Laundry room

Sep. 4th, 2025 03:32 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
One of the things I have been doing with myself in the last three months is watching videos in an online interior design course, mostly because various things about the house bother me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's not mean to be a pro-level course, and there's various things I already know, but it's helped me figure out one room so far, by forcing me to slow down and first think about who uses the room, what for and how it's used.

It's the laundry room. One would think, "Laundry, duh." But it's also circulation space, because it connects the house to the garage which is the door we use 99% of the time, and it's also storage space. And I would like it to be hang-dry space as well, because the other options for hanging clothes to dry are untenable for various reasons:

1) the first and foremost is my ADHD. The more steps I have to do, the less likely it is to get done. Get out the drying rack, take it somewhere in the house or back porch, set it up, hang clothes, check if they're dry, collect them, bring them in, break down the drying rack, and put it back where it's stored? OH HELL NO.

2) drying outside also makes the clothes smell like the outside and I've never had problems with this before, but both [personal profile] myrialux and I concur that the outdoors smell we get on clothes here is not appealing. Plus, we live in POLLEN CENTRAL and would like to not be allergic to our clothes.

3) the best place to dry inside is the spare room/gym and if clothes are hanging there that I need to move before working out, I won't work out (ADHD again). The spare bath is taken up by the litterbox, and the main bath is back to issue #1, with the added problem of fitting the drying rack in the tub. Any other room gets HUMID and GROSS.

So! I have a PLAN for the laundry room, once we get the $$$ saved up. Steps:

1) hire our neighborhood appliance handyman company to stack the washer and dryer on one side of the TINY room and swap the dryer door to open on the same side as the washer.

2) measure the back wall, to allow for power and water outlets and the dryer vent in the next step, which is...

3) install simple shelving of the rails-screwed-into-studs with shelves on them type, adroitly avoiding the outlets and vents above, as well as pegboard on part of it, to allow for...

4) the wall-mounted drying racks that will require a bit of space to extend/fold out. And then finally...

5) a closet rod installed across the room for clothing that can be put on hangers and hung.

SIMPLY RENDERED PEECTURES BELOW THE CUT...
you know you want to know more about my laundry room )

*snore*

Sep. 4th, 2025 02:56 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
It's been a mildly eventful few weeks, mostly because I ended up with a cold for a week and a half. Other than that, nothing too hairy happening.

I did get baby's first AO3 scam comment! It enthused over my story, especially the way I brought the world and the characters to life, making it real and immersive, pulling the reader in. And, of course, sparked creative ideas of their own and they wanted me to talk to them on Telegram or whatnot, presumably to try to scam me out of money for fanart that'll never arrive. Blocked, deleted, reported.

This, uh, is the work that they loved so much. You can see the GLARING PROBLEM with the bot's comment about my...story. XD

(no subject)

Sep. 4th, 2025 01:28 pm
navrins: (wonders)
[personal profile] navrins
Somebody put words to the overture from The Marriage of Figaro and it's awesome (and some people have amazing diction): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nt_phloR-7Y

Somebody here's gonna want to watch that.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
A double-header at this afternoon's medical appointment: the tech not only expressed surprise at my calendar age, but assumed from my voice that I was either foreign-born or had spent significant time out of the country, specifically she thought in the UK. Given the current climate, I should be clear that she was curious, not hostile; one of her children had been a staffer in the Obama administration and two others had been some kind of federal employee and she had considerable feelings on subjects from vaccines to tanks. But after I had gone through the standard litany clarifying the rather pathetic fact that I have lived my entire life in New England and the Boston area for most of it, she still thought I sounded British. "You should go over there. You'd blend right in." She herself had an old-school Boston accent. "People from anywhere, they can tell where I'm from." I am not good at other people's ages, but I don't believe that I look younger than my early forties, especially after the last few ravaging years, and I expect to be heard as American by anyone who actually has one or more of the plethora of accents on offer in the UK. Weirdest instance of trying to place my voice remains the time I was told by a very drunk Australian that I sounded like a Norwegian. Someday the question of my vocal origins will come around again because it has been doing so since my childhood and I will answer "Lisson Grove" just to see what happens.

