agonyaunt | Member Posts

One out with a hamstring injury. Another with a cold. I'm still in recovery. Two more who can't be relied on.

It's gonna be a rough week.

I'm at the tail end of a racking cough (not RSV, not COVID, not Flu A/B), being managed with cold-and-flu ephenphedrine or whatever that stuff is called. Doc decided against antibiotics, which is a pity because antibiotics would have cleared this up fast, and instead I'm supposed to survive on about 3 hours of sleep a night because the other 3 hours I would get is taken up with racking coughs. Then again, I often reach for the antibiotics a bit faster than perhaps we should so...

I'm just hoping I haven't passed it on to anyone I've seen this week. UGH.

the_shoshanna

I haven't been very enthused about making food lately; I've felt behind on things and not interested in planning or making meals, and if I lived alone I'd probably have eaten a lot of peanut butter over the past few days.

But! Today I went for a jog in the morning after several days of being unhappily sedentary, and got pretty much everything prepped for the service I'm helping run on Sunday, and decided that by god I was going to cook some of the things that have been on my to-do list!

Before we went away last month I made a dinner of roasted vegetable ratatouille, and we had enough left over to freeze, and it was just the right amount to top a pizza with, which I did last week. And it was great having pizza topping ready to go, only having to make the crust -- especially in the immediate aftermath of getting home and collapsing; before we left, I prepped and froze several meal bases with that in mind. So today I made a huge batch of ratatouille: five cookie sheets full of chunked eggplant and zucchini and bell pepper and onion, tossed with tomato paste, garlic, herbs, and olive oil, and that massive load of veg all roasted down into just four servings to put in the freezer. Eventually they will go on pizza, or pasta, or gnocchi, or directly into our mouths.

Also today I made a similarly huge pan of sauteed ground turkey and kale, with onion and herbs&spices; it's the base of a tomato ragù, but I froze two servings without the tomato sauce, and the third will get simmered in tomato sauce tonight (which came out of the freezer!) and go over pasta.

I had hoped to also make an apple-cheddar bread, but I'm out of time. (And energy.)

Tomorrow is Pride, and I'll be walking a lot: half an hour to the start and then another half hour home from the end of the march, plus the actual march, plus however much we wander around the post-march festival; I didn't get to see any of it last year because I had to bolt immediately as the march ended, to go perform a wedding that kept me waiting for more than four hours and ended up not even happening. I hope to convince Geoff to go for takeout burgers and fries for dinner tomorrow!

shewhostaples

Two fics in two weeks, gosh.

The first one is simultaneously not really fic and extremely fic: it's a smutty sequel to faites-lui mes aveux, a somewhat chaste I wrote for

femslashex... getting on for eight years ago now, good grief. I'm not sure it makes much sense without the original original, but never mind.

ardentes, folles, enfiévrées

(Neither of them are actually in French, and I translated pretty much everything I quoted, too.)

The second one is part of the magnificent weirdness that is

intoabar. Harriet Vane goes into a bar and meets Mercutio.

through the long horror of that piteous night

I have a third fic in the works but it's been that way for a long time and I don't know when I'll get it finished. 11000 words and counting. I've also been working on some original original stuff, which again I am not sure that anyone else is going to want to read, and again, I don't care, I'm just glad to be writing.

petra

I caught up with all the requests at my Donate for a Drabble post.

If you have recently donated 25 USD or the local equivalent to a food bank/pantry, the ACLU, or a Pride-related organization that includes trans-positive outreach, hit me up and I'll write for you!

I have just edited Project Hail Mary (book or movie) and The Pushcart War into my fandom list.

*

Ways to say "I love you" (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Ray Kowalski, Benton Fraser
Additional Tags: Drabble, Headaches & Migraines
Summary:

Ray wears his sunglasses at night.

*

Real vampires don't sparkle (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darren Nichols & Geoffrey Tennant
Characters: Darren Nichols, Geoffrey Tennant
Additional Tags: Dracula References, Drabble
Summary:

Geoffrey disagrees with Darren about the cosmetic choices in his production of Dracula.

Current Mood: fulfilled
Current Music: I wear my sunglasses at night so I can see

princessofgeeks

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aflaminghalo

Finally got to take myself off to He-Man and oh that was enjoyable. There were bits that could have been tightened, and bits that would have been better if they'd been allowed to breathe, but then i remind myself that it's a He-Man movie and any issues I had were very much outweighed by how much I enjoyed it. (And while he didn't get any lines as awesome as Langella asking about the loneliness of good, Leto was a very decent Skeletor which, I have to admit, does nark me off a bit. I think he watched Tim Curry chew the scenery as Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers.)

So a nice afternoon. And then because I made the mistake of going out without a mask, and the cinema is surrounded by evil, scheming trees, I came home and had a massive nap because the pollen count absolutely wiped me out.

maju

It was very hot and oppressive yesterday afternoon, and although the thunderstorm brought the temperature down slightly, it was still by no means cool. When I got up this morning it was still 22C/72F, and that was the lowest point. I went for a walk at about 5:15 am, but the oppressive warmth and humidity plus lack of sleep (I had one of those nights where I just couldn't get to sleep) meant it was an extremely low energy walk as well as shorter than usual at just over 5 km/3 miles. Then at breakfast Aria asked me to walk her to school again, but fortunately having breakfast had boosted my energy slightly. I had a short nap before lunch but it didn't refresh me as much as I was hoping.

