Cimorene

Also we can't get hockey tickets bc apparently Turku's team keeps rescheduling games

2026-10-11T12:53:19Z

Another dogsitting weekend. Luci is here and being very sweet and adorable. She's still afraid to go into Sipuli's territory and usually has to be carried into the kitchen (Sipuli hissed at her once last time she was here). It's overcast and around 7°, but she is perfectly happy to walk and not at all eager to come back even when the ground is still all damp from rain. We were out more than an hour yesterday. She's only a Havanese! The size of a footstool! Her little legs are only about as long as my hand. You'd think she'd get tired before that.

I've been knitting some socks, and I keep making mistakes and having to redo things. I do want to have some more socks, both for me and to give away, but I don't really want to make them. I want to make sweaters. It's much more exciting and rewarding to work on them.

I am itching to replace two favorite sweaters that I have lost and which both left big gaps in my wardrobe, a v-neck cardigan (lightweight heather-gray alpaca, made by Wax) and a sturdy zip-up jacket with a funnel neck (brown worsted Andean wool, knitted by me in... 2013?). Both of these had flaws that I ignored for years but which would be fixed in the new versions: fit problems and lack of pockets.

But also, I really DO want us to use up our yarn stash and not just keep buying more. Maybe even get it to fit in the barrister case (which, again, is six feet tall, so not fitting in it is ludicrous). It's incredible that we have so many little scraps of different yarns that they more than fill the case while not being able to produce any sizable project! I suggested that we try to sort it by gauge/type later today, and Wax agreed. So maybe we'll manage to squeeze it all into the barrister case soon.

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Sock knitting total disaster and sweaters

2026-10-08T09:58:42Z

I got the brilliant idea to knit wool socks with cats for Christmas for every adult in my wife's family (2 brothers, 2 SILs, 5 niblings). First pair were accidentally okay, but I just spent a week making a second pair all the way to cutting the yarn and starting to weave in ends when I realized they were too fucked up (I didn't have enough short rows in the heel, so instead of a 90° angle between the foot and leg it was more like 130° and the extra fabric was bunched up on top of the foot) and had to unravel them all the way. I don't know whether to try again immediately or make some for myself or Wax first so I can have a win. Very humbling.

I have also (successfully) knitted two sweaters for myself since my dad died, both stashbusting! (Yay! But it turns out the stash still doesn't fit in our barrister case even though it's like six feet tall, and even now that there's not enough of any one yarn to make another sweater.)

First I made this natural wool sweater (from the Stripe Hype Sweater pattern by Veronika Lindberg). This is from a batch of undyed lanolin-in wool that we bought at a local sheep farm two Easters ago (although I had to add stripes of the leftovers from my Stentorp fair isle vest because it turned out we only bought 700m; now there's a bunch of it left in several colors, though I think not quite enough for another whole sweater).

Then I made this chartreuse sweatshirt (from the Marseille sweater pattern by PetiteKnit). I unraveled a merino cardigan I had made several years ago (cat snag damage & wouldn't stay buttoned at the top button), washed the yarn, discarded the messed up bits, and bought a little more to make contrast stripes.

It's not really quite cold enough yet to wear either of these inside without having to pull it off and on alternately several times an hour. It's just the season for them outside!... Except it's also VERY windy. Also not cold enough for my wool socks.

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Little window, poetry, fancy food

2026-10-04T19:42:46Z

Tiny window has been stripped of all putty and loose paint and sanded.

We need to glue and clamp one joint (tomorrow?), and then I can paint it: linseed oil paint, three thin layers, so I hope we get nice weather and it can dry on the balcony this week.

My dad's fandom community invited us to a virtual reading of his poetry today. (He was a grand master of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, past winner of the Rhysling award which is the poetry version of the Hugo and Nebula, published in Asimov's and other major genre publications.) I haven't cried that much in the last week, and was not prepared for how sore my eyes now feel.

We went out to eat yesterday, impulsively. I love serious chefs and their hilarious ideas and hilarious fancy plating. Wax ordered a deconstructed fish (delicious aborre) and chips - but it came with precisely 16 French fries arranged in a Jenga tower. That's not nearly enough chips, dude! Luckily my pizza was way too big for me to finish. For dessert we had an herbal creme brulee with local herbs served with two teensy scoops of sorrel icecream and two lingonberries. It was delicious.

