command_liners | Member Posts

Watching my soprano section shrink in real time the week of a concert due to the germ soup we're all swimming around in out there: augh. (People. This is why most of your section leaders and certain choir elders have decided to continue singing masked, even if we can't make it policy again for the whole choir for various bureaucratic reasons. Seriously, 3M, where are those black N95s we've been politely requesting for four years now?)

Still, glad to be singing with a group whose music is meeting the moment; check program notes, well worth a read for background. Keeping in mind the timelines for performing classical music are scheduled well over a year in advance. A program replete with music from immigrants, combining disparate musical traditions in the best ways.

*

We almost had snow in the Bay Area again last week - well, okay, the actual 2500' peaks like Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton got snow and it looked pretty, and of course the much higher Sierras to our east got feet of snow and "no you can't fucking travel today" warnings and avalanche deaths - and now we're missing the first real snow in Boston in years, and it's pretty, but I'm okay with that.

*

I dropped my phone awhile back, and while it was still technically functional, the back had enough spiderwebbing and flaking glass revealing the motherboard structure below that I got it replaced. It has literally taken most of the day since it arrived to get things swapped over. Mostly because this also involved a forced upgrade to Liquid Glass, which I'd been ducking, sigh.

*

A few months ago,

hyounpark and I were getting on the freeway when a billboard flashed "LOCAL BIRRIA BALLS" at us. For, like, half a second, just long enough for H to read the phrase aloud, and go, "Birria *balls*?"
Me: "That's like, bringing up ancient catchphrases in my brain. Remember 'I wanna dip my balls in it'?"
H: "... I don't want to know, do I."
Me: "MTV in the '90s. For what it's worth, they were golf balls."
H: "I suspect birria balls are going to be quite different, but I'm driving so I can't find out right now."
Me: "I'm on it!"
Me, five minutes later: "Well, I can't find a local option for whatever these are, and Google keeps asking me if I'm looking for 'birria bombs.' But apparently a Mexican food truck in Kentucky says they're meatballs made of birria? With Hot Cheetos dust on the outside for crunch? ... and there's a restaurant in West Virginia that agrees with them."
H: "... I mean, that sounds like uber-American stoner kid food mashup culture, but why aren't there more local search results if there's literally a freeway billboard promoting it?"
Me: "Or we can buy them frozen. From an Italian specialty food shop. In Denmark."
H: "Google, you have utterly lost the plot."

We finally saw that particular billboard again (it's one of those electronic billboards with a rotating stash of ads), and this time, it had a URL attached, so we discovered that the local birria balls are literally just flavor packs, you have to provide your own birria in ball form.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: and smiles and knows she's home

jadelennox

I take a lot of pictures of three classes of things:

Cats: This pictures are good on any camera, including my agéd single-lens SE.
Birds: These pics are shit on the aforementioned handheld phone.
Moss and lichens and bugs: These pics are fine on the phone, but could be much better.

My real constraint is my hands and arms. I can't hold my arms above my head, I can't hold a phone still very long, the non-ergonomic controls and shape of a phone are shit, I realistically can't carry a tripod on a hike, and I can't bear weight on my shoulders or the back of my neck for any length of time. (I recognize that this collection of constraints means my pictures will never be great, and that's okay.)

So, questions:

Are there any cameras that have particularly good ergonomics, are particularly light, or have a good reputation for accessibility?
I believe I could get a remote shutter trigger & a remote focus, so I could prop the camera somewhere and get a good pic from a less painful angle; do you know how to choose a hand-friendly one? (Not finger-fiddly, easy to attach & detach, easy to click buttons.)
On a modern camera, is it possible to get lenses good enough for bird pics that are not, you know, heavy? Last time I had an SLR I was taking pictures on film, so that tells you how out of date my knowledge is.
What's the lightest tripod that works well for people with shit fine motor control and no finger strength? I can sort by weight on hiking sites, but hikers put up with a lot of fiddly controls that I can't handle.

