life on a crocodile isle
Dec. 16th, 2025 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiGood wishes and hugs as wanted to people on my f-list (and others too!) who are having a hard time right now; a lot of people seem to be sick and stressed, even aside from the usual global issues.
More adventures with Kuro-chan the cat, no photo this time: I went past the park gates one evening to find Kuro-chan curled up on the wall outside, so naturally I stopped to say hello. Me: aw, your fur is so cold, 小冷猫猫, let me pick you up-- Kuro-chan: [hiss, growl, snap] Me: okay okay, I get it! Kuro-chan: [looks around, stretches, jumps off the wall to suri-suri around my ankles] Mrrowr? Me: …okay, if you say so? Kuro-chan [contentedly settles into my arms to relax langorously throughout the very short trip across the street to their putative actual home, while being stroked and crooned at in whatever language came into my head]. Cats.
I was thinking about what my family always called “household words” meaning phrases either from books/movies/etc. or heard in real life which we started using on a regular basis. Five cents, please (courtesy of Lucy van Pelt the psychiatrist, also allowing me to link my favorite Peanuts strip of all time here); long time no interface, I have no idea where this one came from or if anyone else says it, but I use it with online friends often; that’s life on a crocodile isle (from T.S. Eliot, sometimes used in full with “You see this egg? You see this egg?” too, I say it to myself when frying eggs); Study now, dance later. Plato AD 61, a graffito my mom saw once, which we use as shorthand for “get down to it”; after the opera—my dad ran a semi-professional opera company in his spare time, and was always exceptionally busy with rehearsals in the last few weeks before a performance, so that any normal household duties would be postponed until “after the opera,” a time sooner but not much more definite than the twelfth of never. What do you guys have of this kind?
I posted my Yuletide fic, considerably later than I’d planned but well before the deadline; it could still use (and will hopefully get) a brisk edit, but I think it hangs together. Big relief! Knock wood I will manage to write a couple of short treats before the 25th, we’ll see.
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: a couple of new ones from a music program, 好盆与 and 小孩与我, not all that exciting musically but fun to watch and listen to, the former in particular has a couple of really lovely vocal moments.
It’s the season when vending machines in Japan offer hot drinks of all kinds; many varieties of coffee and tea, to begin with. I’m not much of a coffee drinker except when very sleep-deprived, so I favor 焙じ茶 or roasted green tea (I also like to make it from teabags at home and soak dried fruit in it as a late-night snack). Corn tea is also much rarer but delicious (I was wondering if cornsilk tea, known in both Korean and Japanese as “corn beard tea,” is correspondingly 玉米胡茬茶 in Chinese…). I love hot chocolate, but vending machine cocoa is usually repulsive, basically hot brown water full of sugar and chemicals. Other standards include corn soup (with corn kernels in), お汁粉 hot sweet red-bean porridge, and Hot Lemon (just what it sounds like, hot flat lemon soda with honey, stickily sweet but very satisfying on a cold day). The less standard offerings are getting weirder and weirder every year, this year I took some notes: miso soup with clams, yukkejang soup with rice, sundubu soup with tofu, extra-fancy corn soup scented with truffles (at an extra-fancy price), Starbucks caramel macchiatos, and “milkshakes,” which as far as I can tell are hot sweet slightly thickened milk with caramel?
The download problem never ends! cobalt.tools was so great and now it’s not; it doesn’t do YouTube any more, which is YouTube’s fault, of course (and I’m still not sure of a decent YouTube downloader, none of them seem actually safe?) and now cobalt.tools won’t recognize bilibili URLs any more either, although it says it should work. And you can’t ask for support help with error messages without signing up to a github account, and… (Yes, it’s a free service! I would be happy to pay them some money and get some support in the normal way!) oh dear.
Rereading Melissa Scott’s Dreaming Metal, the second volume of her Dreamships SF duology (the eponymous first volume is also very good). I really love these, they are far and away my favorites of anything Melissa Scott has written. They are about, among other things, AI but not in the way we think of AI right now (although the first volume bears a little more resemblance). The worldbuilding is wonderful—everything is in there, technology and language and clothes and entertainment and politics and ethnic groups and class issues and public transit and food and jobs and religion and family structures and God knows what else, but it’s not infodumpy, you just get to live in the world for three hundred pages or so and see it all there. Spoilery thoughts on the central conceit of the book: where it’s also amazing is the ideas about what kind of music an AI musician might want to make, how it would be derived and what it would sound like, and the way human musicians might react to it and work with it—in a way that’s both plausible and sounds like something exciting that I actually want to hear.
