And another interview today

Jul. 24th, 2025 01:48 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
It never rains, but it sure does pour.

(Although this really is a somewhat archaic construction and doesn't mean what I've formed it to mean here. I do know that.)

**************************


Read more... )

22 July 2025 Tuesday

Jul. 22nd, 2025 11:27 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 ONE: 


and... TWO: 

and wow, my eyeballs, I can't comprehend what colour rewards are happening here... Peace and long life!
oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
[personal profile] oursin

Paging the ponceyness police, what?

It’s never been easier to build an impressive-looking library, especially if you’re mostly interested in the colour and size of your books. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

In an age of constant scrolling, there is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever, thanks to an increase in booksellers who trade in “books by the metre”.

You know, I would be just slightly more sympathetic with people who are about The Aesthetic of BOOOX if they would ever demonstrate a touch of quirkiness and have shelves of (okay maybe nicely preserved copies) old Penguins? or those rather nifty little volumes of The Traveller's Library. Or just something that would suggest that this is more than just a step up from manifesting your Posh by having a lovely set of Heron Books Collectors Editions (bound in sumptious leatherette).

I think that if you're going to have Randomly Chosen For the Decorative Vibe books scattered about your pad, you should actually have to read at least some of them. And be able to respond to somebody asking about them without having to resort to whatever garbled wifflewoffle some AI engine serves up.

Okay, I am now meanly recalling the complete set of the works of Bulwer-Lytton in very good condition that lurked on a shelf in a bookshop I used to frequent. And also wondering as to whether there are collected editions of CP Snow's yawn-worthy 'Strangers and Brothers' sequence.

On the other hand, they might pick up something that they enjoyed and found engrossing, and develop the habit of reading. I would be there for that, in fact.

My own aesthetic is, the books have taken over, what do you mean, curated? maniacal laughter.

Peridium (2017) · Alluvium (2018)

Jul. 22nd, 2025 10:57 am
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
[personal profile] pauraque
I am very interested to play Powerhoof's new game The Drifter, but I'm really trying not to buy any more games until I play some of the ones I have already bought, so I played... two of Powerhoof's old free games? Wait, I think I messed this up.

These are both horror point-and-clicks, and they're both game jam entries so they're short, less than an hour each.


Peridium

in a dim research lab a man stands outside a locked door and says there's nothing human out there for a thousand kilometers

A researcher is trapped on an Antarctic base where something has gone horrifically wrong. )


Alluvium

pink silhouette of a man stands in a neon colored camp site with camp fire highlighted

A plane crash survivor keeps talking about the things 'we' had to do to survive... yet he seems to be the only one around. )


Though I think both of these games are worth playing if you like horror, I wouldn't recommend playing them back-to-back in an evening like I did, because I was still thinking about Peridium while I was playing Alluvium, and I kept looking for similarities and got really distracted. So, play them, but not like that. Or maybe play the commercial games you have purchased that are languishing in your Steam library. Do as I say, not as I do.

Well, I'm home

Jul. 22nd, 2025 08:36 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

The trip home was OK as these things go: I ordered a cab to take us to Heathrow, using the service Mom always used, and paid in cash using my half of the British money she'd had in an envelope, including a generous tip for the driver. We had time to finish things like washing our dishes and clearing Mom's data off her computer before leaving, and enough time at the airport to be at the gate before boarding started, but not enough to get bored. I arranged the cab, and got us all aisle seats for the flight home, on Sunday, and then turned everything over to Cattitude and Adrian once we got to Heathrow. By the time we got off the plane, I was so worn out that I was stopping occasionally to lean on the walls in the airport, but fortunately doing better once we got home.

I woke up this morning at 7:30 Boston time, which seemed good--about 7.5 hours sleep, and back on my home time zone. The milk from before we left was iffy but the cut of tea tasted OK. The igniters for the stove burners didn't work when I turned them on, but I remembered both that we have long matches for just this purpose, and where we keep them, so that was OK for the moment, and we can investigate that further when Adrian and Cattitude are also awake.

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.
cimorene: Illustration from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back showing a pink-frosted layer cake on a plate being cut into with a fork (dessert)
[personal profile] cimorene
The cake in this recipe is delicious. It could be very successful muffins, like without any icing.

