Sanguinity

Zanthor, Fallen on Hard Times

2020-05-11T06:17:05Z

leboyfriend was a talented singer and voice actor. evannichols put together this clip, originally recorded in 2008, of leboyfriend playing a Sumerian god for the Ask Dr Eldritch podcast.

I remember the night we recorded that; there was a lot of goofing around and laughter. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

sanguinity @ 2020-05-08T07:11:00

2020-05-08T14:17:33Z

leboyfriend died in his sleep around 2am Friday morning, UK time.

Icon because he took the photo. For about a decade, for nearly all the photos of us, he was the one behind the camera -- no one else was able to get shots so relaxed and happy for either of us.

Fuck. He was always absolutely confident he would live to ninety-six (a fortune-teller told him? I don't remember the details, but he joked about it regularly), and this is twenty years too early, damnit. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

sanguinity @ 2020-05-07T11:59:00

2020-05-07T19:16:00Z

I thought I should say something here for the people who knew him through our journals and might not follow him on Facebook: apparently leboyfriend is dying of COVID19 right now.

We've only been in touch sporadically the last handful of years, but we've known him since I was twenty-six, and for fifteen years or so he was a major part of our lives. I've been cycling between okay and not-okay (as one does), while we wait for further news. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Today's Lunchtime Wordcount: Zero

2020-04-20T20:12:08Z

Kitty doing what she does best: exactly what she wants.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

I've been calling her Boney all morning. She answers to it as well as anything.

2020-04-15T14:35:54Z

Yesterday, @tgarnsl floated the idea that our kitty is actually Napoleon Bonaparte.

Proposition: Kitty is Napoleon

Evidence:

does what she wants
starts fights
doesn’t listen when she’s told it’s time to stop fighting
still wrangles treats out of people
would probably escape captivity to stir up trouble
needs attention

@grrlpup added this further evidence:

short!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Quaranmeme

2020-04-12T15:09:22Z

gakked from sara

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Nope. The paperwork for it was in process (I’d been voluntold on the basis of the union rules, seeing that I’m junior on my team), but then someone else volunteered to take it.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine started?

I had a week of stress-drinking at the beginning, with occasional spikes of it thereafter. Altogether, combined with the run of March holidays, it’s amounted to a four-fold or greater increase over my usual intake. A lot of people wouldn’t blink at the sum total — it’s still only one drink every two or three days — but there are a lot of alcoholics in my family, many of them dead of it, and I’m as jumpy as fuck about having “I can’t cope with this, I want a drink” feelings. Which I’ve absolutely been having, and which have sometimes culminated in my having a drink.

(FYI, I don’t want advice on this topic: that’s what my therapist is for.)

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

No kids.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this?

None, I’m still working full time. I’ve got a couple more hours in my day now, what with not having a commute, but not nearly so many as before I started this job, so I’m not even up to before-I-went-back-to-work levels of hobbies.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

I’ve done none; grrlpup has done two. She’s aiming for once every two weeks right now, maybe three if the produce holds out.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

Rebuilding our emergency fund — we went into debt last summer over the sewer job, remember. Since I started this job, we’ve managed to pay off the debt, but we still don’t have the cash cushion we like to keep.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

Birthdays, mostly. We’ll still celebrate, just at home.

8. Are you keeping your housework done? Ish?

More so than usual, because we’re here to do it and here to look at it if we don’t.

9. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

The Fate of the Furious, last weekend. It was fun, but not my favorite of the series. I really liked… *consults wikipedia* Fast & Furious 6, partly for Gal Gadot, and partly because the Letty plotline hit hard one of my bombproof kinks.

10. What are you streaming with?

*cough* Not so much streaming, no.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

Hahahahano.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

We’re eating much like we did before, except I’ve gone back to spam+rice+wakame for breakfast, now that I have time to fire up a frying pan. Other things I have time and access for again: marmalade tea and apples with peanut butter, both of which were difficult to swing at the office.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

I express myself with anxiety, not paranoia. And yes, the anxiety is intermittently back at pre-medication levels. Happily, I have a therapist for that.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

*knocks wood and refuses to answer the question*

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

It ends whenever it fucking it ends. In the meanwhile, it’ll get however bad it’s going to get, and we’ll cope the best we can.

But more concretely:

OHA is saying that before they start relaxing shelter-in-place orders, they want 1) Oregon deaths to be decreasing for at least two weeks, 2) the capacity to do 15,000 mostly-rapid tests a week (we’re currently at 10K/week, and mostly-slow), and 3) the ability to do widespread immunity testing. So, eh, maybe June before they start dialling restrictions back? And even then it’s going to be baby steps, not all-at-once. This isn’t going to end-end for another year or two: vaccine or herd immunity, whichever comes first.

16. First thing you’re gonna do when you get off quarantine?

Ask if I can pet a random stranger’s dog. Pet the cats who greet us on our walks. Put things on hold at the library. Hug my friends. Hopefully visit my mom and dad. Go out for birthday oyster shooters, assuming that there’s still anywhere to get them. All in whichever order the lifting of restrictions allow — the restrictions almost certainly won’t be lifted all at once.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

Exactly where I am, thank you.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Walking the canyon trail down to the college commons for a lazy weekend morning writing date, with a stop by the library on our way back home. And I’m pre-emptively missing Wednesday afternoons at the river: I’d been planning on taking some vacation time this summer to align with grrlpup’s half days.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

Never had any hand sanitizer, and we’re good for toilet paper.

ETA: grrlpup says we have a personal-size bottle of hand sanitizer down in the camping equipment. Obviously we haven't been using it, opting for hand-washing instead. (Our hand-washing song of choice is the first verse and chorus of Barrett's Privateers: if you begin in 1778, twenty seconds later you're a broken man on the Halifax pier. grrlpup, being a Colorado girl, sings it with a John Denver twang. I made the mistake of letting her know I think that's hilarious, and she's been trying to scrub the song of the twang ever since, so sad!)

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

Yes, although we’d be jonesing for fresh food by the end of it. But we have Tang powder, so I don’t imagine we’ll get scurvy.

