March 18th, 2026
calimac: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] calimac at 02:59am on 18/03/2026
As a small boy I ate cold cereal for breakfast. I liked sugary treats like Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, but some cereals like Cap'n Crunch I found over-sugared and would not eat. I also wouldn't touch anything with marshmallow bits in it, so no Lucky Charms.

I ate these dry. At the age of 9 I started finding the taste of milk to be sour and spoiled - I had probably developed a slight allergy - so I simply stopped using it.

As an adult my tastes changed to more boring cereals, like Special K and Product 19. I never much cared for corn flakes, though.

On special occasions, or when eating out for breakfast, I'd go for an omelet or scrambled eggs and sausage. But whatever the breakfast, I never ate very much in the mornings, preferring a large early lunch.

Eventually health reasons led me to give up cereals and I turned to fruit. For a long time this was apples, and I developed a taste for tart but crisp and sweet apples, like Fujis and Braeburns. Occasionally I'd spell these with pears.

But after a while I started finding apples too heavy to eat. I tried other fruits. I liked kiwis, and they're supposed to be good for you, so for a while I ate that. But I found, to my surprise, that while a kiwi as a special treat is great, as a regular diet they quickly palled. I eventually settled on a can of mandarin orange slices. No peeling or tearing up, simple to eat.

That worked fine until I started having trouble swallowing. Oranges would not chew up into mush that I could get down. When I was in the hospital and they put me on a liquid diet, I was surprised to find for breakfast cream of wheat. Did that count as liquid? But I could get it down.

On coming home, I settled on packets of instant cream of wheat. B. has a little kettle that boils water in a jiffy, and a small measuring cup used only for water, so I can fix it easy with a little salt substitute and a lot of margarine added. My dietician approves; she wants the fats and the calories in my otherwise meager diet.

The first time I stopped in at the grocers to buy some more cream of wheat, I discovered to my delight that there was also instant grits. I'm a northerner but I've always had a taste for southern US food, and I love grits. They're basically cream of wheat except with corn (maize). So now I alternate between the two, finishing one box of packets before turning to the other.

And that's my breakfast these days.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
posted by [personal profile] oursin at 09:41am on 18/03/2026
Happy birthday, [personal profile] james_davis_nicoll and [personal profile] perennialanna!
oceangrey: Scene from Withnail and I, showing Marwood peering over a newspaper. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] oceangrey at 09:35am on 18/03/2026 under
[community profile] withnailandi is a community for everything related to Withnail & I (1987). Fanworks/recommendations, meta/discussions, whatever, all are welcome here! Another related community is [community profile] withnailandinsfw, for any more explicit fanworks/discussions.

Although not entirely new (made in October 2025) both communities are unused as of yet, due to most of the fandom being on other platforms. Feel free to join whether you're a casual fan, or if it's your favourite film of all time, or if you're somewhere in between!

[community profile] withnailandi is open for anyone to join, and [community profile] withnailandinsfw is set to administrator-approved due to the community's content.
posted by [syndicated profile] apod_feed at 05:40am on 18/03/2026
rmjwell: (Default)
thistleingrey: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] thistleingrey at 09:38pm on 17/03/2026 under
Uzma Jalaluddin, Detective Aunty (2025): when the landlord of her daughter's small clothing boutique is murdered, Kausar drops everything to go. Kausar's (white) friend feels sure that Kausar will find out what really happened. But her daughter wants help with housekeeping and child-minding, not an adult peer's support.

