Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 45

being with people

Every time I get to exchange friendly words with people, it's a shot of pure joy. Every time I get to be (safely) in proximity to people, it's a rush of euphoria.

( under here find a beautiful stallion )

( under here see me talking to some kids about my apples )

( under here see some stylish motociclistas )

Anyway.

This is how I satisfy my need for connection in a time of coronavirus.

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music meme

Via sovay , in turn via kore .

What I love about seeing other people's version of this meme is discovering all the weird and wonderful song titles that I didn't know previously.

A Place: Arrested Development: Tennessee
A Food: Johnny Flynn: Cold Bread
A Drink: Shurwayne Winchester: Girl Born to Wine
Animal: Dolly Parton Little Sparrow
A Number: Pray for Polanski: 9191991
Color: Nina Simone's version of Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair
Boy's Name: Of Montreal's cover of M.I.A.'s Jimmy
Girl's Name:...

Lagoonfire cover

Lagoonfire, the sequel to The Inconvenient God--or shall we say, the second in the Tales of the Polity--has a cover!



Art this time by Susan Lavoie.

And it has a back blurb for the paperback edition:

The past can be a difficult thing to escape…

Decommissioner Thirty-Seven is not the most conventional decommissioner at the Ministry of Divinities, but she takes her role of helping fading gods to retire seriously—and feels bad when things go wrong. Take the decommissioning of Laloran-morna, former god o...

3%

I talked about this Brazilian SF show once before, in 2017, when just one season was out and I started watching it. It's now complete at four seasons. The premise is that 97% of the world (or at least the portion we're focused on) live in poverty in a desertified "Inland" (Continente), but 3% live in a tropical paradise, the Offshore (Maralto; probably based on the actual island of Fernando do Noronha based on its location on the map that plays in the opening credits). When people turn twenty, t...

Honeytrap, by Aster Glenn Gray

“At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet and an American agent fall in love.”

Not only are their countries enemies, but the agents are both men, in an era when being gay was still taboo. Fans of Aster Glenn Gray know that she’s excellent at complicated and anguished love—and Honeytrap really lets her show her stuff.

She’s also in top form when it comes to another of her strengths: the intelligence of her characters. Gennady and Daniel are interested in ideas and ideals, in what poetry’s all about,...

latest adventures in chalk drawing

You know when you photocopy something from a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy--you know how generations down from the master, the results get a little weird-looking? The image or text is shrunken, and bits have somehow ceased to transfer, and other bits get blobby, and maybe the whole thing is streaked or gray, or misaligned now? That's what my mind-on-pandemic-and-Trump feels like. In an effort to get back to the master copy, I've been doing things like ....

New chalk drawing! I copied th...

reading...

I"m going to have to ration Murderbot. For one thing, I don't want to rush through all the books and be all done. For another... I'm not in the habit of buying books as if they were iTunes songs, and $10+ is a lot for a novella, even a good one. So I'm going to wait to get the next Murderbot book until September. I did spend money on a book though--I just got the ebook of If You Can Get It and will enjoy that, I can tell.

sleeper hit of the month

This morning, since I have a dearth of paid work, and since the topic is tangentially related to something I'm writing, I watched a simply fabulous 47-minute video on Singapore's transshipment port.

I've always been fascinated by ports--or as fascinated as a person can be who's never actually hung out at any. They're such complex systems, and so important! So much going on. And the port in Singapore is especially so--the video claims it's the world's busiest.

Oh man, the video was just so well ...

map of a land I'd like to visit

I realized that the charming watermelon I'd bought at a farm stand came with a map imprinted on its rind--I guess all watermelons do; how did I not notice?



It's a map of a wetland, rivers threading through buoyant land--the dark green is the rivers, the light green is the land, but you can see how streamlets are woven right into the land. You can travel by boat along the rivers, and the marshgrass is so high no one will see you the next river over.

Watermelons keep these maps on their rinds becau...

Reading Wednesday ON A WEDNESDAY YESSSS

I zoomed through All Systems Red, the first of Martha Wells's Murderbot stories, and enjoyed it as much as I'd hoped I would, which was enough that I've already bought it for half my children. Among other things, I love the *competence* of Murderbot. Competence, suppressed or understated emotions, loyalty/dedication--OMG so my jam.

The action centers around Murderbot, a SecUnit (human-bot composite person created as a security unit) assigned to protect a planetary survey team. Murderbot has no g...