Wax increased the amount of lemon in the frosting to about three times the recipe so it is noticeably tart, but basically it's just way too much butter and sugar for the amount of cake involved. It's fine if I leave most of the frosting scraped off on the plate. But the lemony quality of the strong lemon curd is actually lovely; it's the underlying buttercream that's wrong, so another type of icing with lemon curd might be great.

Basically Wax concluded that she forgot American cake recipes typically have about four times as much frosting as the cakes can hold as well as too much sugar in the frosting itself. I usually have more tolerance for sweeter dessert than she does, but in this case the cake is SO good that I couldn't stand to let it be drowned in excessive buttercream.

Our Street

Jul. 22nd, 2025 01:16 pm
cimorene: Blue text reading "This Old House" over a photo of a small yellow house (knypplinge)
[personal profile] cimorene
Our neighbor across the street who has been replacing the midcentury asbestos shingle on his house with new wooden clapboard at the rate of one face of the house per summer also has a lockdown baby who is a toddler now. We aren't very well acquainted like other people seem to be to their neighbors towards whom they have positive attitudes - [personal profile] waxjism and I wave hi at them but otherwise only talk about practical issues, like our shared mailbox stand and when their outdoor cat stayed away a few days; though they gave us a bottle of their homemade apple juice a few years ago. But since he has built a scaffolding on the side of the house across the street from our diningroom window and spent a lot of time all summer working there with power tools while our window was open just opposite and a small human was often in the yard demanding his attention, I've frequently heard him speaking to it, and he's definitely a Swedish-speaking finn like Wax. (Today he was teaching it to ride a tiny bike with training wheels outside our window.) (Due to cat divorce, the diningroom is a bedroom; Wax sleeps there with Sipuli and I babysit her there during the day, and before that I slept there with Snookums and Tristana while she was in the bedroom with Anubis.)

The weird part is that when we first moved here, my MIL's ex-boss, a retired high school English teacher and principal who also taught one of my BILs, lived on the other side (they downsized to an apartment last year), and his wife told us that she thought the constructing neighbor's family was Finnish! It's hard to imagine how that misunderstanding could come to be, unless his wife is a finn perhaps; I don't think I've overheard her speaking with the children. The new neighbors who bought the English teacher's house are also Swedish-speaking and have two toddlers and a small dog (possibly two small dogs?). This is a relief to me because sudden use of Finnish can make my language center stall out, unlike Swedish.

The other two houses on this block of our street are abandoned eyesores and public health menaces owned by the city, which has done nothing in the last couple decades of its ownership to demolish them or secure the property. (The rooves and trees AND POWERLINES in the yard are falling down and the guy who they finally hired to do an asbestos assessment last year told us it was appallingly bad, actually risky even to collect the samples that told them it's full of asbestos.)

We got a notice that they are going to build a new fire station there and close the end of the street off from the highway, which is exciting news, but experience with the city government suggests it's not likely to happen this decade.
jadelennox: a sign which reads "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GORGEOUS LIBRARIANS"  (liberrian: girls girls girls)
[personal profile] jadelennox

I have started rereading the Amelia Peabody mysteries. It makes me sad that they've definitely had at least a light visit from the suck fairy [note], because I've never realised before how much Amelia is in love with Evelyn in The Crocodile On The Sandbank.

She's obviously got it bad for Emerson as well, but my goodness her jealous desire to spend her life with her beautiful Evelyn is overwhelming.


Note: Amelia was never supposed to be a reliable narrator, and her Victorian Orientalism was always to be read as historical. It's just that in modern conventions we -- correctly -- no longer feel it's okay to portray the likable heroines of (wholly unrealistic) historical romances with historically accurate racism. [back]

little vent...

Jul. 21st, 2025 08:59 pm
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 all right, now that ad blocker isn't working now, I have decided WHATEVER product interrupts what I am watching? I will AVOID that product, Period.
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend.

Nera has been helping her father at the titular Station her whole life. Or...her whole life-ish thing. Because Nera has only ever been in the Station, so she only interacts with her father, the dead, and the dogs who guide the dead on their way through the Veil and keep them safe. (The dogs. OMG the dogs. So many good doggos in this book.) Charlie has just lost her sister, who is also her best friend, and her family is falling apart. On top of it all, she's been seeing ghosts--but never the one she most wants to see.

