Jonah Sutton-Morse
Youngest kid is almost six, dog is confined behind a baby gate, and cats are restricted to bedroom/bathroom until they show they can use the new litter box. There are areas of the house that can have breakables in them and all my reflexes are freaking out when I see it.
Kiddo is starting high school and setting up a new (Windows because games) computer but we also have access to things like a Raspberry Pi at home to host random stuff. They’ve got ADHD and will definitely need help remembering calendars and assignments and stuff. Anyone have any tips?
Well, the thing that got me back on Facebook was needing to get rid of various items before we move out of state and wanting access to the marketplace, so there we are.
People are staking out very odd positions on the relevance of older SFF. Where’s the modern Flatland or Heavy Planet?
So glad to have discovered The American Vandal podcast. These Jameson Tapes, and the discussion around them, are fascinating and incredibly generous. overcast.fm/+AAkiQ0y8…
Picked up this “gem” at my local bookstore recently. Seemed appropriate to find it on the day I was listening to a podcast close reading Prufrock
Fantastic Coronations
So, I want to riff a bit more of this observation I made about Fantasy coronations, specifically Maia’s in Goblin Emperor and Kelson’s in whatever Deryni book it was where he got crowned.
In some ways these are very similar. The ruler spends some time in seclusion, then goes through some rituals and ends up with a crown. There are specific important words spoken by a Prelate or Archbishop, and also lots of political undercurrents. The thing about Kelson’s coronation is that the young king has allies at court and a political awareness. He knows what he’s trying to accomplish (getting his magic), and as an author, we know what Kurtz cares about (the actual mechanics of the ritual, and specific political maneuvering).
Maia is still finding his footing. He’s had a couple of very long and bewildering days, and now he needs to sit by himself for a while and then later he walks some places, endures the coronation, and then goes to bed and collapses. In some ways, what’s going on is that Addison really does wants us to understand this character, and so we’re tightly focused on Maia’s feelings and what he notices: the attempt to re-connect to his mom’s meditation practice, his awareness that there are a lot of people at court and he should try to notice who is acting in what ways, but because he’s out of his depth he can’t really, etc. This is well done, but what it means is that we’re following along with a very passive character, which at least for me detracts from the scenes.
As an aside, a few scenes earlier, Maia insists on meeting his household servants. A day or so earlier he attended a funeral for not-nobles. I couldn’t tell you anything specific about those household servants, or how Maia remembers them (except the one we’d already met). When passing by the places where the commoners review his procession, Maia doesn’t see or recognize anyone - the relative lack of specific individual interactions in the coronation is aligned with the lack of any connection to previous scenes in which Maia set himself apart from other Emperors by being interested in people who aren’t politically important.
There are three things I’m noticing on this read of Goblin Emperor: the first is that I really am rooting for Maia. He’s a basically good guy in a very difficult situation, and I want to enjoy reading a book about his journey to be happy and successful as emperor. I want this to be a story about Maia coming to power and using it well. The second is that there are a lot of ways that Goblin Emperor is very consciously in dialogue with the fantasy tradition: whether or not Addison is specifically writing to Kurtz, the notion that the ceremony by which a new ruler comes to his power is important isn’t novel - here as with many other scenes, Addison is telling us about Maia and how he fits in as a character in a fantasy world. Finally, I’m unfortunately very consciously that I just don’t like the choices at a craft level. I don’t think the scenes tell us much about characters beyond the obvious thing intended in that particular scene. I don’t think the details are dense enough or illustrative enough of what’s most important. The world and characters around Maia just don’t feel lived-in to me, in ways that I am consistently disappointed by.
Sigh, let’s give this another shot and see what I missed last time. (And also whether I hallucinated the racism and vague anti-religious stuff)
📚 - Original Sins, Eve Ewing
Started Eve Ewing’s Original Sins, which seems like it’s going to be about how schools are part of the construction of racial hierarchy that’s been reinforced since the original sins of chattel slavery and Native American genocide, and I’d forgotten what a good author she is and also how good it is to read good sociology
My mom dug up an old photo of me (which came sometime after high school graduation, since that cowboy hat was a gift from my uncle). I am who I have been.
Having narrated The Lord of the Rings to my youngest (5 1/2) once, and working through it a second time, we’ve now decided to watch the movies. Lovely seeing these characters through her eyes.
Seems appropriate that I got Eric Klinenberg’s “Palaces for the People” via ILL from my small-town library.
American Vandal really is an excellent podcast, and I appreciate this episode on the two VP candidates, and specifically Walz’s Minnesota politics. overcast.fm/+AAkiQ3B-…
I am in general enjoying reading “Building a Second Brain” but the section on “Intermediate Packets” that references IP but doesn’t seem to understand the legal framework around work for hire or work created as an employee of a company is kinda obnoxious
It’s been about a month since I left my job and, uh, I can read again. Books are good. I appreciate good books. I am focusing on them for a while. I stayed up late finishing Witch Roads last night. Will report back later on A Physical Edication which I’m reading because of the recent 404 media podcast.