I'm not sure how this afternoon is going to pan out, because the girls have early dismissal due to the heat - not all of the school classrooms have air conditioning.

maju

https://maju01.livejournal.com/2967255.html

oursin

Surprise, surprise: anti-air-pollution intervention has measurable health benefits: Emergency hospital admissions fell after introduction of London’s T-charge and Ulez, study suggests.

***

A celebration of the end of England’s badger cull, despite the loss of nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped unnecessarily; Cattle in England to get tuberculosis vaccine from 2030 as badger cull to end

***

Miller helps save watermill for the second time.

***

Memories of Spare Rib (I do wonder if the lack of online availability as at time of writing was due to the BL cyberattack and it may be restored?)

***

‘The first humble beginnings of an agitation’: the women’s suffrage petition of 7 June 1866

***

An Unreliable Archive of Internationalism: The Women's Christian College, Madras: 'the significant, overlooked work of colonised women in shaping the terms of the institution’s commitment to internationalism'.

***

From Olympia to Hyde Park: British anti-fascism in the summer of 1934

cimorene

As you may remember, my wife,

waxjism, is currently into Heated Rivalry. She's reblogging the same gifsets twenty times a day and she's reading nothing but Heated Rivalry anymore. It completely displaced her previous fannish interest in 9-1-1, by the way, and she didn't even watch the end of the season of that - which is probably an improvement for her because Heated Rivalry, the show, is well written, meticulously planned, brilliantly acted, and made with extraordinary care to every detail of photography and editing and visual design. In contrast, while 911 is a good time, it's a network prime time soap opera churned out by an underpaid writers' room and a questionably reasonable showrunner. Of course 911, (sociologically) intriguingly, seems to be in the midst of making their male BFFs a canon pairing ( Read more... )

So anyway. Wax is now reading fanfiction for Heated Rivalry, which is a miniseries made out of a romance novel about gay hockey players. Wax and I are veterans of hockey RPF, having both read it and followed NHL hockey for maybe 5-8 years (I started to get fed up with the evil ownership and conservative culture around 2016-18). In hockey RPF the level of hockey knowledge is obviously high and sports fandom was the canon text. But this show's broad appeal has brought in a lot of fans with no knowledge of hockey at all, and as always with a very popular fandom, a critical mass of the ones with no knowledge of hockey also lack any sense that any knowledge about hockey is necessary to writing about professional hockey players. (It would totally be possible to write fic about this show with no knowledge of hockey beyond what is shown onscreen, provided you simply paid attention to what was onscreen and used it; but this would probably require more attention to detail than is plausible in a person who is so enthusiastic that it doesn't occur to them to look up even a Wikipedia article's worth of information on the world and setting of the story they are writing.)

So there's apparently a huge range of mistakes about hockey, and even though this problem is so endemic that Wax is reading mistakes egregious enough to upset her multiple times a day and has been for months, the pain never dulls.

You know what this reminds me of? The last time I was reading for an extended time in the same fandom: I spent about a year intensively reading almost every last scrap (at the time) of Steve/Eddie fic in the Stranger Things fandom after season 4 (Here's my 75 bookmarks, mostly from 2022-2023). Stranger Things is about teenagers in 1980s midwestern America. The fandom appealed overwhelmingly to young people (although the show had a lot of nostalgic appeal for adults as well, they were definitely a minority of writers represented in fic). Also, less predictably, the plurality of the writers seemed to be from the UK (???). Like Heated Rivalry writers who don't know about hockey, these youngsters didn't know about the culture, technology, or slang of 1986 (including the parts that actually were shown onscreen, which again mirrors the Heated Rivalry writers).

After a while I was far more annoyed by ridiculous errors in technology and British dialogue that they didn't bother getting American-picked (it's a small percentage of young fanfic writers who think having a beta reader is worthwhile now; in fact it's quite popular and socially acceptable to post without rereading) than by anything that you could call bad writing in the traditional sense. At some point I got so annoyed with it all that I would have gratefully used a filter that only allowed fic by writers born before 1985 in North America (that's when I knew I needed to stop reading it, probably).

People have to start writing and keep writing to get really good. People have different taste. People have different skills. So there's no point holding it against anyone that they're young, or haven't been writing for that long, or are writing a different kind of fic than the kind you like because they're interested in different things than you.

On the other hand, everybody who doesn't bother to look it up when they don't know what a trade is, or how a cassette player works, or how hockey games are scored, or queer terminology in the 80s, is making a conscious choice they didn't have to make. They could have left it out if they didn't want to look it up and weren't sure! So it's absolutely fair to hold all of those things against them.

Of course, it would be difficult to filter, even theoretically, for writers who look everything up, so the quickest way to this more-relaxing reading experience is a writer who already knows. Hence "writer was alive in the 1980s" and "writer has been a hockey fan for years" would be highly useful filters if they were widely adopted.