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What to do to the broken window

2026-10-01T11:36:18Z

Wax wanted to buy a 60 cm square of glass and trim it to size ourselves (our pane is about 55 by 32 cm). We both did lots of web searching yesterday, and she drove to a different suburb of Turku (Lieto), ten minutes in the wrong direction, because the branch of the hardware store on the way home didn't have glass in stock.

So apparently it's semi-normal to use hand tools to trim sheets of glass for things like building greenhouses (as well as the work of stained-glass artists). There are specially hardened cutters that you use with a straightedge to score a line, after dipping in oil for lubrication. Then you turn the sheet upside down, brace it on the table edge, and gently but firmly tap the back to break it. I guess this sounds doable but still intimidating.

The cutter was less than 10€, and the glass was 30€. But NO hardware stores around here have glasscutting oil and all the online glass stores that sell it don't say what it is on the page, they just display a long list of warnings. Finally a separate search informed me that glasscutting oil formulas are all slightly different patented mixes formulated for precise viscosity. Vegetable oils are too thick, it says. The only single substitute suggested was kerosene, which was what people used to use before glasscutting oil. It has a good viscosity etc, and is deprecated because it's dangerous and super flammable.

Kerosene is easy to obtain, anyway, right?

waxjism wouldn't buy it because you can only buy it in big containers, which would be bad because it's dangerous to store and dangerous to dispose of, and we would have no other use for it.

If we can't find a small container of it, we will order the glasscutting oil online, I guess.

My aunts and my grandmother before them have been making stained glass art as a hobby for decades, and now I'm really wishing I had asked for a lesson or two. I could also really use a craft room. There is not a good place in our house for stripping this window frame.

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Act 3. Defenestrated Window Retrieval

2026-09-27T16:08:12Z

I was able to wiggle the window off the pipe. It must have fallen with some force though, because even the narrowest point was difficult to squeeze between the house and the edge of the pipe cap.

Now I need to remove the rest of the glass and then thoroughly strip and repaint the wood before puttying in a new pane. (We bought a kit with all the materials for this from the Finnish old house store Domus Classica a few years ago.) Wax has agreed to be in charge of buying the pane. Probably not a standard size (the house was built in 1950, and at this period Finland was pretty unstandardized and house building was very DIY).

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Throwing the window out the window: a very stupid day

2026-09-23T18:29:37Z

So, did you know that windows (at least in Finland) can just be a sort of... flat panel that's friction fitted into the frame, with nothing holding them in place at all?

Well! I didn't!

i. The Prelude.

Most of the windows in our house are casements that open like little doors with hinges on one side (or rather, most of them have one casement next to a big pane that doesn't open). Upstairs in our house, the attic level, there are big wide windows positioned centrally under the peak of the roof on both the east and west faces of the house (the gable ends), and then on each side of each of these, under the eaves, there are sort of miniature single-pane windows as well. Of these four little mini windows, the SE and SW ones are in the unconditioned attic space; the NE one is next to the head of the bed, and the NW one is in the library (Wax's WFH office). The mini window at the head of the bed is opened and closed frequently, for ventilation and rain and cold; as the house is from 1950, the windows are all double glazed, but the inner window opens inward on its hinges and then the outer one opens outward on its separate hinges. In the summer, we remove the inner windows for all the windows which we frequently keep open (lift them off their hinges) for easier opening and closing of the outer ones. And the mini window by the head of the bed has a slightly different hardware for holding it open and closed than the big ones; it only needs one latch for holding it closed and one latch for holding it open.

ii. Act One.

When Wax's aunt was coming to visit this summer, and Wax was at work, and I was furiously and industriously cleaning the house before the beloved aunt's visit, I got the idea to open the mini window in the library, which is at the foot of the guest bed, for ventilation. I was convinced that it had been opened many times (this wasn't true), so I just pried at it until the inner window came off - not off of hinges like the NE window, just popped out of the opening. "Wow, another example of very sloppy and careless housebuilding!" I thought.

