the deep moans round with many voices

drive-by update

2024-04-02T16:01:30Z

In summary: taxes! apartments! problem tenants! busy! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Also I highly enjoyed Tumblr's April Fools booping gimmick and got up to LOL boops given and MAX boops received, which is objectively a meaningless achievement but was extremely fun to reach and y'know, fun can be its own justification. :D

And now back to work.

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wherein Liz reviews some hard ciders, because why not

2020-07-07T01:46:03Z

A post apropos nothing in particular:

I don't like beer.

I never have, and I am pretty sure I never will.

When Nick and I were kids, our parents used to let us try tiny sips of whatever alcoholic beverage they were drinking with dinner -- basically, we got a clean teaspoon from the kitchen and they'd measure out a spoonful as a sample -- and while I thought red and white wines were a bit odd (and Mom's occasional Black Russian and Dad's occasional brandy or other fancy liqueur were a bit odd and also bitey), my invariable reaction to beer samples was "BLEUGH!!!" When I was older, I tried beer under what are probably the most favorable circumstances possible: a good German beer, fresh and cool, after I'd been walking for several hours on a hot summer day. At which point my reaction improved from "BLEUGH!!!" to "...mneh." I figure that there is no real point in experimenting further, though I do try a sip every few years just to confirm that yeah, still "BLEUGH!!!" (Or, on very good days, just "Bleugh!!" Which is still emphatic enough for me.)

I do like wine! But wine is often tragically expensive, as are hard liquors, and sometimes I want a drink with somewhat less alcohol by volume so I can get more liquid in with my mind-altering chemicals.

The solution? Hard cider!

Hard cider is lovely (except when people try to make it taste more like beer by adding hops to it -- and before anyone pipes up, no, hops are not the whole reason I object to beer; it's the fundamental beeriness of beer that I dislike, though the hops certainly don't help anything) and it's been experiencing a great resurgence in America over the past ten or twenty years. I first encountered hard cider as a specialty thing bought in wine-sized bottles from a cidery that was part of the Cayuga Lake Wine Trail. That was circa 2005. These days, I can buy six-packs or twelve-packs of hard cider at my local supermarket. It's WONDERFUL.

I mention this because a newish development in the hard cider world is rosé ciders. I think this started as a way to ride the coattails of the slightly less newish dry rosé wine movement (which I also like a lot, FYI; I like rosé as a flavor but traditional rosés are often undrinkably sweet) but it has turned into a Thing in its own right.

I tend to drink Angry Orchard ciders because it's always a bit of gamble trying new things and also I don't like thinking in supermarkets (my goal is to buy what I need and get out before I get distracted), but Angry Orchard Rosé is often sold out on my shopping days. So I've been experimenting a bit with some other brands.

The two I've tried so far are Crispin and Beak & Skiff 1911 Established.

Angry Orchard Rosé is 5.5% alcohol by volume, and a nice dark salmony pink. I like it because it's less sweet than a lot of hard ciders, but without that sort of... hmmm... thin, scrapey edge a lot of drier ciders get? It's still quite full-bodied, which is good. I usually buy the 12oz glass bottles.

Crispin Rosé is 5% ABV, and noticeably paler than Angry Orchard. It's also significantly drier in taste, and I find that it is best drunk with one or two ice cubes in the glass. (It comes in 12oz cans, and so is best poured into a glass. Drinking cider from a metal can leads to weird undertastes.) Crispin apparently mixes pear juice in with apple juice when fermenting ciders, and their rosé also contains rose petals and hibiscus, which seems a bit fancypants to me, but hey, the ability to get a bit fancypants is a sign of a healthy industry, so.

Beak & Skiff 1911 Established Rosé is 6.7% ABV (edging toward apple wine, tbh). As with Angry Orchard, it's a very full-bodied drink -- just enough so, I think, to counter the relative sweetness -- still less sweet than a properly sweet hard cider, but even so. It comes in 16oz cans and is consequently a bit dangerous, due to both the increased ABV and the increased portion size.

In conclusion, the Angry Orchard and Crispin rosé hard ciders are best for accompanying meals, while the 1911 Established rosé hard cider is best for drinking on a hot summer afternoon.

But they are all delicious. :)

(Also, it's annoying to have to keep copypasting an é character from a Word document, since I can't seem to type one in Chrome. BLEUGH!)

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how to steal an apartment

2019-12-10T21:08:08Z

Apropos of nothing in particular:

So I was reading a fic yesterday (which I will not be naming or linking to, because it's relevant only as the spark of this ramble) in which (as a minor backstory point) two skilled hackers essentially steal an apartment by making it vanish off all electronic records so they won't have to pay rent.