I'm only in ch. 3, I don't care currently whether books stick the landing (though I like this one so far), and ch. 2 is great for its tender forthrightness: when a kid (even a thirtysomething adult, like Kausar's daughter) is used to seeing a parent in a certain way, that's how the two are paused, unless the child makes an effort to grow a bit more. It's not something that the parent can shift solo.
kareila: (ooooh)
posted by [personal profile] kareila at 10:42pm on 17/03/2026 under ,
I haven't had much to say lately, but hey, the Project Hail Mary movie is actually great. I laughed; I cried; I've started crocheting planet Earth beanbags for all my friends. Even the kids loved it, and they hadn't read the book.
Mood:: 'pleased' pleased
sineala: Mac laptop whose Apple logo has no bite (Young Wizards reference); text reads "my other Mac is a manual" (Young Wizards: My Other Mac)
posted by [personal profile] sineala at 11:04pm on 17/03/2026 under
I have slightly more brain now and maybe enough energy to post more? Let's find out. I'm sure you've missed me posting about random video games.

Anyway, Slay the Spire 2, the sequel to my most favorite roguelike deckbuilder Slay the Spire came out in Early Access two weeks ago, and is apparently stunningly popular -- it had 500,000 concurrent players its first weekend, beating basically everything else on Steam at the time, which no one was really expecting from, you know, an indie card game.

I haven't played it enough to give a full review, because even in EA there is a lot more content -- there are five characters, two of which are brand new, all of which have new cards, and there are all sorts of new mechanics and events I haven't discovered yet. So far I have now beaten what exists of the game with four of the five characters and I know I haven't seen anywhere near everything yet. I think it's currently balanced harder than the original game, but the subreddit is full of people saying it is way too easy, so I guess we will see what happens when the balance patches start coming out.

But the really cool thing about this game is the multiplayer, which we only found out existed in a trailer that they released, like, two weeks before the actual game. It has co-op with up to four players! I only have one friend who plays this game, as far as I know -- [personal profile] gelishan, who actually introduced me to the original game -- and we played a game of it the other night, and I have to say that co-op is absolutely the most fun way to experience the game. It helps to be on voice chat, so you can coordinate things like 'who are we targeting first" or "if you have anything inflicting Vulnerable, please play that first" or "do you need this Strength Potion" or "do you want me to play Piercing Wail this turn so you don't take 35 damage straight to the face" or whatever, but I guess theoretically you could play it in silence and just deal with the fact that everyone is playing their turns simultaneously.

Anyway, that is clearly the way this game has always been meant to be played and I need to do this again at some point. The co-op multiplayer is absolutely amazing! I don't know that I would recommend the game in its current single-player state to people who haven't played the original, just because it is already a hard game and it helps to have some idea of how three of the five characters play, if you're going to play it by yourself. But if you are playing multiplayer, I think you can just go for it and you and your friends can take turns carrying each other through the game.

So, yeah, that's what I've been up to, as I slowly regain some brain. Slaying the Spire anew!

(Also it's really weird to actually talk to someone you have known on the internet for, like, 25 years, but you've never heard their voice before.)
Mood:: 'nerdy' nerdy
troisoiseaux: (fumi yanagimoto)
posted by [personal profile] troisoiseaux at 10:09pm on 17/03/2026 under
Read The Stranger by Albert Camus and spent the entire time thinking about the Ben Affleck smoking meme, or perhaps a little cartoon man smoking a cigarette and muttering bah in a French accent, which is to say I had a deeply unserious reading experience. I found this book to be surprisingly (darkly) funny, because the main character/narrator, Meursault, just floats through life— including his own trial and forthcoming execution for murder— by responding to everyone and everything with abrupt and odd statements about how nothing matters, actually. Promotion at work? It's all the same to him; nothing matters. His girlfriend wants to get married? Sure, if she wants to; it's not like anything matters. The blurb describes this as the "story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach," which led me to expect that Meursault would be an accessory to murder, or perhaps framed for a crime he didn't commit— especially as, early on, a shady acquaintance has him (Meursault) write a threatening letter to his (the acquaintance's) ex— but no?? He literally just shoots a random guy multiple times at close range for no reason?? Because Life Is Absurd And Nothing Matters, Actually????

