dilickjm | Reading

It occurred to me the other day that I've got a lot of trips planned in August. I've got 5 trips planned in just 4 weeks!

Aug. 4 I'm making a "rubber band" trip (out and back same day) to Phoenix

The week of the 11th I'm headed to Chicago on on a business trip for 4 days of sales training

On the 18th I've got another rubber band trip to Phoenix

The week of the 25th Hawk and I are traveling to Toronto to see family and visit waterfalls.

Somewhere in the middle of all that we've got a weekend road trip to the Eastern Sierra planned.

As I noted in a blog last night, travel is what inspires a lot of my blogging— when I have energy left to write. 😔 We'll see how much I write this month. It could be a little... or a lot.

canyonwalker

I lost my tempo in July. My blogging tempo, that is. For the month I met my mid-level goal of 1.5 blogs/day, scraping in with a 1.55 average, but my pace across the month was not even. I missed my baseline goal of blogging every day.

I churned out journal entries at a rate of 2/day for the first half of the month. My writing was powered by enjoyable activities on a several days long road trip to the Oregon Cascades. But around mid month I lost steam. Even with a few blogs from Oregon still in my backlog I just... couldn't even. I had not one but three missed days in July. Three days when I didn't post to my blog. Before July I only missed two days across a whole year.

Why so many misses last month? I'm not sure. As I noted at the time, partly it was running short on energy, partly it was running short on care. ("Short on care" is the polite form of the expression, "Short on f---s to give". 😨)

It certainly wasn't lack of things to write about. I began the month with a healthy backlog of things to finishing writing about. During July I not only didn't get to anything on that backlog, I grew the backlog. I still haven't finished blogging about our trip to the Oregon Cascades at the start of the month, and I'm at least 4 blogs behind on last weekend's North Coast roadtrip. Why don't I enjoy writing about doing enjoyable things? 😣

canyonwalker

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #4
Sue-meg State Park · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 12:30pm

Saturday morning we drove from Garberville up past Eureka and Arcata on the north coast to Agate Beach. Agate Beach is a perennial favorite of Hawk's because it's a great place to troll for rocks, particularly agates. Visiting this beach to go rock-hounding is one of the centerpieces of this weekend trip. And it's a thing we've been meaning to do for... over a year now. It took us this long to get around to it. (We finally made concrete plans when I threw a fit earlier in the week about too many weekends lolling around at home.)

Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park (Jul 2025)

Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park (Jul 2025)

A visit to Agate Beach starts with a walk down from the cliffs. Fortunately there's a good trail here, with switchbacks at the top and stairs at the bottom. This is part of a state park, the recently renamed Sue-meg State Park. It was called Patrick's Point when we visited here a few times in the past. California State Parks renamed it in 2021 to the traditional name used by the Hurok people.

Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park (Jul 2025)

Agate Beach has always seemed like a quiet, remote area. Not so much today, though. Today the day-use parking lot was nearly full, and not just with people who came to visit the beach in general but people who came specifically for rock-hounding.

Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park (Jul 2025)

It was obvious most people were here for rock-hounding because they were all carrying specially designed shovels for picking rocks on the beach. It's like someone posted on Facebook, "OMG rockhounding at agate beach is the bestest thing EVAR!" and helpfully included a link to their shovel-selling page on Etsy. Because everyone, like dozens of people, had basically the same shovel. 🤣

Well, Hawk was doing it old-school, picking rocks by hand. We started near the bottom of the trail, where we'd always found so many things on past visits, but gradually migrated further out on the beach as the center area was getting pretty well picked-over by all the other rock-hounds.

Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park (Jul 2025)

On previous trips Hawk came home with quite a haul from Agate Beach. Today she was more selective a took only a handful of rocks. Partly that's because she's become more knowledgeable of the kind of rocks on the beach. Most of the stones here are basalt. Most of the white ones, which people commonly mistake for agate, are quartz. In fact many people proudly showed Hawk zip-lock bags full of stones they'd picked up with their shovels— oddly, identically sized zip-lock bags they picked up with their identically designed shovels— only for Hawk to tell them that all but 1 or 2 of the pieces in their bags were quartz.

I found a lot of pretty stones in olive green and orange-red colors, many with banded shades. Hawk identified these as jasper. She already has a lot of jasper, so we left those stones for others to find.

On previous trips I found a lot of sand dollars out here. There were none today. I don't know if that's a seasonality thing or if they had already been scooped up by all the other beachcombers.

canyonwalker

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #3
Redcrest · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 9am

This morning we got up around 7:30 at our motel in Garberville. The main reason I picked this particular tiny town for Friday night halfway, as opposed to pushing 30-45 minutes further north to a larger town along US 101, was to do a special drive in the quiet hours of the morning today. The Avenue of the Giants.

Watch on YouTube

The Avenue of the Giants begins just north of Garberville and runs 31 miles, roughly paralleling highway 101. But for most of the drive you can't tell that you're close to a major north-south artery with 4 lanes of cars and trucks whizzing past at 65mph. Instead you're on a quiet country two-lane that winds among stately trees that can reach over 300 feet tall. The oldest of these trees are over 2,000 years old; though most of the trees in these groves probably are just 500-700 years old.

We dropped the top on our convertible, cranked the heat (because it's chilly out this morning!), and enjoyed the 360° view.

In beauty I walk. Even when I drive my car.

canyonwalker

When I wrote about age gap relationships yesterday one thing I wondered about is, what's normal? Well, I didn't just wonder. My cursory research turned up at least one reasonable study. "Reasonable", meaning scientifically rigorous and comprehensive. Simply polling people on social media is not rigorous. Even the journalist who basically polled people on social media in the article I wrote about yesterday admitted it doesn't represent reality.

An article I found from a few months ago in Psychology Today cites a recent study on the matter. "Age Gaps in Relationships: What Men and Women Prefer" (29 Jan 2025) cites a study published in December 2024 about the relative ages of partners at the start of relationships. The interesting finding is how the age gap preference changes over time and how it's different for men and women.

The study found that for people beginning a relationship in their early to mid 20s, men on average pair with a partner 3 years younger... and women on average pair with a partner 3 years older. There's a pleasing symmetry to that. And it also matches what I heard, as a matter of pop psychology, when I was in that age group many years ago. Plus, it matches my actual circumstance. My partner and I began our relationship in our early 20s, and I am 2 years older than her. We're right there near the average for our age and gender.

I'll include a summary table here for further illustration:

At age...	Men pick a new partner...	Women pick a new partner...
25	3 years younger	3 years older
30	4 years younger	2.5 years older
40	6 years younger	1.5 years older
50	8 years younger	0.5 years older
60	10 years younger	0.5 years younger
70	12 years younger	1.5 years younger
80	14 years younger	2.5 years younger

Another aspect that interesting about the study is that it showed men's preference for younger partners increased with age. At age 25, men starting new relationships picked partners 3 years young on average. The preference gap increased with each age increment, to an average of 10 years younger at 60 (60yo men picked 50yo partners on average) and 14 years by age 80. I don't have another rigorous dataset to compare this to but I will say it matches pop psychology I'm familiar with that says older men "date younger"— and noticeably so.

The third interesting aspect of the age gap study is that women, too, prefer younger and younger partners as they get older, though the gap in their preference is not as pronounced as it is with men. Women at age 25 prefer to "date older" with new partners, on average, 3 years older. This gap drops to near zero by age 50 and reverses to a "dating younger" in their 60s and beyond. The dating-younger gap for women is only a few years, though; not the 10-14 measured in men.

canyonwalker

An article appeared in my newsfeed a few days about stating that the topic of age gap relationships has been going viral. I first saw it on BuzzFeed, which tends to pop up with its listicles in my news app, though a bit of further reading I did on the topic today shows that it's a reprint of an article that appeared in Huffington Post a few weeks ago. I'll share the HuffPo link here: Gen Z Is Particularly Weird About Relationship Age Gaps. Here's Why (12 July 2025).

Okay, so what is the answer to the question posed in the article's headline? Well, having read the article twice now (once at HuffPo, once at BuzzFeed) I'm honestly not sure there's a there, there. The author cites mostly social media hullabaloo about specific celebrity pairings but then opines, in a journalistic aside, that collective real opinions are generally more nuanced than what gets likes and retweets on services like X.

People having negative opinions about age gap pairings has been a fact for probably as long as there have been age gap pairings. Literary works from the 1800s wrote of "May-December romance". In the late 1900s terms like "gold digger" became popular, particularly when the relationship involved a significantly younger woman and a wealthy older man. The modernism of shaming women goes ways, BTW. In the early 2000s we heard the term cougar for older, financially stable women who pursue younger men for their looks and physical stamina.

My 2 cents on the matter is that I refrain from judging a priori but instead caution a couple, if they ask my opinion, "Are you in enough of the same place in life?" Because aside from egregious cases, like where the younger partner is underage or the older is in mental decline, that's the biggest challenge: the age gap makes your needs too incompatible.

