Day in the Life of an Idiot

Turns out, in a surprise to only the richest man in the world, if you cut funding for the National Weather Service, storm predictions suffer.

We have a neighbor in one of our closed neighborhood groups who is a meterologist. When everyone (including me!) was complaining about the storm prediction that had "everyone overreacting," she explained some things to us.

Firstly: Garbage in, garbage out.

When budget hatchets come down, fewer things like weather balloons go up. Atmospheric conditions are largely tracked by weather balloons and some states have gone from releasing the usual two a day to ONE a day. Our weather here in Minnesota largely comes from the west. So, that means, on the day leading up to the potential big storm, the weather predictors were depending on data that was last current IN WYOMING, approximately 900 miles (1,448 km) away.

There was no new data between here and there that included upper atmospheric pressures, etc. All that data normally goes into the models they use to run their weather prediction maps. When they don't have data, their predictions are... SURPRISE!!... crap. Garbage in (or nothing at all in); garbage out.

So, if you feel "ripped off" because we got no storm on Monday, then BLAME TRUMP.

I mean, this is where it feels dumb... rather than evil. Like, I expect this current administration to be vindictive against what they call "wokeness," but what the f*ck is "woke" about weather reporting? Did people really feel there was a Big Weather problem, lots of bloat and misuse of funds? (Don't feel the need to answer this, these questions are rhetorical. I know that all government agencies got hit.)

/rant

But, so here it is Wedensay already, and I'd been meaning to write up some notes about what I've been reading. I am currently eighty-some percent of the way through the audiobook of The Mechanics of Memory by Audrey Lee. I will say that I think this book is a little longer than it needed to be, but I'm enjoying the general premise of it. It's about a woman who is basicaly wrongfully sent to a psychatric "spa" in order to have false memories implanted in her--though it turns out she's resistant (or maybe was prepped to withstand the "treatment"), so she's trying to figure out the mystery of why everyone has been sent here and what it has to do with a bunch of hackers known as the Mad Hatters (which, I mean, the name alone gives us a clue that perhaps this psych ward is, in fact, somehow involved.) It's one of those mysteries where you're pretty sure you're guessing ahead, but then another twist is introduced. It feels like it should be closer to the climax than it is right now. I'm at that phase where I would LIKE THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT, but another complication just dropped. But, despite that, I would recommend it. The audiobook has at least two narrators and, unfortunately, one of them reads like he has never experienced an emotion in his life. But, luckily the majority of the chapters have someone else reading.

Previous to this I had someone read The Sculpted Ship (by K. M. O'Brien) to me, and that was another one where I started out more keen than I finished. The Sculpted Ship was to science fiction what Legends & Lattes is to high fantasy. The place where I ended up growing disintersted in The Sculpted Ship was where it left the formula of low stakes problem solving. There's a whole heist at the end that solves one of the main plot issues of the story, specifically how our heroine will get the parts to finish making her ship space worthy, but it goes deep into characters we only just met and I could have done without it, even though it puts a bow on the whole thing. I was there for the "how will our heroine make enough money to buy this part?" and "Will the heroine pass her etiquette lessons in time for the safari booking?" non-tension conflicts.

We all need a book like this from time to time.

If you pick it up, my only caveat is that K. M. O'Brien is a dude writing about women and I knew that the moment that his point-of-view heroine described another woman as "well-endowed." This wasn't a cardinal sin? I do know some women who might say something like this, but there is later an aborted sexual assault that just didn't quite ring true for me. Mileage may vary, however.

So, with The Memory Mechanic nearly done, I have another list of possiblities.

HOWEVER, if I can figure out how to get the audio files to my phone, the following list may be moot, as the Hugo Award reading packet included audio files for almost all of the books nominated this year. Audiobooks included are: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wisewell  (the last of which I listened to some time ago and really enjoyed.)  So, it's missing a couple? But, that's pretty impressive!

