Reading

Entry tags:

star trek,
voyager

(no subject)

god have I really not posted about Voyager in a year and a half?? we are still very slowly watching Voyager! we are almost at the end of season six! but I am NOT posting about thirty episodes in a single post so, let's see, I left off with Latent Image, let's see what I remember about the rest of Season 5.

( Voyager Season 5, Episodes 12-26 )

WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.

Entry tags:

ebooks,
sales

Today only -- Aug 1st -- big ebook sale.

As in the title. Sale ends at midnight; I assume USA Eastern time (GMT -5, I believe). Links to all the booksellers -- Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, Kobol.

This is the main link; you can filter by genre in the top menu.

Happy reading!

Entry tags:

travel

Oddly Specific Museums

Today, the internet decided to create a travel guide for Me, Personally, in the form of a mildly-viral thread about unique museums:

what is the most unique museum u have visited
for me possibly the ramen museum

[image or embed]
— darth™️ (darthbluesky) August 1, 2025 at 2:38 PM

After some thought, the most unique museum I have visited is the Tobacco and Salt Museum in Tokyo. It's unique among oddly-specific museums because it *isn't* someone's collection of Stuff that got out of hand, it's a well-curated museum run by Japan Tobacco, the company which formed when the Japan Tobbaco and Salt Public Corporation privatised. That corporation controlled the import anad manufacture of both both products in Japan until the 80s, hence it makes perfect sense to have a museum on the history of both! They also have an exhibition space: when I visted, they had an exhibition about matchboxes.

Here are some notes on other oddly specific museums I have visited. I included the Shipwreck Museum (Freemantle, Western Australia) in my Bluesky thread, but on reflection, there are a fair number of Shipwreck Museums in the world which approach maritime history through that lens. It's unique in that it's specific to Freemantle, but I gather that many maritime museums are simiarly local.

- The Phallological Museum, Rekjiavik: goes without saying. I found the bull's pizzle particularly enlightening (being familiar with the Fallstaff insult "you bull's pizzle").
- The Musée d'Eroticisme in Paris: Bad, at least as of 2011. Racist in the "insulting anthropologists" way - groups artefects from ancient Europe with items from 19th c Pacific Island cultures as "primitive". Collection of premodern Japanese art is wildly more heterosexual than, statistically, one ought to expect. The section on 19th c Paris was also way Too Straight, and dismissive of primary sources which reported lesbian relationships between sex workers/dancers/etc.
- The Schwules Musem, Berlin: has no permanent collection so every time you visit you get two exhibits on specific aspects of German queer history. When K and I visted there was an exhibition on queer experiences of disability, which was cool in many ways and which I thought did an excellent job with a quiet little corner on Nazi eugenic programs; and there was a fascinating exhibit on the East Berlin squat the "Tuntenhaus" (home to high fag drag queens and trans femmes) in the context of radical squat culture of the 80s.
- The Derwent Pencil Museum in Keswick: personally, I found this disappointing. Not enough museum too much shilling for Big Pencil.
- The Swiss Puppet Museum, Fribourg: why there is a Swiss Puppet Museum, and why it's in Fribourg, are unclear to me, but this was a fun little exhibition.
- The Nijntje (Miffy) Museum in Utrect is an absolute delight
- The Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam: a lovely 17th c house, bought up by a rich guy who has a madcap collection of cat art. There are cats roaming the rooms that you can pat.
- The Klingende Sammlung in Bern, which I like to translate as the "Noisemaking Collection". Wind and brass instruments. There's a downstairs with practical examples that they use for school groups - there weren't any the day K and I went, so the guy let us downstairs to try out Making Noises.
- Blundell's Cottage in Canberra. Every historic house is unique - this one I particularly love because I stumbled on it almost by accident, and because it's set up to exhibit / inform about working rural life in that area in the time before the creation of Canberra as a capital - and before Lake Burley-Griffin was created. There's photos in there of other farm cottages on the plain that became the lake.
- The Alpine Museum in Switzerland, which has some fun permanent exhibits - I particularly enjoyed a collection of donated objects relating to mountain sports, a collection of historic skis. When I visited they had a temporary exhibit on "Alpine trades" - heritage local trades and the schemes to encourage young people to train in them. There was an interactive bit where you could make roofing shingles. And they partner with other countries to put on exhibitions related to Mountain Stuff - I didn't see it but there was an exhibition about life in the North Korean mountains while I was living in Bern.
- The Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris. They have a bunch of his lesser-known or unfinished art - that's where I found My favourite St Sebastian. Also they have the room which, after his mother died, Gustave turned into a weird sort of memorial shrine for his dead best friend (also the model for his St Sebastian paintings).
- The Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, ceramics gallery of. This is stretching the "unique" part because for the most part this is a solid Regional City Museum - I went there because they have some of the Staffordshire Hoard on display. But the ceramics gallery is truly unique - comprehensive in its narrow focus on the history of English pottery. They have a lovely medieval travel jug/mug shaped like an owl - the owl's head removes to become a cup. They have a giant fuck-off porcelain peacock. And a LOT of English from the peak industrial period, which makes sense given Stoke was, apparently, not so much a city as five factory towns in a trenchcoat.
- Musée des Troupes de Montagne, Grenoble. Turns out, there are specialist troops for Alpine combat!
and
- The Mechanical Toy Museum in Nara, Japan. There are many toy museums, and I have been to a few of them, but this one is unique. Instead of a large collection, they have one room with tatami mats, and a small collection of Edo period mechanical toys which operate using gravity and simple kenetic mechanics. The attendants don't speak English, but they give you a brochure and let you kneel on the tatami and gently play with the toys.

