Japan is understandably a hot travel destination in general, but I've seen it come up here on Tildes several times, with many people sharing their stories. This is and isn't that.

I traveled to Japan (and Korea) over a year ago, and I've been rotating this post in my head nearly the whole time. If you want to skip my word vomit: tl:dr it was kind of mid, there are parts I would return for, but many that are very off-putting (especially as of this moment with Japan's politics).

I'm a millennial, and by most accounts, a weeb. I was first was exposed to anime/manga via Slayers, Sailor Moon, Tenchi Muyo and other early Anime that played occasionally on network television, around the late 1990s, which evolved as it did for most of us with Toonami, Adult Swim, and renting movies like Akira and Ghost in the Shell at Blockbuster. I've been regularly consuming Otaku culture essentially my entire life, and my wife was exactly the same as me, we both read Manga and watch Anime as a regular pass time. I was also completely aware that Otaku culture is generally looked down upon by genpop, probably moreso a decade or more ago till now, but I wasn't under the impression that Manga/Anime was how Japan actually was.This isn't to say we had some idealized view of Japan or Tokyo (where we spent our vacation), we've done a lot of domestic and international travel up to that point, so I believe we had realistic expectations going in of how our vacation would go. To be clear, it's not that those expectations weren't necessarily met, but there's some things that I started to realize I may have overlooked, tidbits of Japanese culture that you will get glimpses of in their media, and specifically, the types of media I related to, the series I found most interesting to me with characters that aligned with my own values, or something like that.

You will hear many testimonials of how great visiting Tokyo can be, and I want to caveat with the single complication that made things unreasonably difficult and why I would exercise caution if you are in the same position, but being perfectly frank, it was only one component: We traveled with myself, my wife, and our 2 year old daughter. To clarify, I do not have a difficult child, in fact by almost all metrics she's extremely well behaved and easy to travel with, if she wasn't I would never have considered a 14+hr flight, so take everything I say that I have a near saint of a toddler, she wasn't the problem at all.

Tokyo is not toddler friendly, Tokyo is toddler hostile, weird things you would overlook or not even think about as adult travelers will consistently cause problems. Tokyo is great for walkability if you are able bodied, it is a far cry from being ADA compliant as we're used to stateside, expect to carry a stroller as I did up stairs many, many times. Over our trip there, you notice things: not a single native Japanese takes a toddler outside, like at all, let's ignore birth rates for a moment, because kids were present, but not a single kid under 3 was anywhere to be seen. Not in restaurants, not at parks, not in malls. The possible sole exception is Odaiba, which is designed to be a family friendly area. This begins to cause friction almost everywhere else though. Kids menus are few and far between, rarely will you find high chairs, and frustratingly: many restaurants will not give you a to go box, that's just not a thing there, so expect to simply waste food or money if you order a main for a toddler (because there is no kids meal) etc. There is also nearly nothing catered to toddlers....basically anywhere, again this is pretty in line with our expectations, but when we went out of our way to find solutions, and they still didn't seem possible (or were inexplicably closed....they will actually CLOSE parks if there is a light drizzle) it begins to wear on you. Similarly shopping! One of the biggest draws of being in Tokyo, will be rather limited, both in things that would fit a 1-4yo and in physical dimensions of stores, which may or may not accommodate you pushing a stroller. The busy tourist areas are also quite challenging to navigate, and especially in places like Shibuya, a lot of the joint restaurant areas will have exceptionally small tables or standing room only, as will most Ramen or Tempura restaurants. "Family restaurant" is a category in Japan because taking a family elsewhere is difficult.

I can handle almost all of this, but it's coupled with, and again, I am a parent, I understand that children can be taxing, but there's a low level of animosity ever present almost anywhere you go, of course there's background radiation of, you're a tourist and not a local, but couple that with now you're being a difficult tourist, and you can start to tell people do not want you there. This isn't to say we didn't have good experiences, many native Japanese were very accommodating to us, helped us out, were happy to see a cute kid etc. I don't want to paint it as the experience was entirely negative, it wasn't, but it was SO MUCH WORSE than literally anywhere else I have traveled re: having a toddler or child with you, and it's not really conveyed because well, most people traveling to Tokyo do not have kids in tow (and I have heard that for example Osaka and other cities are better about this, so I don't want to paint a broad brush.) There were also plenty of tourists traveling with kids, and even when we didn't share a language, we exchanged knowing glances of how tired of the whole situation we were.

Also the food is seriously overrated, give me hate if you want, but the US has better food, especially LA/NYC. You can get better sushi, cheaper, in LA than Tokyo. It's the truth. The hamburg steak at Tsubame Kitchen in Shinogawa was an exception, that was delicious.

