Reading

Entry tags:

booklists - august and september

I haven't been seeing as many booklists as I sometimes do; maybe it is the quiet part of the year for it, or maybe I've just been skimming past and not registering them. Anyway, what have I found?

from the Otherwise Award site, Celebrating work from 2022-2023: Part I a list of works to consider from the years the awards were on hiatus. I was in a 'no, no more books' mood so was reading for interest but not to put things on the wishlist.

from pangur-and-grim at tumblr, their favourite books from this year. Not normally the kind of list I'd look at, but at first glance it starts with Alien Clay, which I loved, has a couple I think I'd like and a stack I've never heard of. It also has The Last Unicorn. There are six that Greer has read, and three 'up next'. Turned out some of the ones I hadn't read were already on the wishlist; i added all but one of the rest.

at tumblr, suspiciouspopsicle said I need some good fantasy or scifi to read that doesn't involve romance., First set of replies from specialagentartemis. Sadly, their absolute favourites is three I've read and one I don't want to (saw the movie, don't care), and the weird and interesting is a mix of read it, can't find it, that doesn't sound like my thing. Second from girlfailuregawain, where the ones I recognise make me a bit meh on looking up the rest, because very much Not My Taste. There are some more in the comments, but I ran out of steam. One book added to the maybe list.

I also added two to the wishlist after reading bibliofile's notes about them.

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Svengoolie

Entry tags:

Fannish Friday

It was a boring work day. Pretty sure I made some students think 'you bitch' guess that's my accomplishment of the day.

So have some fannish reccommendations. Nothing new from me this week.

Cloud Watching Torchwood

Frustration Stargate SG-1

Uncertainty Torchwood

Harassment FAKE

Some Enchanted Evening Stargate SG-1

Meet Me In Purgatory Hawaii Five-0

Manipulation Tactics Torchwood

Walking Away. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Shanked Oz

Preparing for the Full Moon Teen Wolf

i know that you want me (fuck me lovely) Hazbin Hotel

The Care and Keeping of Oversized Lizards (and Other Unfortunate, Related Occurrences) Merlin

Postcard of the Day

White People Week, Presidents Edition---and definitely behind a cut. Trigger warning: probably ( the 2 most white supremicist U.S. presidents, and almost surely definitely if you don't count slave 'owners' as the worst cuzza that. )

Ugh.

Entry tags:

I Due Figaro, year unknown

(Catchup - 26 September 2025)
Dear Readers. For some odd reason, I never posted this to Dreamwidth! Fortunately, I found it today and can now share it with you. I have set the date to the original Reddit post. This whole thing keeps getting stranger!

( I Due Figaro, year unknown )

Entry tags:

New Culinary Adventures and a New Subreddit

(Catchup - 26 September 2025)
Hello, Dear Readers. Today's entry is mostly about food. I have been having all sorts of wonderful culinary adventures with my new Prepology machines lately! Since this is all experimentation, I've been doing them with Mom. But once we figure things out, I will be making these things and more on my own.

Yesterday, I decided to make pork chops for lunch. I was originally going to have them with mashed potatoes, but I decided to create my own recipe. I have been doing this since I was at least ten, and I love thinking of new ideas and trying them out. After deciding against the mashed potatoes, I thought of maccaroni and cheese, but I had run out. Then, I found sticky rice that I had bought some time ago but never tried. So I used cream of mushroom soup as a gravy, added extra mushrooms, mixed in the sticky rice, and once that was done and I had cooked the pork chop, I added it all together. All I can say is wow! This will absolutely become a staple in my home! This time, I used canned versions, because it was a very sudden decision, but I might try fresh ones as well. Last night, for dinner, Mom decided to make me a cheeseburger in my grill. This time, it was all her. I think she's really starting to like it, which makes me laugh, as she normally hates cooking. The recipe was very simple, since this was a pre-made burger in the sense that she didn't use chop meat to shape it, etc. But she did add the onion and cheese and it was delicious.

