spacehawk

Kiddo's gotten to the point of being able to produce on demand various animal sounds, which is quite a fun development. (Also trains.) He's also gotten reasonably good at signing "more", which is really the most useful baby sign. So I guess we're officially in the "responding to questions in a pattern-matching way" phase.

We stayed with my folks at a place near Syracuse, it was good to see them and it was nice and chill. Don't need a lot to keep kiddo interested outside right now.

Aside from that, we've been doing some fun outings (aquarium, Garden in the Woods, zoo, apple picking, in addition to our usual library/book store rotation). He's not always super-attentive to what we're notionally there to see, but he likes running around and messing with leaves and gravel and all that jazz, and sometimes he'll be interested in flamingos for a bit or whatever.

He likes cars and watching them, and also pointing at and watching planes fly overhead (though he has not mastered the word "plane" yet). He does not like dogs barking at him, though.

I didn't want to be a staring-at-phone parent so I'm now a paperback-in-purse parent, and it's been super nice. Spending more time reading than I have since I stopped riding the bus daily, and it highlights for me how easy it is to spend time online and not notice you're not really having fun.

On that note, recent reading:

Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto: a fun sci fi heist with a uniquely Hawai'i-centric sci fi community, reminded me of some of Tobias Buckell's Caribbean-centric sci fi in that way. Definitely a fun read, but spent a lot of time on build-up and ended up feeling a bit overly straightforward/twist-light for a heist: too much things going according to a plan when we the audience has been told the plan, with an occasional side of acting like something's a big reveal when it'd been obvious from the beginning. But some fun gender stuff, some schtick-y relationships, and some fun playing-around with genre conceits, so it was an enjoyable read nevertheless. And I do like books that unapologetically let characters talk how they'd really talk without catering to a "standard" English-speaking audience.

Numbers in the Dark by Italo Calvino, a collection of less-well-known short stories. I love Calvino so I really enjoyed it, it being sorta a grab-bag aside. The earlier stuff felt thematically unified and also a bit excessively relevant, writing about facism and union dynamics in the aftermath of WWII. The later stuff was more all over the place, with some fun Bruce Holland Rogers-reminiscent surreal shortshorts and also a segment that was basically "what if Invisible Cities was actually about Cassanova talking about his lovers". Not the first Calvino to read but I'd recommend it if you already like Calvino.

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson is a book I'd picked up in college and vaguely remembered liking but wasn't sure if I wanted to keep. The short version is no, I don't. ^_^ I'm abstractly interested in the pre-isekai 80s-ish genre of novels where someone is summoned from our world to another world as a savior, distinct from Narnia-esque portal fantasy in that there's well-defined mortal magic doing the summoning, the summoned person has an explicit cheat power, and it's not such a pat coming of age thing. (Spellsinger is the other one in this category I read back in the day that comes to mind.) But anyways this particular example was not very good. It does the "we spend the first book not resolving anything so you read the sequel" thing I dislike, and just is overly repetitive and non-progress-making about it. The seductive jerk keeps almost seducing the protagonist, people keep trying to kill her and she doesn't know why, people keep interrogating her and she doesn't know who to trust. Also people make bad decisions for the sake of the plot, or whatever. And people are obnoxiously incurious about her cheat power or about helpful uses of the normal mirror magic, because I guess book one only gets to raise the stakes and no one can do helpful things until book two. Grargh.

Also played Kedamono Opera with some folks and it was really great. Not going to repost my whole Bluesky thread here, but it has a really cool deal where the cost of using powers or of failing roles is to establish "portents" of things that must happen later on in the story, for good or ill, which does some really cool stuff narratively. It also highlights how useful a good module can be for keeping a one-shot moving, which is something that I think is often overlooked in the indie ttrpg space.

Cheers!