Natterings From Nepantla

Left digit bias strikes again

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 02:06:10 GMT

Remember when I said I expected cherries to be $10 a pound at the farmers' market? Well, technically I'm wrong: the place that sells them by the pound has them at $9.99. Not using whole dollars is very unusual at the farmers' market, but in this case I guess they really, really didn't want to add that extra digit.

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Labels and linguistics

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:31:47 GMT

Index, A History of the explains how scrolls were labeled in Ancient Greece:

In order to identify a scroll without having to unroll it, a small parchment tag-- essentially a name label-- would be glued to the roll so that it stuck out, displaying the author and title of the work. It was known as a sittybos, or more commonly sillybos (whence our word syllabus, which we use to describe the contents of a course, just as a sillybos indicates the contents of a scroll).

For the Romans, the tag was an index. Which leads to this:

Meanwhile, we may quibble over whether the Latin indices or the Anglicized indexes is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: sillyboi.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 42

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:03:47 GMT

Shock newsflash: cancelled con manages to refund everyone (eventually) for once. How can I pass up the opportunity to mention an organization called Gaaays in Spaaace?

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Two conventions and a festival

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:58:43 GMT

Memorial Day weekend, I attended Bridging the Gap, a one-off fan-run online Pathfinder/Starfinder Society convention which was thrown together when Paizo announced that PaizoCon would not happen this year. By the time I was trying to sign up, a lot of the Saturday and Sunday sessions were full, so I wound up with significant chunks of time free both those days.

(Technically, I still am attending Bridging the Gap, because it had a play-by-post component and I'm in two of those games.)

So on Saturday afternoon, I went out to Waterfront Park to check out CityFair, the county-fair-like area set up there for all three weekends of the Rose Festival. It seems less ambitious than in past years-- just the rides, some food, and a few other vendors. Perhaps I'll be skipping that for a couple years.

On the way back, I stopped by one of the food cart pods in my neighborhood to try out the new barbecue cart I noticed last time I was there. The brisket was divine, the barbecue baked beans were excellent-- I haven't had barbecue baked beans in probably decades, and for that reason alone I'll be going back-- and the collards, okay, I don't know, I don't think I've ever had collards prepared in a traditional manner before. They're certainly something I think I can acquire a taste for.

Last weekend was PIGcon, the first convention run by the Portland Indie Game Squad. Like any first convention, there were a few things to make one think, yup, this is a first convention, I'm sure they'll fix that next year, and a couple things that led more to "have these people ever attended a convention before"? The main thing for the latter was the extremely random length of program items, plus no apparent time allowed for people to cycle in and out between items, meaning that big delays built up throughout the day.

But there were some good items, and some neat things to see. My favorite things were the Choosatron and the print-on-demand con T-shirt setup featuring a manual silkscreening machine. Customers would pick out a blank T-shirt of a size and color they liked, then select one of four possible designs. The only hitch was that this table was badly undermanned, but first convention and all, they'll be able to predict demand better next year.

There was not a whole lot to do, though, so again I wound up with significant free time, and I spent some of it Sunday morning wandering around downtown and checking out about two-thirds of the Bloom Tour installations, another part of the Rose Festival. Lots of pretty things, but a few that didn't work out, like the one that incorporated fruits, and probably looked fine on opening day, but the bell peppers were now visibly shrived and one of the oranges had gone moldy.

Saturday, on my way home, I decided to stop by BG's Food Cartel to pick something up for dinner, and discovered that for once I'd arrived early enough that the Hawaiian cart, which mostly does lunch, was still open, so I got their yakisoba, which is basically stir-fried saimin, and it turned out to be pretty good.

Symposium 2026 is coming up in a couple weeks, and the weekend after that, I will not be attending Between Two Cons, after realizing it's Friday-Saturday rather than Saturday-Sunday, so one day is a work day and the other is Free RPG Day. Still weird that an RPG convention would schedule itself into a conflict with Free RPG Day.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 41

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:02:20 GMT

Nuremburg Worldcon bid withdraws for understandable reasons.

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Quinoa

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:42:14 GMT

To review: I have non-IgE-mediated food allergies, which are much less deadly than what people normally think of when they think of food allergies, but are much harder to diagnose. Over the last few years, through trial and error and occasional medical advice, I think I have nailed down all of mine.