Someday we’re going to actually be moved, and this experience is going to be A Story, in which we try to remember how many times we went under contract. But right now, it just sucks.
An update
A week ago I left my job. We are moving to Maine this summer. Currently we’re still in the process of getting under contract and through all of the bits of inspection and financing, but if all goes well soon enough we’ll be in a place with a bigger barn, more acreage (we might actually grow hay to feed our sheep year round, assuming we can find someone to hay it), and a legislature not trying to make things unsafe for my family. That move wasn’t compatible with staying at my job, and so for the summer I have the difficult task of enjoying myself with my kids in New Hampshire and midcost Maine … we all have our crosses to bear :)I have rediscovered that kayaking is a lot of fun, and that in particular my oldest simply lights up when they’re out propelling themself around on the water. We’re planning to do a lot more of that this summer. We’re also going to see if the three siblings can remember how to be kind and extend grace to each other more often than pushing buttons (or lashing out pre-emptively in order to protect the buttons). I’m also going to see if not being “on” quite so much will help me extend a bit more grace. So far, the signs are good.Today we had two different unplanned kids come over, which was awesome for us, and seem sot have been appreciated by the other parents. Hopefully we’ll manage more of that.I haven’t yet gotten back into the groove of reading, but I’m working on it.I recently listened to this podcast series on churches in decline, and an episode about a church in the bay area trying to stay active. The host interviewed a number of young adults about inviting others to the Church, and all demurred, because they don’t want to just go out an evangelize. And look, I’m not big on evangelism either, and I don’t regularly invite people to attend Quaker Meeting with me, but if it comes up, I do let them know they are welcome, and if I’m being honest, I think most people should go. I mean, the spirit of God lives within us, and speaks to us best spontaneously when we gather in silence, and through our relationships in community. There is one, indeed, who can speak to my condition and also to yours. And I think if you’re attending a church and can’t comfortably say that, or something similar, and mean it because you think it’s a true statement about the world, and a gift to the person you’re talking to, then you probably just shouldn’t really be going to church. (Which is easy for me to say, since I attend the Meeting for Worship where I am a member, which we don’t call a Church, ‘cause the Church is a whole different thing, and is us, not a steeplehouse).I have done some tinkering with computer stuff, and while there’s a lot that can be said about LLMs, I can say pretty conclusively that they are very good at pumping out code in arbitrary languages that more or less does what it’s supposed to. In a week (including two weekends) I’ve stood up a Raspberry PI, a few different services (tailscale networking, plus a calendar/task manager, and Obsidian note-taking), a service on the Pi to manage turning simple tasks and notes into coordinated project/action management with linked reference material, and an Obsidian plugin to turn random notes into tasks. I don’t know javascript, typescript, or python, but I’ve got code from all those languages running and doing more or less what it’s supposed to, plus various Docker installations.I wouldn’t want to use all this stuff in production (I was on a call near the end of my time at work with a developer who had a very straightforward and well-thought implementation for bug-fix that ALSO didn’t really jibe with some of our standard architecture and after talking it through, the architect made him do the more complex but also more correct implementation. I’m sure an LLM could do the thing either way, but certainly my company lacked the tooling and structure to also incorporate the “understanding why”, “making it meaningful to all the needed stakeholders” and “making the call about which possible option to select”, which are much more important pieces of solving actual production issues that affect something more important than me getting to scratch a computer-productivity-system itch), but for being able to do the thing that there are lots of tutorials about, it feels a bit like I’ve unlocked the “how to draw an owl” where there are a few outline circles, and then it jumps straight to the detailed owl. The other observation I’ll make is that my job for the last 8 years has been capturing users saying “I wanna do X” and turning that into “here are some detailed implementation plans for a computer system” and then making sure it actually worked. I couldn’t use generative AI to draw a pretty owl because I don’t know what a pretty owl is. But telling it to write me code that does X, and describing when it deviates from that, that I can manage.Anyway, more to come on the book front, and the computer tinkering front, and the house front, and the kayaking front, I hope. Have a couple pictures of NH in the summer. It’s lovely.
I’ve been retelling The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings as car ride & bedtime story with my 5 year old. We just finished LoTR, so onto the Silmarillion. Kiddo wants me to turn off the water early because it’s hard for her to hear about Eru Iluvitar and The Void over the running water.
Steven Erickson really is “what if literalizing the metaphor but like even more than you think”, isn’t he? (And yes, I do love it, even as I judge myself a little bit)
Learning that Skrmetti was decided while I was wiring earnest money for a new house in a safer state the week after leaving my job because of that cross-state move is just a little on the nose.