actuallyclintbarton

Today being (US)Thanksgiving, I will try to extend this back over the last year, more-or-less. I am thankful for...

Having survived what is now almost 13 months here in the Netherlands, making this my second Thanksgiving here. (And my fifth without Colleen, for which I am NOT thankful, but sad.)
Finally having gotten the kitchen and other parts of the house re-stocked to a useable level, if not exactly where we left off.
220V house wiring, for electric kettles, other appliances, and vehicles.
Frame.work.
Having successfully signed up for health insurance and gotten reasonably-priced health care. Including for the cats, who don't have insurance.
While I'm on that subject, a vet who makes house calls.
Having, with N, started our (required for immigration) business, and thanks mainly to N's book, actually made some money at it.
Living in a country that has both good public transit, and excellent bike paths (which work just fine for mobility scooters).
(Tin)Lizzy and Scarlett-the-carlet, our folding mobility scooter and micro-car respectively.
Fuzzy blankets. NO thanks for whatever health problem makes me feel cold in the evening no matter what the ambient temperature.
Finally getting screen rotation working on my Frame.work convertible laptop. Whether it's automatic depends on the window manager, and possibly the phase of the moon. But it should be usable.
Walks, and occasionally st/rolls.
Compression socks. (No thanks for the condition they're supposed to improve.)
Hydrocortizone ointment.
The filk community.

Last year's Thanksgiving entry is mostly still applicable, but a few plans for what was then the coming year have, predictably, gone by the wayside again, and my health isn't holding up as well as I would like. I'd be thankful for executive function if I had any. I'll be thankful for good drugs once we get my BP and psych meds figured out.

Again, happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. (That includes us, but we're having the feast on Saturday to accommodate j's school schedule. Including the annual American Thanksgiving celebration in Leiden,)

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag

lb_lee

Sneak: there is a little old lady cat on my lap. Who knew such a little cat could make such big purrs? Where do they come from? Where does she fit them all? It is a cosmic mystery that can only be pondered, never solved!

Current Mood: content

lb_lee

Mori: today, we helped a lady clean out her kitchen, and because it was full of great things, we trucked two big backpacks and five big bags of food, staples, and seasonings across town to the community fridge. It was HEAVY! Good thing Kitchen Lady donated a cart to the cause.

There were a bunch of other people at the community fridge, including a church lady offloading turkey dinners and pumpkin pie, and a lot of our stuff got claimed even as we were unloading it. (One Spanish-speaking family wanted ALLLLL the chocolate we had: chips, syrup, and two kinds of cocoa. Don’t know what they’re planning but by god it’ll be fuckin delicious!) The church food containers were neither dated nor labeled, and we had Sharpies on us so we marked all of them for reference. Feeling that we had damn well earned it, we swiped a pie slice and ate it with our hands like pizza, grabbed a pumpkin and some soup, and carted home the bags, backpacks, and new cart.

Biff is so fucking happy. We have fed so many people this month! And a merry fucksgiven to all!

EDIT from Biff (transcribed): I like doing this. I want to keep doing it.

Current Mood: accomplished

lb_lee

Everyone ignore this; this is a book list for Rhincodons whose email keeps bouncing me.

( Read more... )

umadoshi

I complain sometimes about time and the surreality of the passage thereof and whatnot, but this morning I had several minutes of genuinely wondering if the way the year is barreling toward its end meant the first Sunday of Advent had already passed without my even noticing. I'm not sure if something about the timing of US Thanksgiving threw me off, or if it's as simple as my not having put "Advent begins" on my calendar, which I think I usually note in advance. (In practical terms it'd be fine; as it happens, I'm planning to use a "burn a bit every day of December" Advent candle, which probably means not breaking out the wreath for the four Sundays. But still.)

I often have weird dreams and don't usually remember much about them, but until today I'm not sure I'd ever before woken up from a dream where I was watching a movie? In the case of this dream, I was at the theatre watching what was officially a Newsflesh film adaptation, but in the sense that (from what I know of it, never having seen it) the World War Z movie is based on that book, which is to say, really not at all. ("Lead" characters who were supposed to be Georgia and Shaun, yes, but nothing to do with [*checks notes*] characters-as-people, zombies, viruses, or politics, and possibly not journalism, either. I think there was some sort of lab creating humanoid/animal mixes of some sort, possibly giving them guns.) It went on for quite some time.