One of them is rice, which has no handy obvious similar thing to substitute for it for home cooking purposes. Quinoa was suggested to me, so I went looking for it in the nearest supermarket. The only kind they had was some fancy three-color organic quinoa.

Actually, the first thing I did was consult the Internet to find out what quinoa is, exactly. Apparently it's in the amaranth family. I know I've had no reaction to amaranth flower, so the experiment seemed safe to go ahead.

After washing, the quinoa took on the appearance and consistency of wet beach sand. Cooked, the texture was very similar to brown rice. The taste is never going to be mistaken for rice, but it does have a similar lack of flavor to rice. It also freezes well, which is a good thing because the standard recipe off the package resulted in several meals' worth of cooked quinoa.

So it does need to go with something that has a strong flavor. Pairing it with some cooked supermarket potstickers did not work very well. One of my favorites out of Fannie Farmer, though, a recipe for spiced chicken and fruit that calls for brown rice and was one of the main reasons why I was looking for a good rice substitute, worked beautifully.

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Dragaera

Sat, 30 May 2026 02:02:48 GMT

Last week and into this one, I read Lyorn and Tsalmoth, which catches me up on the main sequence of the Dragaera series.

I started in on it a few years ago, meaning to read the books in internal chronological order. Which I've mostly managed, although there are a couple books which have different sections happening at significantly different times, and Tsalmoth takes place relatively early on but was only published in 2024.

I got interested in Dragaera after coming across references to how the big threat of the series is alien creatures, and the whole setting with gods and demons and magic might actually be science fiction underneath. From that perspective, going in chronological order was not the best choice since most of the early books (in both publishing and internal order) don't touch on that at all. If that's what interests you, I'd say start with Taltos, which is a great entry point in any case, and then you can skip forward to Issola without missing much.

Reading the whole series, though, I've been able to appreciate how Brust has improved as a writer over time. It was about at Orca in particular that I stopped and thought, this is really way better than the first couple books. And so most of the books dealing with the big ongoing potentially sfnal stuff are at the better end of the series, so there's that.

I took detours into a few of the books outside the main sequence. The Paarfi of Roundwood books are definitely not for me; no matter how much Brust has improved, I feel he still isn't quite as funny as he thinks he is. Brokedown Palace, though, might be the best Dragaera book of all. It's about the Old giving way to the New, but with sympathy and understanding for those who support the Old; and there's some action and fighting (including the banishing of a god) but overall it's the story of resolving an argument between close family members.

Of the main sequence, my favorite hands down is Vallista, partly because I like stories about the structure of time and space going wrong, partly for the look at the customs of the different houses in one section, and partly for the moment when one of the chief schemers of the series suddenly realizes that their scheme may have already succeeded some time ago.

There are two more books planned in the series, Chreotha and then The Last Contract. Reportedly Brust finished the first draft of The Last Contract a year ago, so we at least will be able to find out how he intended for the story to end somehow. But I hope he's around long enough to get both of them finished.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 40

Thu, 28 May 2026 02:04:20 GMT

The annual reminders about staying healthy at big cons.

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More early Cherryh

Wed, 27 May 2026 03:47:23 GMT

I think I last checked in on this after reading Gate of Ivrel, which I thought was a pretty average planetary romance. After that:

Well of Shiuan: Now this is something special. Suddenly we're talking about deep time, insane aristocrats, and a doomed planet that cannot be saved by some last-minute feat of technological magic. It's very much more Tolkien than Burroughs. Possibly the best middle book of a trilogy I've ever read.

Fires of Azeroth: Sort of Tolkien-like again, with the qhal sort of playing the part of wood elves. A decent conclusion to the series, but badly overshadowed by the prologue, which is a parting shot from Shiuan and just served as a reminder of how good book 2 was.

Wave Without a Shore: And then into one of the more obscure corners of the Alliance-Union continuity, in fact so obscure that you can't really tell that it is part of the Alliance-Union continuity. This takes place on a planet where everyone is ranked by brainpower and the protagonist is the smartest man on the planet, competing with the other elites to impose his own version of reality on the rest of society until events intervene.

