- BREAD. I have coaxed myself back into giving it vaguely sensible timings, and shockingly it works better when I don't leave it to get sad and lonely.
- I slightly tripped and bought myself a writing slope last week? ... I am somehow surprised that it's being useful, specifically for when I'm being a horrible laptop + paperwork goblin on the sofa.
- SPEAKING OF WHICH, I am going through a bunch of tragically overdue paperwork for Admin: the LRP purposes (the person it is overdue to is... me) and found the answer to a mystery. (I am somewhat baffled that I apparently got the answer to this mystery at the second event this year and yet had completely forgotten that I'd managed anything of the kind until Just Now, two weeks before E4; I think I'm probably just going to chalk this up as another piece of evidence that my brain just... wasn't... working very well at all in June.)
- TOMATOES. Actually this is related to the Good Bread -- I had an excellent bread-and-butter-and-tomatoes-and-parsley lunch, which was delightful. The Purple Ukraine are so good and I like them so much.
- Today I have managed non-zero tidying, and the flat is marginally better and more usable for it. Mostly sorting out some of my gardening horrors on the patio; partly Wrangling The Dishwasher and some of the washing up; partly the aforementioned overdue paperwork, a consequence of which is putting a bunch of paper IN THE RECYCLING. Is good.
A couple years back I had occasion to read in slightly more detail than I had before about the state of the art in cryptographically secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs). These are PRNGs we trust to have additional properties beyond the speed and randomness requirements of normal ones -- inability for an attacker to reveal internal state, mainly, so you can use them to generate secrets.
If you look, you'll find a lot of people recommending something based on one of Dan Bernstein's algorithms: Salsa20 or ChaCha (or even more obscurely "Snuffle"). All the algorithms we're discussing here are very similar in design, and vary only in minor details of interest only to cryptographers.
If you follow that link though, you'll notice it's a description of a (symmetric) stream cipher. Not a CSPRNG at all!
But that's ok! Because it turns out that people have long known an interesting trick -- actually more of a construction device? -- which is that a CSPRNG "is" a stream cipher. Or rather, if you hold it the other way, you might even say a stream cipher "is" just a CSPRNG. Many stream ciphers are built by deriving an unpredictable "key stream" off the key material and then just XOR'ing it with the plaintext. So long as the "key stream" is unpredictable / has unrecoverable state, this is sufficient; but it's the same condition we want out of the stream of numbers coming out of a CSPRNG, just with "seed" standing in for "key". They're fundamentally the same object.
I knew all this before, so people naming a CSPRNG and a stream cipher the same did not come as any surprise to me. But I went and looked a little further into ChaCha in particular (and its ancestor Salsa and, earlier still, Snuffle) because they have one additional cool and weird property.
They are seekable.
This means that you can, with O(1) effort, "reposition" the Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha "key stream" / CSPRNG number stream to anywhere in its future. You want the pseudorandom bytes for block 20,000,000? No problem, just "set the position" to 20,000,000 and it will output those bytes. This is not how all CSPRNGs or stream ciphers work. But some do. ChaCha does! Which is very nice. It makes it useful for all sorts of stuff, especially things like partially decrypting randomly-read single blocks in the middle of large files.
I got to wondering about this, so I went back and read through design docs on it, and I discovered something surprising (to me): it's not just a
How does the construction work? Embarassingly easily. You put the key material and a counter (and enough fixed nonzero bits to make the CHF happy) in an array and hash it. That's it. The hash output is your block of data. For the next block, you increment the counter and hash again. Want block 20,000,000? Set the counter to 20,000,000. The CHF's one-way-function-ness implies the non-recoverability of the key material and its mixing properties ensure that bumping the counter is enough to flip lots of bits. The end.
Amazing!
But then I got curious and dug a bit into the origins of ChaCha and .. stumbled on something hilarious. In the earliest design doc I could find (Salsa20 Design which still refers to it as "Snuffle 2005") the introduction starts with this:
Fifteen years ago, the United States government was trying to stop publication
of new cryptographic ideas—but it had made an exception for cryptographic
hash functions, such as Ralph Merkle’s new Snefru.
This struck me as silly. I introduced Snuffle to point out that one can easily
use a strong cryptographic hash function to efficiently encrypt data.
Snuffle 2005, formally designated the “Salsa20 encryption function,” is the
latest expression of my thoughts along these lines. It uses a strong cryptographic
hash function, namely the “Salsa20 hash function,” to efficiently encrypt data.
This approach raises two obvious questions. First, why did I choose this
particular hash function? Second, now that the United States government seems
to have abandoned its asinine policies, why am I continuing to use a hash function
to encrypt data?
In other words: the cool seekability wasn't a design goal. Shuffle/Salsa/ChaCha was intended as a tangible demonstration of a political argument that it's stupid to regulate one of the 3 objects (CHF, CSPRNG and stream cipher) since you can build them all out of the CHF. (And, I guess, "obviously you should be allowed to export CHFs" though I wouldn't bet on anything being obvious to the people who make such decisions).
And then I googled more and realized that when I was a teenager I had completely missed all the drama / failed to connect the dots. Snuffle was the subject of Bernstein v. United States, the case that overturned US export restrictions on cryptography altogether! And as this page points out "the subject of the case, Snuffle, was itself an attempt to bypass the regulations".
Anyway, I thought this was both wonderful and funny: both the CHF-to-CSPRNG construction (which I'd never understood/seen before), but also the fact that Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha is like the ultimate case of winning big in cryptography. Not only does ChaCha now transport

