Beyond Selidor

Back in the day (by which I mean over a decade ago, when Youtube's algorithm just showed you music it thought you might like if you were using it without being logged in, as opposed to shoving horrific far right podcasters and video essayists in your face, which is what it does now), I stumbled on MrSuicideSheep's epic, four-part 'Taking You Higher' progressive house mix. I edited the final stages of my PhD to this music, wrote numerous job applications, and cleaned and cooked repeatedly with this on in the background. Many of the close to 100 systematic reviews for which I've done the database searches (a fiddly task that takes about half a day when it's easy, and multiple additional days longer when it's hard) were done to this soundtrack. I've discovered so much music I like through those mixes, and I'm very certain that multiple Dreamwidth posts have titles taken from some of the included songs.

I follow the guy (I'm assuming gender based on the 'Mr' in the Youtube handle, but obviously I have no idea) on social media, and a few weeks back, he started teasing that Part 5 of this mix was coming soon — after a pause of nine years. When it dropped, the comments were full of rapturous gratitude from people who had clearly used the previous four parts as the soundtrack to their lives in much the same way as I had. They reminisced about the stages of the lives at which they were when the earlier parts had come out, and how far they had come (graduations, marriages, children, new jobs, moving cities or countries, etc) since then. It was just such a nice moment of warmth and community, with people coming together across continents and oceans to celebrate music that had meant so much to them, and rejoice in a new addition to that stream of sound that connected them all. In that space, in that moment, everyone put everything aside, and just united in the sheer, earnest love of music.

The new mix itself is 4.5 hours long!

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 ♥

This is my first year trying out a slightly new format and set of questions for the year-end meme; I made the decision this time last year to retire the previous format (which I'd been using for close to twenty years, since the Livejournal days), the questions of which seemed in many cases more suited to a teenager or undergraduate university student. I've taken this set of questions from falena.

( I'll sing a story about myself )

Today's prompt is something I'm surprised I haven't used before: do you have any music which you only listen to during specific seasons/types of weather?

I'm not talking here about songs associated with specific seasonal festivals (i.e. not Christmas carols, spooky Halloween songs, etc), but rather music that just sounds summery, autumnal, nighttime, like misty rain or clear spring mornings, and so on.

( Embedded music behind the cut )

What about you? Let's start the weekend dancing.

After a few false starts, summer is truly here in earnest. Matthias and I spent part of the morning in the garden, planting corn, peas, nasturtiums, chives, zucchini and butternut pumpkin, and pulling out handfuls of weeds. The tomato, rocket and radish seedlings I've been growing in the kitchen are off to a good start. We ate breakfast this morning on the deck under the umbrella (and the fruiting cherry, apple and pear trees) for the first time this year.

I've been drinking a lot of iced coffee, and listening to a lot of Miami Horror.

Yesterday (or really the middle of the night on Friday), the Once Upon a Fic collection went live, and I spent most of Saturday afternoon reading through it, and commenting on the stuff I enjoyed. I'll do a full recs post once authors are revealed, but I am very happy with my own gift, my assignment was well-received, so I'd say the exchange has been a success from my perspective.

Other than the usual cooking (a new-to-me Indonesian recipe last night), reading (just more of my Benjamin January reread) and gym/swimming, Matthias and I managed to finish booking all the accommodation and most of the flights/transport for our Finland and Baltic countries summer holiday. The latter half of this is something we've been planning vaguely for a while; the Finnish component is happening because one of Matthias's old school friends is getting married there this summer to his (Finnish) fiancée, which gave us the push we needed to finally make concrete plans for the other countries in the trip. It's a bit complicated (because of the location of the wedding, we ended up needing to stay in five different places for the first five nights), but as long as trains and ferries run as anticipated, it should work out smoothly. I will post more details later on a post just about the trip.

This afternoon will be slow and sleepy: catching up on Dreamwidth, a yoga class, a bit more reading, taking the laundry in, lazily cooking risotto. We are going out to the community cinema to see Challengers this evening, but beyond that it's been a pretty low-key weekend, which was definitely welcome.