This morning, we tried grilled cheese. I wasn't very impressed. As I told her, the cheese and butter were wrong. We'll have to change them next time, and perhaps keep it in a little bit longer so that the bread can become toasty. But it was still good enough to eat. One thing about me is that, if something is bad, I won't eat it. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet. Dinner couldn't have been any more different. we made a fillet mignon and paired it with a potato pancake, and, of all things, a tiny bit of pork fried rice! Joanie brought home both. The rice was hers that she had left, and the potato pancake was one of several that she bought for me. I liked the seasoning that I chose for the steak (it was Tuscan) but it didn't really penetrate themeat. Oddly enough, though, when I had a piece of steak in my mouth and ate some of the rice, I loved the sweetness! So I told Mom that the next time we did this, I wanted to make it with teriyaki sauce, or whatever they used on their pork to make it so sweet and delicious. Usually, I don't like sauce on steak, but she said she has a glaze, and I can't wait to try it.

What really amazes me about these machines is the speed at which things cook! The steak was done in about two minutes, and the pork chop in about four (we did five but that was too long). Mom has been checking the meats, since I didn't order my talking thermometer, and all have been cooked properly. They say that meat loaf will take about five minutes. Both of us also want to try making lasagna, which fits in the same pan.

On a non-culinary note, I had to give up on the Opera subreddit. I tried everything in my power to resolve the issue, all to no avail. Today, I discovered that every single post and comment I had ever made to that subreddit had been removed. But when I go to the appeals page, it says I have nothing to appeal, since I am neither banned nor suspended. Anyway, I created my own subreddit for pre-1950's opera singers and the genre in general. I have posted my reviews and whatnot there, and will add new things as I think of them. It's all is coming along nicely. This is the old.reddit link, but of course, you can use the regular one as well or look for OldOpera. Please feel free to join if you wish and to promote it anywhere where it's appropriate to do so.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OldOpera/

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: On the Case with Paula Zahn

Entry tags:

mia vita pazzo

Highly incompetent

Now I've known this about student loans. When I first moved here I would go into panic attacks just seeing something from them in the mail. and you knew there was going to be zero help from customer service so upon seeing NEITHER of my loans had the income based repayment plan put on them automatically as I was assured would happen I called today after pulling up the email from August 14 at 2:03 in the afternoon.

( If I wrote this up as fiction no one would believe it )

have some community recs how about some love for older fandoms

highlander_chat Connect with Highlander friends to chat, discuss, squee, brainstorm, seek beta-reading, and more.

fkficfest Forever Knight_ Fanfiction Games

Postcard of the Day

White People Week continues with some advertising. The newest of the advertising we'll see here.

I find them each a bit creepy.

Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Guy's Grocery Games

Entry tags:

I need to remember

that I have BIG classes this semester and if I put all the tests on one day, I'll be working for hours to grade it all in one night. That was my entire day.

That and finding out one of my EOBs was a denial for my DexCom monitors and I wrote and asked them WHY they denied a claim from the company they INSISTED I use. I hope that gets straightened out because that's 1000$ to me if they don't.

We needed rain bad. We're now on day 4 and flooding. fantastic. Lost my power third day in a row too. It was raining inside my building again. Also someone turned on the heat. Again. It was 77 when I showed up to work outside so WHY the heat is on....

I did manage to finish a

fandomgiftbasket story but I'm worried that it's toeing the DNW list (Jealousy is one request but so is no other pairings other than listed...)

What I Just Finished Reading:

Nothing Special vol 2 - a fantasy webtoon, it's cute

Jaws - I needed as J and one of my dentists handed me this to read. Someone's thesis on why there is so much malocclusion. Riveting (no, it's not)

What I am Currently Reading:

Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie - a good reminder she was a woman of her time and that Italians were NOT liked well in the 20s and 30s The victim seems to have deserved to die because Dagos are shifty and untrustworthy....it's not in there much but it was there in the beginning and I set this aside for years and now it's back about mid way in...

Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World - imagine Gavin or Lindsey trying to get promoted at Wolfram and Hart and you more or less have it. It's interesting but it's hard to root for Colin since he's actively evil and petty

What I Plan to Read Next: I'm so behind on my challenges. something for that.

Postcard of the Day

Before I continue with White People Week, I reckon I oughta cop to my own whiteness. While I'm poking some fun at extra-whiteness and the creepiness of its hegemonic presumptive regularity or standardness and, like, blandness and bizarreness and such, I'm doing that from a place of what we used to call skin privilege, and aiming to hone my progress as a race traitor, both as a traitor to "my" race and as a traitor to the whole cultural construct of race(s), along with some of what's such a deeply felt objection to class, running through all my days, that it feels like I'm shouting it all the time. Upper class whiteness is especially repugnant.

So, let's see,... let's go lite with the white today, and I won't put it behind a cut.

Entry tags:

language,
words

drive by post

I keep thinking about making a happy post, and then there are too many moving parts and argh. Instead, you get a possible insight into my mind you didn't need. I keep reading

it also predates genAI

in the verb form related to predator, rather than date and time. I'm not sure what is eating the genAI, and I'm not sure I want to (is it silverfish? it absolutely would not surprise me if it were silverfish).

(note also that I get a giggle out of un-ionised vs union-ised)

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. There are some really good stories in here and one good poem, and I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of the journal? I'm thinking a lot lately about didacticism in art and its purposes, and of course about writing dystopian fiction while living in a dystopia. There's the sort of "this thing that is happening is bad and you should be upset about it" kind of classic dystopia, and there's the hopepunk variant of "here are some people fighting against the bad thing?" but I think we ought to be pushing past both of those tendencies. To what end? I don't know. I'm thinking a lot about Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco, which sadly I have never seen staged but is one of the most brilliant explorations of fascism in the way that it weirds it and adds something new and useful to our understanding of fascist psychology, and thus our ability to resist it. (It is unfair, of course, to critique something for not being Ionesco.) So I dunno how to do that, I am a hack and a fraud. Anyway, there were a couple of really standout stories—one about a house contents sale, one with a retelling of Fall of Jericho, one about a group of church ladies resisting ICE, and of course the title story.

Currently reading: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. Adam is a Marxist artist and critic whose work I really enjoy, so when they came out with an actual book that I can recommend to people, I was all fuck yeah. This examines the relationship of art to capitalism and resistance, drawing on Benjamin, Fisher, Brecht, and so on. It gets points right off the bat for explaining uneven and combined development, which the Historical Materialism crowd is always on about, in a way my never-went-to-grad-school brain can actually understand. I just finished the bit on the ways in which conceptual art arose in rejection of the commercial art market and then almost immediately got subsumed into it. Anyway, it's really good.

Entry tags:

A Strange Bug, Walking Update, and Cooler Weather

Hello, Dear Readers. Let's do something we haven't done in a while and start with some music. I know I set this for the twenty-third, but since it's so early on the twenty-fourth when I am finishing this entry, I will include this piece for today.

( Thoughts on Haydn: String Quartet Op 64, no 1 )

Not much happened today, except for an adventure with a bug that pleased neither of us. I was outside, eating my game hen when I felt a bug on my thumb. Usually, I don't care if bugs are on me, since I'm outside, after all, and I knew it wouldn't be a mosquito that early in the day. But I didn't want it to get into my food. I turned my hand and felt pain. The bug was clinging to me, presumably with a stinger. And no, despite the question of both my mother and a friend, I have no idea what it was like. I'm blind. It was a big bug on my hand that was causing pain, so I pulled it off. I went in the house to show Mom, and she said that she didn't see a stinger, which meant no vinegar, but she did put some Neosporin (antibiotic) on it. Even now, it still hurts, but more ina paper cut way than anything else. It's not swolen or anything like that, just annoying. I can only hope it wasn't a bee that stung me. I love bees. I would feel terrible knowing that I killed one, even though I had no choice. They are necessary for the world to survive. Still, I do hope this heals quickly.