But with the inner window off, I could see that the outer window had the one little latch at the right that the bedroom mini window has, so I pushed on it. It was stuck tight, but I thought it was just stuck, and hit the edge of the frame carefully with a hammer over a folded towel until it opened a crack. Only then it didn't open any more, and I could see that the reason it was sticking was that somebody, at some point, had STAPLED a bunch of thin plastic over the outer edge of the window, the face that was wedged into the window frame. So that's when I realized that this window had NOT in fact been opened since we moved there, and decided to close it again. I pulled on the latch to close it as violently as I am able, and it didn't close all the way, but it did close enough so there was only a thin crack left. And it was the middle of summer, so that wasn't an issue at that time.

iii. Act Two.

Yesterday Wax finally got switched back from only working in the office to 50% WFH again (yay!), starting immediately. Today. She plugged in her computer late last night and started working early this morning without taking full stock of the window situation (stuck open a crack) or the temperature situation (about 15°). So it wasn't until she finished work for the evening that we could tackle the window.

Wax edged between the bookshelves and the seaman's chest, leaning forward and around the massive hoya carnosa which stands at the window on a wooden plant stand in a very heavy ceramic pot with its tendrils twisted around the bookshelf, the hanging light, and the curtain rod on the big window. She did not have firmly planted feet, she did not have a good center of balance, and she could not clearly see what she was doing, is my point. She started trying to just tug the window closed. That didn't really work. She noticed the stapled on plastic I had told her about. Then I guess she... pushed instead of pulling? And just threw the window... out the window.

There was a popping noise and then a tinkle of breaking glass. "It didn't have any hinges!" she said. "We're too stupid to own a house," we mourned. We stuck the inner window back in place (or rather, just sort of set it in place, since there's nothing to hold it there since it has no hardware attached to it at all, it's just a rectangle of glass in a wooden frame) to keep the rain out and went downstairs.

As soon as we walked out the door, it started raining on us, and when we got to the bed of flowers under the window, we found that the window had somehow landed on a vent pipe coming out of the side of the addition and stuck on it, well above my head, so I could not possibly lift it off, but the ground slopes down so it's not going to be easy to even get a ladder there. It also broke a chunk of asbestos shingle off the addition while it was at it! (So in that sense I guess it's good that it was raining???) We picked up the loose glass from the ground and got ready to trudge sadly back inside when I looked up and saw Tristana's tiny face sticking out of the hole in the wall. Then she stuck her whole head and shoulders out, and given that she's tiny and fearless, clumsy, and not very smart, I panicked with the fear that she would fall out of the window. Apparently the inner window had just fallen back out as soon as we left. (It was caught between the wall and the plant pot and unharmed.) We taped it up with blue painter's tape for the time being. (Tristana didn't fall out the window. She came when I called - from inside - and then, due to being excited about us moving furniture and windows around, started yowling and zooming around the house.)

iv. Act Three.

I guess that will be whatever happens when we try to retrieve the window frame, reglaze it, and cover the hole in the wall with whatever kind of weatherproofing we can manage, since Wax has to work 50% of this winter just out of arm's reach of the tiny NW window. I didn't want to end the post after two acts, though, because that just seems like bad dramatic structure.

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Day 22

2026-09-16T12:38:29Z

My mom and sister are having escalating amounts of paperwork and stuff to deal with. My dad handled all the paperwork for my mom, who is maybe the most ADHD person I've ever met, and she's having so much anxiety that we're trying to get her to call her doctor, but she also already has multiple calls she's having to make each day. Dad also used to make all the calls he could for her because she hates making calls. Wish I could help! But my passport isn't here yet anyway. If it hasn't arrived by October 12, I am allowed to ask the Embassy to check on it. So it would perhaps be tempting fate to schedule the funeral too close to that date anyway. My sister does the paperwork for her and her husband, but she and my dad are on the mortgage, so she has to deal with that: personally presenting the death certificate and all kinds of paperwork.