(But they would also narrow the pool so much that most people wouldn't want to - be able to? - stick to them very long.)

oursin

Happy birthday,

ase!

dine

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jadelennox

Current Mood: sad

conuly

Jane Yolen, Author of 450 Books Including The Devil's Arithmetic, Dies at 87

topaz_eyes

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petra

We went to see the steam engine Big Boy No. 4014 at Letchworth State Park, which was fascinating, crowded, and hot. The enormous train whistle echoing through the gorge, which is known as the Grand Canyon of the East, will stick with me.

We got there two and a half hours early, so we settled in to wait. While I waited, I started writing Last Week Tonight: Petrova Truthers. Anyone who is familiar with Project Hail Mary -- particularly the book, but the movie, too -- and John Oliver's voice is invited to come help me with it.

After I got home, I shared the draft-so-far with

buggery, who read it aloud via phone and laughed immoderately. That was a great feeling.

My previous effort in John Oliver voice is:

Last Week This Benduday with J'hon Olivah: Clone Soldiers (5516 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (TV), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Characters: John Oliver, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker, Original Clone Character(s)
Additional Tags: In-Universe News Broadcast, John Oliver Pastiche, Jedi Discourse, Galactic Republic (Star Wars), Galactic Republic Politics (Star Wars), Parody of Satire, Turtles all the way down - Freeform, Screenplay/Script Format, Mancrush, Comedy, Dark Comedy
Series: Part 42 of Petra's Favorites Of Their Own Work, Part 1 of Star Wars Prequels in 2020s Media
Summary:

Last Week This Benduday with J'hon Olivah is a Coruscanti late-night talk and news satire program available throughout the Republic via the holonet. The main story from this week's episode discusses the clone soldiers fighting the current war, their origins, and what responsibility the Jedi Order bears for them, including interviews with current and former Jedi.

*

I am pretty sure that, while the Jedi pressure their heroes to do press, Eva Stratt has infinite numbers of better things to do.

What's the over/under on whether Grace does science education outreach via late night satire? John would hit on him so hard and tell him, "It's really, truly okay for you to say 'Fuck.'"

( Project Hail Mary spoiler )

Current Mood: #hotforstratt
Current Music: You're not ready for the world outside

landofnowhere

There's an oft-quoted line from a letter from Abraham Mendelssohn to his daughter Fanny saying that while her (now more famous) brother Felix may pursue music as a profession, for her it can only be an ornament, never the foundation of her being and doing.

However, recent research has pointed out that this line has been misquoted for ~150 years, and the original does not have this never. Instead it reads:

Die Musik wird für ihn vielleicht Beruf, während sie für dich stets nur Zierde, immer Bildungsmittel, Grundbaß deines Seins und Tuns werden kann und soll.

translated by HenselPushers into English as:

Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, always a means for self-cultivation, the root of your being and doing.

It's still very gender essentialist, as the full passage quoted in the article above makes clear, but provides more complexity.

I learned this from this HenselPushers post, which also provides relevant historical background.

topaz_eyes

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princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: tired

oursin

Off to the Royal Academy to see the Michaelina Wautier exhibition before it finishes.

A female artist who was pretty much erased; painted in genres not usually associated with lady painters; and we note the probable significance of having a male artist (brother) in the family, in fact it looks as though several paintings were collaborations between them.

Worth seeing, even if her paintings do not have the drama of her contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi.... (No decapitations.)

Observed while we were out a poster for this forthcoming exhibition: Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld, so I think that is going on the agenda.

Also considering the Escher exhibition, adjacent in Somerset House though I'm not sure one would want to combine the two?

conuly

and she said we still have them "because what if the dryer breaks" and I thought to myself "oh, yeah, that's gonna come back to haunt us" but I didn't say anything for fear of making it worse and today - the dryer broke!

*headdesk*

This is Jenn's fault. I will stand by that.

The first repair appointment I could make is next week, but that's okay, we won't have enough money until next week anyway.

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

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maju

The craft group was very lively and I felt fairly comfortable even though I didn't interact all that much with anybody. Everybody seemed friendly enough but they mostly knew each other and were exchanging news and gossip about things unfamiliar to me. I did get somewhat involved in a few discussions about what we were working on. What made me more comfortable was that I was sitting across from a woman who was also very quiet. There were approximately a dozen women there (no men), and they were mostly older than about 50 although there were two or three slightly younger women there as well. I plan to go again. I figure I'll eventually just be the quiet one who everybody is familiar with.

I worked on the off-white throw, which I'm doing in a fan pattern that's not too complicated, but after i'd done a couple of rows (i.e. towards the end of the evening) I discovered that the thing was not much more than two feet long when it should have been almost four feet long. I'm using what I thought was the right weight yarn (#4) and the size hook the pattern calls for, but maybe I'm using a lightweight 4 instead of a heavier weight 4. (Why wouldn't #4 yarn all be the same size? Apparently it's not.) The lady next to me said I should just rip it out and start again before I get too far into it, but I stubbornly finished the row I was on. Then this morning I unravelled the whole thing and started again from scratch, after looking at a few other throw patterns in #4 yarn and deciding that I like the fan pattern too much to give up on it.