I think I doomed myself by posting about travel mishaps on Friday's open thread, but more about that later. Yesterday, Matthias and I went to London, the main intention being to see dark electro group Rue Oberkampf perform live. Unlike on usual London concert adventures, we were completely unable to find a hotel cheap enough to justify staying overnight, and since the gig was in Islington, we decided to chance it and return home to Ely on the last train of the day.

We travelled down just before lunchtime, had a quick lunch at a new-to-us Mexican place in Coal Drops Yard behind the station (the food scene in the immediate surrounds of King's Cross Station these days never ceases to amaze and delight), and then hopped on the tube to see this art exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was very busy — a Saturday afternoon on the last weekend of the exhibition, so to be expected — but very worth seeing, although inevitably the new works engaging with the gallery's legacy and collection were much more interesting than the source material.

Then we headed across to Islington, dodging the rain, for drinks, dinner, and the concert. It was in my very favourite kind of venue — a tiny little club (this one on the top floor of a pub; the club was only open to ticketholders, the pub was open to whoever wanted to come in for a drink and pizza), with room for no more than sixty or so people. I can see the value in big spectacular arena concerts, but increasingly these days I'm much more interested in these tiny, small-scale events. This particular club seemed to be populated by every ageing goth in London ... and me and Matthias (I was certainly the only person wearing any kind of pastel colours in that room, that's for sure), and the gig was a lot of fun, just really relaxed and low key. We finished up just after 10.30pm, with plenty of time to get back for the last train.

So how do the travel problems come into all this? Well, just before the gig began, Matthias checked the National Rail app and saw that for some reason no trains were going to Ely, but rather stopping in Cambridge. 'Urgent track work,' allegedly. Further reading revealed that a bus would supposedly be there to take anyone needing to go beyond Cambridge, and in any case as long as we could get to Cambridge, a taxi beyond that would be expensive, but not the end of the world. We tried to relax, enjoyed the concert, and made our way to the station.

Things were at least as described, except that the train to Cambridge was slightly late, it was dark and devoid of rail staff, and no information about where this replacement bus would be. It was also pouring with rain. This, however, is not my first rail replacement bus rodeo, and I ensured we were among the first people out of the station, ignoring the crowd stampeding towards the queue at the taxi rank, and spotted a lone bus at the far end of the bus interchange. I dragged Matthias in my wake, it was indeed the bus we wanted, and after we got on (the only people who got on after leaving the incredibly crowded train), the driver ... closed the doors and left! So anyone else who waited in the station in confusion, walked more slowly, or had no idea the bus was a possibility was utterly out of luck!

We made our way meanderingly back to Ely through dark fields, torrential rain, and massive puddles of water that sprayed up alarmingly every time the bus drove through them, and got home only half an hour later than we would have done if the train had gone all the way through to Ely. All in all, not too bad, although I did feel terrible for the other people on that bus who needed to get all the way to King's Lynn!

Today, after not enough sleep, I went to pool first thing in the morning, and swam languidly back and forth for a kilometre while the rain poured down outside. Beyond that, I have not left the house, just lounged around, cooking, eating, and catching up on Dreamwidth. Signups opened for rarepairexchange and I managed to write a letter and sign up, which (given my lack of sleep and slightly downcast current feelings around fanworks exchanges) is something of an achievement!

I hope you've all been having lovely weekends.

I'm writing my usual weekend post today, instead of Sunday, because I'm likely to be too busy and tired to write anything substantial tomorrow, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This weekend is an unusually busy one for me, after an uncharacteristically tiring work week, and I feel as if I've barely had time to catch a breath.

Last night, Matthias and I went to an '80s silent disco in the cathedral. We'd done something similar nine months ago (that was a '90s music silent disco though), and enjoyed thing so much we were very happy to go again, and spent a delightful three hours dancing to (and screaming along with the lyrics of) three hours' worth of '80s cheese. As before, the headsets came with three channels, one per dj — broadly separated into rock, pop, and hip hop — and a good time was had by all. I always feel a bit weird about these events being held in a beautiful, massive medieval cathedral that is still a house of worship (they sell alcohol, etc), but since I'm not a Christian it's not really my call. There's going to be a follow-up event in September with '80s, '90s and noughties music, and I'll definitely go to that.