Reading another book of essays by a Taiwan-born writer who lives in Japan and writes in Japanese; unlike Li Kotomi|李琴峰, who grew up in Taiwan, taught herself Japanese, and came to Japan as an adult, 温又柔 came to Japan with her parents at age three and has lived here ever since (she’s Wen Yourou in the Chinese reading and On Yuju in Japanese; her romanized name on the copyright page splits the difference and uses “Wen Yuju.” I’ll settle for the latter for convenience. She also comments on how much her real name sounds like a pen name). I’ve only read one of her novels, 祝宴, which is about a middle-aged Taiwanese businessman, resident in Japan for many years, and his family—he’s 外省人 and his wife is 本省人, their younger daughter is marrying a Japanese man and their older daughter has a girlfriend. Very little actually happens but it was affecting and hopeful without veering into melodrama or Japan Sentimental. I found a lot to resonate with in her essays (reminded also that for me, with no original connections to Japan or Taiwan or anywhere else in Asia at all, studying/writing in Japanese or Chinese can be a much less fraught matter for good or ill). Like me Wen Yuju was fascinated by Lee Yangji’s short story Yuhee—she’s the editor of a Lee Yangji collection, which she says drew her some criticism from Korean-Japanese readers who argued that a Taiwanese-Japanese woman shouldn’t be doing it, another complex issue.
In some ways she covers a lot of familiar ground—growing up as a first- or 1.5-generation immigrant, more comfortable with the new country’s language than her parents’, sometimes accepted and sometimes dealing with microaggressions and blank majority ignorance, struggling with identity and complicated relationships with her parents’ country and family, and so on. It occurs to me that though there are so many anglophone novels, both YA and adult, now that go into this—just from a quick look through my shelves right now, Elizabeth Acevedo, Bernadine Evaristo, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Jean Little, Melina Marchetta, Naomi Shihab Nye, Chaim Potok, Nina Mingya Powles, Isabel Quintero, Joyce Lee Wong, Lois Ann Yamanaka, and that’s just a tiny sample—and still so, so few in Japanese, so that Wen Yuju and just a few others are reinventing the wheel because they have to. It’s not like the “monoethnic Japan” myth was ever true, I wonder when this will change.
Photos: Seasonal leaves, flowers, and skies; Koron-chan, who doesn’t seem to feel the cold and maybe I wouldn’t either if I were that nicely rounded; a bakery with an interesting tagline; kumquat jam made by Y from the produce of his father’s kumquat bush, which was as delicious as it was beautiful, although the photo isn’t very good. I’ll take a better one next time.
Be safe and well.
More adventures with Kuro-chan the cat, no photo this time: I went past the park gates one evening to find Kuro-chan curled up on the wall outside, so naturally I stopped to say hello. Me: aw, your fur is so cold, 小冷猫猫, let me pick you up-- Kuro-chan: [hiss, growl, snap] Me: okay okay, I get it! Kuro-chan: [looks around, stretches, jumps off the wall to suri-suri around my ankles] Mrrowr? Me: …okay, if you say so? Kuro-chan [contentedly settles into my arms to relax langorously throughout the very short trip across the street to their putative actual home, while being stroked and crooned at in whatever language came into my head]. Cats.
I was thinking about what my family always called “household words” meaning phrases either from books/movies/etc. or heard in real life which we started using on a regular basis. Five cents, please (courtesy of Lucy van Pelt the psychiatrist, also allowing me to link my favorite Peanuts strip of all time here); long time no interface, I have no idea where this one came from or if anyone else says it, but I use it with online friends often; that’s life on a crocodile isle (from T.S. Eliot, sometimes used in full with “You see this egg? You see this egg?” too, I say it to myself when frying eggs); Study now, dance later. Plato AD 61, a graffito my mom saw once, which we use as shorthand for “get down to it”; after the opera—my dad ran a semi-professional opera company in his spare time, and was always exceptionally busy with rehearsals in the last few weeks before a performance, so that any normal household duties would be postponed until “after the opera,” a time sooner but not much more definite than the twelfth of never. What do you guys have of this kind?
I posted my Yuletide fic, considerably later than I’d planned but well before the deadline; it could still use (and will hopefully get) a brisk edit, but I think it hangs together. Big relief! Knock wood I will manage to write a couple of short treats before the 25th, we’ll see.
