alee_grrl | Reading

The Old Usher
Oliver Reynolds
2010, from Hodge

--

for Farès Moussa

I have
shouted Lights! in the foyer as the show begins

I have
opened and closed a million doors
Push and Pull stamping my palms

I have
woken with Good Evening on my lips

I have
ROH in moles over my left nipple

I have
Tchaikovsky as a heart-beat

I have
told ten thousand bladders
It’s down the slope and on the right

I have
stood at the bottom of Floral Hall stairs
with Peter Bramley at the top
tapping the metal hand-rail with his ring
to annoy me

I have
bent my head to complaints about the row in front
the big hair-do, the change-jingler, those who snore or smell

I have
turned a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a stopped nostril

I have
opened and closed a million doors
Push and Pull stamping my palms

I have
waited in the wings to present flowers
cygnets wafting past me in a crush of tutus
each back tight with the cordage of muscle

I have
sold ices with Susie Boyle

I have
passed the black-and-white monitor at Stage Door
and felt proud to see Haitink in the pit
a bottled homunculus preserved in music

I have
opened my locker on a vista of dirty shirts

I have
killed a moth for Monica Mason
It wants to settle on me!
she who once danced her death in the Rite
now frightened of millimetres of flutter

I have
Tchaikovsky as a heart-beat

I have
bassoons and strings planned for my last-act death
the weightless pas-de-chat
lifting me out of this ninth life
into the proscenium’s eternal gold

I have
perfected my farewell
a final turning-out of the pockets
as I rise and vanish into air
swirling with the confetti of ticket-stubs

I have
shouted Lights! as the show begins

I have

kaberett

Reading. ... I think, like, a page or two of Descartes (Treatise on Man), and that's it?

OH. NO. I also finished my first pass through indexing The National Trust Cookbook for EYB. That's right. That's a thing I did.

Watching. Three Whole Entire Episodes of Beddybyes, halfway through the third of which the toddler (who felt it was Very Important that we saw it) pretty much fell asleep where it was sat.

Playing. RIDICULOUS Inkulinati run for Preposterous Amounts Of Prestige.

Cooking. Medlar jelly (plain, spiced). Quince sorbet. Several bread. A batch of buttermilk pancakes. Some terrible First, Burn Your Lettuce, thereby ticking another item off the current Cook The Book project. Buttermilk pancakes.

Eating. One of the CHILLIS from the CHILLI PLANTS we brought HOME from the GREENHOUSE just after first frost (but they were fine); also A turned the small pile of peppers that broke off the sweet pepper I brought home on a bike, still green, into akuri this morning.

Exploring. Important sploshy stomp through the puddles of Barking Park. I... think that's it?

Growing. I have NOT sown any physalis or lemongrass in the electric propagator, to get them hopefully Established by the time I need it for Other Things in the new year. This is a deliberate decision. They can go in next week.

... and now it's very definitely time for bed, goodnight world. <3

primeideal

In a fantasy world where magic exists alongside familiar forms of scholarship, a mysterious event wipes out at least one city and possibly most of the human world. Rukha, a geographer, is exploring an abandoned tower when Eshu, a student wizard, emerges from the "Mirrorlands" that used to connect major cities via a parallel world and literally runs into her. Rukha decides they're friends and it's her job to help him get home, but with modern forms of transportation disrupted, it turns out to be a longer journey than anticipated as they make their way across the post-apocalyptic landscape.

The good: worldbuilding. Creepy ruins of a city that's been overrun by crystals:

All around him, towering spires of fluorite and fool's gold clawed toward the sky. Downhill, where switchback streets led inexorably to the sea, shards of quartz gleamed like knives from every roof and balcony. Blood-brown garnets lay beneath the ruins of merchants' awnings, which hung in shreds over heaps of broken stones. Temples wept icicles of some thick, green stone swirled with black.
Whatever this city had been before, now it was a wasteland of glittering rock.