My hearing aids seemed to perform well. Earlier that afternoon I discovered that I need to turn them up a couple of notches; maybe if I hadn't done that I would have thought they weren't working well. I think the audiologist said if I'm consistently turning them up the higher level can be set as my new normal, so I think I'll have her do that when I talk to her in a couple of weeks. It's hard to really know how they compare to the old ones since I can't do a side-by-side comparison, but even the old ones were definitely better than nothing.

I fell asleep fairly quickly last night but I was a bit restless for the first couple of hours and didn't wake up feeling very refreshed this morning. I'm extremely motivated to go out walking or running every morning now that I've got my long-distance walking companion, so I made myself go for a walk even though I didn't really feel much like it. The humidity was over 90% and it was already around 70F/21C so it felt like hard work, but I got it done. Then Aria asked me to walk her to school again, so that was almost two more km, this time in the sun. (My early morning walks are mostly in the shade because I go so early on purpose.)

My daughter bought me some French vanilla honeycomb ice cream yesterday and it's delicious, very rich and creamy with little crunchy bits of honeycomb.

ashelterofpages

Even though I keep falling off of updating, Ithink trying to have it in my mind to *try* and update each day is doing well for me. I'm coming back to putting a post up more often than I was, so yay on that?

I head out to Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon and I'm very much getting both nervous and super bouncy for it! I have to finish up some stuff tonight, but it's all very doable.

I went to my foot doc yesterday and I'm still in the surgical shoe until I get back here in August. This is fine because I don't find the shoe super uncomfortable or anything, but I'm still just a tiny bit sad I don't get Proper Shoes again yet.

One of the things I want to frantically pack is All The Notebooks. Which I'm shaking my head at because I don't *use* All The Notebooks, I just want to bring them just in case. Because of course. Anyway, the way I'm trying to keep myself from doing it is by making myself only bring the notebooks I use starting from yesterday. So I have my catch all notebook for like, brief journaling/to-do lists/anything like that, and I've got another notebook that I did a couple of doodles in for some friends. I did test some watercolors in a third one, but if I don't either properly write, or do a doodle in it, I'm going to try and resist the urge to take it with me. We'll see how it goes.

( If you'd like to see a silly mushroom scribbles, here is the spot. )

pauraque

I've seen a lot of interest in this postcyberpunk novel since it finally came back into print recently, in conjunction with the author finally releasing a second novel earlier this year. I knew that the author was a nonbinary trans woman (she/they) but what I didn't know until looking further was that she was also the author of The Androgyny RAQ, one of the only web resources in the 1990s on what we would now call nonbinary gender (though that term hadn't been coined yet). The site is of course extremely dated now, but as a teenager it was a lifeline to me. I studied it closely—even re-reading it now, every word is familiar. So that was quite an astounding and unexpected blast from the past.

But moving on to the book: In dystopian 23rd century Russia, Maya is a well-known "camera"—a journalist whose cybernetic implants allow her to record not just sight and sound, but all her sensory perceptions, emotions, and knowledge, and broadcast them to the online audience. She works remotely with Keishi, a "screener" who manages the broadcast and handles research in the vast realms of cyberspace. Maya is doing a story on a massacres perpetrated by a mind-controlled Unanimous Army, which for some reason no one seems to quite remember the details of. The closer the pair gets to the truth, the greater the danger, as the regime they live under punishes thought crimes, and Maya has already been convicted once before and had her forbidden thoughts and feelings forcibly suppressed. The authorities might not be so lenient a second time.

I started out liking this book—the worldbuilding is wonderfully trippy—but somewhere in the middle it lost me and didn't win me back. I was invested in Maya as a protagonist, but the focus kept getting pulled away from her. They find a key witness to the massacres, and once he gets going he monologues for several chapters at a time, and I just did not care about him or his story at all. Later in the book there are even more interminable sequences of characters talking at Maya about everything that happened after the massacres, explaining the labyrinthine plot to keep it covered up. Perhaps this was thematically intentional; Maya is just a "camera," her job is to learn of things that happened, not to participate. But this is why people came up with the writing rule that you should put your POV character where the most interesting events are: if all the interesting things happened to other characters, why isn't the book about them?

Similarly, we hear a lot about how the most technologically and socially advanced region of the world in this time period is Africa, how people aren't oppressed there and their internet is more sophisticated so they can upload themselves fully without losing anything, etc. But we never go there and see any of it, or even meet any actual African people. This struck me as using Africa as a mere prop, a superficial reversal of presumed reader expectations that still holds it at an exoticized distance.

The other thing I didn't like was how the F/F relationship was handled, and all of that is probably a

spoiler.

Maya's past thoughtcrime was that she's gay, and the authorities fitted her with a suppressor chip that made it impossible for her to feel sexual attraction or romantic love. This is presented as a horrific fate. And, I mean, in the context of the story, with it being forced on her, yes, it is horrific. But as an aroace reader, the presentation was incredibly uncomfortable. I know aspec identities were not well understood in the queer community in 1996; I know because I was there. But since the author doesn't seem to know that some people are naturally the way Maya is, she doesn't specify that the problem is that it was forced on her, and just writes the book as if not experiencing attraction is inherently tragic.