Something struck me a little weird about that, but the sense of wrongness didn't crystallize until later on, when the hackers get into more serious crimes and one tells the other to stop bringing one-night stands back to where they have evidence lying around. Because they don't want to get found out.

The thing is, they would have been found out LONG before that. You flat out CANNOT make an apartment vanish that way. Not if the rental company/property management company is remotely on top of things.

Like, okay, you disappear an apartment off electronic records. You steal electricity and whatever other utilities you require. There are still people who know the unit is physically there. If the rental company keeps paper records, they REALLY know it's there. There are going to be paper floor plans and architectural diagrams floating around. And sooner or later somebody is going to notice that they don't have a lease or a tenant listed for Unit X, and also that Unit X has vanished from their electronic records, which is a big red flag that something fishy is going on. This will likely take one year maximum, given that apartments tend to rent on one-year leases (which then have to be manually extended/renewed each year).

Some buildings have regular preventative extermination treatments, and in those cases the exterminator will go to every unit; that doesn't rely on electronic records. The exterminator will have a master key and will see all your criminal paraphernalia, and if they're remotely competent will report that to the rental company or property management company. And if you change your lock so the master key won't work? That gets reported even faster.

You're also going to have trouble if there are general maintenance projects, like a burst water pipe or a problem with the heating pipes/vents. It doesn't matter how well you maintain your own apartment -- you can't control what other tenants do in their spaces, and believe me, somebody will break something major sooner or later. Then maintenance will have to notify the tenants that they're coming in to do Project Y, and if nobody has a record of the tenants in Unit X? That's a problem. If maintenance can't work the lock? That's a problem. And so on.

If you want to disappear a property, you're much better off with something you own in full rather than something you rent. And not a condo, either -- then you'd be stuck with the condo association, which is just as nosy as a rental company or property management company. You want a freestanding house. This of course means you'll have to fuck around with tax rolls, and probably intercept tax assessments now and then, but that's much less of an ongoing problem than trying to Jedi mind trick a whole rental company.

But really, you don't want to make the apartment vanish. If you're going to steal an apartment, what you want to do is lease it as a perfectly normal tenant (possibly under a fake ID) and then pay your rent promptly and in full with money you've stolen from somewhere else. Much simpler and less stressful! And if you want to be all "yay computers!" about the thing, you can do leases entirely by email these days, and pay electronically; most rental companies are quite happy to facilitate that sort of thing.

...

I think too much about logistics sometimes.

Also, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief over things I am unfamiliar with, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of several years ago, when I first read the fic in question, but had not yet started working for a rental company. *wry*

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wherein Liz tidies a small bit of old digital flotsam

2019-07-21T18:11:40Z

Over the past few weeks, I've been getting a handful of spam emails claiming to be from Amazon.com. The thing is, they've been coming to my fandom Hotmail account, which is not associated with my Amazon account, so obviously there's no way they could be real...

Except I just remembered today that I do, actually, have a secondary Amazon account under an alias that's associated with my fandom email. I opened it back in... I want to say 2001, and only used it for a month or two. IIRC, it was meant to let me review books that I was embarrassed to admit to having read but did want to say something about? I don't remember the details at all, but I think that was the general notion.

Anyway, today I reactivated the alias account (because obviously I still have the email! I just needed to reset the password) and then promptly told Amazon to please close it down. There is no sense in having useless digital flotsam drifting about in one's wake, after all.

Also I will now be able to automatically delete any future pseudo-Amazon spam messages without having to double-check that they're fraudulent. :)

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on butterflies and gender

2019-02-23T02:15:59Z

Random thought of the day:

I just realized that for some reason, having a little brother with a phobia of butterflies is about ten times funnier than having a little sister with a phobia of butterflies.

There is absolutely NO objective reason why this is true, but it is true.

Cultural perceptions of gender are so weird.

(Look, I do my best to be respectful of Nick's phobia and avoid setting it off -- I don't draw butterflies on his birthday cards, use butterfly stickers on things he's likely to see, send him videos or photos of cool butterflies I've seen, talk to him about butterflies, wear my t-shirt with a bones-flowers-and-butterfly-wings motif around him, etc. It's still absurd. Most phobias are. That's why they're called phobias instead of rational caution. *wry*)

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February shitposting, day 19

2019-02-19T14:44:10Z

Today's randomly chosen theme is: otters

Otters are cute and adorable!

