Asakiyume mita

I have started playing a video game! After the healing angel (youngest kid) told me about Disco Elysium, I thought, heyyyyy, I could try that. That sounds like something I might like. (I can't remember what she said that made me interested, but it was probably something along the lines of what raven says in her entry here about playing and loving the game. In fact, it was reading Raven's entry that CONFIRMED me in my desire to try the game.)

For context, I have played approximately zero video games in the past thirty years. The last (and only) video games I played for real were Tetris and Mac Man (Mac computer version of Pac Man). Somewhere we have a photo of me sitting with infant ninja girl in my lap, playing one of those like the happy but not very skilled addict that I was. Since then, nothing. But I was encouraged by comments on Raven's entry from another person who'd come to it with my level of video game experience. That person said, "I was generally able to learn how to do things by floundering around and fucking up (it helps that floundering around and fucking up is very much in the spirit of the game)."

I needed Wakanomori and the healing angel to turn off all the special bells and whistles that people with dedicated gaming computers enjoy when playing video games, as those were causing my poor desktop machine to huff and puff like the tired engine in The Little Engine That Could, and I need this faithful desktop to keep functioning. But they did, and then the healing angel sat with me through the first fifteen minutes or so, showing me how I could interact with things, etc. Good good! The next day I played a little on my own--Good good!

It was a while before I tried again, and to give you a sense of how incredibly out of it I am with regard to video games, when I decided that today was the day I was going to play some more, I happily opened ... the Discord app. (This also shows you how rarely I use Discord--I think it's been three years?) "Huh... this ... does not look right..." I said to myself.

Because it's Steam that you need to open, not Discord!

Oh, oops!

Then I opened the right app, and I played for almost an hour! 😌😌 I'm so proud of myself, and I'm having fun.

Below are two screenshots--I am not sure when/how I got the first one; it seems tutorial-like in nature? I have marked it up to show all the things that I'm ??? about (but you'll have to click through to see a large size to read). The second is an example of game humor--the last dialogue choice (well, and the third, too).
( screenshots )

This past week gave us plenty of cold days for frozen bubbles. I blew one beautiful big one that floated up past my neighbor's pussy willow tree and eventually snagged in the upper branches of my apple tree:



(The black blob in the sky is a crow)



Tangled up



One day I decided to walk a birthday card to the post office--to get there I chose a path along trails and through the woods. There were many animal tracks. This photo is from a different day, but it gives the sense of the busy traffic:



Eventually I emerged from the woods, patted my pocket, and--oh no! No birthday card! It had come out at some point! So I turned around and retraced my steps and retrieved it from beneath a pine tree. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the Healing Angel responded:

Meanwhile, a very lonely pine tree droops when it realises that this courier was not for it, and that it will have to wait still longer for the letter it anticipates

OMG blood of my blood, soul of my soul.

Yesterday we went to visit the healing angel, who lives in an apartment nestled up against a steep hill topped by impressive towers of rock in which are ... the Sunderland Caves. We didn't actually know there would be cave-caves. We thought it would be mainly things like this overhang:



But then we rounded a corner and felt a sudden breath of cold air ("Wow, this is ... very Lovecraftian," said the healing angel). With a little exploring, we found an entrance.

Here the healing angel looks into the cave:



It was very dark within. We had to use the lights on our phones. Here's a look back at the entrance:



Light from a chimney shone in:



Here's the chimney from above--don't fall in there (*shudder*)




There was a drop of about ten or fifteen feet, into the dark. There was a fairly easy way down, but see previous: (a) huge drop and (b) dark. Eventually I managed to slither down and join the healing angel and wakanomori. There were some cute pseudo cave paintings:



Back on the outside, the healing angel posed on this stone formation:



She then started to walk round it...



But at just the point where I took the photo, we all heard a sharp hiss. Like a snake, or like air being released from a tire. But we couldn't see evidence of anything making the noise; everything was still. "Mmmm, I'm just not going to walk this way," the healing angel said, and she came back around, and we continued on our way. On our return journey we came across the spot from the other direction. Again Valerie looked in. Again we heard a sharp hiss. Again we could see *absolutely nothing*, nor was there any scurrying or anything.

