Cimorene

He had texted me yesterday in our conversation about antique sf. He was coherent as usual, but my sister says he was cold yesterday and tired, and those were normal signs of building infection for him. ( Read more... )

I've started watching some of Columbo after seeing many posts about it on Tumblr. Season one is from 1971. I'm not saying the writing is bad or anything, but my favorite parts are -

1. light fixtures


2. everything else about the interior sets


3. bell bottoms


4. everything else about the clothes


5. cars


6. hair


7. waterphone, sinister piano chords, and other soundtrack


8. the stories and filmmaking techniques

Puppy sitting

Luci the Havanese dog was here over the weekend, but I only got one nice long walk in the sun with her because the weather didn't cooperate. Our niece has been delivered to Sweden and is settling in and starting to cook badly, and her parents came back and picked up the dog very late last night. Tristana refused to sleep in the bed when the dog was there this time, even though the last few times we had the dog here, she came back after the first night! I had to endure 3 nights without a cat to cuddle, which is incredibly rough and makes it hard to sleep (the dog sleeps by my feet or in the dog bed on the bed, so she does not substitute for a cat). We changed all the dog-contaminated sheets last night and I started washing the sofa covers she lay on today.

Remaking sweaters

I finished unraveling my chartreuse grandpa cardigan in dk-weight merino, and for the first time after frogging I wound the balls of yarn into skeins on the swift and washed them thoroughly. Now they've dried (that was really fun and made me feel like I was reenacting something, twisting the skeins and hanging them to dry in the sun) I've started winding them back into cakes for re-knitting. I needed to wash the yarn, because the sweater was worn a lot, and this way it is also no longer crimped like ramen noodles. I only finished half the cakes today, though. After I have them all I can weigh it to find out how many meters I have left (I had to snip threads and discard various parts a bit more this time). If there's not enough to make a whole oversized pullover, I will add another color and make a striped one. But I will not be remaking the long grandpa cardigan yet, and when I do it will definitely be in a proper wool this time, not merino. It will have slit pockets and a double knit button band, and a higher v-neck as well.

My experience has convinced me that dk-weight merino is just too functionally inferior to regular woolly wool in too many ways, and I'll probably not be making any more sweaters out of it, but it does have the benefit of softness. (And it baffles and irritates me how popular it is on ravelry!!) It makes a nice sweatshirt for lounging around with pajamas, as long as you can compensate for the fact that the ribbing isn't properly elastic and give the shoulders a solid seam to prevent the weight of the fabric from dragging it down and stretching the hell out of the neck. I tried to compensate for that in my 2nd to last house sweater attempt with a turtleneck and very fitted slim sleeves, but the turtleneck turned out to be too warm for me to wear, even lounging, except at the absolute coldest few weeks of the year. The blue merino pullover Wax made me a few years ago is my current lounging sweatshirt (when it gets chilly again), but it has major drawbacks: not being able to push the cuffs up, and the fact that the neck is too big even after I added a seam around the neck opening to limit the stretching. The sleeves are also too long. Both neck and sleeves block to measurements! They just don't stay there when they're on my body and I'm standing up. Because merino is softer than it is elastic. I guess I need to remake this one too, but unfortunately I would not like them striped together.

Wax's vacation is over. Her favorite aunt was here for half a week again, which was also nice. We got around to going driving together (I mean, for me to drive, trying to get used to our van because I learned to drive stick in a driving school car which was a very modern high-powered BMW sedan)! We got around to picking a lot of raspberries and Wax made a raspberry mousse cake (with chocolate) and a raspberry-blueberry Eton Mess.

We did NOT get around to unmounting the wooden outer door so I can strip it. We need sawhorses for me to work on it on, and Wax didn't want to buy them because we have the lumber to make them, but we didn't get around to making them. IDK what we're going to do. It's hard to do stuff when you're kind of... sick! We are just both not doing that well, or like, Wax is doing Apparently Fatigue All The Time, Physical and Brain, and I'm not doing well enough to manage stuff on my own that we usually do together.

