taina

i've been really into building railways in my minecraft world lately. it's such a good form of transport that i haven't used terribly much, and absolutely perfect for the short-ish distances that i'm making rail connections for so far. a few hundred blocks is easy enough to do on foot, on horseback or by boat if there's coast, but after a while it just gets tedious if you have to do the same run over and over. with rails in place, i can just hop in a cart and get up to make a cup of tea and don't have to actively do anything!

so far i haven't run into resource bottlenecks, although i'm resource-constrained on iron. i collect rails from abandoned mineshafts from time to time and occasionally craft some rails myself, and so far that's been enough.

the first section of rail is fully underground, from the cellar of my starter house to the village that i keep just slightly apart from Spawn. most of the subsequently built lines have been aboveground on elevated bridges, though the stations are underground, under the built-up areas. i'm getting to the point now that i need to start thinking about a better-organised central station at Spawn, before the underground gets too crowded.

i'd actually really like to build even more railways, but i don't have that many different places in the world yet that need to be connected. although induced demand is definitely a thing, even in singleplayer minecraft: when i build a rail line to a previously-empty place, i start spending time there and building up the area near the station. it's a good time.

a review of Bloodywood's second album Nu Delhi

i was very excited for a new album from my favourite band, after a number of covers and singles and a spectacular first album! however, the second album Nu Delhi is a bit disappointing. it's not bad; it's... fine. it's all okay, good music, but nothing stands out. i feel like the debut album Rakshak had a lot more variation in moods and styles and levels of heaviness, with some very memorable flute melodies ("Jee Veerey", "Endurant") and haunting choruses ("Zanjeero Se", "Jee Veerey").
Nu Delhi sounds like they blended "Gaddaar", "Machi Bhasad" and "Chakh Le" from Rakshak and made seven variations on the theme. also, with 8 tracks and a runtime of 33 minutes, Nu Delhi a bit shorter than Rakshak's 47 minutes over 10 tracks.

there are some nice riffs (see below), but i miss Jayant Bhadula's clean vocals. i've read a review of Rakshak that called Raoul Kerr's English rap lyrics "rote posturing", which i agree with, but somehow the English rap lyrics manage to be even duller on Nu Delhi. all that said, i still enjoy the new album and i'm happily listening to it on repeat. it's just the comparison with the mind-blowing debut where everything stands out that's causing the disappointment.

( track by track thoughts: )

i love* how John Flanagan's Ranger series gets less and less subtle about how Araluen meddles in international affairs, and the eponymous rangers of Araluen are the fantasy!CIA. the interventionism is not really condemned, but not portrayed as beneficial to those at the receiving end either: the text is pretty clear on the fact that it serves the interests of Araluen's ruling family, and not necessarily anyone else.

they've previously propped up a friendly regime in a foreign country's internal power struggle. now they're supporting a weak ruler in a neighbouring country just enough that he remains in power, so that the state remains too unstable to grow into a threat to Araluen.

* i'm not being sarcastic, by the way. i genuinely think it's genuinely an interesting dynamic and it entertains me greatly.

a review of Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Toward Eternity has a lot going for it that should really be my shit: poetry; AI; AIs reading poetry; exploration of the meaning and import of language(s); of what makes humanity (especially in a world where there are sentient beings that are not (biologically) similar to H. sapiens as we know it today. But I found it just okay. It didn't really focus enough on language(s) and I felt it also forgot about poetry for a while.

It also cared deeply about capital-M Music (especially classical European music – Bach and Mozart in particular), and that is an effective trick for making me lose interest. I simply feel "an intense, burning indifference" to it as a major component in fiction. I cannot relate, I anti-relate, it's just not for me. (To be clear, I haven nothing against music, I just don't care for it in fiction.) At least one of the points of view contrasted Music with poetry (which in the rest of the book are cast as an eternal, essential part of the universe, something that transcends humanity and keeps existing even if no one is around to read or recite or remember it anymore), and considered it even more pure and sublime(?) and so on than language – and then it wasn't really brought up again.

The book was maybe also too short for what it wanted to do (or at least for what I felt it was setting up). There was not enough page time for each character, and the book ended in a kind of awkward place of not enough mystery to leave me intrigued after finishing it, yet not enough revelation to leave me satisfied either. I would also have liked the eternal essence of poetry to be supported a bit more.
(Also, the poetry featured in this book is primarily 19th century English and American poetry, which one of the viewpoints states early on was a tool of imperialist violence. And while the same character states that these poems have merit nonetheless, I do find it awkward that the only examples of eternal and universal poetry we get are from this hegemonic Anglo-American canon.)

Speaking of characters and viewpoints – the story is told through a single notebook in which a chain of roughly a dozen characters each write their own story, or part of their story, or their part of the story. The first three or so characters have somewhat distinct voices, but the later ones all sound/feel the same, and I found myself asking when and how they had the opportunity to write in the notebook, which broke my suspension of disbelief a little.

That said, Toward Eternity still manages to do a bunch of interesting stuff, and it's easy to keep turning the pages (or keep listening), and I did enjoy the musings about poetry, such as they were. It may be interesting to people who enjoyed Anjet Daanje's Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris. It's not the same, of course (nothing can be), but the structure and red thread of the respective books are similar in some ways, as well as the poetry/literature and music themes.