We didn't go on our walk as planned yesterday. Mom had to wait for an important phone call. Perhaps, we'll go on Wednesday, though she did say she had a lot to do. Perhaps, we'll start next week when things are calmer.

They said it was supposed to rain. First, at five, then at seven, but it didn't. Fortunately, it's still warm, but tomorrow is supposed to reach only sixty-eight, so I'm not thrilled about that. But I think it's supposed to warm again later this week, which is good.

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Dan Da Dan

Entry tags:

Sympathy for the Devil

Watch on YouTube

As many of you know, there is another woman in Texas with my exact birthdate and name (what ARE the chances) with my same illnesses and for years United Health care had her on MY insurance and did jack shit. And in 2021 when I fell I found out there was a medicare supplement attached to my name (so I knew Other Dana was on SSI) I have fought this for the last 4 years.

So today, I had to call Riverside Hospital because they billed my Blue Cross insurance from 2 years ago. I get them and she says 'oh yes we saw we made a mistake. We've resubmitted it to your EverCare insurance.'

I'm like that is a medicare supplement. I DO NOT HAVE this insurance.

Riverside - oh...really?

Me - really.

I give them my real insurance and ask for the Evercare number. She gives me United Health Care (who owns EverCare) phone number and I'm like thanks but I meant the member number because half the time you call you can't get through the automated system without it.

So I call United Health care and explain why I'm calling. She says 'I have never heard of this. Let me get you to someone better.' She does and I explain it again and say this is messing up MY insurance and Other Dana's too since they keep calling ME.'

She is appropriately horrified and instead of saying I'll look into it and hanging up she says, stay on this line. I'm calling my supervisor. I agree (I have tuesday mornings off) They come back and say 'we can't take your phone number off this account because you're not the actual member BUT will you wait while we call Other Dana?' Fuck yeah I will.

At the end of this not only is my phone number off (and this is what we get for only using phone numbers/birthdays these days) the damn insurance I have the phone number and the name of Other Dana's caregiver at his request so if it gets fucked up again (which it could because again we have the exact same name and birthdate) I can call him and tell him because Other Dana keeps getting denied stuff because they call ME and I tell them I'm not in Texas.

But at the end of this I have a lot of sympathy for Other Dana in spite of all the years of drama because in spite of being the same age with the same illnesses, I'm not in need of a caretaker (my smart ass friends asked 'are you sure?') I don't need home health. She is very obviously incredibly ill and I feel bad about that.

Fannish 50 time.

I wish I had friends in Japan still. Because OMG, Hazbin Hotel is getting its own Maid Cafe in Osaka for a few weeks and there is SO MUCH merch for this both maid cafe merch and kimono merch. And it doesn't look like it'll be available anywhere else. Argh. I would kill for any of it (but especially Husk/Angel in the kimonos)

I admit it, I am into collecting bullshit I don't need but desperately want (in fact today, looking for a lost lab experiment I found a bag of The Crow cards from the 90s movie. I didn't remember I had them and I have NO idea what the hell they're doing at work). If I had room I'd have a room that was nothing but collectibles on display (I have enough of them) Heck my parents have a room like that so I come by it honestly.

If you want to see the merch here are some links

the announcement

her and her twin are high energy but I like this look at the merch

Come On, Angel dressed as an Oidon That is too perfect (no Dana, you aren't writing an AU for this)

Postcard of the Day

This one's not terribly upsetting, but I'll put it( behind this cut. )

And White People Week continues here on PotD.

weekend

Saturday was nice in the morning, so I did some yard and garden work. In the afternoon, we went out to Raised Grain in Waukesha for their tenth anniversary party. Wasn't planning on staying for a long time, but... we did. Cindy seemed to be not hating being with my friends, and periodically it was time for more beer, so we got more beer. There was a barbecue stand set up, so when the guys went to get some, we were like, should we have barbecue? We didn't really have a better option for dinner, so yes. We had four beers in four hours, but it turns out that was kind of a lot.

