sylleptic | Network

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: We all probably have multiple WiPs, but which of yours has been hanging around longest, waiting to be finished?

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

oursin

Last week's bread held out very well.

There was even enough left over to make frittata with chopped red bell pepper for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown toasted pinenut, with strong brown flour.

Today's lunch: partridge breasts lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, panfried in butter with a little olive oil, deglazed with a splash or so of white wine, served with kasha, baby sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil and splashed with elderflower vinegar, and asparagus steamed and tossed in melted butter + lime juice.

lilly_c posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: meddling
Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager
Rating: G
Length: 119 words
Content notes: no leola root was harmed in writing this slightly over-drabble length fic😜
Author notes: A little off-screen shenanigans sometime around State Of Flux in season one.
Summary:

( Meddling )

scrubjayspeaks

Okay, so it’s probably not the sound card. It really is the speakers, and Windows just likes to be a pain in the ass about recognizing hardware when I plug it in, thereby undermining my troubleshooting efforts. I haven’t gone through to test if any of the individual speakers work when plugged in directly, rather than through the subwoofer hub. I could use headphones, except the jack is positioned such that the cord won’t reach comfortably.

*sigh*

We’re routinely at or over 100 degrees. All outdoor work needs to be done by 9 AM to avoid The Suffering. I’ve been seeing some mockingbirds around home, which is unusual. Someday, maybe I’ll have blue jays. I would like that.

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written

Day job: 41 hours, in which every morning was screaming chaos and every afternoon was stupefying tedium

Cleaning: have possibly solved the problems with the weed whacker stalling out, still need to really test it

Crafting: got a little more progress on the dice bag

Gardening: garden club post, succulent club meeting

Reading: Strangers in Paradise #13 & 14

Watching: more Murderbot TV :3 (man, I forgot how much fun and how infuriating a proper potboiler story is)

Listening: Greetings From Echo Park by Ryan Cassata (new release for Pride month)

Aftermarket Parts: got through one appointment with a non-trans-related doctor without drama about my surgery, one to go

Clock Mouse: 1343 words

umadoshi

Eating: This weekend is

scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.)

Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.

I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far.

Watching: Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that,

scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.

Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to

wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as

scruloose and

wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.

We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4.

wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.

But last week,

scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.

smbc_comics_feed

Posted by Zach Weinersmith

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/poll

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
It absolutely kills me dead when the votey is funnier than the daily comic.

Today's News:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/poll

muccamukk

Ophie Dokie released us from the requirement to have one of these, but then linked to a video I thought was quite good (

BryonyClaire: Sabrina Carpenter has divided the internet - is satire dead?), and then I saw how it's been rolling out across the Internet. So here goes. ( cutting for the sake of people who are sick of this discourse. )

fred_mouse posting in

beautifulmechanical

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69593&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dungan-radio-broadcasts-from-2018-2021

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69593

We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log. That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia. See "Selected readings" below.

For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female voices — we are fortunate to have a series of ten radio broadcast recordings (here).

Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings, e.g., "Salam alaikum" (Arabic as-salāmu ʿalaykum السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ ("Peace be upon you"). That would not be possible in sinographic transcription of northwest Sinitic speech. This and other aspects and implications of alphabetic Dungan have been extensively discussed on LL.

After I brought Dungan speakers to America and wrote about them in Sino-Platonic Papers (no. 18, May 1990) and elsewhere four decades ago, they caught the attention of Berkeley professor William S-Y. Wang, to the extent that he organized a research trip to Kazakhstan / Kyrgyzstan where the Dungans live. He was hoping to have one of his graduate students write her Ph.D. dissertation on Dungan. Unfortunately, he had to give up on that plan because he said that neither he nor his graduate student could understand Dungan speech.