In a rare (and only very, very loosely book-adjacent) movie update, I saw The Bride! (2026, dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal) last weekend and it was SO much fun. It is not a particularly coherent movie— it does feel like a sort of Frankenstein's monster in itself, cobbled from about three different premises ("what if Bride of Frankenstein was Bonnie & Clyde?"; "Frankenstein 2: Mary's Revenge, A Feminist Retelling", etc.)— but as a fan of campy horror and classic Hollywood I felt incredibly catered to. I also watched National Theatre's Ncuti Gatwa-led The Importance of Being Earnest, which is in fact as absolutely delightful as it looks. (It's available on YouTube through tomorrow, the 18th, and streaming on National Theatre at Home after that.)
Music:: The Man I Killed - NOFX
posted by [syndicated profile] ct_text_shitpost_feed at 01:43am on 18/03/2026

Posted by Mark Dominus

A while back I wrote about the time I didn't eat the gizzards:

At some point I passed by a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere away from everything else, and since it was dinner time, I went in.

The special that day was chicken gizzards, which I've never had. But I wimped out and ordered a hamburger. Dammit. I was having an adventure, and when the adventure offered up a plot twist I said “No thanks, I've had enough.”

It would have been easy enough to get gizzards since then, they do sell them in stores. But the opportunity I'd missed was to have serendipitous gizzards: unexpectedly end up somewhere I'd never been, and have the gizzards be offered without any need for me to seek them out.

One nice thing about getting older has been to finish some of those projects I didn't complete when I was young. Well, it's taken decades, but the hand of fate offered me more gizzards, and this time I took them.

Last Saturday Lorrie was busy, and Toph wanted a midnight pickup from a party, so I decided to kill a couple of hours by taking the car for an unplanned later dinner somewhere before I picked her up. I ended up at Rudy's Tavern in Upper Darby. I've probably driven past Rudy's a hundred times, but I'd never been in.

Rudy's was hopping, clearly in the early throes of a big night. There was a DJ, folks playing pool, couples sitting at the bar, some people thinking baout dancing. Food at Rudy's is supplied by an elderly Chinese couple at a takeout window in the back. The offered dishes included the usual bar fare, some Chinese dishes, and various battered fried things… one of which was deep-fried chicken gizzards. And this time I did not wimp out.

Gizzards are tough and cartilaginous, fun to chew. Battered and fried, they were pretty good, accompanied well by cold Yuengling.

I thought about the time I'd been in the yakitori pub in Tokyo and had gotten batter balls with chicken joint cartilage at the center. This was better than that. If I were offered them again in a similar situation, I might order them again, especially if they were cheap and I was not very hungry.

Just a few hints on client-side configuration options for handling SSH keys on macOS using the keychain and 1Password.
watersword: A compass and the words "a compass that doesn't point north" (Pirates of the Caribbean: compass)
posted by [personal profile] watersword at 09:52pm on 17/03/2026

Oh my GOD can it be spring yet, I am SO TIRED OF WINTER. There is a tiny tiny tiny pink nubbin of rhubarb in the garden. No asparagus yet. I cannot wait to get the dopamine hit of seeing my summer clothes for the first time in months.

The NT's production of The Importance of Being Earnest is of course a delight (Sharon D. Clarke deserves a knighthood and Ncuti Gatwa wears clothes, and few clothes, to perfection); [profile] velveteenrabbi and D's Pesach class is as excellent as one might expect; somewhere on this desk is an embroidery needle and I am convinced the gherkin is going to stab herself with it. Wednesday is actually largely unscheduled and I need only survive the conference Thursday, which requires me to leave the house at godawful o'clock.

I am looking forward to the three-hour train ride and the Dessa concert so much. And then I get a weekend in my favorite city! I have been promised brunch and a museum and rainbow cookies and bagels. (Promised by myself and I intend to follow through in every particular.)

