ada_hoffmann

I have spent the majority of my day in the pursuit of bureaucracy, which is obfuscating and elusive and in our supposedly frictionless digital age requires multiple rounds of phone tag, and am seriously tempted to run screaming into the afternoon. I hadn't known there was a documentary about Pete and Toshi Seeger and the Clearwater, but it's playing the Somerville in July. Recent fruits of college radio include Violet Grohl's "Bug in the Cake" (2026), the Japanese House's "Boyhood" (2023) and Noah Kahan's "Doors" (2026), which the DJ at WERS declared would make her cry all summer as she drove around Boston, unless she'd actually just been looking at the price of gas. I took a picture of myself yesterday with the late-blooming dogwood in my mother's yard.

Current Music: Nxdia, "Nothing at All"

sovay

Good Monday! I slept an hour and have to fight with both my insurance and the city parking department. Have a small number of links.

1. Thanks to the ongoing movement to eat the invasive green crab, I have discovered the existence of Maine Garum. Of course I want to order a bottle of their fish sauce; I haven't had garum in the kitchen since our last apartment. Then I want to order their crab sauce, because intense oceanic funk is most attractive to me.

2. Since I last checked in on Dermot Turing, he has produced two books of obvious interest to me: Enigma Traitors: The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War (2023) and Misread Signals: How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers (2025). The first makes me hope he has written about Leo Marks and Englandspiel, the second is right on.

3. Have a photoset of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton outside a pub in Shepperton, 1963. They are obviously in the middle of filming Becket (1964) and just as obviously are the modern AU. "He's drunk and wenched his way through London, but he's thinking all the time."

I have draft schedules for both Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. I like the looks of both of them. Wish my constitution luck.

Current Music: Joy Oladokun, "Nothing Comes Easy"

sovay

For the seventy-second yahrzeit of Alan Turing, it feels inevitable that I should find AI tools incorporated into the creation of opera and sculpture about his life. The flaw in the imitation game is not the mimicry of the machine, but the mirror test of humanity which has such difficulty recognizing itself to begin with. How much more readily the present of this future ascribes personhood to an app than acknowledges it in a rainbow. No chatbot has ever been as queer as the Manchester University Computer. His ideas on computability are still investigated and his reaction–diffusion systems turned into art and I can't remember knowing that a road had been named after him in 1994. When Alan imagined a child-machine, he included the concern that it would be made fun of at school. It was never necessary to share a taste for strawberries and cream.

Current Music: Rabbitology, "Sweet Death of Me"

sovay

I had entertained fantasies of attending Pride, especially since I can really get behind the theme of protesting since 1776, but what I actually had the energy for was imitating a pancake. Eventually I gathered enough verticality to walk around the neighborhood and make hot dogs for dinner. TCM gladdened my heart by running The Sea Wolf (1941). I have not enjoyed the news about either Marjane Satrapi or Anthony Stewart Head. In lieu of a parade, I wore the rainbow cat T-shirt my godson handed up to me.

Current Music: Houndmouth, "Tiger Blood"

sovay

For six years I did not see

ladymondegreen except through a screen, so it was especially lovely to meet them in the bright hot afternoon by Spy Pond and catch up on the respective ways we had managed not to die since last we compared notes, after which it planlessly evolved that we repaired to my parents' house and ended up cooking a suitable dinner with interludes of watering the irises and the alyssum, touring the art in the house with my father, and lying around on the couch. Late in the evening

akawil and

pecunium came by to collect their spouse and talk programming and rocks with my parents and my mother had to kick all of us out into the night before her natural nocturnal clock ticked over to the point where she woke up. We are resolved to keep not dying so that it need not be another six years before we share a view of the water.

Current Music: Levyosn, "A Bletele Vert a Bletl"

sovay

We might not have spent the sunset at Marblehead Light if we had known that all five yacht clubs within earshot would fire off a salute of cannons in accordance with the naval tradition of evening colors in season, but on either side of the sudden harbor-rolling cracks of smoke it was a postcard of a sunset in the smelted oranges and wave-mirrored blues of a painted present from, partitioned by the nineteenth-century cast-iron skeleton of the light itself.

spatch had wanted to take me to water after I had spent the previous day in the kind of pain where as soon as it eased off a little I passed out. We ate roast beef sandwiches parked at the Mystic Lakes and drove north once rush hour had died down.