But when Charlie finds the Station, she hopes for a chance to reverse what was lost. Nera is astonished--delighted--to meet another living person who can share at least some of her ghost experiences. But all is not well with the Station itself--dark forces threaten its peaceful work of helping spirits leave this world for what comes after. They want to shatter and rend. And the dark forces know all of Nera and Charlie's most vulnerable points.

Like life, this book is so full of both grief and joy. Both are extremely well-drawn and intense--I started reading this book on an airplane and stopped almost immediately, because I could see that there would be moments of stronger emotion than I wanted to invite by myself in seat 16B. If you've suffered loss recently, time your reading of this book carefully, but I think it can be very healing. I think this is one of those rare books that can be enjoyed by many but will be desperately needed by some. There's so much heart here, for other people and of course dogs, but also for places. Highly recommended.

But why do they want to?

Jul. 21st, 2025 06:12 pm
oursin: My photograph of Praire Buoy sculpture, Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, overwritten with Urgent, Phallic Look (urgent phallic)
[personal profile] oursin

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

You know, women are notably broader in their reading parameters? I'm not convinced by this argument:
He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Or maybe it just Wasn't All That?

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Because the damselly laydeez never, ever dabble in the waters of crime or genre fiction....

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

I scheduled two interviews today

Jul. 22nd, 2025 12:34 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
With a generous leave at one commute schedule and 2 hours between them


But then it turned out the first one had inexplicably been scheduled in GMT so I didn’t eat and barely made it out the door. And I’ll have to jog to get from one to the other, too!

21 July 2025 Monday

Jul. 21st, 2025 08:13 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 ONE: 

...
...
TWO: 

Maintaining step work to retain this list:
 
1) Hartnell
2) Troughton
3) Pertwee
4) Baker
5) Davison
6) Baker
7) McCoy
8) McGann
9) Eccleston
10) Tennant
11) Smith
12) Capaldi (who I have not viewed much of…)
13) Whitaker
14) Gatwa
 
I think I got those all accurate, but that is the point of using steps usually counted to repeat this list… Another way to cope, yes, but hopefully the work will help later on! 
 

(no subject)

Jul. 21st, 2025 09:39 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] coughingbear and [personal profile] kerk_hiraeth!

FIC: Open Water (Star Trek, K/S)

Jul. 21st, 2025 12:17 am
laurajv: Holmes & Watson's car is as cool as Batman's (Default)
[personal profile] laurajv
Open Water (6287 words) by Laura JV
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock, Amanda Grayson & Spock, Sarek & Spock (Star Trek)
Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock (Star Trek), Amanda Grayson, Sarek (Star Trek), Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Vulcan Characters (Star Trek)
Additional Tags: Episode: s02e05 Amok Time (Star Trek: The Original Series), Episode: s01e14 Court Martial (Star Trek: The Original Series), Episode: s02e19 The Immunity Syndrome, Episode: s02e15 Journey to Babel, Family Issues
Summary:

The Intrepid is an offer, and a threat, and eventually a lifeline, but Spock cannot be other than he is.

petra: Superman looking downward with a pensive expression (Clark - Beautiful night)
[personal profile] petra
The sidekick with no fear (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DCU (Comics), Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent & James "Jimmy" Olsen
Characters: James "Jimmy" Olsen, Clark Kent
Additional Tags: Drabble, Crack
Summary:

Jimmy's not from around here either.

*

Inspired by this Tumblr post.

A good grade

Jul. 20th, 2025 04:16 pm
azurelunatic: A glittery black pin badge with a blue holographic star in the middle. (blue star)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
One of the LED bulbs in the bathroom vanity developed a distracting (which is code for sensory nope) flicker. Since the porch fixture takes the same bulb, I proposed that the ailing bulb become a public nuisance rather than a private one.


