Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes

Is there a racism 101 community on DW? I've just worked out that the community I thought I was following is in fact 'racism_101_feed' (or similar), and has no posts at all.

I was going to post the following two links there, because I found them useful reading. You mob get to read them instead.

4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Hijacking the Conversation on Racial Justice

103 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice - I'm partway through this one; my perception is written by a white American.

I have a huge backlog of online stories to read, from various recommendations. I've made it through just a few recently! Several of these are from Bourbon Penn which is a 'weird literary journal', and thus outside my usual comfort zone. I've subscribed to them on Patreon, because I did love a couple of the stories, which means that I now have several back issues to read through, so probably won't be adding any more here.

Rated 5

• The Ones Who Look - Katharine Duckett - commercialised heaven, ethics, and some other interesting ideas.
• The Necessary Arthur - Garth Nix - very Diana Wynne Jones whimsy.
• Given Sufficient Desperation - Bogi Takács - audio and text versions. This is a post-alien-invasion apocalypse story, originally from the anthology Defying Doomsday
• How to host a haunted house murder mystery party - A.C. Wise - horror-ish exploration of murder mystery tropes

Rated 4

• Benjamin 2073 - Rjurik Davidson - 'lone' scientist trying to resurrect the thylacine.
• The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex - Tamsyn Muir - set in the same world as Gideon the Ninth, recommended if you enjoyed that, may not make any sense if you haven’t read it. Pre-series short about the Sixth House.
• The Front - Daniel Ausema - not entirely sure about this one. Atmospheric, fabulous language, all story and no plot, set in an unspecified war with an unreliable narrator.
• The worst breed of vultures - Walter Dinjos - humans being awful to humans, plague. Not a pleasant story, but captivating.

Rated 3 or lower

• Of Roses and Kings - Melissa Marr - transformative work, Alice in Wonderland, dark, nasty. Clever, but tedious
• Yellow and the Perception of Reality - Maureen McHugh - I’m beginning to think that McHugh’s work is not for me. This is a clever, thoughtful, very science based story that is also very personal, so it should have been exactly my thing, and somehow it wasn’t.
• Boxing the Breakable - Charles Wilkinson - meh. Kind of supernatural, kind of bland. Intuition - Holly Day - humans being horrible to humans type horror. Needs content warnings, but I can't articulate what they should be.
• Cricket Swing - H. Pueyo - I didn't get this one at all.

DNF

• Anything Resembling Love - S. Qiouyi Lu - Content warning for fictional depictions of sexual assault, which was just a tad too real.
• Flight - Claire Wrenwood - content warning for some kind of violence against the main character, possibly sexual or domestic, but I didn't get far enough through the story to find out.
• The road knows when a journey is over - George Sandison - post-apocalyptic introspection is not my thing.

• Books in is now at 14, of which 1 has been read. This is because there was another one I'd missed putting in to the spreadsheet. I think that technically, it should be at 17, but three of the op-shop books have not yet made it in to the house, and are instead roaming around the back of the car
• total read this year: 11, plus 5 on my 'have been started/progressed list
• Despite having had the aircon on in the bedroom earlier today, and the everything that can be and still keep the mosquitoes out now being open, the Lindt ball that I just botted from artisanat, which had been on their bedside table, was much more liquid than solid.
• I remembered to parkrun today, and managed a PB, despite it being appallingly hot at 8am. I took cold water in an insulated bottle, and that helped.
• haircut! There was an hour and a half wait for Just Cuts, so we solved 'mouse needs running shorts' and 'artisanat and Youngest need running shoes'. Also, 'mouse is more cheerful after coffee', and 'argh, why don't we have vegetables?'.
• went and refilled all of my daily meds prescriptions. Youngest was a bit bemused by how many there are. I don't think it had really registered with them how much management of health I do as a baseline.
• Tomorrow is rumoured to be cooler. I could really do with that. Am taking Youngest on driving practice to ?Hamersley, which I'm informed is 'about half an hour up the freeway'. Youngest is pretty confident on non-rush-hour freeway driving, even if Main Roads does keep changing the dratted lanes around. (Youngest is also very good on roadworks, and roundabouts. We have not yet got parking sorted. Night driving is for the last 5 hours of the log book, where we already know what will be done, because it will be the same two hair-raising trips we did for Middlest).
• Project 'books on shelves' is progressing. I've had to rearrange some books, but at least I think I can now get all books on shelves? There is still need for revisiting, but I'm thinking about this carefully. Probably, my magazines will go sideways on the shallow/display shelf that I've set up. Still thinking about this one!