sebastienne

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

a pineapple crown, growing a whole new set of leaves

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)

thefairymelusine

Years ago I used to do Tarot and Oracle on here (and on my now defunct LJ). I still do quite a bit of Tarot and Oracle stuff, although I tended to not have a web presence with it because I compartmentalise a lot and I also get really self conscious about it. A couple of years ago, when first trying to start the PhD I set up a Tarot and Oracle card instagram and back at the end of August I decided that maybe I should start updating it. Have been managing to do that daily since, with a couple of exceptions when I was dealing with severe overwhelm. Or sometimes dealing with tech issues.

Anyway, I now also have a website Medraut Mordion | Tarot. (Thank you very much to my partner for building that). I also have a ko-fi store where you can purchase readings. Either by Zoom or by email: Support Medraut Mordion

It is sort of in the spirit of having a go at everything which is conceivably a marketable skill of mine or source of income. I am a good reader and a thoughtful one, and I do put work into readings when I do them. If they seem like something you would like, why not book. (If they do not seem like something you would like, but do seem like something your friends might like, point your friends towards it, please).

rmc28

Or rather the text message to book my covid & flu vaccinations. "For 75+ and immunosuppressed". I just double-checked and "have had a blood cancer" is still top of the NHS list of qualifying conditions, so that's my armour when the GP surgery gatekeepers are like, you're too young and you might be DEPRIVING someone of this vaccine who NEEDS it. (This has been the conversation the last three times I got invited to get vaccinated, sigh, and then they get a manager to look at my medical record, and then they grudgingly admit that maybe I can has jabs.)

Date is the Saturday when all the Cambridge undergraduates arrive, so just in time. I'll mostly be avoiding students for the first couple weeks of term to let the freshers flu play out, but I will be playing ice hockey so not entirely. Also getting in and out of the city centre that day may be entertaining, probably best done on foot.

kaberett

Have spent most of the day asleep.

Attempt #2 at pineapple-from-trimmed-top has NEW LEAVES.
I am also fairly sure that attempt #2 at lemongrass is taller than it was when we set off on our terrible adventures about ten days ago.
Actual bed. Favourite mattress.
I got to make someone's entire day by sending an "... I think I have your object" e-mail.
Leftovers for dinner: curry from the crew party on Sunday night. Didn't have to think about food. Extremely grateful for this fact.

azurelunatic

I'm not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I wasn't thinking with some of the usual parts of my sense of humor when I was picking out my non-red jello for Liquid Diet Day (24 oz food service pack) and rolled the wrong citrus out of three: orange.

I could have had lemon jelly.
https://youtu.be/ioudby-xooc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Jelly

Current Music: Nice Weather for Ducks

fox

On her last visit, my aunt brought my mother a CD player and a stack of discs in the full knowledge that operating the thing would probably be impossible for her—she can't tell what she's looking at half the time when she's seen it a hundred times before, so finding tiny black-on-black buttons on an unfamiliar machine, forget about it. But no worries, the place where she lives is full of staff who are always happy to (and whose job includes) assist with that sort of thing.

Yesterday I picked her up for dinner and she said she'd asked someone to help with the CD player one morning this week when they came in to help her get dressed, and they'd said oh, sorry, they didn't actually know anything about how to do that—

—and suddenly in that moment I realized oh my god, it's—what it is, is—the Kids Today, all their music is digital, they just stream it on their phones, asking them to put any type of album in any type of player and press any type of button is completely unknown to them. This would have been the equivalent of someone asking me in the late 1990s to help their elderly mother with her 8-track player. I might as well have used the word phonograph, or victrola. Another staffer came in with a delivery as we were leaving the apartment, and I confirmed that she does know how to work a CD player so she's going to help my mom with it when she can. She's in her 40s and agrees that the young people can't do it for online digital reasons. "Hey, you printed the 'save' icon," I said. "They can't read analog clocks, either," she said. And on the drive to my house my mom and I were talking about how there didn't used to be any such thing as an analog clock or an acoustic guitar or a landline phone, because those were just called clocks and guitars and telephones, but now here we are—a biker is a person who rides a motorcycle, so a person who rides a bicycle has to be called a cyclist.

I remember when I was in high school my parents were pretty bothered that the fall of Saigon was being taught in history class, but now there are people who are grown adults with college degrees and almost old enough to run for federal office who were born after September 11, 2001. Which can't be right because that just happened. Himself pointed out that his date of birth was closer to the Armistice (1919) than to today. It's all very upsetting.

rydra_wong

For anyone who may be Dark Souls-curious, here is a very long video essay of which I've only watched part (because I'm trying to limit spoilers) and of which I mainly want to rec part -- the first 30 mins or so, where the essayist discusses something that the mythology about the game’s supposed uber-difficulty tends to obscure, namely the gorgeous, generous array of different tools and options that it gives you for engaging with its difficulties, and how it tries to teach you to use them:

Watch on YouTube

I think this is some of the stuff that prompted me to declaim “Dark Souls loves me and wants me to be happy.”

