Ingredients:

chocolate ganache left over from the fondue at that catering gig you worked three weeks ago
most of a can of canned pumpkin left over from when you thought you'd try mixing some into your chai
the caramel sauce you ended up with when you tried to make homemade Scotchmallows the other day and failed
1 stick of butter, unsalted
some flour, about a cup and a half
brown sugar, about a cup
oats, a handful
pumpkin pie spices, whatever you have
something like 1 tsp baking soda, because who even fucking knows about leavening
an egg, for good measure
also, some salt

Directions:

The pie plate is too big for the amount of pumpkin you have. And these tart pans are too small. Two of them? Nah, too much work. Where's that set of casserole dishes you got for your college apartment and then never used again because you moved back home five years ago and haven't left? There's a nice 1.5 qt dish that should be perfect.

In your favorite small mixing bowl, dump the flour, brown sugar, and a pinch of salt. Shit, there's no unsalted butter that isn't frozen. Well, it doesn't matter, you can use salted butter. No you can't, you already added the salt. Fuck. Get a frozen stick of unsalted butter and put it in the microwave for ten second intervals until you just don't care anymore.

Preheat the oven. It's set to 350 degrees anyway so go with that. I like the convection setting. It cooks faster.

Cut the now just-barely defrosted butter into chunks and work it into the flour and brown sugar mixture with a pastry cutter. Or a knife and fork, if you don't have a pastry cutter. Or a food processor, if you're a fucking wimp. Mix in the oats.

Press the resulting mixture into the bottom and sides of the casserole dish. Realize you used way too much flour for the amount of sugar and butter. Separate out the chunks of butter from the loose flour by sifting with your fingers. Curse yourself for never learning. Examine the casserole dish. Sprinkle in some more of the mixture, just in case. Put the casserole dish in the oven to blind bake for ten minutes.

The chocolate ganache has been in a container in the back of your fridge for three weeks, so set up a double boiler to melt it. Ideally, you'd like it to be liquid enough to pour into the bottom of the crust, but not so hot that it causes problems with the pumpkin layer you'll be putting on top.

Dump the canned pumpkin into a bowl. Stare at it while thinking. Add some sugar. Don't add any sugar. It comes out too sweet. Add some pumpkin pie spices. Ginger, cinnamon, ground cloves, nutmeg. That stuff. About a teaspoon of each, but who really cares? Add spices until it smells like pumpkin pie to you.

It seems too liquidy. You want distinct layers. Spot the bowl of leftover flour/butter/sugar/oats mixture.

( Read more... )

It does feel weird to look back and see that H2O: Just Add Water was influential to modern mermaid media. Not as much as Splash, of course, but a decent amount. Do not cite the deep magic to me etc., I was there when the show premiered and a gajillion (I exaggerate) people told me about it and although I did check it out then, I only followed along into a third of the first season. TV shows were very different in 2008, and by then I'd lost interest (or outgrown) these kinds of stories.

Now, however, it is a delight! I paced myself through watching the whole first season, and despite only being ~25 mins per episode, 26 episodes a season is an embarrassment of riches. So much content! So many little stories where the girls are Put In Different Situations, and thanks to the past near-two-decades of media trends, I do love it when characters are Put In Different Situations instead of it being One Long Situation Where the Major Catharsis Only Happens At the End of the Season! The theme song is also so great, I've been letting it play out every time and eventually started singing along, both for the opening and longer ending.



The first few episodes have the girls getting used to their powers (I love that Cleo is the one who decides to not let it limit her options), but then it settles into a status quo and although the quality is uneven, a lot of the episodes are SO much fun, and I haven't laughed that hard for a while as I did for the Siren Effect episode, when Cleo gains siren powers and enchants all the boys in the neighbourhood into being idiots. Then there's The Big Chill where Emma straight up almost accidentally MURDERS the popular girl with her freeze powers, and that's not an euphemism, but the show took care to talk around the stakes instead of using words like "corpse", "kill" or "dead", which was so, SO funny. A+, 'tis delightful, only capable when everyone's committed to the light-hearted tone and are decent comic actors. You really appreciate good comic acting after you've watched so much bad comic acting.

So much so that my stomach dropped at the last few episodes of the season when the tension ramped up as the girls' secret is about to be uncovered. I don't need that! I just want bite-sized fun romps! And unfortunately I accidentally read an overview of season 2 and I have never enjoyed the trope where a TV show introduces an interloper who has the abilities/skills of the main characters but are "better" at it, but hopefully the execution is better than it sounds. A team of three evil mermaids to rival the main trio WOULD have been fun, though, since that's more equal opportunity competitiveness instead of usurpation.

