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Based entirey on my probably-inaccurate and decidedly non-expert recollection (I will definitely have some things in the wrong order):

USA: We're not so sure about this NATO thing. Maybe we'd honour Article 5; we'd have to think about it. You should be spending a lot more on defence. Oh and by the way, we're going to publicly undermine your governments, meet with your far-right parties, and some of our rich people with governmental ties will be funding them.

*time passes*

USA: Our new Security Strategy says that Europe is on its own, and if you care about Ukraine it's up to you to deal with it. Also, we plan to invade part of Denmark.

*time passes*

USA: Uh, when we said you should spend more on defence, we meant with American companies! Why are you buying arms elsewhere? How did this happen? That's really disrespectful. By the way, your troops basically didn't do any fighting in Afghanistan. You've never helped us. Why are you sending military personnel to Greenland?

*time passes*

USA: We want to bomb Iran! Can we use your airbases?
Europe: Why do you want to bomb Iran?
USA: We don't know! Can we use your airbases?

Europe: No.

USA: Betrayal! By an ally! What about the Special Relationship?

*Iranian missile hits a British airbase in Cyprus*

UK: OK, we'll let you use our airbases for anti-missile-launcher operations. Also, we're sending an area air defense ship to Cyprus.
USA: Too late, loser, we're not interested in you joining a war to claim the credit when we already won it.

*a short time passes*

USA: Europe, we need you to send ships to protect the Strait of Hormuz, in this war that we already won.
Europe: No.
UK: Didn't you just say you didn't want us?
USA: *threatens to pull out of NATO*

Thanks to being ill, and perhaps thanks to buying a Steam Deck and being able to play from the couch, I just finished this game.

It's 2030, and some years ago a sci-fi-esque disaster affected the former contiguous USA. It left behind a few individuals with superpowers, some perhaps more useful than others. And it left at least two rival authoritarian regimes.
In this game a group of nobodies sets off to cross the continent under the authorities' radar. Their cover: being a band on tour. They meet people along the way, and of course things don't go entirely to plan.

It's interactive fiction, but more interactive than some. It's a road-trip story, of course. The summary is that it's a really nice character-driven story, where the things you say and the choices you make mould the character development along the way. The people feel largely realistic/plausible, which is no mean feat in writing. Like most such games the big picture of the plot is fixed, although I think there are different ways to reach the milestones, but the evolution of the people is not.

It's a game about people, families, and relationships; also a game about resistance, and different forms that it can take.

The protagonist starts off as quite a flawed character, and I had a number of "I don't want to say any of these things!" moments near the start. But that gets better, if you have her develop that way. The pacing is perhaps a little slow in the middle, but it picks up again and makes that a very minor complaint. The art is lovely, and it has a good soundtrack.
Alongside this there's some combat which... eh, I found it fun, but it's not the strongest part of the game. And there's a note-bashing minigame, which... again, I enjoyed it, and how good you are does affect what happens, but I don't think in any major ways. Both of these break things up nicely and give changes in pace.

Good on accessibilty: combat difficulty is adjustable, and fights can be skipped altogether. There's an "easy QTE" mode. It does require a games controller, I think. It took me about 20 hours to complete in non-rushed way. It rewards you for remembering what characters say and like, so it's worth trying to play in a relatively concentrated period rather than spread out over months.

Bonus points for unremarked queer and non-wihite representation throughout, people struggling with mental health, and for a female protagonist. Actually, a majority-female cast. It got review-bombed on steam for being woke, so maybe extra bonus points for that? ;-) Recommended, either way.

This is from the soundtrack. No spoilers.

Current Mood: calm

I'm on holiday! In Madeira. It's not technically my first time here, but the first time was more than twenty years ago off a cruise ship. So functionally it is. I get occasional flashes of familiarity that tell me when I visited a place back then, but really it's all new.

Yesterday I did lots of walking and visited a 500-year-old convent, with a lot of impressive tiles and beautiful ceilings.
Today I took two cable cars to visit two different gardens on two different mountains. And also did a lot of walking, much of which was Up.