For a while this felt like it could have been an attempt to write like Ursula K. Le Guin, until about halfway through when it suddenly turns into a standard Cherryh story of a man who goes among aliens, absorbs their mindset, and becomes a mediator between societies. Le Guin would have found time to deconstruct the whole alleged meritocracy, but Cherryh's hero remains objectively ranked #1, he's just found a new use for his talents.

Also, I've commented before that human women tend to be unlucky or incompetent in Cherryh stories where there are aliens, and this is the most extreme example yet. There are three named women in this book, and two of them exist solely to draw a contrast with the protagonist's utter brilliance, and get killed off as soon as their part in the story is done.

What I should be doing at this point is checking out Exile's Gate, but when I was looking up information about the Morgaine books, I learned about a book previously unknown to me called Witchfires of Leth, and that diverted me onto a new reading project...

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 39

Thu, 21 May 2026 02:17:44 GMT

In which Ohayocon's lawsuit runs into a bad online meeting experience.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 38

Thu, 14 May 2026 02:01:02 GMT

A convention postponement gives an opportunity to explain SMERFs.

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News I can use

Wed, 13 May 2026 01:42:23 GMT

A paper in The Lancet announces that the new name for PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) is now PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome). As a person with that condition, I guess I'd better start working on training myself to use the new acronym.

I agree it's a change that's needed; even when I was diagnosed almost 20 years ago, it was known that plenty of people who met the diagnostic criteria didn't have ovarian cysts.

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Popped sorghum

Sun, 10 May 2026 15:04:53 GMT

This week's new discovery at the farmer's market was a booth selling popped sorghum as a replacement for popcorn. It sounds ridiculous, but I tried a couple samples and the look, taste, and texture are exactly like tiny popcorn.

The price per bag was reminiscent of gourmet pre-popped and flavored popcorn too, though. So I think I'll wait for the version which I can pop myself at home like I do with popcorn. Oh wait, they've got that along with instructions. Hmm, I may try that.

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Taking my own advice

Sun, 10 May 2026 01:07:58 GMT

A couple months ago, I saw an item about how COVID-19 patterns in the US have stabilized into a winter wave and a summer wave, with the summer wave being bigger*. I wrote about it in SMOF News and suggested that people planning to go to big summer cons in the US might consider getting vaccinated in the spring or early summer.

Well, I plan to go out to several potentially crowded events this summer, starting with a new local con at the end of May, so this week I tracked down a pharmacy with Novavax (the side effects I get from the mRNA boosters are too much for me) and today I got vaccinated.

The pharmacist reminded me that the (Trump-RFK) CDC has lately changed its recommendation so that people under 65 are only supposed to get COVID vaccinations if they are at high risk of severe COVID, but the definition of "at high risk" is extremely broad and I fit into it just fine.

*Yes, but why are the summer waves bigger, I hear you ask? I haven't seen any articles that explored that. Maybe it's something about cramming into air-conditioned spaces rather than heated ones, maybe it's just luck, maybe it's because so many of us are getting vaccinated in the fall but not the spring.

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A very long book by Jacek Dukaj

Sat, 09 May 2026 14:54:49 GMT

I've had books that I mean to blog about piling up for a while. I'll start with the most recent one.

Ice was originally published in Polish in 2007, and just made it into English last year. It's set in an alternate history where the Tunguska impact created a spreading zone of altered physics in Siberia. The protagonist is charged to travel into Siberia to find his missing father, who may have developed some influence on the possibly sentient phenomena that accompany it.

This is a very long book. An extremely long book. A book of such size that the sheer volume of it crushes any attempt to think about any of its other aspects. A lot of that space is taken up by political and philosophical speeches, which are interesting at first as the reader is introduced to the factions of a world in which Tsarist Russia still exists and Irkutsk is a boomtown for miners exploiting the alien ores brought in by the impact, but eventually left me sighing and wondering when another tidbit about the main plot would drop.

Politics and philosophy are relevant because it isn't just that different events have led to a different history, but that the Ice, as the altered zone is called, appears to directly retard inspiration and progress. The central question ultimately becomes whether to harness that effect, and if so, how.

But man. People go on and on. This book could have used some editing. By the time the main character made up his mind, I didn't care anymore, I was just checking to see how much more book there was to get through.

