AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
“—- This is all very civilized and delightful,” Mrs. Etaris burst in, rushing back at us like a dark blue sheepdog herding her flock, “but I’m afraid we really should be going inside if we don’t want our friends and neighbours to be sacrificed to the Dark Kings." [p. 345]

First in the Greenwing and Dart series: reread, to remind myself just how miserable, unwell and generally detached Jemis was when he first returned to Ragnor Bella (the dullest town in Northwest Oriole) after the debacle of his final term at Morrowlea. Original review here... 

This time around I appreciate Mrs Etaris much more (and wonder whatever became of her previous assistant, 'a quite lovely young man'). I'm also fascinated by the offhand mentions of life before the Fall. ('Whistle a few notes and anyone could call light into a dark room, mage or no, before the Empire fell' (p. 144)).

Anyway! A fish pie (and the Honourable Rag eating herring eyes); aphrodisiacs and a Decadent dinner party; the mysterious Miss 'Redshank'; Jemis as apprentice bookseller; and all manner of delicious references to life in Ragnor Bella.

I may now need to read another one...

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
He sent his life forth as the crippled tree
puts forth white flowers in April every year
upon the dying branch. He knew the way.[loc. 93]

A birthday gift from a dear friend: it comprises Le Guin's 1982 'The Art of Bunditsu' (a “tabbist” meditation on the arranging of cats, with Le Guin's sketches of her cat Lorenzo); two sets of poems, some of which brought tears to my eyes as they dealt with the deaths of beloved cats; and various cat-letters, anecdotes and blog posts. Even in these small pieces her prose is perfect and precise: I share her love of cats and her preference for treating them as individuals. Beautiful.

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. [loc. 989]

Nigerian-American Zelu, at the start of the novel, is thirty two years old, paraplegic after falling out of a tree twenty years ago, a creative writing tutor, a novelist, and single At her sister's destination wedding, the last three of these change: she loses her job, her latest litfic novel is rejected, and she hooks up with Msizi. And, sitting on the beach in tears, smoking weed, she decides to write a novel about 'a world that she’d like to play in when things got to be too much, but which didn’t exist yet'. This novel -- extracts from which are intercut with the Zelu-focussed narrative -- is called Rusted Robots: it's a story of AIs ('NoBodies') and humanoid robots ('Humes') in Nigeria after the extinction of humanity, and it is wildly successful.

Read more... )
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
The heart of culture is taking the time to do the unnecessary in the most picturesque manner possible. [p. 204]

Reread, after reading Olive and the Dragon... my original review from the 2023 Nine Worlds rabbithole is here. This is a delightful novel with mystical bees, a baking competition, and a dragon (which may or may not be the same dragon met by Jemis Greenwing's mother Olive). There is also an inheritance, an Imperial Duke, and Jemis beginning to relax.

After this I obviously needed to reread the first in the series, Stargazy Pie... especially as there is a new Greenwing and Dart novel, Bubble and Squeak, coming in the next few months! (Also, these cosy fantasy mysteries are perfect for autumn... though they always make me want to eat cake.)

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes. [p. 11]

Concluding the trilogy which began with The Atlas Six (which I liked a lot) and continued with The Atlas Paradox (which I liked less). Sadly the trend has continued. Read more... )

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
“But also,” said Barbara, “if he hadn’t disappeared.” She did not finish the sentence.
“Then what?” said Tracy.
“Then I wouldn’t have been born,” said Barbara. “That would have been better, I think.” [loc. 4153]

Told from multiple viewpoints in two timelines, this is the story of the Van Laar family and their children: Bear, who goes missing aged eight in 1961, and Barbara, who goes missing aged thirteen in 1975. Are the disappearances linked? Were the children abducted? Murdered? Did they run away? One could make a good case for the latter: the family, though extremely wealthy (they own the woods, and the neighbouring campsite from which Barbara vanishes) is riddled with secrets and dysfunction. Barbara has been 'acting up', using makeup and painting a wild mural on her bedroom wall: her mother Alice is addicted to Valium and alcohol, and still doesn't quite believe that her son Bear is dead. Peter, father to Barbara and Bear, has high standards and little time for his wife.

This is a complex thriller, with themes of misogyny, class and scapegoating. I liked female cop Judyta (who's very much belittled because of being a woman, but who is key to solving the mystery) and TJ, who runs the summer camp and is distinctly queer-coded. Louise, the counselor who first notices Barbara's absence, is a working-class girl with a rich fiance and a history of abuse. Tracy, who's 12, is befriended by Barbara and asked to keep her secrets... Each of these women, as well as Alice, and Maryanne Stoddard whose husband died of a heart attack during the search for Bear and was subsequently blamed for the boy's disappearance, has to deal with sexism, powerlessness and injustice.

It's also a very interesting comparison of parenting values: between the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as between working class and upper class families. (There's a really chilling line in Alice's narrative about 'part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic'. This resonates...)

Ultimately, while I was caught up in the story and its complex relationships, I didn't find the resolution wholly satisfactory. Barbara's conclusion just wasn't credible, even for 1975. But the ways in which blame is apportioned and withheld, the ways in which gossip and bias affect everyone in the story, were very well done: and the multitude of narrators, in two different timeframes and out of sequence, maintained their individual voices and never became confusing.

I'm still thinking of the title, The God of the Woods, which refers to Pan and thus to panic. Though there are scenes of panic, it's not a defining characteristic of the novel. But a lot of people do lose their way, mostly metaphorically: and not all of them find the right path again.