The list of things that I have queued up in Libby are:

Nnedi Okorafor's Remote Control (this appears to be a novella, as it's only 4 hours long)
Annalee Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline
Mike Chen's Light Years From Home
Kemi Ashing-Giwa's The Splinter in the Sky
Vic James's Gilded Cage
Jenn Lyons's The Sky on Fire
Christopher Paolini's To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

If anyone has recommendations among those (or which Hugo nominee I should start with), I'd love to hear what you have to say.

I THINK I have a plan to get the Hugo nominees over to my phone, but if not, I'll end up listening to those piecemeal on my computer while doing things in the house (which is fine, it's just less convenient than my phone. And now is the weather for yardwork, so! I may actually become one of those people who has two different books going at once!) 

Anyway, I hope you all are doing well. Reading anything fun or different? 

 I skipped my Zoom writing accountability meeting today because I need to watch all the things before we dump our Hulu subscription on the first. 

The truly hilarious part of this is that the only thing I really need to watch is the second season of the new Bleach arc (Thousand Year Blood War). And, I say this as a tried and true Bleach fan, but it is so dumb and so cringe (the jiggle physics are just... gods help us all) that I need an emotional support fan to be on Discord with me while I watch it.

Seriously, I tried this on my own several times before and I kept hitting cetain moments where I'd have to stop, yell, "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS, KUBO*" slam the off button, and then not watch for months. 

My dear longtime Bleach fan friend in Wales agreed to sit with me (on Discord and on a different streaming platform and in a different time zone) so that we could both get through this. I mean, there is part of me that would be fine if I never watched it to the end. I hate the ending with the fire of a thousand burning suns. However, I am such a completist for this fandom that it just doesn't feel right to give up, you know? I'm still writing fic in this universe from time to time (though my fervor has mostly died. I used to post something once a week. I just don't have that fire in my belly any more since Kubo killed all that is good and right in the world, by which I mostly mean Captain Ukitake but also my ships.) And, despite everything, some of the very best twists--some of which were signaled from the very begining--are in this arc. So, it's... worth it??

Plus, at this point I only have to put up with it for a couple of days. Then there's no more Hulu and no more Bleach. In the US, Hulu is the only place it's streaming; you can't even get it on Crunchyroll. So, I'm in it for the next however many days. And, we watched quite a few episodes today. Hopefully, we can just power through it. (We haven't even hit the awful transphobic scene yet. I can not watch that alone.)

So, that's part of what I'm watching and reading. Not that I would recommend it to anyone. Unless I HATED them.

The other media related thing I did recently was that I downloaded a whole bunch of audiobooks from Libby. Let me do an informal poll (not a real one, because I have never figured out how to embed them). Which of these should I listen to first:

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen
On Earth as It is on Television by Emily Jane
Queers Destroy Science Fiction! by Lightspeed, et. al
Amped by Daniel H. Wilson

I will eventually try to read them all in the time I have, and, if I'm honest, no matter what you all recommend I start with, I'll probaby start with whichever one is shortest (which is The Echo Wife, at 8 hours.)

Otherwise, I haven't been reading all that much. I did end up watching an anime (also on Hulu, since it was going away,) called Summer Time Rendering, which I liked for the cleverness of the time looping. It starts out seeming like it's going to be a murder mystery version of the movie Groundhog's Day (1993), but then the story veers into science fiction (and dark fantasy) kind of quickly. I will say that if you are not an anime or manga fan, this isn't a good one to start with, unfortunately. The manga it was based on is from a genre/publishing category called ecchi, which means that--speaking of jiggle physics--there is more than the typical amount of "fan service." Lots of panty shots and bouncing D-cup boobies. Heavy male gaze. And not nearly enough pretty. pretty men to make up for it. 