Two other long books came to mind as I was reading Ice. One was Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle, which also played with weird physics, and also contained the idea that (another effect of the weird physics in both books) history is malleable even well after the fact. The spaces between the big plot revelations in Ash, though, have a lot more action and drama.

The other one I wound up thinking of was The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This takes place in an alternate timeline where the Black Death killed nearly everyone in Europe, but scientific and political advances happen more or less on the same schedule, just in different places. It has a deliberate focus on some of the slower and less exciting stretches of that history. It is practically a novella compared to Ice, but it felt like a very long book at the time. And it's a good parallel otherwise because it's another case where I feel like the author achieved what he set out to do, only that thing was not sufficiently interesting to me to like it at that length.

I'm not sorry to have tried reading Ice; I believe in having a varied literary diet and it did have ideas that were entirely new to me. But one of it is enough to last me some time. I'm not going to be seeking out any of Dukaj's other work.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 37

Thu, 07 May 2026 02:33:16 GMT

People believe the darndest things about furries, again.

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Book meme

Wed, 06 May 2026 21:34:48 GMT

Copied from althea_valara.

This week I'm reading: Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World, one of the finds at the B&N outlet.

My favorite book of all time is: On the one hand, it's hard to pick out one book. On the other, my favorite fiction author is Stanisław Lem, and my favorite of his books is The Cyberiad, so maybe that.

My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months) is: Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World is a lot of fun so far. Of books I finished in the last 3 months, probably Ballet Shoes, a childhood favorite that I recently reread. My favorite part is still the book affirming that it's fine to decide you're actually not that interested in the performing arts and want to go off and be a geek instead.

The last book I bought was: The online order I just placed for Fate's Trick, the last of the Crossroads Adventures series that I didn't have a copy of yet. Eventually I want to blog about the whole series.

The first book I bought with my own money was: No idea, probably part of an armload of used books from Powell's.

The first book I received as a gift was: Too far back to remember. But the first one I do specifically remember was The Crust of Our Earth, for my 8th birthday, which helped cement my interest in geology.

The last book I received as a gift was: Usually we do gift cards around here, but I do recall the SO tracking down a copy of Fieldwork Fail for me from a source in Belgium.

The last book I borrowed from the library was: Too long ago to remember.

This or that:
Physical book, e-book, or audio: Physical
Used, new, or fell off the back of the internet: Used
Fiction or non-fiction: Some and some
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Park, unless the weather is terrible
Paperback or hardcover: Paperback, both cost-effective and easier to fit onto shelves
Romance or Crime: Why not both?

Yes or no:
Literary fiction? No
Sci-fi/fantasy? Yes
Poetry? Yes
Memoirs? No
Philosophy? No
Thrillers? Yes
Chronicles? Yes
Travellogues? Yes
Dialogue heavy? Not unless the dialogue is very good

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Getting out there

Tue, 05 May 2026 22:28:59 GMT

By lunchtime Wednesday I had nothing to do other than mope around the house, so I thought it might be better to go out and do something. I went over to Lloyd Center, which I've been wanting to do for a while, since it has turned into something of a geek outpost as it awaits remodeling. I checked out the Star Wars installation, learned about two new local cons from the bulletin board at Dicepool, and bought some nonfiction books on sale for $5 each at what's now the B&N outlet store. I also got a small bag of kettle corn at Carmel Corn, and discovered that the arcade museum space is closed during the week, oh well.

Sunday I went out to the zoo, another thing I've wanted to do for a while, particularly to see the baby elephant and the new cougars. One of the cougars was hiding and the other was only visible as a tail dangling from a platform high up, but the baby elephant was on full view, alternately eating and trying to figure out a stick.

I also caught the keeper talk at the alligator exhibit, which only happens on Sundays. First time I've ever seen the alligator actually moving around.

One other unusual sight: some new shade structures are being built, which means the zoo has gotten out its faux exhibit signs for the construction equipment. They have cod-Latin names (e.g. "Scoopius Treadius"), fun facts, and a diagram comparing the equipment size to an average polar bear.

Getting out in the fresh air and sun is doing me some good.

