halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
[personal profile] halfcactus
Just dumping this here so I have a place to drop the transcript. Thoughts/notes to be posted somewhere else at some other time, or added to this post when I have the spoons. This was a very weird project because I had to translate the narration but did it in a very... subtitle-y way (writing the translation directly in the video-editing app, as always) that is not meant to read in plain text form. 😂 Looking at the transcript now, there's a lot I want to change (and maybe I will haha).



translation transcript )

Steam Summer Sale

Sunday, 6 July 2025 09:51 am
lea_hazel: I am surrounded by tiny red hearts (Feel: Love)
[personal profile] lea_hazel
BTW, since I posted about this to Tumblr, too, Turncoat Chronicle is 34% off on Steam until July 10th.

Overall reviews on Steam are positive! It's 180K thousand interactive novel where you play the heir to a usurper king, confronted with the grown heir of your father's old enemies. Choose between allying with the rightful heir (thus turning on your father), or forming a false friendship, then betraying them to your father. Or stab them both in the back and crown yourself.

In between, there's an aloof spymaster, a serene royal consort, a bratty younger brother, and, of course, the loyal guard who, with just a little bit of polish, can be passed off as a false-real-heir.

Today's Smoothie

Saturday, 5 July 2025 10:39 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we made a smoothie with:

1 cup orange juice
1 cup Brown Cow vanilla yogurt
1 banana
1/2 cup frozen strawberries
1/2 cup ice

The result is bright pink and on the thin side. It tastes mostly of orange. It's okay, but not as good as the tropical version from earlier.

Daily Happiness

Saturday, 5 July 2025 07:55 pm
torachan: tavros from homestuck dressed as pupa pan (pupa pan)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We had such a nice time at Disneyland this morning. Too sunny but otherwise lovely weather and so few crowds!

2. We stopped at the farmers market on the way home and got some stuff from our usual vendors (the fruit leather guy definitely knows me now) but there was also a new vendor, a vegan Jewish deli that had all sorts of interesting stuff. Carla got a jar of some sort of pickle relish and I got some pastries including a stone fruit "cheese" danish (idk what the cheese was but everything was vegan so it wasn't actually dairy) that was super good and a pistachio cardamom apricot hamantaschen, which I haven't tried yet but that flavor combo is a favorite so I have high hopes.

3. I love that feeling on the middle day of a three day weekend when you realize that you don't have work tomorrow. That keeps happening throughout the day and it's a pleasant surprise every time. Definitely looking forward to one more day of rest.

4. Jasper's definitely got the relaxing down.

Small successes and mixed-up veggies

Sunday, 6 July 2025 01:33 pm
mific: (ear trumpet)
[personal profile] mific
I'm very much in winter mode here as although some days are sunny, it's cold, and a lot of days are very wet. So not going outside much and not doing gardening, which I don't feel great about. I seem a bit beset by inertia in terms of things physical, possibly a mid-winter slump, but I'm doing indoors things just fine - well, the things I like doing, anyway. Not cleaning or organising! I do tidy up once a week before Fionna comes to vacuum, and occasionally the dishes get washed, but that's about it.

I've started another longer podfic - this one for the due South Big Bang. Am also continuing to add lots of new podfics to the Audiofic Archive (we got inundated by >600 short ones from a recent Voiceteam challenge). And I finished a personal project with the Audiofic Archive of adding streaming links to all the SGA podfics there so they can be enjoyed easily with no need to download zip files. That's 138 pages of SGA podfics! - and increasing each week, as we make more. Next fandom to complete is due South.

In the process I stumbled on Lim's old Fanvid page on Wayback, and the vid downloads still worked. Lim made avant garde vids with lots of altered graphics. Some are on AO3 but a lot of the SGA ones aren't. The Wayback page is here (with additional info and credits), and I downloaded the SGA ones and converted them to mp4 format here. CW for flashing, fast cuts, loud music in some of them. One, Mission Report, (lyrics) is a multimedia podvid where Lim created the lyrics, music, and vid, and sang it for the SGA flashfic comm.

In "first world problem" news, a grocery mix-up. My online delivery packer needs help with alliums! Ordered a bunch of spring (green) onions:
alt
And got a giant leek. Size matters! (in terms of making salads, anyway)

alt


Finally, I saw this amazing poem on tumblr, apparently written by nine-for-a-kiss as a teenager. It's very Dark-is-Rising-ish.

2025 Disneyland Trip #48 (7/5/25)

Saturday, 5 July 2025 04:24 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
We were expecting it to be crowded today because of the holiday weekend but it was actually one of the least crowded days we've ever experienced at the parks.

Read more... )

[pain, food] victory!

Saturday, 5 July 2025 11:30 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I have finally successfully got my head around when the local supermarket reduces the prices on its pastries, which means that we are now well-supplied for doing a batch of pistachio croissant strata to get us most of the way through the coming week. It is not going to be a tomorrow (Sunday) morning breakfast, though, because we have half a cherry clafoutis from this morning, made using allotment cherries.

