september's coming soon

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 23:58:52 GMT

Another expedition into making food from Elsewhere that I lack key ingredients and/or equipment for but I really want to taste it for real: Stroopwafel. We do get them in stores but I love them an awful lot and wanted to see exactly how complicated they were to make at home.

As it turns out: The caramel filling was the difficult part, probably because whatever that German syrup was does not have the same molecular makeup as the closest I got in Scandinavian. I burned it but salvaged it with butter, instant coffee and vanilla.

Splitting the cakes turned out to be very easy and yes you can make them perfectly fine in a krumkake iron.

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Tue, 07 Jun 2022 18:10:45 GMT

It's That Time Of The Year and for the second time in my life, I am actually experiencing legitimate, physical stress.

The last time was This Time Of The Year some... eight or nine years ago, and both times I just realised what it was by very quitetly discovering that I wanted to eat even though I was full from lunch.

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the relief after pain

Tue, 24 May 2022 17:22:48 GMT

Today's adventure was having an ultrasound of my fallopian tubes (nothing worrisome going on). I'd been warned that it might be uncomfortable, and it was uncomfortable even with the self-administered painkillers beforehand. Something about having fluid squirted into places where there usually is none, I suppose; I don't know if "painful" is the word I'd use, but there were cold sweats and occasional groans and then telling them that I'm fine, I'm fine.

Not finer than that the moment the gynocologist declared that everything was peachy, I proceeded to pass out in the chair.

It's not wholly surprising, since the few other times I've been known to pass out in my life, it's been because of menstrual cramps. Still, it certainly was an experience - blacking out, and I remember the darkness, and then waking up to two strange women asking me if I'm okay and the few disoriented seconds before remembering where I was.

I imagine most people would find it fairly indiginfied to recover from a fainting spell with your legs spread in the air, but I'm nothign if not adaptive. I walked home after ten minutes, and reveled in the lightness after my uterus has stopped screaming that I rarely ever feel these days.

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Sun, 22 May 2022 16:17:58 GMT

I'm a book person and I'm a comic person and I'm a cartoon person, but the one thing I'm not is a film person. The films I'll enjoy fall within a fairly narrow criteria, and suffice it to say that the kind of film Book People are meant to like, are not my kinds of film. Having watched both "The Worst Person in the World" and "Compartment No 6" (Norway and Finland's respective Academy hopefuls last year), this is increasingly evident. Intellectually, I can recognise that these are Good Films. Particularly the former has some choice scenes that are stunning. But the stories just don't touch me; recognising the craftmanship of the narrative doesn't do much when I'm just waiting for something to bloody happen to characters I don't particularly care for.

The things I enjoy watching? Well,

Let it be said that "Another Round" is genuinely entertaining and you won't regret the time you spend watching THAT.

Anyway, for posterity: "Out Stealing Horses" is a nice book, but the only reason it'd merit a five star rating is because I guess male reviewers just sympathise more with manpain. The film is a great adaptation and it'll take up less of your life.

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Sat, 21 May 2022 20:43:07 GMT

I got Too Good Too Go and had to suffer other people's inexplicable need to gut croissants and fill them with unholy substances like ham and cheese and brie and bacon. The Koreans I might forgive a little because they seem to do a lot of sweet fillings too, but "ham a cheese croissant"? NO MERCY.

The solution was to empty the worst offenders and keep their mutilated husks for breakfast tomorrow, to be enjoyed with home-made cranberry jam and possibly equally home-made yoghurt. Yeah yeah, "why do you sneer at the ham and cheese when you'll be eating them day-old" IT'S ABOUT FOOD WASTE. And because the entire purpose of Too Good To Go is limiting food waste, getting my sliced bread out of the freezer and put the ham-and-cheese into sandwhiches that will go back into the freezer. This however messed up the logistics of eating the rest of the smoked trout and that egg tomorrow, so that went to Monday's lunch, but this then delayed the ham past its expiration date, and that's how I ended up with six days' worth of lunch sandwhiches all ready to be taken out the night before (one with trout).

