Rusalka's ramblings

This post contains all the tags I have used to tag my posts so far. Tomorrow, I shall post-date it so that it always sits on top of the journal. And I will edit it to add new tags as I create them. Let's see how well this works.

1. Made a big batch of linguine with meat sauce. That's dinner tonight and tomorrow taken care of.
2. Solved today's Wordle in three tries.
3. Walked 2 miles yesterday and another 2 today.
4. Made a duck!

I wanted to used up some of the bits and bobs of leftover yarn in my stash, so I poked around on Ravelry and found a really cute pattern for a plushie mallard duck. The original pattern didn't have feet, but after poking around some more I found another knitter who'd made it and added feet and left notes on how they did it, so I was able to follow. The final product is about life size and totally adorable.

Click on thumbnails for larger photos.



This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/673027.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

What I finished:
The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman.. The 8th book in the Invisible Library series, and while the author's note says there may be more eventually, it still works as a finale. There are major revelations about things that were only hinted at in earlier books, and a confrontation with The Shadowy Masterminds Behind it All (TM). I felt like Irene's survival and ultimate victory at the end felt a little hand-wavy, but not enough to really bother me. Oh, and Irene and Kai still aren't banging Vale, even though he keeps declaring his loyalty and demonstrating his competence and blithely following them into horribly dangerous situations that are technically none of his business. But at least everyone in my OT3 is alive and well and living in the same universe. I can live with that.

Don't know what I'm reading next. I have several cool-looking choices on hold in Libby, so I'll probably just go with whatever comes in first. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/672895.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

You guys, this is so awesome! My little yuletide story about talking yarns got made into a podfic:

[Podfic] Curses, foiled again (71 words) by caminante, Aliteralgarbageheap, GoLBPodfics, Rindle, irrationalpie, thesleepyskipper, ButterfliesInMyBrain, swankster, Aether
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Knitting (Anthropomorphic)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Yarn (Anthropomorphic), Malabrigo Sock Yarn (Anthropomorphic), Homespun Yarn (Anthropomorphic), Noro Kureyon Yarn (Anthropomorphic), Red Heart Super Saver Yarn (Anthropomorphic)
Additional Tags: Fluff, Crack, Fluff and Crack, Knitting, Attempt at Humor, Bickering yarns!, Holiday hijinks!, Podfic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes
Summary:

The residents of Yarn Stash Cabinet are concerned about their crafter’s holiday knitting plans.

The have different voices for all the characters, and cute cover art, and it's just too adorable for words. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/672680.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

Happy new year, everyone!

My wonderful Invisible Library OT3 story, A Lovely Beginning was written by the equally lovely impala_chick.

I wrote Curses, Foiled Again for bardicraven. I was sure, as I was writing the story, that no one except the recipient would care to read it. Instead, it became my most popular yuletide story ever. Apparently fandom has a large contingent of people who want to read about sentient yarn. Who knew?

Off to explore more of the archive now. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/672384.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

The one everyone else is doing.

1. Your main fandom of the year?
I don't think I really had one. My fannishness is kind of free-floating these days, bumping up against many canons but never really settling on one.

2. Your favourite film you watched this year?
Black Widow

3. Your favourite book read this year?
The Huntress by Kate Quinn.

4. Your favourite album or song to listen to this year?
"Therefore I am" by Billie Eilish

5. Your favourite TV show of the year?
Only Murders in the Building.

6. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Like a few other people in my circle, I was rather surprised to find myself liking The Wheel of Time. I bounced off the first book when it first came out, and never attempted the series since, but TV show is good silly fun.

7. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
Natasha is still dead. Grump.

8. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Giuseppe Dell'Anno can come bake for me any time!

9. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Uhm... can I have a threesome? I don't want to choose between Yelena Belova and Nina Markova.

10. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Kate and Yelena bantering over macaroni and cheese on Hawkeye.

11. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Marvel 616. I can't remember the last time they put out a comic I actually wanted to read, let alone feel fannish about.

12. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I might give Hawkeye a try, especially if Kate/Yelena becomes a thing. Or at least Kate & Yelena.

13. Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year?
Both the Invisible Library and Rivers of London have new installments scheduled to come out. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/672133.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

Happy holiday to everyone for whom this is a holiday.

My yuletide author wrote me a lovely Invisible Library Story with Irene, Kai and Vale (on their way to becoming Irene/Kai/Vale) reuniting after Book 1. It's got wonderful, wistful Vale POV, and group hugs and everyone being happy to see each other.

A Lovely Beginning (1161 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Invisible Library - Genevieve Cogman
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Irene/Kai/Peregrine Vale
Characters: Peregrine Vale, Irene (The Invisible Library), Kai (The Invisible Library)
Additional Tags: Pre-OT3, Pre-Relationship, Reunions
Summary:

Vale isn't sure if he is ever going to see Irene and Kai again, but then they break into his house and surprise him.

Makes me want to go and reread the whole series (which I should probably do anyway, as the next book is due out any day now.)

My recipient left a happy comment on the story I wrote for them, as did several other people, which surprised me, as I thought it was a niche little thing that nobody would read except the person who asked for it. Then again, this is yuletide, where niche fandoms go to find their people, so I'm just going to bask in the comments and be happy. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671781.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

I've been pretty swamped with work the last couple of weeks, as well as finishing my yuletide story, so there hasn't been a lot of time to read, but I did manage to finish Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda before it went back to Libby. I found it odd, but in a very enjoyable and easy to read way. It's a series of very short ghost stories (vignettes, really), all set in the modern day but inspired by traditional Japanese tales -- there's a section at the back of the book summarizing the original stories that inspired the book. All of the ghosts are female, none are malevolent, and the people interacting with them are generally pretty chill about it. There's no real plot, either to most of the stories or to the book as a whole, but a loose connecting thread does appear as the book progresses. The translation is smooth and readable, and I'd be totally happy to read a hundred more stories in this world. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671644.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

What I finished:
How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge by K. Eason.. Fun, snappy space opera with a fairy tale twist. Rory Thorne is a princess of a far future planetary empire, and also a descendant of the princess who was Sleeping Beauty. Like Sleeping Beauty, she gets a bunch of fairy gifts and one curse at her naming ceremony as a baby. These play into her ability to deal with an unwanted arranged marriage, a sinister conspiracy against her fiancé, and a threat of alien invasion. The characters are engaging, and there's a fair amount of humor and tons of loyalty kink between Rory and her royal entourage/pirate crew. (Yes, she's a space fairy tale princess who becomes a space pirate! Sorry, privateer). If you like this kind of thing (which I do), then this is the kind of thing you'll like.

The Sweetest Remedy by Jane Igharo. About Hannah, a young biracial woman from San Francisco who travels to Lagos to attend the funeral of her father, whom she only met once as a child (he had a brief affair with her mother and didn't stick around). There's some minor drama with Hannah's Nigerian family, who had no idea she existed until she shows up, and a low-key romance with a nice young man who's connected to the family, but I think the main focus of the story was to give readers a picture of Nigerian life that goes beyond the usual Western stereotypes about African countries. Hannah's father, we discover, was incredibly rich, and everyone in the family is hip and glamorous and sophisticated. There's not much by way of stakes to the story; every now and then somebody says something mean to Hannah and upsets her, but then somebody else takes her shopping for fancy clothes or to dine at a fancy restaurant or whisks her off for a romantic getaway at a fancy resort, and everything's fine again. It's total wish-fulfillment fantasy (starting with the fact that Hannah is a twenty-something who makes a living writing articles for an on-line women's magazine and somehow earns enough to live alone in a nice part of San Francisco), which I enjoyed, but it's not the kind of book that's going to stick with me in the long term, I think. And I do wish the romance was more developed. I didn't get a sense that Hannah had any real connection to Lawrence beyond "we're both young and hot and nice, and also he's the only male character in the book who's my age and not related to me."

What I'm reading now:
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko: a collection of linked ghost stories with a feminist bent.

Nancy Wake: World War Two's Most Rebellious Spy by Russel Braddon.. All those Kate Quinn books about women being heroic in WWII made me want to pick up some non-fiction about the topic, so this.

What I'm reading next: I'll find out when I get there. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671281.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who's celebrating. I wish you good food, easy cleanup, and plenty of time to relax.

The Boy and I are doing ham instead of turkey for the second year in a row. We ordered it, along with a bunch of side dishes, from the local snooty gourmet market, so all I have to do is make dessert, which is the fun part. I've already made the cheesecake last night, and the cookies are in the oven right now. I put cassis in the cheesecake, and topped it with a gelee made from some red currants I froze back in the summer. It looks very festive; we'll have to see how it tastes. And I'm making these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies on the principle that there should be some pumpkin flavored dessert for the occasion.

On the fannish front, I've hit the minimum word count on my Yuletide pic, and I think I'm about half-way through the story, so I should be able to finish on time. That's something to be thankful for, right?