Read more... )

Early Humans

Saturday, 5 July 2025 05:19 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
125,000-year-old ‘fat factory’ run by Neanderthals discovered in Germany

Stone Age humans living by a lake in what’s now Germany systematically processed animal carcasses for fatty nutrients — essentially running what scientists describe as a “fat factory” to boil bones on a vast scale, according to new research.


Note that another thing you can make with animal fat is pemmican: a stable, high-energy trail food made with fat, powdered meat, and a carbohydrate such as berries.  Since it's not something you'd make in a hot climate like Africa (where humans evolved) but rather in a cold climate (such as northern Europe), I'm suddenly wondering if it is in fact a Neanderthal or Denisovan recipe.

New York books read on the East Coast

Sunday, 6 July 2025 08:56 am
landingtree: Small person examining bottlecap (Default)
[personal profile] landingtree
It more or less began as an accident that I spent most of my trip to North America reading books set in New York. I was reading Deep Roots before I got to New York, and I bought The Chosen and the Beautiful having forgotten that The Great Gatsby, which it retells, is set around New York. Then I read Trouble the Saints to complete the pattern. No ill will toward Montreal, Washington D.C., or Boston, where I had good times - and in diverse ways actually better times than I did in New York - but I did not read books set in them.

~

Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).

~

In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.

I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.

Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.

~

Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.

This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.

This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.

~

The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.

This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.

...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.

~

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.

I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.

~

...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:

Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.

Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.

Also bought at Scintillation.

Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.

These are gifts from [personal profile] ambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine."

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.

These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.

Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell

Strand Books.

The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.

Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.

The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thing [profile] jsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while.

More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.

Upside down and back-to-front...

Saturday, 5 July 2025 09:43 pm
rosa_heartlily: (Default)
[personal profile] rosa_heartlily
A year ago, I was frustrated with my laptop's timing, reflecting on PS2 games with female PCs, joining a new project, and watching Psych.

Today after breakfast, husband suggested a walk. We were expecting a video call from daughter after dinner but that meant we had the morning free. It was starting to rain after an hour or so, so we grabbed some dinner at the son's place of work and headed home. We ate our food and I got a text from daughter saying they were going shopping but would call when they got back.

I cleaned the bathroom and downstairs loo, then played Royal Match while waiting for daughter. And waited... and waited... By 3pm I was getting worried, so texted her. 'Oh, sorry - I got distracted looking at toys for Granddaughter...'.

About 4pm, we finally got our video call. Turned out they'd been to Speke Retail, got home - and daughter went off to Belle Vale on her own. In the meantime, I hadn't done my cleaning or got to play ECHH. Why not call us before they went out, then everyone could have got on with their day? Part of me gets a great deal of satisfaction out of knowing Dragon Daughter has a Dragon Daughter - welcome to my world :D

After tea, I cleaned the kitchen, then had a bath, then finally got to ECHH. I can't progress in the new area and need to find someone to help - but the game doesn't give me any clue as to who, or where they are. I did recruit my librarian, though :D And I have a new companion who has a strange idea of 'fun'.

Now I'm watching some old Doctor Who. We have werewolves... And 1970s attitudes...

Birdfeeding

Saturday, 5 July 2025 03:12 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly sunny and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, plus some brown birds that might be female blackbirds.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I refilled the thistle feeder.

I picked up the concrete paver that we used for fireworks last night, along with scraps of paper and cardboard left behind.

Volunteer sunflowers are blooming under the fly-through feeder.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I picked a handful of blackberries in the prairie garden.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and some of the savanna seedlings.  A sunflower in the telephone pole garden is close to blooming.  :D

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I pulled some weeds from the septic garden.

Fireflies are out.  Cicadas are singing.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Sunshine Revival Challenge 2: Tunnel of Love

Saturday, 5 July 2025 12:56 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Sunshine Revival Challenge 2: Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like

See "Poem: Legs of Grass, Feet of Flowers."

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

Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-4.png

Read more... )

Just one thing: 06 July 2025

Saturday, 5 July 2025 01:17 pm
[personal profile] jazzyjj posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Sunshine Revival Challenge #2

Saturday, 5 July 2025 02:00 pm
kingstoken: (Default)
[personal profile] kingstoken
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-4.png
Challenge #2

Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.
Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like

Oh man neither one of these challenges was made for me. Summer is not my favourite season, that would be Autumn, I know very basic white woman of me. Plus, I grew up on a farm, so summer always meant work. I guess I do like how fast and easy it is to get dressed in the mornings, just throw on shorts and a t-shirt and you're good. I also love all the summer fruit we get this time of year, strawberries, raspberries, cherries, etc, yummy!

I'm not a person who really writes poetry anymore (I dabbled a little bit when I was teenager). I got nothing against it, I enjoy other people's poetry, it just not something I enjoy doing myself.

As recompense for my lack of creativity please accept his famous poem about Sherlock Holmes:

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spindizzy: Cartoon of me wearing a mask and looking tired (Default)
Susan

About

Hi! I'm Susan, I write for [community profile] ladybusiness and The Lesbrary, and I do transcripts for Fangirl Happy Hour.

If you want to throw money at me, I have a patreon!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

May 2025

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