The cousin to whom I am closest in age would rather die than go through the embarassement of this frugality. But it really is about the food waste, for me. Making yoghurt from expiring milk and re-purposing profane sanwhich fillings won't save the world, but you know - I almost never throw away food. At least I don't help drive the demand for meat because I only buy it from the "expiring date today" bins and chuck it in the freezer.

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A tale of modern capitalism

Mon, 16 May 2022 18:30:40 GMT

I'm on my third ereader.

The first one, I replaced because it was a bloody Sony and their ebook store went down, and clearly this was enough to finally chase me off it even though I hardly ever bought books there anyway. (gave it to my sister. AFAIK she never used it)

The second was a Kobo, and was replaced after six years when I found the new model in an outlet bin. (gave it to my brother. Dunno if he's used it)

The third is also a Kobo, and last week I lost it on the bus. It was very tragic, and of course I went digging into the virtual outlet bin and lo, but I found the Pocketbook Inkpad 3 and it could do a lot of neat party tricks, and I've got virtual coupons for the store and could effectively get it for a 70% discount.

Then it turned out there are honest people out there, someone had found my ereader and handed it to the driver, and after biking across town to find the bus company moved all business to a different adress than the one on their website last July, a very helpful man gave me my Kobo back and I was happy, indeed.

But the siren song of the Pocketbook Inkpad 3 still hums between my ears, because clearly I need an ereader with TTS software and bluetooth capabilities and a USB-C-to-aux adapter and you can mail your books straight to it

(and seriously, that last one would be a big one for the girl who knows how to use AO3's download option)

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like reading my non-existent teenage diaries

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 11:16:27 GMT

I went diving through the archive of LJ comments I've left about Hetalia through the years - the most recent one was in 2011. (god pless LJ's comment alert e-mails) It's kind of heartwarming to see how little has changed about my ways of being a not-really-popular blog who people still notice because of my occasionally contrarian opinions, huh. The difference is that I somehow made friends in the MLB fandom, so I suppose there is something to be said for tumblr's interface for those of us who were too socially awkward to handle the word "friending" because omg who'd want to be friends with me. Anyway, these were the hills I was apparently dying on:

I really did not like the dub
I bet this might surprise some people knowing me through MLB, since I'm the person who insists on calling him "Cat Noir" because it was a good decision to change it, actually. It certainly surprised me because I had completely forgotten that I was so passionate about that. My issue with the Hetalia dub was mainly that they changed the show from cutesy comedy to South Park except stupid, because the vulgarity was completely aimless. In retrospect, I've occasionally been thinking that this was probably the only route they could've gone in publishing it in the US without some insane backlash (a minute of silence for "Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarves"), but that still doesn't make it good. I've been watching bits of it on youtube through the years, and to this day I fail to see how anyone can find it funny, and the voice work is bad but not funny bad, even.

Look at me being the one telling people to stop treating this like something that deserved serious scrutiny
Grimdark ~historically accurate characterisation~ fic was not my cup of tea, and I remember that one comm that was dedicated to treating Hetalia like the "serious" work that it was, instead of the cesspit of yaoi fangirls that was the fandom at large. Yeah, Hetalia for sure was a thoughtful depiction of history, not a moeblob comedy about obscure cultural fact and national stereotypes that was occasionally illustrated by being set during historically significant events, huh. I cringed at the fangirls eventually swarming the place as much as anyone, but the snobby "history fans" so weren't my crowd, either. Suffice it to say that I've always been the advocate of treating something as exactly as silly and childish as it is, rather than trying to make it look sophisticated by claiming that the fandom's 2K analysis posts were representative of canon.

I took issue people using fancy words to make claims about things that weren't there
Making comedy about political topics =/= satire. And at one point I phrased myself almost word-for-word like I found myself making a point about MLB recently. Paraphrased: "If that's what he's trying to do, he's failing hard at it"

Gotta wonder if my relationship to the anon meme was like my relationship to discord
I knew it existed and I knew a substantial amount of fandom interaction was happening there, but I never went there. Not even that time someone brought up that I was the villain of the week over there because I was stating unpopular fact about its female characters.

