Online Event
Jul. 29th, 2025 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marthawellsTomorrow (Wednesday the 30th) Summer of Science Fiction & Fantasy: Martha Wells in conversation with Kate Elliott
July 30 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm PT Register at this link:
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/summer-of-science-fiction-fantasy-martha-wells-in-conversation-with-kate-elliott/
July 30 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm PT Register at this link:
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/summer-of-science-fiction-fantasy-martha-wells-in-conversation-with-kate-elliott/
Weekly proof of life: media intake and summer deliciousness
Jul. 27th, 2025 05:00 pmumadoshiReading: I finished both of the non-fiction titles I was reading in last week's roundup. I'd somehow thought Burn It Down would shine a spotlight more strongly on more specific shows than it did, but it was an interesting read nonetheless, if mostly grimly unsurprising.
scruloose and I are now maybe two-thirds through the All Systems Red audiobook.
Other than that, I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, which went on sale in ebook right after I heard it mentioned by a couple of different people. (It may still be on sale! Worth checking!) It was a really good read that surprised me quite a few times via some great redirects. The main downside is that it's very recent and is the first of a...trilogy, I think? Hope I'll be able to remember what happened in this book, because it was a LOT. (Also, I assume this was a deliberate style choice, but it's rather a cascade of comma splices.)
I've just barely started Sky on Fire, E.K. Johnston's second book of the summer. In the leadup to its release I repeatedly forgot and was reminded that it's a sequel to Aetherbound, which I read when it came out in 2021. In this case my memory is a bit fuzzy on what came before, but this book is set a fair bit later and (I think) recapped the major plot outcomes from Aetherbound, so here's hoping I do okay! ^_^ (A definite downside to ebooks--if I had a hard copy I could pretty easily flip through it, but I find that a huge pain with ebooks, and between that and how infrequently I reread anything, sequels can be tricky for me. >.<)
Watching: Minimal.scruloose and I watched episode 1 of the The Summer Hikaru Died anime, which is only a few episodes along so far. I know almost nothing about the manga (and don't know how long [this season of?] the anime is expected to be or how faithful it is so far), but ep. 1 seemed like a good start.
Cooking/Baking: Berries continue to be gloriously available, and I hear the first early peaches have been glimpsed in at least one of the local-produce stores. (It's so lovely to have several of those!) We once again made it to the corner market and came home with raspberries, blueberries, and cherries; strawberries are still around, and I enjoy them, but I don't love them the way I love raspberries and I find them harder than blueberries to eat quickly enough.
Mid-week we made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake to use up a whole heap of strawberries and froze most of the cake (*ritual but intensely heartfelt grumble about needing to eke it out in the name of sugar intake etc.*); the slices we took out to thaw this afternoon are the first previously-frozen ones, so we'll see how it does with this treatment.
Planning: It's been a good chunk of time since the last time we both took the day off to run errands on a weekday, so we're planning to do that in a couple of days. Apparently the day we've chosen is going to be a scorcher (which is a bit awkward since, while we've booked a car for the erranding, AC in vehicles usually nauseates me pretty badly but will be necessary so we don't completely melt. Here's hoping proactive gravol does the trick). (Could we do it another day? Well...yes. But the core inspiration for doing it at all is that there's a local ice creamery that does weekly feature flavors and has legendary lineups, and I've never actually had their ice cream and this week's flavor is lemon. Hopefully going midday on a weekday will mean the line isn't too horrendous when we go on lemon's final day in rotation.)
scruloose and I are now maybe two-thirds through the All Systems Red audiobook.Other than that, I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, which went on sale in ebook right after I heard it mentioned by a couple of different people. (It may still be on sale! Worth checking!) It was a really good read that surprised me quite a few times via some great redirects. The main downside is that it's very recent and is the first of a...trilogy, I think? Hope I'll be able to remember what happened in this book, because it was a LOT. (Also, I assume this was a deliberate style choice, but it's rather a cascade of comma splices.)
