Sunflower Auction
Aug. 19th, 2025 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spikedluvBidding at sunflower_auction, to benefit Ukraine, is open!
My offer is HERE.
(There are only 10 offers, so it's very easy to scroll down to see them. Some are offering fic, and some art. Please go check them out!)
sunflower_auction, to benefit Ukraine, is open!My offer is HERE.
(There are only 10 offers, so it's very easy to scroll down to see them. Some are offering fic, and some art. Please go check them out!)
The Day in Spikedluv (Monday, Aug 18)
Aug. 19th, 2025 07:21 amspikedluvI hit Walmart and the Dollar Tree while I was downtown. (I also stopped in at the Shoe Department to see if sneaker companies had magically started making women’s 10 1/2 or non-ugly men’s sneakers. They had not.) (Later on I stopped at Sunnycrest to see if they had the beef sticks Pip likes; they did not.)
I did two loads of laundry (including bed sheets, so also stripped and re-made the bed; both loads got washed, dried AND folded), hand-washed dishes and emptied the dishwasher, took the dogs for a couple walks, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, scooped kitty litter, and shaved.
I read more Hapshetsut and watched some HGTV programs.
Temps started out at 48.6(F) and reached 73.2. It was sunny with a light breeze, which was perfect. Needless to say, I did not wear the shorts and tank top I had laid out last night. This morning definitely called for capris and a t-shirt. And a sweatshirt, natch.
Since the high for today was only supposed to be 70, I turned off the AC (we only have one in the bedroom) and opened windows to get some of that cooler air inside the house in the morning. Hopefully we won’t have to turn the AC back on for a while. That would be nice. While I appreciate the cold temps the AC provides when it’s 90+ out, I really do prefer a nice fresh breeze if I can get one.
Mom Update:
Mom was not doing great. ( more back here )
I did two loads of laundry (including bed sheets, so also stripped and re-made the bed; both loads got washed, dried AND folded), hand-washed dishes and emptied the dishwasher, took the dogs for a couple walks, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, scooped kitty litter, and shaved.
I read more Hapshetsut and watched some HGTV programs.
Temps started out at 48.6(F) and reached 73.2. It was sunny with a light breeze, which was perfect. Needless to say, I did not wear the shorts and tank top I had laid out last night. This morning definitely called for capris and a t-shirt. And a sweatshirt, natch.
Since the high for today was only supposed to be 70, I turned off the AC (we only have one in the bedroom) and opened windows to get some of that cooler air inside the house in the morning. Hopefully we won’t have to turn the AC back on for a while. That would be nice. While I appreciate the cold temps the AC provides when it’s 90+ out, I really do prefer a nice fresh breeze if I can get one.
Mom Update:
Mom was not doing great. ( more back here )
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1character: a character-focused writing comm
Aug. 19th, 2025 05:33 amgimmighoulcoins posting in fictional_fans
Description: Pick one character as your focus in this fic writing community in the style of
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1sentence, choose from 1 of the 6 theme sets, and make your claim - then, write 50 one-sentence fic inspired by the prompts to share on the comm! This is an ongoing activity, open to writers for all fandoms, as well as original characters. Claims are good for three months, and you can get an extension of one month if needed.Schedule: Ongoing
Links:
On Dreamwidth:
1character
i don't know how you keep on giving
Aug. 18th, 2025 10:15 pmmusesfoolJust ordered some not really necessary stuff from Penzey's since they've got a 25% off everything (but gift cards) sale going until midnight. Also ordered some cute monstera-leaf-shaped earrings because sometimes I need cute new earrings. And a couple of new books and a dress with llamas on it for Baby Miss L.
I guess I needed a little retail therapy...
Here's a cool link: On Set for The Pitt Season Two: Noah Wyle and the Cast Finally Lift the Curtain (contains some spoilers for season 2).
And here is a cute video of a bunch of NY Mets being interviewed at the Little League classic. #LFGM
*
I guess I needed a little retail therapy...
Here's a cool link: On Set for The Pitt Season Two: Noah Wyle and the Cast Finally Lift the Curtain (contains some spoilers for season 2).
And here is a cute video of a bunch of NY Mets being interviewed at the Little League classic. #LFGM
*
A post!