Additional questions, courtesy of china_shop:

1a. Are you in a vulnerable category?

No.

19a. Have you run out of anything else?

Eh, anxiety brain likes to yell about how we're nearly out of every blessed random thing that comes to its attention, but the truth is, no, we're not out of anything yet, nor are we in particular danger of running out of anything. (Cross-stitch fabric! it screeches at me, when I have done EXACTLY ONE cross-stitch project in my life, AND I still have scraps from that last project that I could use if I wanted, AND I have enough fiber-crafts supplies in this house to choke a whale if I tried.)

21. Has anything major happened in your life during the rāhui/lockdown?

Nothing, blessedly. If we could just keep having a nice quiet lockdown, that would be swell. *knocks wood*

22. What are you grateful for?

Having employment, and not just for the obvious reasons. If you asked me a month ago if my job would ever be one of the best things about my day, I would have laughed in your face. But during the workday I'm thinking about utterly mundane work things, and anxiety brain doesn't have the idle bandwidth to twiddle at me about crap, it's great.

I'm also grateful to be spending this time with my favourite person, and that none of our parents are in care homes.

23. Is there anything you'll miss about lockdown life?

Not having a commute. Being able to wander into the next room whenever work is stupid or boring, and drop a kiss on the top of grrlpup's head. Working in my jammies with my cat sprawled across my chest (even if I do spend a good deal of time begging her to be less pointy)... Basically, working from home is great, and I am not looking forward to going back to the office again. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

sanguinity @ 2020-04-08T10:22:00

2020-04-08T17:22:22Z

Sunday afternoon grrlpup wanted to take the car for a short spin, just to make sure it would start...

Narrator: It did not start.

It's a Prius with a push-button start, not a proper ignition, and pushing the button is mostly just booting-up the computer (rather than anything so crude as starting a physical engine). But the dash-display lights didn't come on, and something in the engine compartment started whining weakly like a deflating balloon. Nothing we did could get it to stop making the deflating-noise, either. Well, fuck. Upside: it's not like we needed to go anywhere anytime soon. We called our next-door-neighbor who's a mechanic, and when he didn't pick up, we called AAA.

I have never seen AAA come so quickly -- I'm guessing there were no other jobs in the queue, and our mechanic was delayed by nothing but travel time. He gave us a jump, he had a look at the battery (original to the car, so maybe getting on toward time to replace it, maybe not), quoted us a fee to replace it (we choked from sticker shock, but I guess everything in this car is going to give us sticker shock), and went on his way.

Whereupon we went for a spin on the interstates in the name of bringing the battery back up to charge.

I have never seen the freeways so empty in this town, excepting at three in the morning, maybe. The over-roadway reader boards that give time-to-arrive estimates all said "STAY HOME, SAVE LIVES" (which is the name of our local stay-at-home order), and the downtown skyscrapers were eerily dark. Lots of storefronts were dark, too -- I never realized I'd never seen the bar on the corner dark at night, until I drove by and it was.

Anyway, we did the big interstate loop instead of the little interstate loop, because we needed the engine to run a certain number of minutes and we were making that good of time on the freeways.

Then we stopped off at the Burgerville drive-through for dinner -- there was a line there, to our surprise, but I guess all takeaway traffic, such as it is, is going through the drive-through right now -- and then we came home. I'm glad I got to see what the city looked like during the shut-down, I guess, but boy, creepy.

So that's our PSA for the week: if you have a car and haven't fired its ignition lately, you might want to do that. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

sanguinity @ 2020-04-03T21:42:00

2020-04-04T04:45:52Z

Hah! I found my seam ripper!

Actually, we think it's grrlpup's seam ripper? But it saves us from having to ask the 10yo boy next door if we can borrow his, so I don't care.

(The 10yo next door would be thrilled to loan me his, I'm sure.) This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

[fic] The Taste of Truth

2020-04-02T04:09:27Z

@acdholmesfest revealed today! Way back in January, @capt_facepalm saw that reveals were scheduled for April Fools, and so asked permission to be assigned to herself, as a prank on all the guessers. She succeeded.

My own contribution:

The Taste of Truth, for @colebaltblue
ACD Sherlock Holmes x The Lie Tree (Frances Hardinge)
Holmes/Watson, past Mary Morstan/John Watson
Reichenbach, Magical Realism, Lie Tree AU, Angst with a Happy Ending
25,500 words

Two and a half years after Reichenbach, John Watson discovers the magical tree that caused Holmes to fake his death.

Back in August of 2017, @colorwheel recommended Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree to me, saying that it reminded her of me. My vanity being what it is, I immediately procured a copy from the library and began reading. Partway in, I wrote to @colorwheel:

I really wish the pov was more sympathetic to Myrtle (the mother).
I really wish the Myrtle-Faith dynamic didn't feel like it was put in just so that the reader, via identifying with Faith, could claim to not be like other (girly) girls.
Oo, snake!
Oo, fossils!
goddamn, but Victorian sexism is a fucking drag.
Oo, boats!
goddamn, but Victorian mourning is a fucking drag.
...and now we've gotten to the secret journals about the mendacity tree and I'm writing Sherlock Holmes fic in my head as we go FIE ON YOU COLORWHEEL FIE

The Sherlock Holmes fic in my head went like this: "What if Holmes faked his death because he needed a REALLY BIG WHOPPER to tell the Tree?? And what if Watson found out by stumbling across Holmes' secret journals about the Tree?? Hoo boy, Watson would be MAAAAAD!"

In the end, I wasn't sure I really liked the book, but I did like my idea for a Holmes fic based on it, to the point that I never quite returned the book to the library. A half-dozen times since then, I've run across the book on my shelves, been reminded of the fic premise, considered writing the story, dismissed it as too much work, but was unable to dismiss it completely… And so the book remained on my shelves for two and a half years, just in case I should ever decide to get my act together and write that story after all.

Meanwhile, life went on, I got a new job, and the new job torpedoed my ability to find writing time. I spent a month tearing my hair out in frustration, but finally managed to figure out that I could get some writing done on my morning bus, if I brought a spiral notebook with me and wrote longhand. I felt just optimistic enough about morning-bus-longhand that I signed up for @acdholmesfest (they don't run every year! I would have been very sad to miss this one!) I told myself that I'd do something SHORT. SHORT and also EASY. Because whatever it was, I'd have to write it longhand on my morning bus -- there simply wouldn't be time for anything that wasn't short and easy!

