Reading

Did the memory change, or did my taste?

Every now and then I get a craving like,

"I wish I could read [fandom] the way it was before [subsequent bad canon/creator behavior]."

The thing is, all the stuff I enjoyed the first time I read it is still there, but... it never feels the same. All that Avengers tower fic from 2012 and all that season 1 Teen Wolf fic, for example, actually don't taste the way I remember them tasting.

This is true of a number of foods that I liked as a kid, too. The smell of bacon or hamburger cooking are slightly nauseating to me now that I haven't eaten them in 20 years, but sometimes I still wake up from a dream wishing I could have the bacon cheeseburgers I ate at age 19 from the college dining hall once a week.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Mets pregame show

Entry tags:

books: dungeon crawler carl

he got a great charge on it

Arrgh, book 7 is not the last book! And the next one doesn't come out until next year! Arrgh!

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Entry tags:

health: allergies

There must have been a musk in that curl spray

Like oud or something. Not patchouli anyway. Because after shampooing it three times the night before last, I could still smell that on it yesterday every time it got in my face (the physically irritating part of the smell did wash out, but I personally dislike musks and think they're gross even when they don't make me sneeze). I can still smell it today too, but my hair is dry, and I don't want to shampoo it again yet.

So I guess this is no longer directly related to allergies, but I don't have a haircare tag or an "I fucking hate perfume flames on the side of my face" tag.

Entry tags:

canada fandom,
tv

Canada has come back to haunt me

Last night, Andrew and I and our tv-watching-with friend started The Sympathizer, a drama set just after the Vietnam war, about a Vietnamese double agent. It's structurally really interesting, and it has RDJ in multiple kind-of-gross roles, lol. Darkly funny, but deals with some really serious subjects.

Created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, who are also showrunners. Yes, that Don McKellar.

It also, features Sandra Oh. I did not expect either of their names in the credits! :D

Entry tags:

gardening

the tomato that conquered Pittsburgh

This year I got three (different) tomato seedlings, all container-friendly, along with some peppers and other things. Having failed to do proper research, I allocated the tomato cages pretty arbitrarily. I should not have done that.

potted plants on a patio with a gigantic tomato plant in the middle

The giant tomato plant in the center is a Sungold. It seems to be in the process of conquering my patio, the neighborhood, and perhaps the city. It makes sweet, tasty, orange cherry tomatoes. I've had quite a bounty so far and there's plenty more to come. It was originally on that ledge with the others, but a month or so ago I realized that if I kept it there, I would not be able to harvest without a ladder. (So much for using that trellis.) At least this way I can climb up on that ledge to reach the ones I can't reach from the ground (or at least I hope I'll be able to reach them all!). Wowza. Next year, bigger cage! (They're very tasty, so I do plan to get this type next year.)

The other two tomato types are Patio Choice, advertised as good for small containers, and Mountain Magic. They both produce red grape tomatoes (Patio Choice are sweeter). On the right, not as clear in the picture, are two Cornito peppers and a banana pepper, all still working toward a first harvest. I've moved these around a few times over the course of the summer to try to optimize sunlight.

Entry tags:

health: allergies

Not a satisfactory situation or explanation

Last night I was joylessly reading until way too late in bed, and then after I put my phone down, I suddenly started to notice my throat hurt a bit.

Now, I do have a perfume allergy that has caused my throat to swell mostly-closed in the past, but only about 5(?)x in the past 20 years, and only after a Lot (the perfume has to be concentrated close to my nose and mouth probably).

And yes, yesterday I had tried a new curl-reviving spray and I had been mildly annoyed by its perfume all day, but it hadn't irritated my nose right away the way dangerous perfumes (and also many others) do.

So when I started to worry that the product was causing an allergic reaction that might make my throat swell closed and kill me in my sleep, this was extremely unlikely for several reasons: the perfume had already proven itself not similar to ones that caused a reaction before, and also that's not really how anaphylaxis works, probably?

But my throat hurt and every perfume I could smell seemed to be aggravating it. So I decided that getting up at 3 am and showering all the perfumed products off would be a better use of my time than going downstairs to take antihistamines, painkillers, and a benzo. I shampooed my hair three times and combed conditioner through it in the shower, then put a folded towel on my pillow and slept on it after towel-drying, without applying my usual leave-in.

