Greer Gilman's Blog, page 3

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

Oh my goodness. On Monday, for the first time in eighteen months, I set foot in the *L*I*B*R*A*R*Y*!

 

All very sensible: you present a vaccination card to get your turnstile card updated. Everyone is masked, and the ceilings are so majestically high and the rooms so spacious and so sparsely peopled, that you might as well be outdoors.

Except, *B*O*O*K*S*. There are 3.5 million in that one building alone. Bliss.

I got one that I've been trying to read in snippet view all this time.

Second home, seriously. I worked there for decades, and even after they retired me, I was in and out all the time. For all these weary months, I've been taking make-walks, circling the building. Now I have a place to go and a purpose. A part of my life back.

Small but resonant huzzah!

Nine

By the pricking of my thumbs...

...something wicked this way comes.




I want to see this in a theater. Sigh.

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Pyewacket puzzled

One for All Hallows Eve.










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Autumn leaf

So tempting...



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"I'll make a mythical word"

Fox has started to play Scrabble. He found the box, and asked gaudior to teach him the game. In their beginner's version, all the tiles are face up, so he could just find the letters he needed. He asked for help with some of the spelling, but he thought of all the horizontal words and set them down: BOOM!  (with the blank tile standing in for the exclamation point, which he insists is part of the word), SNAKE, CRASH, GOAT (he wanted to do GHOST but couldn't find another S in the blankets), and TOTORO.

A picture exists of him putting down the last O in TOTORO.  He said that going over the edge of board meant that he'd won the game: "I can use all those word-weapons."

The upside-down board is a nice touch.

Later play got a bit inventive. Fox wanted to go over the edge again, so he added HI to CENTAUR, to make it a speech, and then I and another I.

He'll be five next month.





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Exorcism

It began, as hauntings do, with something not quite right, a shadow out of place.

The "y" on my iPhone keyboard wasn't responding.

Then pit pat, like the first silent flakes of a blizzard, the typing began.  Ghost fingers danced on the screen, writing strings of gibberish and opening unwanted apps.  Wilder and faster, whirling like a snowstorm in a street of neon lights.

I did what you do in a device crisis:  power down and reboot.

Bad move.

Because if you restart an iPhone, it will ask for your password.  And the ghosts will be only too happy to tip-tap dozens of them in, at lightning speed.  Simultaneously, they will be making scores of emergency calls to phantom numbers.

They went berserk.

Of course, the phone has a clever immune system:  after a certain number of wrong passwords, it will shut itself down for 1, 2, 5, 10 minutes, for an hour—black screen, "this iPhone is disabled"—and then it will take the cyanide pill, and wipe.

Yikes!

So I was fighting the fingers, trying to swipe the "power down" control, before they wrested it away, and the lights went on and off like a cheap disco.  This time I wasn't going to reboot.

When I finally got it to shut down—at the ten minute warning—I went to my larger screen to research.  Was this Pegasus?  I had the patch.  But yes, ghost typing is a thing, and there are fixes, escalating in intensity from cleaning your screen to the nuclear option.

The second one was "Remove your screen protector."  So I did—and it worked.

Whew.

Guess it was tickling the touch screen to the point of hysteria, or it fit like a Shirt of Nessus—a chitinous poison.

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Wood

My heavens, isn't this a gorgeous mosque!








I love the way it opens up cathedral vaulting to the sky: lighter, livelier. Being in t'other Cambridge, it's in conversation with King's College Chapel. Perpendicular to the perpendicular, one might say.





Nine

My heavens, isn't this a gorgeous mosque! I love the way ...

My heavens, isn't this a gorgeous mosque!








I love the way it opens up cathedral vaulting to the sky: lighter, livelier. Being in t'other Cambridge, it's in conversation with King's College Chapel. Perpendicular to the perpendicular, one might say.





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Eros

Wow. Love lay hidden.




The newly revealed composition will take some getting used to, but the overpainting of the wall was proven not to be Vermeer's, and the brushwork in the Cupid is. Besides, that same Cupid appears—like diegetic music—in two other paintings by the master.

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I Ate'nt Dead

After my Readercon hit that Zoom iceberg and sank, it's taken me a while to row to shore.

That Cloudish conversation with Sofia Samatar, just concluded, has been an absolute joyand a great restorative.  We're looking for an online venue for it, so all of you can read and enjoy.

If it weren't for this interminable plague, I really wanted to see both The Green Knight and The Lost Leonardo.

The saga that I play with Fox has taken a level in complexity.  We are the co-kings of a diarchy; we rule a kingdom of koalas and Pokémons on the slopes of an extinct volcano that used to be a dragon, who occasionally wakes.  ("Puny mortal!")  Our man-at-arms is a Snorlax.

Fox continues to be good with words.

Watching me swirl his bottle of milk:  “There’s still a vortex of honey.”

Of the prime number 5051:  “It’s not made of twos.”

In the bathtub:  “I am such a hypocrite.  I make bubbles and then I have a war with them.”

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