Assignments came out, @grrlpup asked me what I was thinking of doing, and I shrugged and admitted I had no ideas. (I almost never do for ACD Holmes, for some reason.) Except maybe that one idea based on Hardinge's The Lie Tree, the one wherein Sherlock Holmes fakes his death because he needs a whopping big lie for the Tree. Her eyes lit up, absolutely electrified by the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't sound like a short idea. I sucked my teeth. "Eh, maybe I could pull it off in 8K if I'm strict with myself? I'll start brainstorming on the bus tomorrow and see how it goes."

Mind you, in all this time, the fic-in-my-head had never developed beyond "What if Holmes faked his death for the Tree, and Watson found out? Oo, Watson would be SUPER MAD!" I started brainstorming proper details on the bus next morning, and pulled together enough to start writing the morning after that. The central question, though -- "What does Holmes want to know so bad that he fakes his death for it??" -- was still a big question mark. But I had six weeks; I'd figure something out.

Two weeks later, after religiously writing daily during my morning commute and over my lunch hour, the writing week bookended by marathon transcription sessions on the weekends, I had 8K. I was maybe a third of the way through the story, as best as I could tell? (Shit, fuck, shit, shit.) And I still had no idea what Holmes wanted to know so bad that it was worth faking his death for. (Fuuuuuuuck.)

I grabbed @grrlpup, made her go on a long walk-and-talk story-doctoring session with me, and we eventually came up with a handwavy sketch: something-or-other had happened to Holmes' father when he was young, and Holmes had never been able to solve it. What happened to Holmes' father? No idea, but it was enough that I could begin foreshadowing it.

I continued to write feverishly, morning commute and lunch. I wrote a pen dry. I filled a notebook. I wrote another pen dry. I spent eight hours every Saturday doing transcription and first-pass editing. I was maybe at the half-way mark. If I could keep this pace up, I could probably hit 24K before it was due? Please, please, please let it be no longer than 24K.

Unfortunately, I still didn't know what Holmes' backstory was. And the farther I got, the clearer it became that I wouldn't be able to hand-wave it, either: at some point Holmes would have to tell his backstory for the reader. I kept hoping the backstory would come to me, but it didn't.

Two weeks out from the deadline, I was getting within pistol shot of the story's end, and I'd written just about everything it was possible to write without knowing that fucking backstory. Unfortunately, I had no time to spare for thinking it over: I had to keep writing at the pace I'd been holding if I was going to finish this in time. In desperation, I grabbed @tgarnsl and demanded that she brainstorm something with me. I had a vague idea that the grandfather had done something shameful overseas a la Victor Trevor's dad, and the grandfather's actions had somehow rebounded on his son, resulting in Holmes' father disappearing under a shadow -- but that's all I had. @tgarnsl and I sat down and started working out timelines, and figured out that if whatever-it-was happened before Holmes's father was born, then it almost certainly happened during the Napoleonic Wars. @tgarnsl came up with the idea of loosely basing it all on Martin Guerre's story, and we spent the rest of the morning trying to brainstorm the details. We initially tried to put Holmes' grandfather in the army, but I know jack shit about the Pennisular War: Wellington thrashed Bonaparte (or so the Gilbert and Sullivan song goes), and Wellington was Hornblower's brother-in-law (or so the Hornblower novels go). @tgarnsl wisely suggested we fall back to what we both know: Nelson's Navy. I kinda hated doing that -- I thought it would make me far too easy to guess -- but I was out of time. Over a morning we slammed together a timeline for Sherrinford Holmes and his double, outlining when the switch happened and how, and at lunchtime I took my notebook to the downstairs cafeteria where no one knew me (and thus no one could interrupt me), and I started writing the big reveal of Holmes' backstory.

I finished my first draft five days before the deadline, woo-hoo! And it was in fact 24K words, just as I predicted, OH MY FUCKING GOD. But I'd never even had time to read the thing start to finish! When the fucking FUCK was I gonna edit it? I asked for an extension, and the mods, bless them, gave me an extra week. @grrlpup printed the monster out, sharpened her red pen, and set to work. @tgarnsl pitched in, too. Meanwhile, I wrote another 2K of journal entries, and rewrote one of the Moriarty entries from scratch.

Altogether, we only just finished it in time: the day it was due, @grrlpup and I spent eight hours apiece doing final line-edits, going through the draft in parallel, she a couple pages ahead of me. All said, I'm happy with the result, though. It'd be interesting to see how the story might change if I'd had more time to grow and nurture it, but I think it's pretty soundly built as it is.

One thing that felt really strange while writing this story, was that I was taking the position that Holmes was the lying liar -- usually I see that role assigned to Watson. Surprise, it is much harder to have the liar be Holmes! I couldn't just handwave away inconvenient canon details, saying that this or that was just another of Watson's fibs: I was instead taking the strong position that everything in the story that Watson observed with his own eyes and ears actually happened. Holmes really did show up with barked knuckles the night before they fled for the Continent, they really did spend a couple of days cooling their heels in Brussels, the hotel page really did come up to the Falls to summon Watson back to the hotel, and so forth. I think I did fairly well coming up with an alternate explanation for all the canon events of FINA? But it was a far stricter exercise than I usually engage in, when I'm writing the story of what "really" happened.

Astute readers may also notice that the story diverges significantly from my original idea -- Watson was in fact not hopping mad about Holmes faking his death. This often happens to me in the course of writing a story -- the way I predicted my characters would feel, and what actually makes sense for them to feel by the time the story gets there, often don't match. While writing, I'd been worrying that my original premise assassinated Holmes' character, so I had been trying to make it clear in the journal entries why Holmes was doing what he was doing, and giving him, well, if not a good reason for doing it, at least a sympathetic one. Watson being Watson, he was largely sympathetic to Holmes' distress -- and especially so, given that most of the time he spent reading that journal, he was feeling nostalgic about his dead friend. Sure, it was a sharp shock when it turned out Holmes was alive, but his emotional throughline was very different than what I first envisioned for him. I think this way worked pretty well, though.

