Murderbot: I'm enjoying it. Some minor quibbles, but so far so good. Also, I made icons!



Intoabar: Got my intoabar assignment, and agh! My plan is to do (probably) the last in my SGA/Losers crossover series, and it'll be futurefic, set well after canon. Soooo, the mods gave me an SGA character who dies in season 5! But... I think I have a way around it. Good thing SGA is full of whacky plots!

Book recs:
Overgrowth by Mira Grant. Highly advanced sentient plants seed Earth (like they do with all viable planets) and their offspring/harbingers grow up exact mimics of humans, but tell everyone they're actually plants and the invasion is coming. No one believes them, of course. Then the armada arrives. Very gripping, highly engaging characters, explores issues about predatory sentients (like the plant aliens, and humans), and about found families and whether humanity en masse deserves saving. Although there was an ecological message (the plants aren't happy we've been terrible stewards of the planet), and the ending was happy in a limited way (but horrific in other ways), I felt the aliens were a bit too sweeping in their plans for the non-human parts of Earth's biosphere. And also, they weren't really alien enough for me; Tchaikovsky did that better. Very enjoyable, however, but it is horror, so CW for body-horror, explicit violence at times, and for carnivorous plant-aliens.

Death in the Spires by KJ Charles. Her first murder mystery - there's some romance as well, but it's mostly a mystery. Very well done: a nice complex plot, not too easy to guess the outcome, good pacing, and hard to put down. Set in 1905 England, focussing on a clique of gifted Oxford students (the Seven Wonders) who are haunted by the murder of one of their number at the college 10 years before. One of them, Jem, is driven to investigate, and it all gradually unravels. I liked it a lot. CW for some description of the original murder, and there's a past violation of one character but it's softened by period language and euphemisms. Also, lots of unthinking* period-appropriate slurs like 'cripple' (Jem has a club foot), and regarding the Black member of the clique.

* the author wasn't unthinking, but it's historically accurate so despite many of the characters being relatively enlightened for their times, there's some use of slurs.

3 weeks 4 Dreamwidth
My giant Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia Diversifolia) is finally starting to flower! You can probably see all the buds as well - it'll keep on flowering through autumn and into early winter. Makes a nice spot of colour in these greyer days. After it's done I'll wait for a sunny winter's day and chop it right back with my loppers. I'll strip off the leaves for the compost as they have about the same level of nutrients as artificial fertilisers. What you see here is one year of growth since I last cut it back (the power lines are safe: it's not actually menacing them).

3 weeks 4 Dreamwidth
Three things from tumblr that caught my eye, or ear.

At some point in the past, fuckingfuckersfucked made a map of Terry Pratchett's Ankh Morpork in the style of google maps. Expand it to see lots of detail - very cool!

Before System Collapse was released, elexuscal made a summary of the Murderbot Diaries works up to that point. It's not a bad resource for catching up, but not really needed for the coming tv show (might even be better not to remember the book too clearly for that!) Warning for spoilers, of course.

Dangerous bonkers fascist Laura Loomer tweeted angrily that pope Leo was a WOKE MARXIST POPE (begging to be a band name). So then schmoyoho noticed Woke Marxist Pope scans with Pink Pony Club, and then runawaymarbles wrote parody lyrics to that tune, and then camalyng recorded the song. This is what tumblr is for!