We did NOT bleed the radiators, even though we did get around to it. We have both thought for years that bleeding the radiators is a really simple thing you can just do, and that millions of home owners DO just do. But when we got to the date on the calendar and tried to look up in Finnish "How to Bleed Radiators", we both ended up reading for hours and ... it turns out that it's not that simple. I guess. Apparently there are DIY guys who do it themselves, but also, the experts mostly recommend that you don't do it yourself, because you can mess it up by mistake. The only recent Finnish resource written by an expert that DID say how to do it ourselves that we could find started with the expert saying to "just check the pressure in the radiator" first. He didn't say how to do this. We couldn't find how to do this by searching (all the results just went back to the same results as How to Bleed Radiators). We can't find a manual for our radiators; we can't find the names of them to try to look up a manual. So I guess we have to call a plumber if we want our radiators bled????? This seems sub-optimal.

Luci the Havanese dog, Wax's brother's family dog, is coming to stay on Thursday because the BIL-family are going to Sweden to take our niece there to start university. Puppy sitting! I don't have enough energy to be a full time dog owner anymore, I think; I always get to a point when dogsitting after a few days where I'm like "Wow I could NOT do this all the time". But I'm always happy to see the dog temporarily. And the weather might actually be nice for walking this week, if only it doesn't rain. Sipuli and Tristana are both Concerned about the dog but not afraid of her anymore.

My dad has had cataract surgery that was successful! He's also been to have an ultrasound on his leg where there was a blood clot before but this month there wasn't. If there's no sign of it next month too, he will be declared Free from Dangerous Blood Clots! They also X-rayed an old fracture in his leg that is healing well and will be checked on again. I feel like we hardly ever get good news about his health, it's always problems and calling 911 and in and out of the hospital. So this was very nice! My dad reads a lot and he likes spending time in the garden and checking on the progress of plants, flowers, birds, bugs, and little lizards (they live in Louisiana where tiny outdoor and indoor lizards are common). He says his vision is clearer.

Seeing the Odyssey, mainly because I wanted to spend the time with Wax, mainly made me nostalgic for the original Clash of the Titans, which I am pretty sure I saw three times at school growing up in the 90s. I was obsessed with Edith Hamilton's Mythology and a Greek mythology nerd in elementary school, peaking in 4th grade when I made a shrine to Athena in my room. So I hated Clash of the Titans right from the first time I saw it, when I was probably 10-12, because of "inaccuracy". (Not that it wasn't, but I didn't really comprehend the issues at that age.) However, I am pretty sure it's the only film interpretation of Ancient Greece I've ever enjoyed.

Since I haven't seen it in thirty years or something like that, I don't remember any details, but I feel confident in saying it isn't that great. Or rather, that it is silly and doesn't know what the word accuracy means. This is not a recommendation. What I do remember, though, is:

-Pegasus
-The goddesses all dressed in glittery pastel 70s disco prom dresses
-The gods playing chess (?) at a party in the sky in what looks like a Masonic lodge temple
-a mullet, and the Perseus guy (was it really the dad from Little House on the Prairie? That can't be right) more or less wearing a chiton. Or, like, a skirt at least. Orange skirt?
-Brilliant colors, well-lit, sunny vibes

Anyway, now I really want to watch it again to check my memories.

And the Odyssey could be improved at least 10% if skilled Tumblr gifmakers could recolor the whole thing along those lines. It wasn't the worst-lit modern blockbuster I've seen, but it was still grimy and gray. When this is the biggest overall complaint about a film, though, it's not bad. Or maybe the fact that all the extras were passably Mediterranean but none of the main characters (nor any of the music) is the biggest overall complaint, in terms of things that broke my immersion while watching. But the color grading comes next.