Here we are half-awake

Sep. 2nd, 2025 10:50 pm
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
The second-best part of this highly mediocre day was a gyro on which I put a phenomenal amount of tzatziki, to the point that by the end of it the meat was probably the condiment. The best part was taking a walk with [personal profile] spatch right before sunset. I remembered to bring my camera.

A blizzard in the midst of a sunny day. )

I am not sure that Series 13 of Doctor Who holds together at all, but since Kevin McNally was playing essentially Marcus Brody if he had started in parapsychology instead of classics, I enjoyed him very much.
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
In lesser catastrophes than the general planet, I have been noticing over the last eight months that while the majority of my audio transferred successfully from the archival hard drive that was for fourteen years my beloved Bertie Owen, certain artists seem to have gone incompletely and inexplicably missing, generally to be discovered by trying to cue up a track which no longer exists on my computer, which is what happened last night with Neil Hannon. Of the six albums by the Divine Comedy that I used to own along with a handful of random tracks and singles, the sole full-length survivors are Promenade (1994) and Bang Goes the Knighthood (2010), which are neither chronologically nor alphabetically even next to one another. The consolation lining is that at least I didn't lose one of my favorite songs which can be found on the latter, "Assume the Perpendicular." Like much of its composer's catalogue, it's a chamber-pop character sketch, wittily written and performed with a sincere straight face: trying to fix its position on the irony slider is pointless. "Slip on your Barbour jacket, jump in my old MG" sets the class bracket of its band of day-trippers, while the tenor of their conversation is nailed with equal concision by the architectural divisions of "Lavinia loves the lintels, Anna the architraves / Ben's impressed by the buttresses thrust up the chapel nave." Aside from the narrator who thought of that last line and delivers it with cheekily Coward-esque crispness, none of these people sounds like the most exciting company for a heritage day out with their diffident intentions to "make complimentary sounds and talk about nothing in particular." And yet as the song catchily progresses, these pretentious characters find themselves falling into the fun of their excursion, meandering the hedge maze, bouncing on historical beds, swinging around the library's railed ladders, and the music loosens right up along with them, the neat hand-clapped piano joined first by a brisk roll of drums and then a flourish of brass that unreel from a marching tattoo into a loose-jointed jam, until by the time a music-hallish banjo has ricky-tickied in on the action, the self-conscious distance of the original chorus has turned into "wild ecstatic sounds" and everybody including the listener is having a wonderful time tearing around this stately home where playing at aristocracy has given way to goofing off. It all ends in a little twiddle of electronica like a punch line. It doesn't really matter if it's sending up the sightseers who aren't even interested in the cider in Somerset, what it feels like as it winds down from that explosive high of exploration is a genuine invitation that I can play twenty times in a row, even if my closest examples of the Georgian style are not so much country houses as random historical registers and the occasional Revolutionary museum that I pass on the way to my parents or a supermarket.

Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher

Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:45 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


After disliking both The Hollow Places and The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher, and for similar reasons (idiot heroine who refused to believe in magic when it was happening right in front of her; annoying tone), I gave up on her works. But since lots of my customers like her, I ordered this book. And when it arrived, it was so beautiful that I had to pick it up and examine it. And then I figured I'd read a couple pages, just to get an idea of what it was about. Those couple pages quickly turned into the first chapter. Then the second. The next thing I knew, I was actually enjoying the book, and finished it with great pleasure.

Anja is a scientist specializing in poisons and antidotes, who regularly takes small doses of poison to understand their effects and test out antidotes. She saves the lives of poisoned people, sometimes. This gets her enough fame that one day the king shows up, asking her to save his daughter, Snow, who he believes is being poisoned...

This is a very loose retelling of "Snow White," making clever use of elements like the apple, the mirror, and the poison.

Like the other books of hers I read, this one is set in an unambiguously magical world and/or has a portal to an unambiguously magical world, and has a heroine who doesn't believe in magic. I guess this is an obligatory Kingfisher thing? At least in this one, Anja doesn't deny that things are happening when they're clearly happening, she just thinks that maybe there is some underlying scientific explanation. This makes at least some sense, as she's a scientist. (Though in my opinion, science is basically a framework and a worldview, and a scientist in a magical world would be doing experiments to figure out how magic works, not denying its existence.) In any case, Anja does not act like an idiot or a flat earther, but pursues the clues she finds and doesn't deny what they suggest. She's kind of monomaniacal, but in a fun way.