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Strangers in Paradise XXV

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 10:37:16 GMT

I'm going to assume that people picking up the years-later oneshot sequel to a decades-running comic will already be familiar with the original, so google SiP if you want the summary. Given that nobody I have ever come across online even knows about SiP, I'm going to assume no-one will ever read this, but hell. Reviewing ended up being how I process the media I consume, and this in context with the Utena sequel means I'm having thoughts.

SiP: XXV more or less starts where the original ended: The Parker Empire is gone for good with Tambi devoted to making sure it stays down, Katchoo finally has peace and her happily ever after with Francine. But oh no oh no, some ex-Parker girl is getting into apocalyptic military science secrets and the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of one Katina Chovanski who has to hunt her down to keep her family safe.

Content, as such, is familiar territory for those here from the original. There's a lot less romantic drama, naturally, and all the more James Bond. Which on the one hand is a kind of a weird choice, given that I deeply suspect that the drama was what endeared this story to most readers. I can't begrudge it, though, because the kind of clunky story flow that always bothered me with SiP is absent here. Granted, this is also a shorter format than the one in which I read SiP (the pocket collection), so it's possible that the shorter length just made it easier to digest. Unlike the original, I never was confused about the chain of events, here.

The story is old, and that is of course perfectly fine. The only thing I could fault it for is possibly the ending, which took a turn for the mystic that's not entirely off-brand for this universe, but still kind of dissonant with the genre. (and honestly the plot engine is fifty degrees of spaced out but seriously, who cares). Some might also complain about the relative absence of Francine in this story, or the fact that she and Katchoo are together for like... three pages, total. Some might even note that David is never as much as alluded to, except for being included in a collection of character sketches at the end of the book. Both of these are things that someone concerned with pleasing fans would've probably shoehorned in, but I'm happy Moore didn't - because it would be shoehorning, and I prefer my stories well told. We got BAMF Aunt Libby in exchange.

Visually, Moore is still a brilliant artist, and I wonder if part of the improved story flow isn't that he's toned down the experimental parts of his comics. The larger format certainly opens up for enjoying the artwork all the better, and the artwork was always the absolute highlight of this story, for me. I particularly liked the way he used landscapes here, and particularly the parts set in Scotland were gorgeous. The one "untraditional" thing I noticed here was Moore's brilliant use of vertical panels and whole-page frames. They're sparing, but man, are they good.

Should you read it? If you liked SiP, this is more of the same, and - I'd argue - better narrated. If you want to get into SiP, this is probably a decent introduction to the universe, though be aware that there's a considerable amount of comedy and romantic soap opera in the original that are almost entirely absent here.

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Today is the day for Lesbian Comic Sequels

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 23:03:05 GMT

I went in looking for the last RG Veda omnibus, I came out with "Strangers in Paradisce XXV" and "Revolultionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution". I read the latter, and it was surprisingly good, standing next to the original manga. How much of that is because it clearly ties to the anime can likely be debated, preferably by someone who knows the conception history of the manga vs. the anime and that person is not me.

I really liked seeing what became of the duellists in the future - I thoroughly enjoyed it, for all of them. Kind of weird to have Saionji depicted as someone heroic but from how I remember the anime, he was honestly one of the more sympathetic characters left in the end. I might've said Juri's part was the weakest, possibly because it was pretty much a frank re-telling of the Ruka episode of the anime, only framed somewhat differently. Still, even that one I really liked for the Juri backstory about how she became the fencing champion who is also a model.

The part that touched me the most, though, was absolutely Miki's - or Miki and Shiori's, because she was absolutely no little part of it. Part of that was probably the context - I spent the last two days reading all of "Lady Georgie" which does colour one's view on not-quite-platonic brother-sister relationships. With spoilers unsaid, it is Miki's story that gets to bring some little completion to Utena's story in this volume, and it does so through a visual depiction of music which by coincidence I read while someone else in the room was listenint go something very suitable on youtube.