The game is difficult, it is intended to be difficult (and I still don't know if, for me, it will at some point be insuperably difficult), and progressing and learning through difficulty and failure is the core gameplay loop. As mentioned, it took me a total of seven hours to beat the most recent boss, the Capra Demon. I am currently camped out in the Depths, where I intermittently fall through holes and get cursed by basilisks. I recently got invaded for the first time, by a player who watched as I ran directly under a slime and got enveloped, facepalmed*, and then waited politely while I extricated myself before murdering me**.

And yet my major feeling at this particular moment is of being spoiled (in the pampered sense, not the knowledge sense): I have too many good weapons to try (my beloved halberd, now upgraded to +7, a Balder Side Sword -- a rare and coveted drop -- and a Black Knight Sword)! I'm having to actively try not to over-level! I have so many upgrade materials! I have the world's largest stockpile of charcoal pine resin (purchased on my endless boss runs back to the Capra Demon, so I'd spend any souls I was carrying and not distract myself with losing or trying to retrieve them) so I can make my weapons burst into flame any time I want! I have opened the latest incredibly-convenient shortcut! There's a handy new merchant just before the next boss! I am holding an armful of presents and Dark Souls keeps trying to pile more on top!

{*I went off immediately afterwards to Google "dark souls how to facepalm”, but it looks like you have to join the Forest Hunter covenant to learn that emote and I have other plans. Still tempted, though.}

{**I had expected to loathe being invaded — and had initially planned to play offline mainly to avoid that, but did not for reasons which need to be a different post — but in the event, it was brief, non-inconveniencing, and actually pretty funny.}

rmc28

The Kpop Demon Hunters situation has progressed past "watch a second time", through "listen to soundtrack on repeat" and is now at "find and listen to as many covers and remixes of my favourite tracks as I can".

azurelunatic

Goodbye to bad rubbish BJ, who could make simple things like Madonna being active in the music industry longer than most people of our generation being aware of, plus she didn't look in her early 40s at the time, into some kind of sinister conspiracy theory situation.

You were an absolute jackass, and I honestly don't care if you're alive or not except that I might need to avoid you.

Thanks to Votania and Darkside, who helped me realize what a bad friend BJ was, never mind as a prospective life partner and spouse. Bleck.

This random thought brought to me by the death of Charles Entertainment Kirk, which would probably have been making BJ's circles flail in panic, and hearing a Madonna song on the Doof. (A back episode, we didn't have a SunDoof that I'm aware of.)

kaberett

Reading. Tiny bits of Solutions and Other Problems and The Painful Truth.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac.

Exploring. Chester, including Chester Zoo!

Eating. Almost all of my favourite field foods, including raspberry and lemon curd toasties, noodle pots with the addition of the prepped salad bits (spinach! red onion!), the giant lemon and sugar crepes, and flapjack. ("Almost" because the cake options CHANGED.)

Observing. The Milky Way. Something that might have been some kind of satellite or might have been some kind of shooting star. CHESTER ZOO, etc. At least one field bat.

rmc28

Cambridge Kodiaks B played our first WNIHL game yesterday, against Invicta Dynamics in Gillingham. We had seven players making their WNIHL debut, including me. As team manager I'm delighted, as newbie player I had pre-game nerves for the first time in months, and the biggest smile on my face afterwards.

We lost, but that's almost not the point. Here's a team I didn't even think would exist three months ago, and we've made it happen, creating opportunities for players to grow and develop. One game down, 19 to go (and a playoff game against the North division next May to aim for ...)

kindkit

Still not king. Very far from being king, in fact.

I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.

But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.

All right, first, the boring life stuff.

( health, job, OMG MY FUCKING JOB )

Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.

I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.

Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.

Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.

My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.

On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.

TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.

After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.

Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.

Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.

Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.

This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.

cesy

I really appreciate when authors of longer fics occasionally put a note in the author's notes at the end of a chapter saying it's a good break point if you're binge-reading. Because yes, sometimes I do find it hard to stop, and it helps to have the author say that the next few chapters are intense and flow closely and you might prefer to pause before them rather than in the middle of them.

rmc28

... so I could watch Kpop Demon Hunters, after half my friends mentioned it, and my child told me it was good, and the songs kept turning up on my instagram feed, and I listened to the soundtrack yesterday.

Anyway, it was a great deal of fun, the music is so catchy, the film absolutely leans into its premise, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I'm not great at watching TV at all, and especially not by myself, but I'm glad I did. (I might put it on again, maybe the singalong version, at some point.)