There's a manga I love: Moyashimon, it's about a college student who can see microbes (including the eponymous Yeast), that's entirely unimportant to what I want to talk about. The characters are extremely relatable, I believe I was also in university when I first read it, and many parts resonated with me, and I found the morals of the characters fairly normal. Almost all of these characters are outcasts or pariahs by Japanese standards. Conformity is still very much the norm in Japan, and especially the majority of Tokyo outside the kind of touristy (or counterculture) areas like Shibuya, Akihabara, Kabukicho etc. As we were heavily jetlagged, the majority of our days would start around 5am, the sea of salarymen is absolutely nuts. Thousands of workers in suits, every day, bright and early, and returning at rush hour. Moyashimon deals a lot with the difficulties the characters will face when they leave college and are forced to conform, they will have to be clean shaven, they must stop dying their hair, they must conform to the gender presentation they were assigned at birth. The story, and many other media in the same vein from similar authors, is critical of the culture of conformity. The current Japan, in current year, is still xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic. In relating to these media, whether it's moyashimon, or the works of Nagata Kabi, or even something like HoriMiya (which tragically kills almost all the social commentary of the original work in both the redraw manga as well as the anime), I was relating to being critical of Japan's culture, of being critical of those things.

I don't really know where else to go with this, sorry for the word vomit. I had thought that I knew what to expect when traveling to Japan, I did my research, I knew how to not be rude, not to be intrusive, how to generally be my version of a "good tourist", and it wasn't that my expectations were wrong, I simply found out I liked Tokyo less than I thought I would.

Some serious positives though: meeting my friends who live in Tokyo was great, and we absolutely had a blast, I'd have not had half as much fun if I didn't have people who lived there that knew the places to go and what to see. The climbing gyms and bouldering scene is WORLD CLASS. B pump Ogikubo is famous for a reason, and the national training center in Odaiba was also a highlight.

Maybe this will give some added balance, I'm not sure. This is just the experience I had, there were highlights and lowlights, but overall, I just did not jive with Tokyo in particular, and I would like other people to at least consider that they might not, too.

I had an overnight in Last Vegas for work, and got to spend about 4 hours at the Meow Wolf Omega Mart installation.

It was truly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen -- awe inspiring in scope, vision, and execution.

It's an interactive art installation, but, interactive turned up to 11. If you've ever played a video game where there are bits of stray paper scattered around, and reading them progressively discloses the story, this is like that, it in real life. You start wandering through it, and you realize that, while it is trippy as hell, there is a narrative connecting it all. Another thing that amazed me is the depth of the material. Dozens of pages to read, hours of video to watch. Tasks to complete. Puzzles to solve. Circling back as I realized it was all connected.

The first part of it is an other-worldly grocery store. Equal parts bizarre and hilarious. If you've played the game Control, I think the grocery store so i'd be at home in the FBC. Then you get into the factory where things are made, then the interdimensional portals, the aliens, and the lore.

Here are some pictures I took that don't even scratch the surface of what it is, but maybe set the tone. There are also some commercials on youtube.

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to go, I highly recommend it. But give yourself a whole day if you're a completionist. And pay the three dollars for the boop card.

I originally watched the Bourne Trilogy as a young teenager. I found them to be great action movies, and quite enjoyed them. At the time I knew they were regarded as great action movies, but did not understand the influence they had. Recently, I have heard about how influential they were on the genre, so I decided to re-watch them in my late 20s, with a lot more media awareness. A lot of the commentary I had seen going into this is how the movies popularized the shaky cam and fast cutting on action scenes. Going into this re-watch, I did not remember much, with only remembering just a few standalone scenes, but not much about the plotline (except Bourne has amnesia).

If you have not seen the movies in the past 5 years, I highly recommend you bookmark this post and stop reading then go back and watch them before continuing reading

So going into this movie, my expectations were more along the lines of a dumb action movie, with well done fast-paced editing for action scenes. I was thinking along the lines of mid-2000s equivalent to the John Wick franchise. I was wrong on this. The plot is a lot tighter than the action movies I was expecting, and the action a lot lighter. The entire trilogy has lighter action than compared to more modern action movies. There is a grand total of two explosions for the entire trilogy (one in Identity, where Bourne explodes a propane tank as a diversion, and the second in Ultimatum where another agent blows up a car). Instead, the movie focuses on hand-to-hand combat for the action (which will be discussed later), but also strongly prioritizes Bourne trying to sneak out of a situation rather than fight out of it. Trying to sneak out of an area definitely changes the tone of the movie, and for the better in my opinion.

For the action sequences, I found the fast cutting and shaky cam actually really good. I have been annoyed at other movies that have copied this style, because when done wrong it just turns the scenes into an unreadable mess. I think there are a few things done in Bourne that makes this editing style actually readable. The first is that the scope of these fight scenes are quite small. Normally they are 1v1 fights, not the fighting through a hallway of opponents that can be common in other movies. When the viewer has to keep track of only two people in a fight, the fast cuts are not as jarring. The second trick they use is providing establishing shots of the environment, keeping the environment small, and doing familiar environments (normally apartments). The viewer can very easily keep track of the different rooms they fight through, which grounds it. The third is that the fight scenes are relatively short. Also, all the fights have very clear goals (normally defeat this single person that is preventing escape). Too many movies looked at the well done Bourne action and copied it, without understanding what made the scenes work.