I've just barely started Sky on Fire, E.K. Johnston's second book of the summer. In the leadup to its release I repeatedly forgot and was reminded that it's a sequel to Aetherbound, which I read when it came out in 2021. In this case my memory is a bit fuzzy on what came before, but this book is set a fair bit later and (I think) recapped the major plot outcomes from Aetherbound, so here's hoping I do okay! ^_^ (A definite downside to ebooks--if I had a hard copy I could pretty easily flip through it, but I find that a huge pain with ebooks, and between that and how infrequently I reread anything, sequels can be tricky for me. >.<)
Watching: Minimal.
scruloose and I watched episode 1 of the The Summer Hikaru Died anime, which is only a few episodes along so far. I know almost nothing about the manga (and don't know how long [this season of?] the anime is expected to be or how faithful it is so far), but ep. 1 seemed like a good start.Cooking/Baking: Berries continue to be gloriously available, and I hear the first early peaches have been glimpsed in at least one of the local-produce stores. (It's so lovely to have several of those!) We once again made it to the corner market and came home with raspberries, blueberries, and cherries; strawberries are still around, and I enjoy them, but I don't love them the way I love raspberries and I find them harder than blueberries to eat quickly enough.
Mid-week we made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake to use up a whole heap of strawberries and froze most of the cake (*ritual but intensely heartfelt grumble about needing to eke it out in the name of sugar intake etc.*); the slices we took out to thaw this afternoon are the first previously-frozen ones, so we'll see how it does with this treatment.
Planning: It's been a good chunk of time since the last time we both took the day off to run errands on a weekday, so we're planning to do that in a couple of days. Apparently the day we've chosen is going to be a scorcher (which is a bit awkward since, while we've booked a car for the erranding, AC in vehicles usually nauseates me pretty badly but will be necessary so we don't completely melt. Here's hoping proactive gravol does the trick). (Could we do it another day? Well...yes. But the core inspiration for doing it at all is that there's a local ice creamery that does weekly feature flavors and has legendary lineups, and I've never actually had their ice cream and this week's flavor is lemon. Hopefully going midday on a weekday will mean the line isn't too horrendous when we go on lemon's final day in rotation.)
umadoshiReading: Mostly non-fiction last week, oddly. Still slowly reading through An Everlasting Meal, as well as flipping through a couple of new cookbooks in hard copy*. I also started reading Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.
As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! Butscruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)
*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.
Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)
(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)
Cooking/Baking: Mid-week,scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Blueberry Strawberry Breakfast Cake. It was tasty enough, but not so tasty that I immediately understood why it's one of the two most popular recipes on the site; that said, in addition to swapping the berries, we didn't have fresh lemon zest on hand and used the granulated peel from Silk Road (and also, my impression is that while blueberry and lemon are an iconic flavor pairing, that's not true of strawberry and lemon) and did the vinegar-in-milk substitution for buttermilk. So who knows.
Yesterdayscruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.
As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! But
scruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.
Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)
(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)
Cooking/Baking: Mid-week,
scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Yesterday
scruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.
Z1L movie-release news | An etrike update I may not have mentioned | Weather
Jul. 18th, 2025 01:26 pmumadoshiOn Bluesky, Wenella reports that "Dongjj Rescue, starring Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni, and Leo Wu, will be released in the US on Aug 22, 2025. The film will be released in mainland China on Aug 8." Time to start haunting the Cineplex site in hopes of Canadian showtimes!
I took today off in hopes of getting a bit more sleep (done, although not an impressive amount) and actually starting in on my next manga rewrite. I have just over a couple of hours before I need to venture out, so...we'll see how the latter goes in practice.
I can't remember if I've mentioned here that almost two months ago, I concluded that I'm going to sell my poor basically-unused etrike. ( In case I haven't, here's the gist )
Anyway, this comes to mind because for once I have a little venture that would, in fact, be perfect for taking the trike if I were at all in the habit of/comfortable with using it. Ah, well.
In related news, at least we're not under a heat warning anymore, unlike the last few days. (It's still currently 22°C and humid as hell, resulting in a 30°C humidex, and it's supposed to be a couple degrees warmer later this afternoon. But it's still an improvement.)
I took today off in hopes of getting a bit more sleep (done, although not an impressive amount) and actually starting in on my next manga rewrite. I have just over a couple of hours before I need to venture out, so...we'll see how the latter goes in practice.
I can't remember if I've mentioned here that almost two months ago, I concluded that I'm going to sell my poor basically-unused etrike. ( In case I haven't, here's the gist )
Anyway, this comes to mind because for once I have a little venture that would, in fact, be perfect for taking the trike if I were at all in the habit of/comfortable with using it. Ah, well.
In related news, at least we're not under a heat warning anymore, unlike the last few days. (It's still currently 22°C and humid as hell, resulting in a 30°C humidex, and it's supposed to be a couple degrees warmer later this afternoon. But it's still an improvement.)