Housteads Roman Fort
My standard joke here is that any game involving reflexes and coordination is going to be an excruciating experience of innumerable repeated failures for me, so I might as well play one where that's the point. This is only partly a joke.
Necessary context for anyone who has not met me IRL: I am dyspraxic as fuck. I was in my late twenties at least, possibly thirties, before I could catch an object being gently thrown to me across a short distance. My coordination, reflexes and ability to react to multiple inputs in real-time are so bad that I can't drive (or cycle on the road) because it would be OBVIOUSLY WILDLY DANGEROUS for me to even try (people would die). I have to buy special shatterproof crockery because otherwise my plate turnover is so high.
It was only with climbing that I learned that I can actually acquire motor skills, some of them, slowly, if I have unlimited time to practice them on my own terms.
Further necessary context: I'd been looking wistfully at the Soulsbornes for ages -- having seen videos such as Jonny Sims's Bloodborne streams -- as something that I'd probably love if I only had any coordination or ability at all to cope with having to react to multiple rapid inputs in real-time.
One of my climber friends has argued that Soulslike games are basically the same as working on a hard boulder project: you fail and fail and fail and fail and that's the process, each time you try to learn a bit more or try something new, and gradually you make progress, and eventually, hopefully, you don't fail.
And that's a process that I fucking love, and that works very well for my brain. Perverse stubbornness is my jam.
But when I look at something like Bloodborne -- the combat exchange is over before I can even track who's where and what's happened.
So I was thinking grumpily/wistfully and in secret about how what I really wanted was not an "easy mode," but a Soulsborne game that I could adjust the speed on (maybe set it all to 20-30% slower!), just so I could get my foot in the door, just so I could begin to maybe try.
And I watched more videos of other games, and somewhere along the way I watched people figuring out and/or being coached on how to get through the fight with the Asylum Demon at the end of the tutorial* in Dark Souls 1.
(I also read that Dark Souls 1 has the slowest and, in some people's eyes, "clunkiest" combat of the Souls games — not necessarily the easiest, but more tactical, less fast-twitch.)
And I thought, "... huh, I wonder, if I really worked at it, maybe I could beat the Asylum Demon? That would be kind of cool."
To be clear: I bought the game with the goal of seeing if I could beat the tutorial.
( Cut for length )
2. We had a nice dinner at Disneyland tonight. Waited until later to go down there, so it wasn't hot anymore (though it was still pretty muggy) and the traffic wasn't bad.
3. I feel like I'm already making good progress with tasks for this new project at work and the IT team was very happy with my report today. Also it seems there's interpersonal trouble again at one of the stores and I'm super glad it's not my problem anymore.
4. Silly Jasper.

