This Is Beautiful: Something Rotten!

 Over the weekend I went to see a local community theater production of "Something Rotten!" and it was a lot of fun! The show is really silly and very referential to musicals. The idea is that playwrights from Shakespeare's day come up with the idea of writing a musical to try and one-up Shakespeare. There's just a lot of easter eggs for other musicals and a lot of poking fun at musicals themselves. 

It was a silly goofy time, but I do wish that the female characters had more to do. They were all pretty secondary characters that didn't do much. And as a whole it was a production that didn't say a ton, just was a good time. Which I can definitely appreciate! Just don't expect a statement going in. Just a fun way to spend a evening.

“To Visit The Queen” by Diane Duane

This is the second book in the feline wizards series by Duane, focusing on Rhiow and her team as they work to keep the Grand Central Worldgates running. There are some cool aspects of it, but overall I definitely preferred the first book. 

The premise of this sequel is that the London feline worldgating team needs assistance, so Rhiow and co are told to head over there to help out. They are still adapting to having Arhu around instead of Saash and are not excited about this change, but they head out nevertheless. The London team consists of four cats, there’s Huff the leader, his mate Auhlae, their technician Fhrio, and the new wizard Siffha’h. Tensions are high between the two groups from the start, Fhrio doesn’t like having someone else look at his gates and Arhu’s attempts to flirt with Siffha’h are met with scorn. They figure out though that the gates have been depositing people in other times and that the one way trips have made timelines unstable as well as creating a new, dark timeline where the Queen dies and everything ends in nuclear Armageddon. The cats, along with Ith their dinosaur friend, and a boy Artie that they happen to take along with them while time traveling, devise a plan to protect the Queen of England from being assassinated. Along the way Arhu learns that Siffha’h is his twin sister reincarnated, she originally died by drowning when they were kittens and loathes him for surviving that. They manage to make up though, and her power pushes them through to time travel. Once they get back though, they find that Auhlae’s jealousy of Rhiow getting close to Huff has made her a tool of the Lone Power Big Bad, she kills Huff and then goes poof when Ith shows up with a spell where all of the Egyptian cat mummies wreck Auhlae. The New York team heads home while telling Fhrio they’ll check in on him as he rebuilds his team.

There are cool aspects of the story that I didn’t fully realize until reading the historical note at the end, all of the stuff from the uncorrupted timeline is accurate (except for one detail) and that’s really cool! There is also research that went into things like the cats disrupting Parliament and the reveal that Artie is Arthur Conan Doyle. All of which has respect from me as a researcher, that’s cool stuff.

Having said that, some of this feels tossed in for the sake of it. Why is it significant that Arthur Conan Doyle joined them? His most famous writings don’t involve magic or anything like that. It’s a fun snippet, but he didn’t meaningfully contribute to the plot or anything so I’m not sure why it’s there.

My biggest gripe is probably the ending. They get everything sorted out with time travel, then come home and have to kill off two characters. It is not even a meaningful conflict, there is very little set up for Auhlae to be that jealous so it comes out of nowhere. And killing off both her and Huff means that there are basically no consequences of this. Huff does not have to deal with his mate betraying them and Auhlae never has to make up for her mistake. It feels contrived in order for Ith to use the spell that got tossed in as well. What I really like about the Young Wizards series is that when a character dies it is motivated and it has consequences. This did not have that.

Then there is also the fact that the human characters I enjoy are not in the book at all. It is just the cats mucking around in Europe. So in a sense I was not set up to enjoy this book, but I think even beyond that it is one of the weakest of Duane’s works. There is another book in the feline wizard series, and I will check it out, but hoping that it ends up being stronger than this.

This Is Beautiful: Collective Action

 It's kinda nuts to me that we didn't have spaces like the encampment where people could just hang out, get some food/water/sunscreen, and just like exist. Like the idea that we should just be able to do that without participating in capitalism or having to owe someone something should NOT be radical! But it is! These spaces simply don't exist anywhere else! It's wild!

All that to say, it's just really nice to see this space exist and provide people with a space that we so clearly need. There's so much energy behind it, and it's really nice to participate in it.

Pro-Palestine Protests

 There's been an encampment at my university for a few weeks now, I haven't been camping, but I've been trying to volunteer and support them whenever I can. Especially seeing the way that other schools have been treating their students. Thankfully all has been pretty peaceful here, but we are lucky.

I think though that it's caused a really interesting phenomenon on my campus where people want to agitate and get themselves arrested. Without going into details, over the weekend there was a protest centered around shouting and waving signs at members of the university's Regents that were at a fancy event. We stood around and chanted for the evening, and as the people exited the building.

Once everyone was out though, it was just us and the police. We proceeded to form a line in front of the building, and encircled the police as they tried to exit. Which was cool for exactly 5 seconds before you think about where this goes from here. Police started shoving with their bicycles and spraying pepper spray at students, forcing us to retreat. It was scary.

Now I'm not excusing a damn thing the police did. There was no need to use force, shove students, beat them, use pepper spray, or anything else. None of us should have gotten hurt there. But on the flip side, I think this was a product of pent up student energy. We wanted to make a fuss and the easiest way to do that is to provoke a group that we know to already be corrupt.

Which honestly, fine, you want to poke the bear you can do that. But did it further the movement? Did the bunch of us who showed up to harass the Regents need to get drawn into it? I don't blame individual protestors, I think it's easy to get swept up and I sure as hell am frustrated too, but this seems to be a point to take a look at the movement itself. What are we here for? What are we doing to further that goal?

There does appear to be a bright side, we got hella donations and support after all that. But while that's great to see, with graduation happening I think we need to start thinking bigger. How do you build a movement that's sustainable? We need to be united and in it for the long haul.

This Is Beautiful: Concerts

 This past weekend, went to my first concert in a while! It was far enough away that we had to take a train so we made a little weekend of it, got to stop by a museum as well. It was so fun! And it's the first weekend that I've had off in a while. It's just so nice to not be worrying about your email or experiments and things like that! Plus got to see some live music and I just love the energy of concerts. All in all, a weekend well spent!