Loquat
18hr ago
When I have day-old homemade muffins on hand (admittedly a state of affairs that occurs less and less often as my children grow larger) I've been known to slice them in half for toasting and buttering.
Also, do you consider banana bread to be something not conventionally toasted? Because toasted banana bread is pretty great too.
Loquat
18hr ago
I don't know how China's tap water is nowadays, but when I went (20-odd years ago) we were advised not to drink it without boiling first. Bottled water seemed like a common beverage choice, as well.
Loquat
1d ago
To add to this, have some similar stories from other countries:
From Scotland, Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, in which an oddly-named queen decides to kill her equally oddly-named daughter after a magic fish tells her that her daughter now surpasses her in beauty. Unusually for these sorts of stories, the king/father is not totally useless, and he fakes the daughter's death while also secretly shipping her off to marry a foreign prince. This lie holds for a while, but eventually the queen goes back to the magic fish to verify that she's now the most beautiful woman alive, the fish blabs the truth, and she goes off to the foreign prince's castle with murderous intent, and after a number of shenanigans gets tricked into drinking her own poison.
From Italy, Bella Venezia, in which a female innkeeper constantly asks customers to agree that she's the most beautiful woman in the world, until one day they start saying her daughter is more beautiful, so she locks her daughter away, but she escapes and ends up keeping house for a gang of thieves. All's good until one of the thieves visits the inn and blabs, and then the mom hires a witch to kill the daughter, and things proceed as in Snow White.
From Armenia, Nourie Hadig, in which a rich man's wife regularly asks the moon who's most beautiful, until one day it names her daughter, and she asks her husband to kill her. Less competent than the Scottish king above, the Armenian rich man fakes his daughter's death but abandons her in the forest to fend for herself. Then she wanders into a gender-swapped Sleeping Beauty situation, except she has to cook and clean for the sleeping prince for seven years before he'll wake up, and then when he does some other chick tries to steal credit, but he sees the truth at the last minute and marries the heroine. Meanwhile, the mother had soon learned from the moon that her daughter was alive, and had spent the seven years unsuccessfully hunting for her, but after the marriage the moon starts referring to her as "the princess of (location)", thus giving her away. So then the mother makes an enchanted ring that puts the wearer in a coma, and persuades the daughter to wear it, and this works for a while but eventually someone tries to steal it, she wakes up, and the mother dies of rage-induced apoplexy.
Loquat
8d ago
That is fantastic. My funniest personal experience with a "reply all" cascade was the time it happened at a very buttoned-down corporation and not one but several people employed dank memes in their (futile, counter-productive) "Stop replying all, you fools!" replies to all.
Loquat
9d ago
The "sight words" approach is perfectly fine for common short words with inconsistent pronunciation, IMO. My 5-year-old can sound out a variety of easy words at present, but still gets tripped up on issues like "do" and "go" having different vowel sounds, or "here" and "there", and I don't see any alternative to just having kids memorize them.
Loquat
21d ago
Piranesi, by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It's a very different book from her first - the whole book is entries from the protagonist's journal, and it takes place almost entirely in a weird magic pocket dimension. It's oddly reminiscent of the journals you find in the Myst series, as the journal-keeper has a suspiciously large vocabulary and erudite manner for someone who lives alone in a giant labyrinth with no books, little company, and no memory of ever living anywhere else. (A deliberate choice here - you get hints quite early on that he did in fact once live somewhere else but something has happened to his memory. I will spoil no further, because I highly recommend this book.)
Also featuring a protagonist with memory issues, we have Across the Void, a thriller author's first venture into science fiction. Alas, I cannot recommend it, and therefore will spoil away. We've got the first-ever manned mission to Europa! But oh no Europa's icy waters contain a virus which promptly causes a mini-pandemic among the crew! But the head guy at NASA had a contingency plan for this - kill them all and make it look like a space accident! But the protagonist isn't actively ill anymore, so now we're going to forget all about the virus and focus on getting her back to Earth, while head NASA guy tries to kill her so she won't reveal his crimes. At no point does anyone wonder about the broader implications of alien planets having diseases that can infect humans, nor whether such a virus may have any long-term effects on a human who survives the initial infection.
Loquat
1mo ago
Neat coincidence - I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my own kids, aged 5 and 8. We also watched the old 70's animated movie version, since it happens to be available on HBO, and I got to explain how minor characters and plot points often get cut in the transition from book to film, so that the film doesn't end up too long.
Loquat
1mo ago
The trouble with simply cutting funding is that it leaves the agency with the ability to keep the sinecures and DEI spending, axe the TB drugs and food aid, and then wail to the press that Trump's budget cuts are killing people. You can't prove they're lying unless you actually obtain the details of where exactly all their money is going.