One of my oncologists (I believe I have dubbed her Dr. Bitsblobs, the oncology gynecologist) is retiring soon. So she has been bidding her patients farewell. Apparently I am a "gold star" patient in terms of trying my best to comply with medical advice, and for self-advocacy. A good grade in cancer, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve.

vital functions

Jul. 20th, 2025 11:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

Sunshine Revival Challenge #6

Jul. 20th, 2025 05:53 pm
pauraque: world of warcraft character (wow)
[personal profile] pauraque
[community profile] sunshine_revival's next challenge is:
Game Night
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Well, since you asked. :P

I've played video games for as long as I can remember. My dad was an early adopter of technology and he brought home an IBM clone in the late 1980s, when I was in grade school. He would download tons of games from BBSes for my brother and me. Sometimes these were pirated games from big companies, but this was also a huge heyday for what we would now call "indie" games—stuff coded by one guy in his basement or a couple of college students in the computer lab. Platformers, shooters, puzzle games, arcade clones, roguelikes, RPGs, text adventures, you name it, we played it. Often we didn't know what a game even was until we ran it, because while the original BBS post might have explained what it was, all we saw was an EXE file that was limited to eight characters.

I think gaming was always social for me. Some of the early games my brother and I played did have hot-seat multiplayer (alternating who's sitting at the keyboard) but if it was a single-player game we'd just take turns, and shamelessly order each other around if we thought the other wasn't playing it right. XD When I got a little older and more of my friends started to have computers or consoles at home, inviting people over to play games was a huge thing. I was just recently reminiscing about going over to my friend's house to play Myst, which was a massive phenomenon in 1993. We were young and the logic puzzles were too hard for us, so it would just degenerate into heckling the game and each other until we collapsed in hysterical laughter. That's still one of my favorite gaming memories... and I still don't think I've ever actually beaten Myst.

cut for length )

National Gallery

Jul. 20th, 2025 09:14 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

So we went to the National Gallery, a few bus stops away, and looked at paintings. I wasn't up for a huge amount of walking, but bny the time I was ready to leave, so were Adrian and Cattitude. We spent a few minutes just enjoyong being in Trafalgar Square on a sunny afternoon, then walked to Charing Cross to get the Underground. Annoyingly, while it was (as whichever app Cattitude was using said) only a few minutes walk to Charing Cross, there was a lot more walking underground, and we had to go down several flights of stairs.

ETA: I was emotionally worn out to the point that I was glad it was just t he three of us yesterday, not socializing with anyone else. I hadn't realized that beforehand, only that I was tired enough that committing to anything involving other people seemed imprudent. Being around my brother for most of several consecutive days was a lot of 'there are people here,' even though, or because, much of it wasn't socializing so much as being near each other and sometimes asking whether we needed, or wanted, various items.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little my joints hurt by the time we got back to Mom's flat. I took both naproxen and acetominophen before we left, and wore my better walking shoes and a pair of smartwool socks, and the combination sdeems to have done me a lot of good.

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).

Culinary

Jul. 20th, 2025 07:44 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

Nifty New [community profile] fan_writers Community

Jul. 20th, 2025 12:38 pm
jesse_the_k: Scrabble triple-value badge reading "triple nerd score" (word nerd)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

[community profile] fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by [personal profile] china_shop and [personal profile] mific

Banner shows busy hands typing on laptop and handwritten edited page

umadoshi: (berries in bowls (roxicons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
Reading: Mostly non-fiction last week, oddly. Still slowly reading through An Everlasting Meal, as well as flipping through a couple of new cookbooks in hard copy*. I also started reading Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.

As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! But [personal profile] scruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)

*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.

Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)

(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)

Cooking/Baking: Mid-week, [personal profile] scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Blueberry Strawberry Breakfast Cake. It was tasty enough, but not so tasty that I immediately understood why it's one of the two most popular recipes on the site; that said, in addition to swapping the berries, we didn't have fresh lemon zest on hand and used the granulated peel from Silk Road (and also, my impression is that while blueberry and lemon are an iconic flavor pairing, that's not true of strawberry and lemon) and did the vinegar-in-milk substitution for buttermilk. So who knows.

Yesterday [personal profile] scruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.

20 July 2025 Sunday

Jul. 20th, 2025 09:29 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 ONE:
....
...
...
TWO:  Buenos Dias!
althea_valara: Final Fantasy X's Yuna, dancing on the water during The Sending (Yuna)
[personal profile] althea_valara
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-2.png

Challenge #6

Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


I don't watch TV (except for game shows during dinner, and that's more mom's doing than mine). I don't watch movies. It's rare I read books these days. What I DO do, though, is play video games, mostly (Japanese) Role Playing Games. Those games are filled with stories, which satisfies my need for escapism into other worlds. I also find that I very much prefer my media to be interactive these days; when I do try to watch a movie, I often get antsy and bored because it's so passive.

