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(no subject)

I forgot I hadn't quite brought my

rainbowfic posting up to date, so here's the last one I wrote before summer:

Name: Singled Out
Story: Starfall
Colors: Warm Heart #29 (Pleasure); Beet Red #29 (Wear it well)
Supplies and Styles:
Word Count: 3726
Rating: PG
Warnings: Minor injury.
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Viyony Eseray, Leion Valerno, Kadia Barra, Seahra Jadinor, Kettah Jadinor.
Summary: Leion is being frivolous, Viyony has a question, and Kadia is behaving strangely yet again...

Entry tags:

books,
reading

What I have been reading, July/August edition

Books I read late July and August.

New books

At School With The Stanhopes by Gwendoline Courtney. If you follow my journal, you will sooner or later hear me talk about Stepmother by the same author. It’s one of my constant comfort reads, and has been since I was 10. But not until I was an adult did I realize that Courtney wrote a number of books in the 1940s and 50s, all geared towards teenage girls. Most of them have been out of print for decades, and being in Sweden has made it a bit of a hassle to buy them used. But now girls Gone by seems to republishing them, and I read II earlier this year. At School With The Stanhopes is about 16 year old Rosalind, whose guardian dies, forcing her to move in with her much older brother, whom she hardly knows. Neither of them are pleased with it, but I lifes becomes much less gloomy when her favorite teacher opens a school just down the lane. Especially as Miss Stanhope has a bevy of friendly younger sisters. It’s mostly a school story, but also about Rosalind and her brother building a relationship, and I enjoyed it enormously. I do wish I had been able to read this book in my early teens, though, because I can tell I would have loved it even more had I read it back then.

Furstinnan (The Princess) by Eva Mattson. A biography of the 16th century Swedish queen Catherine Jagiellon. Sweden is pretty bad at noting women in history, and this is the first biography of a very interesting woman. Katarina Jagellonica, to use her Swedish name, was a Polish princess who rather surprisingly married Johan Vasa, the younger brother of the Swedish king at a time when the Vasa dynasty was seen as an upstart royal family. She was highly educated and educated, and it’s clear after reading this book that she had a lasting impact in how late 16th century Sweden was shaped.

The Art of French Pastry by Jacqut Pfeiffer. I read a lot of cookbooks, but mostly just bits here and there, so never mention them in these posts. But this book was really interesting as it isn’t just recipes, but a thorough explanation of why a recipe looks the way it does, and also how it’s supposed to behave throughout.

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox by Lois McMaster Bujold. The latest installment in the Penric and Desdemona series. It’s a series of fantasy novellas about a young man who accidently gets infested by a demon, something which makes him a sorcerer. As he doesn’t know how one is supposed to behave during those circumstances, he names the demon Desdemona, and they embark on a much more equal relationship. Bujold is one of my favourite authors, and the Penric and Desdemona novellas are bite-sized pieces of delight that together form a bigger whole. With that said this was probably one of the more lightweight installments in the series.

Re-reads

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg. The first book has been a comfort read of mine since the early 90s, and I like the movie too. A couple of years ago it got a sequel. If Fried Green Tomatoes paints the past in very nostalgic shades, The Wonder Boy feels like a fanfic, if one can say that an author can write that to their own work. Everyone is happy at the end of it, and if the bad guy in the first novel was a genuinely awful person, the villains in the latter are reduced to a man with murderous intent towards a cat, and an awful mother-in-law. But sometimes one is in the mood for a book where everything will be just fine. And then some.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have always thought of this as a gothic novel for children. I mean, an orphaned heroine moving into an isolated mansion where she hears strange cries in the night, and there is a garden no one has been in for 10 years, and no one knows how to get into. I still remember how thrilled I was when I first read it as a kid. And I still love the description of the secret garden.

Oil stains

The expensive and probably very un-environmentally friendly oil stain remover *does* work, somewhat to my surprise, at least to a degree. At any rate it removes the surface black and a proportion of the underlying mark, with the dabbing cloth getting visibly greyer as you work over it. The trouble is that it takes multiple applications for any 'serious' stain, with a five-to-ten minute wait followed by a one-minute wait for the dissolving reaction to work, and I have a very large number of heavily stained blotches...! I'm not sure there will be either enough stain remover or enough time and patience for me to work my way around the lot.