I have the day off tomorrow, so I've made an appointment for my booster shot. Something else to be thankful for.

In the department of "things that only happen at SIO," there was a mass e-mail at work yesterday with the subject line "Spine in a bag found" and the first line "One of our lab members found a spine in a bag in the parking lot." For a moment I felt like I was in an episode of CSI, or maybe Bones. But as it turned out it was, in fact, a fish spine.

I thought I'd give Simba a treat, so I bought one of those toys that's like a puzzle that you put treats in, and the kitty has to get them out. I saw lots of Instagram and YouTube videos of kitties playing with it and happily getting their treats. But Simba? He just sits next to it and stares sadly at the treats he doesn't know how to get. All he has to do is push them with his little paw, but it seems to be beyond him. What can I say, I may claim he's the world's cutest cat but I don't claim he's the world's smartest.

Time to go get the cookies out of the oven... This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671104.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

What I finished:
The Rose Code by Kate Quinn.. The latest in Quinn's string of book about underestimated women being heroic and competent in WWII. This one isn't as awesome as The Huntress, due to not having Nina Markova in it, but it was still suspenseful and enjoyable. The three heroines all work at Bletchley Park in various capacities, and there's a lot of geeking out over codebreaking details, in addition to all the bits about the characters' personal lives and a plot involving a possible traitor at the Park.

Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall. A fluffy, humorous romance novel set in a fictionalized version of the Great British Bake-Off. The heroine and the two potential love interests are all contestants. The baking and filming scenes are a lot of fun, and I really liked both Rosaline and the dude she ended up with. Hall is great at bantery dialogue; I chuckled aloud multiple times while reading. Also, Rosaline is openly bi, and her ex-girlfriend/current BFF is a prominent supporting character, which I don't think is something I've seen in an m/f romance novel before. (Admittedly, I don't read a huge amount of romance novels.).

What I'm reading now: Nothing at the moment.

What I'm reading next: Dunno. I might go see what else Alexis Hall has written, as I'm in the mood for more fluff. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/670933.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

I'm back!

Actually, I've been back for several days now, but I've alternated between being extremely lazy and extremely busy, so no post until today.

Our trip to Carmel was just about perfect. The weather was gorgeous -- the one time it rained was overnight, and everything was fine again by morning. The view from our hotel room was even more awesome than last year. We once again set up a couple of scopes on the balcony, and in addition to otters and dolphins we had multiple sightings of humpback whales breaching and lunge feeding and generally goofing around. We hiked; we shopped; we ate at many excellent restaurants. Mom and I abandoned The Boy for half a day to have a spa day. It was great. There will be pictures eventually.

I'm woefully behind on Wednesday Reading posts, mostly because I've been busy on Wednesdays. Today is relatively quiet, though, so I have time to mention that I finished reading Declaration fo the Rights of Magicians and A Radical Act of Free Magic by H.G. Parry, which I mostly enjoyed, but with a number of reservations. It's one of those alternate histories where pretty much all the big historical events from our time (French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, the slave revolution in Haiti) also happen, with the same people involved, but there's also magic. I thought it was well-written and well-plotted, and managed to work up a fair amount of suspense about events where I already knew the outcome. But I side-eye the portrayal of Robespierre as a totally well-intentioned guy who only did bad things because ( spoilerCollapse ). (I suspect the portrayal of Pitt the Younger was overly hagiographic also, but at least he never presided over a reign of terror, so I'm more inclined to be tolerant.)

What bugged me about the first book was that in a story where the fight for abolition of slavery was a major driving force in the plot, all but one of the POV characters were white European dudes. The only exception, a slave woman named Fina, had almost nothing to do until near the end. This got a lot better in the second book, where she became a much more major player in the story, but I really wanted the other characters in the West Indies chapters to get more development. And Toussaint Louverture deserved to be a major POV character, dammit.

The books did make me interested in seeking out a good biography of William Wilberforce. Does anyone know of one?