Mostly these days I'm reading fun romances because, you know, everything. But here's two exceptions:
I am not a good reader for non-fiction American history doorstoppers, but I picked up from the library Charles Sumner : conscience of a nation by Zaakir Tameez entirely on the strength of Jamelle Bouie's interview with the author, which intrigued me. And the book was really great, hard recommend. Also very apropos for the moment, in both inspiring and disturbing ways.
About 10 pages in I was thinking, was Sumner autistic? and then shortly afterward Tameez mentions the same speculation. And it's very much written as Sumner's neuroatypicality basically being one of the reasons we had Reconstruction at all -- while all the other Republicans (laudatory) in Washington were thinking about what was achievable, about the next election, not being rude to their more conservative friends, doing whatever centrist compromise David Shor and James Carville told them to do, Sumner was just blowing it all up to do what was right. The man was nearly beaten to death, and he knew the beatdown was coming. He just kept yelling about human rights and civil rights on the senate floor (using those very words), alienating all his closest friends, pissing off President Lincoln, and giving no quarter. And sometimes he was an asshole, clearly; and sometimes he was very much in the wrong. But still. We could use a morally uncompromising neuroatypical asshole senator right now.
Anyway, great book.
I also ILL'd The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, which I never read in high school. And wow, so glad I read it. I picked it up because it was referenced in an article about GenAI, but what I kept thinking as I read is how much all this oldey-timey historical eugenics has come roaring back. The confluence shouldn't have surprised me, because the GenAI weirdos and the eugenicists all travel in the same circles at the very least, and are often the exact same people.
Anyway, very well written, except it took me a while because so much racism. Also the fun thing about living near Harvard is that in any book about American historical upper-crust shittiness, you're going to keep reading about utterly loathsome people while thinking "and that one's a street! and that one's an elementary school!" (Also, "Carl Sagan named a book after this asshole? Really?")
To be fair the elementary school got renamed 20 years ago. I'm apparently now my dad. You know, "turn off where route 99 used to be" and "I'll meet you at Scollay Under".
(CW: Gould is both writing in 1981, and his method of argument is to say, basically, okay even if I take these racist assholes at face value, let me show that their science is shit and their data are nonsense. Which means he restates a lot of the racist and eugenicist arguments—and prints a few of their illustrations—so their racism is present in the book. It's not a style of presenting racism that a history of science book would use today, I believe. Gould is clearly repeating the racist arguments in order to refute them, it's just that he's slow and methodical in the refutations.)
- A coaxed me out of the house for lunch; they'd been intending to spend the day in the office, but Shenanigans ensued such that they needed to pick something up from home and also the office canteen had run out of the veggie option, and by this time the triptan was more-or-less working. So we had zapiekanka at the market in the sunshine, and lo, it was good.
- I apparently somehow managed to duck into the BHF charity shop right before it started raining heavily, and upon reemerging from poking at homeware and books at the back was startled to find that it was no longer raining heavily, but that everything was suddenly and inexplicably (at least briefly at least to me, in my migraine-addled state) damp.
- I have finally picked up Lake of Souls (Ann Leckie), which I absolutely pre-ordered and absolutely was very excited about but am only now getting to, and I am having A LOT OF FEELINGS. SO many feelings.
- A brought me ice cream from the freezer. Raspberry ripple, which I was inexplicably in the mood for, and the hazelnut + hazelnut brittle.
- ... and in fact I am going to go and be in a sleepy pile. Yes. That can be thing number five.
I am honestly, happier with this paper, I thought we had a better range of genuine expertise in the people we talked to, and a more focused area of consideration. We had a little trouble with the third referee, who thought our experts were wrong about Quantum Computing and that we should rewrite the paper so they gave the answer the referee thought was correct. Our experts did not think Quantum Computing was among the biggest risks to be considered in the next 15 years - but instead thought there were a number of issues relating to human factors (sophisticated phishing, difficulty tracing the cause of problems and poor incident response in complex situations).
2. Gemma's soaking in the sun.

Subtitle 50 irresistibly nostalgic sweet treats and comforting classics... featuring "Trinity burnt cream":
Also known as crème brûlée, old recipes for versions of this pudding are found in various parts of Britain and Europe. Its association with Trinity College, Cambridge goes back to at least the nineteenth century.
Despite my documented interest in crème brûlée and, you know, having grown up in Cambridge, I had somehow never come across this before?! And yet it's inexplicably clearly attested on Wikipedia. Nominally this means I should probably be indexing the "Ethnicity" of the dish as "English" as well as "French" but, frankly, je refuse, and even Trinity have the grace to say:
The story that crème brûlée itself was invented at the College almost certainly has no basis in fact.
It's not even like the National Trust is making a point of having all the recipes in this book be of British origin! Clearly-identified non-British culinary sources include Italy, Latvia, and Russia! (... the Welsh- and Scottish-origin puddings have headnotes mysteriously quiet on said origins, though.) AND YET. Crème brûlée! Trinity! Really.
Americans, you know how we did just get updated covid vaccines approved, but because of RFK Junior's fuckery, your insurance will only pay for them if you are over 65 or have at least one condition that puts you at higher risk? I want to assure you that almost everyone reading this probably has at least one condition that puts you at higher risk.
The list of conditions includes, among the more obvious things (ie. cancer and immune conditions):
- Disabilities, explicitly including ADHD, autism, sensory disabilities, motor disabilities, any limitations with self-care or activities of daily living
- Depression or other mood disorders
- Any heart condition, any diabetes, any asthma or chronic lung ailment
- Obesity (BMI >30 kg/m2 or >95th percentile in children)
- Smoking, current and former
and last but not least, and, I can't stress enough that this is literally on the list:
- Physical inactivity
My siblings in middle aged (mostly): if any of you have nothing on the list of underlying health conditions, I salute you. Even your kids have a non negligible chance of being covered under that list.
2. It was much nicer weather today. Even when I came out to the car after being at work, I didn't have to blast the AC to get it bearable for the drive home.
3. Yesterday's episode of Game Changer was so good. This season has really been hitting it out of the park, but man. That was amazing. I can't wait to watch the behind the scenes episode next week. The episode also involved mentioning a lot of previous episodes, which made us want to do a rewatch, so I think we'll be doing that soon.
4. I love Chloe's little foot freckle.