Most Odd.

On our way down the hillside, the light was magnificent.

I decided to buy some street-art-quality chalks and see how long they last (answer: not long! This would be an expensive hobby...)

And I drew this...



The nice thing about chalk art is you can keep on tinkering with it. I might add more red to the face.

I also ended up decorating my jeans:



The healing angel and her significant other are living across our household and the significant other's household (yes: we know--we consider ourselves all one infection/virus family), and yesterday evening they were over, and we all watched Frozen II together, which was relaxing. I enjoyed seeing the sisters' different hairstyles, and the songs were fun. The plot was a little lurchy, but it seemed like it advanced both sisters further along good-for-them trajectories and that it gave young fans more of what they liked.

Then the healing angel and her significant other retired to the healing angel's room, and Waka and I watched the Easter vigil streamed from our church. In addition to the priest, there was a cantor and some readers--the cantor sang the Exsultet, which gladdened my heart.

I finished The Raven Tower. I really liked it, especially the god-narrator's story arc. I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god, the Myriad, who was initially a meteorite but spends most of her time incarnating in swarms of mosquitoes. There was a Justice-of-Toren moment in the story that was very perfect. Ann Leckie sure does know how to show strong emotion in beings that aren't given to emotions; sometimes a very few words indeed will do. And the god-narrator's reflection on the inevitability of change/death and what makes life meaningful was beautiful. The ninja girl is reading it now, and we're having avid conversations. The healing angel has expressed interest in reading it too, and meanwhile we're reading Hamlet aloud together--you know, taking parts--which is very fun. (The human story arc in The Raven Tower has a Hamlet-esque situation and a few analogue characters, though that's more incidental than plot- or character-central).

Having finished The Raven Tower, I started China Miéville's Embassytown, which I've been meaning to read for quite a while. It is *very* rewarding to get around to reading a book you've been meaning to read for quite a while; it feels like keeping a promise. So far I'm liking this book considerably more than Kraken but not quite as much as Railsea. China Miéville has this gonzo imagination that can be a strength or a liability. I found it beautifully, poetically directed in Railsea, but overexuberant (felt self-indulgent) in Kraken. In this one it's better controlled--it's focused on language and other-ness, which I love, but ... I'm waiting to see if the story will have the heart that Railsea had. I'm not holding my breath, though.

In a way it's a perfect book to read after The Raven Tower, because RT had the premise that a god's utterance was performative/became/must be true, and Embassytown features aliens whose language is so bound up in the speakers' perception of reality that they cannot lie, or barely can lie. The (human) narrator and her husband have this conversation:

“Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust …” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers.

And THAT prompted a cynical thought in me about SF worldbuilding--about how even as SF writers play with the rules of one branch of science, imagining (say) a universe with very different physics, they remain very trammelled and hidebound when it comes to other fields--like (in this case) evolutionary biology. Apparently a gajillion years (or mega hours, as the book would have it, because somehow "hour" is a less subjective time unit than a year [why--oh! There is an actual good reason that I was ignorant of: minoanmiss explains here]) in the future, there is no other-better-different notion for how life all and everywhere comes about than Darwinian evolution.

I mean, I get that if you strange up too many spheres of science simultaneously, you end up with a hard-to-understand mess, but still: I'd like to see a book that broke free from the limitations of evolutionary biology. I suppose you could say Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven did that, with characters able to dream things into existence.

For reasons that would make a good story, which I will tell any of you if I see you in person, but which I won't go into here, we made a journey to Canada yesterday.

That is a long trip for a day trip, may I just say, but anyway. We encountered some interesting people along the way.

The Leaf Lady

She was from England. We encountered her at a a rest stop and information center on the interstate in Vermont. She was here, apparently, for the foliage, which is looking pretty magnificent in northern Vermont right now, but my phone got itself in a tizzy trying to update operating systems, so NO PHOTOS.

Leaf Lady: Excuse me, where are the leaves?

Visitor Center Staff Person: There's a board out front that tracks the foliage. It's best in the Northeast Kingdom right now.