And while I'm here, let me note some of ( my Oddly Specific Museum wish-list )

I'm a little short on oddly specific Australian museum goals. I did find out from that thread that the Cyril Callister Museum in Beaufort, Victoria, celebrates the creator of Vegemite and his famous product. And apparently that fuck-off porcelain peacock has a twin, kept in the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum in Warnambool (also Victoria).

There's a Printing Museum in Penrith (NSW). I don't consider that unique, there's a printing museum in every third European city - but I should totally check the local one out regardless.

Please, tell me about more oddly specific museums, anywhere in the world.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when

osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is

osprey_archer's post.

I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.

I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!

The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.

To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.

Now both

osprey_archer and

genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But,"

osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)

However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.

Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'

With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.

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(no subject)

I was sitting outside at work two weeks ago reading Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines when our regular volunteer suddenly popped up next to me. "What are you reading?!" she demanded, and I blinked at her, and she said "I can't remember the last time I smiled as much reading a book as you were right now! Please tell me the title, I have to read it!"

So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)

So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.

Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)

As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.

Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

There are some books that I can't read until I've achieved a pleasing balance of people whose taste I trust who think the book is good, and people whose taste I trust who think the book is bad. This allows me to cleanse my heart and form my own opinion in perfect neutrality.

As it happened I hit this balance for The Ministry of Time some time ago, but then I still needed to take a while longer to read it because, unfortunately, I was cursed with the knowledge that a.) it was Terror fanfiction and b.) it was on Obama's 2024 summer reading list and c.) I had chanced across the phrase "Obama says RPF is fine" on Tumblr and could not look at the front cover of Ministry of Time without bursting into laughter. And I wanted to come to this book with a clear heart! an open mind! so I waited!

.... and then all of that waiting was in fact completely fruitless, I was never going to be able to come to this book with a clear heart and an open mind, because, Terror fanfiction aside, I'm like 99% sure that it's either a direct response to Kage Baker's Company series or Kaliane Bradley is possessed by Kage Baker's ghost. Welcome back, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax! The mere fact that you're so much less annoying this time around means I'm grading on a huge curve!

Okay, so the central two figures of The Ministry of Time are our narrator -- a second-gen Cambodian-English government translator whose mother fled the Khmer Rouge, and who has gotten shuffled into a top-secret government project working with 'unusual refugees' -- and Polar Explorer Graham Gore Of The Doomed Franklin Expedition, who has been rescued from his miserable death on the ice and brought forward into the future by the aforementioned top-secret government project.

The project also includes a small handful of other time rescuees -- Graham Gore is the only actual factual historical figure, and frankly I think the book would be better if he wasn't, but that's a sidenote. Each time refugee gets a 'bridge' to live with them and help them acclimate; in Gore's case, that's our narrator. The first seventy to eighty percent of the book consists mostly of loving, detailed, funny descriptions of the narrator hanging out with the time refugees as they adapt to The Near Future, interspersed with a.) dark hints about the sinister nature of the project and the narrator's increasing isolation within it that she repeatedly apologizes to us for ignoring, b.) dark hints about the oncoming climate apocalypse, c.) reflections the narrator's relationship to her family history, and d.) intermittent bits of Terror fanfiction about Gore's Time On the Ice.

I do not think this part of the book is necessarily well-structured or paced, but I did have a great time with it. Does it feel fanfictional? Oh, yes. The infrastructure that surrounds this hypothetical government project is almost entirely nonexistent in order to conveniently allow the narrator long, uninterrupted stretches to attempt to introduce Graham Gore to various forms of pop music;

genarti described it cruelly but perhaps accurately as "Avengers tower fanfic". But I like the thematic link between time travelers and refugees, and I like the jokes, and I like the thing Bradley is doing -- the thing Kage Baker does, that I am extremely weak to -- where just when you're lulled into enjoying the humor of anachronism and the sense of humanity's universal connection you run smack into an unexpected, uncrossable cultural gap and bruise your nose.

Now, this only ever happens with Gore, because Gore is the only one of the refugees who is a real person in several ways. Margaret (the seventeenth-century lesbian) and Arthur (the gay WWI officer) are likeable gay sidekicks, and then there's a seventeenth-century asshole whose name I've forgotten. At one point Arthur tosses off a mention to his commanding officer 'Owen who wrote poetry' and I nearly threw the book across the room. Have the courage of your convictions, Kaliane Bradley! None of these coy little hints, either do the work to kidnap Wilfred Owen and Margery Kempe from history or don't! But Gore is obsessively drawn and theorized and researched, because, of course, the whole book is largely about Being Obsessed With Gore, about interrogating why the narrator, a not-quite-white-passing brown woman from an immigrant family, has built her whole life around this sexy British naval officer turned time refugee, symbolic of the crimes and failures of empire in six or seven different directions. A bit navel-gazey, perhaps, but as a person who spent five books begging Kage Baker to think at all critically about the horrible British naval officer turned time refugee she'd built, I'm just like, 'well, thank God!'

And, again, for the five people who care, I cannot emphasize enough just how similar Gore is to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax and yet miraculously how much less annoying. They both have a code of ethics formed by the loyal and genuine belief in the good work done by the British Imperial project (thematically and historically reasonable); a shocking level of natural charisma combined with various secret agent skills at weaponry, deception, strategy and theft (extremely funny, extra funny with Gore because as far as I can tell what we know about him From History is 'normal officer! popular guy!'); and -- such a specific detail to have in common! -- Big Sexy Nose That The Man In Question Is Really Self-Conscious About.

And both of them, of course, end up struggling to navigate their positionality in the Imperial machine, between government operative-with-agency and experimental-subject-with-none.

So that's the first seventy to eighty percent of the book, and then, in the last twenty to thirty percent of the book, the dark hints finally resolve into the actual plot, ( which is IMO successful in theme but completely goofy in actual detail )