-- no wait that's a lie, I also investigated an apple tree. (Unremarkable eating apples.)
But! Tomatoes!
Pictured varieties: Purple Ukraine, Blue Fire, misc green stripey, Orange Banana, Moneymaker. Buried so you can't see it is a Feo di Rio Gordo. I did not get the whole rainbow I was aiming for this year (alas the Yellow Pearshaped all failed, as did the Known green stripey), but I'm nonetheless pleased!
( Outfits below the Cut )
Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!
Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!
Costume Bracket Masterlist
Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
If I had been regularly LinkPosting, I would nevertheless have said that if one read almost exclusively Aus content, OR one has not been keeping up with any of the global developments in this field: one could do worse than the dw_news post re Mississipi. It is, in a way which I appreciate, quite heavily tilted to the "we cannot FUNCTIONALLY do the thing you have asked" side of things.
Behold, A Link.
2. I just remembered next Monday is Labor Day, so I've got a three day weekend coming up! And Carla has a very early doctor's appointment that Tuesday at a location that's not super far but also not really close, so I offered to drive her, and was at first thinking I'd just go to work after that, but then decided to put in a sick day request for that day and just take the day off, so I've now got a four day weekend. :D
3. Molly has been really into my chair lately.

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.
Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.
Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.
Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)
Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)
Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)
All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.
We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)
If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.
On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.
Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.
( depressing things )
- My one shred of Nice Things. Before leaving my wonderful supportive boss got me a little vacation time over the holidays. So, this is by no means advisable (but neither is living through *gestures at the news*), but I'm going to be in London in the middle of September.
So, let me know if you:
- would like to meet in London
- would like to meet in some other part of England?? I don't think I'll make it up to Scotland but I could maybe do a daytrip somewhere outside of London
- Would like to meet in Paris? (I haven't been back there since I was 12 and am vaguely considering for that to be my daytrip)
2. I made a rhubarb custard pie this morning before it got too hot. Now that we have the Breville oven, it doesn't heat up the whole house to bake things the way the regular oven did, but I still wanted to get it done early, especially since it always takes so long to cool and set up (it was good and ready by this evening for dessert, though). I still have a bunch of bags of already chopped up rhubarb in the freezer, so can make the pie (or something else) another couple times.
3. I finished another puzzle this morning. This is the first one of this brand I've tried and it was very interesting. The pieces were very irregularly cut, including some with straight edges that were not border pieces. It made for a little additional challenge, but for some really odd shaped pieces, it made it easier to find where they went just by shape rather than color.