They are also ruthless predators, and have been known to gang up and intimidate alligators. As with cats, don't mistake cute for harmless.

...

On a tangential note, is that meme about otters that look like Benedict Cumberbatch still a thing? Because that was hilarious. :D

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February shitposting, day 9

2019-02-10T03:26:11Z

Today's randomly chosen theme is: a fork

Forks are for poking and lifting stuff. Alternately, they are the point where a single path splits into multiple options.

The common etymology is a single thing (path or handle) splitting into multiple things (paths or prongs). Division. The power of change.

Also the power of shoving large pieces of meat in your mouth or throwing large bales of hay up into a loft.

But generally speaking, change.

Given that change is inevitable, I suppose forks are probably also inevitable in some form or other.

(Possibly I should have written this post before I had a Black Russian and 1/3 each of two bottles of wine, but shush, we are pretending I am perfectly sober and coherent. *wry*)

-----

ETA: The reason I was drinking is that tomorrow is my birthday so tonight was my birthday dinner (and we got stuck at the restaurant bar for ~30 minutes before a table opened up), after which my parents and I came back to my apartment and had some homemade pie plus more wine. It was a good night. :)

I will post more coherent details sometime tomorrow, probably.

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I swear there is a reason for this

2019-01-15T01:42:54Z

For reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, I need to crowdsource as many terrible and/or hilarious nicknames for "Nicholas" as possible.

I already came up with Nick-nack, Nickleback, and the potential for endless Christmas and Santa Claus jokes, but I'm tired and have temporarily run out of inspiration. (And yes, I'm aware that "Nick"-name itself is a pun.) We are not going in the "Lassie fell down the well" direction, though I'm open to stuff like Coca-Kolya.

Any thoughts?

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civic responsibility through game prizes?

2018-11-19T20:30:09Z

The Red Cross is sort of adorable in its efforts to drum up, I dunno, a sort of community feeling among blood donors? Or to ping that little game-reward button most of us have somewhere in the back of our brains.

To wit, this email I received after my most recent donation:

Dear LIZ,

It is our honor to congratulate you on reaching your 3 gallon milestone. Your 24 lifetime donations have helped make a difference in the lives of many who you may never know.

We are happy to present this digital milestone badge to you as a symbol of your dedication to helping save lives. Share it with pride. Show everyone you’re a #DonorForLife. You've earned it.

If you'd like a pin to wear with pride, we're happy to mail one to you. Simply click the button below within the next 30 days to request your pin.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Sincerely,

J. Chris Hrouda
President, Biomedical Services

I don't think I’m going to order it -- I don't have any practical use for a pin -- but I am still kind of irrationally pleased to have reached that milestone and had someone notice. *wry*

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wherein Liz sings the praises of comfy shirts

2018-10-13T01:51:39Z

Earlier this year I bought the comfiest sweater in the world at a local clothing store's going-out-of-business sale, and now that autumn has finally arrived for good and for keeps, I get to wear it!

It is not the world's best sweater -- for that, it would need to be three inches longer from shoulder to hem so I could have bought it one or two sizes smaller so the sleeves wouldn't be quite so wide/loose -- but it is so comfy, and it's this really nice warm and friendly geometric pattern in light sand, dark sand, salmon, blood orange, old jeans blue (both dark and light), and the faintest traces of white, and mmm, I love it!

It's just really nice to have soft, warm clothes, you know? Especially ones that are pretty without being all, "Hi these are my boobs and by the way, my name is Liz," which is what a lot of women's clothing unfortunately defaults to. (That or frills/lace. Sometimes both, gods help us all.)

...I should save up and invest in another set of LL Bean or Lands End shirts one of these days. My last set of those lasted me fifteen years as day-wear and another year or two each as pajama shirts before they completely frayed to pieces. And my goodness they were comfy...

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wherein Liz attempts art

2018-06-07T03:43:49Z

I've been trying to work through the tail end of a Great Lectures series on the Vikings, but I didn't feel like rummaging through my art supplies basket to find my coloring pages, so I opened MS Paint instead and have been making little finger "paintings" loosely in the style of Bob Ross as my latest concentration aid.

They're actually pretty fun. :)

( cut for three large-ish images )

I feel like I am slowly getting the hang of Bob Ross's techniques, insofar as that's possible when making finger-doodles with a notoriously shoddy digital art program. *wry*

[[original Tumblr posts one and two, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

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waterfalls

2018-01-21T01:59:14Z

I live just far enough away from Ithaca Falls that I never hear the water inside my apartment, but when Fall Creek is running high, the waterfall makes a constant white-noise backdrop the moment I step out my front door.

