I am obliged to say that if you'd like to read a serialised book about trailer parks and magic that is absolutely not a romance, then step right this way, please.

I love the regionality of people's experiences. Time and place define things in such fascinating ways. Although my partner grew up in Southern California, then Wyoming, there was overlap with the curriculum of rural Oregon. We both had Oregon Trail modules (mine being at the end of the thing, theirs being along the journey), we both watched the same dire dramatic educational series¹ that included segments on hypothermia and building water collectors. But, where they also got a dire dramatic educational series on What To Do If You're Lost In The Desert, there was no forest equivalent for me.

As an adult, I realise we well should have had some sort of Basic Instruction but for most of us a forest was more or less the land somebody's parents lived on and they'd find you soon enough if they needed to. I try to be kind to people who act like the heavy dark of dense trees and the things that live between them are nothing but a setting for horror, because they probably haven't had the experience of being very small and realising that your bladder wasn't going to survive the half-mile walk from the school bus stop to your friend's house and doing your first pee outside in the shadow of thick-mossed trees.

When my fourth grade class took an overnight field trip to the still-unfinished² Oregon Trail Museum (a situation that should have been more interesting than it was), the guide cautioned our little forest valley group to stay on the trails because there were ticks and rattlesnakes. You could feel the whole class of us freeze up a moment in panic. The primary antagonist of nature we were familiar with was poison oak, not animals (unless you were a small dog, then there were coyotes).

Sure, all of us knew someone who had had a hospitalisation-level encounter with poison oak, but for half of us that was a classmate's brother who'd eaten so much that after he got well he was immune for years, somehow. Rather different from a bug we'd maybe seen in a cartoon, if we knew it existed at all.

There are ticks and rattlesnakes where I live now, though not really ticks that badly and even then we have western fence lizards keeping Lyme disease chances low. When you move somewhere new there are all sorts of things that are obvious when you have context. At the start though, context is something you haven't picked up yet, like a fresh shower liner. Eventually, you learn the ins and outs of a place, that you don't drive the first rain if you can help it, because the oil accumulates during dry weather and makes the roads slick. Or, in another place, that actually rain is no reason to put off doing anything as you won't see a break of it for months.

When I went to Wyoming for the first time I saw a frozen lake and walked on it some. Having spent my whole life in various valleys, I find flat, open plains terrifying in a cosmic way I don't care to dwell on. Walking out onto the ice found the same place of unease. Perfectly natural and normal to everybody else, look here are tire tracks on the ice, if it can hold a truck it can hold you. Which! Not actually reassuring, that one just drives out on it. The kind of thing you know intellectually but have never desired to examine close, as you freeze from the soles up because the very earth itself is so deeply cold it drinks your sip of animal warmth as though you were a straw.

The selfsame ocean I know as something wine-dark that you never turn your back on and only dip your toes in if you're brave, here is candy bright like a poisonous animal and blood warm. It's not really that much further south, in a global context, but it's enough of a difference to turn the kaleidoscope.

It's all about the context, baby. I've mentioned finding oneself stranded on an island of lost media context before and assumptions made on regionality, but lately have been turning over the stone of a thought for "you had to have been there" when you never could have been there.

In Shakespeare's Winter's Tale there's the stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear", which I think most people are on some level kind of aware of. I encountered this post that put an interesting spin on it for me.

Image description: A screencap of a Tumblr post from prokopetz that reads "I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it." End ID.

This longer reblog here gives reasons why it wasn't a bear-baiting thing (though Folger Shakespeare Library has an interesting polar bear take here), and it's not as if Shakespeare wasn't somehow the single writer ever who kept all contemporary cultural references out of his work. I'm not like, a great literary scholar, but in a way we're all of us like the Tamarians in the Next Generation episode "Darmok", our language packed with idioms and references that require context to decode.

Image description: An edit of the "Temba his arms wide" scene from the Next Generation episode Darmok to say "Exit, pursued by bear." End ID.

Anyway, I like to think of the context someone encountering “stop trying to make make [pun of fetch] happen” would need to actually get that joke, several hundred years from now. The levels. The footnotes.

I've got two series to recommend this go-round. One with a new entry landing in August and one who recently released its penultimate book. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.

• Shadow of the Leviathan by Robert Jackson Bennett was what got me reading Nero Wolfe stories (thanks to Ann Leckie explaining the relationship of Leviathan's detective and assistant in one of her newsletters). Imagine the weirdest, most particular detective ever and pair her with an guy trying his damndest as he does her footwork. Then plop them down in an eldrich, wet, meaty world of magic made more horrible by science and you've got an incredibly tasty feast of mystery.
• The Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky was recommended me by the same friend who introduced me to Jackson Bennett, and I whipped through the four (three and a half, one is a novella) books available to me in two weeks. As I began reading the first book, set in an occupied city of magic and devils, workers unions and student unrest, I kept getting a weird sense I'd read some of it before. And I had! A short story set in the same world, over on Uncanny. They're heavy books, with threads of humor, unique terrors and relatable tired characters. I really enjoyed them (as tearing through them as quickly as Libby let them into my hands might indicate) and am looking forward to the newest book landing in my holds and for the last book's eventual publication.

Unrelated images that bring me pleasure to remember taking them.

• There were, and are, many pigeons in and around LA Metro's Union Station when I was commuting daily, seeing them always added joy to the long journey.
• The coastal shot was taken in different bit of coast than where we often went, this was at Beverly Beach for the eclipse. My caption for it on Flickr calls the driftwood a windbreak, at which it did a decent job.
• The bluebird came boldly up to where we were pausing on a walk in the Botanic Garden and clearly demanded Snack(tm), which it got an acorn picked up from the ground and angrily took, clearly expecting better (people snacks).

Image description: A photo of a dark pigeon standing at a raised lightrail stop, fully in front of the boldy marked "STAY BEHIND YELLOW LINE". End ID.

Fun note, I had to go look up what something smaller than a cliff was called for the image description here, thank you Mike Gravel dot org for the explanation of "tiny cliffs."

Image description: A pile of worn and crooked driftood in the foreground, sand stretching out behind to red dirt bluff topped by clinging bushes and ocean-battered evergreens. In the far distance is a fully wooded hill partly shrouded by cloud that breaks up as it rises to a vivid blue sky. End ID.

Image description: A photo of the back of a 2000's digital camera, with a postage stamp-sized screen. On the screen is a very petulant looking western bluebird, perched on the back of a wooden bench. End ID.

Mostly, these are all lilypads of links found while hopping around the web like a little froggy.

• I love lists on Wikipedia and I stumbled onto List of individual dresses recently while link hopping around after reading a Tom and Lorenzo post about the movie Atonement, which linked to their post on the costume and bing bang bop and a new Wiki list for me. Fascinating subject.
• Speaking of finding ways to stumble onto things, Chase's daily routine now includes Wikipedia Gacha. It has "card pulls" of Wikipedia articles, which has lead to me learning fun facts about lots of unexpected things. Card collecting/battling and "drops" kind of stuff just doesn't work for my brain, but if it does for you, this apparently scratches the itch really well while also being: free and a cool way to learn stuff.
• I was super charmed by this ASCII Face Maker, which I found via this repository of (mostly free?) tools from Slanted. How I found that link is a mystery, because the tab had been open in my browser for a while.
• Now, I know I found this very good piece from communistsister on Itch: The Artist's Intent Is To Enjoy It. I was bopping around the wealth of engines and programs there are out there for making visual novels and interactive fiction and stumbled across the Manifesto Jam for 2026. I also liked The Future is Possible.

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 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.