Plant: Collage: Original: Aberglasney Gardens - Magnolias & Camellias
Mar. 18th, 2026 07:35 pmFandom: Original
Rating: G
Length: Collage of 9 photos
Summary: We visited Aberglasney Gardens in Wales on Monday, and the magnolias and camellias were blooming
"Everything was always irie"
Mar. 18th, 2026 02:56 pmEd Pottinger's death is very sad news. Until mobility issues intervened, spouse and I were regular customers at The Real Jerk ever since its very first incarnation (a storefront on the north side of Queen near Greenwood) back in the 1980s. We were so happy when the restaurant relocated to Queen and Broadview because it was closer to work and thus an easier destination for takeout for both staff and clients. I really hope the restaurant (now even closer to the old studio, at Carlaw and Gerrard) continues to flourish.
Kebab shop
Mar. 18th, 2026 04:50 pmThis week's theme was: K is for Kebabs
I have to admit I've never eaten a kebab, but this shop is popular and though it looks a little shabby on the outside, it has a hygiene rating of 5, which is the highest possible.
According to the menu, they also do pizzas and burgers.

In other news...
It was the usual Welsh chat group meeting in the cafe. We have some new members who we are nurturing. They're not as advanced as the core group, but I think they're enjoying the chance to practice speaking outside their Welsh classes.
The weather has turned suddenly warm. I have had to shed a layer of clothing and turn the heater off in my study. I also heard the sound of a lawn mower this afternoon. I doubt the fine weather will last for long. We could be back to near-freezing temperatures in a week's time, but it is lovely to feel the warmth of the sun for a change.
Wednesday saw a HERON standing in the eco-pond!!!!
Mar. 18th, 2026 04:21 pmWhat I read
Finished Victoria's Secret - still slightly meh about it - could possibly have engaged a bit with a longer history of 'Monarch has favourite/s who are not Quite Our Sort', even if historically the gender issues in play here were different??? Also had a bit of feeling that QV was not entirely NOT treating John Brown in the light of A Very Large Faithful Dog devoted to her to which she was also devoted and which she insisted on imposing upon people who hated dogs.... Thought it was good on her awful childhood, though.
Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (2024) - telling stories about women telling stories, i.e. the precieuses at the time of Louis XIV, the stories they were telling and their stories and how those reflected one another.
Susan Ertz, Woman Alive (1935), my attention having been drawn towards it by a mention of its having been republished. I have a copy of the first edition, Ertz being one of the early C20th middlebrow women novelists in whom I have had an interest going back decades, but not sure whether I ever actually read this. It is sf Of The Period, in which someone is cast forward into The Future by sciento-psychic means, this is his account. And okay, is not (unlike a cluster from around the same time) about the dystopic crushing iron heel of fascistic misogyny, is about the dysoptic outcome of a war in which germ warfare has killed all the women. Except one who has survived courtesy of mad scientist neighbour's experimental process.
Points for her being a young women of education, character, and something of a backstory conveying a certain cynicism, but she still concedes to the agenda of marrying and going forth and having babbyz, though I think everyone is a bit optimistic that she will pop out multiple daughters and even so, we do not think this will Save Humanity. (Also, no-one seems to suggest she should have Plurality of Mates, surely that would be advisable?) But then it just stops with our narrator pinging back to his present day.
Most recent Literary Review
Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which I really enjoyed and am now looking out for more of hers - think I have copies of some somewhere?
Robert Barnard, Death of a Literary Widow (1979)- everybody in it is a bit of a caricature, not just the American academic.
Emily Tesh, The Incandescent (2025), because I have been hearing well of it. Pretty good, but is it just having Read A Lot that made one character look like a honking parade of red flags?
On the go
I think I am actually giving up on I Am A Woman, I don't think Being A Sad Lesbian is enough to provide a rounded character? Maybe it gets better?
Nibbling at various things. Realise that it is 2 weeks to next Pilgrimage discussion and I do not want to read Honeycomb too far in advance.
Up next
No idea.
voluntary constraint of choice: a rediscovery
Mar. 18th, 2026 04:38 pmIn mid-February I got fed up of all the half-read things in my ebook reader, so I went through and tagged a bunch of them - things I wanted to read, things I meant to get around to, etc - in a special collection, and then said "OK now you can only read things from this collection". I started out with 25 books, but added a few more either because a) they were new Dick Francis books that I wanted to read (2 books), or b) they were for a book group meeting that I had suddenly realised was approaching (2 books). Since then I have read only one ebook not in that collection (another book group! but a chapter-by-chapter one, so I don't want to read the whole thing yet), one paper book (oh look for a different book group), and a few chapters of other paper books, and the collection is down to 12.
It's actually been tremendously productive as an approach ( rambling about my reading habits )
In conclusion, it's been great for my reading but terrible for my booklog, which is sadly behind even though I've been working on it reasonably regularly.
I Wish I Were the Moon (2008/2022)
Mar. 18th, 2026 11:44 am
Coming to it now, my strongest impression is that it doesn't demonstrate anything about art, but it does demonstrate (yet again) that I am extremely aromantic. The game is supposed to be a representation of a love triangle; I do know that. But it makes my brain do the thing that it's been doing my entire life, which is to interpret romantic scenarios that I don't understand as anything other than what they are intended to be. (My brain does this especially with songs, which tend to be worded vaguely enough that it's easy to do. This breakup song could be about a friendship turning sour! This passionate love ballad could be about any kind of love and it doesn't even have to be about a person! It could be about a city or a fandom or a celestial body!!)
So what is the moon in this game? It's something the man loves which is separating him from the woman in the rowboat. Who says it has to be a person? It could be his career or his faith or his family or just about anything! I guess you could argue that one of the essential qualities of art is that it's open to interpretation, but let's not and say we did.
The 2008 version of I Wish I Were the Moon is playable in a Flash emulator here. In 2022 the developer also offered a free remaster on his itch.io page here, but I have to say I think it lacks some of the charm of the original.
(no subject)
Mar. 18th, 2026 10:20 amI’m a 21-year-old college student living in a house with five other students. There are three women and three men. We’re having an issue keeping our kitchen clean, and I am the only one who consistently cleans. I keep the floors and counters clean, wash the piles of dishes in the sink, wash dish towels, etc. Anytime I’ve asked people to chip in, they never follow through. I’ve tried not doing the cleaning, but then the kitchen gets disgusting and I end up caving.
I’m not completely innocent when it comes to not always washing my dishes immediately and being messy, but I feel like I clean more often than anyone else. A general chore chart doesn’t work, and I am tired of feeling like my roommate’s mother. How can I get them to take some initiative and do more of the heavy lifting that always falls on me?
—Not a Mother to Five at 21
( Read more... )
“like a wire on a spool i keep on unrolling / a single thread that seems to unwind and unwind”
Mar. 18th, 2026 07:09 amFunk covers of Linkin Park hits. The happy kind of funk. (via YT sidebar)
Tiny Puppet Sound spins up a 1-hour set of French house in a Korean workplace breakroom. Puppet DJ = joy. (via)
Tycho’s Burning Man sunrise mix for 2025: Joie de Vivre. Hopeful like the sunrise. (via following Tycho)
(Meanwhile, I’m glad to see that Krill Waves Radio is still putting out the chill.)
---L.
Subject quote from Been Undone, Peter Gabriel.
A handful of random One Piece Live Action thoughts ...
Mar. 18th, 2026 01:32 amOne thing that I was thinking about is the sheer challenge of costuming this show, because most of the costumes are directly patterned after their manga/anime looks. So whereas most of the time in most shows, you can probably source the characters' everyday wear from basic mass-produced clothes or even vintage or secondhand shops, aside from really specific superhero costumes or whatever, this is more like a historical production in that everything has to be made from scratch. (Only, if possible, worse, because unless you're doing an unusual time period, normally you could probably go to the warehouses of Elizabethan or Regency costumes or Roman togas that no doubt exist.)
Here, even the relatively normal clothes are directly echoing something specific, like the patterns on
season 2 character's
Tashigi'sanother season 2 character's
Miss Valentine's lemon-patternedAnyway, it's just interesting to think about. Even the simplest costumes are more complicated than they seem, because it's not just an unusual shirt that the costume people found at a vintage shop; they're having to explicitly pattern-match or color-match or style-match items from the manga and anime.
( More specific spoilers about characters' fighting skills )
Babylon 5 fic: Green Growing Things
Mar. 17th, 2026 10:38 pmGreen Growing Things (Londo & G'Kar, 2800 wds)
It is post-canon, and there are gardens.
( Fic also posted under the cut )
( Bonus extras from Tumblr )
current reading
Mar. 17th, 2026 09:38 pmI'm only in ch. 3, I don't care currently whether books stick the landing (though I like this one so far), and ch. 2 is great for its tender forthrightness: when a kid (even a thirtysomething adult, like Kausar's daughter) is used to seeing a parent in a certain way, that's how the two are paused, unless the child makes an effort to grow a bit more. It's not something that the parent can shift solo.