All in all, it was a quick read coloured by floating castles and rose petals and girls with swords, and it was utterly satisfactory even though it probably isn't that deep.

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Fri, 08 Apr 2022 15:38:27 GMT

Going home to the parents for Easter, with a delayed and ultimately cancelled plane meaning I likely won't make the connected flight. So I've been waiting here for three hours, eight minutes on foot (without luggage) from my flat, and likely to spend the night at a hotel unless they hold back a flight just for me. Which is unlikely, but with STOL flights you never know.

The more interesting part: I'm doing this after all.

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The Cat Blanc thing, 3.0 (summary as of S4 having ended)

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 16:27:04 GMT

tl;dr Yeah, if he's meant to be an explanation for Marinette's decision-making this season, they're sure not interested in getting that across to the audience.

S2: Original planned placement of episode

S3: Episode airs as one of the last episodes of the season. Thanks to time-travel and miraculous ladybugs, status quo remains at the end. Marinette uncharacteristically cuddling Cat Noir in relief in the final scene might suggest some change in her feelings for him, but this isn't followed up in later episodes. The episode is not brought up again in S3, and at no point does Marinette appear to have been mentally affected by the experience.

S4: Marinette reveals her identity to Alya, and Hawkmoth cottons on to Rena Rouge (whose identity HE knows) being special. In the final third of the seasons, Marinette repeatedly doubles down on the fact that no-one can know both her and CN's identity, since Hawkmoth would then only need that one person to get everything he wants.

"Sentibubbler": Episode is a bit past halfway through S4. Immediately after letting Alya keep Trixx permanently, Marinette is clearly having doubts about Alya's decision-making independent of her. The episode starts with a nightmare where Alya has made Marinette's idenitity public to all the world, which gets increasingly absurd until Cat Blanc shows up talking about getting married. The scene is not framed as particularly scary to the audience (again: compare it to "Oblivio" or "Cat Blanc"), and nothing in the directing and the framing recalls her actual run-in with him. Both Tikki and Alya chide Marinette for overreacting to the nightmare, and the episode is about proving them right: Alya is trustworthy and cunning and capable of keeping her miraculous safe. Marinette doesn't as much as think about Cat Noir until he shows up for battle and she's got to keep him from finding out that the Ladybug on scene is an illusion. Cat Blanc's presence in the episode is connected to Marinette's insecurities about Alya; at no point are there lines drawn between him and Cat Noir.

"Ephemeral": Adrien is once again akumatised. The only tenuous connection to "Cat Blanc" is the fact that Gabriel uses the same chain of events for akumatising him: get him while he's still reeling from the shock of Emilie's corpse and Gabriel being Hawkmoth.

"Kuro Neko": Ladybug thinks Cat Noir has been akumatised as a civillian. The only possible connection to "Cat Blanc" is her assuming that the akuma would be in the bell. There are no flashbacks or otherwise mentions made of Cat Blanc.

"Strik Back": CN calls her a pussy for refusing to learn his identity; when she brings up the aforementioned earth logic, he counters that they "can't be akumatised". She briefly recalls Cat Blanc, which she knows proves him wrong (and he doesn't, since she for whatever reason never told him about it). She does look upset at the memory, as anyone would (there's also the fact that he's clearly not comprehending how dangerous this could be). They're interrupted by Rena Furtive's activies being revealed to him and the topic not brought up again.

To borrow my own cleverness from elsewhere: Remembering that the world ended because you gave your crush a present =/= having PTSD

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Sentiadrien means the True Selfers has more of a point than the show wants them to have

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 12:03:03 GMT

Here’s one for the designer baby joke I didn’t make because I didn’t want to go into sentiadrien on that post I made about Marinette and Gabriel both being professional creators of identity while Adrien’s story arc is to shape an identity independent of them both.

Full disclosure: To any extent this is meant as a criticism of the writers, it is that they’re being shallow and depending on the audience being so, too. I personally do approach this show as exactly as shallow as I think the writers want me to, but I know that a lot of other people don’t and I guess this one's for you!