Still over a month before I could be there. I am starting to worry I will get covid as soon as I enter the country. And the flight is eleven hours - if I keep the mask on the whole time I can't eat, but I can't go that long without eating?! The levels of covid in Louisiana are moderate according to latest estimates, around 2% infectious, and the latest wastewater analysis results in Turku didn't find any. Like everyone in Finland who isn't elderly or immune-compromised, I only ever had the first covid booster - no others were ever available here.

I keep having dreams about visiting my parents at my childhood home. Completely silly and unrealistic dreams, but I guess my subconscious is aware that I have to go there even though it isn't aware that Dad is dead. Last night there was one where my sister and I went into my childhood bedroom, because we had to get dressed to go out to dinner using only the clothes that were in there - we didn't have luggage in the dream - and my teenaged dresser was there but all the drawers were full of things I'd never seen before that looked like the clothes of young adults at an anime con, complete with pre-styled pastel wigs. For some reason getting dressed had to include one of these wigs. Later I dreamed my parents picked a restaurant that served nothing but seafood without remembering I don't eat it and have hated it since childhood, leaving me hungry.

I was intending all spring to wash a bunch of wool things in the hottest part of this summer, because they dry so much faster outside, but I never got around to that. The sweaters will just have to take 3-6 days to dry, because I can't get through the winter without washing them. I will not attempt to dry blankets indoors. Even apart from these wool things which are taunting me from the bottom of the laundry basket so that it's never empty, even when I have washed everything else, I have not actually at any point caught up on laundry in the last 22 days. In my defense, Luci the Havanese dog spent another long weekend with us, which was a nice distraction. My BIL and SIL each saying quietly and levelly to my face, "I heard about your dad and I'm sorry" reduced me to mildly dissociating and just chirping "Thanks" in the moment, but when I remember it, I break down crying. The cot upstairs is completely covered with clean clothes that haven't been folded and put away.

I did clean the sink and kitchen counters yesterday, though, and vacuum a little. I did this without methylphenidate, which I haven't taken since a few days after dad died - I wasn't up to coping with the appetite suppression effect. But maybe I'll try it again this week.

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Day 10

2026-09-05T19:17:55Z

Sent the passport application off last week with no problems.

Waiting now. No date has been set for the memorial yet. We haven't talked about buying tickets.

Feeling weird, a little surreal at times, kind of behind myself - that sounds like it's describing dissociation, but I don't think I'm dissociating - at least not normally. On the contrary, I've been ruminating on my dad almost constantly (in between reading, which I do compulsively when upset). But I don't feel up to tasks like deciding what to cook and timing it when Wax gets home, like I did the week before. Or like scrubbing things. I did do some laundry last week, but I forgot it in the machine two days in a row.

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going through it planning funeral travel to the US

2026-08-27T13:48:45Z

My US passport expired in 2024, and I haven't got around to renewing it yet (as mentioned in my last post) because I have a shiny new biometric Finnish passport, and didn't anticipate traveling out of the EU in the near future. (We had just started planning to meet in Montreal at WorldCon next year, but I could've used my EU passport.)

Now that my father has died suddenly the question comes up of traveling to the US. Of course, you can enter on a Finnish passport, but I was concerned about visas (Finns need one usually, US citizens do not, but if I had the wrong passport?) and also about it looking sketchy and causing discrimination of some kind at the border, given the current state of everything. I was planning to call the embassy to ask this, but I spent some time on their website first, and it gives the impression that they are very pressed for time and their definition of emergency is quite narrow. I COULD still have tried their phone queue - people doing that kind of service are usually very nice and helpful - but I was hoping to find an answer to my question on their website, which I did not. I did find that the Finnish foreign ministry is currently not recommending avoiding the US, so that seems to be a good sign. It probably means nobody with Finnish passports has been menaced, harmed, illegally interrogated, etc recently.

There is such a thing as an emergency passport if you have to travel within 2 weeks, but I might not actually need one. Would have to call them and ask about that first.

However, apparently the embassy can renew my expired passport in most likely 4-6 weeks, and I just heard from my sister that they've scheduled a service (Unitarian Universalist and non-supernatural) in a couple of months, maybe more like three, and my dad's extended family will probably be coming then. He will be cremated in a few weeks from now, so not sure why the service is that far out. My BIL's mother has offered to come from Texas to stay with them for a short while to help with cleaning and cooking. So I will talk to my mom later today, and if she or my sister prefers for me to come as soon as possible instead of later, I will attempt to do that (starting with calling the embassy to ask about travel documents). I do not care about the service itself, but I would gain something from mourning together with dad's extended family; but that's not as important a consideration as whether my presence would be helpful, or at least pleasant, for my mom and sister.

