some things make a post
Nov. 14th, 2011 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthros1. Sometimes I cook all fancy! I'm home visiting my folks, and my dad wanted to grill because he's been watching this grilling cooking show. But I basically don't eat meat except for fish, so we settled on tuna, because it doesn't stick to the grill. So this was yesterday's dinner:
Grilled marinated tuna and mango salsa taco-ish things for the noms
Misc:
about 3/4 pounds of tuna steaks (this is what my parents had and it fed three people)
some sort of bready thing - tortilla, soft tacos, pita, lavash, whatever
canola oil or other medium-high heat oil
Marinade - all this is going to be blended, so none of it has to be chopped carefully, but you might want to halve the onion/shallot/garlic:
4 scallions, with the dry bits and the roots trimmed off
a shallot or small onion
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
a handful of fresh cilantro
a handful of fresh parsley
a half-handful of fresh mint (about half as much as the cilantro/parsley)
1 ts dried thyme (or fresh, but we didn't have it)
half of a habenero pepper, seeded and deveined (I recommend gloves)
1 cup of water
juice of three limes (or more! nom lime)
some fresh ground pepper and coarse salt
Mango salsa:
2 ripe mangos, chopped into smallish pieces (though to be honest, one of ours wasn't very ripe; I used it anyway)
the other half of that habanero pepper, seeded, deveined, and minced finely
4 scallions, dry bits and roots cut off, chopped finely
half of a red bell pepper, diced
a half-handful of fresh cilantro, chopped finely
juice of a lime
2 tablespoons of brown sugar or to taste
fresh ground pepper and coarse salt
Preparation:
More than two hours before cooking:
1) Put the tuna steaks in a non-reactive dish (I always end up using a glass baking dish)
2) Make the marinade, basically by shoving everything in the blender and blending until the leafy things are little flecks
3) Pour the marinade over the tuna, mounding the greens on top and around the base of the fish
4) Refrigerate for at least two hours (more is fine too!)
Get ready to grill:
5) Have your dad go heat the grill up to hot. (We use wood fire and charcoal.)
6) Prepare the mango salsa, basically by chopping everything, dumping it in a bowl, and stirring until nom
7) Brush the mounds of marinade off (leaving some on is fine, but you don't want a half a cup of parsley on each tuna steak) and brush some oil onto them.
8) Have your dad grill the tuna. (I dunno, he went off and grilled the tuna. Probably high heat, and about four minutes on each side? They were great and flaky and exceptionally nom.)
Nom:
9) Put whole steaks or bite-sized pieces of steak in your bready thing of choice, mound salsa on top, and enjoy some really great fish tacos. Also I guess you could put on whatever else you put on fresh fish tacos - hot sauce or sweet sauce or whatever - but we didn't.
... no seriously nom. NOM. The habenero is spicy, but not too spicy, and it sort of blends into the smokiness of the grilled fish, and it's all sort of tangy-fishy-nom. Also, considering that I live in the mid-Atlantic most of the time, it is like HI WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA WE HAVE FRUIT.
Also, because the marinade was tasty and there was a lot of left in the marinating dish and my mom is very waste not-want not about food, today we sauteed some potatoes in it. Also nom.
2. Speaking of California, I often find staying with my parents somewhat frustrating (and helping my mom out with her work can be exceptionally frustrating).
But! Here are some of the things that California has in addition to fruit: It's-Its. Blue Bottle Coffee (<3<3<3). Tacos. Breakfast pastries at the Ferry Building. Boogaloo's amazing grilled plantain cakes. Persimmons from the tree in the backyard. Some friends I haven't seen in a while. Fan peoples. Thrift stores. An ocean.
3. There is going to be another Avatar: The Last Airbender (and Avatar: Legend of Korra) fanwork exchange over at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
white_lotus! I plan to ask for Korra/Chief Bei Fong, among other things, so it is basically guaranteed to include great things.
Anyway, if you are interested, there's a draft signup post to poke at (to make sure all your favorite characters are on the list!) and tomorrow there will be a draft rules post that take people's suggests from last year into account. And signups will start later this week!
