development corrupts

afuna @ 2024-07-21T22:48:00

2024-07-22T05:54:12Z

I take back what I’d said about the romance in the Vanyel books being somewhat frustratingly limited as a product of their time

( what is the statute of limitation on spoilers )

comments

afuna @ 2024-07-21T22:43:00

2024-07-22T05:45:33Z

Oh god Lavan is a much more spoiled less sympathetic Vanyek with much less reason to be so put upon (well until the school stuff). I am clearly not here for teenage angst. Also is this the whole life bonded weirdness that you all warned me about?

comments

afuna @ 2024-05-10T21:18:00

2024-05-11T04:20:51Z

Inhaled the Oath* books. Then inevitably picked up the Arrows* books.

And then and then. I looked up the valdemar series, I thought I'd read all / most of them, but it turns out so many have been published in the meantime, that there are more books I haven't read than books I have. Hmmmmm.

I think I'm definitely meh over lifebond stuff
but I do like competence
and I do gravitate towards protagonists who overthink (I got it from somewhere okay?)

Now the question I have: do I keep reading? Do I keep reading in publication order? (I semi-sort of have done that so far). Or do I skip the books I've already read and try to just go read books that are new to me? (I've read the Mage* and the Storm* and the first one of the Owl* series, but I never got my hands on the rest of the Owl* series. That was starting to get a bit angsty for me -- I wonder, if I just read the founding of valdemar, the herald backstory ones, and the ones with new-to-me-character Mags, if those would hit the notes I'm looking for)

comments

Valdemar again

2024-05-03T22:38:44Z

Oh right. I’d forgotten about the soulmate thing. Soul bond. Whatever it’s called.

comments

Rereading old friends

2024-05-02T20:26:50Z

I picked up By the Sword (Kerowyn's Tale) at the library because 4yo saw it on the free shelf and decided she really really wanted to get it, without any prompting from me. It was the exact same cover of the one that I used to own as a kid.

Set in the same world as the Valdemar series, it's one of the few that I think has really held up for me over time. I've read / reread this one over a dozen times. I know this story, can feel the story beats echo in my head half a page before they actually happen.

I don't know if I'd wholeheartedly recommend all Mercedes Lackey books still (lots of the tragic gay love story stuff feels a bit... limitations of the 90s (but you can take stefan and vanyel out of my cold dead hands thank you so very much)) (and there's a lot of sexual violence which in hindsight maybe I shouldn't have been reading at 10yo). But Kerowyn holds a special place in my heart both as an unsure teen and as a much more sure and competent adult.

ALSO, I had forgotten just how much Lackey goes for the internal monologue!

comments

Spirit Island

2023-01-28T06:51:03Z

I've been playing a lot of Spirit Island (board game) recently. Sometimes with zorkian, sometimes solo. It's a fascinating game: co-op (1-4 players). You are spirits on an island that is being colonized by invaders. They're not really trying to do anything bad, but as they build up their towns and cities, they blight the land.

As a spirit, you can't really let them hurt you / your people, eh? So you fight back.

Love the theme. Love the flexibility. Love the thinkiness. Love that it's co-op.

I'm slowly getting better at it. Slowly, ever so slowly. I'm trying to get people around me to play it more, but so far no luck. It's so good though!

comments

I miss vacation!

2023-01-07T06:27:47Z

I really love what I do, but we had a week and a half long break for the end of year holidays and my personal creativity exploded in that time period. Tackled multiple projects, learned new things, organized several disaster areas.

And now it's back to work and I can tell that I'm too tired to maintain the previous level of explosion and it makes me a little sad.

comments

Book: Babel (anti-colonialism, translation-nuance-powered magic)

2022-12-22T17:26:25Z

I'm reading Babel, by RF Kuang (same author as The Poppy Wars) and it is fierce.

It also tackles some parts of Chinese/British history (iykyk) that I rarely see other folks treat with sympathy.

( spoilers )

It's about the time of the Industrial Revolution, except this revolution is powered by the space in between words in translations. Centered around Oxford.