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: a couple of new ones from a music program, 好盆与 and 小孩与我, not all that exciting musically but fun to watch and listen to, the former in particular has a couple of really lovely vocal moments.
It’s the season when vending machines in Japan offer hot drinks of all kinds; many varieties of coffee and tea, to begin with. I’m not much of a coffee drinker except when very sleep-deprived, so I favor 焙じ茶 or roasted green tea (I also like to make it from teabags at home and soak dried fruit in it as a late-night snack). Corn tea is also much rarer but delicious (I was wondering if cornsilk tea, known in both Korean and Japanese as “corn beard tea,” is correspondingly 玉米胡茬茶 in Chinese…). I love hot chocolate, but vending machine cocoa is usually repulsive, basically hot brown water full of sugar and chemicals. Other standards include corn soup (with corn kernels in), お汁粉 hot sweet red-bean porridge, and Hot Lemon (just what it sounds like, hot flat lemon soda with honey, stickily sweet but very satisfying on a cold day). The less standard offerings are getting weirder and weirder every year, this year I took some notes: miso soup with clams, yukkejang soup with rice, sundubu soup with tofu, extra-fancy corn soup scented with truffles (at an extra-fancy price), Starbucks caramel macchiatos, and “milkshakes,” which as far as I can tell are hot sweet slightly thickened milk with caramel?
The download problem never ends! cobalt.tools was so great and now it’s not; it doesn’t do YouTube any more, which is YouTube’s fault, of course (and I’m still not sure of a decent YouTube downloader, none of them seem actually safe?) and now cobalt.tools won’t recognize bilibili URLs any more either, although it says it should work. And you can’t ask for support help with error messages without signing up to a github account, and… (Yes, it’s a free service! I would be happy to pay them some money and get some support in the normal way!) oh dear.
Rereading Melissa Scott’s Dreaming Metal, the second volume of her Dreamships SF duology (the eponymous first volume is also very good). I really love these, they are far and away my favorites of anything Melissa Scott has written. They are about, among other things, AI but not in the way we think of AI right now (although the first volume bears a little more resemblance). The worldbuilding is wonderful—everything is in there, technology and language and clothes and entertainment and politics and ethnic groups and class issues and public transit and food and jobs and religion and family structures and God knows what else, but it’s not infodumpy, you just get to live in the world for three hundred pages or so and see it all there. Spoilery thoughts on the central conceit of the book: where it’s also amazing is the ideas about what kind of music an AI musician might want to make, how it would be derived and what it would sound like, and the way human musicians might react to it and work with it—in a way that’s both plausible and sounds like something exciting that I actually want to hear.
Reading another book of essays by a Taiwan-born writer who lives in Japan and writes in Japanese; unlike Li Kotomi|李琴峰, who grew up in Taiwan, taught herself Japanese, and came to Japan as an adult, 温又柔 came to Japan with her parents at age three and has lived here ever since (she’s Wen Yourou in the Chinese reading and On Yuju in Japanese; her romanized name on the copyright page splits the difference and uses “Wen Yuju.” I’ll settle for the latter for convenience. She also comments on how much her real name sounds like a pen name). I’ve only read one of her novels, 祝宴, which is about a middle-aged Taiwanese businessman, resident in Japan for many years, and his family—he’s 外省人 and his wife is 本省人, their younger daughter is marrying a Japanese man and their older daughter has a girlfriend. Very little actually happens but it was affecting and hopeful without veering into melodrama or Japan Sentimental. I found a lot to resonate with in her essays (reminded also that for me, with no original connections to Japan or Taiwan or anywhere else in Asia at all, studying/writing in Japanese or Chinese can be a much less fraught matter for good or ill). Like me Wen Yuju was fascinated by Lee Yangji’s short story Yuhee—she’s the editor of a Lee Yangji collection, which she says drew her some criticism from Korean-Japanese readers who argued that a Taiwanese-Japanese woman shouldn’t be doing it, another complex issue.
In some ways she covers a lot of familiar ground—growing up as a first- or 1.5-generation immigrant, more comfortable with the new country’s language than her parents’, sometimes accepted and sometimes dealing with microaggressions and blank majority ignorance, struggling with identity and complicated relationships with her parents’ country and family, and so on. It occurs to me that though there are so many anglophone novels, both YA and adult, now that go into this—just from a quick look through my shelves right now, Elizabeth Acevedo, Bernadine Evaristo, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Jean Little, Melina Marchetta, Naomi Shihab Nye, Chaim Potok, Nina Mingya Powles, Isabel Quintero, Joyce Lee Wong, Lois Ann Yamanaka, and that’s just a tiny sample—and still so, so few in Japanese, so that Wen Yuju and just a few others are reinventing the wheel because they have to. It’s not like the “monoethnic Japan” myth was ever true, I wonder when this will change.
