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Books
Finished (last week) Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon. As everyone said, it really is very good (and, moreover, I really liked it.) What impressed me the most was the structure: I was expecting a collection of short stories linked by theme and setting. I hadn't known the order of the stories and their timeline would amount to a novel in itself.

Finished (last week) Asterix and the Golden Sickle and didn't really... get it. I don't think I know anyone who read the Asterix books and didn't love them, but I feel like I'm missing something.

Maybe it's that the literary conventions of comics have moved on over the decades, to the extent that the level of exposition makes me feel like a modern science fiction reader reading pulp SF from the 1930s, or a modern TV viewer grappling with the stage conventions of Elizabethan or even ancient Greek theatre. As in: oh, you're explaining that again, alright. Oh, you're explaining that too? Okay.

Unfortunately I'm also unfamiliar with the history, societies, and cultures of Gaul in 50 BCE, so I'm probably missing most of the charm, to say nothing of the Easter eggs.

Read (this week) Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard, and it was okay. I have now read all of the Greenwing & Dart books currently available, and have a clearer idea of what's happened yet in that part of the Nine Worlds, which is useful for fandom purposes. But I don't really like G&D. It's not for me. But I like some of its fans.

Finished (this week) KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning. Mainly a mixture of things that wouldn't work for me but which I could see working for someone else; concepts and skills that do work for me that I'd already learned but could have been absolutely vital if I hadn't learned them yet; and a few nuggets I didn't know as well as plenty that I knew but for which I could use a refresher or some reinforcement.

Reading Sarah Kurchak's I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder on audiobook. I forget who recommended it (Rydra?) but I'm surprised at just how much I'm relating.

Fandom
Received this lovely, meditative story by

justjourneys for Fanoa'ary: Love Beyond Definition.

I wrote Charting a Course for

Crackfoxx, on the prompt "I want the version of Kip being Fitzroy's wingman that includes the joy and the spreadsheets. Let me be very very clear. This expression of love must actually include spreadsheets.", went nearly entirely for rule of funny over characterisation or plausibility, and had way too much fun with the CSS and HTML.

Side note: who here knew what AO3's HTML parser does if you didn't close a <strike> tag?

...Bad, isn't it? (If you guessed "Everything from the open tag down to the end of the chapter is struck through", you're... well, you're not wrong, but you are underestimating the scope of the problem.)

Links

If only this discussion thread about a mathplotlib pull request were a mixed media work of fiction, and not a case in point of how things are going in tech at the moment, I would enjoy it so much.

Garden
Still alive, producing about a handful a week of tiny ripe cherry tomatoes.

Cats
Are a serious threat to the local plastic mouse from KMart population. Are also very good alarm cats when it's time to wake up in the morning and I don' wanna, very alarming.

asiren

I find myself pretty stressed out right now. It's not entirely new since this time of year is always stressful. And that's not even getting into work and personal matters. UGH.

Anyway, somehow I managed to finish Amphoreus during my time off in December. The story mode boss fight for Irontomb was HARDER than the weekly clear version. I basically had to use the meta Castorice team (Castorice, Evernight, Cyrene, and Hyacine), but I only had Hyacine in my box. I had to borrow the free story mode characters for the rest of the team and uh, boy... They felt super weak.

The boss was also pretty hard too (I failed like 10-13 times trying different parties after a few failed runs here and there), and I suspect this was done on purpose. The boss will mysteriously action forward itself without warning, and when used in combination with that energy-reducing move... Well, I wiped a lot before I got to the actual story save point cutscene.

And I know it was harder because at least 1-2 of the teams I used (I probably went through ~5-6 different team setups), are ones that have beaten the weekly clear version of the boss on difficulty VI (whatever the highest difficulty setting is).

I know the weekly clear version of Irontomb. Story mode Irontomb is really something else entirely. I almost feel like this is a way to get players to spend more so they don't have to worry about being blocked by a tough boss in the future.

It's kind of disheartening because for me, it felt like there was no way for me to beat it with my own characters. I had to fall back on the meta Castorice team to get anywhere. That's how bad it was for me. I can only imagine how bad it is for people who haven't farmed up the newer relic sets and are relying on older characters to get through it. I guess if they spent a lot in the past, it might not be so bad, but if you're F2P? I don't think you're going to get through it without the meta Castorice team.

Anyway, it just tells me that HSR only rewards those who spend. You really have to spend your jades wisely if you're F2P.

Current Mood: blah

kaberett

I have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.