Eshu's branch of magic involves "telling the world a story" and convincing it to work differently; this is usually expressed through the metaphors of song, with evocative imagery. When fighting another wizard, he tries to make a magical airship fly, and she tries to make it sink:

She didn't sing, but he felt her magic like a song: the remorseless pull of gravity. The eager ground to which everyone in time returned. The laws of the universe, every fixed planet orbiting every spiraling star, all of them circling the vast devouring void. All obeyed a commandment older than language, older than life. It was right. It was righteous. The first thing any creature did was fall.

Usamkartha, one of Eshu's wizard friends, passes through a mirror as it's breaking, and the description is compelling:

When she looked at him straight on, he was an ordinary man of her mother's generation: lean-faced, dolorous of eye, his hair greying and balding. The veins stood out like serpents on the backs of his hands.
When she let her mind wander for even a moment, he was a mass of shining scales and coils.
"What happened to you?" she asked quietly.
With his free hand, Usamkartha thumped his book. "I am writing a manuscript on my condition, if you care to know the details," he said. "The first true theoretical work on the aftereffects of traveling through a broken mirror--the condition has been called fragmentation by past scholars, but I believe it is more properly termed abstraction. If I'm going to die from this, at least my death advances the field of scholarship."

This description of Eshu practicing his faith in a minority environment is also great:

Being Njowa had mattered so much to him back in Usbaran, when he and Mnoro had been the only Njowa at the university; they'd kept the feasts and fasts together, knelt for prayers together, warned each other about which street vendors fried their vegetables in pork or duck fat. When their exam period meant they couldn't make it home for High Summer, they'd built a holiday hut out of blankets instead of reeds and hidden in its shelter, trading city comedies. Faith had been a kite string linking him home--to Kondala, to his family, to the centuries of far travelers who had come before him.

The bad: I didn't really care about the characters. Basically Rukha just decides "okay, we're stuck together" and never reconsiders, even when Eshu is being whiney and frustrated that he can't find any hair cream or lotion in the post-apocalyptic world. She's been out of university for "a few years"--if there were a big age difference, I could maybe see her being protective in "he's just a kid trying to get home to his family" kind of way, even if Eshu thinks of himself as an adult. But it just kind of borders on the therapy-speak ("you're really not treating me like a friend right now," Eshu confronting his abusive ex), in an underwhelming way. I get that it's trying to subvert the "mismatched strangers to friends to lovers" plotline in a "mismatched strangers to friends who are very important people in each other's lives, they don't need or want a romantic or sexual aspect to their relationship," but there are plenty of times when it's like "why are these people even hanging out together if they don't particularly like each other."

Most of the back half of the book is set in the city of Kulmeni, which is less catastrophically impacted than other human settlements. After "the change," a new "prince" took power, who was until recently the leader of an organized crime gang. The complexity of "maybe she's actually making things better for the common people and representing them better than the aristocracy, maybe she's just out for power" was handled well. There's a great interchange where Eshu talks to the Anjali River, who sometimes appears in a deity form, before they have to duel (it makes more sense in context) and points out the parallels between his situation with an abusive ex and the city's situation with "do we just stick with the devil we know?" and that helped, somewhat, in justifying the "abusive ex" plotline.

There's a brief mention towards the end of the book about Njo, the deity Eshu worships, that made me hope for more "Steerswoman" parallels with the combination of magic and science, but that might have been just wishful thinking on my end.

Bingo: Impossible Places (borderline hard mode, if you count all the chapters set in Kulmeni and/or the Mirrorlands I think it would be over 50%?), Gods and Pantheons (the Anjali's anthropomorphic form is referred to as a god), LGBTQIA protagonist, was a previous Readalong, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land?

kaberett

There was less of it usable than if it hadn't been sitting in my living room for a fortnight, but there is one dehydrator load of apples drying, and one saucepan of Apfelmus cooling, and... I think the latter is probably going to get frozen (at least in the first instance) because I am not at all convinced I have water-bathing a couple of jars in me right now. That might be a December problem.