Entry tags:

cycling

Bicycle affairs

According to the figures I have cycled 263 miles since I got my new cycle computer configured at the start of June (I hadn't realised it was so recent). 33 of those miles have been over the course of the last two days, 43 in the past week, and I am definitely feeling the burn -- so much for those stupid radio promotional slots saying "anyone can do our sixty-mile charity bike ride, 'it's not your wheels, it's how you use them'". It doesn't matter how experienced a cyclist you are or how accustomed you are to propelling along a heavy bike, if you're not used to covering long *distances* you're not going to be able to do it. Ten miles with a following wind I can do at a cruising speed of 13–14 mph. Sixty miles is completely out of my league, and I've been cycling seriously since I was seventeen.

I am getting better at managing the new cycle computer. ( Read more... )

( Signalling arm strength )

( The vanishing luggage strap )

( Oil stains )

Entry tags:

Red hot Chilli Peppers

We have the first ripe red chillies as of this week :-)
The larger chilli plant has nearly finished flowering, I think -- no sign of any ripening fruits on the smaller one, but plenty of green ones. I shall have to step up my kitchen dried chilli usage in preparation for a fresh harvest!

We are about six weeks ahead of last year in terms of ripening :-)

Entry tags:

russian

At the Café

At least when it comes to food and drink my experience with Russian recipes comes in handy for vocabulary purposes ;-)

Watch on YouTube

( Read more... ) So someone was apparently taking the opportunity to do some creative film-making while commissioned to do what is on the face of it a very simple project -- like good books for very small children, this material is actually more sophisticated than it needs to be.

Entry tags:

fanfiction.net

Fanfiction.net log-in

In an almost totally unexpected turn of events, I somehow or other managed to actually log in once again to fanfiction.net last night simply using my email and password, bypassing the incredibly frustrating 'verification test' ("Select all the squares containing 'crosswalks'") that I usually struggle with repeatedly even on the library computers. ( Read more... )
Apparently there is a 'new site' in the offing (which on past precedent is likely to be even less navigable; I can just about work the current one by using the old-school method of manually editing the parameters being passed in the URL even though the JavaScript drop-downs don't function), so it could be they are switching some of the protection resources over to that. I'm not holding my breath for prolonged access, anyway!

Current Mood: boxed in
Current Music: Michael Penn, "I Can Tell"

Entry tags:

internet

Zeroing In

I'm idly trying to do an Inbox Zero type of thing, which is rough after something like two decades of ignoring it. But as terrible as it email is, it is at least reliable, with the ability to build one's own algorithms in even the most hostile of programs. It'll work, if I can work it.

So many of the writers who could have been bloggers are turning to email-list congregators as their post-Twitter platform. Much of it is for ease of use, but I've seen at least one person turn to a no-cost Patreon subscription primarily as a way to prevent AI scrapers from finding their writing.

I'm willing to consider an RSS reader, I guess, but every time I look into it, I still see other people looking for something that'll do what they want. And in my heart, I know that this is something that can probably help me greatly at this point. My inbox is a locus for attention that I do believe I can master, and I want my attention to be my own.

Crossposts: https://havocthecat.insanejournal.com/620572.html

Entry tags:

friends

Circle Updates

Just evening up a bit of subscription/access issues. Drop a (screened) comment if I removed you by accident.

Entry tags:

Fic: Revisions (A Fatal Inversion)

I was feeling a bit better yesterday and typed up this, which I've had in my notebook since spring, for A Fatal Inversion. It of course ended up less shippier than planned and maybe even darker than canon warrants, idk. But it was where my brain went when I rewatched it. (The first time around it's a sort of reverse murder mystery; the second it's an intense character study of the fallout in those involved.)

For

genprompt_bingo,

allbingo,

100fandoms &

100ships, because if I'm going to write super obscure fic that probably won't make sense if you don't know canon, I might as well make it count!

Revisions (1529 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: A Fatal Inversion (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rufus Fletcher/Adam Verne-Smith
Characters: Adam Verne-Smith, Rufus Fletcher (A Fatal Inversion)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Dark, references to murder, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Flashbacks, Community: 100fandoms, Community: genprompt_bingo, Community: allbingo, Community: 100ships, Pre-Canon, Past Trauma
Summary: Adam and Rufus try to resume their friendship where they left off. It's not the best idea.

Tomorrow I go to have my eye test, so no doubt I'll be around a bit less again, although I'll try to post the last AU_gust bits still if I can - they add up to a bingo line for

allbingo and it would be a first if I actually got it completed within the month, lol. (We'll see).

Entry tags:

Crackfic memo to self

I realised this morning, on coming across a copy of "Jo's Boys", that I couldn't actually *remember* the crackfic idea that I'd had for a crossover of something or other with Jo's school set-up in "Little Men" -- who were the couple I'd vaguely envisioned as filling in for Amy and Laurie as the generous rich relations, and what canon had it been?

