I got to read outside again this evening (I’m slowly chipping away at three longish books), and at sunset we walked over to the middle school baseball field and back. It’s the time of year when every day that’s warm, dry, and free of smoke is precious. There’s little risk of it getting too hot. I think today’s high was 79 degrees – just right!

Today J, D, and DG drove down to Cottage Grove for another qualifier for a big Magic tournament, which will be in Portland in four months or so. DG had already qualified. In today’s event, J and D ended up in the finals, and J won. They’ll be going back a week from tomorrow for a third qualifier, to see if D can win this one.

It was great to be able to read outside again, last night’s storm having cleared the air beautifully. I hope tomorrow will also be warm; we expect rain on Monday.

Today I started the process of submitting that paper to the journal where it has a long-shot chance (one in seven). The process was quite straightforward until I got to the part where I needed to confirm that I had permission to name all the people I listed in the acknowledgments section, which is a relatively new requirement. That put the whole thing on hold until I could hear from a dozen people. It seemed like a pain, but actually it was great – they all wrote back with cheerful encouragement!

J. and I have tons of cleaning to do before his parents visit in mid-October, and my main job (for now) will be to sort through the 25+ boxes I moved from my garage to his garage in July for the heat pump replacement. In theory I could just move them all back, but I’d rather take advantage of the opportunity to sort them. My plan is to look through one box almost every day between now and the end of the month. Today’s box had electronics in it – I discarded three keyboards and two 56K modems (speak up if you want one!), and I organized at least a dozen cables and cords. Tomorrow I’ll set up a card table; crouching like that isn’t good for my lower back.

Then, this evening, J started playing the long-awaited sequel to Hollow Knight, which is called Silksong and features Hornet, a major character in the first game. Eight years is a long wait for a video game! It’s every bit as gorgeous as the first game, and they wisely went with the same amazing composer. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to research the accessibility settings, since Hornet is much bouncier than the original character, and it was pretty problematic for my visual vertigo. I sure hope we can figure it out. Already I have learned to shut my eyes for most of the battles.

So, even though the air has gotten smoky outside, we are pretty busy indoors. I’d still like to do more reading out there – we’ll see.

The Dallergut Dream Department Store, by Miye Lee. This generally light and entertaining book has sold over a million copies in Korea, and I can see why it’s a popular sensation. Penny applies to work in the five-story emporium where sleepers (both humans and animals) show up to purchase their dreams; they pay with the emotions they experience after waking, or sometimes after thinking about what they’ve dreamed and incorporating its message into their lives. The dreammakers – an equivalent of film directors in the waking world – are celebrities, each with their own specialty. We readers learn what it’s like to work for Dallergut in the department store, and we also glimpse moments in the lives of his customers, as the dreams work their psychological magic. Very fun.

(I should add that our library has this shelved under Mi-ye Yi, an alternate spelling of the author's name, which is a tad confusing!)

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, by Annalee Newitz. I learned about this book from Worldcon and also saw the author in one of the panels. As a narrative psychologist specializing in public discourse, it was very interesting for me to see what a journalist (who also writes speculative fiction) thinks about the field.

On the one hand, they (Newitz is non-binary) aren’t being systematic in the way I would try to be. For example, they aren’t being precise about using the word “story.” People use “story” and “narrative” in a variety of ways – to refer to a particular telling of a particular story (like, for example, Robin McKinley’s Beauty) or to the generic version of a particular story (which in this case is the story “The Beauty and the Beast,” about a particular woman named Beauty and her history with an unnamed shape-shifted human in beast form), or, even more generically, the “story” of how a woman might find herself trapped in a relationship with a troubled man and perhaps transform him into the man she knows he could be – which doesn’t sound all that healthy, when you’re being that generic about it.

Instead of being systematic about the topic (and the term “story”), Newitz’s book is more of a history and an exploration. As such, it’s quite interesting and pointed out to me some important places in the field that I haven’t devoted much attention to. My work focuses on people telling stories and meta-stories in good faith, although sometimes for what most of us would consider evil purposes – they are describing the world as they see it and speculating what could happen. Of course, people also strategically lie! Newitz discusses disinformation and misinformation (and I saw a distinction between them but if it was in this book I’m not finding it again) – non-factual stories deliberately fed to the public to influence them. (The Internet tells me that disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive people, while misinformation is false information spread inadvertently where there’s no intent to deceive. Of course, on social media, people can plant disinformation which others spread as misinformation.)

They also focus extensively on military psyops, for which the handbook was created by Paul Linebarger, who I was familiar with under his pen name, Cordwainer Smith. They discuss the history of propaganda, malicious slander (as in the book, The Bell Curve, which “explains” – using seriously flawed data – that Black people on average are just not as smart as white people), culture wars over comic books, research on authoritarianism and what appeals to people who think like that, etc. I was especially interested to learn that Ben Franklin engaged in writing anonymous disinformation propaganda, because I’ve been using a journalistic piece based on his propaganda in my own writing, not knowing that this inflammatory passage was itself based on something Franklin wrote to deceive the public.

I also really enjoyed reading the history of the Coquille people, since I grew up on the Oregon coast and knew something of them already and have seen the leader whose story Newitz tells. Newitz also met with my colleague Ajit Maan! Another person described in the book also has deep connections in Eugene and used to spend a lot of time with his child at our public library. Newitz’s ideas about “applied science fiction” bear further consideration and reminded me of the “New Mythos” group I’ve participated in, although it currently seems to have become inactive.

For an energetic, thought-provoking, and wide ranging exploration of the use of stories in the public sphere, I definitely recommend this book – but I hope to supplement it with more systematic discussions too.

The long-awaited sequel to the game Hollow Knight comes out on Thursday, and J is playing through Hollow Knight as a lead-up to the big event. I think the last time he had seriously played any of it was in 2021. I could instead read while he plays, but it would be hard not to watch! Between the extraordinarily beautiful art and the extraordinarily beautiful music, I'm quite content - although it is certainly taking up a lot of our time.

Also today, he took a long bike ride to the Middle Fork of the Willamette - about 15-18 miles round-trip, nearly all on bike paths, then I met him at our neighborhood park and we walked home together. Only a few more weeks left in the year for biking like that.

I was pretty active today, for someone recovering from whatever. It was the first football game of the year, and I use football games as a good way to structure "getting stuff done" in the livingroom, which included a fair amount of cleaning. Then as soon as the game was done, J let me know he was biking back from the river, so I walked down to the park to meet him. It was such a lovely temperature, and the sky was nicely clear! I then rested a bit and read, and chatted with D for about an hour when he came to visit, but as soon as the cats were inside J's house for the evening I mowed his lawn. So much! I hope I won't regret it - I don't have to do much tomorrow, at least.

Circle of Magic: Briar’s Book, by Tamora Pierce. This book was rather dark and sad – the city where the four kids live is stricken with a plague of “blue pox,” which has never before been encountered, and Briar finds himself in the thick of it, at first quarantined with a sick friend and many of the other early patients, and later helping the magical research team work on identifying a cure. The ongoing theme is “how many of Briar’s friends will die?” The one highlight of the book is that we get to know much more about Dedicate Crane, who is well known for his difficult personality – that part is excellent.

Liberty’s Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer. This was fun! I can’t remember ever reading a book that took on libertarianism quite so explicitly, and it was very effective. Beck Garrington is 16 years old, smart and competent, and has lived most of her life on the sovereign seasteads 220 miles west of Los Angeles. She soon discovers there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. After all, if laws are minimal or non-existent, who’s going to make sure you treat your employees well? It’s suspenseful and satisfying, and I think someone should make a movie of it.