But. The pulp leftover from the medlar jelly is frozen in Future Sticky Toffee Pudding-sized portions. The quince sorbet is in the freezer in its tub. And the apples are As Above. I am very very glad to have got that all dealt with, but alas have no other thoughts to contribute. <3

ailelie

I hate dishes. Here is my current system for doing them nightly:
1. I check off each day of the week on a whiteboard by my fridge.
2. When I complete a week,I get to add +1 session to my BeeMinder (basically giving myself a skip day for daily writing).
3. When I complete a week, I also color in a square on a four-part square below my tracker. When I completely black out the square, I get to add +1 session to my BeeMinder (for a total of +5 over the course of completing the square).
4. When doing dishes, I wear gloves, use spray soap, and have a comfy pad to stand on. Comfort is key! Plus, no soft nails, touching food, or wet hands.
5. I only have to do the dishes for 15 minutes max per night. I have a push light over my sink that turns off after 15 minutes if I don't turn it off manually. This illuminates the sink and keeps track of time in a way that requires zero effort from me.
6. If I fall asleep by accident, it counts as long as I do at least 1 dish or if I do them when I wake up.
7. If I miss a day, I restart the week from the next day onward. No waiting for the week to start again. (Right now, my week starts on a Friday).
8. I don't have to dry and put the dishes away the same night I wash them.

Do you see all the layers here? Minimizing suckage, adding a reward, removing rules. For the reward, I have one for the week, but also one for multiple weeks that encourages sustaining my efforts. The reward doesn't cost me money or time. And since I can just do the same reward each time, it doesn't require effort to think up. The 15 minute rule helps when I'm feeling overwhelmed by my dishes. On bad days, even just a few feels too many. If it is only 15 minutes max, though, I can manage that (at least I've been able to so far). If I do dishes and then cook more, I don't have to do them again. And tracking the days on my fridge means I've a passive reminder to do them. Plus, it offloads having to remember having done them. The less I have to think about my dishes, the better.

Will this system stick? I don't know. It is really a collection of other things I've tried previously united into a single system. I hope it lasts.

It is weird -- hating dishes feels like part of me. Having dirty dishes is strangely affirming, even as they stress me out and hurt me financially and health-wise (since I end up ordering in instead of cooking). So finding a way to get them done regularly feels almost like turning my back on myself. Except... I don't actually want the sink full of dirty dishes. I actually do want to be better about them. Improvement shouldn't feel like loss, except it does a bit.

I'm also getting way ahead of myself. This has only been in place for two weeks and a day. Who knows? Maybe this time next month I'll be moaning about another monster pile of dishes to slay.

flareonfury posting in

fandom_icons

These icons were made for the first

vampiremedia 20in20 challenge. The theme is women. So below are 20 icons for the challenge plus all the extras I made.

[01] Aleera, Marishka & Verona (Van Helsing)
[02] Mavis Dracula (Hotel Transylvania)
[02] Barbara Gordon (DC vs Vampires)
[05] Diana (DC vs Vampires)
[01] Raven (DC vs Vampires)
[01] Rose (Vampire Academy books)
[06] Jubilee Lee (X-Men)
[03] Selene (Underworld)
[06] Lily Munster (The Munsters 2022)
[02] Caroline Forbes (The Vampire Diaries)
[03] Elena Gilbert (The Vampire Diaries)
[01] Katerina Petrova (The Vampire Diaries)
[01] Rebekah Mikaelson (The Vampire Diaries)
[07] Hope Mikaelson (The Legacies)
[09] Lizzie Saltzman (The Legacies)

PREVIEW

beware of blood....

kaberett

( Read more... )

full_metal_ox posting in

metaquotes

dissectionist: Back in MY DAY, we had to read Penthouse Forum letters into a tape recorder and put the resulting tape into a first-gen Teddy Ruxpin. Nowadays kids don’t even have to work to turn their teddy bear into a creep.