The gardens were a touch disappointing, and at this time of year mostly felt like tourist traps. Things might be different in summer, and it is certainly unfair to judge a garden by how it looks in December. But I didn't mind, because I was enjoying being out and about at altitude, with views and nice air. I also love travelling by cable car. It's not necessary nowadays - all of the places I went have road access - but it's smooth and calm and quiet, and by looking down you get a fascinating insight into bits of the town you'd never normally see.

One thing that struck me is that Madeira's roads are a marvel of engineering and, I suspect, EU money, thanks to the challenging topography... but beyond this, the infrastructure is incredibly three-dimensional. Dual carriageways will zip across the city, passing over valley roads to enter tunnels only a few metres under somebody's house. I'm almost sure there are roads in tunnels that pass over each other. One of the cable cars I took today passed under a power line. I admire the intricacy and the 3D thinking, and I am in awe at its construction.

I'm here to wind down and not feel pressured to do anything. That's nice, but of course it's going to need a lot more than a few days of that to make more than a short term difference.

I spent this morning achieving nothing while WFH, with no motivation and no focus for anything.
I went to the office to see if that would make any difference. It didn't. I had a big task I had to do, and I couldn't do it, and I also couldn't do anything else.

Then I got the big task started with some GenAI help[1], and it became easier - if not easy - to finish it. And having done that seemed to unlock things, and I've been ticking off minor stuff for the rest of the day.

Brains are weird.

[1] Yes, I used some GenAI. Don't hate me. I fed it a failed research proposal of mine and asked it to turn it into an advert for a PhD studentship for the same project, and it did a half-decent job at a first draft to improve upon.
I still have enormous ethical problems with LLMs, and I still feel like their energy use is undoing everything I work for. And they've broken university learning and assessment in a way that we haven't figured out how to handle. But also, I recognise that complaining about that isn't going to stop it, at least until the bubble pops. And my university is all-in on "use it use it use it use it". This is the first time that I've actually found it useful.

Current Mood: confused

I finally finished this, what must be years after it came out.

It wasn't a patch on the first season. Or even on S2/3. There were some really cringy episodes where I had to stop watching, and force myself to finish later.

I feel that Otis's story was largely told somewhere during S3, with parts left to close out. Maeve's story had a little left, but not a lot. This season was mostly about Eric, and also about Jean. And that's fine. They had significant and worthwhile stuff to tell, and I think it would have worked better if it had pivoted to being more about them. But they kept the focus on Otis even though there wasn't much more to say with him except as part of others' journeys, and that led to some really stupid contrived plotlines and so forth.

Still, it was a nice ending. I was pleased that there was some resolution and optimism for everybody, but that it wasn't happily ever after for everybody concerned.

It wasn't until I finished this book that I realised that it's the same author as Some Desperate Glory. It's very different, but knowing that it was written by the same person I can start to see similarities.

It's a magical school. We've had lots of them already. It's an ancient(ish) magical school in England, in what appears to be a parallel world where magic is normal and acknoweldged and something that you can do a GCSE in. It's yet another magical school, but this time it is written from the perspective of the deputy head. The author is a teacher, writing what she knows, and this shows. She gets it. The best way I can think to describe the tone of the narrative is, paraphrasing slightly,

"No, your squad of demon hunters can't take these children to a place of safety. You don't have DBS checks! In fact you haven't even shown me ID".

There's a good plot, and it was a quick and intense read for me. Beyond that it's about identity. Specifically, identity for a middle-aged woman who has given her life to her job, has excelled, and isn't sure what else is left. It's about trauma, self-awareness, responsiblity, and hubris.

Highly recommended, and special thanks to

sfred who recommended it to me.

Tesh has now done great MilSF (or possibly anti-MilSF?), and excellent fantasy. I'm excited to see what she'll turn her hand to next.

Current Mood: pleased

I enjoyed the first two books of this series. I didn't think they were especially good, in a sense, but they were gripping and enjoyable.

This one flipped over to "ugh, no". I forced myself to finish it, but will not be looking out for the next installment. This series, like many others, has handled the need for escalation between volumes by increasing the scale and raising the stakes. We started off with one young woman's survival, and now we're dealing with world politics. But this simply isn't handled well.

(spoilers follow)

( Spoilers )

Bleh.