I faced this question myself years ago. When I was about 22 I met "Jackie" through an online precursor to modern dating apps. Internet tech was primitive back then, so there was no easy filtering on things like age. Jackie and I hit it off as friends and hung out with each other, both in larger groups of friends and alone, several times. But Jackie was 10 years older than me. While we got along as friends we never clicked as romantic partners. And yes, I definitely was asking myself, "Can Jackie and I be romantic partners?" Cuz, duh, we met on a dating forum. I think she was asking herself the same thing, too, and waiting for me to initiate. (Internet wasn't the only thing more primitive back in the 1990s. 🤣)

Anyway, I thought long and hard about it, and decided No. We were good as friends, but I figured things would never work as romantic partners. Not long term, anyway. In a few months I'd be earning a degree and beginning a big job search to launch a new career. Whereas Jackie had already been doing her own thing for 10 years and had settled into a rhythm— one that wasn't exactly great relative to where I planned to take my career, BTW. I didn't see us being compatible.

The point of this anecdote isn't to establish 10 years as the cutoff for age gaps. Obviously it's going to depend on the question I posed— where are you each at in life? Plus, the number of years that put you too far apart in life is relative. 10 years is huge when you're 22 and meeting a 32-year old. 10 years is a lot less of a chasm when you're 52 and 62. When you're 22 even 5 years may be too much of a difference. As one of the people in the news article was quoted, "At 25, I wouldn’t even date a 21 year old."

Update: What's normal for age gaps? Here's one recent scientific study I found.

canyonwalker

There's a meme that when you were a kid, getting to eat at McDonald's was a treat; but now, as an adult, it's a fail. I was reminded of that last night when I ate at a McDonald's. It was my first time eating at one in over a year, I think. And it reminded me why I eat there less than once a year now.

First, a brief stroll down memory lane. When I was a kid, a family visit to McDonald's once every week or two was a treat. There were actually other fast food restaurants I liked better, but while I grumbled I never said "No" to the golden arches.

When I turned 17 and was more able to choose where to dine— as I was more often doing it on my own and not on my parents' dime— I steered away from McDonald's because of their racist advertising and their ability to rot the brains of my friends and all my younger sisters. Just mention the word "McDonald's" in a conversation, and they'd break out in song with one of the advertising jingles. It was like kids had been turned into kids those dolls with a string on their back you could pull to make them say a recorded line. Or Pavlov's dogs slobbering at the chime of a bell.

But it wasn't all fast food I was frustrated about, just McDonald's. My last two years of college, for example, there was a Wendy's near my house that I ate at a few times a week. So the meme of then-vs-now still holds when read as "Going to a fast food restaurant" vs. specifically "Going to McDonald's."

But there's also an aspect to the then-vs-now comparison in which McDonald's, specifically, is a fail. I experienced that when I ate at one last night.

Put simply, McDonald's in nowhere near as enjoyable as it used to be. The food just isn't as good. The meat patties in the burgers look and taste like what school lunch cafeteria burgers used to be. Their look and texture both scream "filler", and the texture and taste both say "Cooked somewhere else, then reheated here."

The ordering experience is a fail, too. McDonald's steers customers heavily to ordering via computerized kiosks instead of from a human. I wrote a few years ago about how frustrating using McDonald's ordering kiosks is. Four years later it hasn't improved any. In fact it's gotten subjectively worse because now there's the concern the company is applying AI to manipulate the choices and prices presented to us in the menu to get us to spend more.

Finally, the whole customer experience at McDonald's is irritating— if you're savvy to the signs of cost-cutting. The ordering kiosks are one element of it. McDonald's wants to be able to staff fewer people relative to the number of orders, and eliminate the need for training humans to handle the complexity of taking orders from customers.

Then there's the recent removal of the self-serve soda fountains. Years ago they became commonplace as fast food restaurants sought to eliminate one of the tasks that took up employees' time. Now corporate has decided that self-serve refills let people drink too much, so they've moved it back behind the counter— where, BTW, drink filling is now completely automated. An employee just presses one button and everything— new cup, ice, filled with soda— is done by a robot.

The final insult is the signs in the dining room informing customers that there's a 20 minute limit to eat our food and get out. I know, this is a case of we-can't-have-nice-things because a small number of bad actors wrecked it for the rest of us. Like, I imagine corporate felt there were too many people buying a $1 cup of coffee and camping out at a table for 4 hours slurping up unlimited self-serve refills. But, gosh, what if I have an hour for my lunch break and would like to spend 40 minutes not just eating my food slowly but also relaxing while I read news and social media for a bit before returning to work. Lingering just a bit over lunch, when my schedule permits, has always been one of my little pleasures. Now the Man is warning me, "Don't make me tap the sign!"

canyonwalker

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #10
Back home · Sun, 27 Jul 2025, 11pm

Whew. We're back from our weekend road trip up the North Coast (of California). Yeah, I know it seems like we just got started. I'm posting this journal entry out to put a stake in the ground that we got home this evening. Still in my blog backlog are... posts from most of the last 48 hours. 🤣

We did both more and less than I hoped on this trip. Less, in that we didn't get in as much hiking as I'd hoped. Though most of what we did was on various beaches, where hiking on sand— or, in our cases, deep gravel— takes way more effort than it looks.

Also, we packed in 770 miles of driving in 2½ days around those hikes. I knew going into the weekend driving would take a big portion of our time. We drove 245 miles on Friday getting as far as Garberville, 220 more on Saturday going up past Eureka and then back down to the Lost Coast, and 305 today coming home from the Lost Coast with a side trip to Fort Bragg for hiking and beer.

We got home this evening just after 10pm. It's now 11, and I've mostly packed away my stuff and I've taken a shower to clean up and unwind. It'll take a bit longer before I'm ready to settle down for bed... but not too much longer, I hope. Tomorrow's a workday.

canyonwalker

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #2
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 10pm

In my previous blog I wrote about our Friday Night Halfway trip to the tiny town of Garberville. I pushed out thats blog as quickly as possible this evening after arriving in Garberville and settling in to the hotel because I wasn't sure how much time I'd have for more. Well, there's a whole lot of nothing to do in this town on a Friday night, so here comes part 2. I'm calling this Postcards From Garberville.

Driving 101 through Mendocino County (Jul 2025)

Driving 101 through Mendocino County (Jul 2025)

The drive up US 101 this evening was pleasant once we got out of the San Francisco area. Once past the 8- to 10-lane stretches of superhighway— and the loss of lanes in the Novato Narrows as my friend Dave says it's called— 101 is a really pretty road. The photo above comes from somewhere above wine country in Mendocino County. Yeah, the road is narrowing there, too. It's one of the few places in far northern California where 101 isn't a 4-lane highway.

Of course that spot, climbing through the golden hills, isn't the narrowest....

Highway 101 narrows through groves of redwood trees in Humboldt County (Jul 2025)

Highway 101 narrows through groves of redwood trees in Humboldt County (Jul 2025)

In a few spots in Humboldt County US-101 narrows considerably as it winds through groves of redwood trees. Yes, there are redwood parks up here, including Redwood National Park, but you don't even have to go into a park to see these magnificent trees. They're right on the road. You have to slow down and steer not to hit them.

Arriving in tiny Garberville, California (Jul 2025)

Arriving in tiny Garberville, California (Jul 2025)

We pulled off Highway 101 into Garberville just before sunset Friday evening. You can actually see most of the town in this photo if you squint. 😅 That's our motel with the "MOTEL" sign just down the hill.

Our simple motel room in Garberville, California (Jul 2025)

Our simple motel room in Garberville, California (Jul 2025)

In a town this small you don't expect your motel to be the Waldorf Astoria... or even the Hampton Inn. We stayed at a no-name motel that was strictly basic accommodations. A bed, a roof, a shower... and, since it's not 2005 anymore, a mini fridge, a microwave, and wifi. This room ran us about $100. That's kind of the ante nowadays for basic accommodations. We could've stayed at the Best Western Plus down the street, with a pool and a hot tub, for $200+.

Speaking of the mini fridge, I'd packed some drinks and breakfast food from home in a cooler bag to store in the room. I brought a bottle of beer to enjoy this evening... but just one bottle. One was all I had cold in my mega fridge at home, and I didn't feel like going down to the cellar to pull up more. 😅 No problem, I figured; I could check one of the stores nearby in town and buy more beer.

A magical find at the local gas station: NEW Red Tail Ale! (Jul 2025)

A magical find at the local gas station: NEW Red Tail Ale! (Jul 2025)

At a gas station convenience store down the hill I was all set to buy a six-pack from a north coast microbrew I rarely see carried in stores around home. Then I noticed something I've never seen before, in any store. Red Tail Ale.

Once upon a time Red Tail Ale was my favorite beer, hands down. I discovered it when I moved to Calfiornia back in the 1990s. Then around 2010 or so the brewery, Mendocino Brewing Company, was acquired by a Japanese conglomerate that started fiddling with the recipe and ruined it. The company folded up in 2018.

No, these aren't 7 year old cans of beer from before the company dissolved. They're also not 15 year old cans from before the foreign buyer fucked it up. They're a new beer, made by a new local brewery, that found the original recipe for Red Tail Ale and got access to the name and beautiful artwork. You know I had to give it a try!

Enjoying sunset from the hotel parking lot in Garberville (Jul 2025)

Enjoying sunset from the hotel parking lot in Garberville (Jul 2025)

Back at our motel room, there wasn't much of a place for me to enjoy my beer. Just two chairs around a small table under the TV. So I did like I noticed several of our neighbors doing.... I dragged a chair out to the breezeway and set up on a railing overlooking the parking lot. It seemed like such a trailer park thing when I first saw it— and yes, there's a trailer park across the street, complete with crying kids walking around in diapers and yapping dogs—but then I figured, "When in Rome...."