The other part of the movie that uses fast cuts is in the car chases. Bourne car chases are fantastic, although I would argue that there needs to be suspension of disbelief, as the damage to the vehicles are a bit extreme while staying operational. The fast cuts work well as the goal is clear "escape the city center." The viewer is not expected to be able to keep track of where in the city they are, just that they are being followed and Bourne needs to escape. Also, the movie does not use high performance cars, but instead does regular cars in tight European streets, which is a fun change compared to other movies.

The editing in general for the movie is quite engaging. I would describe it as a fragmented editing style, which works really well for the plot. The fragmented style disorients the viewer a bit, which matches well with Bourne suffering from amnesia. Cutting between various things puts the viewer into the mode of trying to piece everything together alongside Bourne (although the viewer has a bit more info, since they are aware of others actions). Then there is the two ending scenes in Supremacy (Bourne in Russia, then Bourne in the US on the phone with Landy) being reused in Ultimatum with it starting with Bourne escaping Russia and then the phone call taking place about 2/3 of the way through Ultimatum. Since I watched the two movies within about a week of each other, I found that having the movie partially exist between the two ending scenes of the previous movie really fun.

I think the simplest thing Arc Raiders nailed about gameplay is the pacing. The enemies move at such a pace that you never get instantly vapourised; you always have a second or two to try something crazy even when you're utterly doomed. The times that 'something crazy' works you have a unique memorable moment. Let me tell you about one of mine.

A Rocketeer is a common headache in Arc Raiders. It's a quadcopter drone the size of a tank that shoots rockets. It usually takes a big and expensive weapon to take one down, but players started to take notice of an item called a 'Hornet Driver', basically a stun grenade. What happens when you stun an aerial drone? That's right, it drops right out of the sky, to its doom if the fall is far enough.

With this in mind, I emerged from some tunnels to find another player pinned down by a Rocketeer. I throw a Hornet Driver, it hits just the right spot and the Rocketeer drops to the ground but is unharmed... and then in trying to angrily get back in the air it flips itself over on its back, completely immobilised. The two of us strangers hesitate for a split second before we sprint over and beat the thing to death with hammers.

There are flaws in this game but in terms of creating organic events it's been a great time.

There are plenty of video reviews of this car out there from people who do it for a living, but I'm not a car influencer or anything like that, I'm just an enthusiast who bought this car with my own money and wanted to give some real impressions for other enthusiasts out there.

Long ago Subaru made a Forester XT that was more or less a de-tuned STI engine in a compact SUV and it was AWESOME. I had an 04 XT that was turbo-swapped, with race exhaust, it was a very quick car and other than getting terrible gas mileage, burning oil, and eventually imploding the transfer shaft in the transmission, it was pretty great. In the ensuing years Subaru pulled out of WRC, killed the STI, and stopped putting turbos on everything (shame). While the hot hatch market has kept up to an extent, the crossover/smaller SUV performance market more or less died entirely.

Fast forward to 2023, I purchase a new Ioniq 5 to replace our BMW 3 series before our kiddo is born, since it's easier to get the car seat in and out etc with a higher vehicle(if it'd have even fit in the 3 series at all). And it's.....great, they are awesome cars, and changing to an EV was not a big deal at all, we mostly charge at home, but the overall build quality of the Ioniq 5 is really quite good, and it's a well put together car, there's a reason it's won many awards since release, outside of the ICCU roulette(which nobody seems to know whether you will or won't be affected, we haven't, knock on wood).

As things go, at some point I start wanting another enthusiast vehicle, my friends and family have stayed car people the whole time, and there's only so much envy you can have when you see Corvettes, 911s, etc, fast is fun. Well Hyundai releases the Ioniq 5N, the legally distinct M5 Estate, the Great Value Urus. And I happen to find one for a good price, and with another kid on the way, I really still can't have a 2 door sports car, it needs to fit a car seat(or two) and well, if having one of a car is good, having two of a car must be....gooder?

I don't need to tell you about all the weird quirks etc about the 5N, every single youtube video goes over this, it's pointless to rehash. What you need to know: holy fuck this car is fast, if you have been in fast cars, or hot hatches, or supercharged trucks, or tuned builds, I assure you it is likely faster. Over 600hp with minimal losses and a single gear transmission, AWD, and large summer tires will do that. The only car faster I've regularly driven is a 992.1 Turbo S, which is a stupid fast car that it's wild they sell to the general public, but those cost $250k, this costs $68k (or the aforementioned ICCU issues, there is quite a few lemons for far less, and those have pushed the clean titled, low mileage used down as well) so you can very easily pick up a 600hp, practical hatchback, for around 50k or less if you want a buyback. That is an absolutely, tremendously insane value. And yes, we all know EVs are fast, but the suspension setup, the grippy tires, and the additional chassis work they did makes it suspiciously capable to cornering, it corners better than many sports cars stock, which should not happen in a 4800lb SUV, wtf.