Otherwise, I should have plenty of time to have my US passport renewed through the embassy before the service. Our printer doesn't work at the moment, but I think I can print and photocopy at the library, which is a block and a half's walk.

I'm not looking forward to traveling to the US in general though. I always find it hard to sleep when traveling and my stomach seems to be upset most of the time I'm there every single time. There's universal availability of lactose-free dairy here, and I will have to either do research on the pills you can take for it or just eat mostly vegan there (but no fresh produce)!

Tips for international travel and eating on same gratefully accepted. Or knowledge about lactose pills, or whatever they are! Practical stuff. No condolences yet though please, I am not ready to wallow right now!

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My dad died a few hours ago.

2026-08-26T20:18:31Z

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... )

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The haircutter's dilemma

2026-08-24T11:22:25Z

A part of me always wants to have my hair in a bob, but long enough to tuck behind my ears.

But another part of me always feels that my hair isn't queer enough, and urges me several times a day to cut it short, at least on the sides. (It takes forever to grow back, though, and I always want it in a bob again as soon as I cut it.)

Since I am prone to nerve pain headaches when my head gets cold behind the ears, I count this as an additional argument in favor of the bob.

But recently I'm thinking "should be more androgynous" every time I see a mirror. Ideally I should be able to switch back and forth at will.

Does this count as two wolves? I tried to get a witty title out of that, but I couldn't connect the wolves with hairstyle successfully.

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Columbo

2026-08-21T10:24:22Z

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 -

light fixtures

everything else about the interior sets

bell bottoms

everything else about the clothes

cars

hair

waterphone, sinister piano chords, and other soundtrack

the stories and filmmaking techniques

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Triplet sweaters (summer 2025) roundup

2026-08-19T10:53:47Z

We told the triplet niblings that we wanted to make them each a sweater for their 18th birthday a year and a half ago (almost). Part of this delay was a lack of strong preference, so that we had to choose what to make for two of them, but the other 8 months was just us.

Here's the finished objects:

1. from the pattern Storm Sweater (Man's) by PetiteKnit in Sandnes Garn Peer Gynt (project page). 2. from the pattern Marseille Sweater by PetiteKnit in Drops Merino Extra Fine (project page). 3. from the Drops Design vintage pattern Fisherman's Friend in Peer Gynt again (project page).

I think we'll declare this a win because it took less than a year and a half.

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One stitch at a time

2026-08-17T20:03:00Z

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.

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New SS and Regency hair

2026-08-16T18:31:42Z

There was a trailer for a new Sense & Sensibility before The Odyssey. I usually see any Austen adaptations that, like, took it seriously (not that recent terrible Persuasion with Dakota Johnson). But this new one has a bunch of actors who look really good but the hair in the trailer is SO bad.

It's worse than the MP miniseries where Billie Piper was wearing a lob in a half ponytail the whole time, because it's multiple women and their hair is down AND TANGLED with daywear. Repeatedly, apparently? It's not just that wearing their hair loose like this is unthinkably shocking and reads as abandoned. It's that you literally COULDN'T treat your hair like this with the hair care technology that existed at that time. It had to be brushed and confined to protect it, because they didn't have shampoo and conditioner!

So anyway, I'm still mad about this. And I'm much more annoyed about it than I am about any of the hilariously dumb choices in The Odyssey.

In addition to inaccurate, it's incoherent. A choice to basically use modern hair, or Ren Faire hair, on all the women in the movie would be more understandable (the hair in Bridgerton and Merlin and Galavant can obviously be down without looking out of place). A systematically inaccurate costume scheme, too, like Bridgerton, or in a more theatrical way, could work. But the trailer seemed to present this hair alongside other women wearing at least normal levels of tv 19th century updos.

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Updates unrelated to reading

2026-08-10T13:02:22Z

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.