And yes, the Red Tail Ale is good. It reminds me of the beer I fell in love with twenty-some years ago. Is it just as good as the original? I'm not sure. It's hard to compare to something from that long ago. But now I know to start looking for this in stores near home.

canyonwalker

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #1
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 9pm

After too many weekends frittering around home we're off tonight for an adventure weekend! Being the working stiffs we are... well, the working stiff I am... that means leaving after work on Friday and needing to be home Sunday night to return to work first thing Monday morning. And, to pack the weekend as much as possible, that means Friday Night Halfway! 🎵 Woah, we're halfway there! 🎵

But halfway where? That's hard to say as there's not any one place we're going this weekend. We aim to visit several. It's easier to say where we are. And where we are is Garberville.

Garberville? Yes, Garberville. A town of about 800 in Humboldt County, in the North Coast region of California.

It was a 245 mile drive from home in Sunnyvale. We pulled out of the garage at 2:15pm and arrived at our hotel for the night at about 8:15. The drive took 6 hours because of some slowdowns for traffic in San Francisco and Marin County, a quick stop for dinner in Cloverdale, a stop for snacks in Hopland, and then an unexpected stop at a rock-and-gem shop near Laytonville.

If the latter three place names elicit a reaction of "Where?" that's okay. They're all basically nowhere. Just dots on a map on US 101 in Northern California well north of San Francisco.

Road Trip 101

Our drive this evening was virtually all on highway US 101. You may have heard it called "The 101". That is true; it is called The 101. But that's in Southern California. Up here it's just "101" or "Highway 101".

Anyway, 101 passes within a few miles of our house, and our hotel is just 1/4 mile off the highway some 245 miles further north. We didn't actually drive 101 all the way, though. You see, highway 101 through San Francisco is awful. We routed around it by exiting at the junction with Interstate 380 to Interstate 280 to 19th Street, rejoining 101 several miles later at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.

North of the bridge 101 is an 8- to 10-lane superhighway through much of Marin County. After several miles it narrows considerably, though, losing half or more of its lanes. Traffic ground to a near halt for miles through this section. Progress was even slower than driving San Francisco's city streets with stoplights every block.

North of Cloverdale, where we stopped for dinner, 101 turns into a canyon road. It leaves behind the broad valley north of the SF Bay and climbs up into the coast range mountains. Improvements to the highway over the past 20 years have made this stretch actually a very nice drive. It's a four lane divided highway with broad, sweeping curves instead of narrow slaloms.

Driving through these mountains in a convertible with the top down is a kind of weird experience. Every few minutes, it seemed, we drove through a cloud of marijuana smoke. There's a town in northern California named Weed; but this is the Emerald Triangle.

Keep reading: I've got pictures from the roadtrip in my next blog!

canyonwalker

The past two weekends I mostly sat around home like a bump on a log. I sat around and I was pissed at myself for letting opportunities slip through my fingers. Opportunities for what? Opportunities to do... anything. Anything fun. Anything more fulfilling that sitting around home like a bump on a log! I was such a bump on a log I didn't even blog. 🤣 So I promised myself (and my blog) I'd starting doing more.

Since then I've not only blogged more, I've done more. Monday night I went out to meet friends for dinner and games. I was feeling tired all Monday afternoon and thought long and hard about just staying in. Come 5:30pm I felt like I just wanted to go to bed early. But I pressed through my grogginess optimistic that by getting out I'd get a second wind. And I did! Monday evening dinner and games with friends was fun.

Tuesday evening we had a dinner date with friends again. Again I was tired in the afternoon. Again I gave serious consideration to text my friends my regrets I'd be unable to join them. And again I put faith in doing-something-brings-a-second-wind... and again my faith was confirmed. We had another nice evening out.

This week we've also been making plans for the weekend. Lack of plans is something that I felt frustrated about last weekend. As I sat like a bump on a log Saturday morning, mildly fuming at myself for being such a bump on a log, I realized that I could've been heading out for adventure... if only I planned it even a day in advance. So for this weekend we thought about where to go on an adventure. We came up with two ideas. And like we tend to do when we come up with two great ideas for travel... we chose them both! We've booked one trip this weekend and the other for two weekends after that. (The weekend in the middle we've already got plans.)

So, tomorrow afternoon instead of slouching into a weekend of torpor at home, we'll be packing the car and hitting the highway. Where to? On the road to adventure!

canyonwalker

Today I was amused to read another BuzzFeed-style listicle[1] about things Millennials don't understand about their Boomer parents. Except it wasn't BuzzFeed this time; it was Upworthy basically scraping a Reddit thread into an article, Millennials share their boomer parents’ 15 odd (and hilarious) habits they just don't get. Now, I'm not a Millennial, and my parents aren't Boomers, and I know these listicles are click bait, but two featured items on their list called me out.

1. They save everything.

Yes! And it's because of this thing called The Great Depression. Your Boomer parents didn't experience it first-hand. By definition they're too young. My dad was born at the tail end of the Great Depression (late 1930s) and my mom in the mid 1940s, so they didn't really experience it directly, either. But, like your Boomer parents, they grew up in households where their parents' lives had been shaped heavily by the Great Depression. Boomers observed habits like saving every scrap of food, washing and reusing Cool Whip containers instead of throwing them away, and holding onto clothes until they were threadbare— then using them for cleaning rags or patches for other clothes— from their parents who, for 10-15 years, needed to do these things to survive.

Now, of course, those habits seem quaint. That's because the reality that made them a practical necessity is now even further removed. But that reality was a lot closer for me when I was a kid because everyone still talked about the Great Depression. Again, for us kids, our parents may not have actually lived through it, but our grandparents all did. Our older aunts, uncles, and teachers may have, too. And the cartoon reruns we saw on TV (in the 1970s and early 80s) all included Depression era storylines— because that was the lived experience of older writers and animators. (Plus, in the late 1970s we mostly had reruns of cartoons from 10-15 years earlier because Hollywood creatives spent the 1970s stoned out of their minds producing little worth watching.)

4. They Don't Travel [Featured item]

This item was #4 on the list but was included in the headline picture for the article, along with the sub-header "They act jealous of us traveling but refuse to go anywhere." Lower down was another testimonial quote, "Ooh good one. Mine act jealous of anything we do/buy that they can't solely because they can't get out of their own way and actually make things happen."

This one called me out not because it describes something from my childhood but because it describes something today (and in the past 10 years) I see with my parents. They are reluctant to travel. But it's not "solely because they can't get out of their own way." It's because of health problems.

Older people may not feel well enough to travel as much as they'd like. Between my parents and my inlaws, all 4 of them have/had health issues that make travel difficult. Issues in my family I can think of just off the top of my head are:

Losing the ability to maintain energy & focus for long car drives
Needing to carry and use drugs like insulin (which can require refrigeration) multiple times per day
Needing to carry and use a CPAP machine when sleeping
Needing frequent/long bathroom visits— and not being able to hold it until the next rest stop or "until the pilot tells you t's safe to get up out of your seat"
Needing the ability to stand up/stretch legs/etc. every hour to avoid swelling and worse on a long flight
Worry about mobility when traversing airports, which can involve literally a mile or more of walking.

These are challenges a younger person might not think about— because few younger people experience these problems themselves. But they're real obstacles for many older adults. It's not just "Boomers can't understand smartphones" or some silliness like that.

[1] "Listicle" is a portmanteau of list and article. It's a derogatory description of lazy journalism that sources content by scraping responses from social media sites like Reddit or X.

canyonwalker

It's been odd reading in the news about heat waves gripping the US as here in California it's been a cool summer. It's more than just a "This week it's cool out" phenomenon, though. It's been cooler than normal the past few months here in coastal California. I already knew that from my own gut sense (I notice the weather every day though I don't record it rigorously) but it was interesting to see it confirmed, and explained, in articles I read today when I looked up why it's such a thing that California is cooler than the rest of the US.

First, here's a picture of what I'm talking about:

California stays cool this summer while much of US bakes (Jul 2025)

California stays cool this summer while much of US bakes (Jul 2025)

This is a chart from a week ago. It shows that over a near-term forecast range (6-10 days) coastal California will have lower than average temperatures while much of the rest of the US is above normal.

As a specific example of what "Below" normal means, high temps the past few days around my home have averaged 76° F. That's 5° below the local average for this time of year. That's where my gut sense of it being cool comes from. A difference of a degree or two, I wouldn't notice. But a 5 degree difference, especially persistently, I do notice. And occasionally grouse about here in my blog because I look forward to enjoying summer-y summer weather!

As far as why there's this temperature discrepancy across the US, worsening summer heat waves are part of what's happening with global climate change. What's happening in California is an older, not-man-made pattern. A strong ocean current brings cold water from the Gulf of Alaska down to the Pacific coast of northern California. High pressure zones have been causing us to get winds from across the ocean. The wind cools over the cold water and acts like a natural air conditioner for coastal California. At some point the high pressure nexus will shift and winds will blow offshore.... Then we'll get heated air from the east blowing over us instead of cool ocean air. But for now the high pressure pattern is sticking in "A/C is ON" position.