I tend to forget about this and get surprised anew each time. *wry*

(I am glad I don't live closer, incidentally, much though I love waterfalls. Houses a block further east start to subtly shake when the water volume gets really high, which is frankly kind of unnerving.)

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soup

2018-01-20T04:24:11Z

Random things I have learned about myself over the years: I am extremely unlikely to make or eat chicken noodle soup unless I am caught in the grip of a REALLY nasty cold and/or mild flu. I have stopped regularly catching really nasty colds and/or mild flu since I stopped working retail. Therefore, there is no point in buying nice chicken noodle soup or any soup in the general chicken-soup family.

I will, however, quite happily eat bean soups, split pea soups, lentil soups, and various chowders. So my emergency backup canned soup supply should lean toward those options rather than anything chicken-based. Beef stews are also an option worth considering.

Tomato-based soups are right out for reasons that are not worth exploring at this juncture. *wry*

(Note: obviously this does not apply to hotdishes. I do buy and use cheap-ass Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup cans to make Laddie's hotdish, but as hotdish is not soup I don't think that's relevant here.)

This post brought to you by the really tasty split pea soup with ham that I had a couple days ago, and the lentil vegetable soup that I had for lunch today and intend to have the second serving of for dinner tomorrow. :)

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note to self

2017-12-14T03:02:25Z

Things to do tomorrow: SO MANY

Therefore, thing to do tonight: GO THE FUCK TO BED

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wherein Liz illustrates holiday cards

2017-12-14T01:53:14Z

I never know what to write in holiday cards, so I resort to tiny doodles instead. (This goes for birthday cards as well, but birthday cakes, flowers, and butterflies do not really say winter, let alone solstice or Christmas. Alas!)

Anyway, this year I wrote and drew my cards at work instead of at home, which meant I had a bunch of ultra-fine-point Sharpies to work with in addition to my usual black ink pen. So I figured I would share the joy of color with the internet. :)

( cut for image )

The sleigh and the string of lights are new to my repertoire this year. Next year I think I might try learning how to doodle a cardinal...

(Before anyone asks, yes, I have tried drawing snowflakes. They never work out right. I can cut paper snowflakes like nobody's business, but adding a pen into the equation somehow always results in disaster. *sigh*)

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

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help Liz buy a shirt

2017-12-08T03:04:08Z

I am crowdsourcing a Christmas present, because I am a deeply indecisive person.

So my friend Susan asked for a Captain America t-shirt, and I have found three potential candidates:

1. generic shield variation

2. comic panels variation

3. fancy patterns variation

I am leaning a little toward the fancy patterns variation, because it's both cool and pretty. Unfortunately that one only comes in two colors -- black or navy blue -- and I think the image pops best on the black background. The thing is, the last shirt I gave Susan was also black, and I'd like to switch that up a little, which is why I've picked baby blue as the color for the other two options. So does cool pattern outweigh pretty color, or vice versa? And if pretty color wins, do I go with the slightly larger shield with random comic panels, or the smaller plain shield?

It's a hard choice!

Anyway, thoughts?

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A Question

2017-11-29T22:42:52Z

This afternoon I opened up my church's weekly newsletter and found this item:

-----

Adult RE - Bonsai: Maximizing the Potential of the Tree and the Artist
Wednesday, November 29, 7-9 pm in the Parlor

A general introduction to the art and craft of creating bonsai trees, with photos, videos, and physical bonsai created by local bonsaiists. Brian Heltsley, longtime FUSIT member and currently President of the Finger Lakes Bonsai Society, will discuss the horticultural and artistic challenges of bonsai.

-----

I get off work at 7pm. Do I want to nab some snacks from work and go to a bonsai presentation? Or do I just want to go home and eat dinner?

---------------
---------------

ETA, 6:30pm

On due consideration, I have decided to go learn about bonsai. Dinner can wait. :)

---------------
---------------

ETA, 9:30pm

This was a good choice. :DDD

I am probably not going to get into bonsai any time soon -- antidepressants are wonderful things, but I still have limited A) time and B) spoons -- but I now feel like it is something I could get into in the future instead of a mysterious art of deepest mystery whose gorgeous creations are to be sighed after wistfully from afar.

