FanimeCon 2018
I pressured Dracosphynx into driving us down to FanimeCon, and had a pretty decent time, and picked up some very nice art. Now I'm ensconced back home for the rest of the holiday weekend, my "get out and be social" duty fulfilled!

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/195335.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Food Catchup, May Edition
You may have heard me mention Curry House before - well, guess what, they had a special, curry ramen! (from now until end of June) While Jared and BoingDragon were out here, we headed down to Curry House to sample their offerings.

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/195229.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Random Pictures, and the Mountain View Irish Fleadh, 2018
Some things I forgot to post from the last time!

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/194902.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival 2018
Yay for a year in which I wasn't sandbagged by an annoying and lingering cough all spring! We left my place early and trekked up to San Francisco for the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was fun!

( Cut for images. Lots of them.Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/194681.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Food Catchup, April Edition
A couple of homemade dishes, and one decently tasty restaurant meal, courtesy of Revar!

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/194403.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Further Confusion 2018 - Quickie
Oh geez, I shouldn't have let this go, but... Better late than never! A very brief trip report for Further Confusion.

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/194234.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Food Catchup, December through March
Random food pictures!

( Cut for imagesCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/193937.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Homemade Keema Curry, General Tso's Meatballs, and Orange Beef with Kale
Okay, by popular request (one or two), it's time for a couple of recipes!

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/193703.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Meowy Kitsmas! With Applesauce Carrot Cupcakes!
Meowy Kitsmas, y'all!

In lieu of a family get-together (most of the relatives are away in SoCal and such) I baked myself some applesauce carrot cupcakes to go with my omelette today. This time, I didn't use cupcake liners. "Tufty," I told myself. "You have non-stick cupcake pans. Why don't you trust them to do their thing?"

... It worked. :)

( Cut for image!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/192003.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

A lynx pin!
From Nicnak044's store I picked up this li'l worried-looking Canadian lynx pin!

( Cut for image!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/191731.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Food Catchup, December 2017
More pictures of food!

( Cut for pictures!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/191369.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

NaNoWriMo update: failure!
I got about 8.5k words done on the proposed Genies: Rocking the Cradle story.

I kind of bogged down though... The real world is too depressing for writing about a bunch of psychopaths. I'm trying to think of a replacement writing project, something that will be just more silly fun.

What do you guys think of the idea of a Starfleet Cooking Academy?

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/191027.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Random thing: PenAgain
( Cut for image!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/190761.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Cooking Experiment: Vegetable Gravies with Meatballs, Pan-Fried Noodles, and Chicken Katsu
I was browsing the web for substitutes that could be used to make tastier gravy and hit upon an interesting idea: blended vegetables. I'd seen vegetable purees before but they never seemed that relevant as side dishes. They had virtually no texture, making them boring to eat.

But... What if I used them as gravies?

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/190700.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Happy Purrsday, Dracosphynx!
For Dracosphynx's purrsday (actually a bit later than that), I headed up to his apartment and we went to Chef Hung Taiwanese Beef Noodles for the noodles he had told me about!

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/190273.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Stuffed Lynxies and Hobee's French Toast
No, these have nothing to do with each other. okojosan pointed me at ebearstore which had some stuffed lynxies that I hadn't already had, so... I got them. They made a mistake shipping the first time so they sent me the second stuffed lynx in a separate package and told me to keep the Hermann lioness, as it would cost them too much to get it shipped back.

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/189964.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Requiescat, Jerry Pournelle
Sad to see one of the big-name science fiction authors of my youth pass. I may not agree with some of his conservative stances of the later years but I don't think many people will argue that he helped shape science fiction and its readers.

I took some pictures of his books:

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/189770.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mew Car!
After my air conditioning broke down, and my old car's air conditioning had also broken down, I determined I really needed... well, a new air conditioner, yes. But also, a new car. My 2004 Honda Accord was just about 14 years old after all!

So I went shopping.

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/189671.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Food Experiment: Homemade Keema Chicken Curry
Here's a good experiment! You might recall I'm a fan of Curry House's "keema curry" which is a mix of ground beef with various vegetables, on rice and served with a soft-boiled egg or fried eggs on top. I decided to try making much the same, but this time with chicken thighs to make the recipe slightly healthier.

( Cut for images!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/189393.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Genies Reboot: Rocking the Cradle
Every now and then I get possessed by the odd urge to write something totally unsuitable. Around July 2014, after watching Star Trek: Enterprise, the Augment episodes specifically, I was annoyed that the writers had taken yet another short cut and turned supposedly "super-intelligent" humans into might-makes-right barbarians. "Surely, actually intelligent humans, even if slightly psychotic, would have evolved *some* kind of society that doesn't rely on caveman principles," I thought.

That fanfic (Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off) ran about 20 installments and petered out. The characters just weren't coming together for me, and with 16+ characters, I felt the readers were just getting lost in all the names as well. So I put it back on the backburner for a while.

Well, it's been three years but my unconscious is nagging at me to try it again. Even though I'm not really that keen on trying to write smart-but-evil characters, given the state of the world...

(though maybe I want to prove to myself that evil, once again, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE STUPID.)

For this rewrite, I'm making a prequel before the original fanfic attempt-- and I'm cutting the cast way down. Leave a comment here if you want to read about an idealistic mad scientist trying to raise eight super-intelligent and slightly (not drooling) evil children in a small colony on a barely habitable world well out of the Federation-analogue's borders.

There will probably not be a starship involved in this story, at least not until novella #3. There will certainly be an effort to try and master writing decent characters. I have a plot outline and notes!

This entry was originally posted at http://tuftears.dreamwidth.org/189056.html. Please comment there using OpenID.