A Cool Summer in Parts of California Doesn't "Disprove" Climate Change

It's sad I have to point this out, but I do. Beause there are climate idiots (not just skeptics but fools) out there who sneer when there's a cold week, "So much for ‘‘Global Warming’’!"

The existence of this cooling pattern in California does not contradict the existence or impact of human-caused Global Warming. As a recent blog on Weather West argues, 100 years ago this cool summer weather wouldn't have been unusual in California. The significant global warming of the last 50 years ago puts it at contrast with the new normal. And yes, there always will be "cold snaps" even in a world of global warming. There will always be winter blizzards, too, in Minneapolis and Buffalo. Global Warming is about the averages shifting in significant ways. Summers, in general, are getting more intense, and days of sub-zero winter weather in the snow belt are getting fewer.

kate_nepveu

Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Newly reprinted under the author's current name, The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed is a post-cyberpunk novel about brain modification, being queer in an oppressive society, the media, species extinction, and the possibility of changing human nature. In 2010, Jo Walton called it "one of the most important books of the last 20 years." We'll discuss what made this novel groundbreaking in 1996, what makes it still fresh and relevant today, our favorite lines that aren't the beginning and ending, and the throwaway worldbuilding detail that most caught our attention.
Kate Nepveu (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD

Last panel report! ... with so much extra.

The audience said they were okay with spoilers, so we included general spoilers for premise and worldbuilding from the beginning of the discussion. I will have a separate clicky arrow for ending spoilers. (Very gratifyingly, when we got to that point of the panel, someone in the audience got up and left, saying something like, "I decided I want to read it myself after all!")`

I gave a little summary of the premise for the couple of people who hadn't read the book, which I will try to recreate/improve upon now.

summary of the premise, with quotes

The book is set in Russia about 300 years in the future. Previously: America ("the Guardians") conquered most of the world [1], committing genocide through lowest-bidder concentration camps and ruling for 50 years. They were defeated probably 75 years ago, mostly by an army of ordinary people who were mind-controlled by a computer virus that erased itself from their minds once it detected victory. (Africa, which is now a walled-off technological paradise, took Egypt back from the Guardians without the virus.)

Maya is a camera, which means she broadcasts news as her senses experience it—except with a screener to filter out not just distracting bodily urges, but also forbidden topics, lest she attract the Weavers (immensely scary censors who live in the internet to prevent another mind-control virus). Screeners instantly know their cameras' minds in full. Cameras have no such reciprocal knowledge. As the book opens, Maya is broadcasting a series about why the reign of the Guardians is barely remembered, unlike the Holocaust and the Terror-Famine [2]. And she has a brand-new screener, Keishi.

footnotes

[1] North America, Eurasia, Egypt, and Japan, as far as we can tell. Hat tip to the Wizards versus Lesbians podcast for pointing out that the rest of Asia doesn't seem to exist; after I heard them say that, I looked and didn't see anything about South America either.

[2] No other information is ever given about this, just the way none is given about the Holocaust.

But actually, the book does not open there. It opens with Maya writing to her audience:

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know.

What a first line.

The prologue ends with another banger:

I will give you my thoughts since that time, but not on moistdisk. I will not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as I explore them—not again. I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

(In addition to the narration, it's useful to know that the book moves through different modes, and some people find the last half to be a jarring change, for expectation-setting purposes.)

panel notes, plus some more thoughts

With that background, we got into the discussion proper.

Marianna: ways in which book is about camera and editing reminded of Dziga Vertov, 1920s Russian cinema, had a manifesto about how in the future we would become cameras. Maya is a camera, constantly making decisions that are directing and editing her broadcasts: pan here, add background information there.

Marianna cont'd: anticipating current social media, when livecasting everything: are we actually seeing what they are? not only that, but the asymmetry in the screener-camera relationship predicted parasociality. as does Maya's relationship with her audience: she needs them, she's uneasy about their demands, they think they know her and they don't—they don't even know what she looks like, she uses a false userpic because she's older and scarred with old-fashioned sockets drilled into her head—and there's literal emotional feedback between them. (also, the camera is preemptive censorship like using euphemisms on TikTok.)

audience member: thought about "veil of Maya" in Hinduism, which is a false reality. me: oh, so that's what Keishi was referencing!

me: going back to Vertov, that reminded me of the book's terrible monomaniacal old man, Voskresenye, who had idea that true teleprescence, that is, what cameras broadcast, can save humanity: overcome the "sins of locality" that arise from being trapped in our own skulls and unable to achieve empathy.

Marianna: Vertov was propagandist documentary maker, believed that if people just saw what was really happening, would get on board with the Russian Revolution. not only that but "Cine-Eye" technique would help improve/evolve humanity.

Marianna cont'd: thinks there are three themes that underpin SF in general: memory, identity, trauma. they all come together in this book so powerfully. but doesn't argue for universality in sense of uniformity, Voskresenye is also very angry about enforced homogeneity and exclusions.

(later on, we talked about the book's pondering of whether love results from, or is stifled by, intense mental intimacy.)

Marianna cont'd: all that and we haven't even mentioned the dead psychic whale yet!

so this may have been where I talked about Moby-Dick, which I re-read specifically so I could talk about how it relates to this book! it's name-checked by the text, given to Maya as a memory:

The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.

But it's a lot more in conversation with it than that quote may indicate.

They both have a central queer relationship. For those who haven't read Moby-Dick but have heard vaguely of Queequeg (the tattooed man), you may not know that Ishmael meets him because there is literally only one bed at the inn. The next day, Queequeg says that they are "married," and they go up to bed and talk, "in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair." This is text.
They both have terrible monomaniacal old men, as previously noted.
They are both narrated after the fact by narrators with specific agendas. Ishmael is desperately trying to understand what happened and to make us understand what happened. Maya is also trying to understand what happened, revisiting Keishi's actions and her own decisions; and she says she's trying to reduce our understanding, but I'm not so sure about that. Also, so much foreshadowing.
There is a whale, who is intelligent and filled with hate of humans, but only because humans keep bothering him or her.
They both are surprisingly funny. (I liked when Maya needs to insert a really gross public plug into her head—this is the very embodied kind of cyberpunk—but doesn't have anything to clean it: "I settled for wiping the plug on my shirt, to replace some of the unknown dirt with dirt I was on intimate terms with.")

My notes get a little sketchy here. I see that Marianna said that the novel is still frighteningly relevant, and there were times during this reread where she had to put it down. I'd previously noted on Bluesky that the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast thought that the homophobia in the book seemed exaggerated, even though the book was set in Russia, because we'd come so far in overcoming that ... which was not an unreasonable thing to say, all the way back in 2021. Ouch. And as for the McGulags, well.

I mentioned that asexuality doesn't seem to be a concept that the characters have (again, published in 1996), so at least one of them treats the ability to feel love and desire as the same thing; this is extremely relevant and in-character but the conflation was noticeable to me and would be a good thing to note in recommending the book to people. (Significant trans themes, though.)

Someone mentioned the Richard Matheson short story "The Box," about whether you really know the person you married (originally "Button, Button").

(Also, I just realized that this Tumblr short story might be a riff off that.)

I think at this point, all that's left of the panel discussion is talking about the ending.

SPOILERS FOR THE LAST 30% OF THE BOOK

Marianna noted that the conflict between Keishi and Maya is, in addition to a fundamentally different understanding of love, very much a 1990s argument about coming out and whether people have an obligation to do so

audience: political dynamic of the decision, Keishi claiming that they will represent hope

me: the way Maya presents things throughout the book seems to me to trying to justify her distrust of Keishi and her decision to leave her, which results in her death. I'm not sure she convinces herself, based on those haunting last two paragraphs:

And if I could, I would freeze that instant forever. But it’s no use. I can trap the young rose in the hologram, but the rose is long since dust. And what I most want to conceal from you, you’ve always known:

That I went up into the world and left her there, in the prison camp beneath the ocean, with the ruined mind of the new Iscariot and the body of the whale.

(Emphasis added.) I think Maya has shame, or regret, or doubt, or all of the above.

and I don't know that I would do the same in her shoes. all through the book, Maya is highlighting how Keishi is lying to her and manipulating her—this is even clearer, more painful, and more infuriating on a reread, but is explicit on a first read nonetheless. On the other hand, at the very end, Keishi says that she was forced into all the pre-whale manipulation by Voskresenye, who does not deny it. On the third hand, it was Keishi who took over Maya's mouth—which she did before and Maya specifically told her to never do again—and forced her to recover her memories before she was ready. Even if she didn't know that Voskresenye was going to broadcast them, that is a huge violation of trust, on top of agreeing to let Voskresenye broadcast the memories that Maya was in.

and now, writing this, I've talked myself back around into thinking I would have done the same: because I don't think that I could trust Keishi to leave my brain, ever. or to stay quietly tucked away like she promised, because she said over and over that she doesn't want that, that she wants their minds to lie next to each other, and she shows over and over that she takes what she wants. including by controlling my body. and that is a very literal horror story, to the point that I may have just given myself nightmares.

Okay! I think that's about all the panel discussion, or discussion directly related to it.

additional SPOILER thoughts

I was going to do a really thorough dive into my many, many ebook bookmarks, but I must sleep. So here's just three things I already had prepared.