Selected readings

"The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language" (10/15/20)
"Dungan-English dictionary" (10/26/18)
"Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13)
"Dungan, a Sinitic language of Central Asia written in the Cyrillic Alphabet" (6/14/21)
"'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14)
"'Thanks' in Hakka and other Sinitic topolects" (2/15/25)
"'Onion' in Persian, Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu, Dungan (northwest Mandarin), and Indic" (3/21/20)
"Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
"Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" (3/5/19)
"Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 18 (May, 1990)
Omniglot
Wikipedia: "Dungan people", "Dungan language"

[Thanks to IA]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69593&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dungan-radio-broadcasts-from-2018-2021

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69593

oursin

Happy birthday,

twistedchick!

marcicat

I've just decided this: I think every fandom (more fandoms? at least more) should have a Steve&Robin relationship.

KEY FEATURES LIST THAT I'VE JUST MADE UP:
*ride or die? YES
*do they love each other? YES
*is it romantic? NO
*is it sexual? NO
*do they hold hands? YES

It probably helps that in Stranger Things fandom, they have to explain this a lot. Yes, they're listed as each other's emergency contact on every form. No, they're not dating. Yes, they date other people. No, that doesn't seem weird to them.

WHY IS THIS SO GREAT?
*please can we have a million more examples in popular media of the vast multitudes of human relationships?

hunningham

I was busy like a hive of busy bees. Himself was out all day (premiership rugby final at Twickenham) and I did not want to have another sofa day.

So:

Weekly food shop
Cooking, much washing-up, laundry
Cleaned the big windows in bedroom where I have been noticing the grime every morning now for weeks & weeks
Bag of things to charity shop
Waterstones to spend giftcard my mother gave me
Went to park, sat in shade, read
Got out my drill & put up a metal support for a bird feeder
did stretching & mobility exercises for 1st time this week
evening walk & admired neighbour's gardens & sniffed roses. Too early for bats alas.

I am very pleased to finally get the bird feeder up - it has been well over a year (himself says two years) since I bought it & a bag of birdfood and it's been in cupboard ever since.

This morning I have been lazy in bed. Coffee, unseasonal hot-cross buns and I am reading Bitch Goddess by Robert Rodi, which is a lot of entertainment for just 79p.

caramarie

A couple of random fic recs while I remember them!

into fire and into ice by

FroyoBoyo (Strangers from Hell, Jongwoo/Moonjo, 5.7K, E)
A sex pollen fic. It was hot, and it fit my mental characterisation for the characters, so a rec from me!

Swimming Upstream Into the Mouth of a Bear by

pastelpom (Death Note, Misa, 2.3K)
An experimental fic reflecting on Misa’s in Death Note. I thought it was really neat!

The current state of me fannishly is ‘frantically trying to finish editing my Squid Game fic before season 3 comes out’ and by ‘frantically trying to finish’ I largely mean ‘procrastinating on’. I still have time! Barely!

bookviewcafe_feed

Posted by Brenda Clough

https://bookviewcafe.com/the-performing-arts-1-beginning/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19116

I’ve been interested in music and theater for as long as I can remember. When I was 6 or 7 years old I attended a performance of ANNIE GET YOUR GUN at the University of Maryland. My parents surely received the tickets as a gift. Even though the flood of story and song pouring past me was too rich, too swift, to grasp, I remember clearly being enchanted.

But I was purely a fan. My creative gifts are pretty broad, but they’re all fine-motor. I manipulate words, or paintbrushes, or fiber. I’m a hand worker. It has never occurred to me to use anything else.

Two things have changed this for me recently. The first is novels. HIS SELACHIAN MAJESTY REQUESTS is about a rock star. Music is Cam See’s life, his path to both salvation and destruction. To write this book I attended concerts, quizzed buskers, toured performance venues and read every biography of rock stars of the 60s and 70s that I could get my hands on.

And then I immediately turned to OFF THE SCREEN, an SF novel set in the 22nd century. I’m rebooting American democracy, because it needs to be done. And, because AI has gutted live entertainment, the characters have resolved to revive Broadway by staging a musical. They wanted to do OKLAHOMA, but securing permission to quote the lyrics from the Hammerstein organization was beyond my power.

So I am doing the simpler thing: I’ll write the entire script of the musical they shall stage, and all the lyrics, the program notes and actor bios — everything. It’s always easier and less trouble to just make everything up yourself — Cam, in HIS SELACHIAN MAJESTY, hails from an entirely imaginary Asian country with a history and culture custom-tailored to my own needs.