Hemlock & Silver meshes multiple genres. It's not a horror novel or even particularly dark for a fantasy, but it has some genuinely scary moments. It's often very funny. And one aspect of the story, while technically fantasy, is so methodically worked out and involves so much science (optics) that it feels like science fiction. There's also a murder mystery, a romance, a surprisingly agreeable rooster, and a talking cat. It all works together quite nicely.

Sit thee down and put them on

Sep. 1st, 2025 11:35 pm
sovay: (I Claudius)
[personal profile] sovay
I have observed Labor Day by doing basically nothing at all, but [personal profile] selkie introduced me to the sea-flooded Paleolithic of Cosquer Cave with its seals and great auks and the hand-marks of children and the one unknown figure like a seal-headed man speared, which reminded me that some days ago I meant to link the Langton Herring burial with its amulet of a Roman coin and its copper alloy mirror whose bladed crescent pattern made me think at first sight of owls. The clouds tonight are too thick for the aurora and the last of the Perseids, but the light has done its knife-trick of paling suddenly to autumn, as if summer just blew off it like haze. I am sure the heat will be back, the way we have scrambled the seasons: I keep trying to look for the tells to hold on to, like the late green curl of the leaves; the last of the monarchs in milk-jade chrysalis, a record twenty-two this summer if all safely make it to flight. I could go for a small ice age if I could be assured of the megafauna.

Labor Day Book Poll

Sep. 1st, 2025 01:12 pm
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 113


Which books would you most like me to review?

View Answers

Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher. The first book of hers I've actually liked!
53 (46.9%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. Fantastic cross-genre western/historical/horror/fantasy.
36 (31.9%)

Into the Raging Sea, by Rachel Slade. The best nonfiction shipwreck book I've read since Shadow Divers.
39 (34.5%)

The Blacktongue Thief/The Daughter's War, by Christopher Buehlman. Excellent dark fantasy.
26 (23.0%)

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Three timelines, all involving witches.
17 (15.0%)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it sounds like.
32 (28.3%)

Archangel (etc), by Sharon Shinn. Lost colony romantic SF about genetically engineered angels.
34 (30.1%)

We Live Here Now, by Sarah Pinborough. Really original haunted house novel.
34 (30.1%)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones. Outstanding indigenous take on "Interview with the Vampire."
46 (40.7%)

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. A Jewish demon and angel leave the old country; excellent voice, very Jewish.
62 (54.9%)

Some other book I mentioned reading but failed to review.
3 (2.7%)

sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
The weekend continued sleepless af with a double whammy of financial stress and I got nothing done that I had wanted, but [personal profile] spatch took a picture of me when I got back in from my walk that I liked, which these days is vanishing. I am not confident a normal amount of summer actually happened.

Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
My paramount goal for last night was sleep and it failed so horrifically that I have had a flat and frustratingly nonexistent day, but in listening to the three different cast recordings of 1776 which I now own—1969 Broadway, 1970 London, and 1972 film—and rewatching a handful of scenes from the handily streaming film, thirty years after initial exposure in eighth grade social studies it finally clicked with me that so much of the appeal of its John Adams is directly proportional to his being such a disaster. Especially as incarnated by the superbly obstreperous William Daniels, the delegate from Massachusetts is simultaneously an incandescent engine of rage against the machines of tyranny and an indignant wet cat of a man endowed with the inalienable right of shooting himself in the foot, cf. the opening number devoted to establishing that he has achieved the political and personal milestone of pissing off an entire continental congress. His capacity for chill is somewhere in the decatherms and he wasn't even close enough to the door to be standing behind it when social finesse was handed out. He has the self-aware saving grace of a sense of humor which quirks out in unsuccessfully repressed smiles, but he's the awkward straight man just as often as he snarks drily for the Colonies; one of the best details of his physical acting is a nervous flicker of the fingers which stands sometimes for constant restive thought and sometimes for not knowing what the hell to do with his hands. It's not a comic characterization, but it does make the moments where he lets his guard down all the more quietly effective, because too often it's punctured for him. His own personality is among the obstacles of policy, philosophy, and factionalism facing a successful declaration of independence and down to the wire the play never lets him forget it. He dances so gravely and gracefully with Blythe Danner's Martha Washington, he earns the smugness with which he calls across to Howard da Silva as they whirl into the showiest choreography of the song, "We still do a few things in Boston, Franklin!" Who wasn't supposed to imprint on that unbeatable combination of furious integrity that shouldn't be let out unsupervised for five minutes? Damn this government for making any national celebration so meanly jingoistic, I couldn't even think about attending this spring's sestercentennial of the Battle of Lexington in my eighteenth-century shirt.