So then: is the 5N worth it over the normal 5? If you do not want an enthusiast vehicle, no it's not. Especially in the US market, the 5N loses amenities that it gets in other markets, or that are on the Limited trim of the base version: no HUD (Boo), no heated rear seats or sunshades (Boo) and no sunroof option(idc). The Limited trim seats are also much more comfortable for long drives, and you have the relax/recline function for charging stations. The 5N bucket seats are perfectly comfortable, they are actually great for the car, but I had to drive the car back 250miles and it was fine, but it would have been better in the default seats. Other downsides: the range is TRASH, expect 200miles at full charge max, 10% of battery buys you 20miles, the car is on fatter, larger wheels, with lots of additional cooling for performance, and you WILL want to drive it like a lunatic because the car BEGS you to. I wouldn't recommend this car as a first performance vehicle for someone, it's just too fast. Nobody should go from a normal car to a car that runs an 11.1 quarter mile bone stock.

On all the N options: I basically never use the e-shift, I don't care, I like not having gears, it's what you'd want in any car if you could get away with it. Shifting is vestigial, and while I can understand coming from manuals, people like the sensation, it's kind of fun, but I like going fast, and I want the cars full power as much as possible, but it's there if you want it. I really like the N-Pedal, I absolutely adore one pedal driving, and while I usually use the max default regen, the N-Pedal cranks that even more, and a quirk is that, because it's intended for track use, N-Pedal won't bring you to a complete stop the way that max regen in default will, I wish they'd change that honestly. Dynamics wise, this car has a rear power bias, and if you make a turn and punch the gas you WILL kick the ass out, especially in N mode(which is basically how I have the car every time I drive it, with everything in Sport+ except ESC in sport not off, and suspension in normal (sport+ suspension is harsh)) so it is far livelier than any other EV with big HP and accel numbers out there. And while again, it is not light at 4800lbs, considering the new M5 weighs nearly 6000, there's no shortage of large and heavy performance vehicles these days.

So yeah, I've had the car for several months now, and really enjoy it, and wanted to share my own opinions with you all, for the price to performance ratio of this car is truly, truly stupid, and you're not sacrificing practicality for it. One of the first things I did was throw a car seat in the back, and it's got enough boot space to put my kid's huge wagon+anything else. You really can't buy anything at all comparable for less than double or triple the price. Downside is that there simply isn't that many 5Ns that were allocated to dealers, and at the beginning they were charging over MSRP for them because they could. AND there's no telling that the ICCU may or may not fail, and it'll brick your car if it's not fixed, so that's a downside, that said, going back to the title of this whole post, my Suburu XT also exploded it's transmission and couldn't drive anywhere afterwards either, at least the ICCU is under warranty for a while, and I went through I think 3-4 high pressure fuel pumps on my first gen 335i, too.

We don't have a ~cars area, so hopefully hobbies is the right place, cheers.

Personally - and keeping it spoiler free - I thought Season 4 was much better than I expected it to be. It felt a lot more sincere and there was just a lot more going on than in some of the other seasons.

Wondering if anyone had any thoughts they want to share?

Just curious if anyone other Tildes users out there are fans of the Dresden Files novels and might have read the latest, Twelve Months. It just released a few days ago and I just couldn't put it down.

I do want to keep my review spoiler free, but I think this is the best book in the series in awhile.

Wondering if anyone else had thoughts!

I controlled Mars, but the Servants, who worship the aliens as gods, had taken Phobos and Deimos. From a previous failed campaign I knew that if I let the Servants gain orbital superiority over Mars, they would shell all of my mines into regolith from low orbit while I watched helplessly. Then, starved of crucial shipbuilding resources, my faction - the Resistance - would wither and die. I’m sure they felt the same fear looking at my fleet. We were both building up our forces as quickly as we could: reinforcements, whether from Earth or the Inner Belt, would take more than a year to arrive, meaning that whoever won the battle for Mars orbit would control the fate of the red planet - and its riches - forever. Or at least until the aliens arrived to wipe us off the map, which amounts to the same thing. Eventually I was able to gain a sliver of a technological lead and force their fleet to battle.

—-

Hooded Horse came out of nowhere a few years ago to become one of the best (IMO) indie game publishers anywhere. I still haven’t been able to figure out whether they’re actually that good or if my tastes and theirs just overlap perfectly, but who cares: they’ve produced hit after hit. Not necessarily critical successes - though almost all of them are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam - but games that just rule. The kind of game that swings for the fences and succeeds in more than it fails.

Terra Invicta is one of those games. Aliens have come to Earth, and you play as one of the secret societies reacting to that news. The first 10-15 hours of a run are spent in what is basically a political thriller simulator - your agents subvert governments, spread propaganda, and initiate coups to try to control as much of the globe as possible. All the while, you devote every resource you can to sprint towards where the actual game begins: space. At that point Terra Invicta turns into an outrageously detailed orbital mechanics simulation. I haven’t actually won yet so I’m not sure what happens after that, but so far it’s awesome.

It’s not for everybody. The game is kind of hostile - it’s obscenely complicated, really doesn’t give you much in the way of tutorials, and in each of my four attempts, thus far, I’ve realized that I made a deadly mistake about 3 hours ago from which there’s no recovery. (Specifically: One time, I concentrated too much of my space infrastructure on Mars, so when the Aliens cracked the planet, I lost everything. Another time, I was so focused on space that when the China-India-EU alliance invaded my America, I was wiped out. Another time, I was so aggressive against the Alien quislings so early that the Aliens left everyone else alone and crushed me.)