My dream-self was appalled, of course, but at least glad to think Seanan had presumably gotten a decent chunk of money for the rights. She's got cats to feed!

lb_lee

We own a laptop that is turning 20 years old in January. Named BSOD (for how it treated our father when he was first setting it up), it has proved the doughtiest, most indomitable workhorse ever... kinda like how you name a kid Chastity and they decide to PROVE YOU WRONG.

For nine solid years, BSOD was basically our only computer*. Since 2015, it's been our pinch-hitter during travel, homelessness, and desktop breakdown, and it has now outlived two desktops. Its keyboard and battery have been replaced, RAM has been added, but it hasn't yet needed its little watch battery replaced, which after twenty years is astonishing. It just keeps going! Is there nothing it can't do? (No!)**

Seeing as how hard BSOD has worked for us over the years, it only seemed fair to get it a birthday present! Especially since it keeps getting called out of retirement. Naturally, it outlived the significantly younger drawing tablet it had, so we got an Ebay replacement, downloaded the oldest drivers Wacom still had on its site, and lo and behold, the secondhand tablet worked. Happy birthday, BSOD!

( computer birthday party and footnotes behind cut )

Current Mood: happy

lb_lee

Rogan: This comic was the surprise winner of the fan poll this month! I originally made it for Kimball Anderson's Inaction Comics, an (out of print) collection all about NOT doing things. It was also printed in the original floppy version of All in the Family #1, but removed for the collected version, because it seemed a distraction from the main story. Warning for internalized ableism and crushing despair behind the cut, commentary in comments.

( Text-only transcript version. If you don't want/need this, click the cut under this one! )

( Two pages of comics behind this cut! )

kaberett

Reading. ... I think, like, a page or two of Descartes (Treatise on Man), and that's it?

OH. NO. I also finished my first pass through indexing The National Trust Cookbook for EYB. That's right. That's a thing I did.

Watching. Three Whole Entire Episodes of Beddybyes, halfway through the third of which the toddler (who felt it was Very Important that we saw it) pretty much fell asleep where it was sat.

Playing. RIDICULOUS Inkulinati run for Preposterous Amounts Of Prestige.

Cooking. Medlar jelly (plain, spiced). Quince sorbet. Several bread. A batch of buttermilk pancakes. Some terrible First, Burn Your Lettuce, thereby ticking another item off the current Cook The Book project. Buttermilk pancakes.

Eating. One of the CHILLIS from the CHILLI PLANTS we brought HOME from the GREENHOUSE just after first frost (but they were fine); also A turned the small pile of peppers that broke off the sweet pepper I brought home on a bike, still green, into akuri this morning.

Exploring. Important sploshy stomp through the puddles of Barking Park. I... think that's it?

Growing. I have NOT sown any physalis or lemongrass in the electric propagator, to get them hopefully Established by the time I need it for Other Things in the new year. This is a deliberate decision. They can go in next week.

... and now it's very definitely time for bed, goodnight world. <3

umadoshi

Reading: I finished August Clarke's Metal from Heaven (really good, with gorgeous writing) and read Into the Broken Lands, which was my first Tanya Huff book in...probably a couple of decades, honestly. Also really good. (I have a bonus soft spot for her because she was GoH at the local SFF con one year when I went in high school.)

Currently reading: Rebecca Mahoney's The Memory Eater.

And

scruloose and I are close enough to the end of Network Effect that we could probably finish it tonight if we really tried; annoyingly, it's due back at something like 6 PM today, and we can't get it finished by then, so we're gonna have to renew it. >.<

Cooking/Baking: I mentioned having apples we needed to bake with early in the month, and what we wound up going with was the Easiest Ever MOIST Apple Cake from RecipeTin eats, chosen in large part based on our available springform pans. It's tasty (we took the last pieces out to thaw for this evening), but I can't say "moist" is one of the first words it brings to mind. (It's not dry or anything, just...a perfectly pleasantly-textured cake.)