Random observation: the first season came out in 2008, and Lewis uses the word "googling". I think that was more a sign of his nerdery than normalized lingo, but interesting in terms of looking at the show as a time capsule.

( More, cut for length. )

The energy of season one as a whole is so charming and fluffy, so I might take a break and continue into season 2 later.

We're having a rainy Chinese New Year this time, which is quite unusual, though I vaguely remember we've had that before recently. Maybe the stereotype of a super hot CNY is no longer as typical?

candyheartsex has revealed, and I have received a delightful gift!

In Which Laurent Rises to the Occasion
The Wounded Name -- D. K. Broster
Laurent/Aymar, Amyar/Avoye
Canon divergence, Pre-Poly

Aymar despairs of clearing his name and leaves France, leaving only a letter behind.

Laurent is so delightfully himself, burning with passion for all the things! For Aymar! To clear Aymar's name! To tenderly care for him! And also to straighten out this mess where Aymar is determined to throw himself on his sword for Avoye's sake, without first consulting with Avoye about whether she even wants that! (If there is one thing that Laurent has learned from his association with Aymar, it is the frustration of having a lover throw himself on his sword for you without asking first! NOT THAT THIS FLEETINGLY CRITICAL THOUGHT MEANS HE LOVES AYMAR ANY THE LESS!!!!!!!)

I have strong suspicions as to who wrote the story (*casts a meaningfgul glance in luzula's direction*), especially given the central theme that maybe you should ask your girlfriend what she wants before making a grand life-altering gesture in her name. (A genre of story that luzula excels at!) But I shall refrain from offering official thanks until after reveals. (But please know I enjoyed it very much!)

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now - Ruby Tandoh
The Tomb of Dragons - Katherine Addison
The Grapples of Wrath - Alice Bell
A Case of Mice and Murder - Sally Smith
No Such Thing As Duty - Lara Elena Donnelly
Inventing the Renaissance - Ada Palmer
Secrets of the First School - TL Huchu
An Oresteia - Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles trans Anne Carson
In the Shadow of the Ship - Aliette de Bodard

So my resolution to DNF more is certainly going... well?

A Case of Mice and Murder - Sally Smith, Secrets of the First School - TL Huchu, In the Shadow of the Ship - Aliette de Bodard

A Case of Mice and Murder
First in a series (of which I accidentally read the second one first, oops) of murder mysteries set in the Inner Temple around the turn of the century, in which one of the lawyers keeps getting dragooned into solving mysteries instead of spending all day solving difficult legal puzzles, as he'd prefer. The setting is very well drawn, as is the lead character (who by today's standards would be described as aroace and sitting somewhere in the overlap between autism, OCD and anxiety) - even with only two books out his development is already promising, but I also loved that he's never cold; right from the first time we meet him, he's trying to meet other people with kindness and sympathy, even if he doesn't entirely understand their emotions or why illogical platitudes help.

This first one suffered a bit from the solution to the mystery not quite landing - more of a "sure, I suppose that makes sense" than an "of COURSE" - but the second one is already better on that front, so hopefully the author will hit her stride with that aspect as well.

Secrets of the First School - TL Huchu
Final volume in the Edinburgh Nights series, in which teenage ghost talker Ropa Moyo gets increasingly tangled up in magical goings on in near future slightly AU Scotland. I feel like this series has always had pacing problems, and this volume is no exception - I could have done with one more book to give all the twists and revelations slightly more time to land - plus it's been frustrating to see Ropa keep on yoyo-ing between "I must do everything alone! No wait I have friends and allies! But I must ignore them and do everything alone!". But those problems aside, I've really enjoyed this series, and I'm sorry that it seems to have been flying under the radar a bit, there's so much good stuff in it.

In the Shadow of the Ship - Aliette de Bodard
De Bodard has been more miss than hit recently, but I liked this one a fair bit! I would have preferred it either without the romance or with more development for the romance than the page count allowed, but otherwise, a nice solid little slice of the Xuya universe.

Didn't finish:

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians - HG Parry, The Iron Below Remembers - Sharang Biswas, Project Hanuman - Stewart Hotston

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians - HG Parry
What if the late 18th century, but with magic? This slightly fell between two stools for me - it's not quite weighty enough to be serious, and a bit too serious to be fun.

The Iron Below Remembers - Sharang Biswas
I just don't enjoy prose superheroes - I keep trying, but there it is. There was a lot else in this novella that I liked, but... prose superheroes. They just don't have the weight for me of their comics counterparts, and it made the superhero characters in this feel underdeveloped.

