i don't storm, i sunshower

grief update: i wasn't sure if i'd be able to make it to my friend's funeral, but my very sweet boyfriend very graciously offered to drive me there and back (no small feat, it's like 8 hours away before traffic). not how i wanted us to have our first road trip but i love him so much for doing this for me. also, weirdly, one of my mutuals on hockey tumblr also knew him personally and will be at the funeral, so. small world. 

shoehorning a book review in: interabled by shane and hannah burcaw. they're vloggers, and a married couple, and shane is disabled and hannah is not. i've been vaguely aware of their internet presence for several years. the book is a collection of stories about their relationship and other interabled relationships. good book. quick read. informative. nice and easy to breeze through even when i've been having a terrible week, so yeah, i guess i recommend

went to the big local library with my boyfriend the other day and walked out with three books, two of them involving "people go up in the air". one of them was MUCH better than the other. 

Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid (of Daisy Jones/Evelyn Hugo fame) follows two trainee astronauts as they enter into a lesbian relationship, and then one of them almost gets stranded in space while the other one is mission control. it's sad. it's totally gripping---the last part of the book especially had me locked the fuck in!!!!!!!! there's an awesome secondary conflict between the main character and her sister, where the mc is basically parenting her niece because her sister won't. it feels located in time. it is, honestly, basically everything i expected from one of Reid's books. i loved it and i really need to get around to reading everything else she's ever written. 

on the other hand, not they who soar by amanda flower... okay. i made two mistakes here. one was not clocking that this was the second book in a series. i realize this as i'm reading the author's note, and i'm like, okay, i'll give it a try and see if it's readable as a standalone. (it is, with a caveat, i'll get to that.) secondly this is very obviously a YA novel and unfortunately not a particularly good one. Flower clearly cares a lot about being historically accurate--the book is about orville and wilbur wright's real sister, solving a mystery at the st. louis exposition--but i got 40 pages into the book and it was already getting in the way--oh, i know this person from this place, my brothers are in these places with these people, all reported very factually, and that on top of a YA style of storytelling that no longer works for me at the age of 25. i do still read some YA, but i've given up on this one. that's why i can't say whether or not it can ACTUALLY stand alone, because within a day i am cutting my losses and not finishing it. maybe i'll buy a copy of the first book in the series for my little cousin and see how she likes it, idk. 

i do kind of tire of having to go to DW every time i finish a new book, but also, i like having a record of all the books i've read over the course of the year, as it turns out. 

i was in the middle of typing that last sentence and then got pulled away into work tasks for like an hour. maybe that's a sign. anyway,

hogfather: terry pratchett's death goes christmas! santa claus is murdered, by teeth hypnotism, and death takes over to make sure the sun will still rise in the morning. i raced through the back half of this one because it was due at the library and i couldn't renew it lol and was a good enough read to not make finishing it a daunting task. went pretty quickly. i like the "belief is a core part of humanity" and "what we believe does literally impact the workings of the universe" aspects. susan is a delightful character and suffers no fools and i love her. and teatime is for real kind of scary. so that's that on that. 

okay time for me to talk about hockey since that takes up an absurd amount of real estate in my brain these days. the four of you on the internet who read these posts may or may not be aware that gavin mckenna, who's predicted to go first in the NHL draft later this year, got arrested this week for punching someone in the face so hard he gave them a concussion. i don't really know about this kid and i don't really care about the draft (or prospects at all) - i know two things. 1) hes eighteen. that's very young. and 2) i'm pretty sure hes Indigenous???? my first thought when i saw that news article was "are people going to be racist about this". (could i check wikipedia right now? yes. am i going to? no, four people read this blog and none of them care about hockey, fact checking is for people with reach.) so like, the discussion rn is very onesidedly, he should not have done that but he's probably going to go high in the draft anyway, because hockey enables violence and toxic masculinity, especially domestic violence. THIS IS TRUE. IM NOT ABOUT TO SAY THAT ANY OF THIS IS WRONG. EIGHTEEN YEAR OLDS SHOULD NOT BE GOING TO BARS, THEY SHOULD NOT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE, AND THEY CERTAINLY SHOULDNT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE THAT HARD.

that being said. 

isn't it kind of fucked up how much fame we place on kids before they're even adults yet? hockey prospects are one example of this, but i'm also thinking of child reality/youtube personalities, kpop trainees, probably also other things that i know less about. it's cool that kids are exceptional, but then you throw them under the spotlight and surround them with adults who are ostensibly supposed to be looking out for them and then don't do that, instead only looking out for their own interests? isn't it fucked up how adults in their thirties and forties get furious at guys who can't even rent a car yet for not living up to already unreasonable expectations? (specifically thinking of the nolan patrick thing here and how the city of philadelphia absolutely contributed to making him a worse person because fans and media were so awful to him.) imagine growing up in that environment???? for years????? honestly once you think about that pressure cooker for longer than five minutes you start to wonder how most of them DO manage to keep their issues private. 