Streamed Games



I'm currently playing three games on my Twitch Stream:

* Final Fantasy V for the Four Job Fiesta, Mondays at 7:30pm CDT
* Final Fantasy XI, where we're currently in the Chains of Promathia expansion, Fridays at 7:30pm CDT
* Final Fantasy XIV, doing side content, Saturdays at 7:30pm CDT

...uh, yeah, I LOVE FINAL FANTASY. I have played non-Final Fantasy games on stream - most recently was the Nintendo Switch game Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles which was chill and delightful. And I really hope to play more non-Final Fantasy games in the future.

Final Fantasy V is a single-player game, in which there are a multitude of jobs your four characters can play as. The Four Job Fiesta is a challenge in which you are assigned four jobs to play, one for each character, and you can only play as those jobs. It's usually a fun, grand time, but I have not had luck with the RNG this year; I've gotten terrible jobs that I don't enjoy playing as (so far: Thief, Mystic Knight, and Beastmaster). Yuck! But I intend to continue the run.

Both FFXI and FFXIV are MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). FFXI has been around for over 20 years (!!!) and I used to play it heavily about 12 years ago. Back then, I played with other players, because it was the best way to progress. The game is much more solo-friendly now, and I'm playing through story on a new alt, so I've been soloing everything with Trusts (non-player characters).

FFXIV is most efficient when played with other players, and yet I do a lot of things solo in that game too. I'm pretty shy and have social anxiety, so it can be hard for me to find the courage to play with others. I'm getting better at doing that, though! I've been joining some Party Finders that sound fun and interesting, including a challenge run of an Alliance raid (we went all healers!) and a Blue Mage spell learning party.

I'm grateful there's so many different ways to advance in FFXIV, and I can do it in a way that's comfy for me. But yes, I do want to practice putting myself out there and being brave.

Casual Games



I play a number of casual games, too! These I can pick up and play for a few minutes here and there.

On my Fire tablet, I play Word Shaker (a Boggle clone) and Solitaire City where I am VERY partial to the Yukon solitaire game.

On my iPhone, I play WordScapes. My particular version sets of the board as a crossword.

On my computer, I'm playing Cats In Boxes which is a delightful puzzle game in which you direct cats to push boxes around so the boxes land on the shaded squares. I'm really enjoying it!

So yeah, I'm a BIG gamer. I enjoy casual games because they distract me from my thoughts and give me a few minutes to reset. I enjoy my (J)RPGs for the amazing stories and fantastic characters. I hope to be gaming the rest of my life!

Rebooting...

Jul. 20th, 2025 12:23 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
My computer died... about a week ago, hence the lengthy silence. The updating of this replacement is underway and shall be on going for a while so just to let y'all know. Peace!
jadelennox: Girlyman: Does Nate ever think of anything he doesn't say? (girlyman: nate doesn't think)
[personal profile] jadelennox

if I were a fae of some sort in a punk band I would simply call my first album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pixies.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

elf: A purple rook with wings spread; the word "Glitch" above it and "Don't Panic" below. (Glitch - Don't Panic)
[personal profile] elf
1. Chaos. Last night, the building across the street caught on fire.

Again.

It's an abandoned/defunct factory; this is the... fifth? time it's caught on fire in the last couple of years. (The owner who acquired it after the previous owner died has been trying to sell it for far more than anyone wants to pay.)

2. Discord. This morning: Skipped my GURPS game (sigh) for round 3 of 4 of the Seattle Worldcon virtual business meeting. 3.75 hours of intense Roberts Rules neepery wrapped around 16 action items. 14 passed, 2 failed. I took notes on (1) everything that happened and (2) How To Bog Down A Worldcon Business Meeting, should I ever be so inclined.

There are a substantial number of people involved for whom Roberts Rules is apparently their main fandom. The Worldcon Business Meeting is their Pennsic. Some of them get annoyed at people who aren't interested in RRONR procedures as much as they want changes to Worldcon rules.