Photos: Seasonal leaves, flowers, and skies; Koron-chan, who doesn’t seem to feel the cold and maybe I wouldn’t either if I were that nicely rounded; a bakery with an interesting tagline; kumquat jam made by Y from the produce of his father’s kumquat bush, which was as delicious as it was beautiful, although the photo isn’t very good. I’ll take a better one next time.
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-16 11:31 am (UTC)Instant hot corn soup and red bean porridge on a winter day sound heavenly to me. :')
cobalt.tools was so great and now it’s not; it doesn’t do YouTube any more,
and now cobalt.tools won’t recognize bilibili URLs any more either
Oh nooooo it's the end of an era :( Crossing my fingers for cobalt updates!
I've never read any Melissa Scott so now I'm considering adding the first Dreamships novel on next year's reading list hehe. ~300 pages and not infodumpy sound pretty doable for me and it'd be nice to visit AI as imagined decades ago...
Thank you for the cats (Kuro-chan and Koron-chan)! I hope the vitamin C from kumquat jam helps protect you from winter flu season! ♥
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:09 pm (UTC)Instant hot corn soup and red bean porridge on a winter day sound heavenly to me. :')
I treat myself to corn soup pretty frequently, it's delightful.
Let me know if you decide to read the Melissa Scott and what you think! Recommended.
<3 <3 <3
ETA: damn, and I meant to say thank you for the Empress roll recipe link! Will keep it in mind.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-16 12:58 pm (UTC)I just discovered this yesterday! :(
I've had cobalt bookmarked for *months* now, and only decided to start making use of it this week, as I finally have some free time - so disappointing. /o\
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-16 01:11 pm (UTC)I love the term "household words". My family first and the housemate now both love referential humor, so I've accumulated quite a few of them in multiple languages by this point. Our current favorite is an-almost quote from a parody movie: "Are you alright? You've barely touched your prop soup!" (said any time someone doesn't finish their meal and there are leftovers). We have baffled a guest or two by saying it when we had company!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:10 pm (UTC)Oh, nice catch!
"Are you alright? You've barely touched your prop soup!" (said any time someone doesn't finish their meal and there are leftovers). We have baffled a guest or two by saying it when we had company!
Baffling guests is one of the major roles of household words! I like this one <3
no subject
Date: 2025-12-16 02:33 pm (UTC)As for YouTube downloader – I use this one:
https://y2down.cc/plFd/
I have an adblocker, and I never had any problems while using it.
Last but not least – lovely photos. And aww, pretty kitty sitting on a chair, looking cute and regal at the same time. :DDD
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:15 pm (UTC)oh my god this is ADORABLE, thank you for explaining it! I love it. and it's so sweet that you and your sister have special words of your own. <3
and thank you for YouTube rec! I'll see what I can find.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-16 03:33 pm (UTC)Monty Python quotesmovie quotes, but we do have some that aren't. One is "we are aware of your cat" (usually said to our cats when they're yelling at us or trying to get our attention), which was something the airline staff told us multiple times after our plane broke down on the runway when we were moving from Hawaii back to the mainland with our cat back in the early 2000s (when pets were still put in the cargo hold), and we had to debark and walk to another plane, with no idea where our cat was. (The cat turned out to be fine but rather wet when we finally got him back, many hours later after the flight!)Another one is "It's interesting. [pause] I wouldn't recommend it." The original context was some kind of weird tourist shop we visited that sold nothing we could imagine anyone wanting, but as you can probably imagine, it's a useful phrase for all kinds of occasions. XD
I've never heard of corn tea, but am curious about it now! I'll have to see if I can find it here.
I love the cat photo. What a great shot, looking right at the camera.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:18 pm (UTC)I wouldn't be surprised if you have corn tea! I'm told that the actual Chinese word is 玉米须茶, see if it turns up...
no subject
Date: 2025-12-17 08:02 am (UTC)Congratulations on finishing the Yuletide fic! As always I remain very impressed with everyone who can write fic to a deadline. (A friend mentioned to me recently that for them writing fiction and nonfiction feel like the same process, so they’re equally comfortable with writing either to a deadline, which was very surprising to me! But maybe most people are like that? To me writing fic is just a completely different beast, I can churn out essays and legal arguments day in and day out but I’m never going to be able to participate in a fic exchange.)
