Like a shimmering of the dark air

Just here to say that I'm still alive. We're in the new apartment, but this has been a move of stages spanning the whole month and we're not quite out yet, though the exit is visible. I don't really know how to go about retroactively chronicling this process, but between the tornado level winds knocking out power at the house necessitating moving essentials and the cat early, Grey's ongoing medical problems and predictable major flare up of her anxiety around such a big change, my bipolar deciding to kick up a fuss and hit me with unrelenting rounds of depression and mania, work throwing a new hire at me with no warning to remind me that oh yeah, hey, you're still autistic and sudden change to routine is Bad, and just the usual stress of moving with some added layers specific to this move has resulted in A Rough Period.

Anyway. Here's what I've been stress reading to get me through it:

A Thief in the Night by KJ Charles. 4 stars. A nice bite-sized queer historical romance novella that features all of KJ Charles' strengths with very few of the weaknesses that can plague longer works.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray. 3 and a half stars that in retrospect I think I'll round up to 4 stars. Deeply enjoyable, slightly bonkers (affectionate) SW read. I truly adore Gray's writing and she's once again served me an autistic-coded Jedi Padawan main character more than likely by accident, but I'll take it (I had the opportunity to ask her at a book signing if she meant to autistic-code Obi-Wan in Master & Apprentice to which she said she was glad I could see that in the character but that it was unintentional on her part).

Society of Gentlemen: A Fashionable Indulgence by KJ Charles. 3 stars. Reread because A Thief in the Night put me in the historical romance mood but moving brain could not handle anything new-to-me. This does less-well as a reread, but is still solidly enjoyable.

Society of Gentlemen: A Seditious Affair by KJ Charles. 3 stars. Also less good as a reread, but the central romance remains compelling and a decent representation of kink, which is hard enough to find in historical romance.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule. 3 stars. Soule's writing is definitely more well-suited to comics than prose writing, so this was...fine. It's very much a first book, mostly preoccupied with setting up this era and the concept of the High Republic, but it never really succeeds at making me care about any of its arguably too large a cast of characters.

So, a lot of 3-star reads. I am hopeful for my current read (Heroes Die by Matthew Stover), because I desperately need a 4-star (or higher) read to lift my spirits.

Life very much sucks right now. I'm recovering from working the holidays, which has taken a considerable toll on my body and mental health, plus the deep freeze over said holidays, PLUS the cat was sick over the damn holidays.

[TW: gross and scary cat health details]

Grey had stopped eating or using the litter box, so we were rightly Very Concerned. On the second(!!!!) trip to the vet, they finally x-rayed her and found that she had compacted stool backed up to her small intestine. So, they gave her an enema and kept her under observation for several hours. Afterwards, they did a second set of x-rays which were clear. However, upon releasing her back to us, the office gave us essentially no instruction for how to care for a post-enema cat or any kind of idea of what to expect, and what treatment plans we were given were contradictory. So, basically, thank god for Google, and also that first night was Very Scary.

Things have seemed to be on the up, but Grey is once again showing some early warning signs. So, we're going to step up treatment and monitor, because lo, it is once more a holiday weekend. D:

[/TW]

Oh! Also, we're getting ready to move. We put in an application at an apartment complex yesterday, so we're waiting for background checks to clear etc. I'm going to have to figure out how to wrangle paystubs out of my employer in this, the digital age. (Minor rant goes here about how nowhere gives you paystubs anymore, but housing still requires them)

Anyway. Media consumption!

Mom gave me the House of the Dragon bluray boxset for Christmas, so I just finished rewatching S1 last night. Some general notes on the bluray release: HBO has clearly tried to color-correct some episodes to make them more watchable, but unfortunately "Driftmark" is still unsalvageable due to already having been color-corrected to turn midday into night (side note: love watching all the actors squinting in what was originally direct sunlight, meanwhile the screen is so dark I can barely see). So, that episode remains damn near unwatchable, which is a crying shame 'cause it's one of the best ones.