But if you’re the kind of person that thinks spreadsheets are fun - if you’re the kind of person whose biggest problem with strategy games is that they’re too easy - TI is the game for you.

Cas' Short Slices were a series of reviews for my favorite short stories, previously posted on reddit. Each comes paired with a full length novel or novella that comes stylistically or thematically close. These are #1 to #5 (by date of posting, not ranking!).

• Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

There are stories to read and forget. There are stories that linger in my head long after, shouting to be remembered. Then there are stories that haunt me like a ghost, that don’t need to shout for me to never let them go.

Selkie Stories… draws you into the heartbreak of a teenage girl lost in the mysteries of her broken home and the stories she tells herself to make sense of it all. It carves a window into her burgeoning relationship with her co-worker Mona and her own darknesses. In the narrator, Sofia writes pain and hope and grief and the reckless desperation only young love can bring.

Even for a short story this piece is brief, spanning a mere three thousand words. But those words pack a hell of a punch, enough to leave me breathless – and that’s a magic of its own.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out How To Be Both by Ali Smith, a Man Booker-nominated novel with similar themes running throughout, gorgeous prose and characters that’ll make you cry.

• Love Is Never Still, by Rachel Swirsky

Sometimes when you chase after something, you find in the end that what you’ve been looking for only exists in the figment of your imagination. Inside your head, the object takes on a life of its own until it diverges from real life. It’s always painful to realize what you wanted all along was never really there in the first place.

Rachel Swirsky takes the classic story of Galatea and Pygmalion and casts all players under scrutiny. Not just the artist and his sculptor but behind them, the affairs of Aphrodite who gave life to a statue and her contentious relations with the remaining Greek pantheon. It’s a love story, but also more than that. This story explores how nature shapes who we are, the many faces of desire and how it can change into something darker, something unpleasant.

I tend to wax over good prose but it’s such a hard quality to define, let alone master, that I have to give it mention here. The descriptions are vivid and strong, each scene painted clear without falling into the pitfall of purple prose. And these words aren’t window dressing – the author knows what she wants to say and how to say it. This story is a long one – more novelette than short story – but definitely well-worth the read.

Read it yourself here at Uncanny Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out Glimpses by Lewis Shiner.

This is a book I really love, and it’s all but unknown in these parts. Ray works as a radio repairman in 90s’ Texas, who finds one day an album by The Doors appearing in his workshop. Only thing is, the album’s never been recorded and released. Over time, Ray learns to walk down alternate timelines into the past – where he has the possibility to change things and make a difference.

Lewis tackles difficult themes such as the obligations of someone trapped in a loveless marriage, alcoholism and the struggle not to project your needs onto others. What’s more, he does them justice.
On surface level, these two are nothing alike but the parallels are there in the characters of Ray and Pygmalion, both of them are looking for something more without knowing what it is they really want.

Want something closer to Love Is… in theme? Try Galatea, by Emily Blunt. A different take on the story, presented in the unusual form of interaction fiction. It’s well-written and considered to be one of the best in it’s genre. Available online here.

• The Dancer On The Stairs, by Sarah Tolmie

There's been a lot of clamour recently for stories that aren't entrenched in darkness and grit. We're all tired of seeing depressing things in social media, in the news. Sometimes all you want is to see a ray of light shining at the end.

Enter The Dancer... where a young woman finds herself awakening on an empty flight of stairs, stretching forever in both directions. She's thrust into another world with no preparation, not even sharing a common language with the people there. Without crichtén - the coin of the stairway - she has no way past the guards stationed on each floor. And crichtén isn't something that can be bargained for. So she wanders on, lost and hungry and desperate to learn and navigate a culture entirely alien from her own.

Why I love The Dancer... is that ultimately, it's a story about kindnesses. From the guard sympathizing with her plight to the old pilgrim sharing his knowledge of the world with someone hapless as a newborn, it tells you that while the world may be cold, it isn't cruel. There are people out there who are willing to reach out to those in want, and to extend a hand into the dark.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Much lauded by /r/fantasy, this book contains much the same warm tones and hope carried by The Dancer... If you haven't checked it out yet, I'm adding my voice to the chorus telling you to do so now!

• Fox Magic, by Kij Johnson

Throughout mythologies there are countless variations of the story of the changeling wife. Selkies, huldras and crane wives play on the theme of captive spirits lured into the world of men by force or trickery.

In Fox Magic, Kij Johnson allows us a glimpse of the inverse through the eyes of a kitsune, or fox maiden. The unnamed narrator grows infatuated with the master of the property on which she and her family resides. The man is married with a wife and son. She is a fox, she does not care. And in this way the story delves into the quiet horror of seeing a person trapped in a waking dream, in what another thinks is love.

The nature of magic is that it's often cruel, giving power to one and not another - easy enough to parallel in the real world. So we have to not just look but see, and realize when it's past time to let things go.