( Read more... )

purplecat

I am surprised to find myself surprised by the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It reveals that I had subconsciously assumed that obviously he would get away with whatever it was he had been doing.

kaberett

Specifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.

I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.

I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.

kaberett

Yesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by

three signs across a blocked-off road: DIVERSION pointing right, ROAD CLOSED, DIVERSION pointing left

[description in alt text, better to follow]

purplecat

Oswin in her red dress, looking at the camera, frightened, face half in shadow.

Clara, head and shoulders, publicity still.

Clara holding the tiny Tardis from Flatline with the Doctor's hand coming out of it.

Clara's face, side view, emerging from the dark with a light shining on it.

Clara in her waitress outfit, face, looking contemplative.

echan

Driving a car is boring. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! Every time I start a trip, I drive my car in reverse uphill on my gravel driveway like its nothing. Which is amazing! I couldn't have done that on a motorcycle, for multiple reasons, but in my car its trivial.

But with all driving being easy mode, the long straight highways that were already boring on a motorcycle are now that much worse. For some trips I take an early exit off the highway to take back roads to keep myself awake. But I'm trying to get better at highway driving, so I've got a music playlist I'm building, of songs that are both very familiar and high energy to keep me going.

Also I started working on a vid. Not any of the vids I haven't touched in over a year, not even the same editing program, but meh. Its one of those ideas that's not good by any objective metric, just two things you like shoved together.

catness

A challenge by Dreamersdare.

Challenge 3:
Make a Top Ten list for your favourite music picks and share what you love about them. This can be in any format - songs, artists, albums, music videos, soundtracks, scores, something else not mentioned here. If it's vaguely related to music, it ticks the box, so go with whatever you like!

Here is a link with more details, and to post the link to your answers.

For this challenge, I picked video game soundtracks. I usually include old Sierra and Lucasarts classics in such lists, but it's time to give the ancient ones a break.

It's hard to figure out what makes a soundtrack appealing. For the Portal song, it's definitely the lyrics, the irony, and the robotic presentation. But for the others? Haunting melody, rich harmony, not too monotonous... Some of them are also with lyrics, but I don't include them here for lyrics. Funny that when listening to regular songs, I prefer a very different kind of music - fast, loud and high energy (rock / heavy metal). My main use of soundtracks is background music while working, so they should be unobtrusive (but still not background noise!)

(One more factor is nostalgic memories of the games where the soundtracks came from :)

I'm sure there are many more wonderful soundtracks around, but I mostly play point&click adventures and puzzle platformers. I know I miss a lot. Open for recs!

( YouTube spam )

Current Mood: contemplative

jjhunter

1. The snow has stayed on the ground here long enough that we're finally Acquiring Some Sleds in anticipation of going sledding with friends next weekend. It is so wonderful to have a winter feel like winter again.

2. Hosted a neat new-to-me game yesterday with some close friends and a potential new friend I met through my Awesome Neighbor friend. We all had a great time! We immediately rolled right into plotting More Fun Like This Soon. It's good to be exercising my making-new-friends muscles again.

2a. The game being Molly House, with its gripping shifts between personal queer joy, community delight, and pressuring fears (constables, rogues, and gossip all threatening to trigger police raids of the central molly houses),( I would be fascinated to play it again... )

3. I am looking forward to some quiet time at home tomorrow, I say, also having ambitions of Bake & Roast All The Things, do my taxes so I can get my solar panel credits reimbursed (yay, solar!), and maybe get some extra time in at the local studio before my pottery class starts.

Bonus: This being the cold hard dark slog time of year, it helps to have something joyous to move to. I went and looked up what all the musicians I last bought music from (mostly 5+ years ago) have put out in the last few years since, and bought the latest album of each. So far I'm particularly enjoying Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn's debut collaboration merging American old-time music and Chinese folksong, and the latest from MEUTE.

Have you been listening to anything particularly good lately? What is bringing you joy, defiant or otherwise?

kaberett

Reading. A Variety of books with the Child, including One Fish, Two Fish and A Squeeze and a Squash.

For my own purposes I have been continuing with The Rose Field, Philip Pullman, and I do indeed continue unimpressed. Not enough to stop! But.

I also picked up What Is Queer Food? (John Birdsall) from the library when I was having an insomnia; I have made it most of the way through the introduction but I am not yet grabbed.

Writing. Words... increase.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac catch-up! "While doing the laundry" or indeed "weeding" continues to work quite well.

Playing. Puzzle progresses! I am not calculating current %age but Significant Progress.

I think we did a leeeeettle bit more of our current run of Inkulinati? But it is petering out.