My throat feels a little better but still irritated today, and I took loratidine and paracetamol with breakfast. I wonder why my throat got irritated, though. I hope I'm not getting sick, but probably not; the last time I went to the store was Wednesday, so the incubation period for a respiratory infection wouldn't match up very well.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Into the Spin - Dessa

Entry tags:

slow climb, but quick to descend

They are installing some fancy new app-based intercom system in my building, which I'm not particularly a fan of, but I dutifully downloaded the app as directed. They haven't told us when the new system is going to go live, or given us really any other instructions on how it works, but I hope I won't have to keep the ringer on because unless I'm expecting an important call, I Do Not Do That. I guess we'll see what happens!

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Reading Wednesday!

What I've just finished
So a number of people have been talking about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I thought it was graphic novels, so I checked out a sample on Saturday. It's not comics, it's something called LitRPG, the trappings of which are a little tedious to me, but overall, it is pretty engrossing reading. I've finished the first 4 books of the series (out of 7) and I'm 2/3 of the way through book 5. It is about our eponymous protagonist Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, surviving a Hunger Games like set up after aliens invade earth. ( spoilers )

What I'm reading now
Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade. So far I find the setting more compelling than the last 2 books (though the train book was my least favorite in terms of settings) and I'm wondering how the rest of the book is going to go!

What I'm reading next
The last(?) 2 books in the series! I don't know for certain if #7 is the last book and I haven't wanted to google because I don't want to be spoiled. The series has taken some interesting turns I wasn't expecting and I enjoy that when it happens. Hopefully they can stick the landing!

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Entry tags:

plant and garden

Benjamin the benjamin ficus is living in the enclosed porch for the summer

Benjamin is one of several large and venerable potted plants inherited from Wax's granny, so he's probably older than I am; he has been in front of the east window in the kitchen since we moved here. However, he's had a hard time this spring after Sipuli peed in his pot several times to protest her litter box being smelly.

Once it got warm enough to not shock him in the process, Wax discarded all his old soil, shook and jiggled and rinsed his roots, and repotted him with new soil; and in apology for the trauma of that, she felt obliged to let him stay out for a while (but not fully outside, where the temperature fluctuations and wind and rain would be too much for him).

The thing is... Benjamin hasn't been pruned in a long time, and he's probably about six feet tall and four feet wide, now.

The porch isn't large.

As Wax put it when carrying out the recycling last week, it's not very convenient having your porch half full of tree.

She says she can't bring him inside, though, because he's enjoying himself so much (making lots of new leaves) that it would be mean.

Entry tags:

farm share

Farm share, week 9

This week’s distribution featured a visit from a turkey hen.

2 medium-small heads of green cabbage
6 zucchini/summer squash (I chose golden zucchini again; these were none of them large)
6 pickling cucumbers (choosing small, as usual)
6 heads of garlic (cured)
2 pounds of carrots (the kind that are purple-red on the outside, but an orange core)
2 pounds of onions (a long skinny red (ok, purple) variety)
2 pounds of beets (I chose golden ones, medium sized)
2 bunches of Bright Lights Swiss chard
16 tomatoes (mostly regular red ones, medium sized)
4 Italian eggplants
4 large green peppers (I swapped 2 for 2 more eggplant)
take-what-you-want herbs (I took some flowering dill, and quite a lot of parsley)

First thoughts: a lot more roasted veggies, whether ratatouille ones or root ones. Cucumber salad. Tomato-cucumber salad. Chard in soup. Maybe a braised eggplant-tomato-chickpea stew? Parsley in yet another riff on ghormeh sabzi. Roasted cabbage. Cabbage-beet relish. Beet pickles. Carrot pickles.

Oh what the fuck, time.

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Entry tags:

3+1

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Entry tags:

places: pargas

Shades of Local Color in the Villages of Ålön

We live in a tiny town with only one commercial street, but spread out with low population density. Our island of Ålön is about 77 square kilometers (about 44 square miles), and most of it is farms and forests.

My late MIL's summer cottage was fifteen minutes by car out towards one of the corners of the island, in the village of Levo, but what a world of difference! Behind its little orchard stretched fallow and planted fields; across the winding road lay a little forest, and on the other side of that the bay of Finland. (The neighbors gave permission to park extra cars in their field and to use their little scrap of sand and dock for swimming.) The music of the evening in Levo was birdsong and the rushing of the wind.