As part of making it work this year, we've also made an AO3 collection for the challenge, so that people who want to play in an anon-slow-reveal challenge but also want to be able to edit their fanworks can play that way. People will still be able to just send us their fanworks and have them posted straight to the comm, but the AO3 thing should make it easier for people who are already using the AO3. (Plus we belatedly made a collection for last year, so if you want to you can submit your fanworks to the collection.)
4. Remember that top one hundred specfic works thing? I haven't forgotten it, I promise, I just got cranky when I organized everything for Condorcet voting on a website that said it would do it ... and then couldn't deal with 250 things in a list, Grr. And then I tried a bunch of other places, and they all would only do ten items or allow 50 voters or blahblah. I might end up just doing it in comments and uploading the data flat to a Condorcet calculator. (The short version of condorcet: it's sometimes called ranked-choice or instant-runnoff voting [though a lot of different methods end up being called these things, since the terms are used confusingly in news stories], and it's usually done for single-winner issues. It can be done for a multiple-winner issue, though, and I thought it would be fun because it would let people rank as many things as they wanted. It's a kind of neat alternative since it lets you rank things you hate low, and not have to do careful vote manipulation to make your vote "count." But APPARENTLY the javascript version of the Condorcet page crashes liek whoah.)
5. I have been feeling alienated from the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) for a while - I went from donating a hundred dollars a couple of years ago, when I had high hopes, to feeling sadness, alienation, and dissatisfaction, not just because of things I'd experienced but also because of watching people burn out, throw themselves against the wall of non-transparency and the pretense of diversity. It's partly a common non-profit problem, of course, where non-profits can go so off-course even though everyone involved is passionate about the projects - I worked in development in several non-profits, and I feel pretty confident saying that these problems aren't unique to the OTW. (See sara's post about founder syndrome and other common non-profit problems, for example. Or from an even wider perspective, vom_marlowe's post about people managing and how that affects retention.) But that doesn't make them any less sad, exclusionary, unwelcoming, infuriating, harmful, toxic to (some) volunteers and staffers and employees and members and end users.
While the stories people are telling right now are exhausting stories of volunteer burnout (renay) and frustrated stories of powerlessness (general_jinjur), I can't help but feel a little more hopeful, not necessarily about the org itself, but about everyone I've known who has been saddened by it, because I see people making connections and building community around it. It's a shitty thing to build a community around - a community for people who have felt alienated, excluded, sad, crushed, burdened, ignored, over-worked, taken for granted, used, dumped on, powerless, irrelevant, unwanted, or silenced by people in power or by the org as a whole, people who have cried and lost self-esteem and abandoned fandom and gone under flock and retreated to other fora - but since I have sometimes been that person who felt I didn't have anyone to talk to about shitty things, I'm glad this revelatory moment is happening, because it's a moment of finding that community, of telling the truth and making new connections. I think I've followed, like, ten new people on twitter in the last week, subscribed to new people on dw, people who I was suddenly like wait - wait - you've felt that way too? And I haven't even volunteered for the OTW, I just feel this way from the experience of reading my rlist for the last few years, from talking to my friends who volunteer, from reading the OTW talking what fandom is and not seeing myself or my friends or my sense of fandom in their descriptions.
And, you know, I hope these conversations will make the OTW better, make the AO3 better, make the Open Doors project better, make outreach better, make volunteering better. But I can just hope about that, whereas it has already made me feel better (but still sad), and clearly has made other people feel better (but still angry and sad), about their experiences with the org. I keep seeing people saying "until now, I thought it was just me," "I thought it was just my corner of fandom," "I thought it was my fault." It wasn't. It never was.
So, you know, hi guys. It's nice to meet you, even though it means that so many people have felt so bad for so long.
And if you haven't been following the conversations around the OTW lately, there are a bunch of roundups and discussions of the voting process but I'm just going to drop a couple here: bookshop lays out the issues and how they relate to this upcoming election, troisroyaumes talks about feeling disgruntled about the OTW and upcoming elections, anatsuno talks about how mission bias in the language undervalue's people's work, and if you want more, ainsley has a link roundup (though I think it hasn't been updated in the last few days).
