readerjane

I'm trying to get onto my Mastodon account at the desktop, so I can send an invite code to a friend.

The logon in Chrome (on my desktop) doesn't recognize my username/password. When I registered at Mastodon, I put them into a secure file because I can never remember. I'm absolutely sure they're the ones I signed up with... but nope. Logon not accepted. And the "Forgot my password" link doesn't recognize my email address. I tried several other email addresses that I **might** have used, just in case, but no joy.

I'm still logged into the Mastadon app on my phone, so obviously my account is still active. But when I try to change my password on that phone app, it won't let me pick the new password. It's recommending a new, super-strong, super-long password which I could live with if I had to, but I can't read the whole thing and I can't copy it, so how the flip would I use that super-strong password to log in on my desktop? Argh.

There doesn't seem to be any way to generate and send an invite code via the phone app.

ETA 12/20/2022 Yay, Mastodon has decided it likes me after all! I'm guessing the fact that the desktop website wasn't taking my password must have been a glitch, possibly due to the heavy traffic of new users. Because I certainly never succeeded in changing it.

BTW, at Mastodon I am readerjane@Wandering.Shop

I live in a cloud of distraction, sort of like Charles Schultz's Pigpen lives in a cloud of dust. It's not ever going to go away.

( Read more... )

Strategizing doesn't keep me from forgetting things. But it greatly reduces the frequency, enough that when I catch myself having missed a step, it's a "whoops, fix it" instead of an "aRRRRGghghgh, why does this keep happening?!?".

There's a thing when I'm knitting a garment, where I make a little mistake, and decide it's not worth unpicking several rows just to fix it. And then maybe another little mistake, or a bigger one. And then I reach the point where I admit that the best thing to do is to rip it all out and start over, but hey! That gives me the opportunity to change one of the decisions I made early on, which I wasn't so sure about at the time.

I've reached that point with the current pair of socks. I'm learning how to knit socks on circular needles instead of double-pointed needles, and to make them two at a time. The upside is, the socks will come out exactly the same number of rows, because you knit the front side of Sock A, then the front of Sock B, then the back of Sock B and finally the back of Sock A. No worries about unmatched sizing. Another plus, I don't need to own two sets of the same size needle.

Downside is, it's an unfamiliar method and sometimes I'm not sure how to handle a step like turning the heels.

But since the main point of the exercise is to relax, watch fun vids, and enjoy myself (with owning a pair of hand=tailored socks being a side benefit), starting all over again is perfectly fine.

Repentance means turning around and going a different direction. It's something I rarely have the privilege of at work because time is at such a premium; discovering a fundamental error can mean giving up on the way you wanted a project to turn out and compromising for something less, just to be done on time.

That's what makes it such a relief, even a luxury, to be able to start all over.

( Fuming about iOS )

Anyway.

Through that wonderful practice of Favorites crawling (find an author, enjoy lots of good stories, then go through that author's own favorites or bookmarks to find others), I've discovered Dira Sudis, and her Vorkosigan series The World That You Need, which is a Cordelia/Aral/Jole series apparently written *before* Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. That makes me want to go back and check the scant breadcrumbs Bujold left on Jole himself, to see what thread Dira Sudis pulled on. Or maybe, her seeming prescience is due to the fact that, for any possible combination between characters, there is someone somewhere who ships them.

The writing is lovely, dark and deep.

So grateful for authors with skill and passion, for the interwebs which lets us find them, and for handheld technology, no matter how fiddly.

ETA: Settings | Notifications | Books app | OFF. Heh.

It's been awhile.

Yesterday I finished The Serpent Seas, book 2 of Martha Wells' Raksura series. An interesting exploration of why we distrust people whom we've other-ed, and when our desire not to other may cause us to trust someone more than that individual merits.

Woo, Wells is definitely in the "chase 'em up a tree, throw rocks" category. The level of disaster-chain was exhausting at times.

Also, how fun is it seeing a male character resist being damseled? Very fun indeed.

My other recent read was Broken Wings by Allegra Grey and Emily Sloan. This is something I normally wouldn't have read, as it's firmly in the romance-without-crossover category, and the formulaic nature of the romance genre usually makes me feel as if the stakes are too low to be interesting.

