem to feature some theme (horses, apples in an orchard, mud), and this walk's theme very much was snowdrops, which absolutely carpetted the landscape, and kept popping up in unexpected places. There was also a lot of interesting fauna, including swans, ducks, a buzzard, and a stoat. We opted to skip the rather creepy pub in Hilgay, and drove instead a few kilometres towards home, and stopped for a post-walk drink in the much nicer pub in Southery, which had a fire going in a little wood-burning stove, and offered a cosy respite from the wind and the cold grey skies.

Now I'm back home, with Matthias fretfully watching the results roll in from the German election, attempting to finish the last fifty pages of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which has been a great distraction this week. For obvious reasons, I've been finding it hard to focus on reading, but weirdly, a discursive, historical doorstopper, filled to bursting with interesting digressions and new-to-me corners of the past was exactly the right thing to pick up. Other than that, I've only finished one other book, a reread of KJ Charles's historical M/M romance novel, Band Sinister, which kept me occupied on the train to and from London.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I walked out this morning to the pool to a cacophonous soundtrack of ice being scraped from car windscreens; while I knew why I was out in the freezing cold at 7.30 on a Sunday morning, the number of people apparently about to drive off somewhere at that time of the day was baffling to me. The pool itself was crowded and a bit irritating, but I got the swim done, and came home to make coffee and crepes for breakfast. I drank the last of my Christmas blend of coffee, looking out at the clear, blue sunlit sky, and the buds on the quince trees, and felt that the season was very much starting to turn.

This weekend was slightly busier than originally intended. On Saturday, I'd been invited in to lead a workshop for a group of nurses and allied health professionals, so I had to travel in to Cambridge. My plan was to head in, do my presentation, and leave, so that I'd be back home at lunch time, but then kelwebbdavies messaged me to let me know she was going to be in town for a conference, and did I want to meet up. I hadn't seen her in years — possibly not since my wedding — and I jumped at the chance to hang out over a delicious lunch at permitroomcambridge. I wound my way back to the train station via Cambridge market, and was back home in the mid-afternoon.

Matthias and I watched Deadpool and Wolverine — a cynical cash grab of a film, with some fun cameos, and certainly on the level of what our brains could handle after a very tiring week — and then I fell into bed.

Today began with a swim as described, and after breakfast, Matthias and I went for a longish walk along the river, to enjoy the clear sunshine. The river and the town centre were busy with lots of other people who clearly had the same idea, including Matthias's old boss (whose presence was somewhat surprising, given she now lives in Australia). We sat outside under the massive tree in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, then came home for lunch.

After I've finished up this post, I'm going to do a longish yoga class while the sun is still shining through the windows, and then relax with Dreamwidth until dinner.

In terms of reading, I only managed a reread this week — Felicia Davin's delightful fantasy adventure Gardener's Hand, trilogy, which is set on a tidally-locked planet and involves a trio of (queer) twentysomething characters trying to uncover a political conspiracy that ends up having serious environmental implications for life on their planet, and also involves all their respective individual traumas, problems, and character journeys. The story itself is deftly done, if nothing left-field, but what really lifts this series is the worldbuilding (Davin has given serious consideration not only to how being tidally locked might affect the metereology and urban planning of the planet, but also the cultures and sociological organisation of its inhabitants; the worldbuilding is on the level of Kate Elliott in this regard), and the characters, who are an utter delight to spend time with. It's swiftly become one of my favourite series to reread.

( Finally, a link and some thoughts )

The skies here are clear, and I'm sending sunshine your way.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious — exactly the right balance between being out in the world, and indoor cosiness. Saturday started with my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then I returned home for lunch, through crisp, clear, biting cold air. I spent most of the afternoon cooking — stewing fruit for our weekday breakfasts, and preparing an absolutely massive quantity of northern Thai-style dal, a new-to-me recipe that involved cooking ginger, garlic and shallots under the grill until they were blackened on the outside and took on a smoky flavour.

In the evening, Matthias and I caught the train out to one of the little villages around Cambridge, where — after a half-hour walk through fields in the dark — we had a Burns Night-themed dinner at the local gastropub. The food was great, the fires were lit, people had dogs in the bar area, and in general everything was wintry and lovely.

This morning was spent swimming and doing yoga, and then we headed out after lunch for our monthly walk with our walking group. This time, the walk was around Ely, so we didn't have to be driven there and back, which was great. The weather was terrible — strong winds, scatterings of freezing rain — but it was still great to be out and about, chatting and catching up with everyone. The walk ended at the pub at the end of our street (after everyone walked past our house and gave us tips on how to prune our lavender plants; some of the group are professional gardeners, and the others have allotments and are very knowledgeable about all things botanical), and Matthias and I have just returned home, for a few hours of chilling out until the weekend draws to a close.

