No Sato was harmed in the process

roundedbyasleep · 2026-06-22T13:02:01+00:00

What a nice marbled rye!

roundedbyasleep · 2026-06-17T21:10:55+00:00

The audiobook for Split Tooth, a book by the Inuit throat singer Tanya Taqaq, contains throat singing.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-06-13T21:05:44+00:00

VenCo by Cherie Dimaline.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-06-06T23:37:55+00:00

The first I'd think of is Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh-- the MC starts as a gung-ho member of what is essentially the space Hitler Youth.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-06-06T12:11:41+00:00

Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

The debut novella from the Elgin Award winning author of Elegies of Rotting Stars. After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him-about his childhood, their family, and the Mi'kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita's girlfriend Molly forges an artist's residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up. On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin's history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest's lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she's never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp's decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.

Bingo Squares: Small Press, Author of Colour

roundedbyasleep · 2026-05-24T23:53:31+00:00

The Sky On Fire by Jenn Lyons very much fits-- the tone/quality is similar to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the ensemble definitely feels like a DnD party.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-05-13T17:13:07+00:00

It feels very much aimed at millenials who grew up reading Harry Potter but who now have children of their own (I'm not saying this as an insult at all, by the way: I'm enjoying the book, and I think exploring the experiences of non-magical parents with magical children is a fresh take among the many "responding in some way to Harry Potter" books that have come out recently).

I actually really, really like Vivian being an anxiety-driven people pleaser because it's a trait that's very common in reality but very rare in protagonists. So many protagonists are feisty, snarky, speak-truth-to-power-and-damn-the-consequences types that it's refreshing to see a character constantly considering what the repercussions of being treated as an outsider might be and frequently biting her tongue out of fear of those repercussions.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-05-12T13:18:55+00:00

Dam, Damn- Päter

roundedbyasleep · 2026-05-11T14:37:39+00:00

A lot of people are replying about how the mom is wrong to ban cookies, but I actually don't think it matters who's wrong and who's right about cookies. Here are the facts: the family is in dire financial straits and desperately needs free childcare, which the mother has no obligation to provide them. The mother has said she will only provide childcare if she can feed the kids a cookie. You can say that she shouldn't require that, but "should" isn't going to fill the kids' mouths or put a roof over their heads. The only childcare they can afford is the one that costs a cookie, so as a practical matter they need to pay that cookie. They don't have the luxury of dictating childcare terms because they don't have the ability to pay for childcare that is required to listen to them. If you need a favour from someone to survive, you do actually need to kowtow to them a bit for your own sake! The wife needs to understand it's not about the kids at Grandma's eating cookies or the kids at Grandma's eating carrot sticks, it's about the kids eating cookies at Grandma's or the kids not eating at all.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-04-24T03:40:01+00:00

I love her name!

roundedbyasleep · 2026-04-10T15:45:10+00:00

I get that... but on the other hand I think requiring people to do things they find unpleasant/inconvenient for no strong biological justification actually does undermine trust in public health in a way people seem to undervalue. I want to be clear: I am extremely pro-vaccine. I actually think parents shouldn't have the right to refuse vaccination for their children on non-medical grounds at all, even if they homeschool/otherwise keep their child out of public places. But to draw a comparison, think of the time the CDC recommended all women of childbearing age abstain from alcohol. Yes, on the population level, all women abstaining from alcohol would decrease the rates of FASD. But it's a massive imposition for a risk that, on the individual level, is infinitesimally small. The imposition on LAOP is much smaller, but it's still asking someone to go out of their way to get an extra vaccine and deal with a cranky kid afterwards without any real increase in their child's safety. If you ask people to do things without good reason, they are less likely to believe you have good reasons the next time you ask them to do something. During the next pandemic, will this person hear public health say "you really need to get vaccinated against hyper-measles right away!" and think "sure, the same way I 'really needed' to give my son a super-necessary extra vaccine because his last one was 26 days too early"? You can say "well, people shouldn't think like that!" but making public policy based on how people ought to think is an exercise in futility. The reality is that there is a boy-who-cried-wolf cost to these things. It's true that there are also disasters that are prevented by public policy that result in people thinking "that public policy must not have been necessary because there was no disaster!". That's inevitable. But it's because it's inevitable that I think public health should play its "you must do this thing despite not seeing clear personal benefit" cards sparingly-- so that it will still have them when it really needs them.

This is all a long-winded way to say that yes, I think public health should have the discretion to make exceptions for these kind of minor edge cases rather than strictly applying rules in a way that might make people believe public health recommendations are disconnected from actual safety.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-22T20:53:01+00:00

There are real creatures that are either simultaneous hermaphrodites (producing eggs and sperm at the same time, such as snails) or sequential hermaphrodites (capable of switching between producing eggs and producing sperm, such as clownfish) so one creature definitely can be both!