The romantic hero is a member of a motorcycle club, and the fact that every club member and club member's SO has a gang name as well as their given name, added to the very large cast of characters, would have made me give up if it hadn't been that AG is a personal friend, and I remembered from our Plum fanfic days how vibrantly she can write.

I was glad I kept going, because once I'd found my footing I started seeing how perceptive the hero could be, and how inventive the heroine's survival skills would get. A good read, and now that the authors have conquered that debut-novel mountain, I'll be watching for more to come from them.

Finished The Goblin Emperor, and yes, it was just as satisfying as the beginning.

Except for one minor detail which is totally my fault: I'd thought the sequel was already out. Went looking for it, only to realize that Katherine Addison is still writing it. Damn. I wish I'd figured that out before I reached the end of book 1.

There was a danger of this book becoming a pity parade: protagonist is exiled to a remote outpost, loses his mom, is dumped into a role he's not prepared for, hated by most, experiences an assassination attempt. But Addison is deft enough to thread that process. Maia loses his temper occasionally, but perceives in the reactions of his subjects how afraid they are of an emperor's anger. He's isolated, but learns to cultivate what relationships are available to him, even while acknowledging which ones aren't. He feels the weight of responsibility, while learning the boundaries of his helplessness.

Still looking forward to book 2 in this universe.

I've recently started Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor.

This is a rags-to-riches story where the mixed-race child of the emperor's fourth wife is suddenly elevated to power when his father and elder brothers are all killed in an airship crash.

I'm liking the twisty maneuverings. I do find the protagonist Maia a little too wise for his years and life experience. Eighteen is still eighteen, for all that he has the advantage of having been raised by a compassionate mother (unlike his brothers who grew up in extreme privilege), and having been ruthlessly schooled by a majordomo who resented being assigned to a remote outpost. But I enjoy watching Maia's courtiers startle when he treats them like people instead of lackeys.

I'm not sure how deeply this story will delve into race. It's obvious that no one, including Maia, wanted him in power. He has internalized his country's scorn for his foreign appearance. Even the book's title underscores it. It will be interesting to see whether that racism remains a pervasive part of the background, or if Addison will turn her focus on it at some point.

It took awhile to get used to the name Maia for a boy. Had I been editor, I would have recommended changing that, since it could throw the reader out of the story during that crucial first plunge. But in compensation, I'm getting the joy of an author who has really put thought into the construction of her fantasy-world language. To read, "Michen-theileian", and *know* it means "smaller audience chamber" because one has already started putting the linguistic pieces together is satisfying. Male names in this culture end in -a, -is, and -et, so Maia: male.

And it makes me realize how much I've missed this: the thing one gets in really good SFF, being dumped into a different world where one must hunt for the edge and corner pieces, and slowly assemble a puzzle by trial and error, hypothesis and instinct. It's delightful.

Looking forward to the rest of this book and its sequel.

Finished The Lost Plot, Genevieve Cogman's fourth Invisible Library book, just this morning.

I'm enjoying this series more and more as I go along. The multiverse aspect plays out well, I think, as Irene visits the alternate Earths in search of rare books, trying to stabilize that temperate zone between order and chaos where human beings can flourish. In addition to the fun of "Now it's Imperial Russia! Now it's the roaring twenties!", we get to see the distinct dangers of worlds where either order or chaos is ascendant.

There are both worlds where women are discounted, and ones where a woman with absolute power is unremarkable.

Near the end of TLP, there's an extended scene where Irene must navigate the three-dimensional chess of a trial before a dragon queen, avoiding giving offense in a culture she's not familiar with, while maintaining the Library's neutrality. The push/pull of that delicate, dangerous conversation was marvelous.

This week I read Dangerous if Unbound, a Person of Interest fic by Astolat.

...and now I'm about to give POI another try with a whooooole different perspective. :-D

I've started The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. So far it's not grabbing me. I was intrigued by what seemed to be second-person POV at first. It wasn't second person, but an odd first-person narrative in which a regional god seems to be recounting another character's story to that character. Which could also be intriguing. (Has the other character lost his memory? Why does the god need to tell the other character the story of his life?) But there are long discursions into the god's own history that remind me of James Michener: a few pages of narrative, then we talk about how the tectonic plates in this region formed, then a few more pages of story, then back to the geological aeons. It's a lot to plow through.

Have been re-reading some favorite fic. I'll give TRT another try before deciding whether to finish.