Project Hanuman - Stewart Hotston
I wanted to like this, but it felt like the prose style was fighting me, and I didn't quite like it enough to soldier on. (It didn't help that it was FULL of typos, what is going on at Angry Robot.)

I'm 95 episodes into 189, which means that I'm at the halfway mark! Kambal Sirena and Mutya both finished their entire runs with less than 95 epiosdes, but Aryana is still going. I can see why, because even with the parts that are repetitive and slow, there's more story to go, and the characters are nowhere near the catharsis you'd expect for certain kinds of family and relationship tropes.

I haven't mentioned it before, but while Aryana is still within that particular teleserye weight class, I do like that they make the effort to foreshadow, by introducing characters or plot points multiple episodes before they become relevant, instead of throwing a new soap opera plot turn the main characters' way out of nowhere. Well, the show still does that, but there's also clearly some planning and forward-thinking involved. Eg. We are given teasing glimpses of Adrian and Stella's ex a few episodes before we're told who they are and they enter the main stories.

There's also thoughtfulness in a particular editing trick the show loves, by intercutting between two emotionally or thematically mirroring scenes in order to make a point, eg. they will intercut between a scene of Aryana arguing with with her mother about their family, with a scene of Megan arguing with her father about their family. There's deliberation in the pacing and storylines that they've put together, and that's neat.

Speaking of Stella's ex, I was wrong when I assumed that Stella was cheating on Victor! (Because of the show's teasing of a mysterious man who's been calling Stella.) Instead this guy is Stella's ex who is blackmailing her, and is possibly Megan's biological father. I kinda like this storyline even if it does feel inorganic compared to other storylines, in that it feels like the show had to add ONE telenovela conflict into Megan's family that had nothing to do with Aryana, and perhaps as part of an argument that Stella is a bad partner to Victor.

The tropes say that Ofelia has to be reunited with Victor, but the show hasn't done the work for it yet, and I was actually enjoying that while Aryana and Ofelia were saw-trapped by Aryana's situation on Love Triangle Island, which was happening at the same time when Ofelia had an ulcer that needed immediate surgery, which made Everyone in that storyline go bonkers.... far far away Megan, Stella and Victor were having the most loving family time they've EVER had since the show started. Victor made it up for his Aryana-insane behaviour to Megan in a realistic way, and everyone was legit happy! They're a happy family! Which is fun and makes it genuinely upsetting to think about how this happiness is going to be ruined when Aryana comes back into the picture. (Which is also why I think they added the Stella's ex storyline, so it's not all Aryana's fault.) I think it would be fun if the two families become friends and Ofelia gets a new love interest, but my guess is they're not gonna do that.

Also Aryana's third love interest has shown up, following the Love Triangle Island blowup that had Aryana shutting down both Marlon and Hubert (though it was more Marlon's fault than Hubert's, ugh). Considering the youtube comments mentioning him before, I wasn't expecting the show to take almost half its runtime to bring the new guy in. Adrian is a surly little sadboy, who's traumatized over his mother's drowning death, and so far I don't care for him because a surly boy who is surly to everyone just isn't fun. May that change soon. I think Marlon's reaction to Adrian will be hilarious.

Fanart Friday ahoy :D

Absolute Wonder Woman
absolute wonder woman by asianfisherman @ bluesky. Our favorite lady and her favorite Pegasus. LOVE the profile of Diana here, the tousled hair, the palette. Perfection.

Absolute Wonder Woman by ohvalkyrie @ bluesky. Unusually angled profile, lovely coloring.

A3 commission by getcampbell @ bluesky. Moody black and white ink drawing.

Really loving Absolute Wonder Woman right now by camartstuff @ bluesky. Full bodied hairporn goddess.

horse girls by crowwkui @ bsky. Diana and Kara, super cute!

Princesses of the Underworld by dylanmacri @ bsky. Hades crossover, very adorable, much muscle.

I still don't know how to spot if certain bsky posts are locked when you don't have an account... sorry if some don't load for you.

+ So.

Night one of trying to go straight to bed: slice my finger open on my razor in the cabinet as I reach for my toothbrush. Spend 25 minutes applying tissue paper waiting for the bleeding to stop before sullenly getting dressed and going to find a bandaid.

Night two, as I'm clearing supper away, a cheerful announcement in the mess hall: we have an extra GB of Internet each! ...That we have to use before midnight and it rolls over to the next week. Well. I can't let that go to waste but hey, I just bought a bunch of comics, they'll eat that GB for breakfast.
iPad: What is this wifi you speak of? Haven't heard of it, I'm not connecting to that.
Me: *beleaguered sigh* I can't not use it. *goes on YouTube and stays up way too late*

+ Anyways. I comfort bought a bunch of comics? Because the pre-order code for the Mitski tickets did in fact not arrive and so no concert for me *sullenly kicks rocks*. It looks like I could have paired it with the Gentleman Jack ballet, and I think the Marie Antoinette exhibit is still on at the VA? Was starting to slowly form a plan and now it ain't happening.

