oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished The Edge. Well, there was a fair amount of research on Canadian railways went into that....

Shani Akilah, For Such a Time as This (2024), sortes ereader, i.e. opened up as I was scrolling my unread list - not sure how I came across this but enjoyed it, linked short stories about a group of Black British young (ish) people of diverse origins.

Forgot to mention this which I had already started last week and put to one side: Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (1995, reissue with new afterword 2009) - I think I saw something about this somewhere and was interested in the idea. I was a bit irked at first by the style which was a certain kind of upmarket journalistic, and I was then a bit hmmm about him getting in touch with his own occluded lost in the mists family roots, but it was intriguing stuff, especially the way he got both drawn into the whole thing and then ejected by the community.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964), since we watched the movie at the weekend (Colin Firth gives with brood) and I couldn't remember the book well enough to say how it matched (it did some odd things). Not, I think, peak Isherwood.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Sleeping Partner (Sarah Tolerance #3) (2011, recently reissued) - I read the earlier ones ages ago but missed this, which I was really gripped by.

On the go

And straight on to Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxies Penalty (Sarah Tolerance #4) (2025)

Up next

No idea - though a book I requested for review has now turned up. (Also essay review I turned in months ago finally came back with some minimal edits to do.)

mirepoix

Jan. 28th, 2026 07:32 am
prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (Default)
[personal profile] prettygoodword
mirepoix (mir-PWAH) - n., a mixture of diced vegetables, such as carrots, celery, and onions, plus herbs, and sometimes ham or bacon cooked at low heat in oil or butter.


Mirepoix is the flavor base for many dishes in French cooking (much as sauteed or stir-fried onions are in mine). It is named after Gaston-Pierre-Charles de Lévis-Lomagne, duc de Mirepoix (1699–1757), whose name is often shortened to Gaston de Lévis, duc de Mirepoix, an ambassador of Louis XV, but exactly what his connection is, dictionaries don't mention, and I'm too tired this morning to dig further.

---L.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
and god, I love her so much. She truly is a sweet and gentle kitty.

*******************


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james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Image

What dark motive leads a successful teen comedian who has vowed never to date anyone less funny than her to help an unfunny but otherwise personable young man work on his comedic skills?

Someone Hertz, volume 1 by Ei Yamano (Translated by David Evely)

Reading Wednesday

Jan. 28th, 2026 07:30 am
troisoiseaux: (reading 9)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Finished the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, technically for the first time— I've read bits and pieces out of order when encountering the different installments at bookstores or libraries, but this was my first time reading the whole series from front cover of book one to back cover of book six. I enjoyed this a lot, partly out of teenage nostalgia for the 2010 movie and for living in Toronto - which is so specifically the setting that I recognized multiple specific locations, even excluding the obvious landmarks - but also in its own right as a somewhat meandering coming-of-age story with a high Nonsense Quotient/casually bonkers world-building (the league of evil exes! subspace highways! the University of Carolina in the Sky!). Other than just having a lot more time and space to explore other characters/plotlines than the movie adaptation, I feel like the big difference is that the 2010 movie was taken (presented?) more at face value and so there's this tendency for people to be like Scott is the protagonist but he actually sucks?? like it's some sort of retrospective gotcha, while the comics are like yeah, no, Scott suuuuucks and he needs to grow the hell up. That's literally just the plot!

Re-read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the whatevereth time, in an attempt to mentally reboot with an actual, physical book and something short and familiar, because my brain has been sliding off of everything else I tried to read. This evidently worked, and now I'm reading Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay, a 1935 murder mystery set at the fictional Persephone College, Oxford— making, as [personal profile] sovay pointed out, for two women's colleges of Thinly Fictionalized Oxford which were the scene of criminal investigations in 1935, alongside Sayers' Shrewsbury College in Gaudy Night. (The scandal!)

Things

Jan. 28th, 2026 11:04 pm
vass: Small turtle with green leaf in its mouth (Default)
[personal profile] vass
Books
Finished Evelyn Araluen's The Rot, which was, as mentioned last week, very good indeed.

Reading KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning and Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff.

Tech
Still working the phone side of my tech problems: prolonged backup of All The Things onto a different external drive. But I did also run Slay the Spire on my desktop once, just to confirm whether that would cause it to shut down: it did not. But of course it's less resource-hungry than Hollow Knight.

Garden
Three more ripe tomatoes. I tried to plant some basil, but it didn't survive the heat.

Cats
Ash's nose looking good. Both cats coping with the heat as well as can be expected, i.e. better than I am but still largely horizontal.

Nature
I am a delicate flower and do not like hot weather. This is a problem at this time of year. Slight understatement. But only slight. (My part of the state is not the worst-off. Our highs are low 40s, not high 40s. And I have aircon at home and don't have to go out. It's still bad, and I do have medical conditions that make me more sensitive to heat.)
Also I sustained mosquito bites on my arms while doing my nightly "try to keep the plants alive" water, and am very itchy, which at least has the advantage of being a small problem to grumble about without the undercurrent of constant dread.