also like i do believe that every human being is capable of change and becoming better (=/= healing all the harm that they caused this is a take that requires more nuance than i'm willing to put in a dw post). yes, even that person youre thinking of in your head. until we die we are all capable of learning and growing and changing. (note that often people don't actually DO this. that is a different thing.) and it kind of sucks that this story is probably going to follow him forever, high in the draft or not. eighteen year olds should be allowed to be idiots without it being immortalized on the internet. 

this is much more a commentary on like, the right to privacy and internet moralizing and "fan spaces stop being weird about teenagers challenge" than it is about the many many structural institutional failings of the hockey industrial complex. that's another post and i'm not the right person to make it, i don't know nearly enough. 

well hey, it's been a minute! i've read one (1) book so far in 2026 and that is whipping girl, by julia serano, aka a seminal piece of transfeminist writing. i've got mildly complex feelings about this one. 

• i'm really into her different axes of sexism (oppositional and traditional) and how those interact but also contradict each other--and how her view of the main conflict is like, it's not being female that's suppressed, it's being feminine. i love this take partly because it breaks open a certain perspective for me re: why trans women are treated the way they are but also just, like, i think she's right? hard agree here?
• particularly she talks about, like, men will be less scared of femininity if it's normalized (massively oversimplifying here but this is a dw post for 5 people so whatever). i have straight men in my life who paint their nails. i guess they're doing the most? but no for real like, the guys i hang around are guys who have traditionally "feminine" traits e.g. being quieter, emotionally intelligent, etc whereas the people i avoid, vice versa. funny how that can be kind of a litmus test for if someone's gonna be cool
• she got personal about her experience here without being too revealing, that's a fine line to walk and i think she knew that going in and didn't WANT to cross that line--especially as she pointed out how the gory details of transition are so often sensationalized. thought she struck a good balance there
• a lot of the stuff she talks about in here re: the social-constructionist gender model and trans-exclusive feminism i've been familiar with for a while (see: tumblr, historically women's college with a trans-inclusive admissions policy, one of my besties from said college, my ex) but she's often cited in discussions about those things so it's cool to read it straight from the source
• couldn't quite keep the difference between her use of transsexual and transgender in my head because those terms are so conflated now 20 years later. like i think i see what she's getting at but it felt sort of slippery
• subconscious sex vs presentation vs gender identity was a big emotional game changer for me. i've spent the past. hmm. checks calendar. 7 years pingponging back and forth between various types of gender expression trying to figure out why something feels so off but i can never fix it and then all of a sudden im like oh. actually i like presenting as feminine, i just also think i should have different body parts than the ones i have. fucked up. not really anything i can do abt that though i like my big long skirts so female social gendering it is 
• having read some queer theory (not a lot), i get why she disagrees with them and their social-constructionist view, i think there's more nuance to be drawn out of that particular discussion but it's all purely theoretical at that level so whatever. 

good book, made me think, there were parts of her theory that i wasn't so into but that wasn't really why i was reading it so whatever

a few complaints to cap off the post:

• man, remember when my local hockey team won games? damn. happy the sabres are getting out of the basement but did it have to be at our expense
• my all-hands work weekend in november conflicts with a friend's wedding and i'm big mad about it
• woke up this morning and the temperature was 23 f with a feelslike of 9. evil evil evil

merry holiday to anyone celebrating and merry wednesday to anyone who isn't! i have made it through a series! after long last! i read the last wayfarers book, the galaxy and the ground within!

honestly this may have been my favourite of the four. it has less plot than book 2 - and i know lack of plot/stakes was my primary complaint about the first and third books, i know - but there is that lasting tension of, what are all these characters hiding? is speaker's sister alive? what will pei decide about her relationship? when will the station's operations resume? etc, etc. so like it felt like there was stuff going on and chambers didn't just immediately spit out a bunch of facts and go "here's my world, look at it!". 

a thing i thought this book did well: the akarak! and more broadly, the idea of what does it mean to be othered? to be exiled, or to choose to live separate, or to go outside of your traditional cultural norms? but especially the way the conflict between speaker and pei was handled and also? chambers noting that many akarak kids are born disabled in some way because of the conditions they were conceived in. that's interesting to me as we know from displaced/disenfranchised human populations that yeah, that's some bad shit that can happen! that's what happens when you destroy somebody's home!

