sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as [personal profile] spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.

Purrcy; kdrama

Jul. 6th, 2025 11:24 pm
mecurtin: tabby cat pokes his cute face out of a box (purrcy)
[personal profile] mecurtin
We were on the sofa together watching Murderbot so Purrcy had to come supervise. Not shown: how he was thwapping me with his tail to make sure I knew he was there. This shot makes it looks like he was watching the screen with us but I'm pretty sure he wasn't.

Portrait of Purrcy the tuxedo tabby gazing soulfully off to the left, as he sits on top of a brown sofa with a green pillow in the background. His pupils are quite dark, his whiskers very faint.

I've been watching Moon Embracing the Sun with [personal profile] feklar42 and [personal profile] libitina, which is my first kdrama. I have a question. I know that double eyelid surgery is extremely common in South Korea. Do we assume that most Korean actors/actresses have had this surgery, the way we assume that most (all) Western actors are on diets?

Daily Happiness

Jul. 6th, 2025 08:20 pm
torachan: tavros from homestuck dressed as pupa pan (pupa pan)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We walked down to our favorite deli this morning to pick up sandwiches for lunch. The UV index was pretty high today so even though we tried to stick to the shade as much as possible, it was still exhausting being out in that level of sun, but the temperature was nice and there was a good breeze every now and then and it was a very nice walk overall.

2. Back to work tomorrow. :( Thinking of maybe making it a WFH day, though. So far the only meeting-like things I have are two web interviews, so that can be done from home, and I've got a lot of desk work and email to catch up on from the three-day weekend. So if no one comes up with anything urgent that needs me in person I think I'll stay home.

3. Tuxie is so handsome!

coffeeandink: (utena (fairytale ending))
[personal profile] coffeeandink

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

esteefee: A Shep chibi with arms spread wide exultantly. (chibijohn_by_crysothemis)
[personal profile] esteefee
Happy Birthday to my brain twin, [personal profile] em_kellesvig!

Tribbles Are Trouble (4583 words) by esteefee
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Dr. Cole MD (Stargate Atlantis)
Additional Tags: Crack, Tribbles (Star Trek)
Summary:

Rodney finds a new alien pig pet, and John is wigged out.

TV report

Jul. 5th, 2025 11:20 pm
sasha_feather: She is played by Tig Notaro and is on Star Trek disco (Jett Reno)
[personal profile] sasha_feather
My eyes are bothering me lately; anything close-focus is hard. Really challenging as most of my hobbies involve close focus. I have a lot of pain in my mouth and face so concentrating is also difficult.

TV seems to be the way to go but I feel like I've run out of shows.

Enjoying: Murderbot. Also loved The Pitt, and the Old Guard 2. Task Master and DropOut (Game changer, etc), continue to delight.

Other things I've watched:

Mr Robot. Gave up after one season. It's grim and humorless. I liked some of the actors a lot but the aesthetic was so gray on gray, and a high preference for very thin bodies and baggy eyes, like heroin-addict chic. For a thriller it's weirdly slow.

The storied life of AJ Fikry: A cromulent romance / drama on Netflix. Cute if not particularly memorable. It's about people who love reading and live on an island only accessible by ferry. Has multiple characters of color.

I watched 2 episodes of "Nobody Wants This", a rom-com with Kristen Bell. Her character falls in love with a rabbi. The characters felt really thinly drawn and so I did not care about them. There was just no there there, as they say.

The Last Breath: a drama about a survival story involving deep-sea construction workers (based on a true story). I liked this pretty well but think it would have worked better with some documentary-style explanations of what was happening.

Clean Slate: on Amazon Prime, a sitcom about a trans woman reconnecting with her father. I dropped this because I could not see what was happening! There seemed to be a gray film over everything! I might try it again later as it had some good humor and characters.

I tried season three of the Bear but it was unpleasant.