We were supposed to be heading into London today (via a very convoluted, time-consuming route due to trackwork on the railway line) for a gig — Swedish industrial electro singer Rein — but last night we were notified that the concert was postponed, which to be honest was a bit of a relief, since going from the silent disco one night to live music the next followed by a tiring Sunday is too much for me these days. We saw Rein live in the same venue five years ago — a tiny nightclub inside a former industrial warehouse in Islington — and hopefully we'll be able to see her again at a rescheduled event later in the year.

So instead my Saturday has been a bit more low-key: I cleaned the garden furniture and outdoor windowsills, I went into the market to shop for fruit and vegetables, and I lay around in bed finishing off a book. Now I'm cooking risotto and pottering around on Dreamwidth, and feel a bit more recharged.

Tomorrow, Matthias and I are heading off on another walk with our friends and their walking group, who generally do a hike in a different place once a month. We've only been to two walks with them so far, and have enjoyed it a lot. It's not particularly strenuous, since everything is local (and the landscape here is extremely flat) and the group tends to walk slowly and stop a lot, but it's nice to be outdoors and doing things with other people, and I always feel great afterwards.

I've finished one book so far this weekend: Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman), which was undemanding and silly. I admire the author's chutzpah in writing the vampire AU, Mary Sue Scarlet Pimpernel fanfic of her wildest dreams, and then getting Tor to publish it. That description really does sum the book up — the author is clearly having a great time, and as long as you're prepared to switch off your brain in relation to some of the more ludicrous elements (and to the fact that Cogman clearly thinks she's critiquing some of the issues inherent in the premise of her book's source material, when she really only does so in a halfhearted way), it's quite a lot of fun.

Finally, a couple of links:

As is often the case, Marie Le Conte's recent post about being an immigrant really spoke to me.

Perhaps most importantly, “roots” can mean different things to different people. Some trees will have few of them but they will burrow deep into the soil to find what they need. Others will stay near the surface but spread and spread. Everyone does what they can, and as they must, in order to keep going.

Insinuating that people who have moved around a lot have less interest in sincere human connection and the places they live in is both offensive and missing the mark entirely. I couldn’t pretend to speak for everyone whose life has been similar to mine, of course, but I’d argue it’s the opposite.

'Live your life so that the good folks at Bellingcat won't have cause to spend a lot of effort geolocating you through photos of the reflection of the back of your head in hospitality venues' social media posts' would seem to me to be a sensible admonition. I mean, on the one hand I admire the work Bellingcat does immensely ... and on the other, it's kind of terrifying.

And on that note, I will draw this post to a close, and go and check on my risotto.

This was a weekend of ruthless gentleness, and ruthlessly guarded rest. This extended to choice of both activities, and of inactivity: starting the morning on Wednesday seeing — of all things — an account I follow on Instagram for interior design and renovation tips uncritically sharing geopolitical misinformation was the final straw, and I've been on a social media blackout since then. (I don't count Dreamwidth as 'social media,' although it technically is, because it lacks the real-time speed, the virality, the dearth of fact-checking, the incuriousity about the source of content a user shares that I find so frustrating about other platforms.)

Saturday dawned cold and rainy, and I was half-drenched in freezing rain on my twenty-minute walk to the gym, and tried not to be too irritated about it. It rained on and off all day, and apart from a flying visit to the centre of town to buy forgotten grocery items, and the aforementioned walk to and from the gym for my morning classes, I didn't leave the house, alternating between writing Dreamwidth posts and comments, and slowly cooking an uncomplicated but time-consuming dinner which involved frying lots of individual slices of zucchini and potato in batches, and then slow-cooking the lot in a stew. After dinner, Matthias and I rewatched Dune in anticipation of seeing the sequel at the IMAX cinema in Cambridge next weekend, and I fell in love with it all over again. Marie Le Conte's newsletter essay about it goes a long way toward explaining why, although I wish she could have expressed her thoughts without the dig at the MCU. (I'm inclined to agree with her there, but I find people's inability to praise one piece of media without comparing it negatively with another really irritating.)

