eruthros

1. 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 )

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. ( some stuff about the OTW )

It's been raining all week here - it's cold and damp and there are flood warnings all over, and we've got two inches of water in the basement (landlord: um, we'll deal with it ... later), and basically it is just the kind of wet blech day that reminds me of my mom making hot toddies on the stove when we worked out in the rain. So I had a spiked hot chocolate and some popcorn and watched MST3K doing a Commando Cody serial.

And that made me think about hot alcoholic drinks that are good when it's pouring rain or snowing or freezing outside. My mom used to make hot toddies for my dad (and later for me) when we were sick or when we had to be out in the rain, usually to a rum recipe but sometimes to a brandy one if we didn't have rum. We had a lemon tree in the backyard, so the hot toddies were always seriously lemony, and the lemon and the alcohol tang would sit above the liquid in the hot cup. Later in life I had things like Irish coffee and wassail (especially nom when it has baked apples in it) and several variations on "put alcohol in hot chocolate," but the hot toddy is the symbol of comforting hot drinks for me.

So I wondered what y'all drank (if anything) and especially if y'all had any good recipes! And I like polls.



( hot chocolate spiked with rum recipe )

And while I'm here let me just drop in a link for a hot buttered spiked cider recipe (a sort of hot buttered rum and mulled cider mashup),

1. Soup!

We made some excellent soup based on this ribollita recipe, and it turned out really nom! And also successful at its main purpose, which was getting rid of the ridiculous pounds of vegetables in the fridge - thingswithwings has renamed it "I live in the Northeast and I have a winter CSA soup." We didn't make the exact recipe - I doubled the beans-and-stock ingredients, and then T'wings chopped up, like, eight pounds of potatoes, and she put in the whole cabbage because seriously the point of this exercise was getting rid of vegetables, like we were going to put in a quarter of a cabbage and call it done. And we didn't reboil it all at once with the bread in it, because we expect it to last all week and then be frozen, so we're doing that bowl by bowl.

In the end, we had enough soup to fill our eleven-quart pot to about a quarter inch from the top. It is a lot of soup, like, I can't lift the pot and a lot of it will likely end up in the freezer. It's good that it turned out to be a great soup.

2. Pie!

T'wings made me strawberry-rhubarb pie for my birthday! Back when I lived in Northern California, my birthday was sometimes, in warm years, right at the beginning of spring produce - the tiniest of rhubarb spears and strawberries - and so I often used to have rhubarb pie for my birthday. And even though we were supposed to have five inches of snow a couple days after my birthday, I had strawberry-rhubarb pie, because last spring I chopped up a bunch of rhubarb and froze it. How awesome is that? It's like a burst of summer in the middle of winter.

Anyway the pie recipe we've been using is this lattice-topped strawberry-rhubarb pie; we double the dry ingredients in the filling and put in about 1.5 times as much fruit, depending on how the quantities of rhubarb work out. But we don't use that crust recipe - T'wings always makes the pastry dough, using her grandma's recipe, which I think she's posted somewhere but I can't find right now.

Anyway, the point is, it was super tasty. But now we're out of rhubarb! I have to wait for rhubarb to actually, like, be in season to have another slice of this pie. SADNESS.

3. Knitting, which today does not get an exclamation mark.

So I looked for a beret pattern to knit for my mom, and decided on the Lupo Beret, and I read the pattern and did a gauge swatch and etc, and everything looked good, and I have been knitting away in seed stitch.

Only I just got to the decreases, and ... wait ... it suddenly stops being seed stitch. The directions keep acting like it's seed stitch, but listen, you can't do a two-stitch decrease and a one-stitch increase without fucking up your seed stitch. And this pattern has a two-stitch decrease alternating with a one-stitch decrease every other row - so the seed stitch will stack every other row. Now I'm staring at pictures of the pattern and trying to decide if this is on purpose, or if I should be modifying the pattern a lot.

This is what I get for reading over the pattern without thinking about it.

1. More Festivids recs!

Attention Please, Paprika. PRETTY. I don't know what's going on at all, but I think that's part of the point. And the editing is really great, and uses the music really beautifully, and the whole vid has this cool hallucinatory quality.