I played Dragon Age: Inquisition through twice, which was very restful for my brain actually. I think it would be a good idea to invest further in video games, which help me pass the time when I'm ill. I don't know much about gaming systems. I'd love to play Dragon Age Veilguard and some other newer games but how to decide on what kind of system to get? They are expensive. I got the Xbox 360 used and have absolutely loved having it.

What are you enjoying watching or playing?

Daily Happiness

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

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

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

4. Jasper's definitely got the relaxing down.

Small successes and mixed-up veggies

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

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

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

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

alt


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

sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
[personal profile] sovay
I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week [personal profile] spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.

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

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

ExpandRead more... )

All of my ghosts are my home

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:32 pm
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
On the normality front, our street is full of cracks and bangs and whooshes from fireworks set off around the neighborhood, none so far combustibly. Otherwise I spent this Fourth of July with my husbands and my parents and eleven leaves of milkweed on which the monarch seen fluttering around the yard this afternoon had left her progeny. My hair still smells like grill smoke. Due to the size of one of the hamburgers, I folded it over into a double-decker with cheese and avocado and chipotle mayo and regret nothing about the hipster Dagwood sandwich. A quantity of peach pie and strawberries and cream were highlights of the dessert after a walk into the Great Meadows where the black water had risen under the boardwalk and the water lilies were growing in profusion from the last, droughtier time we had passed that way. I do not know the species of bird that has built a nest in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen, but the three eggs in it are dye-blue.

On the non-normality front, I meant it about the spite: watching my country stripped for parts for the cruelty of it, half remixed atrocities, half sprint into dystopia, however complicated the American definition has always been, right now it still means my family of queers and rootless cosmopolitans and as most of the holidays we observe assert, we are still here. It's peculiar. I was not raised to think of my nationality as an important part of myself so much as an accident of history, much like the chain of immigrations and migrations that led to my birth in Boston. I was raised to carry home with me, not locate it in geography. I've been asked my whole life where I really come from. This administration in both its nameless rounds has managed to make me territorial about my country beyond the mechanisms of its democracy whose guardrails turned out to be such movable goalposts. It enrages me to be expected not to care that I have seen the pendulum swing like a wrecking ball in my lifetime, as if the trajectory were so inevitable that it absolves the avarice to do harm or the cowardice to prevent it. It is nothing to do with statues. The door to the stranger is supposed to be open.

The wet meadows of the Great Meadows are peatlands. They were cut for fuel in the nineteenth century, the surrealism of fossil fuels: twelve thousand years after the glaciers, ashes in a night. The color of their smoke filled the air sixteen years ago when some of the dryer acres burned. If you ask me, there's room for bog bodies.

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)

Daily Happiness

Jul. 4th, 2025 09:10 pm
torachan: ryu from kimi ni todoke eating ramen (ramen)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I had a pretty relaxing day today. Aside from walking up to the store this morning for pie crust and salad stuff, I did not go anywhere and just chilled at home.

2. I got some of the rhubarb I chopped up and froze a few weeks ago out of the freezer and made another pie. There's still four bags (I didn't divide it that way on purpose but it turns out two bags is exactly enough for one pie).

3. Ollie is such a cutie pie.

(no subject)

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:38 pm
aurumcalendula: Quynh from The Old Guard in a red-ish outfit against a yellow background (Quynh)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
I'm at the annoying vidding stage where I have an idea but not a song yet (and all the potential ones I've listened to feel not quite right).

Purrcy; WSFS

Jul. 4th, 2025 10:09 pm
mecurtin: 3 of GRRM's Hugo Award statues (hugos)
[personal profile] mecurtin
There was a brief but dramatic thundershower yesterday evening, & afterwards when Purrcy came out of hiding he DEMANDED pets, regardless of where I was or what I was doing. As you can probably tell.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands on a light green bathmat on a terracotta tile floor with glossy green accents, looking back up over his shoulder with an adorably demanding face. His tail is a thwapping blur. A white person's naked foot is barely visible behind him, as though they're sitting down in the bathroom for some reason.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands on a light green bathmat on a terracotta tile floor with glossy green accents, looking back up over his shoulder with an adorably demanding face. His tail is a thwapping blur. A white person's naked foot is barely visible behind him, as though they're sitting down in the bathroom for some reason.

Politics has of course been super stressful, I'll write up something under separate cover tomorrow or something.

Today, all afternoon, I attended the first session of the WSFS Business Meeting, which was as almost as emotionally draining as attending one in person but much more convenient. The Chair, Jesi Lipp (they/them) is a *master* at running a meeting and parsing rules quickly & logically.

Result for me: the Hugo Process Committee is continuing for another year (including me by default), and also stuff that I insisted on digging out & including in our report conforms to the second part of C.2 Dude, Where’s My Motion?, even though it wasn't required yet & wasn't even aware it was under consideration, just because it seemed so obviously necessary. So I definitely can bask, feeling like I made a real & meaningful contribution.

I've pledged the family not to overdo it for Hugo Process Committee 2.0, but I *am* going to maybe be the one insisting that we have regularly scheduled meetings & an agenda.

Weekly Reading

Jul. 4th, 2025 06:07 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
Currently Reading
Murder at the Patel Motel
39%. This is not actually a book, so much as an audio drama. It's an Audible Original and comes free with membership, so I decided to try it out. Turns out the author and voice of the main character is the guy who played Jack's assistant on 30 Rock. I loved him in that! And I'm liking this "book" a lot so far.

Just Happy to Be Here
11%. YA about a South Asian trans girl's experience at a mostly white all girls' high school. It's all right so far.

Sister Outsider
No progress.

Riding the Rails
48%.

Recently Finished
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
I felt like this took ages to finish, but it was a good read. Very interesting stuff.

A Terrible Nasty Business
I really want more books in this series.

Sou Iu Ie no Ko no Hanashi vol. 1
New series from Shimura Takako following three characters who were raised in the same new religion (the religion in the story is not any real one, just based on others), marking them as different from the majority of the population, which is not actively religious. I like pretty much everything by Shimura Takako, so I'm curious to see where this goes.

Tsumetakute Yawaraka vol. 5

Hatsukoi no Tsugi vol. 2

MXTX stuff

Jul. 4th, 2025 06:11 pm
soc_puppet: A screencap of Namine from "Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories". She is pictured scribbling in her notebook, but an excerpt reads, "And then Axel and Roxas had hot, steamy sex. The End." (Fangirl writer)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
I finally finished listening to the main story of MDZS! There was some delay for various reasons, mostly related to my car's failing fan motor, but I managed to get to the end 🎉 (Minus the extras. But those can wait.)

Definitely love the story; don't know if I have any particular fandom feels about it, though. SVSSS still has my heart in that regard.


Speaking of, a stray thought: I'm about 90% sure that the "Immortal" part of "Proud Immortal Demon Way" is specifically referring immortal human cultivators, and thus Binghe's heritage. He is both immortal in the human cultivator sense, and a demon. I'm obviously not one hundred percent sure here, but it makes enough sense in context that it just kinda... tickles my brain occasionally when I see alternate interpretations.


Anyway, provided I can find a way to rip my Audible library, I'll probably listen to TGCF next, but we'll see what happens.

2025 Disneyland Trip #47 (7/3/25)

Jul. 4th, 2025 02:30 pm
torachan: karkat from homestuck looking bored (karkat bored)
[personal profile] torachan
This was another last minute decision. With the lower level keyholders blocked out for summer there's almost always same-day availability, so might as well take advantage of it.

ExpandRead more... )
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
Photograph with added text: Working Together, at Fancake. Workers in India use wide wooden paddles with long handles to shove a huge yard of drying grains into big piles. The grain, most likely rice, is a beautiful golden color, and there's a mix of western and traditional clothing among the seven men and women.
[community profile] fancake's theme for July is Working Together!

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

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sasha_feather: Retro-style poster of skier on pluto.   (Default)
sasha_feather

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