Also I have volunteered to be on two committees; we'll see if I get accepted to either.

3. Confusion. Family birthday party. Eldest daughter came over to cook tacos yay. Much bustling around a small kitchen with people no longer used to having three butts in a one-butt sized space.

Tacos were yummy. Cake and ice cream were yummy. French-press coffee was yummy; I wound up thinking "I should do that more often" and then remembered why I don't - because the cleanup is a hassle, and also, I prefer the coffee hotter than the press makes it. (5 minutes of sitting in a glass cylinder is cooler than I prefer.) But it's nice once in a while.

4. Bureaucracy. 2 hrs of OTW Board public meeting. (The meeting is 1 hr, but I'm involved as a volunteer, so had to be there in advance.) It ran short - instead of the normal "dozen questions emailed in advance + 10-20 questions asked in session," it was "5 questions sent in advance and only 4 more asked in session." All questions answered during the meeting; none left over to get posted on the website later.

5. Aftermath. Kid the Elder has gone home with doggo via Lyft; I am trying to catch up on the several chat channels with all sorts of stuff in them. Also now trying to figure out what writing deadlines I have pressing that have been shoved aside during prep for these two meetings.

Now what? )

holy shit

Jul. 19th, 2025 06:34 pm
paperghost: (Go mouse! (NSFW))
[personal profile] paperghost
In last year's Artfight, I only drew 7 things. This year, I've drawn 22... and the month has a few weeks left. Holy shit!!!!

I'm currently resting and aim at mostly doing revenges until my next days off, but come join me!
cimorene: The words "DISTANT GIBBERING" hand lettered in serif capitals (sinister)
[personal profile] cimorene
After my first driving lesson with a clutch and an expert instructor, I felt cautiously optimistic and a bit excited. I knew I was going to need a lot of practice for the mechanical habits, but I was having fun.

After the first lesson with the driving simulator I kind of feel like I did terrible. I don't say this is a tone of despair, because I know it's partly the fault of the simulator, among other things, but I did get quite annoyed at myself.

I also felt like I needed more repetition of just starting, slowing and stopping, and shifting gear before I tried combining them too quickly the way the simulator was asking. I'd only driven half an hour before the lesson started and was not ready yet to shift into 3rd, floor it to reach 50 kph as quickly as possible, then immediately shift to 2nd and brake to slow while looking over my shoulder for a left turn. This is supposed to be a driving simulator, not a street chase video game! Of course I forgot the turn signal one time and released the clutch too fast another! Also, why would you ever go to 3rd gear and 50 kph in a dense urban environment for less than a block? Why couldn't you practice those skills in a realistic scenario? Like a highway?

But anyway, the point is: there are a fixed number of driving lessons included in this course, so it might not be possible to practice each skill more before moving on. And I've always been terrible at video games. And sports. And coordination, if you don't mean the kind of fine control used for art. Though in retrospect, I did forget to take my methylphenidate first, and it should statistically make a significant increase in how safely I drive.

Mission accomplished

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:36 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

Seeking beta for MASH fic

Jul. 19th, 2025 01:05 pm
nocowardsoul: young lady in white and gentleman speaking in a hall (Default)
[personal profile] nocowardsoul
Is anyone willing to beta a MASH fanfic, not quite 2000 words? It's written like an episode so half is BJ and Potter and half is about Hawkeye and Charles (and Hornblower). I can't return the favor because I can never think of things to say about fic.
cimorene: Illustration from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back showing a pink-frosted layer cake on a plate being cut into with a fork (dessert)
[personal profile] cimorene
Something I read recently - I think a vintage women's magazine from the 20s, but I'm not positive - mentioned "eggs Florentine". I did a quick web search, not having heard of this before, and learned that this, also called a Florentine omelette, is an omelette with cheese (traditionally swiss or gruyere) and spinach filling. Dishes named "Florentine" often have spinach in them, apparently. I found a recipe to try, because I love spinach dishes, and we had it for dinner today with bread rolls. I made the filling with pepper gouda and a bit of parmesan because that's the cheese we had, and it came out great!