I've only finished one book this week, This Woven Kingdom (Tahereh Mafi), the first in a YA fantasy series inspired by Iranian mythology. Honestly, I have to say that it's fairly mediocre — tropey and formulaic, with insta-love between its protagonist and her love interest (who are, of course, Romeo and Juliet-style figures from opposite sides of a supernatural and political conflict), the heroine is super super special with powers and abilities possessed by no one else, the lost heir to a supernatural dynasty, living the life of an unappreciated, much abused drudge, in obscurity, etc, etc. The worldbuilding is paper thin. My tolerance for this kind of thing is very dependent on my mood — and because I was in a good mood this week, I responded far more favourably than the book probably deserved. It's trash, but it's my kind of trash. I certainly can't recommend it, unless you're in the mood for this kind of tropey mush.

I have, however, been reading a lot of other interesting things online, and I will leave you with some links.

I liked this piece on Max Gladstone's newsletter, which I felt had a handy analogy for the challenges of our current moment:

Jiu-jitsu this week gave me a useful opportunity to reflect on defense.

The first instinct when someone’s on top of you, aiming for a choke hold or a submission, is to get that guy t.f. off. You want out of here. The adrenaline hits; you buck, you roll, you twist and kick. Full-on animal spirits.

The trouble is, you spend a lot of energy thrashing about. And, if you aren’t much stronger than the other grappler—who, remember, has gravity on their side—you’re not likely to get anywhere, if your opponent has the faintest clue what they’re doing. Even if you are stronger in general, one or two failed maximum-strength attempts to break free will wear you out. A common first step is to establish frames: defenses that work by structure rather than strength. If you get your arm inside a choke hold that works by isolating your neck, the other guy will have a hard time. The structure of your arm, the bone fact of it, protects you. You can save your strength to seize a later chance.

The author Susan Dennard, who left social media for good in 2022, and slowly weeded out any further opportunities for scrolling aimlessly through any form of digital content (to the point that she now only uses the internet to post long-form writing, read some longform stuff, and communicate via email or videoconferencing/messaging platforms). She's written a recent essay reflecting on the various effects of these choices, which I found to be very relevant to the discussions I've been witnessing around leaving social media, or reframing one's relationship with it.

This piece by Talia Lavin, another in her 'notable sandwiches' series of essays, really encapsulates why I'm glad to have subscribed to her writing. It's about a sandwich, it's about The Count of Monte Cristo (and all its many adaptations), and it's also about this:

But the real fantasy at the heart of Monte Cristo—and what makes me keep returning to it along with all those playwrights and filmmakers and artists and animators—is the fantasy of justice. It’s the wronged man, the victim, rubbing the faces of his abusers into their own crimes; it’s the refusal to be cast away, the combination of the ability, the means, and the desire to right such a fundamental wrong. From a man who cannot even see the sky from his dungeon, Dantes becomes a bolt of vengeance sent from heaven. And because injustice continues, and multiplies; because those who wrong others continue to benefit from it; because the cruel use any means to perpetrate their cruelty—well, the fantasy of destroying them utterly, these ordinary heartless men, has endured for nearly two hundred years. The fact that fantastic resources are needed to enact such justice against the powerful is, amid all the fantastical elements of the story, apropos. The scales are so cruelly tipped that it takes a wonder-tale to reverse them.

Finally, here is an article about Ukrainian scientists researching whether radioactive fungi from the Chornobyl site might be able to function as a radiation shield for journeys to Mars.

I hope your weekends have been filled with nice things.

2025 is off to a fairly good start for me: my first day back at work today went smoothly (and, astonishingly, my various inboxes were reasonably empty, although I had to laugh at the student who sent us emails asking for help with a research project on a) Christmas Day and b) New Year's Day — that's keen), I've been swimming, I've read some good books.

My prompt this week is about new year's rituals — not resolutions, but things you do every year, around the turning point of the year. These might be cultural (like the Spanish tradition of eating grapes on the chimes counting down to midnight, for example), they could be specific to your family or household, or something individual.

Mine are fairly boring:

The house has to be clean before the change over to the new year (this makes me feel as if I'm scrubbing the grime of the previous year away and starting with a fresh, new slate)

Just after the stroke of midnight, I post a song on social media, with lyrics chosen to reflect my feelings about the new year (2025's was 'Vidlik' by Onuka; the relevant lyrics in translation: Countdown. Only. Future. Ready)

I have to start 1st January with a walk (this year, tragically, it didn't happen because a) I had a terrible cold and b) it was pouring with rain with howling wind)

The first book of the year (which I aim to have read by the end of 1st January) has to be a good one; I tend to save something up that I trust to be excellent, and usually my judgement holds up

What about you?