Because "identity" is what this story is built on, and forcing a main character into grappling with potentially never having had any in the first place makes this all the more immediate than any quantum masking could. But it also makes it seem like the story doesn't see that there is a vital difference between "not defining yourself by your past and your peers and your parents", and "actually your entire life has been lived with people who have had the ability to mold your mind just by wishing for it".

( I am once again thinking about things the MLB writers never meant for anyone to think about )

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Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:22:22 GMT

In a fairly unsurprising development given current national policies and all, covid got to me, too. My boosted ass can probably sleep pretty safe at night knowing it won't be worse than the current chest cold that seems to be letting up already. The greatest ordeal is that I'm set to run out of tea before I with good conscience can go shopping again, and will have to resort to the... three or four different loose leaf boxes I've been saving for the day my polyps for some reason should give up the ghost and I'd once more have a reliable sense of smell.

Which I have had the last couple of weeks, so boo for stuffy nose now.

On the upside, it seems that this month's adventures in uterus leakage was limited to the not-bad-enough-to-justify-painkillers yesterday evening, and I distracted myself from that by discovering that someone uploaded this masterpiece to youtube. One needs a certain kind of Scandinavian childhood to appreciate the full scope of its brilliance (possibly also understanding the language), but if anyone ever asks me about the power of theatre and adaptations and "how do you even like stuff for kids", that will forever be my answer.

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My none too eventful life

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 22:28:23 GMT

Picture this: A place with snow and cold, where cars are iced down after eight hours at work. I live by what in any city of size would be defined as "downtown" (I walk to city hall in eight minutes), but ironically work ten kilometres away. Thanks to an ongoing pandemic, I've been driving to work the last two years, even though I far prefer the bus.

Picture this: After ten hours at work, I start the engine while I scrape the ice off the windows. Picture the frozen car lock. Picture the moment the door snaps close and I realise that oh, my bag's inside, and the car is locked, and I'm ten kilometres away from home and my phone and my wallet and the keys to work are all inside the car blasting music and blaring lights with the engine running. And outside is me and my nifty telescope ice scraper/snow broom.

That is how I ended up waiting ten minutes on a bus, and riding twenty minutes without a ticket together with my broom, until I was home and could pick up the spare keys and my credit card, scarf down an apple and get on the next bus in the opposit direction (where I couldn't buy a ticket manually, because of course everything happens on our phones these days, and my phone is still inside the car)

and that's twenty-five minutes, and by that time my car has been running and blasting music and glaring the headlights for something like an hour, and because the cold is set to last at least another week, I ended up going on an hour-long drive out of town just to make sure the battery was charged.

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On fandom and dancing in the dark

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 17:30:12 GMT

I swear to god I did not get out of bed this morning with any plans to write 3K words on Cat Blanc and authorial intent, but here we are, I guess. Might post to tumblr later.

( ho boy )

(if you’re at all intersted, check out pages 84-95 in the second edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where you can learn all about how we construct authorial intent, underread and overread as we fill in gaps, and how all of this is just part of human nature)

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On adulthood, social conformity, and travelling in Kino's Journey

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 20:45:11 GMT

Adults were always telling the children: "You can do whatever you like as children. But afterwards, it's forbidden! You see, adults have to work. Work is necessary and the most important thing in life! When you work, you'll certainly have to do things that you don't like, or that you think it's wrong. That's very hard!"

I lived two years in abroad and while I haven't been unhappy away from there, I've always longed to be back, and I am rapidly approaching the point where I'm having to make some Decisions if that is something I actively want to pursue. So on a lovely Saturday afternoon, I sat down in a café an did some ruminating, and sure enough: What I discovered was that what I wanted wasn't so much being in Germany, as that being not-home meant that I would of course come home someday and wouldn't settle-settle in Germany either. Do I love life in Germany? Indisputably, but maybe not as much as I fear staying in the same place for thirty years and being tied down by work and mortgages and a social network I cannot replace. In the end, I suspect my wanderlust is really fear of settling down and settling with the life as a proper adult.