First: you start looking up one chapter title, you end up with a zillion links. My suggestions for your consideration:

Ashes, Ashes: we all fall down.
The Platypus: Oliver Herford?
A Faster Cable: impossible to search; suggestions?
To Make Much of Time: Robert Herrick.
As a Wife Has a Cow: Gertrude Stein.
The Word: was God.
Khristos Voskrese: as the text says, "Christ is risen."
A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves: E.E. Cummings.
All the King's Horses: couldn't put Humpty together again.
My Man Sunday: impossible to search; suggestions?
A Property of Easiness: Hamlet, act 5, scene 1, lines 67-68.
Immediate Touch: as quoted at the start of the section, Paradise Lost.
Icarus: too close to the sun, etc.
Tea and Sympathy: the Classical movie?
Phaeton: as Wikipedia puts it: "See also: ... Icarus; Lucifer"
Very Like a Whale: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, line 382; possibly also Ogden Nash, though that would feel more appropriate for a later chapter to me?
Fallen Like Lightning: Luke 10:18?
You Must Remember This: Casablanca, of course.
Orpheus: now you see why explaining the reference in the prior panel would have been impossible.
Penelope: faithfully waiting, or not, for a spouse who came home twenty-odd years later. (edited because I got this totally backwards at first)
Sorrow's Springs: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Second: as I said on Bluesky, the contrast between Maya and Ishmael's last reported words is just brutal.

Ishmael:

"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."

Maya:

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Both the last things they said to the loves of their lives, but one is wholehearted affirmance that he means everything, and the other is equivocation and denial.

Third: a text to a friend after I finished rereading:

The Fortunate Fall shitpost:
one of the things it foresaw, in addition to going viral, McGulags, and the death of print,
is the meme about the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Two post-panel things:

Afterward, the person who recommended the book to the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast came up and said hi, so that was very cool.

And I took a selfie of my white whale earrings, which I forgot to mention on the panel.

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canyonwalker

One of the most viral things from the past week is the Coldplay Kiss Cam. At a Coldplay concert several days ago a "Kiss Cam" found a couple embracing in the stands and put their image up on the Jumbotron screen. Coldplay's frontman, Chris Martin, called attention to it as the couple on camera panicked.

Concert "Kiss Cam" catches a tech CEO canoodling with his Head of HR (Jul 2025)

Concert "Kiss Cam" catches a tech CEO canoodling with his Head of HR (Jul 2025)

The woman in the couple covered her face and turned away. The man stared like a deer in the headlights for a moment before ducking out of the frame. Martin, on stage, quipped quite cannily, "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. I'm not quite sure."

Apparently they were having an affair. Or at least their embrace and reactions suggest they were.

When the kiss cam video went viral for its moment of embarrassment, online sleuths quickly IDed the man and woman. They are Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, Inc., and Kristin Cabot, the company's Chief People Officer. Byron is married... and Cabot is not his wife.

In the days since the concert, Byron has resigned his position as CEO, and the company board of directors has accepted his resignation. There's no word on Cabot's position, though she has deleted some of her presence on sites like LinkedIn.

What's interesting to me is how major media are spinning this story. The predominant storyline seems to be finger-wagging about publicly shaming people coupled with how we're all unwittingly aiding the surveillance state in causing the death of privacy.

Okay, death of privacy? How about you newspapers stop firing all your veteran journalists and replacing them with 22-year-old interns, because "OMG dEaTh Of PrIvAcY!!" was already old news, like, 10 years ago.

Likewise, the media's tut-tutting about Why can't you just let people live their lives in peace? misses the actual story. The actual story here is Man Bites Dog. Or, more accurately, the 99% who've watched the 1% get rich at their expense fire back at their hypocrisy.

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

For more than a generation now corporate execs have been clamping down on corporate drones, demanding more oversight of minutiae and punishing them (us) for minor transgressions. They've been clamping down on the peons in organizations, citing risk to the business, when it's not the peons who are the risk. It's the execs themselves.

My first experience with this misplaced focus on rules, compliance, and enforcement came in my first professional job. I was just a college intern. But I had to complete training on not bribing corrupt foreign officials. How likely was I, a 20-year-old intern, to be in a position where I might bribe a corrupt foreign official on behalf of my employer? Versus, say, a senior vice president who might be negotiating a multi-million dollar contract? Or the CEO who might curry favor with a country's president so as not to jeopardize government grants or a proposed corporate merger worth hundreds of millions?

Likewise heads of HR have been scourges to many of us corporate drones. We all learned years ago that despite their name "human resources" and their supposed charter in administering benefits and ensuring companies comply with employment law, HR is not on our side. They're more than happy to play disciplinarian when a peon runs afoul of a company rule, such as rules against romantic relationships between employees, but when an exec breaks a rule— or even a law—HR tends to sweep the evidence under the rug and turn a blind eye to reprisals.

Thus once the 99% discovered these two on camera were manager and direct report, and not just that but corporate leaders who fire employees for breaking such rules, well... the knives were out. To me that is why it went viral.

kate_nepveu

The Next Great Gatsby?
At Readercon 33, Max Gladstone mentioned that The Great Gatsby flopped upon publication—and therefore was cheap to send to American soldiers abroad in WWII, which resulted its revival. He asked the audience to imagine how great a world would be in which, for some reason, copies of Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered were suddenly everywhere. What other books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?
Ellen Kushner, Kate Nepveu, R.W.W. (Rob) Greene (moderator), Len Schiff

panel notes

Rob started the panel by talking about the reasons Gatsby was sent abroad, its canonization, and what that might mean for our panel. And, delightfully, he's put up a longer version of that in his newsletter, so that saves me so much typing right there.

Anyway, as Rob says over there, the first question was: "What book would create the most positive chaos if it suddenly appeared in every American household?"

Len: (who is a high school teacher, among other things): something Daniel Pinkwater, like Young Adults or The Education of Robert Nifkin

Ellen: mine! (Swordspoint, specifically.) because I've had a long time to collect reactions to it. remembers getting a negative reaction from Steven Brust, who said something like, "I didn't really like it, am I homophobic? No, everyone's just completely immoral and I couldn't handle it." Thinks some queer immorality would be good chaos. Also, even today still gets people remarking on how much of a difference the representation in it made to them

me: I don't know if it would be chaos exactly, but I had previously prepared the answer of Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison so I'm going to go with that, for the reasons in Amal el-Mohtar's essay: it's about a young girl who loses three homes and chooses the open road; it's beautiful, it's short, it's in conversation with other literature and a gateway into the author's other works.

Rob: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, which is horror novel about gay conversion camp with demons.

(my notes are a bit of mess in terms of chronological order, I'm afraid, so I hope I haven't reconstructed things in a way that distorts)

me: I'm not sure how much I agree with the premise. when I was looking at just the text of this description and thinking about the panel—well, first I thought how great Thus Was Adonis Murdered is.

(we did talk about that, but for the sake of time and my hands, I'll refer you to my old booklog posts and move on. (Except that Ellen knew Caudwell! She met her on one of Caudwell's U.S. signing tours and then visited her in London. I was so starstruck.))

me cont'd: and I immediately started making rules for myself, because I'm like that, and one of the rules I made was that I could not use "this book could fix the world" as a criteria. partly because that's a hole I'd just never climb out of, and partly because it's just too unpredictable. books get misunderstood, they get taught to kids who aren't ready for them, people take away such personal things. of course books affect people, but maybe because I'm not a writer, my goal for this was much more humble: "wouldn't it be great if I could say to people, 'remember when Selena got super high at an orgy and ignored everyone in favor of reading Pride and Prejudice?', and they did."

me concluding: that said, when I eventually picked titles to write down, I deliberately chose all women authors. (I do not give myself a cookie, however, because they were all white.)

Ellen: I think a way to approach your objections is to think about ubiquity. everyone's read Gatsby (me: I haven't!); even if they haven't, it's part of assumed knowledge, the cultural conversation. (just to be clear: she was entirely correct about this and I was being a little bit silly.)

Ellen, a bit later: conversations about ubiquity have shifted to movies. Lord of the Rings has far more power/reach culturally now than it did except at its first wave of popularity in U.S. (where did massively influence environmental movement), and people always quote (Ian McKellen as) Gandalf saying, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Ellen and Len also defended Gatsby as a work against the negative effects that Rob laid at its feet (see his essay).

Rob: mentioned something about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn being the second-most-taught book in the U.S., but I didn't write down the context for that

I think this is when Rob asked what the first book was that changed our lives/opened our minds/showed us what books were capable of?

Ellen: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison, for anarchy and chaos.

Len: The Dispossessed. the utopian impulse is not a thing to be dismissed. dystopia is culturally determined; what we have now in the canon is because people were disappointed by Stalin. it confirms shitty things we believe about people and self-propagates. instead foreground utopia. that said, discovered the book in a counterculture used bookstore, and canonizing things risks losing a lot of their charm

Len, later: did teach The Dispossessed to high schoolers and it went over like a lead balloon, they were just not interested in it.

(I did not jump in on this, though I thought of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor, which I read like twenty times in fourth grade or so.)

me: asks Len about a passing mention he made of The Hunger Games being taught in high schools. that seems like a good thing? inequality is bad, and the revolution needs more than a single teenager?