March 17th, 2026

Posted by Bicycle Dutch

Last Monday the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch opened a new underground bicycle parking garage of about 1,000 square metres, with space for around 1,000 bicycles. The opening had originally been expected in 2023. When the city council approved the plan in …
posted by [syndicated profile] pepysdiary_feed at 11:00pm on 17/03/2026

Posted by Samuel Pepys

Up betimes and to my office a while, and then home and to Sir W. Batten, with whom by coach to St. Margaret’s Hill in Southwark, where the judge of the Admiralty came, and the rest of the Doctors of the Civill law, and some other Commissioners, whose Commission of Oyer and Terminer was read, and then the charge, given by Dr. Exton, which methought was somewhat dull, though he would seem to intend it to be very rhetoricall, saying that justice had two wings, one of which spread itself over the land, and the other over the water, which was this Admiralty Court. That being done, and the jury called, they broke up, and to dinner to a tavern hard by, where a great dinner, and I with them; but I perceive that this Court is yet but in its infancy (as to its rising again), and their design and consultation was, I could overhear them, how to proceed with the most solemnity, and spend time, there being only two businesses to do, which of themselves could not spend much time. In the afternoon to the court again, where, first, Abraham, the boatswain of the King’s pleasure boat, was tried for drowning a man; and next, Turpin, accused by our wicked rogue Field, for stealing the King’s timber; but after full examination, they were both acquitted, and as I was glad of the first, for the saving the man’s life, so I did take the other as a very good fortune to us; for if Turpin had been found guilty, it would have sounded very ill in the ears of all the world, in the business between Field and us.

So home with my mind at very great ease, over the water to the Tower, and thence, there being nobody at the office, we being absent, and so no office could be kept. Sir W. Batten and I to my Lord Mayor’s, where we found my Lord with Colonel Strangways and Sir Richard Floyd, Parliament-men, in the cellar drinking, where we sat with them, and then up; and by and by comes in Sir Richard Ford. In our drinking, which was always going, we had many discourses, but from all of them I do find Sir R. Ford a very able man of his brains and tongue, and a scholler. But my Lord Mayor I find to be a talking, bragging Bufflehead, a fellow that would be thought to have led all the City in the great business of bringing in the King, and that nobody understood his plots, and the dark lanthorn he walked by; but led them and plowed with them as oxen and asses (his own words) to do what he had a mind when in every discourse I observe him to be as very a coxcomb as I could have thought had been in the City. But he is resolved to do great matters in pulling down the shops quite through the City, as he hath done in many places, and will make a thorough passage quite through the City, through Canning-street, which indeed will be very fine. And then his precept, which he, in vain-glory, said he had drawn up himself, and hath printed it, against coachmen and carrmen affronting of the gentry in the street; it is drawn so like a fool, and some faults were openly found in it, that I believe he will have so much wit as not to proceed upon it though it be printed.

Here we staid talking till eleven at night, Sir R. Ford breaking to my Lord our business of our patent to be justices of the Peace in the City, which he stuck at mightily; but, however, Sir R. Ford knows him to be a fool, and so in his discourse he made him appear, and cajoled him into a consent to it: but so as I believe when he comes to his right mind tomorrow he will be of another opinion; and though Sir R. Ford moved it very weightily and neatly, yet I had rather it had been spared now.

But to see how he do rant, and pretend to sway all the City in the Court of Aldermen, and says plainly that they cannot do, nor will he suffer them to do, any thing but what he pleases; nor is there any officer of the City but of his putting in; nor any man that could have kept the City for the King thus well and long but him. And if the country can be preserved, he will undertake that the City shall not dare to stir again. When I am confident there is no man almost in the City cares a turd for him, nor hath he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman.

So home and wrote a letter to Commissioner Pett to Chatham by all means to compose the business between Major Holmes and Cooper his master, and so to bed.

Read the annotations

posted by [personal profile] cosmolinguist at 09:39pm on 17/03/2026 under ,

I thought I was doing okay on the weekend, but now that I'm back at work things are really rough on my brain.

Work is intensely demanding. My dreams were violent and graphic last night and I woke up wanting to do nothing more than call in sick but the work-placement person I'm responsible for started today and I had to be there to talk to her and try to find things to do despite having no idea what the rest of my team is doing and being in maybe the worst possible position to find tasks for a bright graduate who'll be here two days a week for a few months. I had two meetings in a row this afternoon with different parts of the org I work with that were properly existential: we stumbled over questions like "who's responsible for drafting the Scottish guidance on active travel?" or "what exactly do we want local authorities to do regarding the built environment?" This would be so unfair for a new person who feels like she's jumping in at the deep end just being in a meeting about what we're doing on one Government consultation.

I only realised today that I'd kinda conflated two different TfL invites and now the thing I'm going to London for tomorrow, I dint even want to and it doesn't seem worth it. I've got a train ticket I hate to waste, but bleh. Bleh!

Counseling is right after work on a Tuesday, so I managed to squeeze in a quick Teddy walk in the glorious sunshine (the weather has been amazing today, that's today's one saving grace) and then absolutely exhausted myself trying to explain my week. She's not available at rhe usual time next week but I won't be the week after, and the week after that she won't be, so I took the unusual step of fitting in an appointment at a different time next week; usually if my normal one doesn't work I just skip it, but it feels like I need more at this point.

mrissa: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrissa at 01:00pm on 17/03/2026 under
 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

This morning I wrote to another friend, "I've finished reading Amal's new collection, and now the only problem is how to write a review that's laudatory enough." "A good problem to have," my friend correctly noted.

Seriously, though. I've read most of these stories before, but when I came to each one, it was a matter of, "Oh, I loved this one!" rather than "Oh yeah, this one." There is a stylistic and thematic inclination to the stories that never rises to sameness. It's such a distillation of why I have been consistently happy to see these stories (and a few poems!) in the venues where they've appeared, for the years they've been appearing.

If you were hoping that this would be a source of new Amal stories, you'll have to keep waiting, this is the kind of collection that's a culmination of previous work rather than a revelation of new. But it's a beautiful slim volume, I'm thrilled to have it, I will press it upon my friends and relations, hurrah. Hurrah.

shewhomust: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] shewhomust at 07:04pm on 17/03/2026 under , ,
It must be the season when visitors head north. Next week D. will be with us, just for a break and catching up - with us and other friends in the north. And we have just had a flying visit from [personal profile] helenraven, on her way even further north to a family celebration.

We took her to lunch at our favourite wine bar: a little nervously, because what makes it our favourite is not that the food and the wine are superlative - both are good but not stunning. [personal profile] helenraven is a person of taste and discernment, and I was afraid they might not meet her standards. But being a person of taste and discernment, she enjoyed the ambiance, the friendly service, the good food, the opportunity to have fun with wine - and besides, we had so much talking to do that [personal profile] durham_rambler had to prod me and ask, wasn't I going to take a picture?

Quattro rossi


All three of us opted for one of the flights of wine on offer: mine, as you see, were the four reds, [personal profile] helenraven had the 'family flight' from the business's own vineyard, and that lightweight [personal profile] durham_rambler chose a platter of nibbles with only three glasses of wine. That's an impresive eleven glasses on the table (there was some duplication, but not much).

We came home via Collected Books, where I was good, and just bought some cards, and via the North Road, which is looking terribly down at heel, and not just because of the Bus Station, where building work is still in progress (not that it does seem to progress) and where the usual handful of police cards were in attendance. And spent the rest of the day and much of the morning after, catching up - with breaks for reading when all this socialising got too much for us.
sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
For Saint Patrick's Day, I had a foreign body removed from my eye and was immunologically shot in the shoulder. Who needs booze?

Music:: Molly Donnery & The Ciderhouse Rebellion, "The Town of Ballybay"

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