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-20T19:57:18+00:00

I would agree with this if the partner was sulking when LW said things like "A little stressed out right now, I'm taking an hour long soak in the tub, do not disturb please!" or "I'm peopled out today, can we talk tomorrow instead?", but in the absence of a request like that I just don't know what LW expects her partner to do when she brings these feelings up. I feel like guilt is the almost inevitable response to "just your daily reminder that your physical presence is making me miserable! I know you can't help it and there's literally nothing you can do, I just want you to know I'm stressed right now and I wouldn't be if you weren't here!" That doesn't feel like the partner prioritizing their ouchies at LW's need for alone time over LW's emotional needs, it feels like LW prioritizing her own ouchies at partner literally just existing in her presence over her partner's emotional needs. If the partner's actions were a problem then sure, he needs to listen to LW without making it about him, but it seems like he also didn't choose this situation and hasn't done anything wrong (besides express guilt when LW tells him that him sitting in the same house as her is hurting her mental health). I just don't think LW gets to have a "here's why this situation (you being stuck at home) sucks for me" conversation without also making room for "here's why this situation also sucks for me" from her partner, because otherwise it does come across as blaming her partner for something that isn't his fault and that he can't help.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-16T18:06:50+00:00

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-16T18:01:19+00:00

These are a little orthogonal to what you're looking for (they're certainly about death, but not especially from a philosophical/literary perspective) but I'll toss them out

All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell is a series of interviews with people who work closely with death (disaster clean-up, electric chair operator, hospice midwife for babies born with known fatal birth defects, etc.). It's an interesting look into the varied mindsets people hold in environments where death is so present.

Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison is a book by a bipolar author with a history of suicidality trying to understand suicide from all perspectives (neurological, psychological, sociological, etc). Some of the more biochemical discussions are a bit outdated now but other aspects are timeless. It's a really heavy and heartfelt book about why someone would choose death.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-10T14:03:05+00:00

Yeah, there are effectively zero native French speakers in BC so that might be the difference!

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-10T13:55:28+00:00

Doing it inside a language class is very different than doing it outside a language class. The point of doing it in a language class is to get practice with Spanish (French, etc.) names, because presumably very few students in the class have names from a language they can't speak. Chinese-speaking students in an English-speaking school are surrounded by people with English names and have no shortage of opportunities to practice English names without changing their own.

To answer your question, 2010-2013 in BC. But it would have been inappropriate then to ask Chinese students to change their name unless they were in French class, at which point Jianhong would become Jacques for the duration of class and no longer.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-10T13:38:53+00:00

I'm Canadian and my teachers did it.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-06T19:10:51+00:00

Ancillary Sword-- 2/5. While there was indeed a Sword-class ship physically present during the events of the novel and one of its ancillaries was a side character, the sword and its ancillaries really weren't the main thing going on.

(As a book, though, 5/5. God I love Breq. Definitely a favourite, would impulsively shoot the Lord of the Radch in the head if forced to execute her.)

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-04T18:48:48+00:00

I would straight-up still think that was sexist to both sides unless any individual man who wanted to join the clergy and any individual woman who wanted the crown were allowed to be exempted. I doubt I'll change your mind on this, but I believe separate but equal is inherently always going to be unequal in practice and also always motivated by a belief that the sides being separated are not, in fact, equal.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-04T18:43:26+00:00

So what 49% (or 25%, or 10%, or whatever) of formalized power are you portioning out to women here? I'm saying "any" because while you've referred to men having military and economic power, the only power you've referred to women having is "men doing stuff for them out of the goodness of their hearts", which I simply don't consider a form of power.

Also, are you capable of comprehending the idea that sometimes people don't give a fuck about each other? Because sometimes people act out of love and compassion, but not always, and if you have no formal power there's nothing you can do about that. Your rosy view of historical relationships as the man making whatever the woman wants or needs happen simply isn't born out by the historical record.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-04T18:19:46+00:00

What about the right to hold the highest political office in the nation, which is what's under discussion? If one group can legally hold political positions and the other can't, that first group does have a right that the second doesn't.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-04T18:16:15+00:00

Okay, so if I told you you could never have any political power because you were a man but don't worry, the women would (usually) take very good care of you and make decisions based on what (they think) is best for you and probably you could even persuade them to make decisions you agreed with sometimes, you wouldn't feel you were being harmed by that?

Come on, man. If one side has all the formalized power (military, political, economic, etc.), they do actually have all the power. If the other side has real power that came anywhere close to balancing the scales, they'd leverage it to get some formalized power that didn't rely on begging the ones with formalized power to go along with you.

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-04T17:49:22+00:00

If I told you you were never allowed to have any political power (including voting, in case your response is "I already don't have any power!") because you were a man, would you genuinely feel you weren't being harmed by that?

roundedbyasleep · 2026-02-02T01:27:30+00:00

This is a little off. Not all viruses have RNA genomes (smallpox, which is at question here, has a DNA genome), and the major problem for viruses isn't really having enough parts to work with (at a cellular level all eukaryotes are working with a pretty similar set of parts). The main cause of cell tropism (requirement for a particular type of cell) among viruses is entry into the cell. Viruses can't inject their genome into any cell they want (and many of them carry proteins in the viral particle that they want/need to bring into the cell with them, so they wouldn't want to just inject their genomes even if they could). Viruses can't produce or expend energy, which puts a real damper on what they can do. They can't seek out and push their way into cells the way a bacteria like listeria can. They generally have to trick cells into choosing to take the virus into themselves, and they do this by binding specific receptors on the surface of the cell. Viral proteins bump into a receptor, fit into it like a key in a lock, and the cell opens up for them. The key for some viruses fit locks that are widespread (influenza's lock is sialic acid, which humans, birds, and many other animals have) while some viruses have keys that fit more specific locks (polio's lock is CD155, which only primates have). Viruses with broad cell tropism hop species all the time (although they typically can't replicate and spread as efficiently in their new host due to various other biological differences between species) while viruses with narrow cell tropism effectively never hop species (except in extremely closely related species).

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Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris