macapps | Member Posts

I know, two baking entries in a row, but I really do need to write down my riffs and recipes when I make them so that I actually remember what I did! Especially when I use up the tail end of things I don't always keep in stock. So playing a little bit of catch-up here.

For choir baking this week, I started with Nik Sharma's Spicy Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies, and King Arthur's recommendations for making drop cookies into bars.

( the process of riffage )

( spicy hazelnut ginger bars )

*

I also made Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Toffee Cookies for the first time in awhile.

( everything is riffs )

( chocolate toffee cookies, modernized )

*

I had a glut of carrots, so I tweaked Serious Eats' Brazilian Carrot Cake recipe to fit a 9x9 pan.

( riff notes )

( carrot cake in a blender )

*

Cramming one last recipe riff in here while I'm thinking about it: yet another choir bake, furikake marshmallow bars. Basically crispy rice cereal treats with added furikake, black sesame, and a little sesame oil.

( furikake marshmallow bars )

Current Mood: hungry

the_shoshanna

We're getting our first snow today! Possibly a lot of it, too; the forecast is for more than fourteen cm with high winds and a risk of freezing rain and ice pellets, and they add that they're still not sure of the exact track of the storm. And we haven't put the winter tires on yet.

So I'm getting Geoff to drop me at church, since it's not bad out yet (I hope), and I'll walk home. He'd rather I just took the car, since he thinks it's safer to be in a car than walking, but I feel safer walking than driving, and I'm the one doing it, so I win. I'm not looking forward to the walk, except that in a weird way I am, because it will be a challenge? I hate being cold, I'm already feeling the winter slug blahs setting in (and I've been using my SAD light for a few weeks), but it will feel good to have done it and come home to a warm drink. Also I am bundling up as though it were minus twenty, so what I'll do when it actually is minus twenty I do not know.

ETA: well, it's dusk and there's been zero accumulation today, a light dusting of snow on grasses but nothing on asphalt. But it was hard-hailing tiny painful bits of ice the whole time I was walking home, like needles in my face, and footing was iffy; the local-traffic-and-safety Bluesky account has reported fourteen car accidents in the metro area this afternoon. So I'm glad I walked home. And I'm also glad that Geoff put the kettle on for me as I came inside, and that we had excellent sourdough to toast up to go with my tea.

the_shoshanna

Last night Geoff and I went to see Cheyenne Rouleau's one-woman show "Fat Joke," which is a hilarious and absolutely wrenching ninety-minute monologue on fatphobia and a whole lot of other things along the way. If this is the kind of thing you think you might like, her tour is going to British Columbia this spring, but you can also watch a taped performance at https://digitalstage.ca/fat-joke/. (Do pay attention to the content notes, and be aware that missing from that list is discussion of traumatic and near-fatal pregnancy complications.)

I feel so glad that I now live in a place where a) shows like this run, and b) I can comfortably get to them! (Also that I'm partnered with a guy who finds riffs on White Man Math funny and painfully true rather than offensive.)

Highly recommended.

vaxhacker

TODAY’S Friday Five was originally suggested by newagebastard. Transcribed into the annals of the thefridayfive by anais_pf, and of course brought to you by the letter X and the number π.

What’s harder to live without, chocolate or alcohol?
That’s easy: chocolate. For me, it may be easier than for others because I don’t drink alcohol so it’s not much of a choice but I think even if I did, chocolate would still be the answer.
Chocolate is always the answer.
Does the colour yellow remind you of anything?
Schoolbuses, the bulldozers in the opening chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a random memory of Kindergarten or 1st Grade when they were teaching us to read color words, and the number 4 (or 10⁴) when printed on resistors.
Who most annoyed you last week?
Myself, when I wasn’t doing the greatest job of prioritizing my tasks efficiently.
Do you have a cutesy romantic nickname for your partner (or previous partners)?
Not so much, other than the usual terms of endearment. But a nickname like “Angel Princess” or “Buttercup” or anything that could also be the name of a My Little Pony character hasn’t really been our style.
What is your favourite Stephen King movie?
Probably The Shining. Creepy and scary and my first introduction to how well Jack Nicholson can portray evil craziness.

The word “yellow” wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with. Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.
—Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Current Mood: amused

vaxhacker

AMONG my various hobbies is perhaps one of the more unusual ways I spend my time: I’m an amateur¹ game show host. Mostly, if I were to be really honest, for the love of putting together the electronics for the buttons and scoreboards and such, and writing the software that goes into presenting the game to the players and audience. But it’s also enjoyable to set it all up and run people through games at fun events.

So far, I’ve run a few for the Cub Scout pack I used to be in charge of, a bunch more for various church and school events, a number of them for work training and team-building events. And most recently, a sort of “hacker jeopardy” type of game for a local security conference.

Security conferences are interesting places to hang around. There’s lots of good information about keeping yourself and your systems safe, presented by people who wear the white hats as well as the black hats, metaphorically speaking. (And I have heard a few BTS conversations that sounded like “Have you seen the speaker for the next session?” “Um, I think the feds just found them first and took them away.”)

I started out with my own game format that popped up random categories of questions as the players chose them and gave their answers. That developed into something more like the fairly standard grid of topics along the top and point values on the vertical axis, sort of like Jeopardy! but different—we’re playing our own question-and-answer game, not just copying them.²

I haven’t been able to run my game at the conference for the last couple of years, which has disappointed me. Even though I don’t really have much spare time (certainly not enough to finish the new electronic scoreboards I have been working on), I really wanted to take a little break from my research for a couple of hours to run it this year.

This year we tried making a little twist, inspired by the online game show Um, Actually. I thought it might make it easier to answer the more obscure questions and overall make the game a little fresher and more interesting. Instead of asking questions where the contestants have to come up with a correct answer, we rephrased them into statements of fact that just contained a flaw. The players had to buzz in and correct whatever was wrong with the statement. (We did keep the rule from previous years which let players force each other to answer hard questions and steal points from each other.) This turned out to work really well and made the game a lot more fun.

A few of my favorite questions that came up:

(The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.
(CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosopher's Problem in Computer Science.
(Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.
(Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.
(Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.
(Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.
(CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)³
(CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.
(Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).
(– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.

“You know, you don’t act like a scientist. You’re morelike a game show host.”
—Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver)
Ghostbusters

__________
¹Or “pre-successful professional amateur game show host” as Jason Mendoza might have said.
²I have done a few that riffed on popular games people have wanted to try, including one where we let parents test their mettle to see if they’re smarter than their Cub Scouts/elementary school students, another that ran through a stack of questions hoping to get to 1,000,000 points before losing it all on an incorrect answer, still another about weak links, and what turned out to be a very popular one where two teams feud against each other to guess popular answers to survey questions.
³In a very meta moment, this question contained a “flag” number for a Capture the Flag game going on at the conference at the time.

Current Mood: amused

branchandroot

So, it's November, which means it's time for the kick-off of this year's annual Battle of the Downtown Illuminations.

This used to be pretty straightforward, you know. A few blocks of Main St. had beautiful clouds of lights in the trees, and these would be turned on as soon as DST kicked in, that being the start of Michigan's "we need some light in here" season, which hits a measly 6 hours of daylight in midwinter. They stayed on all night, so they heartened morning commuters, too. They'd stay on through February and then be turned off in March, when things started to melt and we all had the olfactory cue that yes, the ice will retreat.

And then Ann Arbor, in their infinite and sometimes performatively crunchy wisdom, passed a city ordinance to reduce light pollution. Street lights should be pointed downwards, and exterior lighting should be turned off between midnight and 6am. Oh, and also holiday lights could only be on for 90 consecutive days.

For the most part, this did absolute bupkiss for light pollution, because the UofM campus is exempt, and the stadium alone casts light fog for a good mile or two. But it did immediately kick off the Battle of the Downtown Illuminations. Try to take away the most joy-giving light display in the city, will you? We'll just see about that.

First, Main St. storefronts put up much more elaborate window lights. Which was indoor lighting, not exterior displays!

Then they started stringing lights over the sidewalk, under cover of outdoor seating. Not holiday displays, this is _obviously_ functional lighting.

Then the tree lights started expanding. 90 days, sure, fine, in that case let's really get our lumens in! Up Liberty they went, and then up Washington. Across State and several more blocks down either end of Main.

This year, in a crowning moment of Midwest passive-aggression and rules lawyering, not only are there lighted garlands on the lamp posts as of November 1st, but (get this) HALF of the street tree lights are on. I strongly suspect that, when December arrives, it will be both halves, and then when February arrives, it will be the OTHER half. So none of the trees will be lit for more than 90 days!

Where there's a will, there's a way.

So I am taking up my regular weekly dinners downtown, to take in the winter lights and delight in the spiteful ingenuity of Main St.

vaxhacker

Image: A sign posted near every high roof at my school campus, reading “There is hope. We are here to listen.” (With a phone number to call.)¹

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
—Emily Dickinson

__________
¹ I’m feeling a bit somber contemplating the necessity for signs like that to be put up around rooftops but at the same time heartened at the thought that someone took the effort to place them there and to set up a support line people can call if they’re feeling overwhelmed.*

*I know it’s “Wordless Wednesday” but I’m pretty sure footnotes don’t count as real words, right?

Current Mood: contemplative

vaxhacker

IN today’s episode of “Famous Scams of the Past,” we’ll take a look at an item that dominated the airwaves with ads years ago—The Phonics Game. (“What’s that?” I hear you asking, “You never had ‘episodes’ of any such thing, what’s going on?” A fair question. I don’t know, it’s just a turn of phrase to introduce the topic. But talking about scams and history can be fun, so who knows? I might do more in the future.)

Anyway, back in the mid-1990s Dr. Greg Cynaumon came out with this revolutionary new way to teach kids to read. He called it “The Phonics Game” and he claimed it was so amazing, so unprecedented and powerful, that if your child didn’t get a full letter-grade improvement on their next report card after using the game, you’d get your money back.

Pretty cool, right? Well, there was some controversy that came to life along with the excited interest from parents looking for anything to help their kids who were struggling with reading skills. (And considering the game’s creator also suffered the embarrassment of getting in legal hot water with the FTC for selling diet pills that didn’t quite live up to their advertising, controversy seems to follow his business ventures more than I’m sure he’d prefer.)

I seem to recall it getting to the point where it was—at least in the circles I inhabited—increasingly viewed by consumers as something of a scam product. I just filed it away as a curiosity until I had kids of my own who were having a tough time learning to read too, and it occurred to me to wonder if something like this game might be helpful, or if indeed it was a scam or money-making scheme more than an educational tool. So we bought a copy for our kids and took a look first-hand.

In my opinion, I came to the personal conclusion that it was a bit of both: a viable educational tool and a bit of a scam as well.

What was actually wrong with it, then? They had this fantastic money-back offer, how bad could it be? The answer to that is foreshadowed by its name. It teaches reading using the phonics method (itself the subject of some controversy, but for people of my generation, this is better known simply as “the way we were all taught to read as kids”). It’s basic, it’s simple, whether or not there’s a better teaching method, phonics has been proven to at least work well enough for a long time now. And for this product they turned it into a set of entertaining games to keep kids’ attention. So far, so good.

Gamification of teaching materials is nothing new and is also a time-honored approach (even for adult education), so nothing wrong with that. Does it actually work, though? In our experience, yes. Yes, it does. It actually seemed to work quite well, to be honest.

So what’s the scam part of this?

I think the only part of this that’s shady is the marketing and sales of the actual game. They hyped it up as some amazing new thing that would work like magic in your kids’ lives, and for that they charged a premium price—over $225 for the game (about $500 in 2025 dollars). But then what price can you put on pure magic that teaches your kids to read, after all?

I learned to read before I went to Kindergarten by using something more or less akin to phonics. For free. As wonderful as this game is, it should probably more reasonably have a price around 10% of what they were charging for it. They made a nice game around it but not that much more to justify that price tag.¹

A little corporate greed ruined an otherwise nice idea. Can’t say that was the fist, nor will it be the last time that’s happened in this world.

Together, we can assemble amazing words and astounding tales.
—Ollie Kayuro
Fairytale Clues: Magic-filled Stories That Slip English Grammar into the Heart

__________
¹We got our copy for a much more reasonable price on eBay from another family who had used it and wanted to pass it along to someone else at that point.

Current Mood: tired

the_shoshanna

I read thirteen books in October! (And DNFed two.) And three already in November.

Geoff and I are considering going to the Channel Islands on our next trip, so I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for research, like you do. It did a good job of really making me feel the location and community, and although for the most part it hit all the expected beats -- city girl ends up in small tight-knit rural community, you will be shocked to learn that she finds love and meaning there! -- it had some unexpectedly hard-hitting moments as well, and certainly didn't make me any less interested in going to Guernsey! Although I plan to bring my lover with me rather than finding one there, thanks anyway.

My local book group read This Is How You Lose the Time War, which took me a while to get into, because significant aspects of the worldbuilding aren't explained, you're just dropped into them; but I absolutely think that was the right way to write it, and once I found my feet I really liked it.

I DNFed The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved, because I thought I was in the mood for a horror novel but within fifty or so pages something so horrible happened that I was donezo, nope, nope nope nope, close file. It did seem to be well written, though; I expect it's a good book but it was way too much for me. So instead I read something called Fake Dating the Prince, which is exactly what it sounds like plus also gay, and it was delightful. The horror novel I read that was just my speed was Meddling Kids, which starts from the premise of "What if Scooby Doo but also Cthulhu?" and was a romp. But also horror. But also a romp. (The frontispiece is a reproduction of a 1977 local newspaper article about the protagonists' last case as teenagers: "Teen Sleuths Unmask Sleepy Lake Monster," and the town is Blyton Hills and the article is written by Nancy Hardy and the photo is credited to J. March and I'm not sure the author could have name-checked more teen classic lit if he'd tried for a week. I knew I was in good hands from that moment.)

In the category of fan writers gone pro, I really liked Freya Marske's Cinder House and loved Emily Tesh's The Incandescent. In the category of fan genres gone pro, not sure about the writers, I've been reading a bunch of hockey romance; I picked up a couple of Rachel Reid's one-shots and then got tired of waiting for a library copy of her Game Changers books (one of which is soon to be a Crave miniseries!) and bought an omnibus of the first three when it went on sale. I've read the first one and am about to start the second, on which the miniseries will be based. I heard somewhere that Reid commented somewhere that a PG-13 adaptation of the book would have to be, like, twelve minutes long, because there's so much sex in the book? Anyway I look forward to reading it 👀.

As for watching, I watched The Long Walk with

dorinda; I remembered being quite moved by the novel decades ago, but I hadn't even realized there was a movie until a couple of weeks ago! It was well made and wrenching and I'm glad I saw it but wow I am not making a general recommendation. Another friend and I watched the movie of What We Do in the Shadows; I enjoyed it and was surprised when I mentioned it to Geoff and he said he thought it was terrible! But my friend wants to go on to watch the TV show together. I'm not sure I'm up for that much casual killing of humans as light entertainment? (Despite the fact that she and I just finished watching Interview with the Vampire together. At least there it's not played for laughs as much.)

And season 10 of Shetland premieres in the UK today! I'm really looking forward to that. Also, looking further ahead, the Call the Midwife Christmas special and new season -- and I was absolutely thrilled to hear that they've announced a prequel series! The main show is getting awkwardly close to modern times, and I would love to see younger versions of the characters before and during the war.

Whee!

ETA: Oh, Rachel Reid. I'm not qualified to reality-check your hockey writing -- and let's be real, it's not like I'm reading you for the hockey -- but when you tell me that Montreal is an hour's drive from Ottawa? I have questions.

vaxhacker

THIS is a meme I’ve seen around here and there, offered as a fun way to introduce yourself to new readers, which seems about right as NaBloPoMo kicks off here. The idea is to pick 26 words that somehow describe you. Some of them may be a bit of a stretch since the letters that are worth more in Scrabble are harder to work into things like this.

A is for Aardvark, or more formally, the Aardvark Computing Society, the geekiest of the geek clubs in my high school. Legend has it that the name was chosen as a “hack” so they’d be listed first in the yearbook.
B is for board games. I have always had a love for playing interesting board games. “Interesting” in this sense tends to have a direct correlation to how many little pieces come in the box, and how many scores of pages the rule book is. Complexity can be fun! My current favorite is Return to Dark Tower, but there are many that have held my interest at this point.
C is for Computer Science, my field of expertise, what my degrees are in, and what I’m grateful every day that people actually pay me to do for a living, despite the fact I’d do it for fun anyway.
D is for D&D, a game I’ve enjoyed playing since I was a teenager. (Although technically we moved from D&D to Pathfinder a few years ago.)
E is for Eagle. I slid onto the plate with this one, finishing the requirements too close for comfort before my 18th birthday, but I’m glad now, looking back on it, that I put in the effort to get this rank while I was in Scouts. It proved to me that I was capable of doing something challenging and was something I encouraged my kids to reach for as well.
F is for family. One of the most important things in my life.
G is for The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a macabre little book by Edward Gorey that describes the unpleasant fates of 26 children in A-B-C style. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so forth.) I had a poster form of the book up in my apartment at college, just showing off my darker sense of humor, but it ended up creeping out my roommates too much, which was also amusing but I took pity on them and took it down.
H is for hovercraft. As a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus since I was a teenager, I made sure that as long as I was going to the trouble to learn another language, I had to learn how to say that iconic phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (Which, if you’re curious, is something like 我的氣墊船充滿了鱔魚—wǒde qìdiánchuàn chōngmǎn le shànyú.)
I is for ice storms, something we survived several winters when I was a kid. It usually amounted to a week without power sometime in January while the city was paralyzed with all the streets covered in a layer of ice.
J is for journal, this thing I’m writing in now, which has proven to be a great way to remember all the things that have happened in my life over the last few decades.
K is for Kermit, in tribute to how much I used to love the Muppets as a kid.
L is for labels. Our family started a tradition of using barcode labels instead of gift tags at Christmas, so the kids wouldn’t peek or open any gifts until Christmas Day (and more to the point, a reasonable time on Christmas Day) because they couldn’t tell which gifts were theirs until we unlocked the codes so they could scan them to find out.
M is for Magic: the Gathering, a great card game I’ve enjoyed. Also, an indicator of how geeky my wife and I are—we brought our Magic cards with us on our honeymoon and played a game or two in the card room on the cruise ship.
N is for nature, a place I like to occasionally go visit to relax and unwind.
O is for optimistic, something I tend to be, probably to a fault.
P is for programming, my favorite pastime.
Q is for quilts. A lot of my childhood memories involve my mom’s quilt frames set up in the living room as she worked on sewing one quilt after another.
R is for Ragnarok, the best Multi-User Dungeon game on the Internet. And where I met my wife, so it’s kind of special to us.
S is for Science Fiction, one of my favorite genres of fiction (along with Fantasy). Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lathe of Heaven, so many more, each with an interesting story to tell.
T is for Tolkien, who contributed so much to Fantasy literature and folklore that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.
U is for unusual. I love being unconventional in creative ways.
V is for volcano, something I live in the shadow of. A few volcanoes, actually. Never gave them much thought until the spring of 1980, when one we thought had been extinct decided to erupt and wipe out the summer camp we were planning to go to that year. And dumped volcanic ash all over us just to complete the bargain.
W is for whodunit. I don’t read mysteries often enough, but I enjoy trying to figure them out before the big reveal.
X is sort of for eXtreme programming, a novel new way of organizing the work of a team of programmers, invented by a friend of mine and his associates.
Y is for Yendor. I spent many hours earlier in my life in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor, the ultimate prize in the computer game Rogue.
Z is for zen. I don’t subscribe specifically to the discipline of that name, but the general appeal of finding my mental place of calm and focus is something I often feel, to recharge in the middle of the hectic chaos of my life.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
—Dr. Seuss
On Beyond Zebra

Current Mood: exhausted

ursamajor

sandboxdiva pinged me this weekend wanting to ensure that I'd seen the latest Binging with Babish episode since it focused on chocolate chip cookies, so of course I promptly had to sit down and watch it.

( Binging with Babish: 10 Levels of Chocolate Chip Cookies (embed) )

1. Did I pause the video to take note of exactly how fancy the ingredients were for the Level 8 cookies, ( yes I did. )

2. Did I also factcheck Babish on his assertion that "regular old homemade chocolate chip cookies probably cost like $6/batch to make," why yes I did. Come on, buddy, you're based in Brooklyn, groceries aren't cheaper there than in the Bay Area.

( How much does it cost to make a batch of Toll House cookies in November 2025? )

3. Am I doing all this to distract myself from all of the elections going down today? Of bloody course I am.

4. Is my version of the Guittard Super Chip cookie recipe still my go-to? Yes, because 72 hours is a long time to wait for cookies. Also, converted to weights, a higher ratio of brown sugar to white sugar, and no nuts.

5. What am I baking for choir tomorrow? Um. I should probably figure that out, shouldn't I. Of all the bougie things to have on hand, I actually currently have a glut of hazelnut flour that needs to get used up, and we do have some gluten-intolerant choir members, so I may end up with a flavor variant of these hazelnut chocolate chip cookies, probably converted to bar format, possibly with the spicing and inclusions changed up.

6. Reminder to self: you'll be in rehearsal tomorrow and will have to miss it, but Community Kitchens is doing trainings for home chef volunteers to cook meals for the Town Fridges in Oakland. Ping them to find out when the next training is.

7. Oh thank god, results are coming in for the major races and I don't know of any truly disasterrific results yet.

Current Mood: nervous
Current Music: cookie cookie cookie

vaxhacker

I have been holding onto this Friday Fiver for a couple of weeks, mostly just because I haven’t got around to posting anything for a while. But somehow it seems apropos enough to bring out here as I start NaBloPoMo and have the topic of online journaling on my mind.

As usual, this Friday Five is brought to you by the letter F and the number 5, courtesy of sumrsue79 and posted to thefridayfive by anais_pf.¹

How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?
I started my LiveJournal in October, 2003. This comes after a lifetime of growing up being taught that keeping a personal journal or diary is one of life’s highest virtues and something I was really strongly encouraged to do from an early age. The small stack of empty journals I was given as gifts over the years attests to how well that worked out. Having not had my ADHD diagnosed until much, much later in life may have been a factor, but generally speaking it was just very difficult for me to sit down and organize my thoughts in a permanent fashion like a pre-bound journal in ink. And when I did, I was paralyzed any time I missed writing anything because I couldn’t just carry on with a gap without completely and perfectly filling in all the missing bits first, so I could never catch up and thus every attempt was soon abandoned.
Fast forward to 2003. I’m allegedly a grown-up with a real life, job, marriage, pets, house, and as a father of young kids, I realized that there were a lot of memories, experiences, and thoughts going by that would be lost in the wind if I didn’t somehow manage to get myself to write them down along the way.
I found that a few of my friends were blogging on LiveJournal and on an impulsive whim I signed up, thinking I’d just post an occasional random thought here or there, but before I knew it I was full-on chronicling my life. Somehow I found the medium where that actually worked for me.
After a while, LJ was bought out by a company that changed the terms of service—including the concerning bit about everything posted there being subject to terms that were only available in Russian.² Plus, apparently it included something about how everything posted would be considered under Russian law as if posted by a media outlet with serious consequences if you said anything that in their view was controversial or restricted.
I didn’t sign up for any of that nonsense just to keep my personal journal, which isn’t a political media outlet at all, other than as a human being I have a few opinions about things. So along with a number of other LJ refugees, I moved my journal over to Dreamwidth, which is a nearly identical platform (technically) which still has the home-grown volunteer-effort feel to it.
How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?
I guess I already answered that in the previous question.
If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?
Yes, technically, but sadly times have changed. The crowds of people I used to follow and interact with between all our LJ and DW journals (and blogs on other sites as well) faded away as people were more drawn to quick sound bites on Facebook (etc.) over writing longer, more thoughtful discourse in the blogosphere.
So while the friends who were the ones who introduced me to LJ originally are still on my friends list, they’re not active there anymore (or on DW).
Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?
Yes, a few, mostly just in the same way I was introduced. In a casual conversation, something I wrote about in my blog would come up and I would suggest the idea of checking out blogs to them, or some similar way of introduction.
Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?
It started out friends-only because at the time my kids were still growing up and I was writing a lot about our family activities and life experiences, and just for the sake of due diligence of online safety, I didn’t want the entire universe unchecked access to all of that, so I managed access to those who asked first so at least there was some sense I knew who my audience was.
These days, now that those days are past us, I’ve opened up my journal to be mostly public and the content is more focused on more general life topics since I’m not raising kids anymore at this point in my life.

The bravest journey is the one within.
—Amanda Lee

__________
¹To play along, copy these questions to your journal/blog, answer them and post a link back as a comment in

thefridayfive.
²They provided an English translation for our convenience but didn’t guarantee anything about its accuracy in any legally-binding way, so we were still at the mercy of whatever the Russian text said.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: VKunia—Reaction video to The Princess Bride

vaxhacker

NOVEMBER. Already? November. It was just November a little bit ago. And with the start of the month of course comes the commencement of National Blog Posting Month, which helps me get motivated to write down a few more of my thoughts and experiences in this, my journal of my life’s thoughts and experiences.

Trouble is, there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to feel like I can justify the time to stop to write any of them down. And right now, I’m deep in the middle of work toward a deadlilne looming for my degree, so I can’t guarantee a post a day here, or that they will all be any kind of pithy or deep thought-provoking ideas but I’ll try to post something and maybe with luck a few bits of humor or interest will show up, purely by accident.

Your PhD is doing its best to grind you down. If you’re not careful, your PhD will take over your life.
—Maureen Lipman

Current Mood: busy

ursamajor

hyounpark pinged me from BART this morning with the sad news that Fugakyu is closing, after 27 years.

It feels like I've been going there forever, even though honestly the last time I went there was probably when we still lived in Boston. But I'm like 80% certain I've gone on dates there with all of my major boyfriends (if I dated you for at least a year, that's the defining line in my headcanon). A bazillion times with

hyounpark during our Boston era. Plenty of times with

noghri, both while we were dating and then when we became friends. I thought I'd brought

kallmir2000 there, but I double-checked and it was Ginza I was thinking of. (Which makes sense because Ginza was within walking distance of my old Fenway apartment). Where, admittedly, I'd also eaten sushi at with even more of the people I've dated, hahaha, including both Punsterboy and Choirboy! 😁 (Even though Ginza's been gone for well over a decade now.) And

theconvictor and I had our Valentines' Day 2000 dinner at Fugakyu when we spent the weekend in Boston on a romantic getaway from campus, feeling ever so grownup, removing our shoes to sit at one of the traditional low tables in the fancy embedded booths.

Fugakyu was even where I introduced multiple friends to sushi (

fes42,

jennifer,

david_grana, Adam); where my girlfriends took me after devastating breakups and meh second dates, because sushi would be followed up by ice cream at JP Licks, and then a visit to a certain little shop down the way (also long gone, alas; I'm hoping this recent rise in romance-specific bookstores brings an appropriate replacement to the neighborhood) because that was definitely better than moping over guys!

And now it's closing, for "personal reasons."

Damn, am I gonna miss their pinetato (pineapple and sweet potato) maki. And the kinuta. And the hotate hokkayaki. And the giant boats of sushi that I would split with my friends. I know where to get sushi; honestly I may just pop down to our neighborhood sushi joint before the trick-or-treaters start arriving. But mostly, finding out that Fugakyu is closing next week is just making me miss everyone in Boston. Even knowing that many of the friends I mentioned don't live there anymore, like us.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: you know it's not the same as it was

branchandroot

Many things continue to be awful, but it's peak color this week, and my bus ride is during sunrise, so I've gotten to have a color tour every morning and watch the sun slowly light up the trees so even the ones that are still green look gold.

It's an ember-colored fall this year, less bright than some because late summer was so dry, but the maples are still bringing the reds and oranges, the pears have turned deep burgundy, and the oaks are shading from yellow into copper and dark red. The oldest, strongest locust trees still have a hold of their golden leaves, and the young ginko trees that the city has started planting recently have all joined in, exuberantly gold from top to bottom. The sumac that lives in the roadside swales is a rich, dark red and the burning bush may be a sneaking invasive but it reliably turns rose red at this season. You can tell there was drought this year; many trees have scorched and curled leaves and can only turn dusky yellow or even brown. But there's still color, and it's still beautiful, and we're still here.

the_shoshanna

Geoff and I have been watching Red Dwarf, which neither of us have seen since the 80s. It's very . . . 80s, but we're very much enjoying it! We've almost finished the second series.

Last night I dreamed that Rimmer managed to fix a radiator on board the space ship, and decided that this achievement was so staggeringly, impossibly transhuman that he was clearly a superhero; showed up in a full-on supersuit complete with self-waving cape (no wind required); and announced that henceforward he should be addressed as "Captain Radiancy."

Then I woke up and found that it was three a.m. and yesterday's flu and COVID shots had me running the usual moderately significant fever.

I still think that Rimmer wanting to be called "Captain Radiancy" isn't out of character, though!

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