As a former superfan of Athena, though, I do feel she wasn't prominent enough. Also just as a reader, because the way the gods are portrayed in Homer is one of the most fun and interesting things about it, and Athena's character could've gone much further if they had the time for it. (Admittedly, the run time was already a concern. It should've been a miniseries. More like 6 hours.)

Wax's vacation has started. And we finally put a floor in the balcony (after two years) because we had to in order for her brother to come direct/help us in building a catio on it (her birthday present). The catio is there now, but we have not painted the metal frame of the balcony with rustproof primer as intended. We haven't put slats under the railing, either, so you can just duck under it out onto the porch roof. Not childproof, but it's not urgent.

We haven't done anything about the disintegrating outer door, either, but we do have enough leftover lumber to make sawhorses. It's been cold and rainy since the weekend, and that might continue all this week, I guess. Wax has another 2 weeks of work after this week before the second half of her vacation.

We also need to clean the fridge. We've been putting that off for way too long and frankly I just want to nuke it from orbit. We can't afford a new fridge, though, and it still does work. No special powers of motivation or iron stomach have descended to inspire us to take on that task.

We have baked focaccia twice, though.

As you may remember, my wife, waxjism, is currently into Heated Rivalry. She's reblogging the same gifsets twenty times a day and she's reading nothing but Heated Rivalry anymore. It completely displaced her previous fannish interest in 9-1-1, by the way, and she didn't even watch the end of the season of that - which is probably an improvement for her because Heated Rivalry, the show, is well written, meticulously planned, brilliantly acted, and made with extraordinary care to every detail of photography and editing and visual design. In contrast, while 911 is a good time, it's a network prime time soap opera churned out by an underpaid writers' room and a questionably reasonable showrunner. Of course 911, (sociologically) intriguingly, seems to be in the midst of making their male BFFs a canon pairing ( Read more... )

So anyway. Wax is now reading fanfiction for Heated Rivalry, which is a miniseries made out of a romance novel about gay hockey players. Wax and I are veterans of hockey RPF, having both read it and followed NHL hockey for maybe 5-8 years (I started to get fed up with the evil ownership and conservative culture around 2016-18). In hockey RPF the level of hockey knowledge is obviously high and sports fandom was the canon text. But this show's broad appeal has brought in a lot of fans with no knowledge of hockey at all, and as always with a very popular fandom, a critical mass of the ones with no knowledge of hockey also lack any sense that any knowledge about hockey is necessary to writing about professional hockey players. (It would totally be possible to write fic about this show with no knowledge of hockey beyond what is shown onscreen, provided you simply paid attention to what was onscreen and used it; but this would probably require more attention to detail than is plausible in a person who is so enthusiastic that it doesn't occur to them to look up even a Wikipedia article's worth of information on the world and setting of the story they are writing.)

So there's apparently a huge range of mistakes about hockey, and even though this problem is so endemic that Wax is reading mistakes egregious enough to upset her multiple times a day and has been for months, the pain never dulls.

You know what this reminds me of? The last time I was reading for an extended time in the same fandom: I spent about a year intensively reading almost every last scrap (at the time) of Steve/Eddie fic in the Stranger Things fandom after season 4 (Here's my 75 bookmarks, mostly from 2022-2023). Stranger Things is about teenagers in 1980s midwestern America. The fandom appealed overwhelmingly to young people (although the show had a lot of nostalgic appeal for adults as well, they were definitely a minority of writers represented in fic). Also, less predictably, the plurality of the writers seemed to be from the UK (???). Like Heated Rivalry writers who don't know about hockey, these youngsters didn't know about the culture, technology, or slang of 1986 (including the parts that actually were shown onscreen, which again mirrors the Heated Rivalry writers).

After a while I was far more annoyed by ridiculous errors in technology and British dialogue that they didn't bother getting American-picked (it's a small percentage of young fanfic writers who think having a beta reader is worthwhile now; in fact it's quite popular and socially acceptable to post without rereading) than by anything that you could call bad writing in the traditional sense. At some point I got so annoyed with it all that I would have gratefully used a filter that only allowed fic by writers born before 1985 in North America (that's when I knew I needed to stop reading it, probably).