I think one of the things I really hate about stories set in this time-era is that it's usually accepted that white folks in this era are biased. And so if there are any BIPOCs, and everyone else is biased it feels frustrating like I want to stamp my feet and yell and if everyone else is not biased it feels a little fake (though sometimes preferable to the former). And this book manages to avoid both traps by including bias but then centering the BIPOC experience, in a way that I didn't realize I needed until now.

I'm a little nervous about the ending, it could still fall apart, but about three quarters of the way in and it makes me so happy.

comments

Hello hello

2019-05-28T03:49:34Z

Some pretty intense life changes lately. I’m pregnant and due soon. So yeah that’s happening!

One thing I didn’t expect is that carpal tunnel is very common in pregnancy and I’m one of the lucky ones.

Basically means my usual hobbies (coding, knitting, playing video games) are off the table. I can still type but keeping it primarily to work hours.

Instead I’ve been reading: inhaling books in a way I haven’t since... idk, highschool.

Lots of them have been baby/parenting related (my first instinct when faced with uncertainty is still to read up on it), but also been a lot of YA fantasy. I may run out of known good things to read at some point, and I haven’t even started maternity...

So hello! It’s been years I know but figured I’d come around here again and remember my roots <3

comments

Apparently I've been knitting for seven years

2017-01-21T06:02:17Z

It feels a little mind-blowing. Knitting as an obsession comes and goes, but it's just so much a part of what I *do* <3

(ETA: I really need to find more people to knit things for. Haha :))

comments

you can't escape your roots

2017-01-09T04:13:12Z

I've recently started doing more crochet to do more color-based / character-based stuff (e.g., a BB-8 toy and beanie), but you can tell that knitting was my first love, because of the long tails everywhere.

Similarly, I've not yet gone over to the poi side, but I've at least started playing with it a little bit, and you can tell that I started with hoops because I have yet to convince my body that the thing at the end of my arms is going to be floppy if I suddenly try to reverse direction.

comments

afuna @ 2016-10-01T21:54:00

2016-10-02T04:57:07Z

Right now it feels like my life is basically work-home-work-home-work-home. Which, I love work, but when I get a chance to stick my head up and take a deep breath, I sometimes wonder if I should try to reintroduce more things.

The problem, though, is that I go through a phase where I blitz through everything possible and add it to my schedule and suddenly find that I started too many things at once and all my evenings are booked.

A little balance would be nice, self...

comments

afuna @ 2016-04-28T20:48:00

2016-04-29T03:57:47Z

Been afraid of saying anything, out of fear I'll scare away the motivation by mentioning it, but I've been playing guitar often enough / long enough that I'm finally starting to develop calluses.

I've been taking a scattershot approach: some evenings I follow a more structured approach (Andy Guitar when I've got the attention span; various apps when I don't). Other evenings I just sit down and play random songs from things people have put on the internet.

It's very nice to be able to sit down and have music come from my fingers. Like... like what, really, is this?

And because pop songs all take after one another, it turns out that even though there are like, a million different chords, half a dozen is enough to play most songs.

I'm still avoiding bar chords, but those come up so infrequently that I sometimes just don't *play* that one chord, and fill it in with my voice instead. (Cheater cheater <3)

I'm trying to wrap my brain around chord transposition. I've got something which takes an existing series of chord and transposes them, no problem. But then... I'm unsure what this means when I'm playing them on the guitar. Do I play on the same fret as I would pre-transposition, just with the new chord? Do I move one fret down for each step I've transposed? idk!

comments

Guitar!

2016-03-21T04:32:08Z

I've decided to start learning guitar, just for kicks.

What really triggered it is that I've always been slightly curious and sort of wanting to pick up the guitar maybe, but never really enough to actually get one of my own. Buuuuuut for Christmas, zorkian got the kiddo a kid-sized guitar. And then a week ago, I decided to pick it up and try it out.

I'm trying to take it slowly, so I don't do the thing where I'm intensely interested in something for two weeks and do that and only that, and then never touch it again. But so far I think that I'm managing to pace myself. I am, however, now considering getting an adult-sized guitar of reasonable quality.