1.
This part of the city was not made for people. It is the output of a terrain generator with a limited set of assets – asphalt, cars, parking space, box-shaped office, box-shaped garage, chain-link fence, more cars – and set to randomise. There are no humans.

2.
Heaters blaze all night. The radio sings to no one, briefly, between the advertising. Spotless unused desks must be cleaned twice a week.

3.
Two brand-new copies of an environmentalist memoir in an oil company’s bin. They don’t do paper recycling here. You can’t make this shit up.

4.
Anything found in a bin is fair salvage. A stapler. Intact plates. Half a dozen reusable water bottles with the name Edwin printed on them. A clipboard. Books with an unprofitable message.

5.
The cleaning supply closet is the perfect dump for anything that needs storing. Cleaning equipment, supplied by the cleaning company and miscellaneous other. A hoard of face masks left over from the earlier years of the pandemic. A supernumerary office chair. A bucket of fresh flowers. A secret stash of snacks where the other office people won’t think to look.

6.
A list of birthdays taped to a monitor. A few balloons migrate from desk to desk, slightly more shriveled each time. Bunting suspended from the suspended ceiling gently rains glitter into the cracks of the keyboards below.

7.
A small office generates an astounding volume of rubbish. Cardboard boxes. Paper towels. Paper and plastic cups. Food wrappers. Takeout bags and containers. Half-eaten food. Unidentifiable plastic. Imagine how much more trash all the office people throw away at home.

8.
Spotlights illuminate featureless concrete and polymer walls. Logos sear their brands onto the night. They offer no hint as to the product or service provided by the businesses behind them. No one is around to see them. The night sky is yellow.

ink is such a powerful metaphor for writing. it's the marking medium for brush, qalam, quill, fountain pen, ballpoint... printed text too. and everyone instantly recognises "ink" to be a metonymy for writing. graphite doesn't have the same connotation, which is very unfortunate for me – i always write in pencil, have done so for the past decade, so using "ink" in my poetry doesn't feel right.

I am absolutely certain that I'm not the first to have said any of this. I don't wish to have any credit for it, I just wish to write out my thoughts. The words want to speak themselves, I think Le Guin would understand.

But what I want to say is that I am disappointed with Ursula K. Le Guin's piece "What It Was Like", a talk given at a meeting of Oregon NARAL in January 2004. I object, in particular, to its argumentation. The thesis is pro-abortion rights/pro-choice, but the argumentation follows the logic of the anti-abortionists.

Le Guin argues that, had she not (illegally) aborted her first pregnancy, she would never have had the three children she went on to have later in her life: "If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, [my three children] would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, senseless law. They would never have been born."

This sidesteps the most central issue: bodily autonomy. The right to not be pregnant, whatever the reason, reasoning, or circumstances.

More than following conservative anti-choice logic, Le Guin obeys it, but not blindly. The authoritarians cry, "Women must give birth, they have no choice in the matter! Their bodies are our property!" Le Guin hears this, has clearly considered it, and comes out to say, "No, actually we must breed better."

Breed, womb-man! Birth more spawn!

a genuine diary extract

“On peut rater deux des sept cours pratiques ce bloc. Le professeur nous a conseillé de les garder pour le cas où – « If, for example… say… a relative dies. Of course, if you die there’s no problem. »”

some of the notebooks i keep:

diary
i keep a diary in A5 notebooks with lined pages. i'm on my twenty-fourth diary right now.

Great Notebook of Lists
A4 notebook with squared paper, like the notebooks i used for mathematics in high school (in fact the first one was a leftover maths notebook). in these i keep all kinds of lists (TBRs, to do lists, ingredients, ideas...); doodles and sketches; poem drafts; other random notes. i fill up roughly one of these per year.

four-year journal
a much thicker A5 notebook with one page for each day of the year. on each page, i write a 3-5 line journal entry for the same date of four consecutive years. i started on 28 May 2021, so i have almost a year left. it was a cheap notebook and is kind of falling apart.

selection of poems
a notebook into which i copy poems (by other people) that i particularly like.

poëziealbum
notebook in which i ask friends to write down a poem (of their own or from another author), like a vriendenboekje.

Board notebook
my notebook from my year as the Treasurer of my literary student association. that means i'm mostly done with it now, but i still refer to it occasionally and recently took some notes for a proposal i'll submit at the next general assembly.

Editor in Chief's notebook
same idea as the above, but for notes regarding the association's magazine of which i'm currently one of the Editors in Chief.

i have decided that 2024 will be my Year of Le Guin, in which i read as many books by Ursula K. Le Guin as i can. i have the following list of books i own or know i can get my hands on:

Year of Le Guin tbr

• Earthsea 1-4
• The Wind's Twelve Quarters
• Les Dépossédés
• Worlds of Exile and Illusion
• Space Crone
• Always Coming Home
• Words Are My Matter
• The Word for World is Forest
• Five Ways to Forgiveness
• Earthsea 5-6

( notes on the list: )