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Challenge 71: Goodbye Kiss

Title: Goodbye Kiss
Artist: mekare
Rating: G
Fandom: Star Trek Discovery
Characters/Pairings: Paul Stamets/Hugh Culber
Content Notes: tried out two new grey markers with this one (Sakura Koi brush pens)

Current Mood: mellow

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Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Earth is ruled by the authoritarian Mandate, which like all such governments is constantly alert for threats to its stability. This extends to its scientific research: although the Mandate has explored space and discovered a number of exoplanets (a few of which have some form of life), it still insists that scientific discoveries must support the philosophy of the Mandate, which holds that human beings are the pinnacle of creation and that other life forms must all be in the process of striving to achieve that same state of being.

Ecologist and xeno-ecologist Arton Daghdev chafes against both these mental manacles and the Mandate in general. Some time before the story opens, he becomes part of a cell of would-be revolutionaries. After discovery of his improper views and rebellious actions, he is sentenced to what is meant to be a short life assisting research on the planet Imno 27g, casually known as Kiln for the strange clusters of pottery buildings scattered over its surface.

Life as a prisoner on Kiln within the research enclave is brutal in all the ways any such prison can be, when the prisoners are nothing but human-shaped machinery to accomplish the goals of their jailers. The Mandate's leadership has absolute control over who among their prisoners lives or dies, and if anyone should harbor the intent to escape, the environment outside the base is all too lively. The death rate among the workers is appalling, but new shipments of convicted crooks and malcontents arrive all the time, so it hardly matters.

None of the weird aliens seem to be builders of the sort needed to create the clusters of mysterious structures or indeed intelligent in any way beyond, perhaps, the level of social insects on Earth. Yet somehow the small, dysfunctional cadre of scientists on Kiln must serve up the desired tidbits of discovery to keep their commandant happy with them: evidence that there once were intelligent humanoids on Kiln.

( Cut for more, including some spoilers )

I am an emotional person, and I want to like at least some of the characters about whom I'm reading. Daghdev is prickly, snarky, and fatalistic — but then, he has cause. He's also an unreliable narrator who only reveals to the reader what he wants, when he wants. The situation is really excruciating: people with a deep dislike of body horror might want to avoid this book. And there is not, in fact, a happy ending (at least not IMO).

On the other hand, this is very well written. For me, it moved along at a fantastic clip, and when I went back to check some particulars for this write-up, I found myself reading far more than I had intended because the story caught me up again. Some of the scientific ideas reminded me of other works (Sue Burke's Semiosis surfaced in my thoughts a couple of time), and sometimes I was reminded of something more elusive, a source that I can't recall. Does anyone else who has already read this have thoughts on the book's likely ancestors?

From my viewpoint, this was one of the most "science fictional" of this year's finalists. I think it might be my first choice in the vote.

Jim Shooter (1951 - 2025)

Former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, 73, has reportedly passed away from esophageal cancer.

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bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales

The English-language rulebook and supplements for Broken Tales, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of upside-down fairy tales from Italian game publisher The World Anvil Publishing.

Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales

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check in and chat

Admin Post: Community Check-In for June 2025

Drawesome Monthly Check-In Post

Today's the last day of June, and we'd love to have you check in and chat with us. How have things been with you this past month?

Did you sign up for or take part in any fandom activities in June, or have you been working on any personal art projects? Are you currently trying to meet a deadline? Feel free to share upcoming art challenges that have got you excited, any frustrations you've been experiencing, possible goals for the next month, and so on.

Reminder: A Round-Up for the Pride! Challenge will be posted this week, and a new monthly challenge will be issued over the weekend. :)

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clarke award

Clarke Award Finalists 2003

2003: PM Blair embraces hilariously transparent lies to justify the invasion of Iraq, two million Britons reveal the power of public outrage when they protest the Iraq War to no effect, and the Coalition of the Billing (UK included) faces an occupation of Iraq that will no doubt be entirely without unforeseen challenges or consequences.

Poll #33305 Clarke Award Finalists 2003

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Which 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Separation by Christopher Priest
8 (16.0%)

Kiln People by David Brin
14 (28.0%)

Light by M. John Harrison
12 (24.0%)

The Scar by China Miéville
20 (40.0%)

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
25 (50.0%)

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
26 (52.0%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Separation by Christopher Priest
Kiln People by David Brin
Light by M. John Harrison
The Scar by China Miéville
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

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For anyone I've successfully lured: my top Disco Elysium tips

* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

~~Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.~~

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.

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in review

June 2025 in review

I survived another dance season. Go me.

21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%),1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).

More details at the other end of the link.

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meme,
poetry

“slowly lurching toward your favorite city / pierced through the heart but never killed”

For Poetry Monday, after an influencer of Pound, Pound himself—at least in part:

The Sole Survivor, Rai San’yō, tr. Ezra Pound

A force cut off
Fighting hard,
Shut around.

I burst the bonds,
I alone,
I returned,

Fleeing by night
Through the crags of the border.

My sword is broken,
My horse fallen.
The hero drags his corpse to his native mountains.

Rai (1780-1832) was an Edo-period historian and poet. In November 1915, Pound attended a London performance of sword dances by Itō Michio (1892-1961), some of which were accompanied by songs sung by Uchiyama Masami (I can’t find good dates on this guy), one of them being this. This translation (made with Uchiyama’s assistance, credited as “from notes by”) was first published in the Dec 1916 issue of Future without naming the author. The original title was “Kogun Funto,” which more literally means “exhausted warrior,” and the original form was a single four-line stanza.

—L.

Subject quote from Anti-Hero, Taylor Swift.