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Interesting reading on LLM-written fiction and style

2026-08-08T19:37:26Z

hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of "creative writing" LLMs – @nostalgebraist on Tumblr March 15, 2025

I recommend following the background links included in the beginning of this essay, but esp. the comment and the list are understandably summarized within the essay, so maybe just the post AI Can't Write Good Fiction - by Justis Mills (12 March 2025).

Then this slightly more stylistically opaque post:Why do they sound like that: aesthetics edition – @witchycatwife on Tumblr (8 Aug 2026).

Apart from witchycatwife's insight about LLM experience, it strikes me that many of the things being said about the cliché, empty metaphors, lack of real direction etc in these earlier essays to distinguish LLM "literary" register from really good writing are things you could also say of much fanfiction. ( Read more... )

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I guess fundamentally I think Greek mythology needs to be in brilliant technicolor

2026-07-27T18:40:51Z

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.)

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Cake events

2026-07-11T18:45:41Z

My wife waxjism enjoys baking cakes as a hobby and yet her birthday cake in May (Princess Cake, which is covered in marzipan) (purchased, because covering cake in marzipan isn't fun for her) and now her brother's birthday cake (Russian caramel sauce and cream layer cake) have managed to create two consecutive Cakes Cim Hates events in our house (the latter projected next Tuesday).

These are probably the only two cakes that ever appear in our house that I don't like! And seeing two in a row that I dislike enough to have no cake rather than eat a piece of is quite a feat, when most of the cakes she makes are so delicious. (She has been tired and hasn't made any cakes since May - that's why they're consecutive.) I have made cookies since then though, and so has she. I'm really more fond of cookies than cake.

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The balcony

2026-07-08T14:42:28Z

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.

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The Odyssey again

2026-06-16T11:05:24Z

I was intrigued (though not all that excited) to learn that Christopher Nolan is filming The Odyssey. I always expect to enjoy film portraying ancient history, but I also always expect to be annoyed. I appreciate Nolan's direction, but I'm not a huge fan of his, either.

As readers may remember, I'm not an Odyssey fan, exactly. I only read the Odyssey and the Iliad in Emily Wilson's translations a couple of years ago. I did go through a period of being in Greek Mythology fandom as a child, and hence accumulated a store of trivia about them, but I was young and it never occurred to me at that time that one could read translations of original texts. People just kept giving me different books that basically were retelling the same things from the same sources.

After the Iliad and Odyssey, I also read a bunch of Greek tragedies; I was going to read some Roman tragedies too, because one of the books I bought to get a Wilson translation of a Greek tragedy had some of both, but I didn't actually read any of the Roman ones. I'll probably get around to it at some point.

But I have been thinking I wanted to reread the Iliad and Odyssey already in the last few months, even before news of this adaptation, and then the other day I stumbled upon a video on YouTube where the classicist Mary Beard touted her podcast, Instant Classics, and said they were going to be hosting or... doing?... a reading-the-Odyssey series and talking about it soon, and I thought that sounded neat. Maybe I'll look at some of the older podcast episodes as well.

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Why writing badly is not that bad compared to writing without checking Wikipedia

2026-06-12T12:26:22Z

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.)

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It's tired girl summer I guess?

2026-06-08T13:21:11Z

They are constructing a new fire station across the street. The empty houses they demolished to make space were a hazard and an eyesore, so it was lovely to see them gone! On the other hand, they cleared most of the trees on those lots, and we didn't really realize in advance that once they did that the entire north face of our house would be exposed to view down the highway all the way across the roundabout, even though our house is a block away from the highway. The view from all the windows on this side of our house is now full of neon signs, which makes it extremely ugly. I suppose the absence of the empty houses, which were ruining the view in a different way, is probably still worth it, though. And we're enjoying following the progress of the project. The site has been leveled and excavated and filled with gravel and groundcloths and now they're pile-driving.

The first episode of the new season of Interview with the Vampire, which has now had its name changed to The Vampire Lestat to reflect which books they are adapting, is out! We watched it yesterday. People were saying that it had 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is deserved, but still surprising. It was a very good first episode, and a very fun time.

