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.

🔗 Links of interest

Jul. 6th, 2025 10:55 pm
bluapapilio: leona and ruggie from twisted wonderland (twst leorug)
[personal profile] bluapapilio
English vs Original version comparisons of Twisted Wonderland

Asian BL TV show recs - They did them for a friend but they have a useful rating scale attached!

The Ethics of Looking And The “Harmless” Peeping Tom - Wonderful job, this is the second video like this I've enjoyed by them.

When Sunshine Falls for Mr. Grumpy: BL Couples That Own This Trope! (Asian TV)

the death of the "monster of the week" = less whump

"I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on. I Am Not Okay" - Really moving talk about their experience, it really made me want to cry tbh
musesfool: Sam Wilson & Bucky Barnes (i'm your goddamn partner)
[personal profile] musesfool
I know I had some stuff I wanted to post about but now I can't remember what it was. Oh well.

I finally watched Captain America: Brave New World and it was fine. spoilers )

*

RIP Julian McMahon and Mark Snow.

*
bluapapilio: boufuurin from wind breaker (winbre boufuurin)
[personal profile] bluapapilio
Spoilers ⬇️

Wind Breaker
season 2

Episode 3: Animated Anzai hugging Nagato is glorious.

The Suo>Nirei forehead flick. 😂

Lmao at Kiryuu picking on Sugishita off to the side.

Enomoto saying this incident was similar to what happened with Kaji in the past, and Kaji was 'terrified of Hiiragi'.

Umemiya: "When things are rough, we can't even afford to taste anything."

Now I know he was talking from personal experience.

Kaji using chopsticks like That.

Sakura blushing never fails to make me squee I swear!

Lol at Endou just lying there, would've liked to have seen that fight from his perspective.

Episode 4: The sick episode! Suou calling Sakura's house haunted. 😭 I love how Suou's VA said the line about Sakura being alone.

Really appreciate how Suou understood not to overcrowd or push Sakura is such a vulnerable moment.

And then Kotoha just bulldozes right in. XDD

The cats outside are so sweet, they look like Sakura and Nirei.

Kaji's classmates teasing him, Kaji doing his best to show Sakura what he means, Hiiragi and Umemiya listening in. :') The punch nearly had me choking on my ramen!
umadoshi: (berries in bowls (roxicons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
[personal profile] scruloose and I did make it to the little farmers' market down the road for its opening day of the season, and even managed to get there earlier than later! (I think it's open from 8 to 1, and we probably were there...a bit after 10?)

We made it home with two quarts of strawberries and one of cherries, new potatoes, a dozen eggs, and boneless chicken thighs, plus a bee balm for the garden, which we quickly tucked into a fairly open space in our little garden bed yesterday evening. (What was there before? UNKNOWN. Will I manage to reconstruct it from old posts or something? Also unknown. But hey, a plant!)

Reading: I finished Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi), which was fantastic. On the fiction front, I followed it up with Tamsyn Muir's novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (not really my thing--I continue to rarely bond with novellas, I guess--but interestingly done), Sacha Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (marvelous), and Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (again, didn't really bond emotionally, but it executed what it was doing beautifully).

Non-fiction: David Chang and Priya Krishna's Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave), which is, like...primarily actually a David Chang book that Priya Krishna did a ton of heavy-lifting assisting on (which may be very normal for co-written cookbooks, but in this case she was interjecting and clarifying in her own voice as well as doing a fair bit of the actual writing in his voice, and it was all very transparent that it was being done that way, but also a little odd to read). I think I bought this as a sale ebook before hearing that Chang (the Momofuku guy) is something of an asshole, but then when I was reading it, it felt really promising as a book that might be genuinely useful for me (and even by cookbook standards, its ebook is terribly formatted), so I was pleasantly surprised to readily find a used half-price hard copy available on line, which is winging its way to me now. I've also made sure that Krishna's own Indian-Ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family is now on the wishlist where I keep an eye out for ebook sales.

And now I'm reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler, which is a cookbook mostly in the form of essays on cooking as a thoughtful/mindful practice.

Watching: One more Murderbot episode to go in this season, and oh, I hope we get a second one. I'm going to miss this little show.

We finished watching the second season of Kingdom (the historical zombies k-drama), which I found very satisfying. The ending very much sets up a subsequent season, and there's a movie out that fills in the backstory of the person/people we glimpse at the end of season 2 who would presumably be extremely central in any further season, but I don't think we feel inspired to watch said backstory movie unless a third season of the show is ever announced and it becomes relevant in that way.

Portland Farmers Market 2025

Jul. 5th, 2025 07:06 pm
lovelyangel: (Haruhi Camera)
[personal profile] lovelyangel
The Berry Patch
The Berry Patch
Portland Farmers Market • PSU Campus
Portland, Oregon • July 5, 2025
Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S
f/2 @ 85mm • 1/750s • ISO 100

I’m trying to do too many things at once. And then I look up and the year is half over. I keep task lists – but tasks get deferred or ignored because I can’t possibly do everything.