People have to start writing and keep writing to get really good. People have different taste. People have different skills. So there's no point holding it against anyone that they're young, or haven't been writing for that long, or are writing a different kind of fic than the kind you like because they're interested in different things than you.

On the other hand, everybody who doesn't bother to look it up when they don't know what a trade is, or how a cassette player works, or how hockey games are scored, or queer terminology in the 80s, is making a conscious choice they didn't have to make. They could have left it out if they didn't want to look it up and weren't sure! So it's absolutely fair to hold all of those things against them.

Of course, it would be difficult to filter, even theoretically, for writers who look everything up, so the quickest way to this more-relaxing reading experience is a writer who already knows. Hence "writer was alive in the 1980s" and "writer has been a hockey fan for years" would be highly useful filters if they were widely adopted.

(But they would also narrow the pool so much that most people wouldn't want to - be able to? - ­­­­stick to them very long.)

Sipuli has been getting gradually more comfortable in the yard and she now spends most of her time there exploring. She wants to check everything out, walk out in the street, climb through the barbed wire in the hedge into the woods, sneak into the neighbors' yard, and crawl under the tenants' table while they're sitting at it.



But she still runs away from the tenants' kids, who are in the yard at the same time as her multiple times a week, if they talk to her. Last week a lady walking by in the street asked if she was having a nice time outside and she whipped her head around and cringed down in the grass and tried to slither away. She also panicked and ran and got tangled in a chair when one of the tenants said Pspsps to her a few weeks ago. In her jumpy moments she has wiggled out of her harness twice now. I guess we need to get her a more secure harness.

The knitting is going fine and the sweater looks good. I've knitted 35 cm so far.

The pattern is a 90s Drops design pattern with an inverted triangle shape to make the shoulders wider than the hem (not doing that) knitted in pieces and seamed (like basically all mainstream patterns of that era, but not doing that) (I will seam the shoulders because those are functional seams that help keep the sweater in place and prevent it stretching out of shape, but there's no benefit to side seams on an oversized simple pullover, or seams where the sleeves attach ever) with set-in sleeves (not doing that)... and I already ruined the bottom hem by following the directions to start with three rows of reverse stockinette between the ribbing and the body, and will have to unknit that part backwards and redo it upside down after I finish the body.

But overall I guess it's going well. Very quick and easy to knit.

My first curséd sweater was ( Read more... ) Later, purple yarn I bought for myself became the second curséd sweater ( Read more... ) The third curséd sweater is the third of the triplet sweaters we promised to make last summer, originally saying we would try to finish them all by last winter, lol. The other two are done.

1. Wax started this traditional Aran cabled sweater last fall and knitted about 30% of it, but she had modified the pattern to make it smaller, and then decided it was too small (because all the cables contracted it so much).

2. I unraveled it and started over, following the pattern exactly (after Wax had to redo the first few rounds of ribbing for me, because the first time I knitted a couple of inches before realizing I had gotten the stitches twisted and was knitting a Möbius strip). I hated the design. Way too many different cable crosses slowed it down a ton.



3. Then I realized, after working for weeks, and especially right after like ten hours of knitting in two days, that I was using the yarn too fast and we didn't have enough left to finish. This shouldn't be possible, because we ordered the yarn using this pattern as a guide. But it was! And because it was over six months ago, we almost certainly could not get more yarn in the same dye lot.

4. Started over again with a new, much simpler cable pattern, and again got the stitches twisted. It's not like I wasn't checking! Both times I was worried about it and checked twice, then incorrectly concluded they were not twisted¹! At least this time I realized that I was knitting a Möbius strip after only about a centimeter.


Footnote
1. this part is just adhd, not the curse