@rachelindeed also noted in guessing-post comments that it was somewhat unusual of me to not make Holmes and Watson go through the work of rebuilding/repairing their relationship. I dithered all through the revision process about whether to leave that kissing scene in: I liked it on its own merits, but the principal arc of this story was "What to do about the evil tree?" and was in no way about whether/how/when Holmes and Watson got together. I didn't have time to do both, sure, but I also couldn't make the second arc fit into the timeline of the first. The Tree plot was resolved in 48 hours of narrative time; the romantic arc couldn't possibly be resolved that quickly, not to my lights. And if I couldn't resolve a romantic arc, should I have it in there at all? But both of my betas liked the kissing scene and thought it worked on its own merits, so I left it in. Sometimes you've just got to trust your betas.

So. That's what I spent February doing: feverishly writing a story, and mumbling vaguely whenever anyone asked what I'd been up to lately. (One day over lunch my coworkers asked what I was writing, and I answered "A novel," not wanting to split hairs about novel/novella. They all thought I was kidding around, and eventually decided that I was actually pulling a Harriet the Spy on them: obviously I was writing down scathing commentary on all their doings. But they never tried to steal my notebook from me to find out, so I left them to their conspiracy theories and wrote the next 200 words of my novella. BECAUSE DAMNIT I HAD 24K WORDS TO WRITE.)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Ask Dr. Eldritch: Where's MY Magical Adventure?

2020-04-02T02:17:04Z

Today is my friend evannichols's book release day:

He's a dork and I love him.

(His book can be bought here. I'm going to post my Today's Zombie Danger sign on my office door, should I ever go back to my office again.)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Happy (belated) Birthday To Me

2020-04-01T01:56:12Z

I had a birthday last week! Most of my birthday cards/emails were about the virus, which was kind of annoying and frustrating, but most things nowadays seem to be about the virus, so that's to be expected, I guess. grrlpup got me a work cardigan (in case I ever go back to work again), and also the book that is currently sitting on the hold shelf at the library for me, unable to be picked up.

(The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which some tumblr friends were enthusiastic about. I'm only seventy-odd pages in, but I'm enjoying it.)

Things are mostly fine here. We're both still employed, both working from home, both going on several walks a day to vent anxiety and/or prevent the stir crazies. Sometimes we do yardwork instead. grrlpup spent last weekend going through our pantry, cleaning and reorganizing, and filled a shopping bag of expired food, which we're currently working our way through. (If something smells off, we toss it, but food expiration dates are mostly about flavour and very infrequently about safety.) The other night she made lime shrimp dragon noodles from two of the expired ramen packets, and it was very tasty.

...and it really feels like there isn't much to report. I'm exceedingly grateful that I like my house and my wife so much. I miss petting the neighborhood dogs.

In fact that's one thing I'm very much looking forward to, when this is all over: being able to ask random strangers again, "Can I pet your dog?" This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Devil in the Drain

2020-03-24T03:50:50Z

Earlier today, @grrlpup asked me if I'd record myself reading Daniel Pinkwater's Devil in the Drain -- someone on Twitter needed it, and Mr Pinkwater said he was down with someone recording it for them, and @grrlpup had a copy on her shelf.

I thought it sounded like a fine way to squander an evening.

Devil in the Drain by Daniel Pinkwater, read by @sanguinity

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ACD Holmesfest: [podfic] So Keen a Sympathy

2020-03-22T18:48:58Z

I got my gift for ACD Holmesfest this morning -- it's a podfic of "So Keen a Sympathy", my very first ACD story, which features Mary Morstan/Kate Whitney, Mary Morstan/John Watson, and John Watson/Sherlock Holmes. (It was also one of my very first forays into romance, too: I remember I almost died of embarassment while writing the hair-brushing scene!)

The podficcer did a lovely job. I put it on my headphones and went for a walk, and it was such a pleasure to hear what they did with the story. My words on the page always seems a poor substitute for the story in my head, but getting to hear someone else's take on it... The story the podficcer told is so much realer than my words on the page ever were, and the story they told was very much the story I meant to tell.

(And it's so interesting to hear all the interpretive choices they made! Because a podfic is very much an adaptation, and there are a slew of artistic choices that a podficcer makes -- how do they choose to give a moment its due weight? And which moments do they think are worthy of that treatment?)

I am very pleased.

Anyway, @acdholmesfest has been posting a work or two a day, and will continue to do so for another week or so. If you're looking for some excellent ACD Canon stories, art, and podfic, do check it out.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

sanguinity @ 2020-03-16T09:45:00

2020-03-16T17:01:47Z

Telecommuting worked for exactly ten minutes, after which I got booted off; I haven't been able to get to even the login page since. Teleconferencing phone lines are also down. I presume the system was never designed to have [unknown but presumably significant percentage] of the agency telecommuting in all at the same time. Team lead is trying to get hold of our boss, but of course our boss is in emergency meetings until who-knows-when.

In the meanwhile, I have been instructed to entertain myself with cat videos until we get word about what they want us to do.

---

I was wondering yesterday whether going to therapy tonight would be a good idea or a bad idea, but yesterday the therapist wrote to say she's cancelling all appointments until she can figure out tele-services. So that's one decision out of my hands. The college down the street where I have alumni privileges has also closed their campus, so there's another one.

This means that all the places I go routinely -- my job, my library, my therapist, my college campus -- are now closed. My one routine destination that is still open is the grocery store. And, I suppose, the public park at the end of the street.

Last night I was feeling a little freaked-out about how everything has turned on its ear nearly overnight, but as I keep reminding myself: this is all preventative.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Signal Boost: fansathome & ACDHolmesfest

2020-03-15T20:23:07Z

@fansathome -- a place for people to share recommendations, fandoms, works, and ways to keep busy while at home!