Context reports FoloToy’s Shock and Surprise! at what happens when you feed a kid’s toy OpenAI.

kaberett

but I did spend this morning sat down with my printouts and my page markers and my highlighters, and I did this evening take some photos of the relevant pages of a book I've loaned to someone else, and the essay (I say, grandiosely) tentatively entitled The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes: against a new dualism is definitely In The Works.

I haven't quite worked out the It is a truth universally acknowledged... opening sentence, and it's probably mostly going to be a series of quotations accompanied by EMPHATIC GESTICULATION in the form of CAPSLOCK, but it's not actually (in its entirety) germane to The Book, so here the indignant yelling can go.

jazzfish posting in

poetry

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A black and white cat
on May grass waves his tail, suns his belly
among wallflowers.
I am reading a Chinese poet
called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.
The cat is aware of the writing
of swallows
on the white sky.
We are both old and doing what pleases us
in the garden. Now I am writing
and the cat
is sleeping.
Whose poem is this?

kaberett

At the weekend we made a mildly unusual detour to a fancy local bakery; one of the things they had on the shelves about which I went "oooh" was fig, hazelnut & anise bread. So that flavour combination (plus some spelt) was went into the oven this morning!

The way bread normally works around here is that I make it, via the Ritual Question of Do You Have Any Breadferences (Bread Preferences). To facilitate this call and response, A List of our Usual Options, doubtless to be added to. Suggestions welcome. :)

( Read more... )

kaberett

"Ugh," I thought, "why am I feeling weirdly migrainey? My Next Phase Of The Menstrual Cycle is very much not due for like another week? I've been weirdly super regular basically since it reasserted itself post-surgery?"

... TURNS OUT that I had lost track of time a bit and I'm not a solid week early at all, it's a whole two days. This Means Some Things:

... still super regular by my pre-surgical standards,
I will not be at the worst stage of my cycle during Significant Travel next week, and LAST BUT VERY MUCH NOT LEAST
the migraine is still in fact very clearly associated with hormonal changes even when I'm not expecting them, take THAT Headache Is The Second Most Common Form Of Psychosomatic Pain ~statistics~ (and ongoing anxiety).

chrysalid posting in

fandom_icons

warning: contains spoilers, and canon typical blood and violence.

here @

caleidoscope.

kaberett

~~... has done so many things and is Going To Bed and will fill in this placeholder Tomorrow.~~

Reading. ( Descartes, Gouldercourt et al., Clifford )

Forgotten Fruits (Christopher Stocks) got auto-returned to the library for a second time while I was still, like, a third of the way into it. I am going to try to take the DNF with grace this time, but the Completionist Itch is still there...

Writing. Grumpy e-mails to HMPO. Grumpy e-mails to uk.bookshop.org (on the plus side, the book I bought from them now has a shiny wee DRM-free tag! on the downside, I can download it in neither of the browsers I've tried so far.) Mental drafting of context-setting on movement and sleep, which really need to get out of my head and onto the page.

Playing. Inkulinati! We have Completed All Three Journeys. In the second stage we achieved an absolutely bullshit strategy that made things astonishingly easy; the third stage (with SEAL) was much harder work.

Little bit more I Love Hue.

Cooking. Two things of particular note, of which the first was ridiculous parsnip risotto with thyme pesto from The Modern Vegetarian, extremely good, would very happily eat again but I'm more dubious about the prospect of cooking it again, though I will concede it would probably go faster now I know what I'm doing.

Item the second was THE MEDLAR STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING. I am not entirely convinced I can actually detect the, you know, medlar, but it is very tasty.

Elsewise I have two batches of medlar jelly on the go (first batch did not set properly, BAH, I have not made enough jam recently, so I'm going to need to redecant and reboil that before I move on to the spiced) and some ridiculous quince sorbet that needs forcing through the sieve before churning.

And I have still not touched the apples.