Tonight's dinner plan is Smitten Kitchen's Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Cabbage. (It calls for a green cabbage and we have a Savoy, but hopefully that'll be okay.) Last weekend when we were out erranding we bought said cabbage, some carrots, and some broccoli (all still in the fridge), and some spring mix (fortunately not still in the fridge), but then we had a HelloFresh box to get through.

Buying vegetables is presumably the first step to actually cooking them, and I made sure to at least mostly choose some that would last a while. >.> The Bee Wilson book I mentioned recently has a section specifically on learning/practicing different cooking techniques with carrots, so I'm hoping to actually make use of the bag of carrots with my own hands. We'll see how that goes.

Householding: The upright freezer in the garage has been making unhappy noises and needing to be poked at periodically to keep it running. Time to get a new one, I guess. >.< Everyone loves appliance shopping!

Current Mood: hungry

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

mdlbear

I had a lot of trouble getting things done this week. That may have been due in part to having gone out of the house three times (for a doctor's appointment, labs, and picking up drugs at the pharmacy). Each of which burns up two or three hours, and I seem to have trouble switching gears after that. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Thursday I let the cats out of my room, which may have been a mistake. Picking Bronx up afterward and trying to carry him upstairs to put him back was definitely a mistake, and a firm reminder to keep one hand on the banister every damned time. Fortunately, I got away with it -- this time.

I've started using compression socks; they seem to help somewhat with the edema, but it's still there and doesn't seem much improved in the morning after not wearing the socks at night. Well, I have another appointment this coming Friday.

Linkies: Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S. -- if you're surprised, you may be reading the wrong blog. Also, Satellite images reveal the fastest Antarctic glacier retreat ever. On the other hand, it seems that A Poem Is All You Need to Jailbreak a chatbot.

And on the gripping hand, here's a filk adjacent cat video: Bohemian Catsody.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: less depressed than yesterday?
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: less practicing than last week :P

kaberett

There was less of it usable than if it hadn't been sitting in my living room for a fortnight, but there is one dehydrator load of apples drying, and one saucepan of Apfelmus cooling, and... I think the latter is probably going to get frozen (at least in the first instance) because I am not at all convinced I have water-bathing a couple of jars in me right now. That might be a December problem.

But. The pulp leftover from the medlar jelly is frozen in Future Sticky Toffee Pudding-sized portions. The quince sorbet is in the freezer in its tub. And the apples are As Above. I am very very glad to have got that all dealt with, but alas have no other thoughts to contribute. <3

kaberett

( Read more... )

fred_mouse

This covers August through beginning of November

At least one of the links was from coth; most I have no idea - some of them have been in my 'read later' for a very long time. There were also stories from All of Tor.com’s Original Short Fiction Published in 2022, which I'm guessing I've started working through before, but didn't remember what I'd read previously (18 short stories, 13 novelettes, 1 translation) (and didn't finish this time either)

Loved it!

Smoke and Sweetness by Zhui Ning Chang, from Jan 2025 - gentle, sweet, slice of life with touches of whimsy and sadness, set in a floristry
Fruiting Bodies - Kemi Ashing-Giwa, from Jan 2022 - very much body horror, in a far future on a different planet. Not quite zombies.
The Chronologist by Ian R MacLeod, from Feb 2022 - atmosphere and character and kind of an apocalypse
The Last Truth by Anamaria Curtis, from Feb 2022 - bittersweet, about how how losing oneself a memory at a time leaves nothing behind.

Not bad

Bone by Karl Gallagher, from May 2025 - heavy on the science, clunky on the rest.
If a Digitized Tree Falls by Ken Liu and Caroline M. Yoachim, from Sept 2025 (novelette) - snatches through time, as the ways in which the world is modelled by digital tech changes, and AI assistants evolved. I found myself distracted and unmotivated to finish, although it is beautifully written
Model Collapse by Matthew Kressel, from Oct 2025 - very clever body horror about the AI takeover.