Also, @acdholmesfest began posting today! Art and fic for ACD Holmes, with a new work posted every day for the next... eighteen days? Or so. I have a work in the collection; guess it if you can!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Dear Author: Unsent Letters

2020-03-08T16:37:05Z

Dear Author,

Thank you for writing something for me for unsent_letters_exchange!

The main thing here is to have fun and write the story of your heart -- I'm leaving you a fair amount of latitude to do that. I like characters to be accorded a fair amount of narrative respect (no bashing side-characters, please!), and I subscribe to the belief that historical queer people were pretty resourceful at snatching some happiness for themselves. (I.e., if Hornblower is a miserable git, it's because of his brain chemistry and war trauma, not because historical homophobia prevented queer people from being happy.) If you're writing shipfic, I prefer consensual and reasonably healthy relationships (although Hornblower canon is such a mess I'll cut you a fair amount of slack on the 'healthy' front). Please know that I'm just as happy receiving gen fic, if that's what you'd rather write.

Hornblower - C.S. Forester

William Bush is a favourite character, and the novels never give us enough about him. I nominated "William Bush & Anyone," and I mean it: tell me about his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his relationships, whether it's the captain's log on the Nonsuch, a letter to his sister, or a letter for the Naval Chronicle. A quick look at my fic will show you I'm a big Hornblower/Bush shipper, but you don't have to follow that lead: I'd be just as happy with gen, or with Hornblower being a minor character or character not appearing. (Who IS Bush when Hornblower isn't around? I WANT TO KNOW.) If you'd rather tell me about Bush via Hornblower writing to Bush's sisters (post-Caudebec is the obvious scenario, but feel free to impress me by coming up with another occasion!), then I'm eager to read that, too.

Maria Mason is another favourite character, and needs far more respect than she is afforded in canon. We're told that she and Lady Barbara have a friendly relationship: I've always been curious about that. But again, I'm requesting "Maria & Anyone," so feel free to take the reins and tell me about her life, her feelings, her relationships: her private diary, her letters to her mother, her letters to an absent friend, her letters to her husband... I don't care. Tell me about the Maria her husband never manages to see.

For both of them, feel free to posit a canon divergence and give them a happier end, if you like. Or stick to the end that Forester gave them and break my heart. You know the story you want to tell, and I want to hear it, too.

Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

Kate Whitney is from "The Twisted Lip" and was an old school chum of Mary's; I enjoy thinking that they were girlfriends, too. Tell me whatever story you please about them, but I do have two requests: no Unhappy Historical Queer Women (it's okay if their relationship doesn't work out, but please don't make them Unhappy Because History Times Were Homophobic and Bad), and also please don't demonize John Watson (if Mary marries John, let it be because she loves him).

Irene Adler needs no introduction. I'd love to hear about her being happy and awesome post-Sherlock Holmes, or about her being happy and awesome before she and Holmes met. I'm really not into the Holmes/Adler pairing, but feel free to pair her with her beloved Godfrey, the King of Bohemia (who canonically does not deserve her), or a woman of your choice.

Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century

(Please note that this is NOT the cartoon series where Watson is a robot, but the two-parter that aired as a part of Bravestarr where Wt'sn is a green-skinned Rigellian. Part 1 and Part 2. Yes, I know it's a goofy kids' cartoon, but the premise gives me serious feels about Holmes, Watson, and Wt'sn, okay?)

My prompts for this one are fairly specific: I want letters across the time-jump, please. I want John Watson in the 19th century realising that Holmes has fallen through time and writing to Holmes in the 23rd, or alternatively, Holmes making it back to the 19th or 20th century, and he and/or Watson writing to Wt'sn in the 23rd. I have a story in this 'verse that you're welcome to use for a jumping-off place, but also please feel free to ignore that and go your own way.

Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) aka 1994 Baker Street

This is a goofy, 90-minute, made-for-tv film, available on YouTube. This one, too, gives me hardcore feelings about Holmes and Watson -- how much does Watson know about Holmes' time-jump, and what does he feel about it?

With that in mind, I'd like communication across the time jump, please: John Watson realising what Holmes has done and writing from the 19th century to Holmes in the 21st; what he has to say is entirely up to you. I have a story in this 'verse; you may use it for inspiration or ignore it entirely, I leave it up to you.

Original Work

Weary 1920s Archaeologist Who Has Seen Some Shit/Museum Curator Who Is Fed Up With Colonialism
Female Historian/Time Traveler from the Past
Female Historian/Historical Person Who Can See the Future
Librarian/Adventurer

No prompts here -- if you have an idea for one of these, run with it, I'm eager to read it. Only consensual relationships, please, and I strongly prefer upbeat shenanigans to angst.

And I think that's it! If you have questions about my tastes or want to run ideas past someone, grrlpup is a good bet, but please don't feel that's necessary. Go have fun, tell the story you want to tell, and I look forward to reading it!

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sanguinity @ 2019-12-16T07:57:00

2019-12-16T15:57:58Z

I just watched the sunrise from my office window.

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Reading Wednesday: Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions

2019-11-06T19:25:58Z

Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, by Michael Helmquist

Marie Equi was been rocking my world lately: she was a Portland lesbian, doctor, abortionist, suffragist, labor activist, and pacifist, who made all kinds of radical trouble at the beginning of the 20th Century.

I first heard about her on a local women's history tour, in which they told the story of her horsewhipping a man in the Dalles in the 1890s: at the tender age of 21, before she was a doctor, Equi was homesteading in the Dalles with her girlfriend Bessie Holcomb. Bessie was a schoolteacher, and the school superintendent — a local minister and scoundrel who was notorious for running real-estate swindles on people back east — stiffed Bessie a year's wages. So Equi went into town, horsewhip in hand, to call the man out. He fled out the back door, but the very eager crowd helped Equi intercept him and the man got his horsewhipping. Afterwards, the triumphant Equi raffled off the horsewhip to successfully pay her court costs and replace Bessie's lost salary.

Which is a wonderful and colorful story, yes? It's the least of what this woman did.