( I've brought silver to set you free. )

Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard

rushthatspeaks' irresistible report on Tokuzō Tanaka's The Whale God (鯨神, 1962), a radiation of Melville I had known nothing about. Rob and I have not yet caught up on the latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026), but last week when we marathoned the previous three we were delighted to confirm that in its remix of New England horrors, Shirley Jackson had unambiguously entered the chat. Hestia, our own lighthouse, was golden-eyed in the cat tree.

Current Music: Goblin Band, "The Prickle Holly Bush"

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! I am thrilled at the notion that we may have been splatted into on Saturday by an Eta Aquariid. I will otherwise have missed all of the year's meteor showers to date.

On a forecast of long-range optimism, I am planning this summer on Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. Noir City Boston is nearer enough future to be uncertain, but this year's selection is generously defined as jazz-themed and I am really eyeing that 35 mm screening of Blues in the Night (1941) backed with Black Angel (1946).

Last week

selkie shipped me a paperback of Lee Welch's Mr Collins in Love (2025) and this afternoon

a_reasonable_man was responsible for the arrival on my doorstep of Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026), which swathe of interests makes me feel very catered for.

I had not heard of Goblin Band before discovering their exuberant version of "Clyde Water" (2026), a ballad I have loved since Kate Rusby via

selkie and Nic Jones via

nineweaving. I have since gathered with pleasure that they are trans/queer trad folk and Martin Carthy likes them.

For the first time in several days the weather heaved itself out of its autumnally raw overcast and I walked around and took a slightly disheveled seasonal picture.

Current Music: Goblin Band, "Clyde Water"

sovay

I have one social medium and I am glad it did not in fact dissolve itself into cheese holes. On the other side of this afternoon's adventures in DW, please accept some slightly disparate links.

1.

rushthatspeaks is legally divorcing and in order to cover the lawyer's fees, since he is both disabled and out of work, has set up a GoFundMe. His further details are frank and lucid. If you can donate, please do. Funds are closing in on the three-quarter mark. That sixpence of Leo Marks' never goes out of style.

2. Not only was the energy yield of yesterday's meteor, at an equivalent of 300 tons of TNT, larger than the Halifax Explosion, as a three-foot meteor it was more efficient than actual TNT. No wonder mass drivers have been outlawed by every civilized planet.

3. I do not regret the rest of The Singing Word: 168 Years of Poetry from The Atlantic (2025), but I took it home from the Used Book Superstore for Jane Hirshfield's "For the Lichens" (2011).

4. While searching for other footage of seaplanes, I found the Supermarine S.6B winning the Schneider Trophy in 1931. I almost certainly learned about the development of racing seaplanes between the wars thanks to Leslie Howard's The First of the Few (1942).

5. Just last night I heard about the West End transfer of the Old Vic's Arcadia and I screamed through my keyboard because unless it does a National Theatre-style stream, I will never hear Oliver Chris shout that he has been fucked by a dahlia.

I haven't read a hardboiled yarn with its own Yiddish glossary since Leo Rosten's Silky! A Detective Story (1979) and since neither it nor its sequel King Silky! (1981) features sheydim, Andrew Hiller's Hornytown Chutzpah (2026) has the slight advantage along with the tikkun olam. I would cheerfully follow the further adventures of its wise guy and his demons through the suburb between Hell and D.C. I read the novella this evening in a medically recommended bath.

Current Music: Impaled Peaches, "Moss"

sovay

For unknown and displeasing reasons, I am currently experiencing a problem with DW where I can't get into my own active entries. I have filed a support ticket. It really cuts down on the conversation.

[edit] And we're back. Everyone's efforts to ping me appreciated!

Current Music: Impaled Peach, "Moss"

sovay

The sonic boom heard across Massachusetts earlier this afternoon has been deemed the explosion of a bolide meteor east of Boston. Which is much more awesome than many other reasons for booms over New England and I can hope that not all the fragments fell into the sea. None of them appear to be in our back yard despite the air-concussing noise freaking out Hestia. Our neighborhood suffers so many flash-bangs to the cochlea, I mistook it for a byproduct of construction—I had earplugs in—rather than the cosmos coming home.