Leaf Lady: All right. How far is it to Kingdom?

VCSP: You're entering it now.

Leaf Lady: And so I'll see leaves?

VCSP: Well, it's overcast today, so it may not seem as impressive, but yes.

Us, mentally: THERE ARE BEAUTIFUL LEAVES LITERALLY ALL AROUND YOU.

We made up a story that one of her children, who likes mountain biking and free running and recaning old chairs and making cheese, came to the United States and married a Vermonter and wanted her to see this beautiful place, but the mom is very suburban and didn't really want to come and this is her passive-aggressive resistance.

That center had a school parent-teacher group raising money by offering fresh coffee and baked goods fro a donation. Excellent.

The anti-tourism border guard

We crossed into Canada at a very small crossing point. There were no other cars on the road, and only one border guard, a young woman in her twenties.

Border Guard: And what is the purpose of your trip to Canada today?

Thanks to Wakanomori's research, we had a good answer to this question.

Wakanomori: We're going to see the museum in Coaticook.

Or was it a good answer

Border Guard (incredulous): No one goes to see the museum in Coaticook!

Wakanomori (laughing): Uh, well, we are.

Me (piping up from the passenger's seat): It's a holiday in the United States.

Border Guard: It is here, too: Thanksgiving.

Me: Hmmm. I wonder if the museum will be open, then...

Border Guard: And where are you from again? Massachusetts? And you're coming up just to see the museum?

Wakanomori: It's a long story.

Border Guard: I have all day!

Wakanomori then told her the story of how he and the older kids had biked this route to Canada years ago, and how he'd noticed about the museum then, and....

Border Guard: I see--so you're retracing your steps! Well, enjoy yourself. Maybe you can get some honey or cheese!

Interestingly, we saw a place selling honey a little further along the road--so we could have!

The gas station attendants

These were boys who looked to me like maaaaybe they were 14 or so, but I guess they must have been older? They were full of life and smiles, and they were going to pump our gas! It wasn't a self-serve station. Going to Colombia has emboldened me in languages that I'm not fluent in, so I tried out my rusty, rusty French: "Avez vous une salle de bain?" And he answered me in French and pointed out where the bathroom was! 通じた！(This handy word means literally, it passed through and more accurately, I made myself understood. THE BEST FEELING)

The man at the museum
The museum had a definite shut vibe to it, though there were other people walking the grounds when we got there. We rang the doorbell, as requested by the sign. After a bit a man appeared and told us, politely and with a smile but at length, that he was desolé and that it was un dommage, but the museum was closed. We nodded and thanked him but he kept apologizing, and in that moment all I could think of for "we understand" was 分かりました and entendemos.

The fox spirit
On the grounds of the museum, the healing angel spied a fox. It ran under the museum porch, but then came out again and ran up some stone steps leading up a hill behind the museum. It was very tall for a fox, with long, graceful legs. It stood on the steps halfway up the hill and regarded us, very foxy. Then it ran the out of sight. It was a prince among foxes, a god, a spirit.

Annnd then we came on home, long drive back. Hope you all had a wonderful Indigenous People's Day/Thanksgiving/Monday.

I generally like, or at least don't mind, people talking to me, but I *do* notice when it's out of the ordinary. Today, I have the distinct impression that I'd inadvertently sprinkled myself with talk-to-me powder.

First in the supermarket, a girl stocking the shelves, looked up as I approached and said, "Is it raining outside?" (It's not; it's a sunny day.)

"No," I told her, "It's still clear out."

"It's just... " she indicated a rumbling noise coming from overhead. "It sounds like thunder."

"Hmmm, yeah, it does. Could it be the air conditioning units?" We mused for a few minutes more and then I went on with my shopping.

Next, as I was gazing abstractedly at the grass-fed beef, a man came up to me and said, "Is this the grass-fed beef?"

"Yes, all of this," I said. There were about three shelves of little one-pound packages.

"Oh! And it's only $7.00 a pound! That's better than at [competitor supermarket]. Over there it's $9.00."

"Then this is a bargain," I said, though I don't really know what constitutes a bargain in the area of sustainably raised beef. In the end I didn't buy any--I don't know whether the man did or not.

Last was at the farm stand across the way from the supermarket. There's a young guy staffing it, vaguely familiar looking. He obviously had the same feeling about me, because he abruptly said,

"Whose mom are you? You look really familiar."

"What year did you graduate?" I ask back, and it's the same year as my youngest, which is complicated, because (a) she detested high school, and (b) about six months after graduating--and moving overseas--she came out as trans female.... which means her classmates knew her as a boy.

Always in these situations I have to make a snap decision: go into the story, or don't go into the story. This kid seemed friendly enough, but I have no idea what kind of relationship he and my youngest had, or if they even crossed paths. So I asked him if he knew [child's old name] and he said yes, that they'd been in band together.

"Tell him I say hello," he said.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He told me. I reported the whole thing to my youngest via messages. She said asking abrupt questions was very much that guy's personality. I said maybe it wasn't him; after all, I'd been wearing talk-to-me powder.

The healing angel, who longtime readers of this blog will remember as a child of 9,10, 11... is soon to embark upon new adventures. Rather than going straight to college, he's going to try to work for a bit in the land of his birth--England. To that end, he had to renew his British passport, not used since he was a baby. (He's used his American one several times since then.)

Today it arrived, and wow, the words at the front are redolent with the fragrance of Empire:

Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.

Requests and requires. Without let or hindrance! It's the ontological opposite of Movie!Gandalf's "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

ETA: The American equivalent:

The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.

America, up your game! Where is your require??

Thank you, everyone, for your good wishes last entry. The healing angel is recovering quite nicely, though still with lingering joint pain. Hope that goes away for him. This week is winter vacation, so that gives him more time to recuperate without missing more school (he's already missed two weeks).

In English he's supposed to be reading The Kite Runner. Although I was pleasantly surprised by his last book, Angela's Ashes, this one is every bit as awesomely depressing as Good-for-You English-class books come. We've been reading it out loud, and to get us through the current chapter (we're still in the very early part of the book), we together created a drinking game--but with the drink being ginger ale.

Behold:



The check marks represent how many times the thing in question came up (and consequently how many times we took a drink). Hassan is the narrator's childhood playmate and servant, whom the narrator treats rottenly. The narrator's got Big Regret about this as the adult telling the story, but right now we've been working up to whatever Really Terrible thing he's going to do to Hassan. Hence drinking game prompt no. 1: take a drink every time the narrator makes a dark allusion to the thing that made him what he is today.

Drinking game prompt no. 2 and no. 4 are self-explanatory. No. 3 is my shorthand for "disappointment in failing to receive his father's love"--the narrator's father is emotionally distant and not very interested in his son. Drinking game prompt no. 5, Hazaras, means take a drink every time Hazaras, the despised ethnic group that Hassan belongs to, are mentioned.

(In writing this entry I went and looked at a plot summary to see just how bad a thing we're in for. Oh. My. God.)

Let's change the subject. Here is a photo of a fire hydrant with a metal marker on it. It looks sort of like the hydrant is a child holding a balloon. If the snow gets high, the idea is that the metal marker is still visible, so (a) snowplows will be careful and (b) people will dig it out. As you can see, one of the neighbors did indeed dig it out. Thank you, civic-minded neighbor!



For a couple of years, someone or ones went around bending and twisting the markers . . . but that person (or those people) must have lost interest in that very mild form of troublemaking, because there's the marker, tall and straight.

Some time ago I posted about creating a matching game with quotes from Warriors of the Wind, a mangled dubbing of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind which we have an affection for in my family. I didn't have it quite done for New Year's, and then it became hard to find a time when the whole family was gathered, but tonight, on the occasion of a family birthday, we all gathered and played. True, the healing angel was ill (he's been sick with a virus now for more than 10 days...), and the ninja girl had to play with us via Facetime from Japan, but we did it! All six of us played, and everyone laughed and had fun. Even the cat got in on the game, temporarily sprawling himself on the pile of matches and then watching with big eyes as we grabbed the cards and shouted out the lines.