Read it yourself here at Kij Johnson's website.

Hungry for more? Check out The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld by Patricia McKillip. Though she writes with a lighter touch than Kij, Forgotten Beasts... is very much in line with the themes in this short story - how strongly magic tempts when it promises to give you your heart's desire, how affection needs to be a two-way street.

• Second Person, Present Tense by Daryl Gregory

Nobody can choose the circumstances of their own birth, and some people come into being in more unusual ways than others. Most of us create an identity for ourselves through the passing of time and gathered experience. For Terry, it's nowhere near that simple.

The moment Terry comes into existence her parents are waiting to claim her, parents she doesn't remember. The doctor informs her that the drug Zen is responsible for stripping away her knowledge of who she was. Whoever inhabited her body before the overdose, she's gone now and left Terry there in her place. And already she's started to form memories of her own, disparate from the expectations of the people calling her their daughter and wanting her back again.

Second Person... is centered around the themes of self-actualization despite the expectations of those around you. Whoever you were is unimportant, what matters is who you are in the now and in the end, it's up to you to make your identity.

Read it yourself here at Clarkesword Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker. Chava, the titular golem, comes to life during a voyage to a promised future in New York. But the one who's commissioned her dies in an unexpected manner, she's left unmoored to find her own way in a strange new city.

Virgin

This album is a banger. Very different in character than her earlier work, much more mature and introspective. I enjoyed her earlier music in the "oh, if it's on the streaming mix I will listen to it" but this album is something else.

I connect to most songs first through the lyrics, then through the music, so here's a lyrical sample.

From Hammer, opening song:

There's a heat in the pavement,
my mercury's raising
Don't know if it's love
or if it's ovulation
When you're holding a hammer,
everything looks like a nail

Bonus, two songs from her previous album. Solar Power that I love, though I feel Virgin is stronger as an album.

Stoned at the Nail Salon

Well, my hot blood's been burnin' for so many summers now
It's time to cool it down, wherever that leads
'Cause all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of
And all the times they will change, it'll all come around
I don't know
Maybe I'm just
Maybe I'm just stoned at the nail salon again

Secrets from a Girl (who's seen it all)

Welcome to sadness
The temperature is unbearable until you face it
Thank you for flying with Strange Airlines
I will be your tour guide today
Your emotional baggage can be picked up at carousel number 2
Please be careful so that it doesn't fall onto someone you love
When we've reached your final destination
I will leave you to it
You'll be fine
I'm just gonna show you in
And you can stay as long as you need
To get familiar with the feeling
And then when you're ready, I'll be outside
And we can go look at the sunrise
By euphoria mixed with existential vertigo?
Cool

https://www.powercomposer.net/

I am not affiliated with this project, I just think it's awesome and deserves more publicity.

Power Composer is a piano-reel-style MIDI editor built in the Godot game engine (though it is a tool, not a game). It's intended to be lighter and more accessible than a DAW, but still quite powerful. The dev has been quietly working on it for a while now and just recently made a free early-access Windows build available!

I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was featured in the Godot 2024 showreel, as I've wanted something like it for a while. Several years ago, I was playing around with Chrome Music Lab's "Song Maker" so I could use it in my classroom. I ended up having such a great time that I got incredibly sidetracked and spent a while just writing stuff. I know the grid-based sequencer isn't a novel concept, but something about that particular configuration just clicked with me.

Ever since then, I've been searching for something similar but more capable that still clicks in the same way. I tried Bosca Ceoil, LMMS, and a couple DAWs' MIDI editors, but nothing quite did it. Then I saw Power Composer. Now that I can actually try it, it's just as comfortable as I hoped! I'm a classically-trained music teacher and have been writing/arranging with software like Dorico for years, but something about sequencers (and Power Composer in particular) just feels more freeing to me than traditional notation.

It is not open-source nor is it planned to be, which is a bummer because I'd love to contribute, but I get it - being paid for your work is nice. No word on the release price or timeline yet.

The dev seems like a good guy. In addition to the website above, Power Composer has a Youtube channel and a Discord server, and he is actively taking feature requests and bug reports on the latter.

I've been exploring it a bit and I'd be happy to answer any questions people have about it! Really enjoying it so far.

So, yeah, apparently a lot of folks don't know about this website. Didn't want to put it on the link because I wanted to briefly explain: I use duckduckgo and put a !justwatch after any movie or show I want to know on which service it is available.
But basically, go there, search for what you want to watch, and it'll tell you where it's available (if it is), and for how much!