Aug. 18th, 2025 04:45 pmunaveeTime has really gotten away from me this year. Anyway, I finally watched Kpop Demon Hunters and loved it. It reminded me of how I felt as a kid watching Sailor Moon episodes before going to school. My sister and I were obsessed with the TV soundtrack (the English-language one) back then, too.
I think my favorite song from the movie is Free, because I am a sucker for a duet. The lyrics are so hesitantly hopeful! It also doesn't hurt that the magpie and tiger are in those scenes. (I don't usually buy merch but I am tempted to get or make something for them)
Links to related stuff I watched:
I think my favorite song from the movie is Free, because I am a sucker for a duet. The lyrics are so hesitantly hopeful! It also doesn't hurt that the magpie and tiger are in those scenes. (I don't usually buy merch but I am tempted to get or make something for them)
Links to related stuff I watched:
- I've listened to so many covers of Golden, these are just a few: Bada (it's like having one of the "Sunlight Sisters" sing the song!), Sohyang (the harmonies!), Seo Eunkwang (I've been listening to BTOB lately and I found it funny how prominent the recording software is behind him).
- Kevin Woo (Mystery Saja) singing Soda Pop - It seems like he really enjoyed being part of the movie, his YT has a lot of fun shorts.
- Wonho covering Soda Pop and Your Idol as Abby - He and his team must have put so much effort into this! Costumes, makeup, choreography, video effects. So cute that he even dressed up as Rumi.
- The Other Saja Boys - I saw some comments speculating how the boy band formed so quickly, and I want all the skits about it. They also covered Your Idol; it's interesting to compare the animated choreography and real life interpretations.
- Chanyeol's review - It's kind of funny and meta to get an EXO member's reaction.
spoilers?
He didn't know their song was in it, and he recognized Andrew Choi's singing.
Hugo Award Thoughts for 2025
Aug. 18th, 2025 03:33 pmkitewithfishhttps://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/winners-and-stats
Hugo Awards thoughts
Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.
I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?
I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.
The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.
I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.
In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.
Hugo Awards thoughts
Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.
I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?
I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.
The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.
I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.
In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.
Chicken Florentine
Aug. 18th, 2025 09:00 pmcimoreneI posted a few weeks ago about Florentine omelette, a recipe we really liked, after I saw it mentioned in a book (neither of us had heard of it previously).
A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:
(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))
Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.
Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.
A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:
Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4] Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5] Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery.
(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))
Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.
Islanders (2019)
Aug. 18th, 2025 01:02 pmpauraqueIn this casual strategy game the goal is to accumulate points by placing buildings in a model town. Each type of building earns points according to what other buildings and resources are nearby, suggesting the city planning process—houses want to be placed near the town center and other houses, but not near noisy industry, etc. It's less a city builder than it is an abstraction of what you do in a city builder, reduced to its most basic elements.
This game didn't do it for me. I love city builders, but for me just placing buildings isn't enough to hold my interest, at least not as it's presented here. I can do object placement puzzles that are completely abstract and arbitrary like Tetris or something. But if we're calling it a town, then I want people in it! I want to manage traffic and resources! I can see from the positive reviews that many players enjoy the simplicity and find it relaxing, but for me it's so impersonal that it feels sterile, and I found myself getting bored quickly. It has good reviews so I guess I'm just the wrong audience for it. It did make me think about how I don't respond just to the mechanics of a game, but also to the setting where those mechanics exist and what I want to see in that setting, so at least there's that.
Islanders is on Steam, GOG, and consoles for $4.99 USD.
This game didn't do it for me. I love city builders, but for me just placing buildings isn't enough to hold my interest, at least not as it's presented here. I can do object placement puzzles that are completely abstract and arbitrary like Tetris or something. But if we're calling it a town, then I want people in it! I want to manage traffic and resources! I can see from the positive reviews that many players enjoy the simplicity and find it relaxing, but for me it's so impersonal that it feels sterile, and I found myself getting bored quickly. It has good reviews so I guess I'm just the wrong audience for it. It did make me think about how I don't respond just to the mechanics of a game, but also to the setting where those mechanics exist and what I want to see in that setting, so at least there's that.
Islanders is on Steam, GOG, and consoles for $4.99 USD.