Luzula

Whew, I am done with this stage of my moving, but it was a struggle. There was just more stuff, and then more stuff, as happens when a succession of housemates have lived in an apartment and left shit behind (wtf, why does Microsoft Word’s dictation censor the word shit and replace it with ***??). And I was left to take care of it. One particularly careless housemate even left dirty dishes in the sink when she left!!! *boggles* I am very grateful for my dad who helped me on the last day. Also very grateful I paid for the cleaning and made the housemates pay for some of that. And I am looking forward to hopefully getting housemates who take more responsibility.

I have managed to keep writing throughout most of this, and now have three chapters and 15K of my current longfic! I love it when a story is alive in my head: I always have a rough outline in my head when I start, with the main plot and with the basic emotional and/or relationship arc. But as for smaller plot details, they usually bloom and embroider themselves in my head when I get to that part of the story, and it's such a delight! When I've thought of a title for the story, I suppose I'll start posting it as I go.

My computer crashed and died, may it rest in peace. If you're expecting a response from me, I may be slow...

Arrgh, Firefox updated and somehow took with it all my open tabs, all my bookmarks and all my add-ons/extensions! Oh well. I had tons of tabs open, perhaps I should just view it as getting a clean slate--but it does mean that I might not reply to something I ought to, just so you know.

Also I lost fics which I was planning to read. I have a backed-up system for fics over 5K, where I mark them as to-read on AO3 and also download them to my ereader and keep those epub files in cloud storage. That's like, two layers of back-up. But for fics shorter than 5K, I just keep them open in tabs in a window...which now was lost. I reconstructed some of them via AO3 history, but not all. Oh well.

Anyway! The Unsent Letters exchange has revealed, showing that (unsurprisingly) sanguinity and I were matched to each other. I received this delightful solution to the difficulties of writing confidential love letters in the open. It is both sweet and funny, with dirty botanical double entendres! \o/

Comfort Me With Apples (1685 words) by sanguinity
Fandom: The Jacobite Trilogy | The Flight of the Heron Series - D. K. Broster
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham
Characters: Ewen Cameron, Keith Windham
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Codes & Ciphers, Established Relationship, Long-Distance Relationship
Summary: 'Then it must be a cipher that none will suspect as a cipher,' Ewen answered stubbornly. 'Surely if we put our heads together we can manage that.'

On the eve of war, Keith and Ewen devise a code to keep their letters private.

And I wrote the following fic, which was inspired by an idea I'd had for a while, to write Ewen's contribution to The Lyon in Mourning. In the end I didn't do that--I tried, but it just ended up rephrasing/summarizing canon and not being very interesting! So instead, I wrote the letter exchange between Ewen and Robert Forbes (the author/editor of The Lyon in Mourning) leading up to that contribution. I always love writing pastiche of 18th century prose! So much fun.

Preserv'd for Posterity (1668 words) by Luzula
Fandom: The Jacobite Trilogy | The Flight of the Heron Series - D. K. Broster
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ewen Cameron, Robert Forbes
Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Epistolary, Grief/Mourning, Documentation, Post-Canon
Summary: To Ewen Cameron of Ardroy

Dear Sir, I have not the Honour of being known to you, & you will no doubt wonder at a Stranger writing to you without an Introduction, but I must hope that you will excuse the Liberty when I have explain'd my Purpose.

I am grading university student papers. Their task was to write about the application of mathematics in other subjects, after watching some lectures by mathematicians in industry who talk about their work. I won't inflict the students' bad grammar or terrible style on you, but let me quote some of their sweeping statements:

Student 1: Society is changing exponentially!
Me: Do you really mean that all social change is exponential? If so, how do you know?

Student 2: All phenomena in nature and society can be modeled mathematically!
Me: I suppose this is technically true if you allow for bad models with no relation to reality, but otherwise, citation extremely needed.

Student 3: In the future, humanity will keep all their knowledge about mathematics, and the subject will continue to develop!
Me: How do you know that?

I don't know what genre they think they're writing in. Some sort of...advertisement for mathematics? *feels grumpy*

I'm so confused by the worldbuilding in the book I'm currently reading. I'm reading it for my book club; it is Alix E. Harrow's The Once and Future Witches, set in fantasy New England in 1893. The main worldbuilding premise is: witchcraft exists, and is persecuted (also there are suffragettes).