(I'm only looking for advice from your experience or from the experience of people you trust. Please don't GoogleKagiGoPT it for me!)

tcpip

Last night I was a guest at the Chinese New Year concert at Hamer Hall, an event organised by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with the Chinese consulate. The concert was a good mix of modern and classical, East and West. Mindy Meng Wang's performance on the guzheng for The Butterfly Lovers was especially notable, and Li Biao's enthusiasm as conductor could not go unnoticed. The main part of the programme, Beethoven's 7th Symphony, is far from my favourite, but I do really like the dreamlike dirge of the second movement. There were also meet-and-greet functions before and after the concert, where one had the opportunity to meet various guests, organisers, and performers, along with vox-pop interviews from CCTV. It is certainly the season for such things, with, of course, the ACFS hosting our own concert next week.

As a sort of musical juxtaposition, earlier this week I wrote a review on Rocknerd for the most recent album, "Crocodile Promises" by The March Violets. Once a post-punk band from the early 80s, their company could also include groups like The Chameleons, The Comsat Angels, The Sisters of Mercy, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, etc. However, more recently, they have moved to a more alt-rock sound, which isn't wrong (bands should develop their sound), but it is different. The album positively thunders along and is a deeply emotional collection of songs, of which "Bite the Hand" really stood out to me. On a related note (pun not intended), I have been delving quite deeply in recent days into the older albums by The Comsat Angels with their often spartan instrumentation and bitter and bleak lyrical content.

It is has all rather suited my current mood. Music is a universal language of mood, both in the uplifting and sombre sense. The latter affects me every day; I seriously don't understand how people remain indifferent to the immediate conflicts (e.g., Gaza) or to longer-term downward trends (e.g., the climate). February 18, for what it's worth, was Bramble Cay Melomys Day, a on-going memorial and campaign for the first mammal species driven to extinction by climate change. Yes, I can enjoy music, culture, artistry, and beauty, whilst simultaneously being driven by such events. As a certain J. Cash once wrote, "I'd love to wear a rainbow every day, And tell the world that everything's okay. But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back. 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black".

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: The Comsat Angels, The BBC Sessions

vass

Books
Finished (last week) Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon. As everyone said, it really is very good (and, moreover, I really liked it.) What impressed me the most was the structure: I was expecting a collection of short stories linked by theme and setting. I hadn't known the order of the stories and their timeline would amount to a novel in itself.

Finished (last week) Asterix and the Golden Sickle and didn't really... get it. I don't think I know anyone who read the Asterix books and didn't love them, but I feel like I'm missing something.

Maybe it's that the literary conventions of comics have moved on over the decades, to the extent that the level of exposition makes me feel like a modern science fiction reader reading pulp SF from the 1930s, or a modern TV viewer grappling with the stage conventions of Elizabethan or even ancient Greek theatre. As in: oh, you're explaining that again, alright. Oh, you're explaining that too? Okay.

Unfortunately I'm also unfamiliar with the history, societies, and cultures of Gaul in 50 BCE, so I'm probably missing most of the charm, to say nothing of the Easter eggs.

Read (this week) Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard, and it was okay. I have now read all of the Greenwing & Dart books currently available, and have a clearer idea of what's happened yet in that part of the Nine Worlds, which is useful for fandom purposes. But I don't really like G&D. It's not for me. But I like some of its fans.

Finished (this week) KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning. Mainly a mixture of things that wouldn't work for me but which I could see working for someone else; concepts and skills that do work for me that I'd already learned but could have been absolutely vital if I hadn't learned them yet; and a few nuggets I didn't know as well as plenty that I knew but for which I could use a refresher or some reinforcement.

Reading Sarah Kurchak's I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder on audiobook. I forget who recommended it (Rydra?) but I'm surprised at just how much I'm relating.

Fandom
Received this lovely, meditative story by

justjourneys for Fanoa'ary: Love Beyond Definition.

I wrote Charting a Course for

Crackfoxx, on the prompt "I want the version of Kip being Fitzroy's wingman that includes the joy and the spreadsheets. Let me be very very clear. This expression of love must actually include spreadsheets.", went nearly entirely for rule of funny over characterisation or plausibility, and had way too much fun with the CSS and HTML.

Side note: who here knew what AO3's HTML parser does if you didn't close a <strike> tag?