I watched approx 2/3 of it between skating lesson and uni hockey practice and the other 1/3 after getting home. I'd just turned it off to get changed, when in walked the students with the speaker playing the soundtrack (and one of the songs, Golden, lived on repeat in my head throughout practice).

kaberett

Between one thing and another we wound up having a semi-impromptu mini-break in Chester, including a few hours at Chester Zoo.

... where we went into the bats enclosure and were transfixed for about an hour, basically from the moment we walked in until chucking-out time.

It's a big dark room, artificially crepuscular, with lots of trees (dead) for roosts, and somewhere in the vicinity of 350 bats (Seba's short-tailed and Rodrigues fruit bats). THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. They were flying well within a foot of our faces. You could FEEL THE WIND FROM THEIR WINGBEATS.

And A was greatly honoured by one LANDING ON THEIR TROUSERS.

There were many other Excellent Creatures -- the Humboldt penguins in particular were very excited by the rain (so much porpoising), and the giant otters were indeed giant, and there was an enormous dragonfly, and the flamingos went from almost entirely asleep (including one baby that had not yet got the hang of the whole one-leg trick) to YELLING INCESSANTLY after being buzzed by the scarlet ibis.

Extremely good afternoon out, 13/10, would recommend.

thefairymelusine

I watched the A Late Delivery From Avalon episode of Babylon 5 the other night, and I thought of you

quirkytizzy because I remembered you quoting Marcus's speech about taking comfort in the unfairness of the universe years ago. (I prob last saw the episode as an actual child because my parents were very into Babylon 5 and it tended to be on British telly at the same time that I was eating supper, thus I watched a lot of Babylon 5 when very small. Am realising on this rewatch that the reason I found it terrifying as a small child was because it is, in fact, quite a genuinely scary show. It is not safe in the way Star Trek or Farscape is. But this is also why it is really brilliant.

Anyway, don't know if you'll see this Tizzy and I know you don't blog much these days, but it made me think of you.

(Also, what an episode! Really incredibly moving and just very kind about trauma. Also, the bits of the Arthurian legend that "Arthur" had imprinted on in it were some specific passages in Thomas Malory that I wrote about during my Masters coursework. So that made me very happy.)

kaberett

Reading. Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie: finished the Radch stories; on to The World Of The Raven Tower!

The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman: in progress; not yet Cross with it but also not yet Impressed by it.

More Dreamwidth catchup.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac!

Eating. SO many tomatoes.

Exploring. Poked around Preston a very little!

Growing. ... SO many tomatoes. More watering system established at plot (so hopefully all the peppers will still be alive and well upon my return). Sowed some probably-past-it seeds.

Observing. A saw a deer on the drive up to Preston! A proper big one with antlers and all! We were very impressed.

Also the local owl Yell.

naraht

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?

kaberett

Or at least "the other line I meant to highlight from the Wikipedia article":

There is increasing evidence that the smooth muscle that lines the airways becomes progressively more sensitive to changes that occur as a result of injury to the airways from dehydration.

I had only taken 700ml of water with me; I'd blithely assumed I'd be able to top up at the café and then had Too Much Social Anxiety to ask or even check whether they had a jug out, because that's a thing my brain is definitely Doing at the moment. ... and then on the way back I was desperately thirsty and stole most of A's water, and I am just personally finding it Very Interesting that the thing my body wanted me to do most was More Fluids.

rydra_wong

Please enjoy this eloquent depiction of The Capra Demon Experience:

Watch on YouTube

(Content note for animal harm in the form of killing horrifying skinless zombie dogs. Also one man's slow descent into existential despair.)

This is a notorious point where a not insignificant number of people ragequit and stop playing the game altogether.

Also as previously mentioned I struggle badly with tracking multiple inputs, I have the reaction speed of a slime mould, and my default combat state is "panicked and flustered."

It took me about 7 hours (spread across multiple days -- admittedly, most of this time was doing the boss run again and again and again and then dying within seconds of the fight starting) and I am very proud of myself.

(And right now I am dealing with a medical stressor -- hopefully nothing, but had to go get some tests, waiting on results -- so I will take my distractions and wins where I can get them.)

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sebastienne

June 2024

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Page generated Sep. 19th, 2025 01:36 am

Reading

[growth] pineapple is go!

Shameless Self Promotion: Tarot and Oracle website now live

I have had the call

tired. so tired.

Colonoscopy week.

in which the march of time tramples us all

"If you like Dark Souls, it's hard to shut up about Dark Souls"

hello rabbitholes

🍾🥂 About 24⅔ years of good fucking riddance

vital functions

Milestone

quarterly report?

I <3 fandom

I reactivated Netflix tonight

BATS

(no subject)

vital functions

That sort of person

[embodiment] that was the other thing I meant to say about EIB

Yesterday I beat the Capra demon

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June 2024

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