Current Events
Australia Day bringing out the racists. Some unmitigated arsehole threw a bomb at an Indigenous elder at one of the Survival Day protests. I didn't protest: couldn't manage the logistics of getting to a protest.
Watching the events in Minnesota and thinking of you all.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Do you know how hard it even is to get people to protest in this sort of crappy weather? It's cold out!

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Japan traffic counts, and McDonald's

Jan. 28th, 2026 06:24 pm
mindstalk: (Default)
[personal profile] mindstalk

Was out on a walk, not particularly interesting, just getting out. I started counting traffic.

  • On a very boring two-way street some distance from the station, with little of pedestrian interest: 7 bicycles, 4 mopeds/motorbikes, 33 cars (and a bus or two). I did not formally count pedestrians, as there hardly were any at first, but it ended up feeling comparable to bicycles. Then I hit a street where there seemed to be a phase transition in traffic.

  • Same street, but now closer to the station: 25 pedestrians, 12 2-wheel vehicles of all types, 17 cars/buses/trucks.

  • 3-way scramble intersection, very close to the station: 26 pedestrians to 9 cars; 28 pedestrians to 9 cars. (Two different light cycles.) Going the other direction, more casual count, but maybe 18 to 14. I note that much more signal time is given to moving the 9-14 cars than the 18-26+ pedestrians (plus non-counted sidewalking bicycles.)


Some internal counter tipped over to the point of trying McDonald's here. The menu is fairly different; no obvious equivalent to quarter-pounders; different flavors like teriyaki burger or shrimp burger. I tried a potato beef burger ("big beef" patty, potato patty) and shaka chicki (fried chicken fillet, and from the wrapping you're supposed to shake seasoning over it? But I didn't have any.) There was a messup and I was handed a simple bag of fries, which I discovered only at home. Went back (stole one fry; it smelled better than it tasted) to say "chigau!" and be glad I'd kept the receipt. Got my actual bag. It was... okay.

I note that if you're hungry Now, hot fast food from McDonald's or conbini has the advantage of coming in paper wraps. If you get nice cold snacks from conbini or supermarkets, it comes in a plastic tray. Given the total lack of public trash cans, the paper wraps are rather easier to stick into a pocket of your backpack. (Some conbini have trash cans, so you could eat there and throw it out -- but many don't!)

Terminology [curr ev]

Jan. 28th, 2026 03:33 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Overheard on Reddit, u/Itsyademonboi:
Sorry, Nazis are from Germany under Adolf Hitler, what we have here is Sparkling Fascists.

So, in my Outgunned

Jan. 27th, 2026 10:26 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
I think the schtick is the crew gets sent out to investigate potentially revolutionary tech and it's always legitimately amazing but also not what they're expecting. Case in point, they were looking into a supposed teleporter and now everyone is ant-sized.

Among my other ideas

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muccamukk: Grace stares at her laptop screen, rubbing her temple and looking appalled. (Lone Star: What Am I Reading?)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I honestly never did finish the last season of 9-1-1 Lone Star because I didn't like it as much after the cast change, and the new stories weren't grabbing me. Then I changed streaming services, and couldn't be bothered to find it another way.

But I was looking at what was on Crave, since I have that right now, and saw that there was a new show called 9-1-1 Nashville, and thought I'd give it a whirl.

Boy, whatever new direction notes they got, were not my thing. It's all about some rich guy and his sons fighting with each other, and a scheming baby mamma, and we basically don't meet any of the other characters in the pilot. How on earth did they talk Chris O'Donnell into this nonsense? He can't be that hard up!

Plus the rescues were just very silly. And this is by standards of the 9-1-1 franchise, which is already extremely silly. This girl gets carried into the air by a kite! Not like a special kite, just a... regular one. A tornado is bearing down on a country music festival and they save it with the power of heart!

I vaguely considered watching the second half of the pilot before deciding there's got to be other trash shows I'd enjoy more. When is the new Stargate show happening?

I think if you're interested in foe-yay half brothers who want to fuck, you might be in business?
aurumcalendula: image from Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half with a vhs tape added and a caption that reads 'vid all the things!' (vid all the things)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
January 27 - 'What are your vidding ambitions for 2026?' for [personal profile] serrico:

Read more... )

(there are still slots open for the January Talking Meme here)

Is this a Canadian thing?

Jan. 27th, 2026 04:13 pm
muccamukk: Abe has a question. (Hellboy: Question)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I want to try making this Melt the ICE hat, which of course knits in the round. I haven't done that, so I looked up a couple tutorials on how to knit with double pointed needles. They both said, "these will come in sets of five." The pattern says, "divide evenly on 4 DPNs" (which I assume implies the existence of a fifth needle to work with).

Every single one of the many sets of DPNs I got from Mom comes in a set of four.

Why?
rachelmanija: (Default)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Image


The sequel to The Darkness Outside of Us. I enjoyed it! It's both interestingly different from the first book and is satisfying on the level of "I want more of this," which is exactly what one wants from a sequel.

Literally everything about this book is massively spoilery for the first one, including its premise. I'll do two sets of spoiler cuts, one for the premise and one for the whole book.

Premise spoilers )

Stop reading here if you don't want to be spoiled for the entire book.


Entire book spoilers )

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