cupcake_goth | Reading

... and Nurse Feratu will take a blood sample!

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Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: awake

Tags:

bts,
swim

Okay, crispy rice = pretty good. I tossed 1 cup of cooked rice with 2 tbsp low sodium soy sauce, 1 tbsp of olive oil, 1 tsp of toasted sesame oil, a sprinkling of garlic powder, and 1 diced shallot, spread it on a foil-lined sheet pan, and cooked it at 400°F for 25 minutes. I still have a bunch of rice left, so I might make fried rice tomorrow.

The salad part was less successful. I cleared some stuff out of the freezer - an old bag of frozen corn, a handful of frozen roasted chicken chunks I got in my misdelivered grocery order a few weeks ago - and then I added some toasted sesame seeds, some dry-roasted peanuts, and some arugula. The dressing was lime juice, toasted sesame oil, ground ginger, and olive oil (all scaled down for one serving) - it was ok, but I wouldn't make it again.

The stuff in the salad was mismatched and didn't go well together, which is my own fault, since I didn't really think about anything but the rice ahead of time. If I did it again, I might use shredded cabbage instead of arugula, and leave out the corn and the peanuts. I might also just dress it with olive oil and vinegar.

If I do it again, I will probably eat the crisped rice by itself, maybe with some scrambled egg like in fried rice, and some scallions. And I'd keep the toasted sesame seeds, because those are always tasty.

Here is today's poem:

An old story
by Bob Hicok

It's hard being in love
with fireflies. I have to do
all the pots and pans.
When asked to parties
they always wear the same
color dress. I work days,
they punch in at dusk.
With the radio and a beer
I sit up doing bills,
jealous of men who've fallen
for the homebody stars.
When things are bad
they shake their asses
all over town, when good
my lips glow.

*

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Mets losing to the Rockies

Tags:

feeling excited! i'm visiting my family in a few days :] i miss them so badly :(
and of course, my chemical romance will get back on tour soon too!!! i can't wait to stay awake at night frantically switching between instagram and twitch livestreams, and twitter. i wonder if they'll bring a new aspect or just return to the original timeline (as it was last year). i hope they do something new!

also, my layout looks so basic </3 yesterday i spent ~1h scrolling through some custom themes and editing them to my liking, but i just completely gave up later lol

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know (Alternate Version) - Panic! At The Disco

Tags:

my chemical romance

HANG ON is the One Ring on Gollum's penis now?

At Gollum’s age, you start to need a little help maintaining erections.

My recip is like, “All I want is for Gollum to win! Maybe instead of falling into Mount Doom after stealing the One Ring back, he shoves Frodo to his knees and forces him to suck his little invisible Gollum cock while gloating about how it’s Frodo’s turn to serve the master of the Precious.”

/flatmemer swears off flatmeming ever again

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I made these salt bread rolls today (pic), and they are very tasty, but I think I still like pretzel rolls better, even with the mess of having to boil them before baking. There isn't much I like better than a big old soft pretzel, so pretzel rolls are where it's at for me. The salt bread is good though - very buttery.

I also made rice this afternoon in preparation for making a crispy rice salad tomorrow. I am very intrigued by the idea of crispy rice salad, but I don't know if I will like it in actuality, even though I like all the components I plan to put in it. (I'd also be more confident if every recipe I look at didn't call for a different type of rice. I made basmati, for the record.) I guess I'll report back tomorrow and how it goes.

And it's been a full day of watching hockey, after a long night of watching hockey last night. It's been exciting, but so much more relaxing since my team isn't in it.

And finally, here is today's poem:

Why You Should Never Marry A Poet
by Heather Bell

Think about it - the way that credit cards, bougainvillea,
vacations, dictionaries, the road on the way to work will

all never be enough. The poet wishes
with her deepest bones
and writes that she wishes
she would have killed you

in the supermarket. She wonders why
she ever loved you in song.

She publishes book after book. Each line detailing
how your hair is ugly and monstrous in the morning. And how,
like moss, you cling to her
so piteously.

But you marry her anyway.
and she looks like a roar of snow
in white. You figure she will read a poem about you
that day in front of everyone: her throat

is, after all, a stamen
or matchstick.

But she is silent, says only the I DO's
and a few Bible verses.

The poet loves with a most violent
heart. What you have not known-
she has wanted to tell you the truth
all of these years,

but grew silent as an old lover does
at eighty. There is no way to say

how one loves the ache of your cracked lips,
the heavy belly of your tongue, the years she spent
feeling not loved,
but still loving. Think about it-

the poet is fearful of others knowing and finding your mouth.

She is frightened of you -
realizing you could have been
loved better or harder
or with real words.

***

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Stars vs Wild intermission

Tags:

I have done my laundry a day earlier than usual because I'm about to pack for surgery. There's a stack of paper on my dining table including the Sculptor's instructions, my packing list, and my boarding pass. Yes, I'm that Xer.