I also hated Keishi from pretty early on, because of how insistent she is that she is in love with Maya and how pushy she is about it. The (not unexpected) reveal that she was Maya's partner before the suppressor chip doesn't make it any better, because she has zero respect for Maya's agency and what she wants. She pressures Maya to deactivate the suppressor chip not because Maya is saying she wants to do that, but because Keishi wants their relationship back the way it was. And if they do that and get caught, it's Maya's neck in the noose! Keishi's cyberspace power level is much higher than she had made it out to be, so she was never really in danger (though when she wants to manipulate Maya into doing something, she pretends to be).

In the end Maya tells Keishi to go fuck herself and finally affirms her own agency. Which I guess is the ending I wanted. But then it's like... what was the point of it all? I want to read it like the pressures of living under homophobia contributed to Keishi's extreme codependence (which is a not uncommon failure state of queer relationships, even more so at the time of this book's writing) but I don't know that that's actually on the page. Keishi is a shitty person and I ended the book not really understanding why, or what Maya ever saw in her in the first place.

I don't want to say that fictional queer relationships have to be positive portrayals (though when you have one [1] queer relationship in a book in 1996 and it's like this, that is certainly a choice). I just felt almost no hint of queer joy in this book at all, no suggestion that after Maya moves on maybe she'll feel more empowered in her lesbian identity or more in charge of her attractions or... I don't know, I wanted some sliver of hope, and I couldn't find it.

As a side note, I was amused by the references to 20th century "classical" media. So many SF writers try to do this, and it's always interesting to me how it ages. Sometimes it feels plausible—sure, maybe in the 23rd century Casablanca is still relevant. Other times Reed swings and misses, imagining that in hundreds of years people will still know the significance of Geraldo opening Al Capone's vault.

hindsightseeing

A few more fic-writer-y questions, just for the heck of it.

( Cut for the usual. )

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Rush -- "The Pass"

oursin

Happy birthday,

angevin and

spaceoperadiva!

dine

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petrea_mitchell

Shock newsflash: cancelled con manages to refund everyone (eventually) for once. How can I pass up the opportunity to mention an organization called Gaaays in Spaaace?

troisoiseaux

In Guys and Dolls and Other Writings, the Damon Runyon collection that I started back in January, I've finally read all of Runyon's "Broadway Stories" of dim-witted gangsters, which are usually funny, occasionally maudlin (or sentimental: there is one Christmas episode, as it were, playing off the joke of "wise men" vs. "wise guys"), and then out of left field the last one ("A Light in France", 1944) was set in occupied France and involved setting a Nazi on fire. Have also read one stand-alone short story ("A Call on the President") that for some reason is classified separately under "The Turps" - after its central bickering married couple - rather than with the rest of "Other Fiction," presumably because of its distinct narrative voice:

The fellow in the striped pants ses what do you want to see the President of the United States about? I ses look Mister, we came all the way from Brooklyn to see the President of the United States and I have got to be back to work on my job tomorrow and if I stop and tell everybody what I want to see him about I won't have no time left. I ses Mister, what is so tough about seeing the President of the United States? When he was after his job he was glad to see anybody. I ses is he like those politicians in Brooklyn now or what?

(At one point Ethel Turp gets distracted "making snoots" out the window of the Oval Office at someone who had been rude to them and my brain immediately cast Myrna Loy, although - after going down a short Wikipedia rabbit hole - in fact Ann Sothern got the role when it was made into a movie in 1939.)

Have also been reading Madly, Deeply, the diaries of Alan Rickman, 1993-2015; now on 1995 and the filming of Sense & Sensibility and (back-to-back? simultaneously? unclear) Michael Collins, which I hadn't heard of and caused a little confusion (for a minute I was like, huh, I didn't know Sense & Sensibility filmed in Dublin!) but has been particularly interesting in terms of thoughts on playing a character based on a historical figure.

Current Music: Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds - the Mountain Goats

magid

This year, I again got my farm share from Stone Soup Farm, a large share (which ends up being double the small share). This week’s haul was unsurprisingly high on leaves; I was surprised that there were so many things that weren’t leaves.

6 small purple kohlrabi (no greens)
2 bunches of red radishes of unusual size, with greens
6 Hakurei turnips with greens (smaller than the radishes)
2 huge bunches of curly kale
1 pound of spinach (big/old enough that it’s more appropriate for cooking)
1.5 pounds of mixed salad greens (leggy enough that a light wilt would work well too)
8 green garlic

First thoughts: saute a lot of the greens with some of the garlic, sweet potatoes, and vegan sausages. Some kind of radish-turnip slaw, maybe with some kohlrabi. Massaged kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing. Fridge pickled kale stems. Maybe some type of Indian saag, with tofu in lieu of paneer.

topaz_eyes

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conuly

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conuly

and you all should catch up on the entire season so you can listen to it when it comes out for real. There are transcripts.

Also, they gave out stickers, so now I have something to slap over the Nazi sticker that just appeared by the train station.

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maju

For some reason, Eden decided she wanted to walk to school yesterday, but she needed an adult to walk with her because Violet wanted to go on the bus. (Violet never wants to walk in the mornings, but likes to walk home a couple of times a week, and Eden is allowed to walk with her.) Then Aria, who is never allowed to walk to or from school except with an adult, decided she wanted to walk with Eden and me, which was fine of course. It was a beautiful morning for walking, not too warm and not humid.

