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My ability to get any sleep has deranged like a spiderweb on LSD, but just a moment ago in the street it was thinly but distinctly snowing. I turned on WHRB and got Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time (1944). I still can't believe Opera Boston folded right before they would have staged the Hermetic crack of The Midsummer Marriage (1955).Current Music: Girl Ray, "Space Song"
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Mother's Benefits become the means by which British governments provide British women with the same benevolent management Britain once provided to India, Ireland, and Africa.
Benefits by Zoë Fairbairns
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Three books new to me. All are fantasies, two are series.
Books Received, November 15 to November 21, 2025
Poll #33866 Books Received, November 15 to November 21, 2025
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41 Which of these upcoming books look interesting?
View AnswersMother of Death and Dawn by Carissa Broadbent (March 2026)
4 (9.8%) Tides of Fortune by Lauryn Hamilton Murray (June 2026)
1 (2.4%) Everybody’s Perfect by Jo Walton (June 2026)
30 (73.2%) Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%) Cats!
30 (73.2%)
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I'm going through the free university mini-course Media and Power from the University of Iowa, and am going to try and take notes as I go. (Yes I do intend to get back to the Ursula K LeGuin book. One day. Shh)
This handbook guides students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power. The authors want students to not only gain the ability to critically analyze the languages and discourses – textual, visual, audio, and code – that people use to create and interpret media content, but also to understand the overarching context: media possess immense power in contemporary societies around the world.
So far there has been A Lot of focus on US political reporting, which is very reasonable but is not actually my preferred area of focus.
( Read more... )
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My mother referred earlier this evening to the state of my health as farshlimmert, which definitely sounds classier than my saying it's gone down the tubes. On the other hand, I do not apparently have TB, so we can hold off on the consumptive poet jokes a little while longer yet.
As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) selkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, slowly straightens to perceive, in the cheval glass where a moment ago he was convulsing, a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.
The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).
P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?Current Music: Lucinda Williams, "The World's Gone Wrong (feat. Brittney Spencer)"
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I would definitely found an SF magazine.
Most mags struggle with handling submissions but I had a moment of insight: all I need to do is tell writers to send me _good_ stories. Their crap, they can submit elsewhere. Bang! Workload down by 99%.
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dissectionist: Back in MY DAY, we had to read Penthouse Forum letters into a tape recorder and put the resulting tape into a first-gen Teddy Ruxpin. Nowadays kids don’t even have to work to turn their teddy bear into a creep.
Context reports FoloToy’s Shock and Surprise! at what happens when you feed a kid’s toy OpenAI.
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A young scholar and his diverse companions are dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission deep into enemy territory.
The Door on the Sea (The Raven and the Eagle, volume 1) by Caskey Russell
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A park guide's life is upended by a pandemic and her charming, idiot son.
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
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"Could it be that (Superman) hides behind the darkest disguise of all? Could it be that he is a woman?"
"(...) What made you ask that?"
"Because he has compassion. He aids people in trouble. He helps the weak. "
It is possible the bad guy in The Secret of Superman has issues.
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This new Yeld 2E Bundle presents the 2024 Second Edition of The Magical Land of Yeld, the all-ages tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Atarashi Games about young heroes (called Friends) finding their way home.
Bundle of Holding: Yeld 2E
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Civilization has crashed, humanity may be virtually extinct, but library books must be returned to their proper facility!
The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, volume 2 by Haruo Iwamune (Translated by John Neal)
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As far as I can tell, after three or so nights of pain-driven sleeplessness broken only by the occasional hour unconscious, I crashed so hard last night that I may have slept as much as fifteen hours, which would be amazing except that we are now on the later side of autumn and I slept out all the sunlight in the day. My entire plan had been to take a walk this afternoon. Tomorrow I have a round of doctor's appointments starting early in the morning, but it's not exactly the same thing. Have some links.
1. Mythic Delirium Books is reviving! In order to celebrate the relaunch and their ten-year anniversary, they are offering a deal on three of their most acclaimed collections, all of which I can recommend from reading as well as general enthusiasm for the press and its authors. Various combinations and formats available and an enticing pre-order bundled if you order through their own website. Check it out! Mythic Delirium was the home of my first published poem twenty-four years ago when it was a cardstock-covered 'zine with black-and-white interior illustrations and my affection for it has not dimmed even now that it publishes actual trade-bound books.
2. Until selkie sent it over to me, I had no idea an online archive had been compiled of the Call, the historic English-language newsletter of the Workers Circle. I am thrilled, even if the first article I selected was, in 2025, a little like being socked in the jaw by 1942:
America is celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Bill [of] Rights. The Bill of Rights is the Magna Charta of our fundamental liberties such as freedom of speech and press, of petition and assembly, of religion. Together with these go concomitant rights such as the security of the home against the military, against search and seizure, and the recognition of due process of law and trial by jury. In brief, the Bill of Rights stands as a guarantee that the individual and the home are inviolate unless certain clearly defined legal procedures are followed.
Before the rise of totalitarianism, we took these freedoms for granted. They were part of the air we breathed. Now we realize that they are a precious heritage, that they are worth preserving and defending. America is not Utopia. Unemployment, economic crises, poverty and need in the midst of plenty, slums and avoidable sickness, are still with us. But as long as the Bill of Rights prevails, as long as we have freedom of speech and of assembly, of petition and protest, of criticism and political organization, there is hope abundant. With these freedoms, we can go on working for the things we hold dear and good, inveighing against injustice wherever we find it, improving the lot of the masses. Without these, we are lost, doomed either to abject silence or the concentration camp.
3. I missed it for Armistice Day, but Frederic Manning's "Leaves" (1917) is a delicately upsetting war poem and completely at the other end of effects of language from his novel Her Privates We (1929).
Cone of Silence (U.S. Trouble in the Sky, 1960) does such wonderfully anoraky suspense about human factors in aviation accidents that it should not be faulted for including Peter Cushing in its cast and then not having him play the brilliant, haunted designer of the Atlas Phoenix which seems to be doing too close an impression of the de Havilland Comet for anyone's comfort, but I did have to adjust to that being Noel Willman.
P.S. Dammit: now TCM has tabletized itself and in the process apparently expunged its considerable database of linked articles, not to mention the hitherto useful indices or even listings of cast and crew. Because what I want when considering a movie is not even to know who's in it unless I can recognize someone from the visual tile which could be anything from a random frame to a production still to part of a poster. The player itself has also been reorganized into a much less pleasant interface. Is there some kind of literal race on to the enshittification? Isn't that one where the only way to win is not to play?Current Music: Girl Ray, "Tell Me"
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Castaways are trapped in a terrible Randall Garrett story!
The Queen Bee by Randall Garrett
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Along with a lot of the interwebs...
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Not over this budget, anyway.
It boggles me that Canada had to endure 13 days of ambiguity about the budget vote. What next, an election cycle that lasts five whole weeks? The suspense would be palpable.
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EPIRBs
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Nov. 17th, 2025 @ 05:00 am
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