I should perhaps clarify that I leave for San Francisco in less than 24 hours. My pre-op appointment is Monday, and my surgery is Tuesday morning.

Even if this trip weren't in the service of something I've wanted desperately for decades, it's definitely time for me to get out of Dodge. Work has been a frustrating grind lately, and it's been nearly eight months since I got back from New York.

In between laundry loads I bopped over to my favorite coffee joint for a mocha. I looked longingly at their baked goods, which are pretty great even if you haven't been denied carbs for two weeks. As soon as the Sculptor says it's OK I'm so having ramen and sake. I wonder if I can persuade Tacoma Girl to join me.

The weather here in Seattle has been glorious. Playing in my head on the way around Green lake on my bike this morning was "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" from A Chorus Line.

Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: The Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated"

Tags:

surgery

I can play light Minecraft (lots of breaks, no sustained or heavy mouse activity) for hours now.
I can type fairly freely for writing and code.

I tried to do some simple sketches and hand-written notes today to get an idea down for later, and it was painful. Sore and aching in my palm. I needed a lot of breaks to get all the ideas down. I would put myself down as NOT being able to draw yet, at all. The simple sketches were too much.

My stitches and the area around them are sore to the touch, especially on the side with the knots.'
The stitches come out on the 30th, though. I'm looking forward to having them gone, if not the process of removing them.

Once they're gone I'll make more attempts and writing and drawing, and try to get back into being able to work again.
In the meantime, I will try to work on some coding and writing and try not to entirely have all my time eaten by Mincecraft.

For tomorrow though, I have game time with friends and probably won't be getting much done this weekend.
Though, I have had a few more thoughts on SK, so that's still getting (very slow) progress even as I'm still healing.

More updates when I have them.

Tags:

state of the dreadlord

The schedule for the 2026 round of Summer of Horror is up! You can view all the date here, and nominations will open on May 15.

Start brainstorming your preferred kinds of spookiness for the summer season!

Tags:

announcement

This is the first book I've read by Tim Pratt. I had somehow gotten the impression that they wrote very highbrow, abstract sf that I probably wouldn't enjoy. I have no idea where that came from because this novel, which I tried because of the delightful premise, is completely not that and I enjoyed it very much.

Zax Delatree, a social worker/mediator from a utopian post-scarcity world, develops a condition where he travels to a random other world every time he sleeps. Through a lot of trial and error, he also discovers that he can take with him items on his person, and also other people if he's touching them when he falls asleep. If they're asleep too, they will arrive fine. If they're not, they arrive insane. ("The Jaunt" is one of many spottable influences.) Here's Zax and his companion, Minna, explaining their situation:

"Do you know the word 'multiverse?' [...] We're travelers, sort of. Sort of explorers. And sort of refugees."

"If this is true, the implications are immense."

"The implications are also very small and also personal," said Minna.

This is the most charming and heartfelt novel I've read in a while. It's mostly a picaresque, with Zax and Minna (and assorted friends and pursuing enemies) visiting all sorts of colorful other worlds, exploring and surviving and trying to be of use. The many worlds are great, I loved Zax and Minna and the friends they meet, and it's full of sense of wonder and hopefulness and people being kind under extremely difficult circumstances. I also liked that Zax and Minna are friends who are explicitly not romantically or sexually involved with each other.

There is a sequel, Prison of Sleep, which I have ordered.

Tags:

This year's Hugo nominees were announced early this week. In an unexpected development, I've read four of the Best Novel candidates (having finished the fourth the night before the announcement) and three (!) of the Best Novella candidates, which is more unusual, given how few novellas I read. I'm delighted that

renay got nominated for Intergalactic Mixtape for Best Fanzine (all the more impressive for how new it still is!), as well as for The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for Best Related Work. ^_^

But the thing that hit me hardest is that A Girl and Her Fed is up for Best Graphic Story or Comic, having wrapped up its third (and for now, final) act last year. (On Bluesky, K.B. Spangler notes "The work *as a whole* is eligible as it concluded in 2025, but since that is 2000+ strips, we are including the 50+ strips from 2025 in the packet, with a cover page with links to Parts 1 and 2 for reader convenience." She and Ale Presser (who took over the actual art from Spangler a while back) will be attaching this cover to their Hugos submissions packet.

I love AGAHF (and especially the connected Rachel Peng novels, as I've said many times) so much, so this is a real joy.

Reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud (the aforementioned Hugo nominee that I finished the night before the announcement), and while I enjoyed the back half of it more than the beginning, it still never really got emotional hooks into me, which is required for me to particularly bond with any story. Fascinating worldbuilding, though, and a grimly plausible look at a future society where humanity lives to serve capitalism.