I was thinking about what my family always called “household words” meaning phrases either from books/movies/etc. or heard in real life which we started using on a regular basis.
Oh I just love this sort of thing! Thanks for sharing yours, "that’s life on a crocodile isle" is delightful. <3 Actually I think all the time about how my and my bestie’s shared lexicon is all 10+ year old memes/TV references/whatever, lol, something something lifelong vocabulary calcifying around high school/college…
A few that come to mind from ours:
-- yes, we know who you are: said to each other anytime one of us says something that is extremely typical of us as a person / obvious from having known each other for over a decade (like yes, of course you like [thing], I am familiar with your taste!); from the first David Tennant Doctor Who Christmas special, where people keep saying this to Harriet Jones after she introduces herself as PM-- a man did not think this through: said after making an error in judgement, definitely originates from some Game of Thrones post circa 2015
-- climbed the whole mountain: after finishing any substantial task; did this originate from Hyperbole and Half, maybe? This definitely used to be in everyone’s internet slang lexicon in like 2012-13 but it just stuck with us forever
-- fuel/refuel the flesh jaeger: in reference to needing to go eat something to not perish, this definitely came about because of Pacific Rim
-- bitch i’m bus: originated in the in-game chat of the Warcraft guild I was part of in 2009-2011, deployed when too busy to respond/engage (not to be confused with the Reddit “bitch I’m a bus” meme circa 2011)
With my actual family I can’t claim that there’s any such vocabulary because, and I have empirical evidence of this thanks to various Russian 1.5/2nd-gen immigrant friends, all Russians apparently share the same Lenfilm/Mosfilm/Soyuzmultfilm-sourced daily-use meme lexicon, lol. (Currently writing a Vorkosigan fic where I was compelled to use the talking bird is set apart by its wit and reasoning skills in direct translation in the dialogue on the basis that 1. it fit perfectly based on how Russian-speakers use this phrase and was possible to fit into the flow of the conversation in English and 2. any Russian-speaker who sees it will know exactly what it is referring to... :,D)
The Melissa Scott books sound fascinating, what a relevant-to-my-interests combination of concepts! Definitely going on the list.
Lovely photos as always <33
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:26 pm (UTC)I never thought of it that way! I think fiction is easier for me to write to order, as it were, because it's less reliant on outside information (I did some research this time around into a field I have zero interest in and even less understanding of, granted, but it's not the same as having to cite your sources for credibility!). Do you feel that fiction just needs to take its own time to cook in your brain, as it were? (sorry, clearly not very verbal today)
I love your household words (and I think the Russian ones count too); "a man did not think this through" sounds especially useful, oh dear. Love the "talking bird" idea, a little easter egg (talking bird egg?) for any Russian readers and maybe the rest of us will learn something too.
Let me know if you decide to read the Melissa Scott books and what you think!
<3 <3 <3
no subject
Date: 2025-12-20 05:17 am (UTC)It’s just a fundamentally different process to me! Writing an essay is a mechanical/analytical task where I know (and in many cases have semi-formally outlined) what I’m going to say, so it’s not an effort of raw imagination, just a matter of assembling the pieces and refining how to frame/phrase the argument. (ETA: Well, and refining my own understanding in the process of figuring out how to explain it!) Meanwhile with fiction I might have a general goal in mind for what’s supposed to happen in a scene but I never know exactly what the characters are going to say / how they’re going to say it / how they’re going to feel about it / how they’re going to look or move when they say it / what the room is going to look like, etc… (Which, that’s definitely another difference, writing fiction is a visual imagination task, writing essays and legal stuff is not.)
Basically the whole reason fiction is fun for me is because it’s an exercise in finding out what the scene is going to be in the course of putting it to paper + an opportunity to spend time in that visual and emotional space! Organic, rather than analytical. In fact a major part of why I don’t do detailed outlining for fiction writing (or even allow myself to think through scenes when I am not actively writing them) is because if I outline/daydream something to the extent of knowing exactly what happens I no longer feel any desire to actually write it, lol, it’s all about the moment of genesis / the first time I get to tell myself that story.