Today, I woke before my 7am alarm clock, and read this article (sent to me by my mum) about the ridiculous shenanigans going on during the campaign for a Queensland mayoral election, then headed out to the pool for my regular Sunday morning 1km, returned home to cook crepes for breakfast, and then left immediately after eating to take advantage of the clear wintry sunshine. I walked down the hill through the park by the cathedral, along the river (which was crowded with houseboats both static and in motion), and up into the town centre, then paused for a coffee at the rig in the market square. As always on weekends, the market was busy, with people browsing the stalls, walking their dogs, and meeting for a coffee and a chat.

This afternoon has mostly been taken up with chores and cooking — laundry, washing up, making a marinade for tonight's dinner (which is various Indonesian dishes), infusing coconut milk with spices and other aromatics, in which the rice for dinner will be cooked. The few remaining hours of the afternoon will be a mixture of Dreamwidth-browsing, finishing my book, yoga, and more cooking: the very definition of relaxing and unwinding. There'll be no reading log in this post: I haven't had the mental energy to read anything new for ages, and so the various rereads continue. I never see any point in forcing these things — I find rereading nourishing and restful, and I'll pick up new-to-me books when I eventually feel ready. I'm listening to a lot of raised by swans.

Saturday was full of ice, Sunday was a day of rain. Thankfully, that aligned with our plans for the weekend — travelling into Cambridge for Mill Road winter fair on Saturday, sticking much closer to home on Sunday.

Yesterday was crisp and cold. We arrived in Cambridge around midday, and walked the length of Mill Road, pausing to eat oysters and prawn toast, loaded fries (Matthias) and fresh woodfired pizza (me), and drink cups of mulled wine with free mince pies. We bought panettone and cheese to take home, and bumped into lowercasename, his fiancée, and several of their friends while we were queueing in the cheese shop. It was so cold that every time we had to pause to queue up somewhere, my feet became numb and I could feel the ice seeping up through the ground into my shoes.

About five minutes before we got on the train to head into Cambridge, we were notified that a parcel Matthias had ordered had accidentally been delivered to our old rental place there, so although walking 45 minutes across town (and back again) had not been part of the plan, it wasn't as catastrophic as it might have been if we hadn't already been in Cambridge that day. As it was, the new tenants were home, we could pick up the parcel, and we had a mildly nostalgic time dropping by all the small local shops that were previously our regular haunts.

We finished things up with an early dinner at a north African restaurant, and headed home on an incredibly crowded train.

Today started with a walk through the rain to the pool, then yoga and reading, and a few hours at a wine tasting down the road. We stocked up on what we'll drink over the Christmas-New Year's week (during which time both of us are on holiday), based on our favourites at the wine tasting.

We then came home for tea and mince pies, and I finished my book (These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs — a female-centric space opera filled with revenge, manipulation, twisty political machinations, and a fight for control of the resource necessary for speedy intergalactic travel), while the light left the sky, and the rain fell all around us.

I'll close off this post with two links relating to Shane MacGowan, whose death has left me uncharacteristically short of words — it's as if all my eloquence drained away at the prospect of that lyrical well running dry, and I find myself unable to convey what I want to say with any clarity. But these two articles — a series of reminiscences with Irish musical luminaries ('It’s ['Fairytale of New York's is] one the best songs ever written but Shane wrote songs better than that,'), and a gift link article about the process of writing 'Fairytale of New York' say a lot of what I'd want to say, if I could.

A few hours ago today, as the result of diving down a particular internet rabbit hole, I was reminded of a song with which I'd been briefly obsessed, back during the years I was a PhD student and spent most of my days at home, alone, writing, listening to music — frequently the same songs on continuous repeat for hours. I don't own physical copies of music any more — I haven't owned a device that could play CDs for years, and I finally cleared out my 1990s CD collection from my mum's house when I was in Australia in April. I don't own digital copies either — I used to have an extensive digital library of uploaded CDs and playlists (about which, more later), but that vanished at some point when the hard drive of my current computer had to be replaced in 2014 — and I don't listen to stuff on Spotify either. So basically the way I listen to music now, and have done since 2014, is to go to Youtube, and search for the album, live set, song, or playlist, and play it.

Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.

These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.

Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.

Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).

I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.

I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.