Len: haven't taught it, but thinks that as long as make authority abstract, can depoliticize it. I'm sure there's a reading of The Hunger Games in which the Capitol are all SJWs.

Rob: Ender's Game is one of the most popular books to be taught. used to be (?) taught as leadership in Marine Corps University.

me: Some Desperate Glory is in conversation with Ender's Game and is very specific about the fascist nature of the leadership

someone: ideally read them together

Ellen: just found out about Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, with regard to Gatsby

maybe in here is when Rob asked about dropping something else in place of Gatsby in high schools?

Len: refers back to Pinkwater

me: Piranesi, because Travel Light seems a little young for high school; Piranesi is also short, wonderfully written, has lots to chew on, is in conversation with other works (specifically The Magician's Nephew), and: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

Ellen: wants to keep all the old difficult books being assigned in high school, because that's the only time get help reading them! know someone who was assigned Dan Brown in high school, come on

me: I had two books on my list that I thought were too dense and complicated, maybe I should put them back on! (Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh, and—of course, are you surprised by this point?—The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed) but also, some things seem like high school is just too early; shudder at idea Moby-Dick in high school, it's so long and I can't imagine the teachers would like explaining the chapter that's just a dick joke

Rob: Parable of the Sower

Rob to audience (copied from his essay): If you were designing a new book-distribution program for today’s challenges — climate change, polarization, technological disruption, nationalism — what would be your first five titles?

responses:

never know what's going to speak to you, needs to be lots of titles (like the original)
almost anything by Terry Pratchett (this was from Delia Sherman, and she and I discovered that we read Night Watch very differently in terms of what Pratchett, or more fairly the text, thinks of the revolutionaries in that book, which was delightful)
Le Guin
The Mahabharata! "it covers it all"
of course books can change the world, Costa Rico has no standing army because a key figure there read Aldous Huxley. (I would love if someone could suggest more reading on this! Wikipedia is pretty bare-bones, and this article I found might be from a somewhat conservative-leaning publication?)

Anyway, that was very fun and juicy.

The final book on my list, which I did not get around to mentioning, is The Interior Life by Katherine Blake/Dorothy Heydt, which Jo Walton reviews usefully and which is free to download.)

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Take Your Novel to Work
In the genre of fanfic known as "take your fandom to work," favorite characters are placed in the author's work environment, often resulting in delightfully concrete and minute details about ecological field research or running a bodega or being a summer camp counselor. How do stories of everyday vocation enhance the experience of reading and writing fiction, and what works of speculative fiction take best advantage of the granular details of work life? What can bringing characters to work tell us about both the characters and the work itself?
Ken Schneyer (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD, Melissa Bobe, Sarah Pinsker

panel notes

Ken, who writes short fiction, amended the title of the panel to "Take Your Story to Work." And asked the panelists to talk about their work in their introductions.

Melissa: children's librarian

Sarah: writing professor, have been many other things including camp counselor, working with horses, nonprofit administrator, SAT tutor, singer/songwriter

Marianna: currently academic. formerly development executive for film and TV production, administrative assistant, film projectionist, IT, bartending training but not experience

Sarah: bartending experience but no training!

Ken: currently professor of humanities. previously IT project manager, ad hoc computer programmer, clerk typist, judicial clerk, lawyer in corporate law firm, dishwasher at deli, actor, director. several of those have found way into stories. asks: particularly good examples you've read, yours and/or not?

Marianne: caveat did not read novel Discovery of Witches, but TV really got minutia of academia right. Stross, Laundry Files, vibe of working in IT. le Carré, sounds very plausible!

(anyone interested in academia and/or Discovery of Witches must, must read this fic in which the author's note reads, "i'm not so much taking this fandom to work as i am meeting it next to the dumpster behind my workplace and engaging it in hand-to-hand combat for the honor of the field of human genetics"

pachytene phase (9096 words) by magneticwave
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Diana Bishop/Matthew Clairmont
Characters: Christopher "Chris" Roberts, Matthew Clairmont
Additional Tags: Epistolary

Summary: The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics is pleased to invite you to the annual Clarence Berrigan Lecture. This year’s speaker is Matthew Clairmont, DPhil, who is giving a talk entitled: “Interspecies compatibility, meiotic flexibility, and the end of the infertility myth: insights from the southern red muntjac.” Please join us after Dr. Clairmont’s talk for a reception in the McNeil Family atrium at 5pm. Refreshments will be provided!

you don't need to know the fandom and it is hilarious)

Sarah: office vibes: Jeff Vandermeer, Authority (second one in trilogy that began with Annihilation); Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke, someone gets uploaded into work Slack

Sarah cont'd: music: Randee Dawn's new one, The Only Song Worth Singing; really picky about those, good details about gritty. Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

Melissa: read T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones, obsessed with research and entomology. own profession: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Bruce Coville (alas no dragons at their library), probably led to becoming librarian

Ken: moments where certain details ticked off

Sarah: curse of being immersed something, is when encountering books where author learned by research. some do well: Dick Francis, glassblowers and meteorologists, seems like got it, at least from outside those professions. it's things that don't think to research that grate. music, people can only picture what rock star is like, not what slugging through every day. also categories where if write thing, prepare to get letters: guns, horses (I'm the one writing the letters), sailing, U.S. Civil War (and if you've done primary source research, often letters you get are wrong)

Melissa: authors try to get librarians right because know we'll buy the book

Melissa cont'd: remembered work meant to mention: The Public, movie, Emilio Estevez, made after watching interactions at LA public library. only thing not believable: entire staff but one person were all men (so much laughter)

Marianna: try to condense rant of many years. authors are like: I went to school, I know what faculty do, I don't need to look that up. get overly focused on research (academic conduct thereof). nothing about hiring, tenure, career track, which is what academics mostly care about: I don't care how in love you are, you are not leaving MIT to follow your lover and teach at an Arizona community college.

Ken: bias toward academia in mainstream novels, so think lot is accurate there. re: law: people view procedure through mainstream TV, movies, think understand. part is that day to day of law work is exceptionally boring. sitting for 12 hours a day in a library (me, to myself: Ken is showing his age: I sit for 12 hours a day in front of Lexis => ). almost threw book across room: passage in Orson Scott Card novel, character obtains divorce AND the arrangement of bifurcated child custody WITHOUT spouse's knowledge (caveat, not set in US and in future, suppose could imagine, but)

Ken cont'd: flip around other way: examples of juicy details re: something otherwise unfamiliar, what did that do for you as a reader?

Marianna: le Carré, spoiler alert I'm definitely not a spy, not just telling you that to throw you off scent. made me want to write spy novels, so good at lot of details but not overwhelming with. particularly love when get book like Perfect Spy: how does this person spend their time on an average day? what is the macro running in the back of their head? everyday stuff that you might not think about.

(le Carré came up so much at the con and every time I have to google his name to remind myself of the capitalization and also copy the accented e)

Ken: and we know that he had experience in British intelligence. can you remember particular detail?

Marianna: how much time he spent with radio when holed up in safehouse, had code keys, sitting around waiting to hear message

Melissa: because in hotel, thinking about Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction—

—at this point, I very rudely interrupted to ask for a repeat of the title, which caused her to completely lose her train of thought. I apologized then and also after. wait until people are done talking to ask for repeats of titles, self!

anyway the publisher's page on Fang Fiction indicates that the main character is a hotel manager, and also it sounds fun.

Sarah: talking about a lot of jobs that do exist, but made think of jobs that don't but believe that do: Peter Beagle, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, about dragon exterminator, like mice in the walls. hates his job because loves dragons, makes reader believe in this guy who knows he has to do, emotions resonant. mild spoiler for early part: protagonist tries to save some, sneaks away as pets.

Ken: The Martian, the book. main character has master's in botany and engineering conveniently. remember being struck by the thought process. no idea what experience author has, not point: I do know enough about electrical circuits to know that you need to know what gauge of wire, so completely sold that character knew what talking about, and did make me feel like I was there.

Melissa: A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon, very short, characters are all working as magical girls of X or Y, get sent on jobs, very much feels like 9-5 in hilarious way

Ken: more completely imaginary jobs?

Marianna: Stross' Laundry Files. wonderful balance between grounding familiar IT work but for government agency dealing with paranormal stuff

Sarah: all those little jobs in Terry Pratchett novels, e.g., candle snuffer. looks at Melissa: the Librarian though

Melissa: look, we take all representation

Ken: even the witches, does mundane detail so well, yeah, a real witch has to do that, more of a human interaction than anything else

(me, to myself: also, research witches.)

Ken: 15 years ago, talking with Elizabeth Hand, who said how in Glimmering, included nitty-gritty details of boat building which made real effort to research, surprised by great number of positive responses to that part specifically, not necessarily by boat builders, people who just really enjoyed. readers in general, American in particular, love to know how stuff is done, procedural details

(me, to myself: which is the joke in the Field and Stream review of Lady's Chatterley's Lover)

Ken cont'd: is detail good in and of itself, or does it have to advance plot/character/theme to be worthwhile?