4. He looks like he's having a good dream.

Reading. ( Raymond Blanc, Ceri Olofson, David S. Butler + G. Lorimer Moseley, David J. Linden )
Watching. An episode of Farscape: S02E04 Crackers Don't Matter, which I note with mild alarm (given how "..." we were at it) is considered to merit its very own Wikipedia page?!
The Old Guard 2. I... might yet get around to writing up thoughts.
Cooking. An Salad. An improvised but definitely acceptable for its purposes (i.e. providing nutrition for someone who currently has some decidedly inconvenient dietary restrictions) chickpea curry.
Eating. BLACKBERRIES. Still. Also plums. Really enjoying the plums. So many tomatoes.
Also a box of Many Salads from Mel Tropical Kitchen, some mildly disappointing cookies and a Good raspberry pastel de nata, and another cardamom bun from buns from home. Hurrah for spending a day at the BL?
Exploring. Poking around the grounds of a new-to-me hospital, where I came across an Exciting Apple Tree that I totally failed to actually inspect more closely, and about which I am excited primarily because of just having read a book a solid, like, half of which was Reviews Of Heritage Apple Varieties. (I was a little sad that James Grieve got only a very passing mention.)
The BL! And Beckenham, a bit, while picking up a watering can.
Growing. LEMONGRASS HAS A ROOTLET. Having another go at rooting a bunch of supermarket tarragon.
Observing. We found BABY COOTS. At least five of them, possibly six, plus one egg. They are juuust at the stage where they are practising GOING INTO THE WATER and then rapidly deciding Don't Like That and retreating to the Warm.
Though of course, out here on the West Coast, getting ahold of actual Fluff is more difficult; when supermarkets have jarred marshmallow product, it's usually Kraft's Jet-Puffed Marshmallow Creme, which is more liquidy. ... hold on, I can get a two-pack of Marshmallow Fluff from my local Cost Plus?! As in the same Cost Plus where my mom used to buy us Botan candy to keep us occupied while she looked at household decor? ROFL.
Of course I ended up down the merch wormhole with my search results; I'd rather have it as a long-sleeve tee, but I love the logo on this What the Fluff sweatshirt from the Fluff Festival. 20th annual this year! Pairs well with this Ice Cream Weather hoodie from Gracie's just across the square that I've been meaning to pick up for years now. As well as my What a Cluster! tee. And now I want Goo Goo Clusters and Marshmallow Fluff. At least Moon Pies have made their way to the Bay? I can get those at my local CVS sometimes now.
Cherry on top of all this internet wormholing: while trying to figure out if Fluff was sold in any grocery stores local to me (besides Walmart, ugh), I stumbled across their recipe section, and amusingly enough, one of their most popular recipes is Lynne's Cheesecake. I swear I didn't submit it - the recipe looks like a New York cheesecake recipe, and I strongly prefer my cheesecakes burnt Basque or Japanese cotton style. But now I'm thinking, maybe I should tackle a burnt Basque Fluff cheesecake. Though admittedly, on my cheesecake back burner, I also want to make a cheesecake with Poppy Bagels' truffle schmear, Wikipedia has just informed me of the existence of a smoked salmon cheesecake, and Kat Lieu just posted a SPAM Basque cheesecake. Time to reup our Lactaid stock!
And now, of course, I'm earwormed with the old-timey Fluffernutter jingle.
(Yeah, I know, an original Fluffernutter has no chocolate, but sprinkling some chocolate chips on top of one side and melting before assembly is pretty standard. Though IME hagelslag or vlokken work better, and of course you can also get hagelslag at Cost Plus, 😂.)
2. It was hot today but aside from my trip to the farmers market in the morning (I went right when they opened at eight but it was so muggy and gross already) we stayed in the house and kept relatively cool.
3. Ever since we had the pizza pockets with cajun ranch dip at DCA, we've been on the lookout for that kind of sauce in the store and could not find any, but the other day Carla finally did find some (Hidden Valley Kickin Cajun Blackened Ranch) and we got pizza tonight and it was perfect!
4. Look at this little face!

What Happened to Lucy Vale?
5%. A girl and her mother move into a house where sixteen years ago another girl disappeared and her mother was found hanged in the house. The story will be told in alternating timelines, but I haven't gotten that far yet, so it's just present day. Sounds interesting. I read another book by this author and liked it, though I blank out on what book it was literally seconds after looking it up each time, so I don't think it was that memorable.
Our Hideous Progeny
41%. A sort of Frankenstein fanfic. Victor Frankenstein's grand niece decides to follow in his footsteps and try to create life, but this time since she and her husband are paleontologists, they decide to create a dinosaur rather than a human. That said, while that is the main plot, it's only a small part of the book, which is more about the MC's struggles to be taken seriously as a woman who is interested in science. I'm really liking this so far. I'm listening to the audiobook and the narrator is great.
Suddenly a Murder
9%. A group of friends from a ritzy high school go to a 1920s themed party and there's a murder. I decided to pick this up because the 1920s themed party aspect sounded interesting, but I have quickly (within the first few paragraphs) become annoyed by rich teens being obnoxious (though the MC is a scholarship student and not rich herself). I'll finish it because I dislike not finishing things, but I doubt I'll really like it that much.
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
No progress.
Recently Finished
How to Survive a Horror Story
This was an interesting premise but I never felt like it really got good and I didn't think the twist was all that. It was fine, but doesn't make me want to run out and check out more by the author. Also, this didn't really have an impact on my enjoyment of the book, but I could not believe that the author couldn't take two seconds to google to see if a store they are mentioning by name exists in the place they are saying it does. No one in LA is going to the Piggly Wiggly, because it is very famously a southern grocery store chain. She could have just said grocery store, or she could have checked to see what stores exist, but nah. (The same character also lives in his parents' basement, which is not quite as unbelievable as the Piggly Wiggly, because I'm sure there are at least a couple houses here that have basements, but it just added to the general vibe of carelessness.)
Newcomer
I found the format a little tedious at first, but ended up enjoying this.
Shady Hollow
This was definitely a miss for me. Too much focus on describing the animals and their town compared to the rest of the story.
DeadEndia vol. 1-3
I reread the first two books because the third is finally out! Apparently it came out last year, but I just realized it was out a week or so ago. It's been too long since I read the others, so I had to refresh my memory, and I'm glad I did, because I would have been struggling to keep up if I'd just jumped right in to volume three. This was a good conclusion and I really love this series.
Skip to Loafer vol. 12
Hen na E vol. 3
Koalas have fingerprints; hairy-nose wombats do not.
Skin on fingers and toes wrinkle in water not because cells get saturated but as an autonomic nervous system function, which we have apparently known since at least 1935. An initial 2013 study found that people with wrinkled fingertips could pick up and move more wet marbles in a set time frame than people with dry skin; a 2014 study failed to replicate this, but there's more at the BBC including a 2020 replication. (The 2013 reference at least is buried in the BBC article.)
Holding a hot drink inclines us to view people as "emotionally warmer"; a heavier clipboard inclines us to believe the person whose CV it's displaying takes their work more seriously. Many other related fun facts over here.
(Book of the moment: Touch, David J. Linden.)