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Food science marches on

Sun, 03 May 2026 23:55:04 GMT

Two new things to me at the farmers' market:

1. Ergonomic beets. They look like tiny chonky sweet potatoes, but they're elongated beets, allegedly easier to hold and peel than the regular spherical kind. One of the youngsters manning the cashbox at that booth said the term they use is "cylindrical beets".

2. Edible strawberries in May! Used to be we didn't get strawberries at all until June, and the first varieties would be the kind which is better for pies and preserves than eating directly. But yesterday there were ripe, full flavored ones available. I was expecting an explanation that involved climate change, but no, it's not that drastic here yet, they just have a trick involving wrapping the plants in plastic to get the berries to ripen faster.

Inflation marches on, too: those delicious strawberries are $6 for a pint, so I think that'll be a one-off treat. I expect cherries to be $10 a pound or more at the market this summer.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 36

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:24:37 GMT

Another cancellation explained in detail.

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Keeping Portland at the forefront of weird

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:46:02 GMT

Tired: Drag queen story hour.
Wired: Drag queen nature hikes.

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Forgot one

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:37:46 GMT

One other show I'm watching this anime season: Nippon Sangoku: The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun. It's set in a future Japan which, for various reasons that should not be thought too hard about, has regressed to a feudal-ish society but with early 20th century technology. The first episode leaned hard into feudal-level corruption and cruelty, so despite the excellent production values I did not plan to watch any more of it, but another viewer at my favorite anime Discord server assured me that episode 2 was a lot less like that.

There are probably a lot of references to Japanese history and/or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that are going over my head, but that's okay for now.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 35

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:58:22 GMT

Problems with Filk Hall of Fame nominations. But also, a chance to point out an award with an interesting voting structure.

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Spring anime premieres

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:25:40 GMT

I want to get back into posting about the anime I'm watching, especially since I wanted to check out a bunch of things this season.

Snowball Earth looks likely to become the show I keep desperately recommending to my fellow Worldcon members until Hugo nominations close next spring. Episode 1 speedruns an entire mecha show about a teenager with a special gift and his special robot fighting off an alien invasion, until things go disastrously wrong and the protagonist finds himself back on Earth after a very sudden climate change. Worse, he was planning to make up for his social isolation and awkwardness by making a bunch of friends after the final battle, and the population of Earth seems to have dropped precipitously.

It's about 75% comedy, 20% earnest mecha action, 5% horror, and all good so far. It's also like someone saw Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet and set out to prove that the premise had a much better show hiding in it.

Rooster Fighter has a pretty thin premise (tough-guy fighter except he's an actual chicken) and yet it's so well executed that I keep deciding to watch one more episode. At some point I think I'll hit a wall and suddenly not care anymore, but today is not that day.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm has managed to conceal a very important piece of its information about its setting from its trailers, which makes for a pretty big shock in the first episode. Congrats to the marketing department, except had I known that piece of information from the beginning, I would have been more interested. Anyway, the last Arakawa Hiromu adaptation I saw felt meh (Arslan) but this is going very well so far.

Mao is the other big adaptation of a manga by a famous long-running author, and um... if you like Takahashi Rumiko's work, this is definitely another Takahashi Rumiko work. I was not gripped.

Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! season 4 inspired me to finally finish season 3, where I'd gotten bogged down in the Harvest Festival arc. Hoping the Music Festival goes better. So far, so good.

Kujima: Why Sing When You Can Warble? is about a boy who meets a migratory anthropomorphic bird-thing and invites it home to live with him. Mildly heartwarming things ensue. This was billed as a "horror comedy", and I feel like the premiere could have used more of both. OTOH, there is some delightfully demented voice acting. I'm going to give this one one more episode.

Killed Again, Mr. Detective? had an interesting-sounding premise, but it's very, very much a light novel adaptation full of light novel tropes that I'm sick of.

Witch Hat Atelier had an excellent first episode featuring the rare anime fantasy world where it all fits together, unlike the usual visual mishmash. Then episode 2 introduced a few characters I feel like I've seen in a million other school and school-like shows, and I was a lot less excited. I'll see how the rest of the season goes.

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SMOF News, volume 5, issue 34

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:40:48 GMT

Notes on a theme about admission level naming in this week's inbox.

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