She became a medical doctor, at a time when it was still fairly rare for women to do that, and joined in the emergency relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was the only woman among the medicos that went down (iirc, the people organizing the relief efforts didn't want her there, but she bulled her way onto the train anyhow), and she ended up organizing the obstetrics ward, and saved the lives of many mothers and babies who would have died without her. She also got involved with the labor movement, traveling throughout Oregon and Washington on a moment's notice to provide emergency medical care to strikers in the aftermath of police violence. She was quite vocal about local strikes, and would try to foil the arrests of labor speakers -- she once made national news for attacking police with an allegedly poisoned hat pin while demanding the release of a pregnant Native woman (identified in the Oregonian articles as Mrs. O'Connor) who had just been arrested. Equi was a fiery speaker in her own right, and did lots of fundraising for strike and bail funds. Once, in her efforts to evade arrest and finish her damn speech, she borrowed linesman's spurs and climbed a telephone pole to give her speech just above the policemen's reach. (The police tried to conscript the fire department to get her down, but the firefighters were union men, and refused to touch her.) Equi got arrested several times over for labor activism, and likewise was arrested with Margaret Sanger for distributing birth control pamphlets. (She apparently had a love affair with Sanger, too, judging from Equi's letters!) However, she never got arrested for providing abortion services to poor women, which was another injustice she was vocal about -- rich women could de facto get abortion on demand, but not poor women.

(1916 arrest ledger bearing the names of Dr. Marie Equi and Margaret Sanger)

Meanwhile, Equi was in and out of the papers for her relationship with Harriet Speckart, a local heiress who was in the middle of an inheritance fight with her family. Speckart's family asserted that Equi's "influence" over Harriet was a major reason that Harriet shouldn't inherit the family money, and that court case dragged on until 1922, before Harriet finally prevailed. During that long court battle, Equi adopted a daughter — an adoption approved by the courts, despite Equi being an unmarried woman and a known lesbian! — and she and Harriet raised the girl together, Harriet taking informal custody of the girl after she and Equi stopped living together some years later. (Harriet doesn't seem to have been comfortable with Equi's radicalism — at one point Harriet negotiated Equi's release from jail if Equi agreed to leave the state quietly. Unfortunately, no one told Equi about the deal until they were at Union Station. Equi refused to get on the train and marched straight back to jail.)

Predictably, Equi was in the bad books of lumber interests and the FBI, and she vigorously fought back. And not just on her own behalf — there's a story about an activist for Irish independence coming to Equi for help when she was in Portland: federal agents had taken the two hotel rooms that flanked hers and were bugging her room. Equi went to the woman's hotel room, fired shots through the walls into the federal agents' rooms, ripped out the dictaphone, threw it through the transom of one of the feds' rooms, and called in anonymous tips that the agents were consorting with prostitutes in the hotel. Then Equi took the activist home to stay with her instead.

Equi was an outspoken pacifist during WWI, believing the war was imperialist and capitalist and fought on the backs of the poor. Unfortunately, a number of wartime Acts of Congress made it illegal to speak out against the war, and Equi was targeted in a sting operation and charged with sedition. The prosecution actively harassed her and her legal team, planting an undercover operative to get close to Equi and learn her defense strategies. Equi's legal team was able to delay the trial until after the end of the war, but that didn't save her: she still ended up doing time in San Quentin for sedition.

Things weren't the same after that: Equi's health had been damaged by her year in prison, and the Wobblies by that point were on the defensive, fighting for their lives, all their efforts going into fighting anti-syndicalism court cases. After the government crackdown on the socialists, the only radical game in town anymore was the communists, and Equi didn't hold with the communists. So Equi raised her daughter — Speckart had died, so Equi had custody again — raised legal funds for Wobblies, spoke on prison reform, gave shelter to other former activists, and provided down-low abortion services to poor women.

When she died in 1952, she had outlived basically everyone who remembered her sedition trial or her firebrand decades, and all her personal papers were thrown out; the private papers we still have mostly come from the Hoover administration of the FBI, who intercepted and copied all her correspondence for years. While Equi's and Speckart's respective obituaries spoke of them as single women, their daughter knew better: Harriet and Marie are interred together at the Portland Mausoleum, just down the way from me; I'm going to make time to go visit their niches soon.

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Kitty Pic Makes a Post

2019-11-05T19:25:43Z

For reasons known only to her, Kitty has rejected her heated cat bed. She always forgets about it over the course of the summer and we have to retrain her to it -- put it on the couch between us, where she's sure to find it, then gradually move it off the couch and across the floor to its usual spot in front of the window. We did that this fall, and she was using it for about a month, but now she's rejected it, and no amount of "Remember this? you like it!" prompting from us is having an effect on her. We've laundered it again -- we always launder it at the beginning of the season anyway -- just in case that was putting her off for some reason, but no. Should we spritz it with catnip? I'm at a loss.

This is what she's taken to doing instead:

(This picture is from a couple of mornings ago, but she is in fact doing exactly this as I type.)

I don't object in principle to her sitting on my chest -- or at least, not once she makes herself short enough to see over -- but it does make it hard to drink my coffee. And she gets very interested in my cross-stitch (if I happen to be doing cross-stitch), with predictably unfortunate results. Not to mention the usual problem of I'm too fidgety to be a good cat-lap, and then she gets all pointy in an effort to ride my fidgetiness out, and I get fidgetier because ow, and she gets pointier, and then it ends in tears for everyone.

But not so many tears on her part that she doesn't come right back again.

(Okay, now I've pushed her off elsewhere, because my back was starting to kink.)

In other news, over the weekend we went on an alumni field trip to the local waste transfer station, as well as the paint-recycling facility. grrlpup has a write-up-plus-photos. I don't have much to add except that the people in our tour group had obviously zero exposure to industrial facilities -- they were horrified by the manual-labor aspects of paint recycling, and wanted to know how it was possible to find people to staff it. grrlpup and I both did manufacturing production work through our twenties -- I for the whole of my twenties -- and I had been coolly evaluating it against some of the assembly line work I had done. It was annoyingly alienating to hear my alumni group having the vapours about HOW do you ever FIND people willing to do THAT?? Do they get BREAKS? Yes, I get it, the dirtiest you've ever gotten at work is changing the printer toner, nice to know. I've been going to a lot more alumni events this summer and fall (because job-hunting, because tapping your network), but between the classism about industrial work and the purity environmentalism in the van, I was reminded of why I don't emotionally connect with the alumni network very much.