Longleat 1983
2. One nice benefit of the timing of my promotion/role change is that I don't have to help with inventory. People are busy with inventory this week and next week, but not me! It's not my problem anymore!
3. We had a nice time at Disneyland and I'm glad we went today instead of tomorrow, despite the heat and crowds, because now I have a weekend with no big plans so I can just rest and relax.
4. Jasper!

( Halloween! )
It was my usual recipe, doubled because I used the oversized 20 oz Ghirardelli bag of semisweet chips, and then I went through my spice cabinet and pulled out baharat and rosewater. Though I've made a couple of adjustments over the years, and didn't actually write them down online, so here, have my ( go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe. )
Ugh, I need a new chocolate icon, FJKR.
That being said, I went by Market Hall this morning since the internet said they were my local carrier for the See's Candy x McConnell's Ice Cream collab - they didn't have all the flavors, but they did have Coffee + Molasses Chips, so that got promptly plopped into my bike basket.
But while I was there, I also perused the other things they had available, and the regular old standard size 12 oz bag of Guittard semisweet chocolate chips was SIXTEEN GODDAMNED DOLLARS I HATE THIS TIMELINE.
Even checking online right now - Berkeley Bowl is claiming $12.39/bag, Guittard direct says $11.99/bag, and I am wondering how many bags of the semisweet I can order via my farmshare at $7.49/bag before they cut me off. Ghirardelli is still available at Berkeley Bowl for $8.79/bag, but I'm wondering for how much longer - before this summer, both of these were pretty close price matches, maybe 50c/bag difference and not always consistently in the same direction depending on what supermarket I was at? This feels like when vanilla prices exponentially spiked a few years ago and my $50 of vanilla backstock was suddenly worth $300.
... the farmshare website dropdown goes to 20 items. I'm not sure I want to be talked out of this. (I will probably buy at least 4, I am literally down to my last bag of chocolate chips and I usually have half a dozen bags on hand at any given time.)
The nature of veg box is that Vegetables for which I have no Plan... accumulate. Today's dinner took a bunch of said accumulated veg and made them salad-shaped, and it worked out well enough that I want a record as a reminder for future self that one can just Do This.
( Read more... )

Sascayhuaman.
2. Chloe and Gemma were so sweet and cuddly today! *_*

In brief: book is the least I've been annoyed by any such book I have yet read, which is fairly impressive going, especially since the copy in the BL's collection is the first edition originally published in 2003 rather than the second edition updated in 2013; more notes possibly to follow (subject to reaching a decision about whether I want to hold out for getting my hands on a copy of the second edition before talking about it in public).
Entertainment: shortly after I finally settled myself down in my nice corner desk against a window with my back to the wall and a whole enclosed-in-glass booth between me and Any Other Readers... my watch buzzed to let me know that I'd just finished a Period Of High Stress. The high stress was, obviously, sitting quietly wedged into a corner on public transport while reading a relaxing book. I did know public transport was exhausting! I have been saying! I'm still kind of impressed at the watch Earnestly Informing Me, In Case I Didn't? Know? and mildly regretting that I'm planning to do the same-ish again tomorrow, and also also I am reassessing A Lot of my wheelchair use in light of this...
Related entertainment: how much my hypervigilance kicked up when I returned from lunch to discover that neatly leaving my notebook and reading-book in a stack on my desk had not had sufficient inhibitory effect, and a Noisy Person had decided to sit diagonally across from me, in my Space, being Noisy. The amount I relaxed when they (temporarily) fucked off is another one for the "yep I can see how not leaving the house for over a year and then staying Hyper Local has added up to me looking much more functional" files...
Unfortunately, breakfast was crispy chicken Caesar salad, with buffalo sauce on the side. And after I finished that, I was dipping baby carrots in the sauce. And there was a spill.
I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax
I can't sleep, 'cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire
Spicy pillow, qu'est-ce que c'est?
Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa, far better
Run-run, run-run-run away
Oh-oh-oh
2. I finally got all our lego sets catalogued, so now we can keep track of what we have. (You know you have too many when you need a site to keep track of them.)
3. Molly looks so sweet here! (It's because she is sweet.)