Eating. Saturday lunch at Holtwhites Bakery :)

Exploring. Stupid little walk on Sunday revealed unto us, among other things: a pair of cyclamen in a bit of the verge outside our house we don't normally walk past; a discarded fork; a local bush of Purple Metallic Berries; a secret holly hedge.

Growing. SEEDS arrived. Jalapeños (at least at home) turning red.

kaberett

Irritatingly, the medlar jelly recipe I used last time I made the stuff, over at the RHS, is no longer extant (web.archive.org link!). Herewith my own readily findable copy of the thing, plus my notes on what I'm actually doing this time around.

(For amusement: I apparently first found the medlar sticky toffee pudding recipe in 2023...)

( Recipe as written )

( Notes )

heartsfate posting in

fandom_icons

Icons
[2] Rogue (Marvel Rivals)
[2] Gambit (Marvel Rivals)
[2] Minx (IDW's Jem and the Holograms comics)
[2] Rapture (IDW's Jem and the Holograms comics)
[1] Minx & Rapture (IDW's Jem and the Holograms comics)
[3] Raya (IDW's Jem and the Holograms comics)
[2] Riot (IDW's Jem and the Holograms comics)
[1] Riot (Jem and the Holograms cartoon)
[2] Stingers (Jem and the Holograms cartoon)
[2] Minx (Jem and the Holograms cartoon)

Graphics
[1] Gambit/Rogue Header (Marvel Rivals)
[1] Invisigal/Robert/Blonde Blazer Phone Wallpaper (Dispatch) *slight spoilers*
[2] Z-Team Wallpapers (Dispatch)

Preview

The rest are Over Here

finch

One thing I have learned about myself doing this Accounting for Managers course is that I absolutely hate having to write from a pure "upper management" point of view to the point where my options are just "procrastinate indefinitely" or "write it as if I run some kind of employee-owned co-op" and so I'm opting for the latter most of the time.

The rest of this is just a thought dump, feel free to ignore.

Somewhere yesterday I realized that I've been tearing down all of my systems and guardrails instead of what I usually try to do, which is changing them one at a time or, ideally, not changing them at all.

My household routines are off and honestly have been since before my nibling got here. Laundry's just. Not moving. I can't seem to make any progress on packing. Nothing's getting out of the house. I've complained about this before, it's boring.

I got a new pair of jeans with a slightly smaller pocket so I decided to try a slightly smaller notebook and all hell has broken loose since then on the notebook front. I've tried and bounced hard off of two, I'm still sort of using a third but not very well, I've got a journal that's too large to be an EDC living next to my bed except when it isn't, and I bought the absolutely gorgeous PaperblanksxFourth Wing notebook and it's in this size they call "midi" which is like... 5x7? It's bigger than my jeans pockets but it's fall now and I'm wearing my jacket a lot and it has no problem fitting in my jacket pocket and I'm trying SO FUCKING HARD not to move into it just because it's SHINY NEW but at the same time it's like... distracting thinking about it so maybe I should just fucking do it, you know? If I like it, then I can try a paperblanks planner for next year in the Midi size too. And if I don't I'll just go back to the one that works.

Please somebody tell me this isn't worth the amount of overthinking I'm doing.

I had somebody suggest making a list of values in a way that hit me like a ton of bricks, where normally that would sound twee as hell. Because it occurred to me that I'm actually always looking for a single word or phrase that unites everything I care about and that's just... pretty much impossible. But if I make a list then I don't have to just pick one. (lolsob why does "you can be more than one thing" feel like a big deal)

Other things I've torn apart and now cannot commit to: - backups (I don't want to depend on google drive. Currently waffling between a nextcloud instance and protondrive.) - email providers (Currently waffling between fastmail and protondrive.) - digital notes/references/bookmarks (kind of half moved into Obsidian, tried xtiles but never settled into it, playing with moving back into Notion, there are some things Notion just makes really easy.) - website (one of the things Notion could make really easy is some variants on website maintenance. not all of them but... definitely some. currently have some sites on a regular ftp host, some still on nearlyfreespeech, and some still running on fastmail's web server option. not keeping up with anything. augh etc.)