Then I went home and watched the second half of the 2017 anime adaptation of Kino's Journey, which includes its own take on the episode wherein this conversation happens.

( I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now )

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Sun, 03 Oct 2021 20:33:05 GMT

I now have seven boxes of books in storage. Three of them are too precious to get rid of, four are "at some point aquired for the purpose of reading but never got around to it, and too interesting to get rid of".

Then there is the box of games (Wii, GC, GB, GBA, DS, 3DS).

One box of film, though most of the ones I put in storage I've at least seen; the "want to check out so picked up a cheap DVD" ones are next to the telly.

(The list of "to read" bookmarks that goes back to some time before I started reading Miraculous Ladybug fanfic, which is nearly two years ago now.)

I've been organizing my storage space in the basement this weekend. Lots of things going into donation, some I've put up for sale before I get around to it. The weirdest thing I've been keeping? My old cable decoder, because it had all of Miraculous Ladybug in Norwegian recorded, because that dub is weirdly dear to me.

Tonight's adventure was to go through lecture notes and photocopies of reading from five years ago and deciding what I might possibly have some use of some day and what I'll never, ever read again. I don't know if other people get sentimental about lecture notes, but I always did love university.

I'm trying to eat the food in my freezer, too. It's slow going, but at least that's because I've gotten a lot better at veggies, and because I bake more than I eat.

That last one goes back to Miraculous Ladybug, too.

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Backstory: I started painting my nails top stop putting my fingers in my mouth

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 18:41:52 GMT

The good: Since I started painting my nails, I HAVE reduced the amount of biting my cuticles

The bad: Since I started painting my nails and keeping them longer (because short nails + nail polish looks silly), I've been experienceing that previously unknown feminine ailment of "broken nails", culminating with today's fun which took a third of the nail off and bled like a pig and today is mealprep + hair washing day and this is inconvenient (but luckily not painful, at least not yet)

Conclusion: Long nails are bothersome and nail painting is time-consuming, but will hopefully be worth it if one day I either no longer have torn cuticles, or at least stop fixing them with my teeth

OTOH: Should Luka Couffaine, who I despise not because of the person he is portrayed as but because of the way he is written, count as a kindred spirit or not? He would share my suffering of the tediousness of nail painting, but as a guitarist he keeps his short and don't have to live with the fear of doing jumping jacks and catching a thumb on a shelf

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Tue, 02 Feb 2021 19:37:15 GMT

Today's good deed: Taking the time to politely and thoroughly explaining that no, Marinette isn't a "Mary Sue" because none of you idiots know what a Mary Sue actually is, rather than firing of a snide comment amounting to mate, you don't get to complain that Marinette "has no flaws" in a thread about "Miracle Queen". You just don't.

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Sun, 24 Jan 2021 21:36:02 GMT

Years and years ago, I took to bullet journaling and promptly fell into the, uh, aesthetic side of it which looks cute but is more like the new scrapbooking fad. I was never great at it at in any way, and at some point realised that keeping it minimalist was the only way I'd ever be productive about it.

I was also horrendously bad at both planning and at keeping up with it. I'm notoriously easy to distract and a chronic procrastinator. I could go weeks without remembering my BJ; I could have lists with three items and never cross out a single one of them.

Until a week ago.

After yet another week of half-done daily tasks lists, I made a list of some twenty things to get done over the weekend - most of them practical stuff around the house. And somehow, I did nearly all of them. Except for one (1) task I postponed for practical reasons and the two work-related things I'd noted, I did every one of those twenty-one things.

And this week, I've done all my daily tasks, and some others on top of it.

I have absolutely no idea what suddenly changed, because it's not as if I've done anything different. I'm still not as good at it at work as I am at home - possibly owing to the fact that a lot of this are purely practical things with visible and/or tactile results, whereas the work stuff is mostly correcting student work and administrative stuff all happening on a monitor. Still, I've been getting better at my to-do list there too.