a thing i thought this book did less well: pei's whole deal. i didn't feel like you needed to have read book 1/be familiar with ashby to understand what was going on here, which is good, but - and maybe my perspective is shaded by the fact that i'm someone who does want children - but what it means to choose to not be a parent is different on a species level? like because the aeluons reproduce so differently i'm not sure that the comparison and moral chambers is trying to draw here actually resonates. and honestly the way that it's framed - hanging around humans makes pei more human, therefore, she doesn't have to reproduce - makes it seem like oh yeah, human behaviour and human morals actually is the gold standard for this society, which i'm less than about. i wish there had been maybe a more culturally specific reason for pei to not want to mate. but again i want kids so maybe that's just me

i remembered about the library book i didn't write a post for almost immediately after publishing my post complaining about how i'd forgotten it and then proceeded not to do anything about it for a while. so without further ado: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

this is... fine. it was recommended to me by multiple friends and is overall a just fine semi-murder mystery. secret societies and fucked up families. the point of view character is a bit nonstandard for this genre, shes this quirky loose cannon brit with childhood trauma whose primary motivation is finding her missing brother. she was fine. the whole book was fine. not really a standout in my opinion but i wouldn't call it a waste of time either you know? although the ending was perhaps a little TOO neat and the plot point about one of the suspects being gay got glossed over just a little too quickly lol 

hi hello it's me back to write another incoherent and conflicted take on a becky chambers book

record of a spaceborn few is interesting to me as someone who studied cultural anthropology. it's not a terrible take on the discipline-ghuh'loloan, or however you spell her name, is definitely participating in the local culture, asking questions, and noting how her presence changes the behaviors of The Locals. however she does then immediately use her influence to change the local culture and then becky frames that as being a good thing where in actuality (i say, a citizen of the imperial core) it's more complicated than that. not really my main issue with this book though--not a significant issue at all really, just, fascinating to me as an outsider, sci-fi take on a discipline i know more than nothing about. one of these days i will make my boyfriend's sister, a trained archaeologist, read it and see what she thinks. 

nah, but like. i get what she was trying to go for here. a snapshot of life in a specific place at a specific time; exploring questions about cultural change, transitional periods, diaspora and homecoming, and coming of age. but never did it feel like the stakes were actually all that high. i was into kip's story a bit, i enjoyed isabel's narration even if i wasn't compelled by her mini plot, but i think actually chambers did her book a disservice by killing off sawyer and using him as a plot point. the questions about homecoming, and making new traditions, and finding belonging in a new-old-new place, that was the story i was most interested in and the one that seemed the most like it was going to Go Somewhere and Say Something. i wanted to watch him settle in!! i wanted to watch him grit his teeth and suffer through sanitation duty, and realize that he was working with space pirates and then get a chance to actually DO something about it! i liked the second book in this verse because it felt like it had stakes and a plot, but this book really could have done with fewer pov characters and fewer storylines, a little more focus.

u/thegreatratsby you can read this even if you're not done i don't think anything i've put in here is too spoilery. so funny to me that we picked up this book at the same time hiiii

anyway. on my boyfriend's recommendation (crazy sentence i just typed. this is happening to me?!?!?!?!) i read blindsight by peter watts which is hard sci-fi that leans very hard into 1) horror 2) the question of "why is consciousness". author makes a pretty compelling argument for the fact that consciousness is not useful. oh well, peter. it's what makes us human. 

other things that were interesting: various cyborg characters, with varying definitions of how to be a cyborg; a scientific explanation for vampires that's never really dug into but is probably a whole book in and of itself; unreliable narrator who thinks he doesn't have emotions but secretly has been feeling emotions the whole time.

this is a good book i thought and you should read it if you're into hard sf and are okay with things not making a lot of sense and also somewhat graphic horror and the kind of read that makes you hyper-conscious of what your body is doing (watts' aliens are on some weeping angels shit). wait yeah so the premise of the book is the first humans sent to space to try and track down and make contact with some aliens after those aliens produce a light show on earth and then induce some physics fuckery

i don't have TOO much else to say, and i don't know how to explain the context of the thing i'm about to type, but one of the paragraphs i sent to my boyfriend is as follows: "it's sort of like this thing we talk about in anthropology sometimes - when the discipline first became popular there was a lot of talk about objectivity and trying to be separate from the people we observe, but in recent years the trend is more that we're an inextricable part of our own research and we change the community dynamic by intruding in it (/that objectivity isn't real) so there's more of a trend towards people writing about communities closer to home". as best as i can explain that in my "cultural anthropology and mostly theoretical undergrad degree" way. this is relevant to the unreliable narrator shit and i think it's interesting but unfortunately i have already taken my melatonin and therefore don't want to explain the whole sequence of events as to why

also on his recommendation i've been watching firefly. show of all time. thoughts on that to come, maybe? 