In other news, I'm scheduled for my COVID booster next Friday. Hopefully it won't knock me out for the whole weekend. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/670606.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

I still have to pack, mind you. But I've closed my work computer (both of them) and set an away message on my work e-mail, and early tomorrow morning The Boy and I are off to lovely Carmel-by-the-Sea for a week of sorely needed rest and relaxation. Watch this space (and my Instagram) for trip posts and photos, whee! This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/670455.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

( GBBO neeperyCollapse )

Watching GBBO always puts me in the mood to try and bake something tricky and/or new to me. This weekend I decided to have a go at a cake roll, which I've never done before. It being fall, I decided pumpkin roll is the way to go. I used the Preppy Kitchen recipe, but replaced half the powdered sugar in the frosting with caramel sauce, since I had a small jar sitting around waiting to be used up. I ended up with a bit more frosting than I needed to fill the cake, so I spread the rest on top. Then I sprinkled on some crystallized ginger and also made caramel decorations, because I'm a firm believer in gilding the lily when it comes to desserts. It's very tasty, if I say so myself, and I think the ginger goes really well. Next time I'm going to mix some into the frosting before filling the cake. I actually meant to do it this time, but I forgot. Anyway, have some photos.

( Click on the thumbnails to see larger photosCollapse ) This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/670147.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

First of all, thank you so much for writing me a story! Whichever of my requested fandoms you choose, rest assured that I love them all. My sign up has some prompts you can use, but really, feel free to go with whatever inspires you.

My likes: Action, adventure, happy endings, casefic, slice-of-life stories, established relationship stories, humor, banter, fluff, hurt/comfort, competence kink (characters being extremely competent at what they do, and other characters admiring their competence). I'm fine with het, slash or gen. Sex scenes are fine in a longer story, but in anything less than 3000 words or so (as Yuletide fics often are), I'd rather it focus on something else.

Dislikes Unhappy endings (meaning endings where everyone is either dead or miserable with no hope of getting better), focus on pregnancy and/or babies, infidelity, partner betrayal, mundane AUs, omegaverse or BDSM AUs, permanent character death for any of my requested characters.

( specific fandom detailsCollapse ) This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/669654.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

I've been really enjoying the new season of Great British Bake Off. They seem to have course corrected from last year -- the technical challenges are properly challenging but not bizarre or obscure, and all the contestants seem pretty likable so far. ( spoilerCollapse )

Is anyone else watching? Any thoughts? This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/669306.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

Despite my lifelong history of having a black thumb, I've actually managed to start a little bit of a container kitchen garden this summer. My basil has grown enough that I can use it for cooking now, snipping off leaves here and there as needed. Rosemary and thyme aren't at that point yet, but they're still growing nicely. The biggest success has been the catnip, which technically isn't a kitchen herb but whatever, Simba loves it. All I have to do is hold one little leaf in my hand and he'll follow me all over the house and do crazy leaps for it.

I think living in San Diego helps. Any idiot can make things grow in San Diego.

The Great British Bake-Off is back, yay! I've been trying to fill the void this past year with other baking/cooking competition shows, but all that's done is confirm for me that the worst season of Bake-Off is better than the best season of anything else. And this season looks good so far (admittedly there's only been one episode.). ( very mild spoilersCollapse )

Aside from GBBO, my main TV enjoyment has been Only Murders in the Building. The fact that I used to live just a few blocks from the Arconia Belnord makes it extra amusing. Will I forever label myself as old if I admit that I had no idea who Selena Gomez is before I watched this show? She's really good.

Possibly because I've been watching all those baking shows, Hulu has recommended me a movie called Love, Sarah, which is about some characters opening a bakery in Notting Hill. It was a cute enough movie, with some very good acting and excellent food porn, but I had trouble stretching my disbelief to cover the central conceit, which is that this one bakery run by four nice white people becomes the only source of International baked goods in all of London. Like, you can't have a character make an impassioned speech about how London is an incredibly diverse, multicultural city with many immigrant communities, and then expect me to believe that none of those communities have their own bakeries serving them already. I know there are London folks in my circle here, so tell me the truth you guys -- how likely is it that a Japanese woman working as a food editor for Time Out would be unable to buy a matcha crepe cake anywhere in the city?

How is almost October already? August lasted about ten years, and then September went in about fifteen minutes. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/668588.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

What I finished:
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. For tonight's book club. This is a book about a failed bank robber taking a bunch of people hostage, which makes it sound like some sort of thriller, but it's actually a quirky and ultimately rather sweet story about a bunch of, well, anxious people working out their various personal issues. I wasn't sure I'd like it at first, as I tend to get annoyed with books where the author breaks the fourth wall to address the reader directly, especially if the author then makes sweeping statements about the human condition; but the more I read, the more all the characters grew on me. I ended up getting really sucked into the story, and even teared up a bit at the end.

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia Manansala Fairly light murder mystery about a young Filipina-American woman who moves back from Chicago to her small home town to help her aunt run the family restaurant, and becomes a murder suspect when a nasty restaurant critic -- who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend -- is killed. The mystery plot is pretty thin, as most cozy mystery plots are these days, but the characters are likable, and the author's genuine affection for Filipino food and culture really shines through. I enjoyed it, and plan to read the next book in the series when it comes out.