Loquat
1mo ago
I can't speak for Scott in particular, but there's a known issue where a creative type gets too successful and then starts being allowed to do whatever they want, with nobody around to tell them, "this one thing is dumb and your movie/book/etc will be better without it," and it turns out they really did produce better work when they were subject to external veto.
Loquat
3mo ago
Did you get to the part where you use the sentient hat to possess a T-Rex?* There's lots more stuff like that later on in the the game.
(*I'd say /r/brandnewsentence, but Mario Odyssey is old enough and popular enough that I'm certain others have independently invented that same sequence of words.)
Loquat
3mo ago
In the interest of countering selection bias, I'll say we haven't had much this season, and our oldest kid is in elementary school, so we're exposed to everything that goes around. Kids have had some mild sniffles and coughing for a couple of days and I developed a scratchy throat today, but that's all so far. Husband hasn't been sick at all yet, though he'll probably catch whatever it is the kids and I have.
Loquat
3mo ago
The question I have been asking since this whole "mystery drones" thing started: drones with video cameras aren't all that expensive, and are widely available to be purchased. Has anyone tried sending up a drone of their own to follow the mystery drones and see where they go?
Loquat
3mo ago
I have seen both baconnaise and duckennaise advertised for sale, though I haven't tried either myself.
You can also make an eggless mayo with a spoonful or two of aquafaba, the liquid from a can of beans.
Loquat
3mo ago
You might even want to try more than one, if the first one doesn't give you amazing results. My husband got okay results on semaglutide, then after several months tried switching to tirzepatide and it's doing a whole lot more for him.
Loquat
3mo ago
I'm gonna tl;dr your post down to an analogy: the art world is solely composed of high-class restaurants with Very Serious chefs trying to Make A Statement with their food, and then Thomas Kinkade came along and invented McDonald's.
Loquat
3mo ago
Oh, you were just talking about age cohorts, not society as a whole. Never mind.
Loquat
3mo ago
Once the underclass starts dying off, the demographics of the surviving people...
Wait, what? How?
Loquat
3mo ago
The individual would-be assassins [of Trump] just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving.
I would argue that's mostly because they failed, and were immediately killed/arrested. Had someone managed to actually end Trump's life and then vanish (at least for a couple of days), that person would have been an absolute legend among the TDS types.
Loquat
3mo ago
Allow me to reassure you on one point: landscaping fabric would have solved this problem for you for a year or two, but it breaks down over time and bits of dirt accumulate in the gravel on top, and before you know it your driveway is growing weeds again. I've got a gravel walkway at my house with landscaping fabric underneath, put in by a previous owner, and it does absolutely nothing to deter weeds now.
Loquat
3mo ago
I decided to Google "ley lines" after realizing I've seen the term used in various fantasy works but never knew where it came from. Turns out the term was invented in the 1920's by a guy who realized that if you look at a map of Britain with lots of historic sites marked on it, it's possible to draw several straight lines that intersect multiple sites each. The original guy thought these lines were ancient trade routes, despite often going straight across difficult terrain, and including sites from totally different historic eras, so naturally this idea didn't really catch on. Then in the 1960's people picked up this concept, connected it to all sorts of stuff like alien landing guides and the ancient Chinese concept of qi energy flowing through the landscape, and now you have modern woo.
So to answer your other question, whether any ley lines intersect at the Finger Lakes depends entirely on who drew the lines and what landmarks they felt like connecting, or in other words it's all made up and the rules don't matter.
Loquat
3mo ago
In China, it's real enough that the guy who was head of the Kong family in the 1930's was offered the chance to become Japan's puppet Chinese emperor (he wisely refused and fled) and later got to help draft the constitution for the Republic of China and was officially a senior advisor to the president of the ROC/Taiwan from 1948-2000.
Loquat
3mo ago
Funny you should mention that, I was browsing Substack Notes earlier today and saw some rando complaining that Notes kept showing them porn.
(Haven't seen any porn pop up in my own Notes feed yet, tbf.)
Loquat
3mo ago
I saw the film back when it came out, and I think it gets about as graphic as a mass-market Oscar-bait film can get away with, i.e. not very. From what I recall we see a doctor sit down to perform an abortion and we see someone revolted after looking into a bucket implied to contain an aborted fetus, but there's very little actual blood on screen.
The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, first novel by Sarah Brooks.
I'd compare it to China Mieville, without his penchant for downer endings, or Jeff VanderMeer without his tendency to reduce his characters to broken, traumatized shells of their former selves. (Coincidentally, both this book and Mieville's Iron Council involve trains traveling across crazy mutating wastelands, though the direct similarities pretty much end there.) Anyway, I recommend it.
Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith (yes, the SMBC guy)
This utter madman has translated and adapted Beowulf into a graphic novel about rebellious kids and the fun-hating grownup who assaults their treehouse.
The whole thing is like this, and it is fantastic.
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