S1 episodes listed from my favorite to least favorite:

1. 1x10 "The Black Queen"
2. 1x04 "King of the Narrow Sea"
3. 1x07 "Driftmark"
4. 1x08 "Lord of the Tides"
5. 1x01 "The Heirs of the Dragon"
6. 1x03 "Second of His Name"
7. 1x02 "The Rogue Prince"
8. 1x06 "The Princess and the Queen"
9. 1x05 "We Light the Way"
10. 1x09 "The Green Council"

The top five are, frankly, all so good that their positions are interchangeable, except for "The Black Queen" which is undeniably the best. However, from about seventh position downwards is a pretty steep, and ever-increasing, drop off in quality. That said, the only episode that is truly bad is "The Green Council," and even that episode has some (few) saving graces (mostly in the forms of Aemond, Aegon II, and Helaena, who should have been the focal points of this episode, but alas. We got totally 100% necessary things, like Larys wanking to Alicent's feet, instead. Sigh).

I also watched The Handmaiden (2016) over Christmas, which was fantastic. I've been a fan of Park Chan-wook's work for a while, but this might be my favorite that I've seen so far. It's messy but extremely productive in its explorations of racial imbalance, imperial colonialism, cultural appropriation vs. assimilation, female sexuality and rage amidst patriarchy, and in particular I think this might be my favorite interrogation of the "evil lesbian" trope. There's something very Rebecca-esque in the first half of the film especially, and just. I felt profoundly seen by this film, which is both deeply unsettling and soothing at once.

On the books front, I've been consuming some BL manga titles, while still crawling through Snape (not for reasons of quality, but rather lack of spoons), and somehow I also read Ocean's Echo and reread Chain of Gold in there.

For the BL titles: I've read volume one of Love Nest by Yuu Minaduki which is a standard forced-proximity gay guy/"straight" guy romance, and the first two volumes of Black or White by Sachimo which has been an unexpected delight. It features an established relationship between two men who already know they're queer, which is rare enough, but it also includes them working through sexual dysfunction, a nearly nonexistent theme in romance, all amidst needing to remain closeted for their acting careers. So far, it's been a much more layered and productive approach to the genre than I'm typically used to.

I'm hoping to get to the second and last volume of Love Nest and volume three of Black or White today, which might be overly ambitious but whatever.

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell was somewhat disappointing. I loved Winter's Orbit, but this second book in the universe just wasn't it for me. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just not really "for me." The trope of mind-sharing was so tiptoed around that it felt very much scifi lite, and like the narrative was trying not to scare the reader. Which for someone else might be fine, but for me I don't need the training wheels. I also didn't love the ending, and felt it was somewhat cowardly. This wasn't bad enough, or indeed even objectively bad at all, for me to lose interest in future work from Maxwell, but this particular book just wasn't to my taste.

We're experiencing a heat wave, which around these parts at this time of year means it's averaging 100 degrees and above. I'm focusing on keeping the upstairs as cool as possible for Grey (the cat) and keeping myself hydrated. I'm running on very little sleep because of all this since I have to leave the (extremely loud) window unit running overnight. The payoff is that my day started at 7 AM, so I've already crossed a lot of things off my to-do list for today. But that balances out with the price of being exhausted by 2 PM.

I finally finished rereading all the new canon Thrawn books leading up to Lesser Evil, so now I can begin the aforementioned new(er) installment. I'm finding it hard to focus on Lesser Evil, though, in a bitter twist of completely predictable irony. I'm having better luck with some academic reading; a biology course and reading Orientalism by Edward Said for funsies. I'm also working my way through a collection of Brothers Grimm fairytales in the original German (Andrew Lang translations are Bad, theory confirmed).

Went by the fabric store yesterday and picked up some needle threaders (the ancient one Mom and I had been sharing finally met its honorable end last week), and then, because I have no self-control, I got some sparkly yarn that was on sale. IT WAS CHEAP WITH PRETTY COLORS AND SPARKLES, WHAT ELSE WAS I TO DO?? Do I have a project for it? No. But I will think of something, I'm sure.

The figure skating rule changes from the ISU congress are coming down and they are a predictable mixed bag. Raising the age limit, good. Reducing the program components from 5 to 3, BAD. Honestly, with the upcoming season, I am seriously contemplating ceasing to follow the sport. I'm not at all interested in watching "figure jumping" and the ISU seems determined to head in that direction unto its own destruction. However, I know myself, and I know that so long as Shoma Uno is still competing, I will be unable to completely walk away from the sport. But I am at the very least going to reevaluate how much time and emotional investment I put into the sport, because I can only take so much nonsense and the last Olympic quad had me at my absolute limit.