Here one block behind city hall and the police station, in the village of Parsby, we sit in the midst of urban decay, as mentioned recently. Our little street contains three inhabited houses and two abandoned wrecks that the city owns and is allowing to fall into public health hazards, with asbestos everywhere, roofs caving in, broken windows, and fallen trees and power lines. The street leading down to the back of the police station contains two more inhabited houses and three more decaying wrecks, and the city tore all the pavement on it up last January to fix the pipes and hasn't paved it again yet. Across the other street (we live on the corner) is a big clot of densely-populated midcentury apartment buildings, whose retired inhabitants risk their lives on the above-mentioned poorly-maintained ripped-up road in winter (it's a steep hill).

Because our town is rural and the driving age for cars is 18 in Finland, the plague of Parsby (and small towns everywhere) is teenagers on mopeds. The music of the evening in Parsby starts with wood pigeons, thrushes, and the distant buzzing of cars on the highway, but is interrupted periodically by the deafening roar of mopeds speeding by under the window and teenagers practicing being cool and adult by shouting the equivalent of "FUCK" at each other. (I fantasize several times a week about an externally-mounted loudspeaker that would play a voice yelling "Shut up" towards the street.)

It would've been impossible to quickly walk to the store from Levo, though.

Entry tags:

weekly update

Me-and-media update

Previous poll review
In the Your Name poll, 73.5% of respondents spell their name out, unprompted, 26.5% offer an explanation or additional information, and 14.3% exaggerate the pronunciation to reflect the spelling. I've concluded that names are super inefficient, and we should switch to serial numbers.

In ticky-boxes, being gentle with yourself (69.4%) came second to hugs (77.6%), followed by three enchanted owl feathers that can draw forth the dawn (53.1%). Thank you for your votes!

Reading
10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall, read by Will Watt -- I loved this! The banter was hilarious, and the reading was flawless. Neither of the lead characters are exactly cinnamon rolls, but that helped to offset the impacts of some, er, questionable choices. I giggled my way through most of it and found it genuinely moving at the end. The basic premise is that the regional branch manager of a bed-and-bath store gets himself and his entire team fired for underperforming, immediately has an accident, and grabs the opportunity to fake amnesia and move into his prick of a boss's house (for "monitoring the concussion" reasons) a month before Christmas, in a bid to reverse the damage and save his team. Reads like a wild remix of the Sandra Bullock While You Were Sleeping Christmas movie, which I also love.

Will Watt is such a great reader that I then listened to another Alexis Hall, this one set half inside a MMORPG, despite my knowing nothing at all about gaming. Looking for Group was cute, contained a) a lot of gaming references and terminology, and b) a fair amount of '19-year-old guy falling for another guy for the first time, and also being very clueless!19, but eventually getting his act together.' The story scaffolding was showing by the end, but it still worked.

I'm now listening to Will Watt reading A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey. Magical AU London. This is an adventure story with lowkey m/m, set in a goblin market and a workhouse full of indentured children. The comps are Neverwhere and The Night Circus, and both seem apt; I'd add in Six of Crows, too. I'm 4 hrs 20 in and enjoying it so far.

Also in audio, Andrew and I started the new Rivers of London. It feels super self-indulgent so far, but you know, fun. Good sense of place, as always (to the point where I keep imagining Aaranovich swanning around Scotland, taking notes).

Ongoing: Guardian by priest, and Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

Kdramas
Just passed halfway in my Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You) rewatch. Still loving it. *smishes everyone*

Other TV
More North of North, the first few episodes of Middle Class Bogan (Australian sitcom about an upper middle class doctor who discovers that a) she's adopted and b) her birth parents are drag racers; features New Zealand's Robyn Malcolm; the main character is very uptight and it stresses me out, but not in a terrible way); the first episode of Chief of War (Temuera Morrison is outstanding); Bluey! Fringe with my sister.

Hudson Hawk (DVD from my collection) -- shamelessly ridiculous, and I am totally here for it!! :D Apparently New Zealand is the only country where this film was a hit. Rated five out of five giggles.