Now, not only do I now own all the rights and intellectual property to this fictional musical. I can compel the in-story dramatic presentation and its development to reflect the events in the actual plot of the work, which will reflect current events — very cunning and complex!

But the other thing? I have moved to within walking distance of a major university, where I can audit courses. Courses in theater! I dipped my toe into a class in the history of theater, and the instructor drafted me to sign on for a class in improv. I have never acted before! But I never say no — so, here we go!

https://bookviewcafe.com/the-performing-arts-1-beginning/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19116

torachan

1. The other day I bought some golden kiwis and they are so good. I like kiwis a lot, especially the golden ones, but these have got to be the best I've ever had. Perfectly ripe and so flavorful. I got them from work, so I'm gonna have to check on Monday and see if we still have some.

2. From the sound of things the No Kings protests around the country were a huge success. I hope that it can actually lead to some change. The ones in downtown LA seem to have been relatively peaceful as well, so hopefully we'll be able to open the store tomorrow morning without issue.

3. Molly's just waiting for a moment of privacy to start splashing around in her water bowl.

torachan

Currently Reading
A Botanist's Guide to Rituals and Revenge
6%. Newest mystery in the series and my current audiobook. This series has developed more of an overarching plot than just stand-alone mysteries and I do not remember much of the book before this but hopefully it will come back to me.

Break in Case of Emergency
8%. YA novel set in the mid 90s about a girl living on her grandparents' farm after her mom dies, reunited with her estranged father who turns out to be gay. Sounded interesting. Just read the first couple chapters so far.

The Fourth Girl
35%. Twenty-five years after their friend disappeared on prom night, three women reunite in their home town on the anniversary of the disappearance. But when someone else connected to their missing friend dies on that same day, it seems like more than a coincidence. This is pretty good so far.

Horrorstör
10%. This is the second horror novel I've read set in an Ikea-type store. I've had this on my to-read list for a while and just happened to find it in a neighborhood Little Library so now seemed like a good time to read it.

Riding the Rails
39%.

How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
52%.

Recently Finished
Architectural Follies in America
Finally finished this! This is such a short book and has pictures so I thought it would be a quick read but honestly it turned out to be kind of a slog. There are not enough pictures, so a lot of it is just reading about these supposedly interesting building but now getting a visual representation. And the pictures that are included are all black and white, and some are not the best quality. This seems like someone's hobby project, so I guess they couldn't put a lot of money in it, but it could have been a much better book than it was.

Red Hail
This was pretty interesting!

Murder in Season
Well, I take it back. After mentioning last time that this is one of the few historical mystery series I've read lately that doesn't have any queer or non-white characters, this book did turn out to have a gay character (and he wasn't the murderer).

Murder at Hambledon Hall
New Cleopatra Fox book! This was a good one. And there was an announcement at the end that the next book will be out by the end of the year. This author has multiple series going, so I don't know how they manage it, but I'm not complaining.

Baby Drag Queen
Grabbed this off the Pride display at the library last week as it looked interesting and is very short so would be a nice quick read for a time when I needed one (I read it in about half an hour this morning). It's about a trans boy who is interested in doing drag, which is not a topic I've seen in other books with trans characters. But the book itself was a huge let down. The writing is very stilted (especially noticeable with the dialogue) and there were so many things that made me go ??? that I couldn't get into the story because I kept trying to figure out why the author was making these choices and at some times trying to figure out what was going on altogether. One big one is that the character is referred to by a male name throughout, but his mom does not know he is trans. So I was left wondering if it was a writing convention where the mom is really calling the character by another name but the author is using his preferred name instead, or if the kid has requested to be called a male name and the mom has gone along with this to the point of getting it legally (?) changed (the kid goes to school using that name and also gets multiple jobs under that name, with no one noting anything about a different legal name) but still is completely gobsmacked when the MC says he's not a girl. (It's definitely not a situation where that would ever be the name his parents gave him.) I just could not stop wondering what was going on with the name throughout the book, but there were a bunch of other smaller things, too.

Bokura no Hentai vol. 5-6
Was not expecting the trans girl to be handled this well, but I was really impressed with the sixth volume.