One thing that might explain this, is that my previous lists were notoriously prone to self-improvement things like "draw for fifteen minutes" or "practice clarinet" and "write on X fic". Those kind of tasks are absent here - except for reading 30 minutes in a novel for my book club, which I should be doing RN. That, and plan first class tomorrow.

All the self-improvement stuff, the learning and the practicing, might be something I should introduce slowly, or maybe do a weekly habit tracker for. Because right now, I'd like to keep this bar so low that I might in fact make a habit out of just getting my daily lists out of the way, because it sure feels great.

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Wed, 20 Jan 2021 20:11:52 GMT

1. Mireille Guiliano's advice boils down to "get used to smaller portions and a treat can be one bit of chocolate, not half the box", and also home-made yoghurt. I have never particularly liked yoghurt, but her advice was such that I in all seriousness looked up the cost of aquiring a yoghurt maker. I never did, but I have since gotten an instant cooker with a yoghurt setting, and I absolutely see her point. I'm consuming something like two litres milk worth of "greek" yoghurt weekly now, which is rather less in volume because "greek" essentially just means "strained".

2. I essentially never eat jam on bread, which makes my fondness of harvesting wild berries a bit of a conundrum. An Episode with my freezing cabinet over Christmas meant that all the food there spoiled except for two small containers of lingonberry jam, which means that just as I was getting ready to start eating all my hoarded jam, I lost it.

3. Luckily for me, if not necessarily the planet, we like to do things that The Americans do on TV, apparently also including cranberry sauce for Christmas even if I'm pretty sure that's just the US version of lingonberry jam and none of our traditional Christmas staples are eaten with lingonberry jam in the first place. Clearly a local supermarket had over-estimated the demand, because they've been selling whole cranberries for almost nothing and tl;dr that's how I ended up with a whole lot of spiced cranberry jam for diet-changing purposes

even if I'm not sure I ever ate much sweets that I'm substituting this with in the first place.

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I expected the culture crash to be lacking metrication, but here we are

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 01:54:22 GMT

I have not known enough Americans IRL to really tell how many of the stereotypes are true, but I'm ghosting my Noom coach because her faux friendliness makes me uncomfortable.

To my own defence, I'm there for the easy calorie counting and the categories of food which I mostly knew but are eye-opening for sure. I like the weight-tracking graph and the peppy ~psychology of weight loss~ lessons, desperately trying to be hip though they might be. It's very friendly and supportive, and I like it!

But the lady in the chat who is paid to talk about my ~goals~ lowkey freaks me out.

I'm honestly not entirely certain if it is her being all friendly with me. It is entirely on brand with the app itself, so the affected tone might just be the natural byproduct of stock phrases she's required to use during customer interaction. But god damn, it is so hard to take it seriously. I'm not here because of grand visions about my life and you're not my friend and frankly it's just creepy when you "can tell that I'm really motivated for this journey" because of some BS ~super goal~ the app required me to enter.

I put "look good in a waistcoat" as my ultimate goal because that was the most concrete thing I could think of in my rush to finish the sign-up. It's not that deep. I'm just overweight enough for it to border on unhealthy, I've thought of myself as fat ever since I was five (and patently wasn't), and I felt like finally doing something about it. I want to know I'm in the healthy bracket, I want a lighter body when I run, I'm tired of feeling like I can't wear cute clothes. My breasts are too tiny for my belly fat to be pretty. I've been doing 5:2 for years and dropped 10 kilo from that, but since I've been stuck at in the lower-to-mid seventies since 2015, I clearly need to do something with what I eat.

The "goal coach" feels like the embodiment of that stereotype about Americans and their therapists. It isn't like I don't want advice and encouragement, but the familiar adress is just so, so out of place. Look, Ashley, I'm a name and a profile pic and a questionaire and nothing more to you. You don't need to talk as if you're my guide to enlightenment. I appreciate your purpose and I wouldn't mind having some stranger pick my brain about it, normally, but I never asked for a personal lifestyle blogger. Please can you tone it down a little and treat me like a grown-up so that I'm not afraid to talk to you.