Now Wax is baking an almond layer cake with lemon curd buttercream because her favorite aunt is coming to stay on Monday. She asked me what kind of cake, and almond layer cake with vanilla was my suggestion. I subsequently remembered I've been craving carrot cake and she said she'd make one of those too, but we'll have to buy cream cheese first.

UGH

Jul. 19th, 2025 12:50 pm
paperghost: (tasty)
[personal profile] paperghost
I already knew that a lot of online stores have a certain price to qualify for free shipping. Today is a day off, so I'm requesting an online order at my job (making them do my job for me lol), and since I have free delivery that wouldn't be an issue. Except THEY have a minimum price or else you'll get a fee. I don't pay for shipping. But I would have to pay $7 for having an order under $35. So here I am, ordering some more food for the coming week just so I don't have to pay this. Jesus!!!

Look, at least it's all food and things I need. I have a con in 4 weeks so I can't spend any fun money until mid-August.

Some v misc things

Jul. 19th, 2025 03:47 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

***

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.

***

Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

***

Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

(What next, Wombles porn?)

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.

pauraque: drawing of a wolf reading a book with a coffee cup (customer service wolf)
[personal profile] pauraque
Almost immediately upon the release of ChatGPT, everybody in the educational field realized it could produce an unlimited variety of essays that would pass muster in a high school or undergrad classroom, and might even get a better grade than a real student's work. Some concluded this meant the end of teaching students to write. John Warner, a college writing instructor, sees it differently—if the writing assignments we give our students are something ChatGPT can easily do, that means there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been teaching writing. This isn't a new problem, it's a decades-old problem that new technology is forcing us to finally confront: in our classrooms, we have forgotten what writing is for.

He argues that the process of writing offers invaluable opportunities not only to communicate ideas but to help us learn to think—to analyze our outer and inner worlds, and to synthesize meaningful conclusions. It's a tool for reflecting on and organizing our messy interiority, and (perhaps) using it to convey to other people something of what it's like to be us. This perfectly aligns with my own experience of writing, in which I often don't entirely understand what I think until I write it (and I am currently learning what I think about this book by writing this post) so I will admit that I'm not the best judge of whether Warner successfully communicates this to people who don't already believe it, but he seems plausibly convincing to me.

But education in the US has become increasingly dominated by teaching to the test rather than teaching anyone to think. (Warner traces this to Cold War-era anxieties over being outcompeted by rising economic powers like Japan, leading American legislators to push hyper-standardized measures of school success.) Students have adapted to this by learning only to write what the teacher expects to read—to produce essays that get everything superficially "right" but offer no individual thoughts or insights.

cut for length )

not quite done

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:43 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that \I hade worked steadily for longer that the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

We reached a point yesterday that I could be satisfied just packing everyting the three f us have decided to take--photos, the gorgeous candlesticks Mom left to Adrian (officially tp me, but she had discussed them with Acrian), and a few other s,mall mementoes, but there's a stack of paper that Mark wants to take a second look at: he was lookinmg both for financial paperwork as well as photos and other mementoes. It felt like it might be 45 minutes more work today, but could take tjhree times as long if we had tried to push through last night.

I told Andy and Adrian to go out and play yesterday, so they spent the afternoon at Kew Gardens. It is raining steadily now, and foercast to do so for several hours. I#m thinking I want to do not much today, just finish the tasks here, and maybe go out and do something interesting tomorrow, before leaving for Boston on Monday.

I am very glad we saw [personal profile] liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.
petrea_mitchell: (Default)
[personal profile] petrea_mitchell
After the second session of the virtual WSFS business meeting:

  1. Another thing it's great to miss is when someone steps up to the mic, starts talking, and is immediately interrupted by half the room shouting "Say your name!!" because people are supposed to say their name before talking so the secretary can include it in the minutes. Not a problem online because not only can you not hear most of the rest of the room, everyone already comes labeled with their names.

    First-time speakers are nervous and forget stuff like this, and having people suddenly shouting at them rattles them further. When people talk about the business meetings feeling unwelcoming, I really think it's more this sort of thing than any of the structural isms.
  2. The words "I see several motions to amend" belong in a horror story.
  3. I'm sure someone thought they were being really funny nominating George R. R. Martin for the trial committee, but what if he takes it seriously and shows up tomorrow and promises to perform the duties to the best of his ability if elected? Who's the joke on then, huh?

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