So you filled your hands

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

I slept??? until 11 this morning??? Blame DST, but I also walked more than eight miles yesterday, much of that inside the Art Institute with Shibrogane, who was in town for a conference, hurrah! I am also on newsletter fill-in duty at work; last Monday, I wrote our afternoon newsletter, which I usually edit, and from Friday to this coming Friday, I wake up at ugly o'clock and put together the morning newsletter, which is horrific. It actively makes me ill to not get enough sleep and throw myself right into work as I wake ("wake") up. Like, thank goodness I found some melatonin so maybe I can get enough sleep early enough tonight, but that's a gamble.

GOSH. It has been a month! We've got elections stuff at work (the Illinois primary elections are March 17th and it requires so much prep work), and then Jesse Jackson died and that became our ENTIRE output (not literally, but it's felt like it) for two or three weeks. I am TIRED.

The biggest thing is: condo got! Closing is this coming Friday! I am — scrambling to get packed and organized in addition to All of This Above, because my original shipment of moving boxes was delayed and then stolen. I'm also constantly laughing at myself because I was like, oh yeah, I'll have two weeks for contractors to fix stuff and for painting and gradual move-in and they can obviously just let themselves in to get things done! And then I remembered, with horror, that no, I am the one who will have to constantly ferry back and forth between the apartments in order to let them in etc etc etc. It's awkward on public transit and too long for a morning walk, but it's a straightforward bike ride, so I'm hoping my ex-dislocated elbow will let me travel that way for now. But yes, I do not know when I will actually be moving, aside from "before the end of the month." We'll see!

Gingko, of course, continues to be herself, by which I mean around Valentine's Day, she ate about a cup's worth of therapy putty for my hand. It was nontoxic, luckily, and she got two and a half slices of white bread with every meal to "bulk her diet" until it came out (which — ultimately, it sure did!). One of her favorite things to do to get my attention while I'm trying to relax or focus is to chew on cardboard boxes while making eye contact with me, so the arrival of so many boxes for packing up the apartment has me a little worried for the next little bit. We'll make it work, I guess! I keep trying to use my weekends efficiently or productively or whatever, and then Gingko has other plans, through no fault of her own — she does need those long walks and equally long cuddles, but I cannot afford to put her in doggy day camp for two weeks straight. We'll see!!!

Zhang Linghe's new drama Pursuit of Jade is on Netflix and it's freaking fantastic so far. Slow, patient, character-focused, beautiful to look at, excellent-af women — it's by the same director as Blossom and A Familiar Stranger, which explains a lot. I am excited to see where it goes! It is not the kind of show I can watch while doing other things, though, that is what podcasts are for.

Chaos, chaos, chaos. I keep saying I can't wait to be at the phase of moving where you have to buy out an IKEA. Today, at least, I've been able to sort through and prune a bunch of books. Maybe going one room at a time will keep me from going absolutely batshit? I've never been good at this part, but I'm very grateful that I've got some buffer time so it's not all in a rush. We haven't even talked about the storage unit I need to source and rent indefinitely... oof. Hi! ✶

Sometimes you read a book at exactly the wrong time, and you're like 'god this stupid big fat fantasy novel. Why are you six hundred pages. Why is everybody Sexy. What's the point of you. I'm tired' and sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time and you're like 'thank god! actual worldbuilding!! somebody had a good time getting weird with this! please tell me more about how weird you're getting!!' and I think I could easily have gone either way on Tessa Gratton's The Mercy Makers depending on the four books I'd read just previous as well as the time of the moon. But as it happened, at the point I read it I was really hungering for something, ANYTHING that felt like it actually cared about depicting a unique and distinctive society with characters that felt like they actually belonged in that society, and The Mercy Makers gave me that in spades, so I ended up really high on it! I had a great time! Please understand that I mean it lovingly when I say that it felt like a visual novel high fantasy dating sim!

-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively through alias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --

Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.

For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:

- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor

In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.

The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.

But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. ( the rest is spoilers )