(Also got ahold of the first Melissa Scott book since I was conveniently between reads, stay posted <3)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 11:49 am (UTC)along the "how do I know what I think until I see what I say" lines lol. I know what you mean. I would say that while I can absolutely write a fic by a given deadline, it's not necessarily going to be a good one; the trick is leaving myself enough time for the writing to marinate (???) until I can get it where I want it. (Similar to work really, among the freelancers' cardinal rules is don't take a job with a deadline so tight you can't do adequate work...)
if I outline/daydream something to the extent of knowing exactly what happens I no longer feel any desire to actually write it, lol, it’s all about the moment of genesis / the first time I get to tell myself that story.
That's fascinating, and exciting. I have often wished for a brain transcription machine, because the scenes I write in my head are always better than the ones I remember when I come to write them down.
and let me know at your leisure what you think of the Melissa Scott!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-17 11:56 pm (UTC)The Chestnut Household Motto is, "This is findable information!"
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 03:49 pm (UTC)Yay for Yuletide victory!
I remember very fondly a rainy-cold-for-June day when we were in Japan and getting bizarrely chilly and came across a vending machine that still had hot drinks. (I can't say I was a fan of the hot chocolate, but it did warm me up and tasted passable as long as I didn't try to think of it as...well, as hot chocolate.)
And "Paradise & Lunch" is quite the restaurant name. *g*
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:21 pm (UTC)and yeah, Japanese vending machine hot chocolate is...what it is. Once in a while I get a craving for it if, as you say, I don't think of it as actual hot chocolate!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 08:25 pm (UTC)well done on your yuletide fic!
your household words are very literary and delightful! ours are, as expected, a random mish mash of chinese, hokkien, english or malay; there's "Lefebvre give up already" (we named our robovac after Henri Lefebvre) for when the robovac stops vacuuming and 要抱抱好吗？ + 不要抱抱 which was initially used to demand cuddles (or say no, too busy) but is now a phrase any time one party wants to 撒娇.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 12:20 pm (UTC)and I think household words are more fun the more multilingual they are! "Lefebvre give up already" lol, in context especially funny, and come to think of it I've inadvertently taught my partner to say "Hug please" in English, so we have 要抱抱好吗 down. <3
no subject
Date: 2025-12-20 03:06 am (UTC)What a fun question! Besides song lyrics whenever they match a situation, which I don't really think fits what you're asking, here are a few I've thought of today:
When someone is being unnecessarily negative, some variation of "Always with the negative waves, Moriarty!" or "Knock it off with those negative waves!" from Kelly's Heroes.
"Get to the f*ing monkey!" for when something is taking too long, from the Jack Black song about the King Kong movie.
"That's the wrong number!" and "I'm not a rapper." It's from an early YouTube video of a rap battle parody, absolutely silly and fun, shorthand for the literal and "I fooled you."
And from the Kingston Trio song (ETA song correction!) Bad Man's Blunder, "You have a point there, judge," used both earnestly and ironically, although mostly when being silly.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 10:08 am (UTC)Of course, that's the difference between being picked up (the horror) and voluntarily choosing a comfortable arm. <3
What do you guys have of this kind?
Oh goooood question! A ton of pop culture quotes. I'll have to think longer about this and hopefully make a proper post of it. Later.
Yours are funny, too! <3
(and I’m still not sure of a decent YouTube downloader, none of them seem actually safe?)
imho savetube is safe, it's made by one guy who i've come to believe is trustworthy over the years. and of course it's open source and i checked what it does (which is nothing iffy). he updates often - every time yt breaks something - so if it doesnt work, it usually starts working again a few days later.
Rereading Melissa Scott’s Dreaming Metal, the second volume of her Dreamships SF duology (the eponymous first volume is also very good)
Oooh that sounds good, and it's old enough to be cheap but still available. I'll get that to read for next year!
and still so, so few in Japanese, so that Wen Yuju and just a few others are reinventing the wheel because they have to. It’s not like the “monoethnic Japan” myth was ever true, I wonder when this will change.
Interesting, fingers crossed that it is a good development in the right direction (no matter how long it takes). "monoethnic" is never true, and always a red flag for me. Most other countries are on their way in the other (wrong) direction these days. :(
Great pictures, as usual, especially the (rounded) bridge and the (rounded) cat. <3
no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 11:51 am (UTC)Let me know what you think of the Melissa Scott if you lay hands on it! You want to start with Dreamships and (if you like it) move on to Dreaming Metal, probably.
"monoethnic" is never true, and always a red flag for me.
you are so, so right.
and glad you liked the photos! <3