Reading

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Hugo Homework (from four months ago)

I read these back in May, and my memories are not 100%. Here's my best stab at the three noms for best novel, one for novella, and one tangential to the Lodestar.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher, narrated by Eliza Foss & Jennifer Pickens. ( Read more... )

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley ( Read more... )

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky ( Read more... )

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed ( Read more... )

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger, narrated by Kinsale Drake ( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

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d&d: titansfall

Titansfall D&D: Summary for 9/7 Game

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

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tv: buffy the vampire slayer

Two New Vids (BtVS)

Another month and another update on

periru3 and my vid album Jagged Little Slayer, a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alanis Morissette. Here are the two we've posted since last time — we're very excited about these two:

Title: Perfect
Character/Pairing: Dawn, Buffy, Joyce
Summary: I'll make you what I never was

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Title: Forgiven
Character/Pairing: Angel &/ Spike, Angel/Buffy, Spike/Buffy
Summary: If I jump in this fountain, will I be forgiven?

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: No Sleep Till Brooklyn - Beastie Boys

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adventures in cooking

engine running hotter than a boiling kettle

Despite getting a late start all weekend and being distracted by a new matching game on my phone (I can lose hours to these stupid games), I got some good cooking done!

Yesterday, I made garlic & mozzarella milk bread (pics), which turned out quite well even though I forgot the salt due to its weird placement in the recipe (in theory I understand why it is where it is, but in practice it makes no sense to do it that way), but I used salted butter, so I don't think I missed it, and the bread rose just fine.

This afternoon, I finally made this strawberry cheesecake since my cream cheese was well past its use-by date and my heavy cream was getting there! It's still chilling, but when I licked the spatula after pouring the filling into the pie plate, all I really tasted was the five-spice powder. Which I like! But it's not what I would expect given the amount of freeze-dried strawberry powder in it. I guess we'll see how it goes when I cut into it tomorrow. (I also have this issue with nutmeg - even when I try to go easy on it in something, it still is frequently the only thing I taste after using it. I don't know why!)

And then I finally got up and made meatballs with oregano and red wine vinegar to have for lunch during the week. This was a method my grandmother used to use, and it is a great way to eat meatballs (or veggies - she also used to make it with zucchini, and I imagine you could do other types of squash or eggplant this way) - you make and cook the meatballs and set them aside. Then you saute onions in some olive oil (or in the beef fat left if you've fried your meatballs - I do mine in the oven, so I just use oil) and lower the heat and let them caramelize a bit, then you put the meatballs back in, sprinkle about 1/8 cup of dried oregano over them, and then pour in 1/3 - 3/4 cup of red wine vinegar. Be careful as billows of deliciously pungent smoke will rise from your frying pan at that point! Then lower the heat and let it all simmer for 10 or 15 minutes. Good both hot and at room temperature! (I haven't made it with zucchini myself, but for that, you slice and fry or bake your zucchini, and then continue on with the onions/oregano/vinegar as described.)

I have taken the garbage out and started the dishwasher, so now I am prepared for the awfulness of Sunday night. Sigh.

*

Two Prompt Fests

spook_me posted: Spook Me Multi-Fandom Ficathon 2025

All fandoms are welcome. Stories can be Gen, Het, Slash or Femslash. All ratings are accepted.

We have TWO new Creatures this year: RAVEN and GRAVEYARD

I have royally failed at this the last like five years, but I do want to keep trying. It's really my favourite prompt fest.

fandomgiftbasket posted: Spreadsheet of All Requests

Here is the spreadsheet of all requests!

Link.

There are two sheets on it. The first one is a list of all baskets sorted alphabetically by username, and this is where I'll keep track of the number of gifts. The second is every single fandom request posted individually in alphabetical order, for ease of finding. If you spot anything missing or any mistakes, let me know ASAP.

I don't have a basket this year, but hope to maybe write drabbles or something? Possibly?

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astronomy

End of the Eclipse

Due to clouds, buildings trees and the horizon in the way, etc. etc. I only managed to catch the last few minutes of the eclipse, and since I had to hand hold the camera with the equivalent of a 2000mm lens it wasn't as sharp as I would like. Best of the bunch below the cut. I've also put in the picture of the near-full moon on Thursday for comparison.

( Picspam - end of the eclipse )

Full-sized images are on flickr from this one (the moon on Thursday) onward

https://www.flickr.com/photos/150868539@N02/54764983482/in/dateposted-public/

Guardian Slo-Mo Rewatch

I don't know where the day went, or the weekend. How is it almost midnight already?!

Anyway: Over at

sid_guardian we've kicked off another rewatch - a slo-mo one this time, half an episode per week. And since we've already done the "take an epic amount of notes and write epic post" kind of rewatch, this one's going to be a bit more relaxed. *g*

Zhao Yunlan sprawled on a couch, grinning at his phone. The background shows a purply sky with stars. Text reads "Slo-Mo Rewatch. Guardian - half an episode per week @ sid-guardian.dreamwidth.org."

Zhao Yunlan sprawled on a couch, grinning at his phone. The background shows a purply sky with stars. Text reads "Slo-Mo Rewatch. Guardian - half an episode per week @ sid-guardian.dreamwidth.org."

Here's the first post, episode 1, part 1.

Current Mood: accomplished

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fanfiction: dragon age

Fic: Side by Side (Dragon Age)

Side by Side (1506 words) by Settiai
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Oghren & Female Surana (Dragon Age)
Characters: Female Surana (Dragon Age), Oghren (Dragon Age)
Additional Tags: Alcohol, The Black Emporium Exchange, Friendship, One Shot, Sparring
Summary: Oghren might have been a nug humping bastard, but he couldn't just stand by and do nothing after he realized that the big scary Warden everyone was talking about was barely more than a kid.

needle lace WIP

Perhaps overly ambitious for a project, but I'm doing this as a fun hobby fidget with no expectation it'll turn out "well." (In real-life, this is fiber-based trolling.)