Cooking. Pineapple upside-down banana bread! This time with some ground almond in it. Otherwise I think... very little of note.

Eating. I was very excited to get to try a Neuhaus dark chocolate poppy seed praline, which on the one hand was not actually quite as dark as I would like and on the other has given me Ideas.

Growing. I got some broad beans in the ground?

althea_valara

So Final Fantasy XIV has these fan fests every few years, right? I cannot afford to go to one, BUT they run a fan art contest alongside it.

I entered the contest two fan fests ago, with a very poor crocheted rendition of the Fat Cat minion. Looks like I don't have record of it on Ravelry. Needless to say, I was not at all surprised when I wasn't even a finalist, let alone a winner.

I entered the 2023 contest with a feverishly-knitted doll, and am STILL thrilled at being a finalist for it. For those that don't feel like clicking through to see the picture: the doll is wearing the Valentione dress that was so popular from several events ago.

It is now 2026, we're gearing up for another Fan Fest, which means the fan art contest is ON. Deadline is March 2nd.

I had a great idea for it, but there was NO way I could get it done in time, so even though I ordered yarn, I reluctantly put that idea to the side. Still gonna do it someday, but not when I'm under deadline.

I had another tentative idea for it, but it would have required lots and lots of counting, and fiber artists aren't that great at counting. Plus, that idea was big enough that I wasn't sure I'd have time to finish it, either.

So I fell back to my third idea, which is really one that I had last year but didn't do. Am working on it today, after not touching it for five days (yikes!).

Said in a discord:

12:21pm
so here I am, working on my fanfest entry. I am designing it myself and there's multiple pieces to it. I have proof of concept that two pieces fit correctly together, HUZZAH! but now I have to knit the other four pieces... aka, the fun part is done and now it's just work work work and blah. send me strength!

12:43 PM
it is a universal truth that knitters can't count to small digits. I was wrong, I do not have four pieces left, I have FIVE. and that's just on [redacted]. After this, I still need to do [redacted] and [redacted], oof

I have finished the first of the five pieces I have left on this portion. It took an hour. Each of the remaining four pieces will take about an hour each. And that's not including [redacted 1] and [redacted 2], which are both rather big portions themselves and will take time. I know how to do [redacted 1] already, and have ideas for [redacted 2], but the actual work of knitting is.... well, WORK.

I'm not sure I can finish before the deadline. But I am going to try. It will mean knitting most of the rest of the day, and touching it every day until deadline.

tcpip

In the past week, I have attended three significant community events. The first was a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria, one of the oldest Linux groups in the world (founded in 1993). It was their first in-person meeting for a while; it was the first meeting I have attended since October 2019, when, after fourteen years on the committee, I stepped down. It was a good meeting, covering interstate collaboration, new utilities, and Linux and AI. The following day, I chaired a committee meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society, which was primarily a planning meeting for our upcoming concert with Shu Cheen Yu and the Lotus Wind Choir, which is promising to be quite a wonderful event with close to 150 tickets sold so far. Finally, today was the Annual General Meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative at the Rose Hotel. The Cooperative, which is now in its tenth year of operations (the namesake journal has been published since 2008!). The meeting itself was quick and efficient, we had a guest photographer in the form of Mike Parry, and Karl brought along his rules for Hippo Jousting for a knock-out tournament all because it was World Hippo Day.

As someone who has been on many management committees since the mid-1980s, I like to keep formal business short and to the point. Matters of debate invariably can be resolved before the meeting actually happens, and if someone thinks "we" (meaning "the organisation") should do a particular activity, that's code to me that they've volunteered to lead it. This tends to mean more people doing things rather than just talking about doing things. It's not as if every committee I've been on has been like this; I do recall one non-profit (which was nick-named "the committee of mis-management") who had a "country club" approach to running the group; paranoid of new members, their meetings would be an exercise in dreariness as they went through and decided action on each and every item of correspondence received, instead of having standing policy that the (paid) office secretary could apply. Unsurprisingly, that body is seems utterly moribund; even their website hasn't been updated in over four years.