The thing about buying new glasses, right, is that I've been feeling avoidant about it in part because I think I was slightly migrainey the day I had the most recent test done and I was already pretty sure that my vision goes... wrong... when migrainey -- most noticeable when moving, but always... there.
Slightly more specifically: it's neither scintillating scotoma nor loss-of-whole-field-of-vision nor any of the other very classic visual auras; instead it's a sense that I'm not managing to track movement properly along the lower edge and especially the lower corners of my field of vision.
... which matches up really well, actually, with the peripheral vision deficiencies that, er, showed up during my last eye test.
I've been noticing the Weirdness on-and-off for quite some time now, and was dithering back and forth about whether it was just confirmation bias in that I was only noticing it when otherwise migrainey -- but then on Monday, while on my way to my GP surgery to pick up some paperwork, it resulted in the railings I was going past (and that I go past regularly!) causing an extremely pronounced and unmistakeable strobing effect. I am very confident that that is not something I would somehow manage to confirmation bias myself out of noticing most of the time, so, hurrah, Definitely A Migraine Symptom (for lo, on Monday I was migrainey) it is.
The thing that is mildly baffling me is that I can't actually find (admittedly on a fairly cursory search) any description of specifically peripheral vision fuckery as a migraine thing! Lots of mentions of tunnel vision, lots of mentions of classic aura, and one case study in which "peripheral vision" is used metaphorically. So, you know, let the record show, &c.
2. Yesterday one of our store managers turned in her two weeks notice, which sucks, as she is a good manager and also I like her personally, but she has to move back to Hawaii for family reasons. When I mentioned that to our company president, though, he said that if she's interested, they can probably find her a position at one of our Hawaii stores. It's not as easy as transferring locations within California, because while they're under our same parent company, they're separate from us, but it looks very likely, and she's interested, so I'm glad for her about that. (In terms of what will happen to the store she's at now, thankfully it's not one of our further away stores, so it should be easy to sort out a new manager.)
3. The armrests on this sofa are perfectly cat height.

Ordered, at least, to pick up next week.
Indulgence is a writing slope off eBay with a lucky dip of writing utensils, one of which I am very cheerful about...
2. Tomorrow I have a meeting in the afternoon, but can have a leisurely morning, which I am looking forward to, as today was spent almost entirely with the aforementioned catching up and then an afternoon meeting, and I got home lateish and didn't really have much time to do other stuff, either work or personal.
3. Tuxie loves curling up under these plants.

2. I don't have to go to Irvine at all this week, which is nice. I do have meetings in Gardena every day, but that's like less than half the drive.
3. Jasper looks so solemn!

( Read more... )
Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.
Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).
My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!
Allotment apples and tomatoes.
Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!
Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.
I caught it just now. His advisor had caught it a few days ago and sent an email that Connor didn't see until he searched his mailbox just now.
Classes start Wednesday.
Valve Corporation said that MasterCard was definitely pressuring them to delist and deplatform adult content, through the intermediaries of the banks and processors, after Mastercard claimed it made no such demands of the platforms. And I'm sure they also didn't say they'd been looking for the excuse once the group that was trying to get their attention did it.And they'd probably deny that they've been at this sex-negative prudery and denying access to their networks for legal, non-obscene content for at least two decades at this point.
A neat thing: a complete run of Computer Entertainer, one of the first video game magazines in the U.S., has been digitized and made available in Creative Commons, by the Video Game History Foundation. Hooray for accessible history!
Also because if you don't have history available to you, you start thinking that the methods of the past are superior to the methods of the present, when what you want is to draw forth the good things of the past into the present. The "90s parenting" being described here is entirely possible in the current decade, without any need for retro objects or such to bring back nostalgia along with what you want to actually do. Such nostalgia often makes people blame things improperly for creating the current world, or to start thinking that simply removing those objects will be enough to bring back the perfect world.
The only way not to build the Torment Nexus is not to build the Torment Nexus, and we have many reasons why we need to stay in the job that's going to build the Torment Nexus. Take care of your souls, and perhaps consider that if you're building the Torment Nexus, you don't have to do it at high speed or efficiency while you look for something that isn't on Team Torment Nexus. (What's also well-noted there is that there are a lot of people on Team Torment Nexus who have rationalized their participation, or who think this really is the way to go,.)
As we move into yet another year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what's been learned and what best practices are good to continue. Including vaccination, even though, as we'll see in the later parts of the post, the anti-vaccination squad are currently running the health house.
A primer on the history of what the phrase "land grant university" means. More often than not, it's "land seized from Native nations, then sold, and the proceeds used to fund the construction and operation of the university" instead of something like "the state legislature granted land for the university from their own stores and funds."
The civility of the women's game (of football) has some fans of the men's game feeling like they're being fed their vegetables with no chance of dessert. We hear that kind of thing in the States as well, even with a top-ranked women's team. Am reminded of statistics I was quoted that suggest most men believe a crowd of about 17% women is 50% women, and a 33% woman crowd feels more like 90% to them. Because they're focused far too much on the thing they don't believe belongs there that they over-represent it in their heads.
( And the rest inside )
Last out, something good in the technology: the engineers behind the Jupiter camera called Juno have been heating and then cooling the components to fix various radiation-related damage that has been seen on images, and the fixes bring the camera back to within specifications, albeit temporarily each time.
And the increasingly misnamed Sacramento Music Archive, and the progress being made on digitization, archiving, and sharing of concert recordings made by one person and/or the collections that have been given to them, many of which are for groups that never made it big, and some of which are previously-unknown performances, demos, or material for very big entities indeed.
A supposedly easy method for folding fitted sheets that they do fold appropriately and aesthetically pleasing-ly.
(Materials via
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2. Went up to the farmers market this morning and the stand that usually has lemonade didn't have any today! They said they forgot to load the cooler on the truck. :( But I noticed that the Filipino/Mexican fusion place where we often get tamales and cookies also has juices. I hadn't noticed before because they don't have the actual bottles out on the table, just a small sign. But they have a jamaica ginger one and a calamansi ginger one, so I got one of each and had the calamansi earlier and it was delicious.
3. Today I did a bunch of chores and also had loads of time to just play Donkey Kong Bananza and read and it was just a really nice, chill day.
4. Gemma lurking under Carla's desk (one of her favorite spots).