I've also finished reading the Hikaru no Go manga! According to Goodreads, I'd read as far as vol. 19 before (a loooooong time ago). (It's now been long enough since

scruloose and I watched the c-drama that I mostly only remember my feelings about it, so I have no real sense of how faithful its plot wound up being by the end.)

Currently reading The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan.

Watching: As I mentioned last weekend, I asked

scruloose if they'd be up for giving Justice in the Dark a shot, if only to give me the excuse to rewatch the first eight episodes before finally moving on to the ones that eventually got released in Japan after not being cleared to air in China. They agreed, and we're now four or five episodes in!

I haven't read any of the new release of Mo Du/Silent Reading yet (partly because I don't read nearly as much as I'd like, but also because I'm getting this series in hard copy, which makes it take even longer for me to get around to reading something >.<), so my memory of the novel from reading the fan translation several years ago is fairly fuzzy, but (as expected) I really, really like the main actors.

The tacked-on sci-fi framing is both bizarre and aggressively pushed, and since Mo Du, unlike Guardian, is a modern setting with no fantasy elements that needed to be given a sci-fit polish to make it passable, I can only assume its main purpose is to put extra distance between the genuinely horrific crimes and reality. (At the very least, I don't remember reading about any other explanation/theory, but it's been ages since I saw much talk about the drama that wasn't largely focused on the relationships/character dynamics--which is not a complaint, since that's totally what I'm here for.)

Working: This weekend I'm starting my adaptation of the penultimate volume of Yona of the Dawn. I read the translation a couple days ago and am having a lot (A LOT) of feelings. Send strength.

Current Mood: busy

Tags:

Via https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mkboea2zgs2k

Clinician Guide: Constellation of Chronic Medical Conditions Commonly Seen in Autistic & ADHD Adults

https://allbrainsbelong.org/all-the-things/

In May 2022, we formed a Task Force of clinicians, patients, and community members to discuss what works (and does not work) to manage these medical conditions or symptoms. We also gathered information from more than 100 autistic adults. These individuals gave feedback based on their personal experiences. The content we share on this website combines evidence-based medicine, lived experience, and our clinical experiences treating patients with these conditions.

Suspiciously specific denial of gruesome actions described in absurd detail including time and place of them not being performed.

I’m about a quarter of the way into Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, which I recall getting a fair amount of attention back when it was published in 2018. It’s less immediately rigorous than Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I’ve also read, but in some ways more immediately helpful because Magnusson’s book directly addresses those of us with a propensity to hang onto things until inertia makes them permanent fixtures. I’m not planning on dying anytime soon (then again, most people who die aren’t planning on it), but I am moving house in the not too distant future, and no way am I taking all of this with me. So.

Someone pointed me to Caroline Shea’s essay “A Candle Burning: Nation and the Agency of Nature in Fantasy” this week, which ties into both my enjoyment of genre fiction (I’ve read all of the books Shea discusses except for Lud-in-the-Mist, which is on my to-read list) and my engagement with the more-than-human world. (It’s a source of ongoing disquiet to me that I’ve yet to find a satisfactory term for the latter, but people in my extended community of nature nerds use that one a lot; it’ll do for now.) What Shea says here about the agency of nature is very much in line with a perspective I find myself aligning to when tracking. To track successfully, you must grant agency to the beings you’re tracking. And if you grant it to them, why not to the rest of nature, too?

I like radio. This is because I’m old. I’m also aware that there are parts of my own country where the only radio stations you can pick up are terrifying right-wing “news” channels and Christian radio (nothing against it, but why is so much of the music so insipid? I digress), and admittedly I mostly listen to KEXP on streaming because the southern reach of their broadcast radius runs out somewhere around Federal Way. That said, I love Radio Garden, which allows you to stream radio stations all over the world. Pick a favorite (one of mine is WOZQ, the Smith College radio station I myself DJed for in the 90s), choose a geographic region, or just cruise at random. It’s the kind of labor-of-love project that seems harder to find in the increasingly monetized, algorithmized, and enshittified Internet, and I hope it doesn’t go away.

Sigh. This administration, man.

I’m a big fan of History Buffs, which scratches the same itch as blogs cataloging the errors of ostensibly historical movies did back in the day. It’s especially rewarding when he recognizes the work that went into something like Master and Commander; that’s actually how I first came across the channel, while doing some research on the kinds of warships from the era in which the story is set. But I have to admit that his takes on movies that get it wrong are hilarious; he did not, for instance, care for Elizabeth.

Current Mood: nerdy

Tags:

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Tags:

friday5

shed some honest-to-god tears yesterday because of these two old men. as expected of me.
last week, i was crying about rhett and link. my period came the next day, which may or may not be unrelated.

Current Mood: touched
Current Music: Old Friends - Simon & Garfunkel

Tags:

"[Captain Sir Mansfield] Cumming was so pleased to discover that semen made a good invisible ink that his agents adopted the motto: 'Every man his own stylo'."

Captain Cumming, eh?

Nominative determinism strikes again!

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Does anyone know where I can get a Trinity Santos icon? [eta: icon acquired!]

*

Always need some Dorianne Laux during poetry month, so here's today's poem:

Prayer
by Dorianne Laux

Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take
your hands and hold them to her breasts,
slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down
on sheets beaten clean against the fountain stones.
Let her rest her dark head on your chest,
let her tongue lift the hairs like a sword tip
parting the reeds, let her lips burnish
your neck, let your eyes be wet with pleasure.
Let her keep you from that other life, as a mother
keeps a child from the brick lip of a well,
though the rope and bucket shine and clang,
though the water's hidden silk and mystery call.
Let her patter soothe you and her passions
distract you, let her show you the light
storming the windows of her kitchen, peaches
in a wooden bowl, a square of blue cloth
she has sewn to her skirt to cover the tear.
What could be more holy than the curve of her back
as she sits, her hands opening a plum.
What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth, your life
rising behind them, your name on her lips.
Stay there, in her bare house, the black pots
hung from pegs, bread braided and glazed
on the table, a clay jug of violet wine.
There is the daily sacrament of rasp and chisel,
another chair to be made, shelves to be hewn
cleanly and even and carefully joined
to the sun-scrubbed walls, a sharp knife
for carving odd chunks of wood into small toys
for the children. Oh Jesus, close your eyes
and listen to it, the air is alive with bird calls
and bees, the dry rustle of palm leaves,
her distracted song as she washes her feet.
Let your death be quiet and ordinary.
Either life you choose will end in her arms

*

Current Mood: thoughtful

Tags:

A science fiction novella about aliens, communication, and certain dark topics which are spoilery to mention. Though if you read the blurb for this book, it very strongly implies those topics and the specific shocking twist that involves them. It reminded me of China Mieville's Embassytown, though the latter benefited from its longer length.

Ro's species, along with some others, can jump into the minds of Star Eaters, the mysterious species that alone can mine the mineral that enables space travel. Ro is told that doing so is the only way to study them, and while jumping into their bodies extinguishes their minds, they are extremely long-lived beings and their minds definitely come back, so Ro is only doing the equivalent of causing a day-long blackout. The Star Eaters were apparently once enslaved, but now work voluntarily; communication with them is difficult and puzzling. Once you jump in, you're stuck for the rest of your life, but Ro is such a curious and skilled linguist that he's willing to give up everything to understand this oddly mysterious race. (I guess the possessing being's mind is supposed to only live for its species's normal lifespan? This is not explained.)

If you've read much science fiction, or many books in general, you have probably already figured out what's really going on. In fact it's so obvious that it seems strange that it takes the characters so long to do so, but of course no one knows exactly what story they're in.

Everything involving alien communication is great. But the plot is so predictable and grim that I didn't enjoy the book much.

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In a lot of ways, this is my favorite time of year. Taxes are done! Porch season has begun, so I can start eating my breakfast outside. It's not too hot, and it's not too cold. There's no need to shovel, there's no need to rake leaves, and it's a little early to start mowing.

So all you have to do is to relax and enjoy the flowers that are starting to spring up. Forsythia blooms in April, and my tulip bed is making a splendid show. Pretty soon the lilacs and apple blossoms will be blooming.

It's too early to garden (the frost date is usually assumed to be around Mother's Day), but not early to start garden dreaming. Everything is potential, and you don't have to weed yet!

Image description:Background: a chart showing high and low temperatures for April and May. The chart is bordered by orange tulips (bottom), forsythia (left side), pansies (right side) and pink bleeding hearts (top).

Spring

16 Spring

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

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2026 52 card project

Tell all the people that you do not know

FFA DW Post #2471 - Vampire medical dramas: Dr. Acula will see you now...

on a loop for days

i have to do all the pots and pans

Lazy Sundays

FFA DW Post #2470 - I see the vision, even if I no longer see the penis.

how one loves the ache of your cracked lips

Less than 24 hours to go. I wanna be sedated.

Hand healing progress

Summer of Horror 2026

Doors of Sleep, by Tim Pratt

Hugo nominees | Weekly proof of life (media intake, mainly)

Relevant to the medical needs of at least 70% of my social circles

(no subject)

Death Cleaning, Nations and Nature in Fantasy, Radio Garden, Flu Vaccines and History Buffs

Friday Five, April 24th

Simon & Garfunkel Making Me Cry (Again)

FFA DW Post #2469 - Invisible ink pens for fic? Sounds like you're writing lemons!

Either life you choose will end in her arms

The Language of Liars, by S. L. Huang

2026 52 Card Project: Week 16: Spring

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