Month: September 2024

#REVIEW: The Phoenix Keeper, by S.A. MacLean

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

It’s possible that by the time I go to sleep tonight I will have finished five books this weekend, and two of them I did not like very much. One of them may have been my fault, as it demanded a more careful reader than I’ve had the energy to be lately, and one, to my dismay, turned out to be something called extreme horror, which is code for “mentions things being crusted in pubic hair four times in the first fifty pages,” at which point I noped out.

We had an afternoon wedding in Indianapolis today, and I read S.A. MacLean’s The Phoenix Keeper cover-to-cover on the drive, closing the book with perhaps a minute of driving to go until we got home, and it was wonderful. Pay no attention to the tagline on the cover, which is referring to the phoenixes, not the people; dating is one of the many things on the main character’s mind, and she goes out with two people over the course of the book, but this is very much not a romantasy, a genre that I’m growing a trifle tired of at the moment. It’s a subplot and while it works out delightfully (there’s that word again) it’s very much not what the book is about. Also, the blurb appears on the back of my lovely Illumicrate edition of the book, and not on the front, which is nice.

One subgenre I’m not tired of yet, though, is the cozy fantasy, and … oh, man, this book is a hoodie and a warm blanket and maybe a sleeping cat in your lap to go with it. The titular character, Aila, is a 28-year old zookeeper with an anxiety disorder and maybe a touch of the ’tism to go with it,(*) and the entire book takes place at the zoo, with only a couple of brief interludes to her apartment and one (1) date at a restaurant. The problem driving the narrative is getting a second phoenix for her zoo so that she can have a breeding pair (the author explicitly references how zoos brought the California condor back to viability in a foreword, and the parallels are not subtle) and then how she manages to convince these complicated animals to accept each other and mate.

There are complications. There’s another zookeeper she doesn’t get along with. It’ll all be fine.

Turns out I like books set in zoos, and while I’m normally a stickler for worldbuilding, “this isn’t set on Earth, there are magical animals, fuckin’ roll with it” is more or less all the worldbuilding you’re gonna get, and it’s really all the book needs. I mean, there’s drama; there are poachers to worry about, and there’s the relationship stuff, but a big part of being cozy fantasy is relatively low stakes, and again, you know it’s all gonna work out fine and it does. I really enjoyed reading this, and I’ll definitely check out whatever S.A. MacLean comes up with next.

(Also: this book does queernormative societies quite well; Aila goes out with a guy, and then goes out with a girl, and it’s all good, and there’s a trans character and her transness is revealed in the most natural and easy and clean way I think I’ve ever seen in a book before. I’ve talked about this before, but trans side characters can be tricky, and there’s no Sekrit Penis moment in this book and the reveal, such as it is, comes in what felt like perfectly natural dialogue. Extra points for all of that.)

(*) I can imagine a reader who feels like Aila is kind of A Lot. I am not that reader.)

What just happened?

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I took a nap today. It was a pretty good nap, but the fact that I can’t tell you a single other thing that I did today is kind of alarming.

What did you do today?

Some good news in some nerdy graphs

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.

Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.

But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.

Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:

The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.

There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.

Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.

So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.

On degeneracy

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.

Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.

(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)

Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.

Bah.

My entire life philosophy right now

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I am disgusted by absolutely everything right now, and I cannot. Hopefully I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. We’ll see.

#REVIEW: Black Shield Maiden, by Willow Smith & Jess Hendel

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I waited too long to write this– life, getting sick, and various other dramas intervened– so I admit my ardor has cooled a bit, but my admiration for Willow Smith continues to grow with every project she releases. It’s impossible to really know how much of Black Shield Maiden is her work and how much is Jess Hendel’s, of course, although I do find it interesting that Hendel is more or less given co-author credit here. Her name’s smaller than Smith’s, as one might expect, but not that much smaller, and I can easily imagine a world where this is simply ghostwritten and only Smith’s name appears on the cover.

Also, I found it at Target, of all places, which is not somewhere I’m accustomed to discovering books. I didn’t actually buy it there, but that was where I noticed it for the first time. The cover’s striking as hell, and it took me a second to actually realize who the author was.

Anyway, Black Shield Maiden is the story of Yafeu, a Ghanaian warrior who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, then rescued during a Viking raid on the camp where she’s being held. She’s more or less still a slave in the frozen north, but the Viking concept of slavery was quite different from American chattel slavery, and she serves as a handmaiden to the princess Freydis and ultimately becomes a mentor of sorts to the girl as well. I won’t spoil the story, but I can safely tell you that she ends the story in a very different place than she starts it, both literally and figuratively, and the book doesn’t quite end on a cliffhanger but the last fifty pages or so make me really interested to see what’s coming next. This is book one of what I think is a trilogy; the final page promises a forthcoming book two but doesn’t give a name or a date yet.

I don’t have a ton of criticisms of this; it’s a really solid book the whole way through, and not only am I onboard for more collaboration between these two women but I’m probably going to look into Jess Hendel’s work as a solo author– this book was my first exposure to either of them. The way Yafeu is integrated into Viking society doesn’t quite go the way you think it’s going to; she learns the language perhaps a bit quicker than she ought but I’ll forgive it because her being unable to understand anyone would have gotten annoying quickly, and it really seems like most of the people around her just literally decide she’s a dark elf and roll with it. The cultural differences and her outsider’s view on Viking society is neat to read about, too, and Yafeu and Freydis and a handful of others are compelling characters with interesting arcs over the course of the story. I don’t know that I liked it enough that it’s going to end up on my end-of-year list or anything, but it’s a well-written, action-packed, enjoyable read with lots of interesting female characters and if the plot tickles your fancy I’d recommend picking it up.

On the Michigan Renaissance Festival

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.

So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.

After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:

Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.

The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.

And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:

Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.

I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.

The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. It’s a murder weapon. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!

(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)

Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.

So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.

Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?

In which I cannot die

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I am so far behind that it has made me immortal. I am aware that I have promised a review of Black Shield Maiden that so far has not been written, and I really want to do a write-up of the Michigan Renaissance Festival (Spoilers: hot, lots of fun) but after the three-hour drive home this morning I took a nap and then spent several hours working on lesson plans and grading and now I desperately need some video game/wall-staring time. I’ll write something involving actual paragraphs tomorrow, I swear I will.