It's February, which means I'm doing Flash Fiction February again. Since I'm queueing this up in the past I don't know if I'm sharing the stories widely or not, but first lines are collected over here on my tumblr.

I mended the cuffs on my coat in late autumn. After some nine years they were ragged from regular wear. I'd fixed up the pockets the year before, but one thing or another kept me from finishing the touch-up job until recently. I sewed it in November 2016 to give me something grounding to do while waiting for bad news. It's had the same pins on it for as long. I've only had one coat for longer, but this one I made with my hands

Image description: A hand tucked into a pocket of a coat, the sleeve and the body of the coat are a faded denim, but the cuff and the binding on the pocket are a darker, fresher looking denim. Bright, floral embroidery decorates the transition of old to new fabric. End ID.

It's wild how we can mark time by different things. What apartment we lived in, what car we drove, which restaurants were where (and how much we miss them, and if we can remember the dishes). How tall a tree was, oh that was the summer they topped it, but now years later it's the same height again anyway. You were doing this with your hair, my name was different, their kids were in diapers, that was before the cats. I mean, we have calendars and all that but it often feels like in the day-to-day they're used as much as maps are. I could tell you to take a right on this street and a left on that, or offer up a right at the baseball field and a left at the house with a mammoth cactus--but one of those will stick a bit better (user experience varies, though once you see the cactus, you will not forget it).

Anyway wow, I started this two years ago. It's all been part of getting back into habits long lost, like blogging (which I am now doing weekly!) The joke in my bio is that I've "been shouting into the welcoming void of the internet for a long time now" but for a while there I wasn't. Life and that curation-focused microblogging (ex: Tumblr and Bluesky) got in the way. You get out of a habit of like, writing 1.3k word blogposts with over a dozen citations. The world around commenting changes, as does how you approach it.

Which is fine, wouldn't it be terrible if nothing ever changed!

I began writing this at the end of December, which is when I do half of my planner and year planning. So the concept of change and intention is very on my mind. You know what hasn't changed--I'm still playing Fallout: New Vegas, using it as a carrot to projects. Anyway it's February now so maybe you're already over the concept of shaping how you want to approach the year.

A friend of mine often uses the phrase "arbitrary date marker is arbitrary" and they're incredibly correct. As someone who has both a far too strong an awareness of time and no sense of it whatsoever, I particularly enjoy the saying. I'm thankful for things like the start of the year, the start of the month, the start of the week, a new day. The first modern clown, Joseph Grimaldi, coined the phrase "Here we are again!"¹ And it's such a drama masks of a phrase--wait I just learned that there are drama mask emojis, which I knew I think but I don't find much use for them in the day-to-day, anyway back to it--there's the tragedy of "same shit/different day" and "nothing changes," but also the comedy of "back in the saddle!" and "try, try again."²

(Of course I made this edit of the " Ah Shit, Here We Go Again" meme edited to say "Ah shit, here we are again," with CJ in clown motley)

Sometimes, yeah, you're a fool (derogatory) for thinking something or someone will change. But sometimes it also can take a fool (complimentary) to keep trying. I think a little of it is thinking you can force a change in others, we're really only masters of a thin bubble of self and often nebulous ones at that. But each new day, new month, new year (heck, new hour, new minute) is a chance to try once more. As we change ourselves we change things around us, bit by bit, and those changes ripple out. Sure, the concept that we get a fresh set of cells every seven years isn't quite on, but luckily we're more parts than just the meat we move around in. Emotional Ship of Theseus. Is that anything?

It probably isn't. But I bet if you replace enough pieces of it, the joke will hold water.

Stories about stories! Oooh, nothing is bigger bait to me. How does one story shape another, or how does the story change by the teller? Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.

• I recently read two books by two authors who write mostly YA and Middle grade, doing adult books for the first time. One worked and one didn't. The one that worked (for me, anyway) was The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, who you may know from the Sideways Stories From Wayside School books (which I re-read a couple of years ago). Often, things pop up in my library holds and I can't remember why I put them ther, plus I am not good at remembering names, so as I was paging through the front matter I did a full double-take and had to go back to the "other works by this author" section after my eye caught "Wayside." Funny thing is I think that wasn't even why I put the book on hold, it remains a mystery. Anyway, king of the sidebar infodump, Sachar's cheeky voice propels this romp through the early modern era via a self-aware magician story that is loaded with lots of fun facts, delightful characters and just the right amount of darkness.
• Speaking of stories as form, The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri is nothing but delicious ingredients (archives, libraries, tale forms, romance) that wrap fairytale categorisation, colonialism, and the argument of what libraries and archives are for into one magical book. The official blurb includes the phrase "heart-shattering romantasy of sapphic longing" and there is that also.

Just some vibes for photos this month.

Image description: A photograph taken through a window, the edge of a thin white curtain pushed aside on the left. The view is a strip of pavement and a strip of mown grass, bordered by the tall wild sea grasses. Beyond that is sand and then the cold yellow mirror of the ocean, under the low setting of the sun. End ID.

Image description: A photograph of the snow, a few frost-tipped branches or bits of grass poking up in the lower left corner. Most of the snow is sunk in and illuminated by a small landscaping spotlight, which glows up brightly through the snow like a magical item. End ID.

Image description: A photograph of a dark road at twilight, the dense trees lining it in silhouette against a clear pale blue sky. Thick clouds loom at the lower horizon, with one small puff, softly rose-lit, floating above them. End ID.

Links about comparisons, kinda, and thinking about why a thing is like why it is.

• A side-by-side of Frankenstein 1818 and 1831 over at UPenn. The 1818 was the first edition, done as a "triple-decker" (three volumes), then there was the 1823 two-volume edition (which credited Mary Shelley as the author), and then the "popular" edition of 1831 arrived in a single volume. I haven't had a chance to tour through this yet but I'm looking forward to spotting the changes.
• Smell is so weird. I have two posts with you and one is a "hear me out" kind of situation. First is What Does Oak Smell Like? over at Chainsaw Nerds, which is a wildly specific site. It's a nice brief overview of the smells of oak and why it smells like that. Okay now, over on Tumblr, fragranticareviewers collects the wildest reviews on the perfume review site Fragrantica. The reviews (and scents) are often buckwild but many share the same notes: "this smells like pee." Wondering why, fragranticareviewers wrote up a blogpost about it. The tl;dr is that smells are composed of a lot of individual chemicals and our bodies smell those chemicals at different levels person-to-person so when a perfume's component parts include those that overlap with pee, sometimes that is all we can smell. Legitimately fascinating.
• I could have sworn I'd shared the Company Logo Gallery at VGDensetsu already, but it appears I have not! The logos have the names of who designed them and it's fun to see a logo and go, "of course it's from Roger Dean." The gallery is just one part of a greater database whose purpose is to "to identify the people behind all the visual elements related to video games." Just a very cool thing.

If you're wondering how to help out Minnesota as they are beseiged by ICE, Stand With Minnesota is a hub of information and places that could use help.

If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like Ele Elna Elak, an initiative that gets families what they need, like drinking water, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.