This morning Aria asked me if I would walk her home, which is also fine except that after 3 pm it's usually much less pleasant than at 8 am at this time of year. I don't know why Aria is suddenly so keen on walking to or from school, but I suspect she just wants to copy her sisters. She won't be allowed to walk to or from school alone until she's in 5th grade, and I guess that seems a really long time to wait when you're only in 1st grade.

I went for a run this morning and found it harder going than my last few runs because the humidity has risen a lot. I think it was above 80% this morning while I was out.

Just now I saw a chipmunk sitting on the back step just outside the kitchen. Because I was inside behind a glass door it didn't get spooked by me and sat there for quite a while. Unfortunately my phone was downstairs so I didn't get a photo.

This evening I'm going to the craft session at the library (the Yarn Darlings). I've started the throw with the off-white yarn because it's a fairly simple pattern which should be good for working on with possible distractions. Also plenty big enough to keep me busy for more than one session if I go back.

oursin

What I read

Finished Blight, and hope that this series is planned to continue.

Alexis Hall, Father Material (London Calling, #3) (2026) - thought this was rather a slow starter and seemed a bit repetitive at first but then picked up, but honestly, could it get over Luc being absolutely hopeless?

KJ Charles, How to Fake It in Society (2026): um, I'm not sure I'd quite go so far as to say 'phoning it in', but this seemed to adhere to a rather familiar formula?

John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955), a recent Kobo deal, and I rather enjoyed The Midwich Cuckoos, but although I did read this ages ago a bit under-impressed. Though did think that these days it would probably be a massive 3-volume at least saga? points for economy.

Slightly Foxed #90: 'Sailing On'.

On the go

Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World (2023): had enjoyed his book on Polari but I'm a bit less taken with this - I've just come across a passage where he remarks upon Ru-Paul's Drag Race having a fanbase of butch working-class straight males, and I think, 'hello, come on, what about working men's clubs going back decades?' this is hardly a new thing (but can I lay my hands on my copy of Jacob Bloomfield, Drag: A British History, which I suspect has something to this point, not at the moment).

Up next

Probably the latest Literary Review.

wychwood

I served four Masses in 24 hours at the weekend, which may be a personal best (or worst?), and has left me with some residual soreness of the knees, but Confirmation and First Communions both went relatively smoothly, and though it was rather exhausting scheduling, I did prefer it to spreading them out over several evenings.

Sunday was very much a flop day as a result; I woke up (as has sadly become customary) at 04:45, but did go back to sleep, and did not in the event leave my bed until after noon.

And I needed it, because it's been go-go-go since then. I said to Miss H that I was actually relieved earlier to realise that it was only Wednesday, because there is so much to get done this week! Not that that is helping me focus my mind, of course.

And last night was choir, tonight is choir, and all day Saturday is also choir, so I'm looking forward to an evening?? at home??? tomorrow. I have nearly a week of washing up to catch up with^*, so that'll be a fun time for sure. Then into the office on Friday, and the treadmill does not stop!

I have been reading quite a lot though. Some day I will have time to write up my booklog, but that day is not this week.

^* Obviously I should have done it earlier, but when I was inspired to try yesterday in a few free minutes, the hot water wasn't working - a different problem from last time! The plumber texted me back this morning with a description of the basic mistake I had made and how to fix it, so I'm back up and running now... kitchen looks extremely sad though.

watersword

things I fucked up today so far, a list:

forgot to take my meds before I left the house
forgot to put my gym clothes in my bag
forgot my ipad with my weightlifting app
forgot my headphones
forgot to transfer a giant file overnight
didn't finish my tea before I left the house and the contents of the abandoned cup will be gross when I get back after several hours of 84°F/28°C

I hate being so dependent on the bus system, when the bus system is so crappy. Buses should come every ten minutes!

things I got right:

I have my wristwatch
I have a fresh tube of sunscreen to leave in my gym locker
I had naan and brie for breakfast
I am wearing office clothes
my hair is brushed
I have my thermos of hot tea
I have my office key

I am pretty sure I can skedaddle off campus around 3, which will give me enough time to get snacks for the Board Annual Meeting tonight.

ETA: Okay, I snuck out of the morning event and ran home and took my meds and got all my stuff and the giant file is transferring (fingers crossed the transfer time estimate is a lie and I can drop the thumb drive off with a colleague before I leave), and maybe the day is looking up.

oursin

Happy birthday,

uhhuhlex!

rmc28

I have about 15 minutes before I need to go to a school meeting, and I haven't updated in ages so:

Hockey

The inaugural season of Kodiaks 2 finished mid-May: we played 20 games and won 1. It was a bit last minute, but we managed to confirm enough ice time to continue with two teams next season, in time to submit our intention to the league by the 31 May deadline. Trials are next week and the week after, the WNIHL annual meeting is in early July and the next season starts in September. We had end-of-season awards, which I was late to due to having a pre-existing booking for formal hall with uni friends, and as manager I got a lovely personalised mug with a photo of the team from our last game, along with a card that made me all mushy and sentimental.

My summer training is still four times a week: uni x2, Warbirds and Kodiaks. Though summer ice for Kodiaks means we have to get a minimum signup from players and coaches to run, two weeks in advance, so it doesn't always happen.