Wax's brothers are planning to help us build a catio for Wax's birthday, and she wants to put it on the balcony, which currently doesn't exist. You might remember that we were in the midst of removing the rotten boards from the steel frame of our balcony nearly two years ago when Snookums died and we had to part with Anubis. Last summer we did not do any work on the balcony, so it is still just the steel frame waiting to be rustproofed. I suppose it's good if this spurs us to finally attaching the new decking to the balcony. On the other hand...

The original wooden front door to the house has been getting worse and worse and now it's so bad that the screws holding the handle fell off because the wood is rotted. Bits (nails from the outside face, splinters of wood around the improperly installed locks from the previous owner) are falling off it.

This is not a weatherproofing or security emergency, because the proper door is between the cold porch and the house - modern, insulated, with a lock. This outer door just needs to open and close and looks cute. But on the other hand, we do want to keep the rain out of the cold porch.

We're gonna have to do something about this door, but we don't really have the skills or the collection of power tools, or enough money to splurge on having it refurbished by professionals. (A couple of years ago before it was this bad, Wax's brother and SIL were here with her mom and stepdad and her stepdad - that is, Wax's brother's wife's stepdad - was like "You should let me fix your door! It really needs it! I know just what to do!!" and we were like "No, haha, it's fine!" because we don't really know him all that well etc. OTOH we translated his doctoral thesis for him and he was able to get several papers out of it, which I also helped him translate (for money though, but he was grateful); maybe that's enough. We should've said yes, because it got WAY WORSE after that. The door presumably needs to have multiple dutchmen, as well as needing to be thoroughly stripped and the outer layer of wooden paneling probably replaced at minimum (totally possible that more pieces of it - like the outer vertical frame piece - will need replaced as well). Even when I was thinking that it could be our main project over Wax's summer vacation this year I was not sanguine about our ability to fix all these things on the door, but if we are actually spending that time on the balcony...? And yet we have to be able to open and close this door... if only by removing the lockbox so it no longer latches. Replacing this door would probably be even harder than fixing it, though, because in 1950 when our house was built they weren't standard sizes, and the house is stucco, which would make any change in the doorframe non-trivial.

I've been struggling for weeks to get together the energy and executive function to bake cookies. I haven't baked cookies for... maybe a year? I keep getting tripped up by the need to take butter out to soften several hours before you start. And today I FINALLY did it! I haven't decided what kind of cookies to make yet though.

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Brave Sipuli in the great outdoors

2026-06-05T12:41:35Z

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.

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The biannual houseguest bonanza

2026-05-28T08:43:23Z

Wax's favorite aunt is here! She came for the triplets' graduation party Saturday. We love to have her.

However, I'm out of paracetamol (acetaminophen) because last time I was in a pharmacy I accidentally bought the small box of 10x 500mg instead of the normal one of 30. And I am completely exhausted after cleaning strenuously the last three days: vacuuming, tons of laundry, sweeping, scrubbing floors, dusting, shaking rugs and moving bunny furniture, and scrubbing two bathrooms yesterday (mirrors and glass, chrome and porcelain, and toilets). My hands, feet, shoulders, back, legs, and arms are all separately sore. It's also extremely windy and the wind is very cold. I do not want to walk to the store! However, I'm about to run out of Earl Grey as well as painkillers (we have plenty of ibuprofen, but I don't take it often because I don't want it to destroy my sensitive stomach).

I also had cause to search the web for tips for removing limescale from toilets and floors and glass shower walls and chrome fixtures. The glass got much better, and with magic eraser some of the scale came off the floor tiles where there's a drip that has made little white rings around their edges (they're cobalt blue Japanese glazed porcelain tile), but all my cleaning products and physical friction made no impression on the other named surfaces. I found insane stuff like people with hard water chipping the calcium out of the toilet bowl with a screwdriver or filling it up with hydrochloric acid. The post I found about limescale on glass was from a woman who has been trying to remove it for ten years and the only things that have worked for her were razors and steel wool. The internet wants me to fill a plastic bag with vinegar and rubber band it around the faucet, but it's a shower mixer that looks like this... do I even have a big enough bag?

I have mostly a pleasant feeling of accomplishment. But also... sore.

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