Grilled marinated tuna and mango salsa taco-ish things for the noms
Misc:
about 3/4 pounds of tuna steaks (this is what my parents had and it fed three people)
some sort of bready thing - tortilla, soft tacos, pita, lavash, whatever
canola oil or other medium-high heat oil
Marinade - all this is going to be blended, so none of it has to be chopped carefully, but you might want to halve the onion/shallot/garlic:
4 scallions, with the dry bits and the roots trimmed off
a shallot or small onion
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
a handful of fresh cilantro
a handful of fresh parsley
a half-handful of fresh mint (about half as much as the cilantro/parsley)
1 ts dried thyme (or fresh, but we didn't have it)
half of a habenero pepper, seeded and deveined (I recommend gloves)
1 cup of water
juice of three limes (or more! nom lime)
some fresh ground pepper and coarse salt
Mango salsa:
2 ripe mangos, chopped into smallish pieces (though to be honest, one of ours wasn't very ripe; I used it anyway)
the other half of that habanero pepper, seeded, deveined, and minced finely
4 scallions, dry bits and roots cut off, chopped finely
half of a red bell pepper, diced
a half-handful of fresh cilantro, chopped finely
juice of a lime
2 tablespoons of brown sugar or to taste
fresh ground pepper and coarse salt
Preparation:
More than two hours before cooking:
1) Put the tuna steaks in a non-reactive dish (I always end up using a glass baking dish)
2) Make the marinade, basically by shoving everything in the blender and blending until the leafy things are little flecks
3) Pour the marinade over the tuna, mounding the greens on top and around the base of the fish
4) Refrigerate for at least two hours (more is fine too!)
Get ready to grill:
5) Have your dad go heat the grill up to hot. (We use wood fire and charcoal.)
6) Prepare the mango salsa, basically by chopping everything, dumping it in a bowl, and stirring until nom
7) Brush the mounds of marinade off (leaving some on is fine, but you don't want a half a cup of parsley on each tuna steak) and brush some oil onto them.
8) Have your dad grill the tuna. (I dunno, he went off and grilled the tuna. Probably high heat, and about four minutes on each side? They were great and flaky and exceptionally nom.)
Nom:
9) Put whole steaks or bite-sized pieces of steak in your bready thing of choice, mound salsa on top, and enjoy some really great fish tacos. Also I guess you could put on whatever else you put on fresh fish tacos - hot sauce or sweet sauce or whatever - but we didn't.
... no seriously nom. NOM. The habenero is spicy, but not too spicy, and it sort of blends into the smokiness of the grilled fish, and it's all sort of tangy-fishy-nom. Also, considering that I live in the mid-Atlantic most of the time, it is like HI WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA WE HAVE FRUIT.
Also, because the marinade was tasty and there was a lot of left in the marinating dish and my mom is very waste not-want not about food, today we sauteed some potatoes in it. Also nom.
2. Speaking of California, I often find staying with my parents somewhat frustrating (and helping my mom out with her work can be exceptionally frustrating).
But! Here are some of the things that California has in addition to fruit: It's-Its. Blue Bottle Coffee (<3<3<3). Tacos. Breakfast pastries at the Ferry Building. Boogaloo's amazing grilled plantain cakes. Persimmons from the tree in the backyard. Some friends I haven't seen in a while. Fan peoples. Thrift stores. An ocean.
3. There is going to be another Avatar: The Last Airbender (and Avatar: Legend of Korra) fanwork exchange over at
white_lotus! I plan to ask for Korra/Chief Bei Fong, among other things, so it is basically guaranteed to include great things.Anyway, if you are interested, there's a draft signup post to poke at (to make sure all your favorite characters are on the list!) and tomorrow there will be a draft rules post that take people's suggests from last year into account. And signups will start later this week!