Light suddenly dawned again in the middle of my singing practice tonight (concert in a week and a half, alas). It was of course the crackfic idea about Athos' school for gentlemen( Read more... )

Entry tags:

Ficlet: Green For Danger (B7)

I managed to post one of the other AU-gust ficlets I did - this one for the prompt "Dragons" for B7. (Also for

100_women prompt #68 fire &

allbingo Crime Classics square "Green For Danger.")

Green For Danger (751 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Blake's 7
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jenna Stannis, Roj Blake, Kerr Avon, Liberator (Blake's 7), Zen (Blake's 7)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Ficlet, AU-gust | August Writing Challenge, Community: allbingo, Episode: s01e02 Space Fall, Community: 100_women, Liberator/Zen is a dragon, Alternate Universe - Fantasy
Summary: There's freedom or death waiting at the end of this tunnel...

Entry tags:

cooking,
russian

Another variant on kulebyaka

I made another successful kulebyaka to use up the rest of the tin of sardines I had opened in order to make a pre-war "Fish Loaf", a.k.a. large baked fishcake roll (I had mashed in a single sardine as a substitute for anchovy essence!)

This time I used a couple of fillets of cheap frozen white fish, and used the fishy water in which I had defrosted them in which to cook up 3oz of stiff semolina in lieu of fish stock, into which I mashed the rest of the tin of sardines. I hard-boiled and sliced a single egg, chopped and fried an onion, and arranged the whole in layers with some (supermarket) fresh dill and seasoning interspersed.

The main problem was that I'd rolled the dough out much too *long* for the rather small and narrow fish fillets that I had available, and ended up folding it up four-square as a sort of flat parcel rather than lifting it up into the intended pasty-shape with a seam on top. This meant that I had a triple layer of yeast dough on one side and a single layer on the other, and the pie also split and leaked along the fold when baking. It still tasted good, though!

Entry tags:

russian

This is about my level...

Russian for Beginners, 1977 -- this is about the level where I can actually understand every word (almost) that they are saying :-p
(Except the numbers -- I never could keep the difference between, say, fifteen and fifty straight.)

Watch on YouTube

Though I can't help feeling that being landed with an unexpected kitten brought home from school (especially when you already have a dog in the flat) might be a mixed blessing so far as the parents are concerned...

Entry tags:

Fanfiction return

Unexpectedly -- presumably due to some change in Cloudflare settings/configuration -- I am apparently now able to view stories and forums on Fanfiction.net again. This isn't as helpful as it might be, since my log-in has long since expired and I still can't negotiate the log-in window ("Please verify you are human") on this browser, but means that I can amongst other things see my *own* stories again!
And see things like this: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/14400031/1/Nous-oublierons-ces-bienfaits
Something I didn't know I needed so much in my life: a series of friendship(ish) fics between Tréville and Richelieu!

Entry tags:

plant-pots

The New Generation

I have been trying to harvest the seed from my marigolds,( Read more... )

I have picked the first ripe fruit from my catch-up towel-tomatoes, which should give me an idea as to how long it will take any fruit from the new, healthy spurs on the old plants (which are now in flower) to ripen. Maybe a month at this time of year, if I am lucky?

( A Swan River daisy in the mesembryanthemum pot )

At the moment my 'garden' is dominated by rudbeckias, blue Swan River Daisies (no sign of any more pink ones), the last of the marigolds and some self-sown alyssum opposite the original pot (now going over).

Entry tags:

(no subject)

I've not been posting or even keeping up with people so much because I've largely been wiped out for one reason or another or prioritising something else with the reduced summer PC time - sorry. This will continue for a little while yet, until it is eventually replaced by my usual slightly less flakeyness.

* The other week I managed some flash fic/scribblets for AU_gust (AU August) on tumblr. I've only managed to tidy up and post one of them since, & there are 2 others to follow once I tweak them a bit, as well as 1 more that I don't know if is worth proper posting & a drabble I still need to type up. But this used up my posting energy for now, so they can wait.

Anyway, in a shocking attempt at pandering to what might pass as popular demand among my works, I committed another Miss Marple + supernatural fic(let):

Tea on Sunday (572 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Griselda Clement
Additional Tags: Ficlet, Alternate Universe, Witchcraft, AU-gust | August Writing Challenge, Community: allbingo, Community: 100_women, Community: 100fandoms, Miss Marple is a witch
Summary: Miss Marple's secret is out.