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Civic Duty: Done

The EHRC consultation on their code of practice closes today. I learnt about it yesterday, which is not ideal, and have just spend around 2-3h hours filling it in.

https://transactual.org.uk/equality-act-campaign/responding-to-the-ehrc-consultation/

has guidance and talking points. You don’t need to fill out everything, but every voice helps.

It’s a transphobic mess. Their stance is basically that it’s fine to get trans people coming and going; they believe in the the ‘trans women are better athletes’ myth and don’t believe that trans women should see gynaecologists.

It’s ugly. I have little hope to have made a difference, but I am spitting mad.

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theoretically I do things but what do I do

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Survived another dance season

Final show: a 5.5 hour bhangra show that was only 6.5 hours long.

Among my final achievements this season, discovering as I hoisted the last of many garbage bags into the dumpster that the bag was leaking coffee. My last achievement was ducking to the men's to wash my hands, discovering someone had plugged the sinks and turned on the taps, and stopping the flood in time.

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life

A sweaty sausage

So I have tendinitis in my wrist, which means I now need to wear a brace. This is really annoying because it gets in the way of doing anything. I can't draw with it on :( Even typing is a fucking hassle. Wearing it in the heat makes me feel like a sausage. A sweaty, sweaty sausage.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Sylt

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Ironheart (TV Series) Episodes 1 - 3

Aka the series which was delayed for years, with the result that there is much preemptive sceptism. Having watched the first three episodes which got dropped a few days ago, I very much like what I'm seeing so far. The way the series provides a distinct feeling of a place and people reminds me of what the show Ms Marvel did with the Pakistani community in New Jersey - in this case, Riri Williams comes from the Chicago South Side, as does the director, google tells me, and that's where she returns to in the series' pilot.

( Spoilers could make an Iron Suit in a cave, but would need the cash to be brought to the cave first )

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To Walk The Night by William Sloane

Jerry's romance with the brilliant, beautiful, eccentric Selena is book-ended with death: first, Selena's husband's, then Jerry's.

To Walk The Night by William Sloane

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games

PSA

Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in

astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.

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series: bleach

(no subject)

I got to episode 237 of Bleach and am now in the midst of filler again, sigh. Even during the parts adapting stuff from the manga, the anime team thought we needed two episodes of Omaeda. And adapting fake Karukura town stuff but not being able to show gore meant that when Matsumoto was gored and everyone was panicking they couldn't show that and it seemed a little silly, because there was no visible wound. But at the same time, the horrors of Ayon were otherwise well realised... I do love the complicated interactions between Matsumoto and Hinamori.

As far as the filler arc I'm in now. Mixed bag, tbh. I've long heard it's one of the better filler arcs, but being better than the Shunsuke Amagai arc isn't saying much. I had the bad taste to actually enjoy the Bount arc 🤣 though.

I have just finished rereading the early urban fantasy parts of Bleach and the Soul Society arc. They're so tightly written and have an energy that leaps off the page. There are certain things that don't hit the same way now that I know the twists, but that just means I admire the skill that goes into making it all come together. It's been said before that the problem with later Bleach is that it's overstuffed, and it's really not wrong. Soul Society arc is such a ride. I feel like I love different things every time. I was especially vibing Renji and Byakuya this time, but sometimes I'm most unhinged about the Chad stuff, or about Ishida, or the 11th div, or the Shibas, or Yoruichi and Soi Feng.... The "why didn't you take me with you" always gets me.

Honestly there's a lot of later stuff that felt like asspulls at the time, but if you reread this arc already knowing it seems fairly well supported, like Yachiru turning out to be Kenpachi's sword, or everything with Gin. Which like, don't get me wrong, plenty of stuff in later arcs is still obviously asspulls like everything KT did with Unohana. But there's a lot of things later on that I feel would have more impact as obvious character growth moments if it weren't so overstuffed with characters that you forget between chapters about such and such. There's so much cool stuff in the fake Karakura town arc, and a bunch of things that pay off later on, but there's so much time and plot and excess new characters between the things set up there and when a lot of them pay off that if you're not paying close attention to a specific character's arc you might not even notice it. Like when Iba lectures Ikkaku to grow the fuck up and get over your bullshit and try to win a fight, even if it means stabbing someone in the back, and the next time Ikkaku shows up in the Fullbring arc he's stabbing someone in the back. But there's so much crap between those points it's easy to miss there's actual character growth there.

There's some great more obvious character stuff I've always loved with Matsumoto, Hinamori, Yumichika and Kira in that arc. But then there's also old man Yama being super boring.

Even in Hueco Mundo I don't get why we spend so much time on Szayelapporo, but then I love the never ending Ulquiorra v Ichigo stuff. But the latter has a clear emotional component and the former is just mad scientist that is hard to kill. Szayelapporo takes forever to defeat, Renji & Ishida are stuck against him forever and then Mayuri shows up and it's like, okay, this guy is just in the way, why should I care?

Whereas with Ulquiorra v Ichigo, there's an obvious emotional issue as well. Which is that even though Ulquiorra literally has a hole where his heart should be, he's obviously fallen for Orihime, and she's there watching the fight so there's something at stake.

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Misc Books: Helene Hanff, Lauren Tarshis, Stuart Turton

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.

I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis

The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

I can see no way in which this could go horribly wrong

Police introduce system to facilitate targeting neurodiverse people.

Federal Funding Update, the NPR version

Pursuant to yesterday's (locked) post where I discussed federal public health funding:

'Where's our money?' CDC grant funding is moving so slowly layoffs are happening (NPR)

God, that's eerie, to see NPR saying the same thing I was saying.

The grants mentioned in the article are all national in scope, btw: it's everybody who's not getting these grants, not just Texas or North Carolina. These grants aren't flashy or sexy, but they absolutely save lives.