I'd planned on staying in on Sunday because the forecast called for rain all day, but it turned out not to rain at all, so I spent more time out there. I went and got flu and Covid shots. My arm hurt, so I really wasn't up for doing more yard work after that, though I did go for a little hike at the lake shortly after that. Didn't really accomplish much that day.

Today it was back to work. I would have gone into the office but I was feeling kind of crappy after the vaccinations.

I have a couple of big tasks to complete soon, and not much time to do them in. Can I get them done tomorrow evening?

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Signs of a Psychopath

Entry tags:

festivals,
music

Happy Equinox

It's Mabon here in the north. It's my favorite time of year. It was not off to a good start today but you know what? It's all just minor work stuff and it'll work itself out.

I don't understand what Rybelsus did to me but ever since I took it just for those 3 days (and it took another 3 to recover) it seemed to reset me. My diabetes is doing good, blood sugar down to normal levels. I know it won't last and it makes me sad I couldn't deal with the side effects. It would be nice not to have to worry about all the damage done from the high sugars.

Had the authors' zoom tonight. It was a short one but that's okay because storms were raging around and I got a lot of words and I finished my second

wipbigbang which is great. Now to get moving on other things. Too much to do.

And I got a request for my bio and buy links from the cryptid anthology I'm in. Finally. Still no release date.

So Mothman festival (pictures like all my pictures coming eventually). Last year I went on Saturday but my friend TH wanted to come with me this year and he couldn't go until Sunday. You know what, SO much better. On Saturday even getting there are 830 (it starts at 10) there was NO parking. Had to park blocks away (for some reason I wish I knew why, pre covid we had to park 2.5 miles in Krodel park but there were buses to the fest, now you still have to park there and WALK to town. No way)

But since Sunday had no 5K mothrun we got to park in the handicapped lot (which I doubt anyone knew existed because very few others asked the boys to move the blockage and let them in. I'm not shy about that). Last year everything was open before 10 (thank you racers) but yesterday no one was expect Silver Bridge coffee (my local favorite brand) I got caught and me and TH sat at a sidewalk table talking until things opened.

It was cool then (ended up around 90 by noon though) We left before 1 and the talks started but let's face it, I'm getting old and TH is several years older than me and it was getting hot. How many Bigfoot talks can we go to?!? We dipped out on that.

So it was a nice few hours of shopping around (and me showing him the new stores because he's a homebody and didn't even know about these stores) It's good. The town is recovering a little and it's great to see and for perspective, Point Pleasant has about 4,000 people. The festival had nearly 40K. Yeah.

Did I get much? No, oddly enough not as much as I usually do but again how much more crap do I need? I got some pins from the guy with popculture stuff, a couple fridge magnets, one book on creepy florida (ha, didn't expect that!) and two more cds from Nox Arcana whom I love. And some more infused maple syrup from the sellers I buy from every year.

I ran into a former student and we'll hopefully by hiring her on as part of the wellness committee to teach yoga.

Lunch was special...bad special, delicious but bad from coal miner diner, a hot dog with cheese, bacon, fried pickles and slaw. I felt SO much better after that and that caused me concern. I think my BP has been low (another sign I might have a slow bleed ulcer) I mean think of all the salt in that. It made me feel good so it raised my pressure up.

I saw storm troopers, ghost busters, men in black, mothmen, the hodag (another cryptid I lived in his town) and the hot new cryptid this year was the Squonk! That's right, the one I was going to his festival in July but had to house sit. He's also in the other cryptid story I wrote that I'm still waiting to hear (I hope they're not one of those we're never telling you you didn't get in) I didn't buy any squonk stuff. Maybe next year if my story gets taken in.

TH is looking at me like I'm crazy because I'm like hey Vendor, saw you at the Kecksburg fest, yo how was the bigfoot fest. No, not crazy but I am deeply weird.

It's just a free for all Music Monday share whatever makes your weird little heart happy. I'll go first.

For Mabon -

Watch on YouTube

and here's the album I bought

Watch on YouTube