Greenwood sidey-O

Aug. 30th, 2025 02:25 pm
nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
Just back from folkie camp (TradMad week at Pinewoods). Idyllic setting (woods, lakes); gorgeous weather (but for one terrific thunderbolt that struck the water); a lovely community; glorious music. Oh, and three good square home-cooked meals a day, all locally sourced, with proper pots of tea. One fortunate evening we happened to have five vegans at our table, so us three omnivores got all the chicken pot pie, green beans, salad, new bread, and vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce we could hold.

The camp provided free tests, and all of us (130+) turned in negatives three days running (first of all to gain entrance and twice after). Cons should be this sensible.

It’s all very leftie and queer-celebratory. Everyone makes others garlands of green leaves to wear. It’s the kind of place where a couple of women in their 70s are talking mycology (“... it looked like an amanita, so I crawled under the dance pavilion to have a look ...”), while a boy in his 20s is singing a German social democratic anthem to the Celtic harp.

My old hero Martin Carthy was there with his daughter Eliza. Hearing Martin for the first time back in 1979 was transformative. He sang “Willie’s Lady” (Child 6) and that was that: my secondary world was made of ballads. Now it grieves me terribly to see him growing frail and forgetful; but still he kindles, still he glows. He seems to draw his memory from his guitar. A tune emerged; he stopped and sang the opening of “Willie’s Lady” a capella. He talked about the making of his version of it, how his friend Ray Fisher (Archie’s sister) had found the Breton tune for it. In his telling, the lady (cursed by her mother-in-law to labor endlessly and never to give birth) is not a mere sufferer, but a rival witch, an incomer from across the sea with a foreign magic of her own.

The Appalachian ballad traditions session was taken by a stunning singer and storyteller, unknown to most of us. Sarah Burkey’s come from some hard hard places, dirt poor in Kentucky, then devastated by Helene in western North Carolina; yet is grounded and joyful. An inspired benefactor at the camp gave her Jean Ritchie’s old handcarved dulcimer (a lovely thing), and to see Sarah touch it, listen to it, was heart-stoppingly beautiful. It played “Amazing Grace” first of all. And then she sang “Wayfaring Stranger” in English and Cherokee. Sarah, who teaches Native American children, had those words from tribal elders, and they are not translated from the Christian song, but prayers from the Trail of Tears.

Daringly, I took a class in song performance. I am utterly terrified of singing solo (above all in the company of gifted singers), so I dared myself to do it. I thought hard about what I would give them and realized that trying for prettiness or pathos only sends me horribly offkey, so I went for raunch and attitude, and gave ‘em “My Husband’s Got No Courage In Him.” I am told it was one hell of a performance. All I remember is glimpsing the tutor bent double, scarlet in the face with stifled laughter.

This year I didn’t see the Pleiades reflected in the still clear water, but you can’t have everything. Maybe next year.

Nine


sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
I had just written an intensely miserable post about the state of my life and my health and whatever was supposed to have passed for my career, but then I discovered the existence of the 1970 London cast recording of 1776 and it surprised me into laughing out loud, specifically because while I had never heard anyone but William Daniels as John Adams and I expect no one again to match his particular abrasive flint, Lewis Fiander couldn't have been terrible from the amount of incredulous disgust he puts into his "Good God." Anything to do with American democracy is of course somewhat depressing to contemplate at the present moment, but not more so from a musical than from the news. In other charms of the week, I have two different kinds of infection in a body that is already not responding as hoped to several months of medicating for an underlying condition, so anything that distracts me from mere grim hanging on to someday reading other people's death notices is a net good.

