My seasonal world

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In my country of origin, Australia, sun protection is serious business, and testing requirements for sunscreen are very strict (in Europe, sunscreen is classed as a cosmetic product, but in Australia it's classed as a medical product) — that's why there's a massive scandal brewing as a number of Australia's most popular sunscreen brands have been found to be making false claims about the protection they offer.

One of the journalistic newsletters to which I subscribe has elected to put all their material behind a paywall for the month of September, and they lay out their reasons in a clear, compelling way here. As they point out, if no one who cares about credible, responsible, independent journalism, especially from foreign correspondents on the ground, is prepared to pay for it, the gap will be filled by nefarious entities that have the funds — authoritarian states, disinformation networks. I'm not saying this to suggest everyone should fund this specific newsletter, but I am saying that (if you have any money set aside for non-essentials), you should be paying for some form of journalism.

One of the journalistic outlets which I do fund is Byline Times, and this piece they published, by historian Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute London, is just an incredible piece of writing, weaving together personal history, contemporary politics and geopolitics, and literary analysis with searing clarity.

This essay from Rebecca Solnit is another way of describing what I've long been calling '(geo)political abuse apologism.'

Did this kid use AI to fake research about how great AI is? — basically what it says in the title.

Speaking of extractive AI, this is basically where I'm at right now.

I liked this essay on fanfic as a form of literary criticism.

I really love instances of people with niche jobs or interests who are able to communicate to interested non-experts in a way that conveys a sense of wonder and curiousity, like an invitation into a hidden world — and I'm very much enjoying boisdejasmin's posts on perfumes and all things fragrance-related.

As always, Yuletide is abruptly upon us, and as always, it feels as if it's arrived without warning (despite being the same time every year). If you're planning to participate, the schedule and other requirements can be found at the yuletide_admin comm.

It's been a pretty standard weekend by my ... standards. I met Matthias at one of the pubs in town on Friday as I returned home from the train station, where we sat out in the garden under a double rainbow, listening to live music and watching various small children and dogs of all sizes gambol about. We made it home just before the rain began again, and sat smugly in the living room, letting the working week slide away.

Saturday was the usual gym classes and market affair, but it felt satisfying and noteworthy that our lunches this weekend have consisted of homemade hummus, homemade pickles, and homemade fermented tomatoes from the garden. Everything tastes fresher and more like itself than the shop-bought equivalent. The tomato plants continue to be absurdly prolific, and every time I go out into the garden, I end up returning with a bowl filled with about thirty cherry tomatoes, which feels utterly abundant.

Faced with this glut, I made a double tomato whammy of Indian recipes last night, sailing merrily past the instruction to serve the tomato rice with dal, rather than a tomato-based curry. Both recipes were excellent, and I'd highly recommend them, either singly or together.

Thanks to everyone who recommended Thunderbolts* as a return to form when it comes to the MCU — Matthias and I picked it for last night's Saturday evening film, and found it an absolute riot from start to finish. It was nice to know that Marvel can still make solid, fun films, when they remember to crawl out from underneath a decade plus of accumulated films and mandatory joyless TV series backstory, and just focus on the magic that can happen when you throw together a bunch of mismatched characters and force them to work together. I enjoyed it immensely!

It poured with rain all of Saturday night — I went to sleep with it lashing the bedroom windows — but I woke to sun shining on wet ground, walking to the pool surrounded by the smells of greenery and rich earth. There are some yellow leaves on the ground, but it still feels more like summer for now. I had to restrain myself from picking blackberries on the way home, since they're still not quite ripe enough to eat.

Matthias and I then wandered through town for a bit, sipping iced coffee (or chai on his part) and browsing through the market, before returning home for more of the aforementioned homemade lunch. Now it's the early afternoon, and after catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to spend a bit of time communing with plants indoors and out, doing a long yoga class, and figuring out yet another tomato-based dinner.

Two books seems to be my maximum per week at the moment, and I found one to be excellent, and the other merely competent. The first book was The Pretender (Jo Harkin), a reimagining of the story of Lambert Simnel, a Yorkist pretender to the throne during the time of Henry VII. (The Wars of the Roses produced a lot of random pretenders at various stages). In tone and writing style it reminded me a lot of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy: lyrical, and in the present tense (the latter of which I usually only tolerate if the writing is really beautiful, which this is, in my opinion), although unlike Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, who knows and understands much more than those around him, Harkin's protagonist is a child, and a rather naive one at that, so hers is a story of the journey from ignorance to rueful understanding of the political machinations of the world. I remembered the broad contours of Simnel's story (like most royal pretenders, he does not have much luck), but she's fleshed it out in a way which feels plausible and perceptive. What I found truly impressive about the book, however, is the way Harkin uses medieval and early modern literature — the various classics of the day, with which Simnel was being tutored by those using him in order to mould him into a plausibly believable Yorkist heir — to shape the story. This is not just in terms of allusions (when her protagonist hits his lowest point, he's reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, for example), but even in the way the character moves through the narrative, so that there are points that feel more like a sort of mirror for princes, whereas other times where the story shifts to a courtly romance, and towards the end it reads more like a Renaissance revenge tragedy. It's a really remarkable feat of literary craft, and was a lot of fun to try to spot and anticipate these things.

The second book, Morgan Is My Name (Sophie Keetch) is the start of a new Arthurian fantasy trilogy, told from — as you can probably tell from the title — the perspective of Morgan Le Fay. There's nothing really wrong with Keetch's book, as she trots her readers through the familiar passages of the tale, and it's always interesting to see which bits of Arthuriana get slotted in where, and which bits get set aside (and speculate as to why), but I can't help but feel that an Arthurian retelling from the perspective of a female character needs to do more than just reiterate that patriarchal honour cultures are dangerous and awful for women, and that changing the point-of-view character from a familiar cycle of tales changes the perspective on events from within that cycle. (Maybe this would feel more groundbreaking to people who didn't read Marion Zimmer Bradley and a bunch of her imitators during their teenage years?) Keetch makes much of the Welsh origins of much of the Arthurian story in her afterward, but there doesn't seem to be much use of any of the Welsh tales I can remember — it's the usual mishmash of medieval and early modern sources, and the usual ahistorical mush of immediate post-Roman Britain politics, much later medieval cultural conventions, and fantasy elements. Her Morgan is ... fine as a point-of-view character, albeit very much lacking in any flaws beyond perhaps being too impulsive and quick to react emotionally in situations where it would probably serve her better to pause and come up with a clever plan. I'll probably stick with the trilogy, but it's definitely not among the more impressive Arthurian retellings, in my opinion.

I hope everyone has been having lovely weekends, and possibly better luck when it comes to the evenness in quality of their reading material.