...Bad, isn't it? (If you guessed "Everything from the open tag down to the end of the chapter is struck through", you're... well, you're not wrong, but you are underestimating the scope of the problem.)

Links

If only this discussion thread about a mathplotlib pull request were a mixed media work of fiction, and not a case in point of how things are going in tech at the moment, I would enjoy it so much.

Garden
Still alive, producing about a handful a week of tiny ripe cherry tomatoes.

Cats
Are a serious threat to the local plastic mouse from KMart population. Are also very good alarm cats when it's time to wake up in the morning and I don' wanna, very alarming.

jadelennox

Maura Healey on state agreements with ICE: “I support them” (via the_mass_dump_feed):

At her January press conference, Healey said she was “prohibiting state agencies from entering into any new 287(g) agreements unless there is a clear and imminent public safety need.” But that part of her executive order contains so many caveats as to be completely meaningless. By only prohibiting new agreements, Healey is keeping the existing one.

“I actually support that agreement,” she said. “When you’re incarcerated under … the custody of the Department of Correction, that means you’ve done something pretty bad.”

The whole post is worth reading. It's a complex situation for activists to respond to because the current situation is an improvement over the pre executive order status quo, and the activist groups need to encourage the governor to do more. And yet also, what an absolute trash human.

All my reactions to "when you’re incarcerated under the custody of the Department of Correction, that means you’ve done something pretty bad" (eg. "no it doesn't oh my god" and "as a society we've agree upon a term of incarceration for certain crimes and when that term of incarceration is over we consider the person to have paid their debt to society" and "the DOC operates multiple minimum security facilities where people work in town and there aren't even walls" and "this is what happens when your governor was the attorney general" and "I guess that's why you don't care about the deaths of Ayesha Johnson and Shacoby Kenny who were only in the county jail" and "ugh the worst east Arlington lesbian is the worst") but mostly my reaction is just flames on the side of my face and also I know you all can say it better than I can.

So, you know. If I were a good person I'd get involved in the fuckery of the Massachusetts Democratic Party but I ain't got the juice. (Tarik Samman is running against Katherine Clark, at least.)

Anyway, support BIJAN, Maura Healey sucks.

jadelennox

one of my more annoying traits is that if I wouldn't like something that I know other people enjoy, I find it very difficult to do for the person who'd enjoy it because it feels rude to me. I wouldn't like it, after all, so why should I do it to someone else?

I know is this is messed up, especially because I often dislike being asked about my day, or being thanked, or receiving presents, or receiving any but very specific forms of recognition. (The Mortifying Agony of Being Seen is a real bugger.)

Apropos of nothing, james makes absolutely gorgeous crafts.

Current Mood: thankful

queenlua

i'm in the middle of Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac by Sylvia Kahan, which is fascinating so far. i'm really looking forward to doing a writeup on it once i'm done. tl;dr: it's a biography of this chick who was the Big Lesbian Money in the Parisian music scene during her lifetime; she personally commissioned a bunch of Composers You've Heard Of and had them debut at her salons and such.

and, yeah, as i said, a full writeup will come later, but rn i'm just noting something that struck me / gave me an unexpected Some Kinda Feeling, idk—

( this is probably all really banal to ppl who read more history and/or queer theory than me idk lol )

althea_valara

So Final Fantasy XIV has these fan fests every few years, right? I cannot afford to go to one, BUT they run a fan art contest alongside it.

I entered the contest two fan fests ago, with a very poor crocheted rendition of the Fat Cat minion. Looks like I don't have record of it on Ravelry. Needless to say, I was not at all surprised when I wasn't even a finalist, let alone a winner.

I entered the 2023 contest with a feverishly-knitted doll, and am STILL thrilled at being a finalist for it. For those that don't feel like clicking through to see the picture: the doll is wearing the Valentione dress that was so popular from several events ago.

It is now 2026, we're gearing up for another Fan Fest, which means the fan art contest is ON. Deadline is March 2nd.

I had a great idea for it, but there was NO way I could get it done in time, so even though I ordered yarn, I reluctantly put that idea to the side. Still gonna do it someday, but not when I'm under deadline.

I had another tentative idea for it, but it would have required lots and lots of counting, and fiber artists aren't that great at counting. Plus, that idea was big enough that I wasn't sure I'd have time to finish it, either.