The week hasn't all been such formalities, of course. Nitul organised two gatherings with friends in the Botanical Gardens on Friday and Saturday evening to watch and hear the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play. On Friday evening, it was with the "Find Your Voice" collective, and on Saturday, it was "Fifty Years of ABC Classic FM". Both concerts were attended by thousands, and the performances were quite uplifting. I must also mention that I spent Saturday with Mel S. on an op-shopping excursion, one of our favourite mutual pastimes. As co-parent to my rats when I'm away, she was quite delighted when I brought them over for a visit, keeping us entertained for several hours. Mel is aware that more rat-parenting duty will be coming up soon, as I prepare for my next trip overseas.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: The Comsat Angels, The BBC Sessions

catness

Stolen from my f/l. Not sure what's its purpose - collecting statistics? developing the feeling of gratitude? but I suppose it proves that my childhood was not as crappy as I imagine. And it's a lot of nice questions, not depressing / invasive like most of the Friday Five questions.

( TL;DR: I'm privileged, I suppose )

Current Mood: contemplative

ursamajor

Twenty-plus years of loving each other, cooking together, and building upon our mutual disdain of dealing with crowds and reservations for Valentine's Day means

hyounpark and I made a dinner worth remembering tonight.

By default, when we have pork belly around in the winter, we usually braise it in apple cider, along with a chopped onion, garlic, a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and fivespice. But we didn't have apple cider in the fridge, so I thought about what else we could use for a braising liquid, and while pondering, found a recipe on the McCormick website for a Thai Tea-Spiced Pork Belly with Condensed Milk Sauce, and my eyes lit up, because I knew we had Thai tea packets on hand.

We riffed heavily off that recipe, mostly treating it as taste profile suggestions. I started steeping a liter of Thai tea while H chopped an onion, then I sauteed the onions with garlic and ginger paste (an incredible convenience courtesy the Indian grocery store in our neighborhood), and then added some fivespice powder. H crosshatched the pork belly skin, then cut it into small enough slabs to fit in our Instant Pot. I added a few tablespoons of soy sauce and fish sauce to the stuff in the skillet, then dumped that in the bottom of the Instant Pot; laid the pork belly slabs on top of the rack in the IP, and poured the tea over everything, and then closed it up and let it go on high for 20 minutes.

While that went, H tried to turn our rice into the suggested rice cakes, but we should've used sushi rice instead of brown rice which was what we had ready. Even using the musubi mold didn't get it to stick together enough, alas. Everything still tasted delicious in the end, though, so no fuss.

Meanwhile, I made the condensed milk sauce in the recipe - we had condensed coconut milk on hand, I subbed in peanut butter for the tahini and chile crisp for the sambal - and then turned my attention to the salad. What did we have in the fridge? Half a head of butter lettuce, some shiso leaves, scallions; enough for at least a little greenery on the plate. Chopped the leafy greens and scallion up, and then, inspired, ran an apple through the mandolin. Whisked together a dressing of peanut oil, lime juice, fish sauce, a little galangal and garlic. Topped it off with peanuts.

The IP finished releasing pressure just as we finished the rest of the plating; we each pulled out a small slab of pork belly, drizzled the condensed milk sauce over it, and utterly freaking devoured our dinner. Everything just came together, building on decades of experience and familiarity with each others' taste, and we will absolutely do this again.

And it's not Valentine's for us without chocolate, so I pulled a log of our favorite chocolate toffee cookies out of the freezer, sliced and baked and ate. (Along with the last crumbs of the gargantuan king cake slice

ladyjax bestowed upon me yesterday! Many thanks to her A for the baking thereof :) )

Somehow we will both get up in the morning and go for a digestive run and continue appreciating how we grow together, even as things around us are so very different from how we imagined when we began.

Current Mood: loved
Current Music: i know that's a strange way to tell you that i know we belong

kaberett

One (1) duplicate letter from the DWP, which I had actually requested, because the council is apparently incapable of giving me the concessionary rate on the basis of disability without me providing one letter per year from the DWP telling them I'm still disabled, despite the fact that for anything that is not the allotment rent they can work this out from all the other information available to them without needing me to have Special Executive function;

three (3) rolls of washi tape from Sweden, one of which I have been Tempted By for probably actual years at this point and the other two of which are relevant for this year's notebook set-up and I was sad and wanted a treat;

and one (1) book, Citrus: A History, because it was £4.56, on a topic I have previously been interested in, and Interest Has Been Expressed in me yelling about it. (When will I get to it? Unclear, because once I've finished reading The Rose Field I should probably do some more pain reading, but. Eventually.)