Since the season end, I've had a couple of games with Warbirds, and a friendly with Huskies against Warwick Panthers. Warbirds won one and drew one, Huskies won. That's a nice feeling.

Media and culture

I finished all available seasons of Ted Lasso and very much enjoyed it, looking forward to the new season dropping later this summer. Tony and I have started watching Spider-Noir (we chose to watch in colour, and I am loving the colours). I've started watching Dollhouse with Owen, which is very very 2009.

A conversation about hockey musicals led to the discovery of "Score! A Hockey Musical" which can be watched on YouTube, but I cannot recommend the experience. The music is catchy but the lyrics are dreadful, not even "so bad it's good", and the musical itself can't decide whether to be serious or slapstick.

I thought idly last week, we haven't been to the ADC in a while (I only managed a couple of the plays on the list I made in March) and discovered an amateur production of Come From Away on last week and this. I took Charles last Saturday afternoon (the Huskies game was in the evening) and am meeting a couple of hockey friends to see it again tonight. It's still a very good musical, this is a very good company, it was nearly sold out when I got tickets and deservedly so. I cried, and will probably cry again tonight.

dine

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

tielan

It went well.

The host finally accepted the situation, we turned up, everything was fine, a great weekend was had. I'm so glad I did it.

Even if it was a bit stressful right before.

Also: I'm pretty sure I left the house with more food than I went into it with. Care of a pot of bolognaise that my friends made, and which turned out to be more than enough to feed 14 people (seven people, twice over - although, in all fairness, we weren't heaps hungry).

The house itself was pretty neat, albeit a little odd in design and layout. Apparently, it had originally been built around a courtyard in the centre of a three-wing house, and when they decided to extend the house, they roofed the courtyard, turning it into a dining/living space that looks in on the kitchen (which had a wall removed that it otherwise shared with the laundry.

We went to markets, antique shops, clothing shops, and a winery for lunch on Sunday. It was great, everyone got along, and there were enough extroverts and ambiverts to keep the conversation going!

--

And then I came home, and promptly acquired a sore throat, a cold, and a headache. I haven't tested for COVID yet. BLEH.

I do want a lot of sleep lately, though. And the house is cold. It's always cold here in winter and we don't realise just how bad it is until it's winter. BRR.

--

Otherwise, I am quite firmly getting into Avatar: The Last Airbender but just the original series, not the comics, the sequel about the Gaang, or the one about Korra. And mostly just reading the fic. Which is kind of fun.

I am also plotting fic. Because this is me.

One of them is a Black Jewels fusion. Because this is ALSO me.

How many of them will get written and finished? Probably none of them. Because, yes, me again.

daryl_wor

I got a tip from Lost in Adaptation about this flick and it sounded deep so, library-willing and we sallied forth! Exciting and definitely spoke to my illness-in-isolation life experience lately. At last the right Bowie tunes in a space movie and some dizzying stuff but super science nut stuff which ain't bad, eh. Nice change of pace, in a way.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: Olympus Mons, Mars
Current Music: Bowie

pauraque

phantomtomato asked: ( What’s a fun or interesting or amusingly awkward story from your life this week? )

cosmicjellyfish asked: ( If you could travel anywhere in the world (with no barriers/restrictions/etc. - assume you’re teleporting there), where would you go? )

larryhammer asked: ( How much for just the box? )

shewhostaples asked: ( What's the weirdest petsitting gig you've ever had? )

starshipfox asked: ( When/how did you realise you were queer? )

dr_zook asked: ( What's your favourite food for comfort purposes? )

lucymonster

Backrooms (2026): I loved this!!! Admittedly, my reception has been coloured by the sheer delight of getting to go see it in theatre; I was able to book the perfect seat in an otherwise empty row, I treated myself to a big cup of mixed lollies in a fit of childlike exuberance, and all in all a great time was had while my husband generously managed the kids' bedtime alone. Under those circumstances the movie would have had to be very bad indeed before it would have dented my joy, but I do think it was genuinely good - especially for something made by a twenty-year-old youtuber.

Based on an internet creepypasta that I'd never heard of in my life but that is apparently hugely popular with Gen Z, Backrooms is about a struggling furniture store owner who passes through a wall in the back of his shop and finds himself in a liminal space of huge, labyrinthine office rooms that are just Not Quite Right: the architecture is all off-kilter, everything is faded yellow, and the space is completely empty aside from the scattering of random items in unlikely places throughout. His therapist gets roped into it as well, and two of his young employees. The ambience and sound design are key to the horror: not a lot of action happens, but the visual wrongness never lets up, and the awful noises made by the Mysterious Thing that stalks the backrooms had me clutching the armrests. If I get a second chance at an evening out then I am going to spend it on Obsession, but a part of me kind of wishes I could go back and see this one on the big screen again.