NaNo is how I first got into writing, but I've since learned that I'm happier and more consistent writing at a somewhat slower pace than NaNo demands. (My top sustainable speed is about half the NaNo pace.) However, most of my local friends are people I met through NaNo, and several of them are doing a modified NaNo this year, and so I found myself at a write-in yesterday, keeping them company and working on my own projects.

(Kitty is back, angling for chest-space again.
Me: "Ow, pointy! Please don't be pointy. You have to be short. Short. Shorter than that. I can't see over you, short. Okay, that's good." [kiss on her back]
Kitty: [purrs])

...and I don't know where I was going with that, as I've been thoroughly distracted by Kitty. But maybe this would be a good place to plug the Write Every Day community? It roves from one journal to the next, month to month (currently being hosted by silveradept, here's this month's intro post), and you basically comment on the days you write saying that you wrote. The minimum unit of writing is one sentence (also known as an "alibi sentence"), and revision and other writerly activities count, too. It can be a useful way of making sure you make some time for your WIPs every day, with a lot less of the write-or-die pressure of NaNo. I've been doing it since July (with a break in October, because omg, this October!) and I've probably gotten a little bit more written than I might have done without it.

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podfic rec: As My Wimsey Takes Me

2019-10-25T16:28:38Z

For starfishstar and other fans of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels:

As My Wimsey Takes Me is a new fortnightly podcast about the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. They're doing the novels chronologically; they've just finished Whose Body? and they'll air the first ep for Clouds of Witness (through Chapter 8) on November 4.

I just listened to the two Whose Body? eps last night, and really enjoyed the range of topics covered, the additional background information for the novel, and the style of the hosts. (I particularly appreciated that the eps were tight and well-planned, while still being conversational!) They're conscientious about not prematurely spoiling the whodunnits, but they do bring up later books in their discussions, particularly when there's a theme or thread that's introduced in the current novel and developed further later. The hosts are obviously fans of the stories, but they're also forthright about things that deserve criticism, such as Sayers' anti-Semitism. I could have followed the podcast without re-reading, but I'm glad I'm reading along: one of the topics for Whose Body? was Sayers' literary style (for example, how and when she chooses to change point-of-view, including her deployment of the two second-person passages), and that discussion was richer for having those details fresh in my mind.

My only real frustration was that it's a podcast, and I couldn't actually join in the nattering. But that's what Dreamwidth is for, I suppose. ;-)

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Left Coast Sherlockian Symposium

2019-10-13T23:45:47Z

We're back from Left Coast Sherlock! (Admittedly, "back" is a a twenty minute drive, but seeing that I spent most of the last 48 hours at the convention hotel and without internet, I feel like I've been away.)

This was my first con of any kind, and it was a good experience. I made myself talk to strangers -- all of whom were perfectly willing to say hello, find common ground, and have a nice conversation, hardly like talking to strangers at all -- and colebaltblue introduced me to people, too (many of whom had been strangers to her until ten minutes before). The con was rather heavily weighted toward scion-style fandom (the kind where they have in-person clubs, pretend Holmes and Watson really lived, and write their headcanons as tongue-in-cheek scholarly articles), so there was a substantial contingent of people there who were deeply confused by the fact that I didn't belong to a scion. (They likewise didn't understand why my nametag was first-name-plus-pseud. colebaltblue did well to have the first part of our talk be an introduction to online fandom!) But there were also a minority of people who were dyed-in-the-wool members of online fandom, so there was a group of people there whom I shared language with, so it wasn't all awkward attempts at cultural translation.

And friends came, too! It wasn't all strangers! colebaltblue and grrlpup, obviously, but bendingthewillow and graycardinal were there, plus people whose pseuds I recognized from around, and also a Holmestice first-timer who came up and introduced himself.

(And I got to meet Lyndsay Faye! And to talk to her a little bit, even! She is charming and lovely and thinks Asylum is the best Holmes adaptation because it has a Kraken. That's not the kind of opinion that I can disagree with.)

Sadly, I had such a bad case of nerves about our talk that I did not sleep at all Friday night. (Not one wink, although I might have achieved the light doze where you believe you're still awake? Basically though: no sleep.) And unfortunately, I was still so high from caffeiene, adrenaline, and post-talk anxiety (WHAT IF IT HAD ACTUALLY GONE BADLY AND I DIDN'T REALIZE??) that I didn't sleep much Saturday night, either. (Maybe four hours?) In short, I am so freaking exhausted right now.

Our talk, I think, went pretty well. Unfortunately, we got a late start because the guy before us ran long by fifteen minutes, and then we ran long on our introductory piece explaining online fan culture, so I had to RACE through the slides about Holmestice. We had a lot of questions from scion-fandom people who legit had no framework for what we were talking about. ("How can a story be a gift for one person AND everyone gets to read it?" was one of the audience questions we got, while grrlpup heard one person near her ask another, "Are they talking about... stories?") There were questions that I wish I'd given better answers to, and some points I didn't get to make because of time -- and of course the thing where we were inadvertently talking over some people's heads and were slow to catch on to that fact -- but the scion-people got to hear about another group of dedicated Holmes fans and what we do, and the online-fandom people got to hear about Holmestice in particular and what we do, and both groups mostly seemed interested, so... I'm just gonna call it a success. We have a recording we'll post over at holmestice, as well as the slides and our planned comments, but it'll probably take a couple of days to get that up. (Especially since I still have to finish matching!) In the meanwhile, Sherlock Peoria liveblogged our talk here. (Second half of the post; I'm Elizabeth and colebaltblue is Haley).

The ball was super low-key -- well, except for people's Victorian finery, which was anything but! -- and grrlpup and I were in fact the dorkiest ones there. There are photos, but they're on colebaltblue's phone, and she had a longer drive home than we did, so I'll save that for a second post.