ETA: scrolled through my tag just to see what kind of stuff I'd put up there, and lo and behold, from march 2017:

Hah.

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My main contribution to fandom, now with graphs

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 11:54:06 GMT

My first fic finished in a year was one where I expressed surprise at having written something “bittersweet leaning on sad”, but then I went over my bibliography and realised that for someone who does not expose herself to hurt without the promise of “comfort” as a reader, I sure publish a lot of fic where happy endings are debatable or at least comes with a distinct aftertaste.

So even though I really had better things to do, I went back and looked it over and did a bit of a rating. And then I did the stats.

( Me talking about my own fanfic )

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Sat, 14 Nov 2020 11:01:53 GMT

I'm really really really not religious, but a post-grad degree in literature teaches you things.

Writing a fic full of of Biblical allusions isn't particularly pretentious. That Hetalia fic that was just Finland and Norway hanging around and making commentary on pieces of history that probably most people even in the countries wouldn't catch? That was pretentious. The only reader I trust to have understood what it was about was the kudos left by a Scandinavia word who turned out to be Swedish when I checked the profile. The rest, presumably lacking the background knowledge the fic was discussing between the lines, would probably just read a kinda weird and kinda sinister NorFin friendship fic.

But mythological allegories in a fandom where canon is not particularly subtle about the mythological allusions?

Not pretentious, unless allegory is per definition pretentious.

But fandom isn't as deep as you all think and when I see allusions discussed at all, it's mostly just to point them out, much rarer in attempts to read them as narrative devices. We love fairy-tale crossovers or maybe artsy fic citing fairy-tales as blunt metaphors, but I yet to find fic where the meaning relies on allegory.

So of course that was what I went and did.

Said fic curently has three different reviews explaining that it left the reader crying in the middle of the night, which I guess says something about its length as a one-shot, but also that I really didn't need to worry about my clusmy use of litterary devices. Because even as I EXPLICITLY POINTED AT THEM IN THE NOTES, at least the audience that liked it enough to bother leaving comments was completely blind to the fact that a fic open to be read as a Christ allegory miiiiiiiight just also suggest a return from symbolic death. (alternatively: my writing simply isn't that great and the readers clever enough to have picked up on that had long since noped out or didn't think I needed encouragement to write more)

I don't fancy being the judge of my own writing, but I've sat through enough lectures to know that what I wrote would be blatantly obvious to any literary scholar worth their salt. I quoted the scripture verbatim twice and the Notre Dame was damn near omnipresent, and that put together with the canon connection to Mary and Joan of Arc would make it clear that yeah no, the references to Christianity in this fic are not incidental.

So I don't know which it is. In an age where faith is strictly personal, is it that people just don't expect to see a living religion used for purposes other than proselytising? Is it truly that foreign to see Christianity treated just like any other mythology? I mean, based on real, honest to god Christians I know, it's just very likely that even believers reading the fic completely missed out on the part where I turned Adrien into John the Baptist because god only knows I've had to discuss the Bible with enough people who believe a lot in a text that my atheist-raised-on-an-illustrated-children's-bible ass knows better than them.

Or just as likely: Fanfic Is Trash And That's Why You Should Read Novels That Aren't Genre Fiction. Yes there is really good fanfic out there no genre fiction isn't per definition bad but if you fancy yourself a writer then you should read good books too and I say this as a person who unabashedly read fic and loves fantasy most of all. I still won't shut up about the fact that almost all fanfic and most genre fiction I read do not aspire for subtlety.

Or allegory is just per definition pretentious, I guess.

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Sun, 18 Oct 2020 21:12:31 GMT

Mournful declarations of lacking keyboard access have a lot more meaning until you remember that you in fact have an old workhorse of a desktop hooked up to your TV for the purpose of watching all that anime you once downloaded, huh.

On the bright side, I have not only backed up my laptop, but backed up the most important things on my SDD to the HDD, since it started getting spotty.

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