...Despite saying that, I kind of want to dig up one of the older scrub maple seedlings from my front hedge, pop it into a pot, and see what happens. They have very interesting structures after years of me stripping their leaves and stems down to the root bases a couple times a summer, and so far as I can tell they're damn near unkillable, which can only be an asset for a novice tree sculptor. *wry*

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dream snapshots

2017-10-24T17:51:48Z

My weird Celexa dreams continue, and I continue to find them vastly entertaining. Also, aside from the general free entertainment, dreams are a fascinating snapshot into the way my brain plays cut-and-paste-and-twist with a deeply random grab-bag of things I've noticed or thought about over the past few days.

Like, a couple nights ago I had a dream that was mostly weird porn (no seriously, whatever you are thinking it was weirder than that; it was kind of like a sociological study of "why the fuck would anyone think this was sexy???") except randomly a bunch of it kept taking place in raw-timber cabins and there was a digression in which two of my friends and I had to build a cabin in order to have a place to set up the projector to watch more weird porn for this sociological study. Which I am pretty sure is because a person I follow on Tumblr sometimes posts pictures of pretty cabins.

And there was a dream in which I kept trying to make a terrible bilingual Spanish pun, which failed miserably because I don't speak Spanish. I think that was because a Spanish class (and a person struggling in it) featured in a fic I'd read a couple days beforehand.

And last night I had a dream in which... well, it was long and full of weird digressions, but the basic plot thread was as follows: after some kind of zombie apocalypse struck, I was with a group of people who'd holed up in a sort of fortress wilderness area (creeks and gorges and stuff, readily defensible). We discovered that people who'd been bitten by the zombies could be kept from degenerating into ravening monsters if -- and only if -- they ate a certain number of printed pages per day. (This varied between literally eating the pages and sort of mystically "drinking" the printed words through vampire fangs, because dreams do not have to be consistent or make sense.)

We were all very worried because of course we had a moral obligation to keep victims from turning into mindless beasts, but we didn't have an infinite supply of books, not to mention the books we did have were mostly practical reference material that we desperately needed since we were not wilderness survival experts. There were some raids into the nearby city library, and I think we were debating the possibility of building a printing press when I woke up.

This is clearly allegorical and stuff, but also might make an interesting variation on a typical zombie apocalypse, because who cares about guns and patriarchy when there are BOOKS at stake. *wry*

Also I have reconfirmed that I cannot do math when I'm asleep -- or rather, I can do math just enough to realize that my sleeping brain is getting wildly wrong answers, at which point I get so frustrated that I force myself awake until I am coherent enough to find the correct answer. Once I reassure myself that I haven't forgotten how to do basic subtraction, I fall back asleep.

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random thoughts on clothing and gender presentation

2017-10-23T00:45:19Z

I've been thinking off and on about this Tumblr post about clothing presentation styles, sorted by both gender impression and level of effort.

( blather about my own clothing style )

...

There was no real point to any of that, but I wanted to get my thoughts down in writing so hopefully they will stop popping up distractingly at random moments. *wry*

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cat fight

2017-10-14T02:13:48Z

I heard the most godawful noises coming from outside my window around 9:30pm, whereupon I went outside and discovered Wilson (my diagonal neighbors' cat) in a standoff on the porch railing with an unfamiliar tailless, all-black cat.

Wilson then dived off the railing and under Upstairs Neighbor E's bicycle, where he proceded to make continuous upset noises while the stranger prowled silently along the railing and scented my windowframe.

I attempted to see if Wilson wanted rescue, but he swiped at me. Then I attempted to shoo the stranger cat away, but it swiped at me in turn.

Wilson was very polite about the swiping -- soft paws, no claws. The stranger made me bleed in seven places.

I went inside to clean and disinfect my wounds, after which I returned to see if Wilson was feeling any better/safer. The stranger cat was gone, but Wilson was still on edge, and swiped at me even though I approached very slowly and never got within two feet of him. So I went back inside again and applied a bandaid to the one cut that hadn't stopped bleeding.

When I returned to the porch a third time, Wilson was once again feeling relaxed. He came into the foyer as I opened the door, meowed in greeting, and asked for petting. So I scratched behind his ears for a couple minutes, before he decided it was time to head upstairs and find his people.

I've heard similar noises from the porch occasionally over the past month, and now I wonder if this is an ongoing conflict between Wilson and the stranger...

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a random thought about blood donations

2017-04-14T22:51:39Z

A random nice thing the Red Cross sometimes does is tell you what happened to your blood donation.

For example, I recently received the following email:

Dear LIZ,

Thank you for giving blood with the American Red Cross on 3/16/2017. After first ensuring that local needs were met, your blood donation was sent to University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, NY to help a patient in need. Your donation is on its way to change lives!