Illumination, Joseon X-Files. Wow, this is completely gorgeous and atmospheric and ...oddly creepy, maybe? I love the way the vidder used movement of light and shadow, and the music is a great choice. I have never seen this show but clearly I must!

Space Oddity, Community. This is a really sweet Abed/Troy vid about their shared geekery, awwww. Their love of spaceships brings them closer together!

They Want More, Jurassic Park. I can't believe I forgot to rec this the other day, because it made me laugh and laugh. Dinosaur pov ftw.

Truth Is in the Dirt, V (2009). Oh, Erika Evans, ILU! This vid draws some interesting parallels between Erika and Anna, and uses the song and the atmospheric footage to great effect.


2. In knitting-related news, if you're going to drop a stitch, should you do it a) while doing some nice 2x2 ribbing, b) while setting up your short rows, or c) immediately after knitting your two stacked short row stitches? Yeah, I picked option c, who the hell even knows where these loops go. *rips back like twenty rows*


3. I was really sick of accidentally clicking on links that people had written to include hxxp (which some people do to anonymize links) so I installed a greasemonkey script to change hxxp to http. Then I realized that I was not respecting people's desire for anonymity and not incidentally was breaking the rules of some communities and forums, so I edited the script to change the hxxps to working anonym.to links instead. If you'd like to do the same thing, ( instructions for making an anonym.to redirect )

And now I am clicking on those links with ease. *is so lazy*


4. I am excited to see the permanent style=mine and style=site options (described in the latest news post), but reading people's comments about both options always reminds me that neither option is perfect for me. I often turn custom comment pages on not because I like the style or worked hard on it or anything, but because I want the sidebar or header (tags and links and etc) to be available on entry pages; I usually prefer to read in the site style. And especially in communities, if the entry page is in the site style, there's no obvious place to click for the rules or tags, which often leads to a lot of questions that are a pain in the ass ("where can I find ..." "but do you ..." "if I want to sign up ..."), or posts that don't follow the posting templates or rules or whatever. So I am still torn about site style versus custom comment pages.


5. Aren't these pantone-chip cookies pretty much the coolest thing ever? I love that she just mixed up colored icing and then matched it to a pantone color after it cooled.


6. And speaking of food, glass_icarus recently posted Potluck #1, a blog carnival dedicated to multicultural/intersectional posts about food.


7. And only loosely related to food, Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates! At the moment I am all eeee white_lotus Lunar New Year Exchange eeee. The fanworks are SO GREAT GUYS, I am so glad to be posting them now where other people can see them. I have been so caught up in the excitement that I have even tried to make some treats, but I keep being interrupted by spreadsheets.

1. Watched Mythbusters! New episodes just started airing last night. All I have to say about it is ( spoiler cut )

2. Made cheesecake brownies! Just sort of spontaneously. happydork linked to this recipe for cheesecake brownies, and I looked at it and went, wait, I can do all of those steps! So I went out and bought cream cheese and then made a recipe.

3. Installed some non-VLC media players, because VLC started being so slow and buggy and building-font-library-y. I've tried KMPlayer and SMPlayer; of the two, I like the KMPlayer better, although I hate its icons. I'm still shopping around, though, if you have other suggestions.

4. Rewashed all of my fall and winter clothes. No, really, all of them. ( allergies are no fun )

5. Gotten excited about knitting again! I used to mostly knit projects on small needles -- fingering or lace weight socks and lace scarves and things -- and now holding those needles hurts too much and it made me cranky that I had all this stash yarn for socks that I wouldn't be using (or, at least, not for socks). So I haven't knit in a year or so, but when anatsuno was here we were talking about knitting, and I remembered I had a worsted-weight sweater to knit, so now I'm in the middle of that. (I <3 alpaca.) And I'm doing a worsted lace scarf, too. And I realized I had some super bulky local yarn that I bought when one of the sheeps-milk people decided to stop making yarn and sold it all off super cheap, and my old slippers are falling apart, so perhaps I will felt up some slippers. I'm all: knitting in front of the tv! This is a thing I used to do! Right! Only now I have to get new needles for basically every project, because I have a ton of 0-3s, but like one pair of size 9 needles.

6. Speaking of TV, I also watched the first few Criminal Minds episodes from this season. ( spoiler cut )