guess who procrastinated again

anyway. book #1: the tower of the swallow, the next Witcher book. continues the same old story: everyone wants to be in control of ciri, ciri wants to be in control of herself, bad magic shit happens, people get murdered. some thoughts--i am HERE for ciri's villain era. she deserves it everyone has treated her so badly; very curious about the vortex portal situation; i really enjoyed the found footage/mixed media vibe here. we've got court transcripts, ciri telling this story around the hearth, jaskier's memoirs. (also - so sad that they ultimately get destroyed and never read. that's mean!); these books are so interesting because ultimately, everything sucks. i have no idea how any of these people are going to get out of this and i'm not sure they're going to, frankly? every time someone tries to fix things, rescue someone, get back on the right track, work together, it turns out to be JUST THE WRONG THING and then everything goes to shit and people die. interesting. 

book #2: a closed and common orbit by becky chambers, the second wayfarers book. overall i found it much more focused than the first book--felt like there were actual stakes in here, actual tension and plot and themes being explored, rather than "wouldn't it be cool if" loosely assembled into a narrative. much more interested in jane's storyline than sidra's, because again, that had a concrete goal rather than just nebulous self-discovery. but i did enjoy both parts, i found both characters likable and relatable. i enjoy this idea of what does it mean to make who you are? what does it mean to belong when you've been othered since your creation? the worldbuilding continues to be good, i'm more interested in reading the other two books now that i know chambers is actually capable of plot. 

one of the reasons i've been so distracted lately is i've been seeing someone. different person than the crush i spent some time talking about on this blog back in the spring. totally separate person who i wasn't expecting to have something serious with but that's what's happening. guys, this shit is fucking scary?????? like what do you mean i have to have conversations about my emotions and bravely explain what i'm anxious about? what do you mean i have feelings that i wasn't expecting? what do you MEAN SOMEBODY LIKES ME ENOUGH TO WANT TO KISS ME AND TO TELL ME THAT HE LIKES ME ALL THE TIME???? i keep waiting for something to go wrong, i keep looking around corners because like it's too good this doesn't happen to me. he's super sweet, he's been very understanding about my mental health stuff and i think the two of us have the same wiring in certain ways so it's easy to understand when we explain what we're thinking to each other. it's been six weeks. it's making my head spin. 

recent read: Janelle Monae's The Memory Librarian, a series of short stories set in the universe of her Dirty Computer album. I have not listened to Dirty Computer and I'm honestly not sure what I was expecting out of this book, but I loved it! Janelle Monae can do anything, seems like. For the unfamiliar, this verse involves a surveillance state that deals heavily with memory: memories can be uploaded for currency, they're seen as a public good, and are surveyed, while delinquent populations (aka "dirty computers": queer, black/brown, or anyone else otherwise considered deviant) get their memories wiped as part of reprogramming. Very interesting concept and one that seems uncomfortably plausible at the same time. 

My favourite theme in this book was less about memory, though, and more about time. In one story, a couple moves into an apartment that contains a closet where time stops. This one has a lot to say about class difference and ideology versus practice; that's as coherent as I'll get, because this is the one that I finished and then had to stare out the window of the subway for the rest of my commute and not read anything else. In another story, the daughter of a mind-wiped revolutionary receives a magic stone that can turn back time, and she uses it to protect her sister from detainment--after having the most risky night of her life. And then the last story is about kids who develop an altar that takes them into a more hopeful future. The stories also have a lot to say about community care--what happens when your biological family is gone, not necessarily for not wanting you, but because they can't take care of you? What happens when you have to take care of them? When push comes to shove, who throws you under the bus and who can you count on? It's a great book that is explicitly queer, explicitly Afrofuturist, and... explicitly hopeful? In all the stories (with the exception of the time closet one, sort of), the protagonists find a way to hold on, fight back, and reclaim something of their own. Really, REALLY good. Also a book that made me think a lot about how time doesn't necessarily need to be linear (a combination of reading the time altar story, having been really fascinated by Arrival back in college, and reading a fanfiction amnesia story lol). Like, what would be different if we didn't experience time that way, you know?

In the same vein of "fascist surveillance state", I recently read a hockey fanfiction (I know, I know) set in a, now, thankfully safely au 2026, where US-Canada relations deteriorate to the point of cold war and nationalistic terrorism, and the NHL is dissolved to make way for two separate leagues. One guy, who gets given the oldest daughter syndrome treatment in just about every fic as the oldest of three brothers who all play pro hockey, chooses to stay in Canada with his team while his brothers are in the US, and it seems like they cut off contact with him and he has to make hard choices to figure himself out and keep the trust of his teammates. Real interesting shit. Not too shippy either--I don't read hockey RPF for the shipping so much as I read it for everything else going on in hockey RPF. Like the intense and just a little too realistic dystopia AUs.