Not for me

Saving the Gleeful Horse - K J Bishop, from March 2010. - creepy. But I managed to get distracted part way through, and then had to come back to finish it.
Synthetic Perennial by Vivianni Glass, from Feb 2022 - normally I like myself some surreal / magic realism details, but I just found this one disorienting. Not for those with medical trauma.
Hush by Mary Anne Mohanraj, from March 2022 - I get what this one is saying, but it is just a tad too real w.r.t fascism and racist supremacy. Unreliable narrator who thinks they are one of the good guys didn't help.
The Long View by Susan Palwick, from April 2022 - this went too close to farce for me. Seemed to be both attempting to be Meaningful and Funny.

DNF

Victory Citrus Is Sweet by Thoriay Dyer, from Sept 2022 - couldn't deal with the narrative voice
Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson - sometimes I'm in the mood for gritty noir cyberpunk, and today is not it.
The Sisters of Saint Nicola of The Almost Perpetual Motion vs the Lurch by Garth Nix, from July 2022 - DNF - While I like Nix's novels, I often bounce from their short fiction, and this was no exception

hitokage posting in

getyourwordsout

Can you believe it? We are twenty days into our Year-End Marathon! That means we're roughly a third of the way through the challenge, for a par of 10 000 words or 10 days towards your YEM pledge. But whether you're on par or not, we'd love to hear how things are going for you. Your triumphs and your frustrations. Are the words flowing like water or does it feel more like time is slipping through your fingers? What can we do to help you reach your goal?

For myself, I've been struggling to get words into the project I was wanting to focus on this month. The desire is there, but bum glue has been in short supply. And then a whole new (and much shorter) project blossomed into my GYWO Scrivener project and oh look at that, words! 😅

If you're soaring ahead, great job! If you feel like you're falling behind, just remember this is a Marathon and we've still got a good ways to go. You could have zero days of writing and still make a daily writing pledge, so hang in there!

This is not a check-in post and participation is entirely voluntary. The official YEM check-in will happen on Discord at the end of the month, and while that is also entirely optional, we strongly recommend it as a way of supporting your writing habit.

kaberett

but I did spend this morning sat down with my printouts and my page markers and my highlighters, and I did this evening take some photos of the relevant pages of a book I've loaned to someone else, and the essay (I say, grandiosely) tentatively entitled The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes: against a new dualism is definitely In The Works.

I haven't quite worked out the It is a truth universally acknowledged... opening sentence, and it's probably mostly going to be a series of quotations accompanied by EMPHATIC GESTICULATION in the form of CAPSLOCK, but it's not actually (in its entirety) germane to The Book, so here the indignant yelling can go.

lb_lee

(this is copied from my email; I'm writing my postcard right now, and I hope Masshole readers will too, because this is the stuff that I need if I want to keep selling my darn books)

Hi, local authors!

A project we've been dedicating a lot of our time to this fall at BCAF [Boston Comics Arts Foundation] is working with the Mass Freedom to Read coalition to strengthen the protections that the state of Massachusetts has for books (including comics and graphic novels) and protect them from book bans and challenges, while supporting teachers and librarians in their work.

I'm delighted to say that the law we've been supporting, 'An Act Regarding Free Expression,' came to a vote and passed in the MA Senate last week.

Yay! (And it only took three years!)

Now it's on to the House -- so this is a great time to email, call, or send a postcard to your local house reps to tell them to vote for 'An Act Regarding Free Expression' when it's on the docket.

Here's some info on writing a great postcard or email, from us and Mass Freedom to Read: https://www.massfreedomtoread.org/act

Thanks everyone!

Gina Gagliano
Boston Comic Arts Foundation

Here's what I wrote on my postcard:

( Read more... )

mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

Coffee. AKA bean soup, in this household.
Compression socks. NO thanks for hypertension.
Onions and garlic. Just because I have to cut back on salt...
Not tripping when I carried Bronx upstairs. Remind me NEVER to carry ANYTHING up or down stairs that requires taking both hands off the railings.
Memories. (This season a lot of them include our drives down to LA for Loscon, also giblet gravy and Mom's chopped liver recipe.)