There is casual mention of saints, priests, nuns and monks in a way that implies that Catholicism is the dominant religion. My first theory about this was that the Reformation never happened in this world, but that doesn't hold water, because there's an off-hand mention of a Quaker. My next theory was that perhaps most of the Catholics in England were driven to emigrate to America, instead of the Protestant Dissenters? But that doesn't work, because there's mention of the Georgian Inquisition, implying that England's government is Catholic in the 18th century. (And by the way, the term "Georgian Inquisition" is not a great idea, because the reason the Georges were on the throne in the first place is to make sure the monarch was a Protestant.) So I suppose my theory is now that the Reformation happened, but was unsuccessful in England and the country remained Catholic, with a minority of Protestant movements like the Quakers.

I probably was not meant to think so much about this (and I might not have if I was more gripped by the book in general), but I can't help it! It's unclear to me why the author chose to make Catholicism the dominant religion. I hope it's not because they thought that Protestants did not persecute witches? Surely not. But why, then? I really can't see any connection at all to what's going on in the story. Is this just very random worldbuilding? Will it all make sense later in the book? Am I too picky about worldbuilding?

I just discovered that I have moths (well, moth eggs and moth larvae) on my sock shelf, at 10.30 pm in the evening, and I am leaving tomorrow morning (for the family summer place). Yes, I have lots of woolen socks. Yes, I do like biodiversity, but not among my socks. /o\

And yes, it's a small problem compared to, uh, some others. *crosses fingers for the US*

cos(x + 90°) = 0
cos = −(x + 90°)

Aaaaaaaahhhh...

So as well as previous quarrels, my mom and I have now had The Money Quarrel! Fun times. But tomorrow I will be back home, whew.

( Really no need to click, I only wanted to vent )

So tonight there was a discussion in my home where one of us (let's call him K) turned out to have some pretty disturbing opinions. We were talking about this guy who is wrong on the internet, named Jordan B. Peterson. Among (many) other things, he's against no-fault divorce, thinks a woman in high heels who does not want to be harrassed is a hypocrite, is against climate science, etc.

I was sitting with N (another person in the household) and we were rolling our eyes at this guy's opinions. Then K came into the conversation and it turned out that he actually thinks this Jordan B. Peterson is a great guy. He thinks that Peterson helps young frustrated men with his sage advice and that the things we're reacting against are just things that Peterson is saying to provoke and gain an audience and that they're not that bad. And that we're only reacting to them because we're not Peterson's audience. *eyeroll* We asked him didn't he think people like this were a danger? Wasn't Trump a danger either (another person who spouts stuff like this to get attention)? And he...equivocated.

N and I were upset by this, and before they went to bed, N sent me an email saying that they didn't feel comfortable living with K anymore and that this was just the last drop. It's true that there are other issues. K does do his share of the housework (at least when prompted), but he never takes initiatives for example to decide when we need to clean or fix things and is passive in the process of finding new housemates when needed (we have one fourth room which is small and there's a higher turnover of people there).

Actually N feels bad that K got into the household without going through an interview process. K was originally a friend/acquaintance of N who was in a spot of housing trouble and stayed temporarily with us. Then the person in the fourth room moved out and K got that room instead, and he later moved into one of the bigger rooms when the person who had that room moved.

It's possible that eventually N would leave because they don't want to live with K (they said so). And I really don't want that to happen, because I love living with them! And I would definitely prefer another housemate than K myself. OTOH I don't know how I feel about booting someone out of the shared apartment. I have been booted out once myself (IMO for ridiculous reasons on the face of it, but I guess really because some people just didn't like me--in that case I ended up in a far better place afterward).

Am I just being conflict-averse here? I mean, being housemates is a relationship, and it is reasonable that relationships can end when one or more people don't want to be in them anymore. Legally I have this covered--I hold the lease and have a secondary contract with him that I could end--but I am more concerned about the social aspects of it.

Or am I being intolerant? I do think that one should be able to discuss differences and not immediately cut people out once they express different opinions than me. If someone says something I disagree with at one point, that doesn't mean they're forever a bad person. OTOH it's not the same thing to say that one should be able to discuss with people in general, as to say that one needs to have a housemate relationship with such a person. And there are the other issues as well.

We have also just admitted a new fourth member who seems lovely, and I am sorry about involving them in the drama of this. They're moving in on the 1st of December.

Any advice, O internet friends? Have you ever been through something like this?