Also other stuff I'm forgetting, I'm sure.

kaberett

... Nor shall I say what objects of vision must be agreeable or disagreeable to it; for from what I have already said about the other senses, it is easy to grasp that light that is too strong will injure the eyes and moderate light must refresh them; and that, amongst the colours, green, which consistss in the most moderate action (which by analogy one can speak of as the ratio 1:2), is like the octave among musical consonances, or like bread among the foods that one eats, that is, it is the most universally agreeable.⁴⁰

⁴⁰ What the basis of this remark is is unclear, and although various writers have made suggestions about the relations between colours and sounds, the attempt to quantify green on a par with an octave certainly cannot be sustained. It is worth noting that Descartes will later advice Elizabeth to rid her mind of sad thoughts by reflecting on the greenness of a wood (Descartes to Elizabeth, May/June 1645, AT iv. 220).

(trans. and footnote courtesy of Stephen Gaukroger.)

kaberett

[cn time-restricted eating.]

( Read more... )

sulien

A very interesting and informative article over at Forward Kentucky by Bruce Maples: “Christian Nationalism…or Christo-Facism?” . It was written back in April of 2023 but is even more salient now.

We are without a doubt now living in the Christo-Facist Dictatorship of Trumpistan. There is not a single, solitary doubt in my mind that Der Wannabe Führer will not give up the Presidency in 2029, if we even have an election in 2028. He fomented insurrection when he lost in 2020 and now that he has the Supreme Court locked in and so many of the senior leadership of our military either fired by him or retiring/resigning because they refuse to serve under him, he will likely not have even that as a speed bump to declaring himself President for life.

On a more personal note, I am very glad that my daughter and her partner have already emigrated to the Netherlands. If it wasn’t for my 87 year old parents being in an assisted living facility and refusing to leave, I would join them as soon as I could offload my house.

Current Mood: indescribable

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Manda

August 2025

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Page Summary

chestnut_pod in poetry - "The Old Usher," by Oliver Reynolds
kaberett - vital functions
primeideal - (SFF Bingo): The Map and the Territory, by A. M. Tuomala
kaberett - I have processed the fruit
ailelie - Dishes
flareonfury in fandom_icons - 20+ Vampire Women for vampiremedia 20in20 challenge
kaberett - some good things!
full_metal_ox in metaquotes - New from Torment Nexus Industries: THE BAD IDEA BEAR!
kaberett - this post is not Descartes apologia
jazzfish in poetry - For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson
kaberett - [food] breadferences
kaberett - [embodiment] ... ha
chrysalid in fandom_icons - 157 icons - wfa, batfamily
kaberett - vital functions
kaberett - [food] medlar jelly recipe
heartsfate in fandom_icons - Multi-Fandom Icons (and a few other graphics)
finch - what I need is Accounting For Anticapitalists
kaberett - [pain] today in Descartes: green is the best colour because it is most like an octave
kaberett - [embodiment] still a terrible hobby
sulien - Article: Christian Nationalism…or Christo-Facism?

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Page generated Nov. 24th, 2025 01:23 pm

Celebrate the Dreams of Others

Dream a little dream with me

Reading

"The Old Usher," by Oliver Reynolds

vital functions

(SFF Bingo): The Map and the Territory, by A. M. Tuomala

I have processed the fruit

Dishes

20+ Vampire Women for vampiremedia 20in20 challenge

some good things!

New from Torment Nexus Industries: THE BAD IDEA BEAR!

this post is not Descartes apologia

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson

[food] breadferences

[embodiment] ... ha

157 icons - wfa, batfamily

vital functions

[food] medlar jelly recipe

Multi-Fandom Icons (and a few other graphics)

what I need is Accounting For Anticapitalists

[pain] today in Descartes: green is the best colour because it is most like an octave

[embodiment] still a terrible hobby

Article: Christian Nationalism…or Christo-Facism?

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August 2025

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