* In other writing, before summer got underway, I typed up the bulk of the longest continuous sequence I'm doing for the current arc at

rainbowfic, and then ever since have been scraping away at finishing it and editing it, and I am nearly there, although I suspect it'll still take another week or two before I have the first section ready to post. (I knew this would happen, so I also started two shorter pieces, but one of them, which is more or less done, has just been even harder to edit because tiredness etc. and the other one is still stuck at only two paragraphs, so that plan went well. Summer brain is not up to much. That was why I had to silly no-pressure AU ficlets my way back to life and even then summer rudely and immediately interrupted all over again). But there has been writing of sorts even so.

(The long sequence was one of the very first bits of this arc that I drew up, which is very funny because I essentially set up a sort of grand house murder mystery affair except that then everything changed so much that now my main characters aren't bothering taking part in the murder bit so am not sure if it will read ok (hopefully when edited) or if I committed Worst Murder Mystery ever as a result. I think probably I will also write a note on the header when we get there saying that One Day I Will Come Back, yes, one day I will come back, until then all 2 or 3 of you should go forward in all your beliefs about how people shouldn't wave a murder mystery at you and then literally run away from it, and I will eventually demonstrate that what is going on is in fact an Apocalyptic Overarching Plot, so there. And edit, of course.)

* I am currently listening to: a 1989 BBC Radio adaptation of Wilkie Collins's No Name I was delighted to find, starring Sophie Thompson as Magdalen, Jack May (as Captain Wragge), Eleanor Bron (as Mrs Lecount) & Robin Ellis (as Captain Kirke). I'm going slowly, but have just started part 3. It's very good and they're making excellent use of the epistolary bits, which is where radio has an advantage over TV. Mrs Lecount and her sinister toad have just turned up and Eleanor Bron is obviously a v good choice.

* I have watched some things, which, aside from what I've already mentioned, and a ridiculous amount of TV detectives, includes these:

The Tribe (1998), The Halfway House (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Admirable Crichton (1957), Creation (2009), Cause Celebre (1988) & Eye in the Sky (2015), all of which were either v good or worth talking about anyway. (Creation and Eye in the Sky have brought me very nearly to the end of my Jeremy Northam's viable CV, so I'm a little bit in mourning now; I suppose a new blorbo will come along in time. Talking of which, I found that the iPlayer had the BBC 1970s All Creatures on it, so finally got around to seeing Suzanne Neve's episode of it, which would be the one thing I would certainly have watched with her when I was a child to see if I had shadowy feelings and indeed, as soon as she appeared, before even I saw her, the set was suddenly Significant in the back of my head, so yeah. I think I can prove childhood imprinting on all my top faves and that's what the thing is about, and why even when I'm so ill they reach me in ways that other people, no matter how much I enjoy them in things, don't unfortunately.)

(Hopefully I will get to talk about some of them properly, but I am happy to attempt such talk in comments if wanted, although sense is not guaranteed, and it is true that at least one or two I watched in a fugue state that all I can say is, well, it was good and I watched it very slowly in bits and there we are, but, yes it was good /o\)

* Also random funny thing. My old housemate N lent me a DVD (!!) of The Residence (was not joking about the sheer amount of detectives watched this summer), which I enjoyed so much I recced it to my Dad. A couple of weeks later we had this conversation:

Dad: I've been watching that medical drama you recommended, but it's not that great, really, so I've stopped.

Me: ... Medical drama??

(It turned out he'd found The Resident on one of the back Freeview channels, so I emailed him a trailer of the 2025 Netflix detective show that I magically got lent on DVD as if it was 2015 or something. He found a pirate source and then lost it again, but he definitely liked what he watched so far a lot better than the Resident).

Entry tags:

Athos in the water

I have been reading Venjamin Smekhov's memoir When I was Athos (and have just skipped a section in Chapter 9, where he talks about location filming in the desert -- the Soviet Union was of course conveniently provided with those within its southern territories, as well as 17th-century street scenes in Lvov! -- because it looks as if it contains spoilers for the third film). And apparently they *did* insist on putting an aging and respectable actor into a struggle in the water when filming the small-boat scene where Mordaunt tries to drown him. It was, ironically, Mordaunt who was doubled for those shots! ( Read more... )

Entry tags:

plant-pots

Rudbeckia seed

The first of my rudbeckia flowers has finally died and gone to seed, and I managed to extract a decent handful of good seeds from it based on this half-remembered method: https://growitbuildit.com/harvest-rudbeckia-seeds-black-eyed-susans/

( Read more... )
So I now have a brown paper bag of bits which, as before, contains *some* rudbeckia seed, but also a little paper packet which contains largely rudbeckia seed only :-)

Current Music: "Language Is a Virus," Laurie Anderson

Entry tags:

food,
tv

The Usual

Sometimes I think about "Earl Grey, hot."

When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.

The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.

Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.

In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.

Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.