Oh! And I knew a trivia question that hardly anyone did! I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it basically asked what unites Sir Henry Baskerville, Mycroft Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes?</i> (rot13: Puevfgbcure Yrr -- which I knew because of making the vid, of course.) While grrlpup knew the trivia question about which Holmes character debuted in 1970 searching for half a chicken sandwich. (Fureybpx Urzybpx.) And I won two raffle prizes, so now I own a Watson teddy bear and a Sherlock Hemlock doll, along with a pair of Sound of the Baskervilles mugs (Sound is the Seattle-area scion, one of the sponsors of the con) and a few more gewgaws that came in the two prize-packs.

(click to embiggen)

In short, I had a good time! I wish I'd gotten more sleep, but I had a good time!

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sanguinity @ 2019-10-09T12:30:00

2019-10-09T19:35:14Z

I know I researched the fuck out of "Selected Letters of Abraham and Fanny Glassman: 1874-1886," back when I wrote it (c.f. the end notes and selected bibliography), but I wasn't really expecting someone to cite it in their biography of Sam Wing, one of the historical figures whom I gave passing mention in the story.

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sanguinity @ 2019-09-24T12:12:00

2019-09-24T19:12:09Z

holmestice sign-ups are open, and scfrankles has marked the occasion by gifting me a delightful treat based on one of the sources I requested last round, a Muppets sketch wherein Holmes is a whale. When I requested that sketch, I dearly hoped that someone would give it a think and tell me how Holmes-as-a-whale even worked, and scfrankles has! While remaining absolutely true to both the Muppets source and Holmes canon, as anyone who is familiar with her work might expect.

The Prince of Whales by SCFrankles
General audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply
Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Humor, Bit Shippy, The Case of the Red Herring (Muppets Tonight sketch), Whale!Holmes
1200 words

Man meets whale. Man loses whale. Man finds whale again. Whale eventually retires to Sussex.

Meanwhile, remixrevival has come off anon, so I can reveal what I wrote:

No. 36 Bannerman Road by sanguinity
General audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply
The Sarah Jane Adventures
Alan Jackson, Haresh and Gita Chandra, Original Characters
Humor, Five Times, Remix
3200 words

Living over the road from Sarah Jane Smith has a terrible effect on one's property value.

Inspired by Alien Estate by paranoidangel

Sarah Jane Smith lives at No. 13 Bannerman Road and has many encounters with space aliens, many of whom eventually find their way to her front door. It's absurd, of course, to think that no one else in the road notices all this, and indeed, paranoidangel's "Alien Estate" is about Alan Jackson's difficulties in selling No. 36, primarily due to so many of his prospective buyers noticing the obvious: Bannerman Road is infested with space aliens.

I thought it'd be fun to do a POV-swap of the original story, and meanwhile imagine some of the other times someone tried to sell No. 36 after Sarah Jane moved in over the road. The only canon knowledge you need for this story is that Mr Smith does love his big entrances. (I swear they get more involved as the series progresses -- he starts releasing balloons at one point, and I kept expecting him to eventually upgrade to fireworks.)

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Redbeard! (the Detective's best friend remix)

2019-09-16T21:45:03Z

remixrevival went live today! An anonymous artist remixed my BBC Sherlock ficlet, "On the Uses of Dogs in the Work of a Detective," which was written post-S3, when we all still thought Redbeard was a dog. (*eyerolls forever at S4*) I'm fond of the story, but it never received much attention, so imagine my surprise and pleasure to receive art for it!

Redbeard! (the Detective's best friend remix) by Anonymous.

btw, I wrote the original story as a cracky, humorous piece, and was quite shocked when the comments it received were all from people mourning their dogs. Consequently, that story lived in a somewhat uncomfortable place, where how I saw it and how readers saw it obviously didn't match. But this fanart spans the gap between the two beautifully: it is very clearly art of the story I wrote, while also just as clearly illustrates the story that my commenters read. Suddenly I, too, am having sadly wistful thoughts about how much I still miss my own dog.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say that the my offering to the exchange is being favorably received. But right now we're all still anonymous, so that's as much as I'll say about that.

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sanguinity @ 2019-09-09T16:55:00

2019-09-09T23:55:56Z

Last Wednesday we went to the river again, mostly because the weather was feasible for it -- mid-eighties, which is about as hot as it gets during September -- and September being September, it was unlikely we'd have much more river-swimming weather. As it was, we were pushing it: even though it was warm enough, the days are getting distinctly shorter, so it was only warm enough for an hour or two. And by "warm enough" I mostly mean "warm enough on the river-bank to not regret having gone in the water," instead of "warm enough to properly enjoy going in the water." The other problem with shorter days is that rush hour hadn't quite finished by the time we started getting shaded out by the trees on the opposite bank -- there was a little while where we were looking for any stretch of riverbank that still had sun, so that we could wait out rush hour AND be warm while we did it.

So, that was our last hurrah of summer: we went to the river! We were pretty much the only ones there, because it was JUST a little on the cool side for it, and also everyone was in school. It was a completely different scene from the week prior, high-nineties and the last week before school started, when everyone else was having their last hurrah at the river.

The other reason we went to the river on Wednesday: I had spent the entirety of Labor Day weekend preparing for a job interview on Tuesday. And after three-and-a-bit days of trying to keep raging stress-levels at bay through compulsive preparation, and then the interview itself on Tuesday, I was more than ready for a day spent fucking off at the river. But the interview went well enough for me to get a second one! (Which was today!) And I haven't obviously flubbed the second interview, so... Fingers crossed, we'll see.

On Labor Day weekend we did one non-job-hunt related thing: we went to see As You Like It, performed by the company that does free Shakespeare in the parks all summer. It was great, ridonk fun. I especially enjoyed that they made both Rosalind and Orlando explicitly nonbinary, and incorporated a lot of gender play into the proceedings, too: it was roughly even odds whether a role was being played by the "correct" apparent gender, and furthermore for some roles they changed the pronouns to match the apparent gender and for some they didn't. And the epilogue was rewritten to explicitly include non-binary people! Altogether it made for a great vibrant mash of effects, and it was very clear that not only were they having fun with gender and cross-dressing and cross-casting, but that they were creating a playground where everyone was invited: as a production, it was ribald and open and welcoming, and a lovely grace-note to the summer.

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