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/162: Magic Lessons — Alice Hoffman
A streak of independence and a curious mind meant trouble. In Martha’s opinion, a woman who spent her time reading was no better than a witch. [loc. 3165]

Prequel to Practical Magic (which I haven't read since the last millennium), The Rules of Magic and The Book of Magic (which I don't think I've read at all), this novel explores the roots of the curse on the Owens women.

The novel begins in Essex, England ('Essex County', hmm) in 1664. Maria is found as a baby, abandoned in the snow, with a crow keeping her company. She's taken in by spinster and wisewoman Hannah Owens, who teaches her the 'Unnamed Arts' -- herbalism, midwifery, and the importance of loving someone who will love you back. These are troubled times, though, and solitary women are suspect: Read more... )

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/161: Bliss and Blunder — Victoria Gosling
Sometimes he’ll be mopping the floor and listening to a couple of the regulars, and he knows it’s not from now. It’s from before. What’s more, time is supposed to be sequential, right? One thing happening after another. Things further back receding, more recent things feeling, well, more recent. Not for Wayne. [loc. 1637]

The Matter of Britain meets Jilly Cooper! The setting is the medieval town of Abury, in Wiltshire: the characters drink at the Green Knight, where Vern the landlord has an odd agreement -- 'anything you gain you give to me' -- with Wayne the barman. Arthur is a tech billionaire, Lance is a veteran with PTSD, Gwen is an influencer, Mo was adopted from a Bangalore roadside, Morgan is ... vengeful. 

Read more... )

Yeah, 'bout that

Oct. 15th, 2025 03:18 pm
vampwillow: minime (minime)
[personal profile] vampwillow
Hhumm.. Well I'm still around though not sure why. The ups and downs of life are mostly the latter and, quite frankly, I'm not sure the few of the former are worth it; it's all so much pointlessness. I keep going but my heart isn't in it...
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/160: Olive and the Dragon — Victoria Goddard
Olive had dreamed of the next days a hundred times, for all it was no necessary tragedy for any of them, seeing fragments play out of a hundred different choices.
No necessary tragedy, if she chose aright.[loc. 61]

A novella set well before the beginning of the 'Greenwing and Dart' series, Olive and the Dragon focuses on Jemis Greenwing's mother Olive (deceased before the series proper) and her gift of seeing possibilities and probabilities. Read more... )

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/159: They Called Us Enemy — Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, George Takei

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans (the majority US citizens) were relocated to internment camps. George Takei's family was among those affected, and this is his account of what it was like, as a small boy, to be taken away from everything he knew. At the time it was a great and often joyous adventure, but as a teenager he raged against his father for not standing up to the authorities. Only in later life did he come to understand how his parents did whatever they could to protect their three children. 

Read more... )
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/158: The Summer I Ate the Rich — Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite
...what I am doing is only leveling the playing field. I have claimed my power for myself just as these wealthy people have done time and time again. And I will not feel bad about it, even if I am bending the rules to my will. [p. 319]

Brielle Petitfour is seventeen, Haitian-American, a gifted cook who's planning to start up a supper club in order to pay the bills. Her mother Valentine is in constant pain, and her health insurance won't pay out for the medication she needs. Brielle's father is out of the picture, and isn't the father of her half-sisters in Haiti, who form a Greek chorus (they're named after the Muses) to contextualise Brielle's family history. Brielle's best friend Marcello, also a chef and helping with Brielle's supper club, is expected to go into the family business: his grandmother runs a funeral parlour, which for complicated reasons is popular with the wealthy of Miami.

Read more... )
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/157: Saltwash — Andrew Michael Hurley
English delapidation was... the blistered formica on the tables of a seafront cafe. Derelict gift shops and thrift shops with whitewashed windows. A pub with steel plates over its doors. Cracked, pebble-dashed sheters along the promenade, roosted by gulls. [loc. 168]

I've enjoyed Hurley's previous novels (The Loney, Starve Acre, Devil's Day -- I note that I read all those in the space of two months!) but found Saltwash thoroughly depressing: bleak, nihilistic and devoid of joy. The setting (the eponymous Northern seaside town in November, delapidated and down on its luck) is dispiriting, and the protagonist is dying of cancer and raddled by guilt.Read more... )

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/156: Dreamhunter Duet — Elizabeth Knox
'I was finished. I wanted time to stop, and to let me stop with it. And I wanted revenge.
I ... said to the land, 'Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.' [loc. 5131]

Rereads, after reading Kings of This World -- which is set in the same alt-Aotearoa-New Zealand, rather later than the Dreamhunter duet, which begins in 1906. My original reviews from (OMG) 2005 and 2007 are here: The Rainbow Opera and The Dream Quake.

The link points to the first of two volumes: the second has only just become available on Amazon.

Read more... )

2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee

Oct. 9th, 2025 09:28 am
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee
There are genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars soaring, levelled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of spilled dusts -- all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind. [loc. 53]

Another reread, when I was (unsuspectingly) coming down with a migraine: I last read this in the last millennium, and had forgotten much of it. It's a short novel, an SF vampire romance set on Novo Mars -- like original Mars, but pink rather than red, with rapid sunsets and mutated earth-import flora and fauna. 

The novel opens with Sabella Quey receiving an invitation to her aunt's funeral. There's an ominous bequest (her aunt was a devout Christian Revivalist, and knew about Sabella's unsavoury youth) and a gorgeous young man who tracks Sabella back to her isolated home, and does not question her about her aversion to sunlight, or the bottles of red juice ('pomegranate and tomato juice... my physician makes it up for me') in the fridge.

Read more... )

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