In a landscape of so many quality things to watch, I wanted to take a minute to recommend Code 3, which came out earlier this year. It stars Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, and Aimee Carrero, among a few other known actors and actresses. It follows Wilson's character, a paramedic working for Los Angeles 911, through a period of a couple of days. The comedy is pretty funny, although I should mention it does have a couple of dark moments as well, in case anyone would rather shy away from that. But I recommend it specifically because, having lived that life, it's the most accurate depiction of life on a 911 truck I've seen from Hollywood. The ups, the downs, the laughs, the tears. I watch a fair amount of things that I feel like weren't worth my time in hindsight, but this is the first movie in a while where I enjoyed the entirety of it. Hopefully some of y'all do as well :)

Trailer (YouTube)

IMDB

TheMovieDB

Rotten Tomatoes

At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that the number of collisions will increase exponentially. A large number of moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a "white sky" and blanketing the earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides; this will cause the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and oceans to boil away, destroying the biosphere and rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. It is decided to evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a "Cloud Ark" in orbit, including a "swarm" of "arklet" habitats that will be able to avoid the debris from the moon—both to attempt to preserve the human race and to give the remaining doomed inhabitants of Earth something to hope for, to prevent civil disorder from breaking out on Earth before its surface is destroyed. Each nation on Earth is invited to choose by lot a small number of young people to become eligible to join the Cloud Ark.

The Cloud Ark is to be based around the International Space Station (ISS), currently commanded by American astronaut Ivy Xiao. The ISS is already bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against moon debris. Robots are used to excavate Amalthea to provide more protection in a project run by mining and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie. Technicians and specialists, including Doc Dubois, are sent to the ISS in advance of the Hard Rain to prepare it to become the headquarters of the Cloud Ark.

The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. A Human Genetic Archive is sent to the Cloud Ark, with the intention that it will be used to rebuild the human population. Approximately 1,500 people are launched into space in the two years before the Hard Rain begins.

Suspecting that some architects of the Cloud Ark are interested only in pacifying Earth's inhabitants with false hope (rather than creating an environment that will actually survive in the long term), a billionaire named Sean Probst realizes that the Cloud Ark will need a ready supply of water in order to provide propellant for the space station and to prevent it from eventually falling into the earth's atmosphere. He embarks on a two-year expedition to extract ice from a comet nicknamed Greg's Skeleton, using a nuclear reactor to provide power to bring it back towards Earth.

The Hard Rain begins approximately two years after the destruction of the moon as predicted; human civilization as well as nearly all life on Earth is obliterated, although some try to take shelter underground (such as Dinah's father) or in the deep ocean (such as Ivy's fiancé). Markus Leuker, appointed leader of the Cloud Ark, declares all nations of Earth to be dissolved, and imposes martial law under the Cloud Ark Constitution. Despite a worldwide agreement that members of government will not be launched into space, the President of the United States, Julia Bliss Flaherty, manages to get herself sent to the Cloud Ark at the last minute. Shortly afterwards the main cache of the physical Human Genetic Archive attached to the ISS is ruined by the thrusters of an arklet passing too closely, leaving only samples that had been distributed amongst the arks.

There is disagreement on the Cloud Ark about the best way to organize its society and avoid the debris of the moon. Some "Arkies" favor converting the Cloud Ark into a decentralized swarm of small space vessels at a higher orbit out of range of debris, rather than maintaining the central authority of the ISS. Doc Dubois wants to shelter in the "Cleft", a crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the moon. Others want to go to Mars. Julia Flaherty starts to acquire a coterie of followers and encourages the proponents of the decentralized swarm plan.

Sean Probst's expedition has succeeded, and he has brought a comet into an orbit that will soon pass by Earth. His radio has failed and he has built a replacement by hand, and is able to communicate with Dinah MacQuarie by Morse code. However, he and his party die of radiation sickness caused by fallout from their nuclear reactor long before the expedition is complete. Markus Leuker and Dinah travel to the comet with a small crew to take control of it and bring it back to the Cloud Ark, in order to provide sufficient propellant to reach the Cleft on the moon's core. Just before Dinah returns with the ice as the sole survivor of the mission, Julia Flaherty persuades the majority of the population to abandon the ISS and move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, and sends a preliminary expedition to Mars. In the course of their sudden, unauthorized departure the ISS sustains catastrophic damage to many sections. The surviving portions of the Human Genetic Archive are carried along with them, but due to the Arkies' ignorance, these surviving portions are discarded or ignored. Only the digital version of the Human Genetic Archive survives aboard the ISS. The ISS and remaining third of the cloud ark combine through reshaping the ice into a support structure, and is rechristened Endurance.

During the three years that it takes for Endurance to reach the Cleft, the majority of its population die of various causes (cancer caused by cosmic radiation, suicide, bolide strikes, etc.); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight; Flaherty's faction is defeated. Running out of food, the Swarm resorts to cannibalism, and by the end of three years only 11 survive, including Flaherty and the leader of the opposing faction, Aïda. Aïda requests to reunite the remnant of the Swarm with the Cloud Ark before it reaches the Cleft, but secretly plans a battle for control of Endurance; as a result of that battle the population is diminished even further.

By the time Endurance reaches the relative safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. The Human Genetic Archive has been destroyed, but they have sufficient resources to use the surviving genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the Seven Eves gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Aïda predicts that, hundreds of years from now, this project shall result in seven new races.

The narrative jumps to 5,000 years later. There are now three billion humans living in a ring around the Earth, and they have indeed formed into seven races, each one descended from and named after the Seven Eves who survived the events of Part 2. These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. The iron core of the moon has mostly been used to build space habitats, but the Cleft itself has been turned into "Cradle", an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth.