As Above, So Below (2014): My trip to see Backrooms was a second attempt at an evening out; the first one fell over, and As Above, So Below was my streamable-at-home consolation prize, plucked from a "You're obsessed with Backrooms, now what's next?" listicle. I can see their point, but the tone could hardly be more different and for me this one scratched a completely different itch. It's about a rogue archaeologist and her thrown-together team of urban explorers who blunder into a haunted hell dimension while searching the Paris catacombs for the Philosopher's Stone. It is ridiculous, corny, historically incompetent, and overall spooky as fuck. Someone clearly said, "Imagine if Indiana Jones was a beautiful twentysomething woman! And imagine if her tomb runs were even scarier and more deadly! No, don't worry about the plot, we're going for Vibes here, it doesn't have to withstand even three seconds of scrutiny! Also, I can get us approval to film in the actual real catacombs!" And then they took that as a mission statement and committed to it with their whole heart and soul. It was so dumb. I had such a good time.

The one misstep that I did actually take issue with was the choice to frame it as found footage. I get the vision, I do! But the script and the acting and the overall story are just way too campy to pass as subject matter for low-lit handcams. Absolutely no one is mistaking these people as real. They are actors reading lines. They are so, so obviously actors reading lines. They are having earnest dialogue about Nicholas fucking Flamel! The found footage conceit kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the camp, and the camp kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the found footage, and I think ultimately it would have been a much stronger movie if they'd just scrapped the handcams and accepted that nothing about the project was going to lend itself to realism. It should have been shot like the 80s-action/adventure-inspired brain candy it was.

boxofdelights

It's Swan Lake, but the swan is a beautiful dog and the lake is a comfy chair
( sleeping dog )

conuly

1. This author is clearly pretty young. Still, they won't be half-bad once they get a little more experience.

2. Wow, this author's note is unhinged

3. and long

4. and not apparently connected to anything omg

5. Oh, wait, she's in the 7th grade!? Well, now I definitely won't leave any sort of comment about whatever the hell that was!

6. Still, she's definitely a better writer than I thought if she's producing this at the age of 12. (The fic, not the author's note.)

oursin

Bus and Windrush line from N London to the southern peripheries to foregather with kake and friends for sociability, which was very agreeable indeed.

Also boo to miserable ol' Matthew Arnold dissing on the growing London railway network of his day as enabling people to merely move between 'a illiberal, dismal life in Islington to a illiberal, dismal life in Camberwell'. Sad git.

***

In other news: have received A Very Odd email alleging that The Textbook (of all things) is now listed on Bookbub.com. It is not entirely easy to ascertain the truth of this, as the site has no search function whereby one can locate specific titles, but searching under possible categories has not shown it up. I am not going to page through the alphabetical list of titles! What is this thing that this thing is? Spam? Phishing?

***

I actually have some passing acquaintance with Prof King (as usual, archives were in the mix): Turi King: ‘The Knox case shows there was a misunderstanding about what DNA can tell you’. I loved this:

You led the DNA verification of Richard III. How important was that project scientifically and culturally?
What I loved about it was that it wasn’t just the genetics. There were lots of different strands of evidence – genetics, osteology and radio carbon dating – and it involved people from lots of different areas, all bringing their expertise to make it a wonderful project.
....
I think one of the things that was missed in the film is that no one person could have done it on their own. Philippa Langley [from the Richard III Society] absolutely got the project off the ground, but didn’t have the expertise to lead it. Another thing the film didn’t capture was all of the women who led various aspects of the science. I’m not worried I wasn’t in the film, but it was two years of work. Nor did all the money come from the Richard III Society. Some of it did for the excavation, but the vast majority came from Leicester University.

And she doesn't say in any answers in so many words 'It's All More Complicated', but it's very much implied, no?

maju

I woke up with a headache this morning, bad enough that I took a couple of tylenol as soon as I got up (just after 4:30 am). It mostly wore off by about 6 so I went for what I planned to be a somewhat shorter and easier walk than normal, but it was so beautiful out this morning (clear and sunny with low humidity) and my headache was so much reduced that I ended up covering about 7 km/4 miles. Then when I got home just after 7 Eden asked if I would walk her to school and I agreed, allso I finished up covering almost an extra 2 km. Aria also decided to walk with us, but Violet chose to go by bus. She likes to walk home from school but doesn't like to walk to school in the mornings.

I'm not a dog person but I seem to be making friends with some of the neighbourhood dogs. (Or they're making friends with me.) First it was one of the dogs next door, one of two yellow labs who always barks when any of us go out into the backyard. Eden told me he just wants to make friends, so I started going over and letting him smell my hand whenever I go out there, and he immediately stops barking. The other one of the two, who looks older, doesn't seem to be interested in the comings and goings in our yard.

Second was a tall dog with noticeably long legs (it might be a Great Dane) which just stops walking and refuses to move when it wants to be greeted/petted. I've seen this dog being walked by its owner a few times; a couple of weeks ago I stopped to let it smell my hand, and this morning as soon as it saw me it stopped and waited for me to greet it. It's actually a she I discovered this morning, so I should stop saying it.

daryl_wor

From the previous entry I wanted to express more WHY mass/group approval is UNtrustworthy and suspect: It is all based on each person in the mass constantly trying to figure out what all the other people believe, so it's just based on everyone grasping at straws and desperately speculating what the rest think, just like quicksand it sinks and has no real definite. Hence in the previous Century we set our sights on individual will and consideration, but that worry of dis/approval came crashing in with the likes and kudos to an unconscious level to make it all meaningless. Based on constant guesswork, ugh. No wonder people like maths.