As part of making it work this year, we've also made an AO3 collection for the challenge, so that people who want to play in an anon-slow-reveal challenge but also want to be able to edit their fanworks can play that way. People will still be able to just send us their fanworks and have them posted straight to the comm, but the AO3 thing should make it easier for people who are already using the AO3. (Plus we belatedly made a collection for last year, so if you want to you can submit your fanworks to the collection.)
4. Remember that top one hundred specfic works thing? I haven't forgotten it, I promise, I just got cranky when I organized everything for Condorcet voting on a website that said it would do it ... and then couldn't deal with 250 things in a list, Grr. And then I tried a bunch of other places, and they all would only do ten items or allow 50 voters or blahblah. I might end up just doing it in comments and uploading the data flat to a Condorcet calculator. (The short version of condorcet: it's sometimes called ranked-choice or instant-runnoff voting [though a lot of different methods end up being called these things, since the terms are used confusingly in news stories], and it's usually done for single-winner issues. It can be done for a multiple-winner issue, though, and I thought it would be fun because it would let people rank as many things as they wanted. It's a kind of neat alternative since it lets you rank things you hate low, and not have to do careful vote manipulation to make your vote "count." But APPARENTLY the javascript version of the Condorcet page crashes liek whoah.)
5. I have been feeling alienated from the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) for a while - I went from donating a hundred dollars a couple of years ago, when I had high hopes, to feeling sadness, alienation, and dissatisfaction, not just because of things I'd experienced but also because of watching people burn out, throw themselves against the wall of non-transparency and the pretense of diversity. It's partly a common non-profit problem, of course, where non-profits can go so off-course even though everyone involved is passionate about the projects - I worked in development in several non-profits, and I feel pretty confident saying that these problems aren't unique to the OTW. (See sara's post about founder syndrome and other common non-profit problems, for example. Or from an even wider perspective, vom_marlowe's post about people managing and how that affects retention.) But that doesn't make them any less sad, exclusionary, unwelcoming, infuriating, harmful, toxic to (some) volunteers and staffers and employees and members and end users.
While the stories people are telling right now are exhausting stories of volunteer burnout (renay) and frustrated stories of powerlessness (general_jinjur), I can't help but feel a little more hopeful, not necessarily about the org itself, but about everyone I've known who has been saddened by it, because I see people making connections and building community around it. It's a shitty thing to build a community around - a community for people who have felt alienated, excluded, sad, crushed, burdened, ignored, over-worked, taken for granted, used, dumped on, powerless, irrelevant, unwanted, or silenced by people in power or by the org as a whole, people who have cried and lost self-esteem and abandoned fandom and gone under flock and retreated to other fora - but since I have sometimes been that person who felt I didn't have anyone to talk to about shitty things, I'm glad this revelatory moment is happening, because it's a moment of finding that community, of telling the truth and making new connections. I think I've followed, like, ten new people on twitter in the last week, subscribed to new people on dw, people who I was suddenly like wait - wait - you've felt that way too? And I haven't even volunteered for the OTW, I just feel this way from the experience of reading my rlist for the last few years, from talking to my friends who volunteer, from reading the OTW talking what fandom is and not seeing myself or my friends or my sense of fandom in their descriptions.
And, you know, I hope these conversations will make the OTW better, make the AO3 better, make the Open Doors project better, make outreach better, make volunteering better. But I can just hope about that, whereas it has already made me feel better (but still sad), and clearly has made other people feel better (but still angry and sad), about their experiences with the org. I keep seeing people saying "until now, I thought it was just me," "I thought it was just my corner of fandom," "I thought it was my fault." It wasn't. It never was.
So, you know, hi guys. It's nice to meet you, even though it means that so many people have felt so bad for so long.
And if you haven't been following the conversations around the OTW lately, there are a bunch of roundups and discussions of the voting process but I'm just going to drop a couple here: bookshop lays out the issues and how they relate to this upcoming election, troisroyaumes talks about feeling disgruntled about the OTW and upcoming elections, anatsuno talks about how mission bias in the language undervalue's people's work, and if you want more, ainsley has a link roundup (though I think it hasn't been updated in the last few days).