Every day, patients receive blood for a variety of conditions including life-threatening illnesses, blood disorders and traumas. Your blood donations are critical to helping save patients' lives.

On behalf of the hospitals and patients we serve, thank you for being a Red Cross blood donor.

I think this is both a nice gesture of acknowledgement and a really effective way to make people want to donate again, because it puts a tangible result -- your blood went to this place to help an actual human being who needed a transfusion -- onto what is otherwise a very open-ended, giving-to-the-void sort of activity. So kudos to the Red Cross communications team members who came up with this idea. I will even forgive you for trying to make me sign up for a half-dozen blood drives while I am still in the ineligible eight weeks after my previous donation. *wry*

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wherein Liz considers tropes

2017-03-06T22:47:23Z

I spent last night sort of idly spinning ideas for a Daredevil A/B/O fic of the sudden-change-inflicted-on-a-previously-normal-world type (because A/B/O is one of my bingo card squares, and I think one of the best ways to get to grips with a trope is to try writing it) and...

Well. Occasionally it becomes really obvious that I'm asexual, because I drifted off into alien retroviruses transmitted via magic spells, three-caste social pack systems and their awkward overlay on human sexual dimorphism, varying development/exhibition of A/B/O traits based on the presence or absence of a more socially dominant member of one's caste (similar to arrested development of secondary sex characteristics in male orangutans, because that's always struck me as fascinating), and the whole porn aspect got almost completely lost along the way. I had to keep reminding myself that hey, there's supposed to be a sex thing here, right? This is a porn trope, right?

Apparently my hindbrain disagrees!

Possessive behavior, sure. Pheromones, sure. Marking bites, sure. People dealing with bodies gone strange and unfamiliar, sure. I am totally into that stuff. But bluntly, I don't often find sex especially sexy. Power and fangs and stuff like that are way the hell more of a turn-on, as is found family, pack bonding, and people renegotiating social relationships. Meanwhile, sex qua sex can go hang for all I care; I do not need to interrupt my delicious plot and character dynamics with random bedroom grunting. *wry*

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stuff done: Friday-Tuesday

2017-01-04T04:46:48Z

1. Taped, sanded, and painted a fifth frame; touched up the two I painted on Thursday. Then I touched up the fifth on Saturday morning before packing them all into a laundry basket, carefully cushioned by towels, and took them down to NJ.

2. Made a packing list. Then packed.

3. Bought groceries.

( more items under the cut )

10. Went to see Rogue One with Susan at 4pm. I liked it a lot!

( cut for spoilers )

On the other hand, as Susan justly remarked, there wasn't very much of that ineffable sense of joy/wonder/boundless possibility that is the hallmark of Star Wars at its best and most inspiring. For me, the movie's virtues outweighed that flaw -- I am totally down with Star Wars attempting a gritty and morally gray war movie (the tragedy is not a departure; tragedy is a central theme of the franchise, just as much as hope) -- but judging by reviews a bunch of other people feel differently. And that's okay!

( more items under the cut )

17. Responded to all the comments on my Yuletide fic and my Daredevil Secret Santa fic. \o/

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ghosts!

2016-10-30T22:45:36Z

Ahhh, I just played Google's little Halloween ghost-fighting game (it's their logo image for the day) and it is so damn cute, I about died. ♥

(I am not sure exactly how the score gets calculated, but mine is apparently 103,940. I think I missed some double knockout chances, and also I was too slow and got 'scared' out of a life-heart a few times, which probably lowers it.)

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wherein Liz plays with clay

2016-10-13T02:47:47Z

When I went to NJ to dognap Dottie in September, I dropped by the pottery studio where my friend Susan works and made two rather awkward pinch pots for an event/project the studio was doing. My latest dognapping venture (this past weekend) happened to overlap the sale days for those pots (proceeds to benefit two local charities), so I figured I'd buy them if they were still available, which they were. And now here I am with two new pots and no clear idea what to do with them.

I'm toying with the idea of trying to propagate new jade plants from my big tentacle-y jade plant, and then maybe giving them to people as gifts next year...?

But anyway, two pots! Susan picked the glazes; the designs, however, are all me. The first is just a geometric thing that looked nice to me, with no deeper significance. The second is a simplified variant of one of the infinitely extendable border designs I used to doodle around my notebooks in high school and college. I have included an example (sketched really quick in MS Paint) of the full design for comparison purposes -- as you can see, I didn't try to put the bubbles or the indication of sand/seafloor onto the pot.

.

. .

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

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