… so I’m playing Dark Souls

Aug. 29th, 2025 05:53 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
That is a thing that is happening.

My standard joke here is that any game involving reflexes and coordination is going to be an excruciating experience of innumerable repeated failures for me, so I might as well play one where that's the point. This is only partly a joke.

Necessary context for anyone who has not met me IRL: I am dyspraxic as fuck. I was in my late twenties at least, possibly thirties, before I could catch an object being gently thrown to me across a short distance. My coordination, reflexes and ability to react to multiple inputs in real-time are so bad that I can't drive (or cycle on the road) because it would be OBVIOUSLY WILDLY DANGEROUS for me to even try (people would die). I have to buy special shatterproof crockery because otherwise my plate turnover is so high.

It was only with climbing that I learned that I can actually acquire motor skills, some of them, slowly, if I have unlimited time to practice them on my own terms.

Further necessary context: I'd been looking wistfully at the Soulsbornes for ages -- having seen videos such as Jonny Sims's Bloodborne streams -- as something that I'd probably love if I only had any coordination or ability at all to cope with having to react to multiple rapid inputs in real-time.

One of my climber friends has argued that Soulslike games are basically the same as working on a hard boulder project: you fail and fail and fail and fail and that's the process, each time you try to learn a bit more or try something new, and gradually you make progress, and eventually, hopefully, you don't fail.

And that's a process that I fucking love, and that works very well for my brain. Perverse stubbornness is my jam.

But when I look at something like Bloodborne -- the combat exchange is over before I can even track who's where and what's happened.

So I was thinking grumpily/wistfully and in secret about how what I really wanted was not an "easy mode," but a Soulsborne game that I could adjust the speed on (maybe set it all to 20-30% slower!), just so I could get my foot in the door, just so I could begin to maybe try.

And I watched more videos of other games, and somewhere along the way I watched people figuring out and/or being coached on how to get through the fight with the Asylum Demon at the end of the tutorial* in Dark Souls 1.

(I also read that Dark Souls 1 has the slowest and, in some people's eyes, "clunkiest" combat of the Souls games — not necessarily the easiest, but more tactical, less fast-twitch.)

And I thought, "... huh, I wonder, if I really worked at it, maybe I could beat the Asylum Demon? That would be kind of cool."

To be clear: I bought the game with the goal of seeing if I could beat the tutorial.

Cut for length )

Choir is Coming Soon!

Aug. 29th, 2025 09:49 am
oracne: turtle (Default)
[personal profile] oracne
Choir is kicking off with a long weekend rehearsal September 6. I might or might not have to miss the first Monday night rehearsal after my surgery, which would be a bummer, but it's better than missing a concert.

We will be singing a joyous concert all about death, LOL, consisting of the following three pieces: Pearsall's "Lay a Garland," Victoria's "Requiem Officium Defunctorum," and Howells' "Requiem," old sandwiched in the much newer.





So Krishna stole the butter, did he?

Aug. 28th, 2025 11:49 pm
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
[personal profile] sovay
The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.

Enshittification (episode 500!)

Aug. 28th, 2025 08:46 pm
[syndicated profile] craphound_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow

A poop emoji with a grawlix-covered black bar across its mouth.

It’s the 500th edition of my podcast, and to celebrate, I’m bringing you an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook of my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux US/Canada; Verso UK/Commonwealth).

Because Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks (or any DRM-free audiobooks), I have to produce my own books and pre-sell them on Kickstarter campaigns. The Kickstarter for this one is underway and going great.

I hope that listening to this long sample will convince you to pre-order your copy! I don’t ask for Patreon donations, I don’t put ads on my work – these Kickstarters are a big part of why I’m able to pursue my open access, enshittification-free publishing program, and I really thank you for your support.


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sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
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All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

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