Sarah: love granular detail and think is a danger of too much, either "I've suffered for my research and so must you", or because genuinely love the subject—haven't written horse novel because of risk get too in weeds. new novella Haunt Sweet Home, protagonist is working at reality show as production assistant (PA), very bottom of ladder. got lots of feedback from ex-PAs, used to live from someone who was a set dresser got some flavor from her. the things sometimes skip between big plot moments, are what make the job and character pop, so that when get to plot, believe in fully rounded character and ability/inability to do thing

Ken: remember in your A Song for a New Day, early on, step by step to get into venue and set up, played really real to me, felt like there and put me on her side

Sarah: makes it really hard to read those in public readings, not most dynamic

Marianna: just crystallized, what really sells me on details being necessary, is when feels like answering question already had, or didn't know needed until got. joy of discovery for reader, not only having fun but just learned something. can get away with a lot

Melissa: always comes back to how well written. joke never want to represent someone going to toilet, but that's first story in Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, really works. as writer, always worry that losing audience when writing library

Ken: been moments where you as reader has been lost?

Melissa: hard to lose me, find a lot of things interesting

Sarah: if I do one good thing this con, it's getting people to go read Molly Gloss, in particular The Hearts of Horses, horse trainer novel; sequel of sorts, Falling from Horses, Hollywood stuntman. details ARE the story. not SFF, basically Westerns. nobody does it better than her.

Ken: granular details about occupations as tool of worldbuilding. thinking about economy of language, classic example "the door dilated"

(me, to myself, once again: can I tell you about The Fortunate Fall????)

Melissa: Evil, CBS series, investigating Catholic Church, which everyone gets wrong (never heard priests complain, think happy to have people talking about). does get details wrong of church, but climbing and motherhood details were really interesting and well done (in the same character)

Sarah: from writer's perspective, stuff make sure to show to beta reader, especially someone who knows field really well if not your area, or if your area, to someone who doesn't know

Marianna: one of best pieces of advice ever seen, if in situation where danger of infodump but exposition needs to happen: get two characters having intense emotions, maybe even conflict, about information. can get away with so much more and also tell readers about stakes

Ken: decades ago, reading SFF story about lawyer, remember character bemoaning that his pleading-generating software was so outdated and running so slowly; opened up entire world of, what does law practice look like when there's genuinely good AI that can generate pleadings. no big commentary on that in the story, just one little detail

Sarah: going back to annoys: music related: describing music in way that music critic would. stories that do music right, talk about emotions of playing, hearing. Lewis Shiner always gets right, also LaShawn M. Wanak

Ken: reminds of TV show M*A*S*H. there are lots of doctors shows, almost always have consultant on set to ask questions of. one for M*A*S*H said, usually actors ask how to hold this instrument, they always asked how would it feel. showed in series

Ken: asks Marianna about mundane occupations in fantastical setting

Marianna: always fascinated by genre as magnifier, makes things bigger. only way to do that is to ground in mundane in one way or another. PhD dissertation about Whedon in Buffy would have outrageous situations but mundane jobs like bartending at demon bar, or inverse, to really push contrast

Ken: reminded of very short story, 15 years ago, "Accounting for Dragons" by Eric James Stone, very tongue in cheek, also satire. when look at fantastical through lens of mundane, casts light both ways

Melissa: ongoing manga, Kowloon Generic Romance, about realtors: feels very grounded but in a fictional city where things shift and disappear

(me, to myself: is manga particularly good at this? or do I just happen to hear about examples there?)

audience: reality is stranger than fiction. experience is that weird shit happens more often in real life than is written out. sparks some of my best ideas. any of that that forms heart of why you write?

Sarah: hard thing is that because so much stranger, sometimes don't read as true; wife works for liquor board, her stories are so weird (snakes falling out of ceiling onto fire marshal who was trying to figure out what rustling noise was), haven't found way to make fiction

audience: Snow Crash opening: the Deliverator was speculation, but sheer terror and anxiety is all of our delivery services now

Marianna: genre wonderful tool for laundering these things

In the rush to get notes out, I haven't been saying, "this panel was great," but if I didn't say something, they were. however, it's worth saying, and it's true: this panel was great.

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canyonwalker

Oregon Cascades Travelog #14
Christmas Valley, OR - Thu, 3 Jul 2025, 4pm

This afternoon we're hiking the Crack in the Ground in the dry, volcanic bluffs of eastern Oregon. This hike has been a long time coming... and I say that not just because it's taken me over two weeks to move this blog from my backlog but also because this is a hike that landed on my hiking backlog a few years ago.

"Check out this amazing volcanic crack in the ground!" and Oregonian friend texted us a few years ago.

"Looks awesome, are you planning a trip?" we asked.

And from there the conversation fizzled out. 🙁 But while our friend may have forgotten about this fascinating geologic feature, I did not. So when we planned this July 4th week trip to Oregon this hike was on my short list of things I wanted to do.

Watch on YouTube

On this hike I recorded both photos and video. As I prepared this blog I thought about which to include— or both. Ultimately I decided in favor of video as it's way better at conveying the immersive experience of walking through this narrow canyon.

In beauty I walk.

And this is only part 1 of, like, four, so stay tuned for more!

kate_nepveu

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
In an article of the same name, Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
Claire Houck/Nina Waters, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Laura Antoniou, Victoria Janssen

This was my last panel of Saturday and I was so much more tired than I realized. At one point, maybe halfway through, I went looking for my next thought and found only an empty brain. So I took basically no notes beyond the setup, my apologies. I will see what I can reconstruct now, and invite anyone else who was there to chime in!

panel notes

I started by saying that I read the article in question, thought it was interesting and Readercon-ish, and dropped it in the panel suggestion box. Then I started outlining it as panel prep and wasn't sure that I agreed with it! and I knew that at least some of the panel also did not, so I hoped for a lively discussion.

I suggested that the problems in the article could be put into two groups: problems of intellectual property (IP), and problems of scale.

Problems of IP: scraping fic sites, for text and also AI-generated audiobooks. selling bound copies of fic. these are problems caused by design of fic sites but more importantly, fic authors having much less power to protect their own works.

Problems of scale: the greatly increased number of readers means that readers come to fic as fiction rather than fan fiction. this ties into ongoing conversations, as the article notes, about fracturing of fandom communities and shortening of fandom life cycles, and about distance between authors and readers.

I asked the panel what they thought about these problems, and what problems they saw that weren't addressed by the article.

Victoria: is really very mad that fan and pro fic has been scraped. really can't do much about it, just feels worse.

Claire: interesting that article didn't mention plagiarism of fic by the kind of author who releases a new novel every two weeks to flood the market in a romance subgenre. many of those are legit, they're house names or groups of authors. but many are plagiarizing and filing off the serial numbers, and romance novels are so trope-based already that it's hard to definitively identify the plagiarism. happened to friend, was only able to demonstrate because had very distinctive setup. and that author just keeps reinventing self.

Laura: have had professional work plagiarized. giggled manically about AI scraping pro erotica and fic: poisoning the data set! maybe reaction is too muted but it's capitalism. can't really protect fanfic.

Claire: harassment of fic authors. started Duck Prints Press because wanted to publish fic authors, knew could be the firewall between authors and harassers. (aside: theory was that fic readers would like reading fic-style stories without fandom characters, and turns out no: people want those characters. they're making it work nonetheless.)

lots and lots of discussion about this; see anti-shippers on Fanlore for a primer.

we generally agreed that we had not heard of any writers modifying their own writing in hopes of being plucked out of the fic websites for professional publishing, as suggested in the article.

I mentioned seeing efforts to educate new fic readers on Tumblr, where I spend a lot of time, but it's hard to tell what effect they have.

I asked people how they've connected in fandoms, or maintained connections, or seen people fostering connection.

Claire: people need to understand that it takes work and time. built up community around small fandom, by creating fandom events, setting up references for the fandom's fanartists and writers, creating a Discord. have to find people who seem cool and interact with them regularly and in a chill fashion over time: find a fanartist, comment on their stuff. may not get immediate response, but will eventually become familiar to them as a person who is not going to be weird.

Victoria: used to be active in Blake's 7 fandom, dormant for long time, participation revived recently because discovered (or was invited to?) a Discord for it, and was even meeting people from it this weekend.

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kate_nepveu

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
J.M. Sidorova, Laurence Raphael Brothers, Shiv Ramdas, Steven Popkes, Victoria Janssen (moderator)

panel notes

intros: say if bureaucrats and what kind

J.M. (Julia): born and raised in then-USSR, example of autocratic bureaucracy. immigrated over 30 years ago, USian bureaucracy in immigration. is opposite of bureaucrat, day job as academic scientist, pride self on being unruly

Laurence: R&D background, joined US Patent and Trademark Office as patent examiner last year, in feat of amazing timing

Victoria: day job, bureaucrat for 28 years at major research university. currently helping with grant applications, require great deal of finicky attention to detail. before that, a lot of university policies about purchasing and reimbursement

Shiv: first novel was cyberpunk bureaucracy (Domechild). bureaucracy experience in two separate countries. government of India in professional capacity, used to make ads for them; then immigration to US

Steve: career working with what people call bureaucracy, big government agencies. never really had to deal with Kafkaesque ever. really like the bureaucrats that has worked with, far-thinking and well-intentioned, hobbled by bad legislation and insufficient finances

Victoria: bureaucracy can be used for good or bad, don't really want to argue about its existence. organizing principle for any large human endeavor is basically bureaucracy. panel: have you read anything with fresh approaches, or suggest ways that bureaucracies can make good fiction

Laurence: bureaucracy implies stability in a way, even if malicious or oppressive, can hopefully find way to adapt to it.