As with anything, being a beginner is scary and confusing and there are so many conflicting pieces of advice.

(It is not as intense as, say, the debate over circs vs dpn, but there seems to be an ongoing debate as to whether a laminate guitar is ever worth the money, or whether one should just jump straight to a solid-top one.)

I've decided for sure that I'm getting an acoustic guitar with steel strings (so not electric, and not classical with all nylon strings).

The remaining things I'm trying to decide are:

whether I want to try a 3/4th sized guitar or a full-sized one.

I have short and stubby fingers. The only gloves I've found that will fit me are kid-sized. So, while all beginners say that they can't do the chords properly, and while most experts say that this problem will go away once you've practiced enough that you have some finger strength, it may in my case be worth cheating a little bit and getting something explicitly for smaller hands.

OTOH some kids are able to play full-sized guitar just fine so...
whether to get a solid-top one or a laminate

I'm definitely not getting the cheapest guitar out there, on the principle that as a beginner I don't want to spend all my time just fighting my tools. But given that I'm only a week into this interest, and this is mere casual interest and not "I want to perform someday", I want something that reflects that.

What I figure from all I've seen is that by virtue of material, most solid-top guitars are likely to have a minimum bar of quality. You can find good laminate ones, for like $100 cheaper but it'll be a bit hit-or-miss -- if you know what to look for in the guitar / reviews then you might be able to find a good guitar for the price. If you don't then you'll want to upgrade soon enough that you'll end up spending more than if you'd just bought the higher-quality guitar in the first place.

My plan right now is to learn a couple of chords, and then go into a music store and try out a couple guitars that have good online reviews, and then pick one.

I don't know if this is reasonable or not! Wish me luck :)

(In the meantime, I can uh. Play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and the "So Do La Fa" song from Sound of Music. Very very laboriously and slowly. I cannot play "Do Re Mi" though, because I don't actually remember what the notes for that are

Oh and I can semi-sort-of with much careful positioning do C, D, G, and Em chords.)

comments

DW Knows All

2015-11-28T05:42:09Z

Struck with the sudden desire to watch DS9 (especially since I lost my access to regular episodes around the time the dominion arc started getting good so I've never seen the end)

But it's a case of too many episodes too little time. Anyone able to recommend a good episode watching guide?

I tried googling but there are a lot of lists and I can't tell which are any good! Suspect someone here knows my pain :3

comments

Today I...

2015-11-03T07:09:57Z

* completed my first full DST cycle

* found my first bug related to DST time changes

* mourned the gradual loss of daylight. omg where is the sun going why is it abandoning me halp

comments

afuna @ 2015-10-21T21:10:00

2015-10-22T04:13:01Z

Just spent a week back in the Philippines with family, and now I'm back home. Contentment <3

comments

afuna @ 2015-09-20T20:52:00

2015-09-21T04:10:19Z

I've been thinking a lot about how I've drifted away from being defined by what I do.

As a teenager, I was heavily into anime fandom. I'd stay up until ~3am on dial-up to socialize with fellow fans on message boards and IRC. Eventually learned Japanese so I could understand, etc. Now, well it's been years since I even saw any anime, and I don't have any anime fandom friends anymore. (I have friends are still in anime fandom, but I don't talk anime/anime fandom with them).

I still play games, but I never identified as a gamer (not back when I was playing MMOs 8 hours+ a day, and certainly not now).

I enjoy programming, but I don't think of myself as a hacker (I enjoy building stuff, I enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect, I don't default to doing it in my spare time. And while I used to volunteer on other projects, these days I do my work, read tech-related articles, and call it a day).

I love books, but that's a pretty generic thing -- I don't love a particular series of books (and never have).

I enjoy knitting, but I haven't done it in a while, and it's not like I make new patterns.

I am geeky in general, but I don't think of myself as a geek anymore. A lot of things that give my little geeky heart a thrill have gone mainstream which is fantastic and amazing, but it seems ridiculous to go "oh I'm a geek" when there is nothing different in my level of affection or devotion from that of any person who considers themselves a non-geek. It's all normal now (I would have killed to make this happen as a kid; I luxuriate in this now).