Desperately Seeking Susan at the cinema -- I love this so much!! Delightful romp with TV/movie-amnesia. Stars Rosanna Arquette, Madonna, and young!Aiden Quinn. Rated five out of five hearts.

We have tickets for Jaws at the end of the month.

Fandom
I posted a poll to the

fan_writers comm -- possibly a tactical error given the state of my arms, but the discussion there has been great. It's so interesting seeing people's different approaches to writing.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Letters from an American. (I should get back to Midnight Burger sometime -- I stalled out in the middle of chapter 18.)

Online life
Busy, busy, busy, but it's all good fun stuff.

Writing/making things
At this point, if I can finish my flashfic for the Crowd round of

fan_flashworks for the 11th NZ time (10th in most places), I'll count myself lucky and satisfied. A lot of my time, energy and arms are going into other things.

Life/health/mental state things
Same as last week, via-à-vis arms being bad and things otherwise being mostly okay.

Food
I made easy fried rice on Sunday, malfatti yesterday, and today I have a beef stroganoff minus onions in the slow cooker. Also, yesterday I made a ton of Korean pork dumplings minus cabbage. I'm still slightly baffled that I cook now -- what is happening??

Good things
The profusion of m/m profic and excellent audiobook readers. Online friends, and active Dreamwidth comms and fandoms. An inbox full of things to reply to, and a life full of things to do. Cooking. Fic and art. Wishlist is coming!!

Poll #33465 Reading preferences

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49

View Respondents

I prefer

View Answers

standalone novels
35 (71.4%)

duologies / trilogies
18 (36.7%)

finished series
27 (55.1%)

ongoing series
10 (20.4%)

re-reads
22 (44.9%)

new books by favourite authors
30 (61.2%)

discovering new authors
27 (55.1%)

gazing helplessly at my TBR list
22 (44.9%)

mostly fanfic
18 (36.7%)

other
2 (4.1%)

ticky-box full of swinging on a star
19 (38.8%)

ticky-box full of carrying moonbeams home in a jar
25 (51.0%)

ticky-box full of having more fun than you are
14 (28.6%)

ticky-box full of teenage giraffes adopting more of a flamingo aesthetic
25 (51.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
30 (61.2%)

Entry tags:

dad's injury

The Ambulance Merry-Go-Round

My dad (C5/6 quadriplegic wheelchair user) has been in and out of the hospital all spring and summer.

Initially, there was some kind of internal bleeding, I think, and he kept having very low blood pressure and cardiac events and then having to have his many medications adjusted. Then he had to have a colectomy, and then he got a persistently recurring UTI that is resistant to antibiotics. A lot of these times he's been carted off to the hospital it's been for low blood pressure or a slight fever, and it seems to my sister and me like they're just stabilizing him, tweaking his medication, and releasing him, sometimes the same day, only for him to be back in an ambulance in less than a week.

This is having a weird effect where it's cumulatively and abstractly more scary every time he goes, while at the same time it is becoming so familiar that it's starting to feel routine. I know this is why people got convinced they were safe from COVID after a few months of wearing a mask and why people are frequently injured in the streets near their homes: the cognitive illusion that an action is proved safe if you've done it a bunch of times and nothing bad happened. Or in the case of these hospital visits, bad things happened, but he didn't get seriously (ICU) ill.

It's rough on my sister, who lives with her husband and my parents in the US, and I can't really support her long distance very effectively. And even if it were safe to travel there now, there's no way to know how long it would keep happening, so it still wouldn't probably be practical for me to go.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Mets vs Giants on tv

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adventures in cooking

the summer of four to three

I made a half-batch of corn fritters this morning, but having neither scallions nor chives, I used garlic and onion powder and Italian seasoning, and Parmesan instead of cheddar for the cheese. They are a little bland. Also, I definitely need to dig out my splatter guard, because they do spit and pop while they fry. If you have a fear of frying - and I know some people (reasonably) do - definitely invest in a splatter guard.

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trope of my dreams!

