Books
Read Cliff Jerrison's short story 'Question 3', which is (as the author himself writes), "an ongoing mood".

Finished Freya Marske's A Power Unbound. Quoting my own reply to sovay in a comment on an earlier post, after finishing the trilogy: "it tries to do some interesting things with the nature of power and privilege, with reference to land ownership, aristocracy, cultural heritage, but I'm not sure how well it stuck the landing. I get the feeling the author was wrestling a bit with the politics of the system she'd set up, the implications of those politics, and the fact that she had to wrap up an Edwardian period fantasy romance trilogy with a happy ending."

The ending I got was fine for a romance novel, which is what this is. But I wanted more exploration of what the denouement really changed for everyone, and what I wanted would have been incompatible with that romance novel ending.

Started reading R.A. MacAvoy's The Lens of the World. I'm about 3% through and found it a lot rapier than I was expecting, although considering that it was published in 1990 I should have braced myself.

Comics
Tense about current events in Dumbing of Age and Questionable Content, for different reasons. Re QC, what I haven't seen mentioned yet in text is that the worst Anh's father can do to her is not simply cut off her allowance. [after the cut, spoilers and also psychiatric abuse triggers]

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Fandom
Beta-read the latest chapter of Drel_Murn's 'Wheel and turn'. First time I've betaed in a while.

Games
Unlocked Ascension 5 for all four Slay the Spire characters. The last of them was the Silent, tonight, with a lot of luck, Donu and Deca, and Corpse Explosion my belorpse explosion.

Tech
Finally got a secondhand laptop to replace the one which died. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get it in a condition in which I'll be comfortable using it.

Unfortunately, I made the decision that I'd try switching to Wayland, which necessitated exploring a lot of different utilities, and... yeah.

The most ridiculous shark I encountered, however, was not a Wayland problem but rather a font installation problem. In that when I installed font-awesome (a font package that is mainly symbols, often used for decorative purposes, e.g. pseudo-icons in one's status bar) none of the few fonts I had thus far installed had configured themselves as a default font family. font-awesome... did.

So all of a sudden my app launcher, my terminal windows, and some websites (including the Arch wiki) were displaying in font-awesome.

Some features font-awesome has:
- ligatures which convert the string "OSI" to the Open Source Initiative logo, "windows" to the Windows logo, and of course "at" to an @.

Some features font-awesome does not have:
- visible colons, virgules, or periods
Did I mention this was happening in my terminal?

The solution was just to install another font that considers itself a default font family (e.g. DejaVu) and clear the font cache. I managed to find a post by someone on Reddit who had the same problem, same font, same window manager, in a different operating system (Void.)

Links

• UK signal boost: this post by kaberett about PIP/UC reform (the House of Lords is debating it next Tuesday)


• Five Lego walkers versus seven different obstacles. They are all very good robots and doing their best.


• New Ann Leckie book on the way! Set in the Radch!

Nature
Saw a red fox crossing the road last week.