sraun | Network

Terence Stamp was a notable actor who made his mark in many, many films. The first two Superman movies with Christopher Reeves, Star Wars Episode 1, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, His Dark Materials. Other work included a Federico Fellini film of an Edgar Allen Poe story, various voice work, