how many days?

Jul. 30th, 2025 09:18 pm
mikogalatea: Eito from The Hundred Line, smiling cutely. ([Hundred Line] Eito)
[personal profile] mikogalatea
I've been playing The Hundred Line since it released in late April, and beforehand had played the demo as soon as it dropped on the Switch... and as of last night, I've beaten the whole game! As in all 100 endings!

When I started playing, I didn't necessarily plan on or expect to get every single ending, given how dang huge the game is. After a certain point, though, my desire to explore a good number of different routes turned into wanting to see all of them, and the game's such a fun ride that I found myself more than happy to stay on it the whole way through.

Because I'm nuts, below the cut is a list of what order I did the routes in and the order in which I got each and every ending, plus a few more thoughts.

Surprisingly, not that many spoilers beyond route names; I've kept things as vague as I can )

It feels weird to be done with this game after I've been playing it to death for three months, but I've seen Kodaka talking about wanting to possibly add even more routes through updates or DLC, so I'm glad this isn't necessarily the end of my time with these characters and the world and situations they live in.

(no subject)

Jul. 30th, 2025 11:50 am
rachelmanija: (Default)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 110


Which of these books that I've recently read would you most like me to review?

View Answers

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. SF dystopia much beloved by many dudes.
17 (15.5%)

The Daughter's War & Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman. Dark fantasy featuring WAR CORVIDS.
32 (29.1%)

The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister. Very hard to categorize novel about a family whose oldest son can call a wife from the bog. Maybe.
31 (28.2%)

Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang. A descent into Hell by a pair of magic students.
47 (42.7%)

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Three timelines, all involving witches.
20 (18.2%)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it sounds like.
32 (29.1%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. It's so much harder to write reviews of books I love.
36 (32.7%)

Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn. Small-scale fantasy with really original magic system; loved this.
52 (47.3%)

Hominids, by Robert Sawyer. Alternate world where Neanderthals reign meets ours.
26 (23.6%)

Under One Banner, by Graydon Saunders. Yes I will get to this, but it'll be a re-read in chunks.
11 (10.0%)

A round-up of multiple books (not the ones in this poll) with just a couple sentences each
20 (18.2%)



Have you read any of these? What did you think?

The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio

Jul. 30th, 2025 11:25 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


This book has a hilarious premise: a single woman's attic suddenly starts producing husbands! A husband comes down from the attic of Lauren's London flat, and she's instantly in an alternate reality in which she married that guy. The decor of her flat shifts, sometimes her own body or job shifts depending on whether she now works out regularly or some such, and sometimes there's wider ripple effects. Lauren is always aware of the changes, but no one else is. If the husband goes back into the attic, he vanishes and a new husband comes down.

I adore this premise, and the book absolutely commits to it. It is 100% about husbands coming down from the attic. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the way it explored the premise. It's largely a metaphor for dating in a time when you can swipe on an internet profile and instantly get rid of a possible match, so Lauren cycles through hundreds of husbands, often rejecting them at a glance, and we only ever get to know a very small number of them. Of the ones we do get to know, they're mostly fairly one-note - handsome and nice and American, handsome and nice but chews with his mouth open, handsome and nice but boring, or mean and hard to get rid of. The falling Ken dolls cover is apt in more ways than one. Lauren is also pretty one-note - shallow and frantic.

I also had an issue with the pacing. There's so much repetition of the same actions. A husband comes down, Lauren examines her text messages and photos for evidence of their history together, Lauren calls her friends to see what they know about him. A husband comes down, Lauren takes one look at him and sends him back. Some of this is funny but it gets old. The book felt at least 50 pages longer than it needed to be.

I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been way fewer husbands, and more time spent with each one. I never really got a sense of what Lauren wanted in a man, apart from some surface-level characteristics, or what she wanted in life. Her lives were also generally not that different, which didn't help.

There was one part that I really liked and was actually surprising.

Read more... )

Rec by Naomi Kritzer, who liked it more than I did. But thanks for the rec! It was an interesting read, and not one I'd have found by myself.

My absolute favorite alternate lives story remains the novella And Then There were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker, available free online at that link.

saving to the murmuration

Jul. 28th, 2025 07:56 pm
asakiyume: (bluebird)
[personal profile] asakiyume
"Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird," read the beginning of a Bluesky post that linked to a 30-minute Youtube video about birdsong and starlings' capacity for mimicry. A guy drew a picture of a bird in a spectral synthesizer, which then will produce the sounds that the lines indicate.** The guy played those sounds for a starling, and lo and behold, the bird copied it--such that when you look at the spectrogram, you see a picture of a bird that's very close to the picture the guy had drawn.