Humanity has divided mostly along racial lines into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a form of Cold War characterized by cultural isolation, espionage and border skirmishes, mediated by treaty agreements more honored in the breach than the observance.

The orbiting races, the Spacers, terraform Earth by crashing ice comets into it to replenish the oceans, and seed the planet with genetically created organisms based upon re-sequenced DNA data saved from the escape to orbit. Once a breathable atmosphere is recreated, and sufficient plant and animal species have been reseeded, some members of the orbiting races ("Sooners") resettle the planet, in violation of treaty agreements.

A "Seven", a group of seven people with one member from each race, is recruited by "Doc" Hu Noah, to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. As the story unfolds, they discover that some humans did indeed survive the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines ("Diggers"), while others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"). Although these survivors have also evolved socially and biologically to form two additional races, the survival of root stock humanity separate from the Seven Eves causes turmoil in Spacer high politics. Ground conflict eventually occurs because each of the orbiting camps (Red and Blue) wishes to establish a preferential or exclusive relationship with the Earthbound races: the Diggers, although descendants of Dinah's family, interpret the Blue state's presence on their territory as an act of aggression and develop an alliance with Red, prompting Blue to seek out an alliance with the Pingers on the strength of Ivy's connection with one of their founders. Matters are further complicated because the Diggers claim all of the Earth's land surface as their own, and initially hold the Spacers in disdain (despite their high technology) for having fled the planet eons ago.

In an epilogue it is revealed that a separate, secret underwater ark had been created concurrently with the cloud ark, leading to the development of the Pingers, based on analysis of the "selfies" Ivy's fiance had sent her, using diagrams and sketches in the background as clues. Ty invites the surviving Seven (along with Sonar and Deep, representatives of the Diggers and the Pingers, respectively) back to apartments at his bar in the Cleft with the intent of forming the first "Nine".

I have decent internet at home.

I have great internet at work.

Despite the speeds of those though, seemingly every website out there feels laggy and heavy. You click, you wait, you get a skeleton of the page, with different elements that rapidly pop in until you're staring at the full site. You see the little loading animation on the tab for one, two, three seconds. It isn't exactly "slow" by any means, but it's far from instantaneous either.

Clicking around the web these days feels like I'm playing a game with unignorable input lag.

And I get it. The modern web is complex. It's genuinely a miracle that this is possible in the first place, so I really shouldn't be complaining that the bits traveling through the internet from dozens of servers thousands of miles away aren't getting here immediately.

I get that high resolution screens require large images, and the ubiquity of video these days adds even more weight. I get that many websites are closer to applications than they are static pages.

I'm not trying to take away from the awesome magic that is our modern miracle of connectivity in the slightest, and I'm appreciative to all the people here who spend their livelihoods working on it. Y'all are awesome.

I'm just trying to say that, well, sometimes moving around on the web can drag. And when you've been using it for a long time, the dragging can get under your skin a little bit.

However, my real point lies not in the rest of the internet, but here. I'm talking about this "heavy web" baseline as a contrast for one of the things I love about Tildes:

it. is. so. snappy.

I click, and BAM, the page is there. Immediately.

It's sharp. It's crisp. It's no-nonsense. No waiting for elements to pop in. No subconsciously watching for the loading animation to stop so that I know I can start to interact with site.

For general design reasons, I've always loved that Tildes is text-only, but more and more I appreciate that aspect simply because Tildes feels good to use because it is so quick and responsive. I don't know how much of that is due to the text-only part of things and how much of it is Deimos being a genius code wizard who made an amazing platform, but I'm happy about it regardless.

This site has got zero input lag.

And that feels great.

Subsync is a program that will sync any subtitle file based on either audio or another subtitle. It is remarkably good at syncing any subtitle you throw at it. I never encountered anything even remotely as good as Subsync for that task.

Unfortunately, the author archived it due to some technical reasons as well as bad interactions with users. I don't believe there is anything as good out there when it comes to syncing broken subtitles. Subsync still works, but I don't know for how long. I am not a programmer. I am posting this as a call for help: if anyone is interested in maintaining this program, I think it would be of great help to a lot of people.

Right now, Subsync is a manual tool with a graphical interface. But I foresee it working in the background with programs like VLC, Plex, or Stremio. That would be awesome.

EDIT

Subsync is automated and language aware. It will sync individual lines using audio or another subtitle as a reference. It won't just shift everything; it will adjust them individually. It is usually not necessary to go through the entire file, but you can do it for badly synced subtitles. Adjusting every single subtitle will take more time, but you can do it.

Merely shifting all the subtitles won't work for older TV shows because of the breaks. Depending on the version (DVD, Blu-Ray, WEB, or recorded directly from TV), the ad breaks will be edited slightly differently, with different delay times before resuming the show. That is enough for the subtitles to lose sync after every act. There is also the issue of frame rate and perhaps other video features, which I believe can also unsync subtitles. I probably have more issues with subtitles than most because I mostly watch older or classic TV content.

(Adapted for clarification from my response below)