What I'm reading now:
I finished the chapter on "Gotz von Berlichingen and the Military Revolution" in The Verge and am taking a break before I start in on "Aldus Manutius and Printing". The military chapter really did drive home how the past is a foreign country sometimes. These days, mercenary soldiers are considered pretty unsavory, but back then it was apparently a perfectly respectable, even prestigious occupation for sons of noble families to take up. Fighting for a country not your own was perfectly normal, and so was switching sides if somebody offered you more money. It was all interesting stuff, but I think I need a break for some lighter reading before I move on.

I'm also breezing my way through The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, which was recommended by lizbee, and which I'm greatly enjoying so far.

What I'm reading next: Who knows, my plans always seem to be changing. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/668274.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

To all who are celebrating, may your next year be sweet.

I love it when a High Holiday starts on a weekend (long weekend in this case), 'cause then I have the whole day free to prepare all the tasty, tasty things. Right now I have tzimmes bubbling away in the slow cooker, the apple cinnamon cake cooling on the counter, and the challah dough waiting to be shaped for baking. In a bit, I'm going to put the chicken soup on and later make the salad. And I took the day off tomorrow, so I get a four-day weekend. Yay me.

What are you all up to today? This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/667661.html. You may comment there using OpenID.

What I finished:
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator, Klara is a solar-powered android purchased to be an Artificial Friend (called AF by all the other characters) for a teenage girl named Josie, because that's apparently a totally normal thing to do in the world of this book. Josie is ill with some vague but life-threatening illness that's a side effect of some sort of genetic tinkering that her mother had done in order to make Josie smarter and more talented, which is apparently also a totally normal thing that people do to their children in this world. Klara is extremely intelligent and observant, but also very naive and ignorant about how the world around her works, which I think is something Ishiguro does on purpose when he writes science fiction to disguise the fact that his world building tends to be shaky on the details. He did a similar thing in Never Let Me Go.. What saves if from being annoying is that Ishiguro is such a damn good writer, and so good at characterization. Klara is such a sympathetic and empathetic narrator, and I got very invested not only in her but also in all the other characters, even the asshole ones, because I was seeing them through Klara's eyes and she saw something worthwhile in all of them.

The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu. I really liked Huchu's Library of the Dead and wanted to read more by him, so I picked this up. It's not fantasy, more of a slice-of-life story about Vimbai, a young single mother working as a hairdresser at a salon in Harare, Zimbabwe, who feels threatened when her employer hires Dumi, a young male hairdresser who becomes more popular with customers than Vimbai is. In the US, this might be the kind of petty conflict that sitcom episodes get written about, but Vimbai lives in a country where unemployment is at 90 percent, life expectancy is 37, and inflation is so rapid that no one wants to be paid in advance for anything because the money you get today will be worthless by tomorrow. Job security is literally a life or death issue for her and her daughter, so her initial hostility to Dumi becomes understandable. Still, they manage to become friends, and then something more, and then ( spoilerCollapse ). The portrayal of everyday life in Zimbabwe felt very vivid and real, even though I had to stop and look stuff up from time to time.

What I'm reading now:
Still working my way through The Verge. Finished the chapter on Jakob Fugger, which did a good job of laying out how wealthy investors got to control the fate of nations in the 16th century (not too different from the current century, really). Like, Fugger basically got to decide who got to be the Holy Roman Emperor simply by deciding who he would lend money to. Also, Fugger lent a bunch of money to an ambitious priest so that the priest could buy himself an appointment as bishop (which is already pretty shady to start off with), and the bishop raised money to pay off the loan by selling indulgences. Lots and lots of indulgences. So many indulgences that Martin Luther got pissed off and invented Protestantism, which is probably not what Fugger intended. Oops. Anyway, now I'm into the chapter on how warfare changed during this period, focusing on a mercenary dude named Gotz von Berlichingen, who apparently made a lot of historians very happy by writing a memoir late in life. Oh, and he got his hand blown off by a cannon ball in a battle and used an iron prosthetic from then on, which got him nicknamed Gotz of the Iron Hand, which totally sounds like he should be a Game of Thrones character. I love details like that, though I'm still annoyed by Wyman's occasional tendency to novelize the things he's writing about.

What I'm reading next: Dunno. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/667429.html. You may comment there using OpenID.