Current Mood: bitchy

After my day in Aachen I took a short train ride to Maastrict and spent most of a day there. It's odd, insomuch as it's a Dutch city with hills... it has some interesting historical churches, city walls, etc., and was generally nice to wander through as the temperature had dropped from the >35C of recent times to the mid-20s.

I took a tour of the "caves" - actually old limestone mines - a couple of km out of town. It turns out there is a huge network of these tunnels - thousands of miles in total - that extend not just under a hill outside Maastrict but all the way under the border to Belgium. They've been used for smuggling people or things under the border at various times in history - apparnetly the Belgian resistance made especially good use. Looking at the map, it mostly made me think of the Tombs of Atuan.

Map painted on an underground wall showing a huge maze of roughly right-angled tunnels

Map painted on an underground wall showing a huge maze of roughly right-angled tunnels

I posted some more phonecam photos over on Pixelfed: 1 2

Heading home now after a couple of days with Dutch-resident friends; I'm writing this from the Aberdeen->Kirkwall ferry.

I'm on holiday!
I haven't been blogging much on this trip, because it's mostly a trip to see friends and family. But yesterday was all about tourism, and I spent the day in Aachen, Germany, in 36C heat. I came here once before with friend L, when she showed me the place briefly, and I knew I needed to come back. Six years later, here I am.

My favourite thing about Aachen, although I've no idea how true it is, is this quote from Wikivoyage:

"As Aachen is a legally recognised spa, it could call itself Bad Aachen, but refuses to do so, as it then would no longer be first in almost all alphabetical lists."

My second favourite thing about Aachen, and the reason I'm here, is undoubedly the cathedral. It's unique, and beautiful. The central octagonal part dates from the 9th century, while the gothic "extension" is newer. It was built as the seat of Charlemagne (and this is why the octagonal shape - it resembles an Orthodox cathedral and he was making a statement about being equal to the rulers of the eastern empire). The throne that was allegedly his, and almost certainly wasn't, is present in the upper level. But it's not really the history that interests me so much as the look of the thing, with wonderful mosaics on the ceilings and a general sense of opulance that actually - in contrast to most Catholic opulance - manages to look well-designed. I didn't bring my good camera on this trip, but here are some phonecam photos.

Exterior view showing a tall but narrow octagonal section between a larger gothic bit and a tower (which is actually part of the city hall)

Exterior view showing a tall but narrow octagonal section between a larger gothic bit and a tower (which is actually part of the city hall)

Interior, looking down at the octagon. A two-level space with marble walls and an intricate mosaic floor, seats for worshippers.

Tall choir in a gothic style. Stained glass either side, golden reliquaries on stands in the centre.

Blue and gold mosaic ceiling with a hanging lantern. Vaulting between marble-clad columns.

HOT

But aside from that, partly in search of a/c, I went to the Royal Academy summer exhibition. Mostly it was stuff that did nothing for me, but clearly thought very worthy. That’s OK, art is about personal taste. THe things I liked were generally £15000 or more, but that's also OK, as I didn't go in with the intention of buying anything - I know that buying art at the Royal Academy isn't for the likes of me.

Except, right at the end, there was a screenprint of wind turbines that spoke to me; it really captured the amount of energy in the air in a way that photos of a wind farm can’t. I bought a limited edition print for a just-about affordable amount.

The next day I met up with friend L and we went to see the musical of Benjamin Button. I was a little sceptical of this, but it won me over: An intimate show in a small theatre, and not a typical West End show. Musically it's folky, trying (and succeeding) to be anchored in Cornwall. There is no orchestra per se. The actors all play instruments - usually more than one - and switch between singing, acting, and playing, fluidly, sometimes within a line of a song. Must have been a nightmare to cast for. If I have a criticism it's that the lyrics don't have great depth, but that doesn't really matter. It's good music, it's good storytelling with impact and humour, it's nicely lit, and most of all it is really well directed - with the exception of the titular character it's an ensemble piece where the audience’s attention has to be guided slickly around the stage, and it accomplishes this with ease.
Worth a visit if this appeals to you. Act 2 is a tearjerker...

Current Mood: hot

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A brief history of the last ~year in US/Europe relations

Dustborn

Funchal, Madeira

Brains are weird.

Sex Education, Season 4

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

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