Today I went to the local used book store for their Penny-a-Page sale. I knowwwwwwwww I don't need more books, but I do need more adventure in my life and it was cheaper than a trip to the beach or IKEA. Besides, the sale limit was 5 books, so I couldn't get into too much trouble. I ended up with about $65 worth of used books for something like $17 plus tax, so it was worth it.
I also put in an online order for some D&D sourcebooks as a birthday treat. I was hoping to get the new Artificer supplement, but it's been delayed from August to December.
Lately I've been rereading the first three Greta Helsing books in order to refresh my memory before catching up on the final installments. My pile of library books is down from 18 to a slightly more manageable 12, although some of them are very large.
How to Survive a Horror Story
16%. A group of people are invited to the reading of a will for a famous horror author at his family mansion, only to find it's haunted. Interesting so far.
Newcomer
52%. Second (in the English translation order) Detective Kaga mystery. This is told in an interesting manner, not with the detective as the POV character, but with each section being from the POV of a possible suspect, but with each section wrapping up by clearing that person. I liked the first book better, but I'm enjoying this one, too.
Shady Hollow
74%. A typical small village murder mystery, but they're all woodland creatures. I got this on an audible sale when I was looking for a second book to buy on a buy one get one free sale, so I took a chance on something I was not wholly sold on and without having finished this book I can say I definitely will not be continuing the series. I have often struggled to figure out what makes something a "cozy mystery", and it seems that a lot of times things are declared to be cozies just because the person solving the mystery is a woman, or they're not a professional, but then I started this book and I'm like, that's definitely a cozy mystery. Way more time is spent on describing in detail the various animals and their town and all that than on the mystery, especially in the first third of the book. It's not what I'm interested in, and for me this would have worked much better as a comic, where you can just show all the cute animals and stuff through illustration, without going on and on about it forever. The mystery is fine, though, so it's not a bad book, just not a good fit for me.
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
13%.
Recently Finished
Isle of Ever
I was not expecting this book to end without wrapping anything up. There is a sequel, and this really feels like what should be one book split into two, which is not my preference.
A Death at the Dionysus Club
I guess these books are from a small publisher, but that doesn't excuse the lack of professionalism in the audiobooks. The first one had a narrator with a lozenge in his mouth the whole time, and this second one has a different narrator who did the whole first chapter in a wildly different voice than he did the rest of the book, like he was trying it out and decided not to continue with it, but rather than rerecord the first chapter, just left it at that. The voice used for the first chapter was terrible, so I'm glad he switched, but why on earth leave it like that?
Drop Dead Sisters
This was fun. Not sure if I will read the sequel or not, though.
Abscond
Coming of age short story set in the 1960s about an Indian American boy dealing with his father's sudden death. I enjoyed it.
Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.
( Read more... )
I wound up taking a small dose of my "street cred" when I realized I was starting to have a trauma response. That turned out to be a good idea. There's a follow up in a few months, and I should pre-medicate for it.
Afterwards I got the 32 oz reverse mocha from a local coffee shack. (Not one of the bikini coffee shacks.) With chocolate whipped cream, thank you very much. My first time encountering white coffee espresso in a drink. Interesting and almost floral. I had Belovedest (a bitter supertaster) try it. Still coffee tasting, but not as strongly.
Although that's also possibly due to me only having 3 shots of espresso in the drink instead of the usual 6.
I would much rather discuss the coffee than the source of the trauma and the appointment, in any event.