However, the mystery as it gets unraveled was pretty fascinating and by the time it turns into a battle/fighting anime (Summertime Render, the manga version, was a Monthly Shounen JUMP+ product, so becoming a fighting manga was inevitable, alas), the cleverness shifts to "how are they going to out run time and thwart the bad guy's ability to track them, this time." Which is a neat way to do it, for my money.  If you are cool with all the ecchi, I would recommend it. If not, yeah, there are a lot of uncomfortably large boobs bouncing around without nearly enough support. :-(

Otherwise, I will need to report soon on how my New Year's Resolution is going. I've heard back from nearly all 20 of the people who signed up to be my pen pal for a year. It's been really good for my mental health to have something to look foward to in my post box (gods know, my inbox is full of Democrats screaming for money and push articles from the NY Times and The Atlantic reminding me that the world is, in fact, on fire and democracy has died in darkness weeks ago.)

ANYWAY.

Oh, I forgot one other thing that I watched: The God of Ramen (2013). This a live-action documentary about a guy who makes ramen really, really well.  I am a member of Japanese Film Festival and so I get a lot of notifications when they run online "screenings" of various movies for international audiences. I have a couple more that I want to watch, but I also need to get though Bleach....

How are you all holding up? Reading (or watching) anything interesting lately? 


==

*Kubo Tite, Bleach's mangaka. A man I love to hate and hate to love. A ruiner of lives. A gifted genius and babbling dumb face.

I'm currently listening to an audiobook called Flux by Jinwoo Chong. I picked it because I'm running out of books that Goodreads has decided are cyberpunk that I can easily get through my library (or as audiobooks). So, what I did was just put "cyberpunk" into the tags I wanted into the Libby app and asked it to find me some stuff. I'm not sure how well it did.  There is a tiny bit of "wetwear" in this novel (one of the characters was mute, but receives a voice modulator,) but... I don't know, man. Like, the SF is light on the ground. I think I was duped into listening to mainstream fiction.  *grumpy face*

My plan is to listen to the book until the loan period runs out (about five days) on the off chance that it markedly improves. I have another book that just became available, which is not SF, which is Someone You Can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell, who I met, briefly, when he was in town for Fourth Street. This book is getting a lot of good buzz, plus I rather liked John, so I thought I might as well give it a try. So, that one is up next in the queue.

Otherwise, the big thing I'm re-reading right now is the rulebook for Thirsty Sword Lesbians, as it seems that is the campaign that my brand new once-a-month Tuesday night RPG group is going to have me run for them. Due to having run this several times before (including twice as a one shot at ConFABulous), I have homebrewed the f*ck out of the cyberpunk scenario, and so another huge thing I've been doing is writing what amounts to a personal Player's Guide. 

Which, not going to lie, I've been really enjoying. 

I'm a whore for worldbuilding. It's a big part of what I used to do when I was writing a metric ton of Bleach fanfic. (Which, shhh, don't tell, I've also had a yen to write again. This is all, of course, because I have a novel I SHOULD be working on.)

Anyway, how about you? Reading anything interesting or fun right now?

 
Image: Classic lunch counter in diner built in 1956 just outside of Milford, PA

Today was mostly just driving again. By chance, I took the majority of commenter's suggestions and listened to Darcie Little Badger's A Snake Falls to Earth, having finished the Murderbot audiobook. I'm enjoying A Snake Falls to Earth so far, though I agree with sabotabby that the plot is very meandering. Currently, I care more about the story in the reflective world than in this one. But, I'm only about three hours into an 11 hour book. There isn't much more road ahead of us tomorrow, so I might not get back to it until we're making our return trip. 

We are in an actual roadside MOTEL just outside of Milford, PA. 


Image: The Scottish Inn, an honest-to-god motel

We got off the highway ahead of this motel just to see what the town of Milford looked like and we've determined that it's worth a detour (back a few miles) just to wander around a little bit before we head on to Middletown, CT. Milford, if you are unaware, is THE town where the Milford Method of critiquing was born at Damon Knight's science fiction workshop. So, it seems appropriate for us to wander around there a bit tomorrow before the very short (only two and a half hour) drive to our AirBnB near the Wesleyan University campus. 

Hopefully, I will have some fun pictures tomorrow. 

Now, off to a shower and well-deserved sleep!