(And why have I been sad? I genuinely do not know; my brain has just been having a Sustained Patch of Uncooperative. I would like it to stop. In addition to post, today's efforts in that direction have included a batch of pineapple upside-down banana bread, this time with some of the flour replaced with almond meal.)

wychwood

Today was a very exciting landmark: I went to the TIP. Miss H agreed to take me, because she is a wonderful person. We are now I think fourteen months into our bin strike, and while various people have very kindly taken my recycling for me during that period, my usual volunteer has been busy lately and I've accumulated rather a lot (mostly cardboard - the packaging for the new IKEA bookcase was particularly bulky) since mid-November. I also keep a box of "things to take to the tip" that aren't the standard recycling - electrical cables, lightbulbs, hard plastic, etc, which are a bit unfair to dump on other people, so that was a year or more of accumulation. My spare room is so nice now!!

One of my university friends used to celebrate "Bins Clear Eve", which was the day before the first rubbish collection after New Year, and it feels rather like that.

Otherwise there seems to be rather a lot of terrible things happening to my acquaintances; in the last week, deaths include one friend's brother, a second friend's stepmother, and the very unexpected death of an distant internet acquaintance. Also a swimming friend has had a bad prognosis for a while but now sounds to be likely in his last few weeks. I would like it if someone I know had a sudden and unexpected nice thing happen next week, please.

I keep trying to play computer games and then getting bored and wandering off. On the other hand, I have read a lot of books (most of them very frivolous). Partly it may be because it's so much nicer in bed than anywhere else, what with the cold spells so far this year. I did manage twenty minutes of Dave the Diver today;

isis, I don't know if you ever did play it after you recced it to me, but so far it's both quite fun and making me feeling very concerned that he's being exploited by his "friend" Cobra *g* (the set-up is that he's on holiday when his friend calls him up with promises of fancy sushi that turn out to be an "opportunity" for him to spend his days diving for fish to turn into sushi and nights serving the sushi to customers... his "profits" go into repairing the bar, which appears to be co-owned by Cobra and the sushi chef). However, I am only one day in, so it could all change.

This has been a fantastically expensive month so far. Aside from purely frivolous expenditures (my 99p ebook habit does add up!! but not all that quickly) I renewed my passport on Thursday (they already sent me two emails to tell me to send the old one in! cool your beans, people, it was less than 24 hours! I posted it on Friday anyway!) and then bought a bunch of clothes today - hopefully replacements for things which are getting rather tatty. I wanted to get a hoodie from the Florence gig but I couldn't try it on and I wasn't sure it would fit, and £85 was too much to gamble on! So now I have ordered a less cool one from M&S but on the other hand it wasn't nearly as expensive. And if it's too small, I can return it.

Oh, but what is nice: I've been given the keys to my new garage! I should go and check I can actually open it (after first looking up the deeds to check which one it is, now I can't identify it by the combination of hardware around the lock...) before I get swept up in next week's choir-all-the-time and next weekend's exciting visit from

shreena and

quizcustodet. Today would have been a good time to do it, since it's actually not raining for once, but, well.

catness

Today I learned that I've been using my electric guitar incorrectly this whole time! Well, not the WHOLE time, but since mustering the courage to connect Tom's Focusrite Scarlett audio interface to the computer. I needed it for the mic, but there's also input for the instrument cable. But I thought why would I need it if I already have the amplifier?

So, just discovered that with Ableton, I can bypass the amp entirely. When I connect the guitar directly to Focusrite, and run Ableton with the input monitoring, I can use all these FANTASTIC audio effects, like my beloved Hybrid Reverb, which do not exist on my simple amp, and Ableton is so much more user-friendly anyway.

I don't even have to sit in front of the screen, because the cables are long enough to reach the bed ;) But sitting in front of the screen is good for practicing with backing tracks and all kinds of digital tools which I can now use through the same headphones, and without delay.

I hope it will boost up my guitar practice, which has been regrettably neglected lately...

[EDIT] I just realised that I used "Ableton" and "user-friendly" in the same sentence. ;)

Current Mood: hopeful

jjhunter

Happy Galentines/Valentines Day! We are midway through February. If you started the year with some intentions, or have accumulated some new intentions since, how are they going? Is there anything you want to prune back or lean into?

jjhunter

Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.

=

Signal-boosting much appreciated!

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Things

Oh I guess I'm ranting about story mode Irontomb again...

[food] the kale thing

Suprised

what does one do with Sad Bedsheets?

particularly timely

Clara Icons

(no subject)

February top 10, Challenge #3

3 Good Things

vital functions

+cries in knitter+

Community Activities and Concerts

Educational privilege meme

i know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls that brought me here

today the post brought Many Things

get a postcard to my year 11 self in her year 11 hell

Guitar - new workflow

Meme: Quarterly Intentions (1.5/4) - Check In

How Are You? (in Haiku)

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