So it's in that sense that the guy saved an image to a starling.

I'm charmed that this involves translation from a visual medium to a sound medium. "We can save your picture, but only if you sing it." --This concept of translation is familiar to us, of course. Data that's stored digitally is translated into zeros and ones, then translated back into something we can understand--words, images, sounds, formulae.

... If we were going to use starlings to save our data, we'd have to beg not individual starlings but whole murmurations.

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it. Imagine going out and standing on a hill and taking a deep breath and just singing out, hoping that the murmuration would deign to listen and retain what you were singing. It would be like an incantation or an invocation or a prayer.



**A spectrograph of a bird's call looks like, for example, this:

(Song sparrow spectrograph from this web page)


So the guy drew the bird below and then played the sounds that this set of lines makes...

white line drawing of a bird on a blue background

And the starling sang back this:

pink-purple bird on an a black background

(Images are screenshots from the Youtube video.)

Headache, by Tom Zeller, Jr

Jul. 24th, 2025 10:24 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A solid, well-written, and generally engaging book about migraine and cluster headaches. The author suffers from the latter, with suffer being the operative word - cluster headaches are called "suicide headaches" because people with them are known to kill themselves because of the intractable, excruciating pain.

The first-person account was the best part of the book: what it's like to have cluster headaches, how you're driven to hoard medication because you're not allowed to have enough (which leads doctors to view you with suspicion as a drug-seeker - NO SHIT you seek painkillers when you're in pain!), how you cling to any doctor who will take you seriously, and the psychology of chronic pain generally.

(In Zeller's case, he wasn't seeking opiods or anything that could get him high, but a medication that does nothing to anyone but stop cluster headaches if you have one. But his doctor didn't believe that he actually got them as often as he did, and his insurance company didn't want to pay out for his medication, so he was forced to hoard and ration his medication for no good reason, and then looked at with suspicion when he asked for more.)

The book gets a bit into the weeds in terms of the biological mechanism of cluster and migraine headaches, which is not yet known, and the reasons why there's little research or funding devoted to them. But overall, a good book that will make people with chronic headaches, or any chronic pain, feel seen.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Recent DNFs (Did Not Finish)

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman



A horror novel about - I think - how a Q-Anon analogue turns people into literal zombies. I couldn't get into this book. I don't think it was bad, it just wasn't my thing. I didn't vibe with the prose style at all.

The Baby Dragon Cafe, by A. T. Qureshi



A woman opens a cafe that's also a baby dragon rescue. I adored the idea of this book, not to mention the extremely charming cover, but the execution left a lot to be desired. It was just plain dull. I dragged myself through two chapters, both of which felt eternal, then gave up. Too bad! I really wanted to like it, because the idea is delightful.

In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, by Richard Waitt



This ought to have been exactly my jam, except for the author's absolutely bizarre prose style, which is a combination of Pittman shorthand and Chuck Tingle's Twitter minus the sense of humor, with an allergy to articles and very strange syntax. I literally had no idea what some of his sentences meant. This weirdness extends to direct quotes from multiple people, making me suspect how direct they are. And yes, this was traditionally published.

Here are some quotes, none of which make more sense in context:

It contrasts the chance jungle violence with lava flows off Kilauea - so Hollywood but predictable.

"The state's closure seems yours. Have I missed something?"

[And here's a bunch of Tinglers.]

Heart attack took Eddie in 1975.

These years since wife Eddie died Truman's fire has cooled.

Since wife Eddie died, Rob is the closest he has to a friend.

Since wife Eddie died, Truman has been a bleak recluse, the winters especially lonely.

Mulling rereads

Jul. 22nd, 2025 09:35 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
[personal profile] ambyr posted recently about culls and memory that got me to thinking about the complexities of reread, memory, nostalgia, and so forth.

For example, when I read Peter S. beagle's Folk of the Air it was the right time for that story. I've kept it ever since, but never reread it--his later work didn't click with me, making me hesitant to revisit that one lest the same thing happen.

As I keep culling, I've discovered books that seemed really progressive at the time--books I really enjoyed, or that got me through a difficult period--that time has caught up with and bypassed in significant ways. Patrick Dennis comes to mind. His book about divorce, The Joyous Season, got me past the emotional whirlpool of my parents' marriage breaking up when I was a teen. There were other aspects that I really liked, but there are now attitudes and language that makes me wince now. And yet I can't cull that book.

But others I can place in the donation box with a mental salute to find memory, and hopes it finds its readership somewhere else. This ambivalence can go for problematical authors, too. But these things I think have to be decided for oneself. So many aspects to balance.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.
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