So I fell back to my third idea, which is really one that I had last year but didn't do. Am working on it today, after not touching it for five days (yikes!).

Said in a discord:

12:21pm
so here I am, working on my fanfest entry. I am designing it myself and there's multiple pieces to it. I have proof of concept that two pieces fit correctly together, HUZZAH! but now I have to knit the other four pieces... aka, the fun part is done and now it's just work work work and blah. send me strength!

12:43 PM
it is a universal truth that knitters can't count to small digits. I was wrong, I do not have four pieces left, I have FIVE. and that's just on [redacted]. After this, I still need to do [redacted] and [redacted], oof

I have finished the first of the five pieces I have left on this portion. It took an hour. Each of the remaining four pieces will take about an hour each. And that's not including [redacted 1] and [redacted 2], which are both rather big portions themselves and will take time. I know how to do [redacted 1] already, and have ideas for [redacted 2], but the actual work of knitting is.... well, WORK.

I'm not sure I can finish before the deadline. But I am going to try. It will mean knitting most of the rest of the day, and touching it every day until deadline.

tcpip

In the past week, I have attended three significant community events. The first was a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria, one of the oldest Linux groups in the world (founded in 1993). It was their first in-person meeting for a while; it was the first meeting I have attended since October 2019, when, after fourteen years on the committee, I stepped down. It was a good meeting, covering interstate collaboration, new utilities, and Linux and AI. The following day, I chaired a committee meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society, which was primarily a planning meeting for our upcoming concert with Shu Cheen Yu and the Lotus Wind Choir, which is promising to be quite a wonderful event with close to 150 tickets sold so far. Finally, today was the Annual General Meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative at the Rose Hotel. The Cooperative, which is now in its tenth year of operations (the namesake journal has been published since 2008!). The meeting itself was quick and efficient, we had a guest photographer in the form of Mike Parry, and Karl brought along his rules for Hippo Jousting for a knock-out tournament all because it was World Hippo Day.

As someone who has been on many management committees since the mid-1980s, I like to keep formal business short and to the point. Matters of debate invariably can be resolved before the meeting actually happens, and if someone thinks "we" (meaning "the organisation") should do a particular activity, that's code to me that they've volunteered to lead it. This tends to mean more people doing things rather than just talking about doing things. It's not as if every committee I've been on has been like this; I do recall one non-profit (which was nick-named "the committee of mis-management") who had a "country club" approach to running the group; paranoid of new members, their meetings would be an exercise in dreariness as they went through and decided action on each and every item of correspondence received, instead of having standing policy that the (paid) office secretary could apply. Unsurprisingly, that body is seems utterly moribund; even their website hasn't been updated in over four years.

The week hasn't all been such formalities, of course. Nitul organised two gatherings with friends in the Botanical Gardens on Friday and Saturday evening to watch and hear the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play. On Friday evening, it was with the "Find Your Voice" collective, and on Saturday, it was "Fifty Years of ABC Classic FM". Both concerts were attended by thousands, and the performances were quite uplifting. I must also mention that I spent Saturday with Mel S. on an op-shopping excursion, one of our favourite mutual pastimes. As co-parent to my rats when I'm away, she was quite delighted when I brought them over for a visit, keeping us entertained for several hours. Mel is aware that more rat-parenting duty will be coming up soon, as I prepare for my next trip overseas.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: The Comsat Angels, The BBC Sessions

ursamajor

Twenty-plus years of loving each other, cooking together, and building upon our mutual disdain of dealing with crowds and reservations for Valentine's Day means

hyounpark and I made a dinner worth remembering tonight.

By default, when we have pork belly around in the winter, we usually braise it in apple cider, along with a chopped onion, garlic, a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and fivespice. But we didn't have apple cider in the fridge, so I thought about what else we could use for a braising liquid, and while pondering, found a recipe on the McCormick website for a Thai Tea-Spiced Pork Belly with Condensed Milk Sauce, and my eyes lit up, because I knew we had Thai tea packets on hand.

