What I've Been Up To:
- Professional Life -
I started a new job at a new place! Still a university, but much smaller and with a much more tight staff. Crucially, it is completely remote, and responded to Covid with much stronger protocols and much more humane approach to the staff. They were not advertising the position as remote, but they are expanding to have remote staff as something they learned from the pandemic, so I'm feeling quite hopeful about this place and a return to the part of my job that I really liked.

In the weeks before and after I left, two people from my old team at my old university also left and moved to new places - I'm pleased for all of them.

-Social Media-
I'm still doing Tumblr and TikTok as my main incoming information - both of them seem to be good at showing me new things, which I really value. I'm basically off Facebook, Instagram, and anything else except Dreamwidth (eh, sorry for going dark at lot there!)

-Journals-
I've become moderately obsessed this week with book journals that I have seen on Tiktok - they seem part of an enjoyable tread of maximalist bullet journaling which is rather attractive as an art form. I started a bullet journal in January of 2020 and it rapidly turned into a hybrid model of a journal with a to-do list - it never really took the turn of involving all the colored pencils and stencils and graphs that people seem to like, but it did involve an investment in my own pleasure in the form of buying myself nice journals to write in, nice stickers to put in them, and nice pens to write with. All of those things, working from a mindset of "You are allowed to buy yourself Enough Things so that you don't start hoarding them to Save For Later" has really worked - I got out of my own way a bit there.

Partially I am a bit jealous of my sister, who has a notebook where she has written down every book she's finished since her early teens. It's patchy - she lost the habit for a few years - but it's kind of charming and I like the idea of it as a compact aide de memoir.

What I've Been Reading

-Traditional Publishing -
A Marvellous Light by Freya Markse - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/9ae07ba5-fd85-44d6-ac5d-f9d45b3b21e7 - An excellent first novel! Really enjoyed the story, the characters were charming. It felt like someone took a look a Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and was like, but what if the story was brisk and breezy and queer?

Red Thread of Fortune by Neon Yang - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/be5daded-a3d3-427a-9bc5-c122fee68b7a Short, solid, not as dark as it seems like it should be from the premise. Takes place after the Black Tides of Heaven, and seems like they are both stories pulled from a mythology that exists just to the side of other novels. Really good stuff.

Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/40d83eee-cab2-4a83-b05d-cc0400c3fdc4 This novel was very very solid and just a touch too slow for my attention. The characters and their banter were charming enough to carry it - for a mystery reader with more  taste for the genre, I think it would come across better.

- Self Published -
Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nascosta - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/cda06f38-9c67-42c3-89a1-b6d016fbc5aa Oh, god, just read the summary. It's sexy and goofy and absurd and a little too on the nose about the post-college millennial life

Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2b1c3268-5abe-4e82-85e5-c2e98b4450a5 - Absurdly long, deeply kind, a book in which the main character saves the world by being the most organized person in an empire and actually being put in charge of the damn thing. And by, saves the world, I mean establishes universal basic income, decentralizing the nobility, and instituting government reforms based on his fantasy!Polynesian background that emphasizes the good in people being fostered and leadership as a duty.

-Fanfiction-

Soldier's Heart by Alex51324 - I re-read this sprawling, gorgeous thing again, and it was just in time. The WWI setting was profoundly helpful in re-watching the Lord of the Rings films and catching on thematic resonances in that work that I hadn't paid attention to before. Tho, also, probably some of that is from trying to do media studies in a more thoughtful way.

What's on My Mind
-Covid-
Not again. Please. I am very glad now I got my booster, since that seems to keep Omicron at least from being quite as spreadable. But I am about to leave on a trip and there are literally no antigen tests in any pharmacy for a 50 mile radius - they all sold out within two hours of showing up in the store.

So, it's a family visit with some masks and antigen testing and strong precautions about avoiding people outside the bubble.

-Great Queer Supernatural Re-Watch -
Thank god I didn't call off my Great Queer Supernatural Re-Watch - that nonsense is sustaining me thru the idea of another winter in insolation. We're resolved to do more careful reading about race and whiteness in the show - after season 3 there are almost no characters of color in the show at all, but there is a LOT of symbols and ideas that work on ideas of whiteness and masculinity, and we need some more tools to think about those.