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Earworm: Donkey Riding (no idea why)

lb_lee

Rogan: When Biff and I made Coming In or Staying Out, I originally made two versions of the files. There's the black and white version, which I printed, and then a purple/pink/white version, which became the ebook version. But that colored version was the one I originally planned for, the version I dreamed of printing via Risograph, basically a copier that specializes in printing in one or two colors. (Some people use it for fancier stuff, but those people perplex me.)

For almost two years, CISO sat around as I tried to find a Riso printer, figure out how much it would cost, only to keep getting distracted with things like becoming homeless, moving twice, paying double rent for a long period of time, etc. Also it's always awkward to do the, "are you okay with printing dongs?" conversation with a print shop.

But lo and behold! It looks like CISO will be getting a bubble gum pink and violet limited run of 30, courtesy of Just Right Press, a queer/furry-owned press in Providence, RI! I'm super-pumped about this!

Riso is cheap, by color printing standards, but the CISO color edition will still be quite a lot pricier than the black and white--probably around $22, compared to the B/W's $5. I don't know how well this will work out for me, so if the color CISO doesn't sell, 30 copies will be all there is. However, there's a reason I originally made CISO with the intent of making it in color; it gave me the freedom to use color for mood effects that is much harder to do with only black and white. I hope y'all like the results as much as I surely will!

Even more exciting, Just Write has not only bubble gum pink and violet among their colors, they also have burgundy, which means my next comics project will also likely get printed with them! Yeehaw!

Current Mood: excited

kaberett

At the weekend we made a mildly unusual detour to a fancy local bakery; one of the things they had on the shelves about which I went "oooh" was fig, hazelnut & anise bread. So that flavour combination (plus some spelt) was went into the oven this morning!

The way bread normally works around here is that I make it, via the Ritual Question of Do You Have Any Breadferences (Bread Preferences). To facilitate this call and response, A List of our Usual Options, doubtless to be added to. Suggestions welcome. :)

( Read more... )

silveradept

Good day. Let's begin with 144 hours of DDR to make a record.

Early hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.

If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.

The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.

Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.

( There's more inside, about people who have made cruelty the point and disclaim any responsibility of care for what they've created. )

Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.

And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness

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December 2018

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Page Summary

mdlbear - Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday
lb_lee - Photographic Evidence Forthcoming
lb_lee - Happy Fucksgiven!
lb_lee - Book list for Rhincodons
umadoshi - Discombobulation and dreamstuff
lb_lee - Happy (early) Birthday, BSOD!
lb_lee - Comic: How It Was, How It Is (December 2014-January 2015)
kaberett - vital functions
umadoshi - Weekly proof of life: reading | foodstuff | impending appliance shopping (>.<)
mdlbear - Done Since 2025-11-16
kaberett - I have processed the fruit
kaberett - some good things!
fred_mouse - Short fiction
hitokage in getyourwordsout - How's It Going YEMers?
kaberett - this post is not Descartes apologia
lb_lee - 'An Act Regarding Free Expression' passed in the MA Senate!
mdlbear - Thankful Thursday
lb_lee - Jesus Clowns... SOON IN COLOR?
kaberett - [food] breadferences
silveradept - Only a little bit behind - Early November 02025

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Page generated Nov. 27th, 2025 07:46 pm

just focus and keep aiming

aw, coffee, no

Reading

Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday

Photographic Evidence Forthcoming

Happy Fucksgiven!

Book list for Rhincodons

Discombobulation and dreamstuff

Happy (early) Birthday, BSOD!

Comic: How It Was, How It Is (December 2014-January 2015)

vital functions

Weekly proof of life: reading | foodstuff | impending appliance shopping (>.<)

Done Since 2025-11-16

I have processed the fruit

some good things!

Short fiction

How's It Going YEMers?

this post is not Descartes apologia

'An Act Regarding Free Expression' passed in the MA Senate!

Thankful Thursday

Jesus Clowns... SOON IN COLOR?

[food] breadferences

Only a little bit behind - Early November 02025

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December 2018

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