Comics though!
- pre-ordered vol2 of Absolute Wonder Woman, it was 50% off and that seems so silly to me.
- Vol 5 & 6 of Poison Ivy. The joy of realizing I was that far behind :DDD I'm two thirds through vol5 and it may be my favorite?
- Voyager: Way Home 5 issue mini concluded, I picked those up. omnomnom more Janeway.
- Nice House by the Sea vol1 for my creepy lil alien guy making poor decisions about his blorbos.
- Daredevil & Echo mini bc sale and pretty art.
- Defenders: Beyond bc it looked like a fun romp (I should re-read Saladin's Exiles tbh)
- Kaya vol1. Been wanting to for a while due to the art I've seen, and once again: sale.

+ Things I'd like to do when I'm home:
Post that Top 10 prematurely cancelled series list I wanted to do for Snowflake.
Festivids recs.
Get intw_amc rolling.
Last masterpost from forsquares.
Play Dune Awakening, they've made it much easier to jump back in thank fuck.
Maybe the ABC of comics I saw on BlueSky that looked fun.
Open laptop. Make shiny squares. Possibly shiny vid.
Work on my layout.
Update scrapbook.

+ it's just TWO MORE DAYS you can do it Self! Let's go lesbians etcetera.

+ Doing poorly at getting enough sleep. I hereby decree that if I go straight in the shower and then straight to bed after work for the remainder of the trip, I get to order a batch of the damaged chocolates from Jentene På Tunet the next time the offer comes up + one new tarot deck (or just the oversized Buffy one? idk).

+ We did get two more days of orcas last week. Day one was just a solo boisterous youngling aggressively darting after the net, but the next day? The biggest pod yet! And best of all: after the net was up on deck they slowly glided alongside the ship, letting me observe them from the deck under water (which was crystal clear that day). I stood outside until all feeling left my hands and snot was running freely. ( Read more... )

+ Comics! My brain is so cooked, the only reading I've attempted was the physical trade of Batman: Secret Files that I picked up for a song during the New Year's sale. Made it half-way through the first story before my brain went "no thanks, I'm full". And I know The Gardener is in there! Brain tired. Sucks.

Know what doesn't suck? Poison Ivy still has an ongoing written by G Willow Wilson and Harley is in it as well and it is beauuutifull. Vol 2 of Absolute Wonder Woman is dropping in a few days. Meanwhile THIS HERE is Diana showing up in Absolute Batman (the writing is excellent, but THE LOOK woohee).


I'm waiting for it to be collected, but Harley & Ivy is bringing so much cuteness. Lookit!


+ I really wanna whine about work but I'm not gonna. Big sigh though.

+ hrrmm I need to cut my nails.

unsent_letters_exchange is running again this year, hurrah! Nominations open next week, Feb 18. Anyone up for playing with me?

~

I'll post more about this later when my listing is live, but I took the plunge and signed up to offer fic for the 2026 Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction. Because shit is rough out there right now.

My current fandoms are small enough that it was a little bit of a conundrum about what to offer, but I went with:
Broster novels, Hornblower, and Vorkosigan Saga.

Fingers crossed!

~

For a couple of years now, I've been reading The Flight of the Heron to phoenixfalls over chat. We started at a sentence a day, mostly because she had gotten an idea in her head that there's a tragedy at the end and she wanted to ease into that slowly, idk. Sadly, one sentence a day was a miserable way to go through all the lyrical scenic exposition at the beginning; it was like wandering lost in a nightmare dreamscape with no way out. Also, it was really hard to build any kind of narrative continuity. I did what I could by posting multi-day recaps before each new sentence, but progress was still glacial.

Consequently, it wasn't too long before we decided on two to three sentences a day, with an option for four if I asked nicely first. (Always granted, for she is a gracious person.) That has gone much better.

It's been a lot of fun. It's a lovely excuse to say hello to Phoenix every day, and the novel bears up well to close reading. It's also encouraged me to look up all the things I gloss over at speed, which has had some interesting surprises. (When BCP suggests that letting Ewen accompany them to Lady Easterhall's will bring the party to four and make them a partie carrée, he is making a dirty joke! That they will be a perfect foursome, two men and two women! I imagine them all side-eyeing each other, trying to figure out who the women are supposed to be. “As your Highness pleases, of course,” said O’Sullivan stiffly.) There's also been a lot of time to spin pet theories and get attached to minor characters. (Saunders, Lady Easterhall's servant with the cough, is a favorite.) I've also been able to introduce her to relevant fic as we went, which has also been an opportunity for me to revisit them, too.