One of the items that kept sliding down my task list was to go into Portland and photograph the Farmers Market and the Saturday Market. This wasn’t just because I like to do this every year – it was also because I needed to learn how to use my new Nikon Z8 in the field. The Z8 is very complicated. I needed to be able to shoot very quickly at OCF. And then, all of a sudden, OCF is next week!

A last second mad dash is all that’s left.

Nikon Z8 Photography, Below This Cut )
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.
selenak: (Cat and Books by Misbegotten)
[personal profile] selenak
Aka a 2022 novel set in the Appalachians during the late 1990s and early 2000s with the euphemistically called "Opiod Crisis" very much a main theme, and simultanously a modern adaptation of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The last Copperfield adaptation I had seen or read was the Iannucci movie starring Dev Patel in the title role which emphasized the humor and vitality of the novel and succeeded splendidly, but had to cut down the darker elements in order to do so, with the breathneck speed of a two hours mvie based on a many hundred pages novel helping with that. Demon Copperhead took the reverse approach; it's all the darkness magnified - helped by the fact this is also a many hundred pages novel - but nearly no humor. Both adaptations emphasize the social injustice of the various systems they're depicting. Both had to do some considerable flashing out when it comes to Dickens's first person narrator. No one has ever argued that David is the most interesting character in David Copperfield. As long as he's still a child, this isn't noticable because David going from coddled and much beloved kid to abused and exploited kid makes for a powerful emotional arc. (BTW, I was fascinated to learn back when I was reading Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography that Dickens was influenced by Jane Eyre in this; Charlotte Bronte's novel convinced him to go for a first person narration - which he hadn't tried before - and the two abused and outraged child narrators who describe what scares and elates them incredibly vividly do have a lot on common.) But once he's an adult, it often feels like he's telling other people's stories (very well, I hasten to add) in which he's only on the periphery, except for his love life. The movie solved this by giving David - who is autobiographically inspired anyway - some more of Dickens`s on life and qualities. Demon Copperhead solves it by a) putting most of the part of the Dickens plot when David is already an adult to when Damon/Demon is still a teenager (he only becomes a legal adult near the end), b) by making Damon as a narrator a whole lot angrier than David, and c) by letting him fall to what is nearly everyone else's problem as well, addiction.

Spoilers ensue about both novels )

In conclusion: this was a compelling novel but tough to read due to the subject and the unrelenting grimness. I'm not saying you should treat the horrible neglect and exploitation of children and the way a rotten health system allowed half the population to become addicts irreverently, but tone wise, this is more Hard Times than David Copperfield, and sometimes I wished for some breathing space in between the horrors. But I am glad to have read it.

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.

fennectik: Anime (Anime)
[personal profile] fennectik posting in [community profile] anime_manga
So it seems Usagi will once grace us with her magical girl adventures.

"To celebrate the birthday of Sailor Moon’s main protagonist, Usagi Tsukino, new colored manga art has been released by the series creator, hinting at the publication of the next two volumes in the Japanese 'all-color' digital manga release."-CBR

Link to the full article

https://www.cbr.com/sailor-moon-naoko-takeuchi-usagi-birthday-art/
umadoshi: (summer swing (never_ender))
[personal profile] umadoshi
At the start of the month I entertained the fleeting thought of trying to post every day in July, especially with [community profile] sunshine_revival (in which I have in no way participated) going on, but. Well. *gestures at current date* And as we all know, something-something-only-perfect-results-matter, etc. etc. etc.

But here. It's Friday. The world is terrifying, but at least for this moment the sun is out. I spent most of my workday in a style guide meeting, which was genuinely pretty fun; tonight we're seeing Ginny and Kas because this week it's better for them than our usual Saturday hangout.

Tomorrow the (very) wee farmers' market that's only a few blocks away is getting underway for the season. I have ambitions of actually rolling out of bed and walking over in hopes of strawberries, even though tomorrow and Sunday are also Eevee community day in Pokemon Go, so I'm also hoping to leave the house those afternoons. Leaving the house twice in one day is not exactly a thing that happens often, and as a result, the prospect of it is exhausting. ^^; But here's hoping!

There's been zero doubt for a long time now that my only actual investment in Pokemon Go is the pursuit of shinies, and community days are the best chance to get shinies of a given critter, and Eevee, see, has EIGHT possible evolutions, so if there's any faint hope of ever having a full set of shinies of those, well, it's this weekend.

(I can't remember if I've said here that this is a crystalized perfect demonstration of why it's really, really good that I don't gamble. I'm usually pleased when I catch a new-to-me Pokemon, but it's pretty minor. But rather than setting the game aside, since it mostly hasn't resulted in me actually getting outside and walking much more than I had been, the hope of catching a shiny critter keeps me opening it back up. Nobody get me into slot machines, okay? [That sounds facetious, but I mean it very seriously.])

That's all I've got right now. Stay well, friends.
lovelyangel: (Yukinon Wow)
[personal profile] lovelyangel
While there are still a few weeks before we actually begin construction work, I’m having to relocate my existing bookcases – some will be repurposed and some will be given away (probably to ReStore).

The first step is to pack up all the books. It’s like moving, and I hate moving.

Photos, Below This Cut )

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