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three sentences

Three sentences about 2025-11-02

Happy Standard Time! Now I can finally stop being annoyed at everyone at work who says "EST" when it's actually EDT, for a few months at least.

Still feeling kinda discombobulated, although I don't think the timezone change had much to do with it, but I guess you never know. I slept in this morning, played a game or two of Magic with Quentin, and picked up Juniper from her usually Sunday morning babysitting gig, so she could drive home; she walked there, and can walk home, but wanted to get home quicker today. I went for a nice walk after that (it was a beautiful day), and then Junie drove me and Quentin to his D&D game, then picked up a friend of hers, and then she drove us to Alewife so they could take the T into Boston for some shopping and hanging out. I shopped on the way home for ingredients for dinner, once of the recipes from a Trader Joe's cookbook we'd gotten from Michelle & Eric for Xmas last year, from these people I believe. I don't see the particular thing on their site, but despite not having much experience cooking fish, and really not knowing at all what the heck I was doing with the asparagus, I managed to make honey mustard glazed salmon with roasted potatoes and asparagus, and it was pretty good. :^ ) Caught up on random online things after dinner, and now I've stayed up too late, oof.

Entry tags:

three sentences

Three sentences about 2025-11-01

It feels like the last 48 hours have been like three or four days long, I'm not entirely sure why, just lots of different stuff going on. I slept in this morning, then ... something for most of the rest of the morning, and then played some Magic with Quentin. (We finished the Bloomburrow box, and had played a bunch of games directly out of it, and have now decided to shift to deckbuilding. I have a Frog deck, it says ribbit. He has an Otter deck, it says shit goddamn I'm complicated.) I then headed out for some pokego, Gigantamax Garbodor battle day, and that went pretty well, except I optimized things somewhat incorrectly, but it worked out ok in the end. Came home, ordered Sweetgreen for dinner, played another game of Magic with Quentin, enjoyed tasty Sweetgreen. Took Juniper and a couple of friends to a second-day-of-Halloween party, watched the Wonder movie with Quentin and Amy, and now it's super late and I'm so, so tired.

Entry tags:

three sentences

Three sentences about 2025-10-31

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Happy Halloween! The teenagers (teenagers! two of them! they are wonderful) went out with their friends, various combinations of trick-or-treating and parties. We got about half a dozen groups of trick-or-treaters on our sleepy side street. I went for a pokewalk at like 20:30 or so, and it was nice. I checked various bowls of candy that people had left out for after-hours visitors; they were mostly empty, or full of Twizzlers, but a couple had peanut butter cups, yum.

I should try to remember that the answer to "should I go for a walk, even though I don't feel like it?" is always "YES, dumbass".

(And also, that the answer to "should I eat this thing that I've claimed I want to stop eating so much of" is always "NO, dumbass".)

Entry tags:

free stuff

Boston-area Kitchen Clean-Outs

Nobody's getting food stamps next month, and I'm doing something about it! Maybe I could do something... FOR YOU!

See, I've discovered that I'm a really good courier when it comes to getting stuff into free boxes! I've also discovered that I'm good at helping people clean out their kitchens (and other rooms, but right now, food is the important thing). I've helped people do this and can give references!

So: is your kitchen full of herbs, spices, teas, drinks, or food that you are never going to get to? (Teas and herbs/spices are SO useful to people, and so often forgotten!) Does looking into your cabinets stress you out? I can help with that! I can help clean out your kitchen, disappear the bad stuff into the compost, and transport the good stuff to local free pantries so that hungry people can eat it! You get cupboard space, your neighbors get fed, I get to prove to myself the government can't break my spirit, and everyone wins!

This is an open offer for the general Boston area, but because I am a pedestrian and stuff like canned goods are heavy, I'm most useful in the Arlington, Cambridge, Medford, and Somerville areas. I will be limited in how much I can carry, but I have two VERY sturdy 20 liter backpacks, a tote bag, and a heart filled with determination and spite.

Help us feed our neighbors! Spread the word to anyone around who might find this useful!

(I don't require payment for this. I am MAD.)

oops

Accidentally deleted all my interests by not reading directions. So I redid them and now they actually reflect my interests now rather than my interests twenty years ago...

Database maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Entry tags:

yuletide

2025 Dear Yuletide Author

Hello! Happy Yuletide! I've been participating for awhile and I love Yuletide for the chance to share a moment of enthusiasm for something that isn't a big fandom. I like all kinds of things in fic (gen, worldbuilding, angst, romance, humor, plot, smut, AUs, etc) and I love getting to see what someone else finds interesting about a particular canon or character. So please feel encouraged to take anything I say here in the direction of your own creative vision. (And I'm happy to receive treats, if someone else happens to read something here and it sparks an idea for you!)

If you have a great idea for a story, I'm fine if that includes whatever makes sense for it, including "dark" elements like character death or violence. But no child death, please, and no sexual violence/rape. And I would prefer characters to more or less keep their canonical moral values, like, if they're thoughtful or caring in canon, I don't want an AU where they're careless or cruel, if that makes sense.

My requests behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Thank you so much, author, and happy Yuletide!

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The Chosen and the Beautiful

The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo, 2021 fantasy retelling of _The Great Gatsby_. I definitely have more than no interest in _Gatsby_ - I did go and see one of the musicals - but I'm not sure I had this many pages of interest in _Gatsby_. Vo came up with some neat imagery here and it was interesting to see her take but her original work is *so good* and this just wasn't up to that level. I thought the strongest parts were the parts she brought to it entirely like the idea of Jordan as a transracial adoptee. I had some trouble with the plot arc - there was a bit early on that seemed like it must be being told more out of order than I thought, for where people's emotions were, but I think I was just wrong/confused about that, but then there were still aspects I didn't feel like I really understood by the end. One plot point I was only able to figure out by finding an interview where Vo happened to spell it out. There's a sequel out now that might help clear some of that up; I'll see when I get there. I would definitely recommend _Siren Queen_ rather than this if you're looking for Jazz Age fantasy, or _City in Glass_ if you want imagery-heavy fantasy, but if you've read both of those and want more Vo I don't *dis*recommend this.

Entry tags:

bicycle

advice/thoughts on local cycling

I am seeking anecdotal advice about cycling in the Somerville-Medford-Malden area. Even the amazing Susan McLucas could not teach me to ride a bicycle (I can't keep myself from looking down on a turn) so I am considering investing in an adult tricycle with or without power assist. (I can fall down and bang myself up while walking with something in my hands that throws my balance off-center, too.)

My issue is that as a motorist, I have noticed that I often don't have room to pass a cyclist. I keep pace with the cyclist until I can safely pass with two or more feet between the side of the car and the cyclist. I very much appreciate the roads painted with the indication that cyclists are allowed to ride down the middle of the car lane!

How well is this honored? Am I a typical motorist when it comes to cyclist safety?

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.