I started this a few years ago but life got busy.

(Technical details posted elsewhere to

prototypediablerie.)

Trek rec

I'm aware that my taste in fic can be a bit outré, and that the kind of off-centre stories (and characters) that I like aren't for everyone. But for those who are searching for something different from the current brand of Trekfic,

nonelvis's "The Satchel" offers a very welcome change.

To say too much about this clever and well-written 2,000-word story would be to spoil all the fun. I'll just note that the author causes Pelia and Jett Reno to enter into some shady shenanigans--and posits a believable and in-character explanation for Reno's connection with Starfleet. Recommended reading.

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Rewatching Babylon 5 “The Long, Twilight Struggle”

Continuing our latest Babylon 5 rewatch, and we’re up to S2E20 "The Long, Twilight Struggle". And it’s peak Shakespearean tragedy.

The only downside for me in this otherwise superb episode is the poor overacting by the recast Draal actor. Which is a big problem for me. But the rest of the episode is stunning.

Current Mood: indescribable

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Meet the Gaza music teacher behind viral drone song

"In the middle of this war and this madness, there is a flower inside the fire."

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: quixotic

hardware

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latest spinning WIP

I figure if I'm spinning anyway, I may as well entertain myself by spinning my own silk thread (largely the white on the left, mulberry/bombyx, with a random foray into the darker yellow on the left, eri silk) for needle lace.

(Ignore the red/yellow nonsense on the bobbin, which is sari silk; I was too lazy to reel it off because my bobbin situation is hilariously dire.)

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musings,
sport

That sort of person

I had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.

When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"

"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.

No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)

Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?

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highly scientific poll

what should wychwood read next?

I have inventoried my to-read pile and am slightly horrified to find that it contains 98 books (39 non-fic and 59 fiction, which is interesting because I thought it was mostly non-fic! But in fact it's just that the average non-fic book is much larger so the fiction takes up less space). The fiction is about half SFF. I'm not going to make a poll of the whole lot, because I'd be here forever, but I have picked some categories:

Poll #33582 what should wychwood read next

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

View Respondents

Which loan book should I start next?

View Answers

Acts and Omissions - Catherine Fox
1 (11.1%)

Cavedweller - Dorothy Allison
2 (22.2%)

Data Structures and Algorithms - Alfred Aho, John Hopcroft, Jeffrey Ullman
2 (22.2%)

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
4 (44.4%)

Which detective story should I start next?

View Answers

Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge - Ovidia Yu
5 (62.5%)

In the Shadow of Agatha Christie - ed Leslie S Klinger
1 (12.5%)

Land of Shadows - Rachel Howzell Hall
0 (0.0%)

Murder in Williamstown - Kerry Greenwood
0 (0.0%)

Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters
1 (12.5%)

The Chemistry of Death - Simon Beckett
1 (12.5%)

Which non-fic book should I start next?

View Answers

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat
3 (33.3%)

Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries - Kate Mosse
2 (22.2%)

Black Tights: Women, Sport and Sexuality - Laura Robinson
0 (0.0%)

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - Suzanne Haden Elgin
3 (33.3%)

The Augustinians from the French Revolution to Modern Times - J Gavigan
1 (11.1%)

Carrying the Fire - Michael Collins
0 (0.0%)

The bedside pile is down to four books, including the ongoing Oxford History of England project and the current SFRG book, so it is time to build it up again!

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(no subject)

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college perks

Holy shit: university library access. It's probably good that I'm not in a historical fandom right now, because guess what I'd be doing instead of homework.

*remembers doing a bunch of Afghan War reading for Sherlock Holmes fandom last time around*

Current Music: Jack, "3 O'Clock in the Morning"

And there's this all-night garage and the 7-Eleven

For reasons as yet unknown to medical science, although I am doing my best to get medical science to find them out, I am in the acutely worst shape I have been in since the summer of 2023 and it is devouring all of my time. Have some links.

1. In music still in situ on my computer, I have had the Punters' "Jim Harris" (1997) since 2005 when I believe it to have been one of the fruits of a now-deceased music community on LJ. It is not a variant on Child 243; it was contemporarily written by Peter Leonard of Isle Valen about a local schooner fender-bender in 1934. I discovered last year that it's got a Roud number and I have never gotten over the way its last verse turns from traditionally recounted maritime mini-disaster to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi:

It's all right when the wheel is going up, but when she turns for to go down
You all might meet with the same sad fate as Jim Harris in Paradise Sound

The folk tradition being what it is, this song is naturally the only thing I know abour its eponymous captain, which is rough.

2. I should not have read this article about the Instagram filter valley of the current rejuvenative craze for deep-plane face-lifts no matter what because one of the reasons I have trouble being read as younger than my age is that I have worked very hard to reach this one, but toward the end of the piece I hit an anonymously quoted surgeon, "When you look at someone else with an elite face-lift . . . all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people," and at the notion that eugenics should be aspirationally mixed with ageism, I just wanted that surgeon to be operated upon by Dr. Einstein after an all-night open-bar horror marathon. I felt better after dialing up the grainily inimitable footage of Pamela Blair's "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" (1975).

3. Thanks to listening to Arthur Askey, I became curious about the origins of the musical have-a-banana phrase which diffused decades ago from music hall into general pop culture and apparently the best guess is a Rocky Horror-style audience improvisation that has now endured as a meme for more than a century. Good for it.

I just want to sleep and read books and write about movies. Who's even asking for a small fortune?

Current Mood: blah

End of a vacation

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