Wednesday metal bird report

Jul. 9th, 2025 11:37 am
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
When in doubt, send the Marines. USMC aircraft flocking over at the base, including a pair of (metal) Ospreys coming in for a landing just as I headed across the end of the runway. Funny-looking things.

First goldenrod blooming, tansy, continued St. John's wort. And the first purple loosestrife of the season, bedamned invasive weed.

No fresh roadkill. There *may* be a different dried-out skunk on my detour road, since I haven't been over that section in more than a week.

Got out on the bike, air temperature 78 F when I got home so marginal conditions for my aged body. Did not die.

15.58 miles, 1:30:55

In which I read Martha Wells

Jul. 9th, 2025 10:05 am
glaurung: (Default)
[personal profile] glaurung
Huh, I totally forgot to repost my first review of Martha Wells's fantasy books here back in March, so have two posts in one. First post: Witch King and the first three Raksura books. Read more... )

The Emilie Adventures, and the rest of the Raksura series: Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


In a city with over a million people per square kilometre, real estate firms will never lack for clients. Good news for the employees of the Wong Loi Realty Company!


Kowloon Generic Romance, volume 1 by Jun Mayuzuki (Translated by Amanda Haley)

Existence continuing

Jul. 9th, 2025 06:59 am
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Air temperature 63 F, wind near calm, fog at the airport. Clearing here, sunshine. Hill-side's dew-pearled. Bike ride probable.

crossposter?

Jul. 9th, 2025 11:53 am
mizkit: (Default)
[personal profile] mizkit
Does anybody have a functional crossposter from Wordpress (a private site, not the .com) to Dreamwidth? It turns out the one I was using doesn't work with scheduled posts, which I've been doing, and furthermore is abandonware so I'm deeply, deeply reluctant to pay money to use it to crosspost. And at this point, Dreamwidth is so legacy internet that nobody newer is crossposting to here.

Garden Photos

Jul. 8th, 2025 10:01 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
Shade cloth project is coming along but is not finished.  Here is a little walk through the garden.
The little fig tree is, well, little.
Pictures )




Firefly

Jul. 8th, 2025 10:01 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
Another successful ride on Firefly with my friend Kim riding Raja.  I was a little worried, the wind was blowing, coastal fog (rare this time of year) had cooled things off, and Firefly was objecting to everything from being groomed (normally she loves this) to having the bridle put on.  I walked for the first 1/2 mile of our "ride" because it was all downhill. Downhill invites faster speed and that isn't what I wanted.  Uphills usually follow downhills, so I mounted up and we went up for the next most of a mile, which calmed things down a lot.  She was never "bad" just a little snorty at first.  We worked on confidence, she did great, and only once needed Raja to take the lead and show her that the scary downhill with an eroded trail was perfectly safe.  We also worked on refining our cues.  The times that I have to use big gestures and insist on where I want to go are getting fewer and the times I can give a tiny squeeze of leg, or tightening of my fingers are getting more frequent.  At one point I leaned over a little, grabbed a gate and pushed it open a little further. It took some pressure to push, and I could see Firefly thinking hard about what was going on, but she stood perfectly still.  Oh, and we picked up trail ribbons from April's event. Firefly only once looked scared of the ribbon, and that was a big 3 color one with 18" streamers.  Like usual she thought about it, sniffed it and relaxed. If I can ride, at least a little, three or four times a week, we will make really fast progress.  Sorry, snuck out before M took any pics, but here is one of Firefly today being very, very serious about eating her evening meal.


P.S.  Yes, she has changed colors again.   In my last post, on June 19th, she was dark grey.  


gonna need some backfill

Jul. 8th, 2025 11:42 pm
marycatelli: (Default)
[personal profile] marycatelli
The heroine  has been given the run-around.

She deduces it, but since "go heal those people' is something she should do, she tries to puzzle things out.

I am picking up the pace again, and thinking that section is really going to need some work.  I'm sending her to Mass, but it will take more.

The Words of the Night

Jul. 8th, 2025 08:01 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli
The Words of the Night by C. Chancy

A historian is on a plane to Korea when it is attacked by a dragon.

Read more... )

(no subject)

Jul. 8th, 2025 01:25 pm
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
[personal profile] sholio
I have discovered Enemies to Lovers exchange. o deer.

THAT being said, I really need to put a cork in the new exchange signups for a bit. Summer of Horror and Temperature Flash both reveal somewhere around this weekend, as well as that being the Casefic submission deadline. I have a pinch hit, I have things to edit, and I haven't even started Just Married.

Today it's rainy AND smoky, a wonderful combination.

Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger

Jul. 8th, 2025 10:05 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Ellie is a Lipan Apache teenager in a world where magic, vampires, ghosts, and so forth are known to be real. She’s inherited the family gift for raising ghosts, though she only raises animals; human ghosts always come back wrong, and she’s happy with the companionship of her beloved ghost dog Kirby, not to mention her pet ghost trilobite. But when her cousin, who supposedly died in a car crash, returns in a dream to tell her he was murdered, she finds that knowing who killed him isn’t as helpful as one might imagine…

Ellie’s cousin Trevor told her the name of his killer, Abe Allerton from Willowbee, but he didn’t know why or how he was killed. Ellie enlists her best friend, Jay, a cheerleader with just enough fairy blood to give him pointy ears and the ability to make small lights. More importantly, he’s good at research. They learn that Willowbee is in Texas, near the town where Trevor lived with his wife, Lenore, and their baby. Jay brings in help: his older sister’s fiancé, Al, who’s a vampire.
All of them, plus Ellie’s parents and a ghost mammoth belonging to her grandmother, play a part in the effort to solve the mystery of Trevor’s death and bring his murderer to justice. And so, in a sense, will a major character who’s long dead (and not a ghost) but who’s a big presence in Ellie’s life: Six-Grand, her great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, the last person to have a gift as powerful as Ellie’s… and who vanished forever into the underworld.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mean, come on. GHOST TRILOBITE. GHOST MAMMOTH. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s heartfelt, it has lovely chapter heading illustrations, and it’s got some gorgeous imagery - I particularly loved a scene where the world transforms into an oceanic underworld, and Ellie sees a pod of whales swimming in the sky of a suburban neighborhood.

It's marketed as young adult and Ellie is seventeen, but the book feels younger (and so does Ellie.) I'd have no qualms handing it to an advanced nine-year-old reader, but it also appeals to adult me who misses the time when "urban fantasy" meant "our world, but with ghosts, elves, and so forth."

What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

Jul. 8th, 2025 11:27 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

 

I love planetary settlement novels, and I love alien communication novels, and Cam has given us both. When John Maraintha arrives on the planet Scythia, he has no particular intentions toward its inhabitants. It was never his intention to be there, and now that he is, he expects to serve as a doctor for the colonists. But he's simultaneously shut out of some parts of Scythian society and drawn into the puzzle of its sentient species and their communications. Their life cycles are so different from humans', but surely this gap can be bridged with goodwill and hard work, even in the scrubby high desert that serves as home for human and alien alike?

 

Science fiction famously touts itself as the literature of alienation; Cameron actually delivers on that here in ways that a lot of the genre is not even trying to do. The layers of alienation--and the layers of connection that can be found between them--are varied and complicated. This book is gentle and subtle, even though there are scenes were John's medical training is put to its bloodiest use. If you're tired of mid-air punching battles as the climax of far too many things, the very personal and very cultural staged climax of What We Are Seeking will be a canteen of water for you in this arid time. Gender, relationship, reproduction, and love mix and mingle in their various forms, some familiar and some new. I expect to be talking about this one for a long time after, and I can't wait for you to be able to join me in that.

A Mouthful of Dust, by Nghi Vo

Jul. 8th, 2025 09:21 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is another of the novellas featuring Cleric Chih and their astonishing memory bird Almost Brilliant, although Almost Brilliant does not get a lot of page time this go-round. This is mainly the story of hunger, desperation, shame, and unquiet ghosts. It's about what depths people might sink to when famine comes--in this story, a famine demon, personified, but the shape of the story won't be unfamiliar if you've read about more mundane famines.

The lines between horror and dark fantasy are as always unclear, but wherever you place A Mouthful of Dust, I recommend only reading it when you're fully prepared for something unrelentingly bleak.

Queen Demon, by Martha Wells

Jul. 8th, 2025 07:55 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not a stand-alone book. It's a close sequel to Witch King, and the characters and their situation are more thoroughly introduced in that volume. Unless you're a forgetful reader or specifically like to reread whole series when new installments come out, I think Wells gives you enough grounding to just pick this one up, but not enough for this to stand alone--it's not intended to.

If I had had to pick the title of this book, the word "alliances" would have figured heavily in it. I get that the two titles pair well this way, but this is a book substantially about dealing with one's allies--the ones who are definitely, definitely not friends as well as the ones Kai loves dearly who are not actually as reliable as he might have hoped. The other enemies of Hierarchy are not all immediately eager to team up with an actual demon; some of them require convincing that the enemy of their enemy really is their friend (VALID, because that is not a universally true thing). And of course Kai's own nearest and dearest are growing as people and have the growing pains associated with that. If you enjoyed Witch King, you're in for a treat as this is very much a continuation of all the things it was doing.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Arrogant traffic analyst Boyd Hakluyt is just a pawn in the struggle for Ciudad de Vados' future.

The Squares of the City by John Brunner

Recouping losses

Jul. 8th, 2025 07:10 am
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Air temperature 65 F, wind north 9 mph, rain shower on the weather radar but not seen here. Breakfast internalized after a "fasting" blood draw at a lab across town. Glad they open at 0600 . . .

On to coffee.

Profile

dancinghorse: (Default)
dancinghorse

August 2017

S M T W T F S
  12345
67 89101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 05:16 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios