unclutter | Member Posts

Reading. ( Brosh, McMorland Hunter & Hughes, Melzack & Wall )

Dreamwidth! Down to two and a half months behind.

Writing. So many e-mails about objects. So many.

Watching. Farscape S02E06, Picture if You Will. The discussion about which of the Highly Specific Fetish Big Bads it was who was resurrecting in this particular context was entertaining in terms of highlighting the, you know, motifs. Of the work.

Playing. We have just managed some Fluxx. <3

Cooking. Batch of puff pastry for the sake of making two (of the three) things in East that call for it (because I could not quite bring myself to buy pre-made). Pleased with how the puff came out; mildly dubious about both the tomato, pistachio + saffron tart and the banana tarte tatin, but on the level of "I am unlikely to make these again", not "I regret making them".

Eating. On Tuesday we hit the point of Make The Internet Bring Us Pizza. The Pizza was very welcome.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to say goodbye to Ruby Violet, i.e. we had cake for breakfast, along with hot chocolate. The flavours were all ones I was familiar with but I'm still pleased to have had them. (It is not impossible I will decide I want to make another trip by myself, though, especially given that they currently have the malted milk on...)

As mentioned we then also availed ourselves of an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean Veggie Combo and a piece of Japanese Curry Bread, both of which I am pleased to have experienced.

Exploring. St Pancras Waterpoint! Brief turn through Camley Street Natural Park.

Growing. Spinach that I thought was unlikely to still be viable turns out to in fact still be Extremely Viable! Spinach is go! And the lambs' lettuce has self-seeded nicely (so in fact I also had some of that plus some allotment rocket accompanying the tomato tart). Tomatoes continue to produce tomatoes. Peppers various looked very happy last time I went to see them ~~so now I want to overwinter them all~~. At home, the pineapple continues to grow and the lemongrass isn't obviously dead yet (and I'm doing something right with at least the larger of the two orchids...)

Observing. BAT, extremely obliging with the aerobatics. Good sunsets. Cyclamen various. Moon.

nanila

[Epic god-light over the Pacific]

I returned to the UK last Thursday evening. I went to work and had a hectic day on Friday, greeting the returning students and my tutees. This weekend we got the suitcase turned around and at midday today, the bloke left for Uganda. At some point our kids will remember what it's like regularly having two parents around, but apparently that is not this year.

I have to give three presentations tomorrow, one of which is a two-hour lecture, so I shall leave this photo here and go do some deep breathing.

tozka

Life Updates

This week has fairly flown by but honestly I’ve been spending most of my time petting the cats, wandering the neighborhood, reading fanfics, and doing a BIT of work.

It’s a very enjoyable life, but at the same time I wish I’d gotten more done than I had. Oh well! There’s always next week…

Media Consumption

📺 Tried watching several movies and nothing much caught my eye, so instead have been putting Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on in the background. Some of the newer episodes– including the very newest ones that were audience-funded– are now available on the Shout TV streaming channel (or Tubi) which is interesting because there’s a whole new host!

📖 Currently halfway through a very fun Star Wars fanfic, The 212th Attack Battalion’s Guide to Staging Rescues by antigrav_vector and Quarra, and am very much enjoying it.

🎮 I have my (hacked) 3DS with me, and am currently playing a fan translation of Rocket Slime 3 (not as fun as Rocket Slime 2, but okay) and Animal Crossing: New Leaf (which will get its own page on my website eventually).

I also have Sanrio Characters Picross going, which is super cute– you get “stickers” for finishing puzzles and can use them to decorate the backgrounds IN the game.

I’m planning on writing a post later about my 3DS because a) I decorated it and want to show off, and b) there’s some fun homebrew stuff which came out recently and has made the 3DS community more active than it was a few years ago when I first jailbroke it.

Food & Dining

Went to the farmer’s market and splurged on a few things, including a packet of “Reaper” flavored cheese from a local dairy farm and a $10 loaf of jalapeno cheddar sourdough (yum).

Also stopped by a coffee truck and got a honeybun latte, which was good but perhaps just a little overpriced ($7+ yikes).

Web Updates

I need to get back into the habit of posting again! I have so many drafts, but very little energy to finish them. Until then:

Looking Forward

Next week is several fun local events, including a flea market. I’m also planning to go to a thrift store and perhaps a Little Free Library. And of course, reading lots of fanfic (and maybe finishing a book or two).

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

tyger

Lunch actually didn't take as long as I thought it would! It was still. You know. Over two hours. But considering we got the five-course tasting menu, that's really not too bad.

Also it was extremely fucking delicious, and absolutely worth being Out for that long. (ALSO also hideously expensive, but as my parents had been there before and were paying I am attempting to ignore that. Yes.)

But yeah even though it wasn't as long as I was anticipating it still drained my batteries hahahaha. Rest of the day was pmuch just reading and some minecraft.

And I'll give them this: you don't feel like you're eating that much with the tasting menu (even though it's also not a stingy serving!), but I didn't feel hungry at all until like 11pm, so you know. Definitely more food than a single meal's worth!

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY Mama had a good time yesssss :D

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Birthplace

fred_mouse

I had a swathe of things I was hoping to do this morning, but each one I do takes longer than I was anticipating. One of the things I'm abandoning off the list is a well thought out blog post.

In other news,

Middlest is getting married.

At the Zoo.

In about 3 hours

And it is raining (it most likely won't be by then, but now I'm in a tizz about which trousers to wear to go with which jacket because I had not planned for 'dammit, I'll get cold'. I've already hemmed one pair of trousers, going to have to do another. very much appreciating magical hemming tape)

zenigotchas

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kaberett

Ruby Violet, my favourite source of ice cream, are continuing as a business (I feel like that bit is important to say first) but will alas be closing their King's Cross parlour for the last time at 5 p.m. Sunday next, the 5^th of October. They're apparently still intending to have their ice cream van at Granary Square during the summer, and to have a variety of "pop-up shops" around London, but... gosh I have a lot of feelings about the amount of post-therapy ice cream I have eaten at the lovely big wooden table indoors and on the benches and grass outside.

So today we went to say goodbye (and I managed to drag a university friend into joining us, as they're also independently fond), in the form of Dessert For Breakfast: apple crumble + the hazelnut & hazelnut brittle ice cream for me; sticky toffee pudding and coffee mocha ripple for A. Hot chocolate for both of us. (I'm very glad we had the Afternoon Tea Experience in 2023 for Animals Week; by the time I thought to try booking a farewell repeat it'd gone from the online shop.)

We followed this up with some slightly more savoury food from around the entire Coal Drops Yard situation (one veggie combo from an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean stall, mostly for me; one Japanese curry bread mostly for A); fifteen minutes or thereabouts poking around St Pancras Waterpoint, an old water tower that was having a serendipitous open day; and a quick poke around the Camley Street Natural Park, which A had not previously met.

I'm very glad we did it.

arlie

My bridge club has once again sent me multiple emails, telling me about a bridge game scheduled at a time too early in the day for me. They hold lots of games, and are eager for more people to play. Once a week, they have an evening game. But it's important to them that I hear about all of them. How else will they get more attendance at their 10 AM games?

My online pharmacy feels a need to send me 4 or 5 emails per package they send me. They also require proactive action once a year for each prescription, because they won't send a request for a refill prescription without asking me first.

After an attempt at cleanup, I currently have 45 threads in my INBOX, each containing one or more unread emails. This does not count unread emails auto-filed into other mailboxes, generally because I have strong reasons to believe they aren't actionable. It also doesn't count anything recognized as spam.

I routinely lose important emails among all the junk mail, even with an active spam filter and other filters for FYI and routine verbosity.

Meanwhile, when I delete the obligatory requests to respond to customer satisfaction surveys, I get sent reminders of this pending task I've already decided not to do. If I respond accurately - "now that you've punished me for using your service by demanding I respond to surveys, I won't use or recommend you ever again" it'll be misinterpreted as a complaint about whatever employee I dealt with, rather than a complaint about the demand that I contribute my precious time to their not-so-precious business interests.

Note to the senders of most of those 45 threads: I hope your afterlife involves wading through emails, full of repetitive rubbish of limited interest, to find the one and only email that - if read attentively - might relieve your ongoing agony, in the manner of Dante's afterlife for sellers of bogus medicine.

A few of your messages *are* the things I'm looking for. Most though are e.g. 5 separate threads to convey one piece of information I want, in the manner of my wretched online pharmacy. And that's with the outright spam already pruned.

zenigotchas

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tyger

Very good floppy day today, yes!

Mostly I just read - finally finished a long fic I've been reading! - but also some minecraft. :3 And cleaned the bathroom but whatever, boring.

Mama's birthday tomorrow! We're going out for lunch, so I expect that'll be most of the day. It's a FANCY restaurant, after all. Close to home, at least, though! :D

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Birthplace

fred_mouse

I haven't been seeing as many booklists as I sometimes do; maybe it is the quiet part of the year for it, or maybe I've just been skimming past and not registering them. Anyway, what have I found?

from the Otherwise Award site, Celebrating work from 2022-2023: Part I a list of works to consider from the years the awards were on hiatus. I was in a 'no, no more books' mood so was reading for interest but not to put things on the wishlist.

from pangur-and-grim at tumblr, their favourite books from this year. Not normally the kind of list I'd look at, but at first glance it starts with Alien Clay, which I loved, has a couple I think I'd like and a stack I've never heard of. It also has The Last Unicorn. There are six that Greer has read, and three 'up next'. Turned out some of the ones I hadn't read were already on the wishlist; i added all but one of the rest.

at tumblr, suspiciouspopsicle said I need some good fantasy or scifi to read that doesn't involve romance., First set of replies from specialagentartemis. Sadly, their absolute favourites is three I've read and one I don't want to (saw the movie, don't care), and the weird and interesting is a mix of read it, can't find it, that doesn't sound like my thing. Second from girlfailuregawain, where the ones I recognise make me a bit meh on looking up the rest, because very much Not My Taste. There are some more in the comments, but I ran out of steam. One book added to the maybe list.

I also added two to the wishlist after reading bibliofile's notes about them.

vass

Books
Listened to the audiobook of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian SF novel We, translated by Bela Shayevich and narrated by Toby Jones. I don't have any basis for comparison for this particular translation, but I thought it was good. The narration was exceptional.

This edition also included a forward by Margaret Atwood, an old review by George Orwell, and an essay by Ursula Le Guin, 'The Stalin in the Soul'. By the time I'd finished the novel, I had forgotten the Atwood forward. The Orwell review was interesting. The Le Guin essay got up my nose: it was about how market forces can suppress ideas just as effectively as state censorship (a valid point), but somewhere along the way became about the dangers of unserious writing.

Read Victoria Goddard's newest novella, Olive and the Dragon,
and her previous ones Clary Sage and Traveller's Joy.

Currently rereading her second ever novel Stargazy Pie, because the fan server I'm in is doing a reread of the Greenwing & Dart series, and I'm hoping it'll lend me the momentum to read the rest of them.

Fandom
Still working on the concluding chapter to the fic I posted part one of at the start of this month. I've added at least a thousand words to the draft, and struggling with it.

Missed the nomination period for

trickortreatex and, subsequently, the signup period. Things have been difficult.

Did my Yuletide nomination a couple of hours before the AO3 server outage.

Games
Achieved A10 with all four characters in Slay the Spire and also killed the Transient before it faded; am now taking a break.

Tech
I've been working through the original levels of Reeborg's World, a gentle guide to programming using Python. As of this post, I've completed all the original levels except Rain 2, Centre 1 and 2, and Storm 2 through 4. (Edit with breaking news: I beat Centre 1 and Centre 2.)

Garden
Harvested some broccoli, purple and green varieties.

Hired a mower to come do what I was not managing.

Misc
Got out my old Lego Classic set, sorted the contents, and started working through the instruction booklet in order. I've never been into Lego: as a kid, I had my older brother's hand-me-down bricks and half an instruction manual with crayons scribbled across it. In my early teens I was in love with the short unit we did at school, using Logo to program Lego Technic sets (this was long before Mindstorms), but I couldn't get my parents to buy me Lego Technic to have at home. And as an adult the Lego kits just seemed too expensive and also too specialised. Recently I've been thinking I'd like to give Lego another look, in particular the less... "spend a lot of money on a playset to assemble and then dust" side of it.

Subsequently bought myself a "miniblocks" Halloween pumpkin kit from KMart, and have started building that. Much swearing has ensued. The quality really isn't as good as Lego, and the smaller size does not help.

kalloway

Whew, IIBB is done. It still feels a little surreal that I finished that project, tbh. Just... aaaaaaaaa for ages and then suddenly, actually done.

I had also entered the project in a tiny gunpla discord's seasonal contest and neither won nor placed and that's fine. The important part was the deadline along with the oft-painful lessons on time & project management.

That said- I can solidly say I'm at the upper end of whelmed with basically all my hobbies. So time to take a short breather and re-evaluate.

Monthly mail has gone out to everyone aside from folks in Canada.

TGS has not been overly exciting. The Xbox presentation was surprisingly strong, and I've watched bits of a few others. I briefly tuned in for the Suikoden one but wasn't awake enough.

Considering that I've not made it past the 'pre-cleaning other areas so I have space to sort' phase of cleaning the utility room, the actual utility room cleaning will be postponed until I get some other spaces under control. Nothing is terrible, just... I can see how this year has been rough in various ways.

I had been considering the cemetery walk this weekend at the big local-ish cemetery but I didn't enjoy last year's and left after an hour (during which the tour had progressed about three stops on a list of about thirty graves to visit) and also my digestive tract has not been thrilled with me for the last couple days, which I suspect is mostly a delayed reaction to the busyness of everything else.

kaberett

I cannot tell if it's that I'm asleep, or that I'm Not A Biologist, or just that this paragraph (from The Challenge of Pain, Melzack & Wall) is actually very, but I am... struggling to persuade it to resolve into meaning:

Embryological and anatomical studies of fish, amphibians, and reptiles reveal that, even in the lowest vertebrates, reflexes are created by internuncial cells that link the sensory input to the motor output. During embryological development in these species, behaviour becomes increasingly a function of earlier sensory inputs as a result of the memory traces they have etched into the neural connections. Behaviour, then, is not merely the expression of a response to a stimulus, but a dynamic process comprising multiple interacting factors. Coghill (1929) was the first to propound this principle, based on his brilliant neuroembryological-behavioural studies of salamanders, which has been substantially confirmed by later investigators. Given this fundamental principle -- that organisms are not passive receivers manipulated by environmental inputs but act dynamically on those inputs so that behaviour becomes variable, unique and creative -- the remainder of evolution becomes comprehensible as a gradual development of mechanisms that make each new species increasingly independent of the push-and-pull of environmental circumstances.

Other than (but also, actually, in addition to) being sufficiently puzzled by this that I should definitely Go To Bed: I have caught up (mostly) on the PD e-mail. I completed one EYB indexing project and have been happily rolling around in making a start on the next. I made pastry, and used it as a prompt to unfuck the kitchen some, and then made progress on project Cook All The Things (From This One Book). I went on a Stupid Little Walk for my Stupid Mental Health. I am very very tired, and it has been a good day.

watersword

An excellent teaching experience today; the kids were more engaged and we had fewer tech snafus (and were better prepped to pivot for almost all of them), the one downside being that I did not act fast enough before the kids descended like locusts on the leftover lunchboxes and therefore I gotta get my own lunch.

But at least I had already prepared to buy myself dinner as a "yay you did a teaching!", so I can just get a gyro wrap and fries instead of bánh mì and spring rolls without any kind of emotional agonies.

A friend's yard sale is tomorrow and I have successfully offloaded a surprising number of things for that — two curtain sets! branded mugs! IKEA plates! — and I need to set up folks to care for the gherkin while I am away, and someone to pick up the corms for a public beautification project that is also happening then, and after a followup call, the Parks Department has finally finally admitted to looking at my pollinator garden plans and has feedback, which I gotta respond to. Also laundry needs to happen.

umadoshi

Woke up to a very classic autumnal bluster that made me just as glad to not have to venture outside, given the humidity. (One local on Bluesky: "It's a rainy day, and VERY warm. Expect individual ecosystems to form in your rain jacket this morning. Un-zipping the armpit holes for ventilation is a MUST this AM" Another local's response: "This is the sort of weather report I want. Not “plan for this temp or that precipitation”. I want “don’t straighten your hair, and make sure you have good armpit ventilation.”")

And our friendly local meteorologist measured 20.5mm of rain overnight--hardly drought-ending, but still very appreciated.

I don't know how widespread this sale is, but at least on Kobo Canada, the ebook of Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible is currently $2.99.

I've bought this book twice, when after reading it in ebook I really wanted a hard copy. Have I actually cooked from it? No. (No one is shocked.) But for a second rec,

runpunkrun reviewed it in a more informative way last month. (In comments there,

jesse_the_k noted that this subset of cookbooks--which includes other excellent books such as The Sad Bastard Cookbook--is called "struggle cooking".)

paperghost

I don't write much anymore, but here's the page I said was due today:

I Got a Letter From the President?!

A humorous and somber reflection of a funny childhood anecdote, and part of history.

(If any politically savvy types are wondering why I didn't cover the Whitewater controversy, it's because I had enough on my plate when it came to research and fact-checking.)

I also published a shitpost. Third and fourth draft are still in progress, and the promised review won't happen until whenever it actually airs.

tyger

Mostly better today! Still not got a lot of energy, but I was able to do a bunch more than yesterday so that's good! :3

Not that I did anything too exciting, just reading and gardening and minecraft, but you know. Much better than being passed out all fucking day again!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Birthplace

stonepicnicking_okapi

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order. It was begun in January 2021.

I will have to double check but I think with The Clocks [1963] I am caught up to where I should be. This book if fan fic would be called crack. There's a spy (and marine biologist) Colin Lamb who's wandering round a neighborhood trying to look for an address when a girl comes screaming out of a house and says there's the body and a blind woman is about to trod on him!

It's not a bad story. The solution is highly improbable but there are clever bits. It's a Hercule Poirot story and it seems to be a treatise on detective fiction itself, which at this point in Christie's career she's entitled to give. Very meta. I did like the clocks.

At one point, Colin Lamb says (in effect) 'ho hum, the girl I love is liar and always will be. Oh well.' The girl (screaming girl who found the body, also illegitimate, Christie's trunk of Mummy Issues making itself known) is called Sheila Webb. Christie is a walking red flag for healthy relationships but it was a fairly entertaining read.

Next up: By the Pricking of my Thumbs is a Tommy and Tuppence but then I have Hallowe'en Party which of course I shall want to do at the end of the month.

zenigotchas

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uncluttering one day and one thing at a time

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vital functions

Maui sunset

📝 weeknotes (sept. 21-27, 2025)

A very nice meal

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(almost the) end of an era

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I Got a Letter From the President?!

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All of Agatha: The Clocks

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