Since we've been very consistent, only taking a break when I was in Japan, we have been making good progress. As of this weekend, I can report a milestone: we have just now completed Part II! Hurrah us!

With the move to Part III, Phoenix is anticipating a tonal shift and thus has authorised a whole paragraph a day. (With two or even three paragraphs authorized in dialogue sections!) So we will be cruising along, and finish in... well, it will still be years. But not as many years!

On to Part III! Hurt/comfort, here we come!

+ Butches in Books. Found a bunch I hadn't heard off, looks to be a solid list.

+ 2025 Recommended Reading List by Locus. Really appreciate the addition of a translated novels category.

+ How RPGs Became A Haven For Women In South Korea.

+ What Was Luke's Plan in 'Return of the Jedi'? The ever escalating amount of hostages XD

+ We need to talk about Fournier-Beaudry and Cizeron.
Fournier-Beaudry and Cizeron are both talented skaters from the Ice Academy of Montreal, who teamed up in 2024. They are both very striking, with beautiful skating quality that makes them captivating to new and old fans alike. But there's a darker side to the beginning of their partnership that has escaped the notice of a lot of casual fans.

+ Green's Dictionary of Slang is now available online for free. Allows lookups of word definitions and etymologies for free, and, for a subscription fee, it offers citations and more extensive search options.

+ Trans athletes may not have fitness advantage in women’s sport, landmark study finds.
Trans women in the studies were found to have significantly greater amounts of body fat than cis men, but levels comparable to those of cis women.

However, while trans women appeared to have more muscle mass, there were no observable differences in upper or lower body strength, the study found.

+ Saving this for later: Wonder Man by Abigail Nussbaum (so very likely to be good).

+ Very informative step by step recap of Bad Bunny's Half Time concert.

The algorithm feeds you more of what you already like, so this is likely to be a snapshot of a subsection of certain social media platforms (instagram and youtube, because I've seen it myself; tiktok and twitter, as reported to me by friends since I'm not on either; maybe others). Within this subsection of certain social media platforms, you'll find that if there are posts or videos praising Malaysia or showing photos/footage of major Malaysian cities, there will be comments from my fellow Malaysians jokingly decrying it as AI, or fake news, or "actually this is Singapore/Thailand/Indonesia, please don't come to Malaysia, we still live in trees". It's a whole joke and in-joke, and some non-locals have figured it out and play into it. We will be there, in the comments, refusing to directly claim the positivity from outsiders.

I've seen some comments claim that this trend is because we're afraid of overtourism. That may be the motivation of some, but IMO not the major one.

With a disclaimer that this is my personal impression of why we feel and respond this way, and of course I can only speak to those of my own social and business circles that have discussed this, and I think that younger generations have their own interpretation of it. I think the real reason goes back to how we used to feel in the 1980s and 1990s, as a South East Asian country that the international community didn't really know about. Oh, people know about our famous neighbours: Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia. But we kept getting left out of the global conversation; an afterthought in news, business dealings and pop culture, or folded in/mistaken for our more-famous neighbours.

After a while, I believe, we preferred it that way. Being low-key means we don't get sucked into geopolitical drama as much, and the global perception of us (IF ANY) would be so wrong that it's easier to laugh about it than get upset. (The "we still live in trees" was a legit thing for years, before we took it.) Singapore can get the high-profile billionaire expats. Indonesia and Thailand can get the cultural exposure. To not know about us is to have no expectations about us, which is to be pleasantly surprised by us, if you visit.

Because we know very well what our shortcomings are. We love our food, our cultures (major lion dance troupes are ours!), our mishmash of identities. But we also know our infrastructure is uneven, our cities are not walkable (with only a few exceptions), our salary levels are not competitive, conservative populism still reigns, LGBTQ people might as well not exist (though they do, in the cracks of plausible deniability), and that we can be insidiously bigoted in ways that aren't obvious without context. But on the flipside, our standard of living has improved in such a way that a lot of us don't realize it has improved: our metro lines are great, some of our government services are better than some more advanced countries, our banking and payment systems are excellent, the multiculturalism is so ingrained that we take it for granted until non-locals point out how unusual it is. So while we do feel pride in ourselves, whatever that means, we also don't feel that being loud about it is the right way to go.

It's not self-deprecating, I think. More like, it comes from an awareness that we can do better and wincing preemptively before our ugly bits get exposed.