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Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Mets vs Giants on tv

Entry tags:

adventures in cooking

he is throwing a gem tonight

Anyone got a good recipe for corn fritters? We used to make them when I was a kid, but I have not turned up a recipe in the folder of old recipes I inherited from my parents, and neither my brother nor sister had a recipe. I'm guessing it was probably the Bisquick recipe, but I don't have any Bisquick, so I will probably end up halving the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

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Entry tags:

finland,
health

The ibuprofen barrier (also the paracetamol barrier)

Tragically, the supply of ibuprofen we bought the last time we went to the US - in 2017 - is running out now! Ibuprofen is more expensive in Finland and you can only buy 30 tablets of 400mg each at a time, and you can't mail it internationally, but you can bring it in your luggage, so in the past, I have just brought back a bunch of bottles each time I visited the US. (Technically, you can only bring your own medication for personal use, but we've never had a problem.)

The even more tragic part is that my sister was here just a year ago, but I forgot to ask her to bring it. Obviously it would be unwise to go there in the near future now, and I'm not sure if it would be fully safe even for my white middle-class family members to leave the country in case they had trouble going back (although they don't have any travel plans in the near future, because my dad, being quadriplegic, is immunocompromised and air travel is an elevated risk for him, and he's been in and out of the hospital lately).

When I was a teenager and young adult I used ibuprofen heavily for cramps, but in my 30s the severity lessened dramatically and I was often able to skip painkillers or get by with a small dose of paracetamol/acetaminophen, so the supply from our last visit has lasted longer than expected. (The last bottle has an expiration date in 2020, so possibly it is only working by the placebo effect at this point.) Concurrently with the perimenopausal symptoms I've started getting over the last few years, though, the cramps have started to worsen again and a couple of times in recent months I think they've been more painful than when I was a teenager! (But I also can't be sure because it's about 25 years ago.) A few years ago I was advised to try 1000mg paracetamol + 600mg ibuprofen together in case of emergency, and I now typically need to do this a few times per month. And also to buy paracetamol approximately every 1.5 months, because you can't buy more than 30 (500mg) tablets of paracetamol at a time either, and Wax and I both get migraines (not bad migraines by you Migraine Sufferer standards, but they are still headaches)! I've just never happened to bring paracetamol/acetaminophen back in my luggage because (a) I didn't know I could and should use it instead of ibuprofen until I was in my late 30s and (b) until recently there was always a larger bottle of it around leftover from various prescriptions.

Ugh, and I hate big Finnish 400mg ibuprofen tablets, too. They're not nearly as nice as the standard round coated ones you get in the US. And if you buy gel caps you can't break them! Come to think of it, I also don't like the big paracetamol tablets, but I don't have any clear memories of the size and shape of acetaminophen tablets to compare them to. But, honestly, they would have to be fairly awful tablets to be worse than the inconvenience and annoyance of buying them 30 at a time.

Entry tags:

ephemera

Chicken adventures

Last time I saw my hairstylist, she had just bought four chicks and was embarking on a lifestyle of backyard chicken-keeping. She told me all their names. It was sweet.

Turns out chick-sexing is an imperfect art. Over the intervening month, she started to hear one of the birds crowing, but it took a while to figure out which one. It was Dottie.

My stylist called everybody she knew out in the county until she found someone who was both interested in rooster and zoned for rooster. When she was carrying Dottie out to the car to take him to his new home, he crowed a goodbye at the coop as they passed.

Out of the coop they heard some farewell cackling. And more crowing.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Into the Great Wide Open - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

Entry tags:

the future was wide open

I spent most of the day glued to trade deadline updates - the Mets did pretty well. I would say they got 90% of what they needed. I would have loved for them to get a top of the rotation starter in addition to 3 excellent relievers, but I guess the price was too high.

I also had to complete a 90 minute cybersecurity training which was incredibly boring and repetitive, but if it finally gets our CEO or our AP department to recognize fake invoices as phishing emails, I guess it's worth it.

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I finally watched Thunderbolts and I enjoyed it, mostly because of Yelena. She is so great! I'll never stop being mad about what they did to Natasha in Endgame, but at least we got Yelena out of the fun but way too late Black Widow movie. She is fantastic! I also enjoyed Ava Starr. Hannah John-Kamen needs to be in more things. I could have done without Walker, but whatever. He's nothing.

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Here's the July recs update:

unfitforsociety has been updated for July 2025 with 16 recs in 3 fandoms:

✭ 13 Batfamily
✭ 2 Percy Jackson/Batfamily crossovers
✭ 1 Lord of the Rings

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