Steve: bureaucracies have to handle issue of scale. organizations helping thousands of people, then bureaucratic structure starts to appear. Star Wars, "fear will keep the local stations in line," doesn't really work

Shiv: bureaucracy is model that is designed to only work at scale, which is unusual, can't scale down. useful to remember that was original meritocracy as envisioned, China created exams to select (and then ignored results for centuries). really cool moment in human history, did not previously have concept of best person for job gets job.

J.M.: bureaucracies are based on rules and order. range of perceptions about how fair rules are (also transparent). ideal cozy bureaucracy is heaven, also hell: rules are fixed, no arbitrariness. so many TV examples. Korean shows or Chinese, have a structure that's bureaucratic in essence, but at top is a deity: great turtle or ox that holds the world. innate sense of fairness comes from that non-human entity. reflects distrust of human, ideal of fairness. Nobody's Looking, Brazil: character figures out that little hamster in wheel powers the whole fair structure

Laurence: Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are chaotic opposites

Victoria: comfort of predictability: in fiction, can make case for subverting that.

Shiv: challenge that predictability is one of core functions for bureaucracy. what about bureaucrats working within or against. Winston Smith in 1984 is one way

Steven: Miracle Workers: god decides to flush whole universe down toilet, two bureaucrats trying to save it

J.M.: absolutely, love it; god is not malevolent but absentee landlord, played by Steve Buscemi

Victoria: can be benevolent, non-benevolent, indifferent

Shiv: another reason challenging for story, bureaucrats are quintessential middle management.

Victoria: idea that bureaucrats go mad with power, even over really small stakes

Shiv: post-independence, India had bureaucratic system that was called License Raj, called that because was so fiendish like British still there. wanted car? go through government, takes years to be assigned one. takes years more to be assigned color ... even though there are only white cars

Laurence: bureaucrat has flexibility in interpreting the rules. once he has rejected application, can write examiner's note with advice, or suggest to attorney that have an interview so can explain conditions. some examiners like that, some don't. some green card interviewers like being kind, some get out of bed on wrong side. gives room to portray individual characters: what is their experience

J.M.: therein lies narrative tension, long for ideal bureaucracy that would be helpful and just, but only human. two problems: middle management is human, don't apply rules uniformly or at all; other side: cannot write the rules that are good enough. trying to cover all contingencies, becomes barriers

Shiv: private sector bureaucracy: try to file insurance claim. interesting, public bureaucracy designed to prevent worst-case scenario, private to prevent best-case

Steve: all worst experiences have been with private sector. (admits maybe sample is biased.)

Victoria: in private sector, people aren't rewarded for staying for long time in same job: leads to people doing things their way because institutional knowledge isn't there

V: fantasies of bureaucracy, affect how people think about government (treating government and bureaucracy as interchangeable for these purposes). how use them for positive effects?

Laurence: 20th century stories almost exclusively negative, lead to cynical and negative responses (which is not to say that not deserved). chicken and egg, Catch-22 or Kafka as responses to experiences maybe, but still cycle

V: showing bureaucrat going through daily lives and trying to do things well, goes along with seeing self in fiction. felt connection to people in Arkady Martine duology, also Murderbot experiencing different types of bureaucracy

J.M.: Star Trek itself, huge organization that works

Laurence: Iain Banks' Culture, see in interfacing with non-Culture

Shiv: Star Trek really good example, what matters is not that good, but least worse option available to you.

Steve: also Known Space, Niven, when successful, invisible. no narrative tension until fails. could do positive bureaucracy in untenable situation, e.g. natural disaster.

Shiv: how set baseline opinion of bureaucracy is during moments of non-crisis, which is difficult because stories are about overcoming obstacles. in a non-crisis, the obvious obstacle to overcome is bureaucracy itself, which is not message want to send

Victoria: trying to write post-conflict fiction, would be one way of doing it. Goblin Emperor, Hands of Emperor, consider both aspirational fantasies of bureaucracy: none of us have power of emperor, but what would I do with the power, especially since Maia (in Goblin) is so shy, downtrodden

Laurence: love Goblin Emperor, not sure best example since he is at top, many problems are because hasn't had chance to find feet. Witness for the Dead trilogy is maybe better example, very conventional church bureaucracy, protagonist working within that system; aspirational in that way too, because things do work out

Victoria: bureaucracy is background to and part of mystery plots in that trilogy

Shiv: Goblin Emperor: about to ruin, cover ears. at some point if don't draw line between politics and bureaucracy, going to have argue that Game of Thrones is bureaucracy novel. really about courtly politics

J.M.: Memory Called Empire also mostly court politics

Steve: respectfully disagree: Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings are failed systems because don't have bureaucracy, whole purpose of which to prevent what happened. "Sauron should never have gotten a building permit." medieval delegation in Europe is start of bureaucracy there, limits power of kings/emperors

Victoria: Hands of Emperor, another imperial novel but POV character is career bureaucrat. same issue of having imperial power, but mostly looking at what things this single bureaucrat puts into motion, because emperor gives instructions but bureaucrat must implement. we see that change takes time. has been working on what's effectively universal basic income, see played out in different people's lives. odd novel, massive, kind of circles back on self, but very much about civil service

audience: friend who writes legislation read it, was furious: person who writes legislation shouldn't also be implementing! can you have fantasies of bureaucracy where protagonist is not limited or collective in some way? is that necessary feature? or can we indulge in fantasy of purely good bureaucrat

Laurence: fantasy of bureaucracy, to my mind, should be much more egalitarian, focused on middle management

J.M.: the classical Western narrative with a lot of agency, is kind of at odds with this

(me, to myself: Saiyuki Gaiden features very corrupt heavenly bureaucracy and is about failing to prevail over it)

Shiv: lot of pushback about personal anonymity for specific bureaucrats. as species we really don't like not knowing who said so

Laurence: in US Patent and Trademark Office, my name is on all the rejections and allowances

Victoria: federal grant agencies: applicants know reviewers, can request not-that-one

audience: short story about alien bureaucracy gone wrong, title of which I didn't get; what would look like for alien bureaucracy to go right?

Laurence: aliens often stand for mysterious unknown powers, so bureaucracy can be monster

Shiv: weirdly, really functional bureaucracy is in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, appoint President for everyone to yell at while others do work; works at so many levels. also, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is one-person bureaucracy, developed immortality and is very mad about it, has list to personally insult every person in universe

Victoria: probably somewhere in C.J. Cherryh

audience: comment on Laundry novels, Charlie Stross?

Laurence: fun, mockery of system that deserves to be mocked

Victoria: Going Postal is a good example of good bureaucracy. obligated to mention Andor, examples of bad bureaucracy

Laurence: Too Like the Lightning, only decent people are UN functionaries

audience: Alastair Reynolds Prefect series, whole system based on voting

(me, to myself: Kagan, Hellspark; whole apparatus to determine if species is sapient)

Victoria: Rivers of London, regular cop trying to get magic police bureau and other bureaus to work together

Steve: Jasper Fforde

(I can't believe I didn't think of the Witness for the Dead books instead of Goblin Emperor! My panel idea submission even joked about how there were probably books about this that didn't have "Emperor" in the title!)

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dilickjm

December 2007

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Page Summary

canyonwalker - A Travel-Packed August Ahead
canyonwalker - Lost Tempo in July
canyonwalker - Trolling Agate Beach
canyonwalker - Driving the Avenue of the Giants
canyonwalker - Age Gap Relationships: What's Normal?
canyonwalker - Age Gap Relationships
canyonwalker - Eating at McDonald's used to be a treat; now it's a fail.
canyonwalker - Back from the North Coast
canyonwalker - Postcards from Garberville
canyonwalker - Friday Night Halfway... in Garberville
canyonwalker - Seeing People, Planning Adventure
canyonwalker - "Things Millennials Don't Understand About Boomer Parents"
canyonwalker - California Stays Cool While Rest of US Bakes
kate_nepveu - Readercon: Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
canyonwalker - Karma Comes for Chiefs Caught on Kiss Cam
kate_nepveu - Readercon: The Next Great Gatsby?
kate_nepveu - Readercon: Take Your Novel to Work
canyonwalker - Hiking the Crack in the Ground
kate_nepveu - Readercon: The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
kate_nepveu - Readercon: Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies

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Page generated Aug. 2nd, 2025 02:14 am

Piece Of π

Lemony goodness in every bite

Reading

A Travel-Packed August Ahead

Lost Tempo in July

Trolling Agate Beach

Driving the Avenue of the Giants

Age Gap Relationships: What's Normal?

Age Gap Relationships

Eating at McDonald's used to be a treat; now it's a fail.

Back from the North Coast

Postcards from Garberville

Friday Night Halfway... in Garberville

Road Trip 101

Seeing People, Planning Adventure

"Things Millennials Don't Understand About Boomer Parents"

California Stays Cool While Rest of US Bakes

A Cool Summer in Parts of California Doesn't "Disprove" Climate Change

Readercon: Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

Karma Comes for Chiefs Caught on Kiss Cam

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

Readercon: The Next Great Gatsby?

Readercon: Take Your Novel to Work

Hiking the Crack in the Ground

Readercon: The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

Readercon: Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies

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December 2007

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