But I feel like... like I've lost something somewhere. The ability to geek out and obsess over specific things? The desire to take something I enjoy and make it a part of my identity? I enjoy things still, I just don't have the intensity I used to have. And I don't know if this is because I don't make the time to foster my interests, or if it's because my outlook on life has just changed.

I'm happy though. I'm just no longer intense. I can't decide what that means.

comments

why is the cereal different?!

2015-09-14T03:18:03Z

A couple weeks ago, I decided I was in the mood for cheerios and bought the normal ones. I was then very confused when it was not at all sweet. Turns out what I'm used to is honey-nut cheerios, which was the only kind we had back in the Philippines. Here you get (no-adjective) cheerios and honey-nut? what is this.

And then the other day, I was putting together a grocery list. zorkian suggested I buy Captain Crunch. I knew that name! So I put it on the list...

Turns out canonical Captain Crunch is actually called Captain Crunch Berries, and just plain old Captain Crunch is weird.

I knew I was going to run into culture shock in the move over here. I just didn't expect it to be the cereal that got me.

(But at least I have Lucky Charms <3)

comments

zzz

2015-08-22T05:25:44Z

oh wow. Every time I think to myself "tonight I won't be exhausted", I do something like miss my bus stop and end up with a longer walk home than expected, and still end up exhausted.

(It was nice though, detoured and got some useful stuff along the way)

Been in new job a month. I've been sort-of-deliberately sort-of-not been careful about how I dress: mostly tshirts, jeans, minimal makeup. But I think by now I've proven I can *rock* it. So on the way home today I bought some happy-colored nailpolish. It's time to femme it up!

(It's not that coworkers would have judged me; but I want to avoid adding to any potential unconscious bias, especially if I was going to fail at any point. You all know what I mean.)

comments

afuna @ 2015-08-14T23:30:00

2015-08-15T06:42:48Z

Oh huh. I keep thinking I've been at new company only a couple weeks, but it's now actually been almost a month.

I've finally settled into the point where I can start *thinking* about other things, which was not the case before.

Especially the first couple weeks, I'd go to work, and well, work. And then I'd come home and read about work-related stuff -- either background in healthcare, or something about the specific technology stack we're using.

And now I feel a little like a swimmer surfacing from a deep dive and taking that first really deep breath of air. It's nice :)

--

Today I actually cooked dinner for myself (sort of). I've been interested in making the marinated eggs you find in ramen. I haven't had the ability to think about cooking in so long... and now I'm back. It's back. I boiled the eggs, made a marinade of soy sauce + rice vinegar + sugar, threw it in the refrigerator, and tomorrow I shall have something to eat. Hopefully delicious!

If it goes well, I may do a batch of it for breakfasts. Or I may not. WHO KNOWS.

--

On Monday I'm headed to New York for work! I'm excited :) I haven't been before. I'm staying in NY, but spending the bulk of my day at the office in Jersey. (Jersey City? New Jersey? I can't figure it out).

I don't have any plans, except to maybe get some New York pizza. Maybe also wander around. I think my chances of the first are lots more likely than my chances of the second.

comments

oh gods this company

2015-07-25T04:15:48Z

Manager of engineering to someone just before I left work: "Go home, it's Friday!"

My team lead on Yammer as I was cooking dinner: "What are you all still doing online! Stop working it's the weekend"

(I'm pretty sure *they're* both still going to work though :p)

(I am rather liking this place though. It's just been a week so who knows, but I am tentatively happy.)

comments

For my last trick in the Philippines before I go

2015-07-12T09:13:05Z

Halo-halo. Made personally just the way it should be :)

comments

For my last trick in the Philippines before I go

2015-07-12T09:13:00Z

Halo-halo. Made personally just the way it should be :)

comments

Guess who made takoyaki today

2015-07-05T09:24:37Z

(Technically it's not because we used sausage instead of octopus -- but it came out pretty well!)

comments