We riffed heavily off that recipe, mostly treating it as taste profile suggestions. I started steeping a liter of Thai tea while H chopped an onion, then I sauteed the onions with garlic and ginger paste (an incredible convenience courtesy the Indian grocery store in our neighborhood), and then added some fivespice powder. H crosshatched the pork belly skin, then cut it into small enough slabs to fit in our Instant Pot. I added a few tablespoons of soy sauce and fish sauce to the stuff in the skillet, then dumped that in the bottom of the Instant Pot; laid the pork belly slabs on top of the rack in the IP, and poured the tea over everything, and then closed it up and let it go on high for 20 minutes.

While that went, H tried to turn our rice into the suggested rice cakes, but we should've used sushi rice instead of brown rice which was what we had ready. Even using the musubi mold didn't get it to stick together enough, alas. Everything still tasted delicious in the end, though, so no fuss.

Meanwhile, I made the condensed milk sauce in the recipe - we had condensed coconut milk on hand, I subbed in peanut butter for the tahini and chile crisp for the sambal - and then turned my attention to the salad. What did we have in the fridge? Half a head of butter lettuce, some shiso leaves, scallions; enough for at least a little greenery on the plate. Chopped the leafy greens and scallion up, and then, inspired, ran an apple through the mandolin. Whisked together a dressing of peanut oil, lime juice, fish sauce, a little galangal and garlic. Topped it off with peanuts.

The IP finished releasing pressure just as we finished the rest of the plating; we each pulled out a small slab of pork belly, drizzled the condensed milk sauce over it, and utterly freaking devoured our dinner. Everything just came together, building on decades of experience and familiarity with each others' taste, and we will absolutely do this again.

And it's not Valentine's for us without chocolate, so I pulled a log of our favorite chocolate toffee cookies out of the freezer, sliced and baked and ate. (Along with the last crumbs of the gargantuan king cake slice

ladyjax bestowed upon me yesterday! Many thanks to her A for the baking thereof :) )

Somehow we will both get up in the morning and go for a digestive run and continue appreciating how we grow together, even as things around us are so very different from how we imagined when we began.

Current Mood: loved
Current Music: i know that's a strange way to tell you that i know we belong

althea_valara

FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026
FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026
FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026

Yes, that's right, the Kiss Battle is back! The premise is simple: folks leave a prompt, others fill those prompts. The fill MUST include a kiss of some kind - your interpretation of what that means is open! And this is not just for fanfic - fan art is welcome, too!

COME PLAY WITH US!

FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026
FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026
FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2026

Current Mood: KISS BATTLE

ursamajor

I have plenty of half-drafted posts on tap, but right now, all I can think is DAWSON'S DEAD?!

It's as if invoking Dawson's Creek in my last post for the first time in forever caused it, sigh. Definitely feeling my age today since he was only nine months older than me.

(Cancer, apparently; I don't tend to keep up with celebrity news, but I found out because

phamos818 posted about it on FB. And apparently he's, like, only nine months older than me and has six kids.)

Current Music: the years pass by and now he has granddaughters

azurelunatic

Yellface (spayed, *16) decided to sit on me last night. Thorn came in and snuggled me. Yellface sniffed their hand politely as we held hands. The first time she'd ever encountered Thorn's hand without some cranky meowing. (Right now Yellface will sniff and rub her face on an extended finger, but will say things about it.)

Many minutes of stillness later, Thorn said something.

Yellface suddenly took notice of an alien hand near her territory, stood up, and gave a snake-strike grazing bite to the nearest hand, followed by a swat.

My hand, naturally.

I uninvited her from the bed and found an alcohol wipe. She broke skin but didn't draw blood. Today only the deepest scrape is visible, if you're looking for it.

Oh, cat.

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Command Liners

Member Posts

why do you elude me

advice from camera nerds

The Rhythm of Bitterness

Things

Signal Boost: Maura Healey on 287g agreements: “I support them” ie. ACAB

playing tricks on my brain to get around the buggy pathways

an early note on Winnaretta Singer

+cries in knitter+

Community Activities and Concerts

i know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls that brought me here

Kiss Battle? KISS BATTLE 2026!

i want to know right now, what will it be?

Grouchy, territorial kitten*

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January 2022

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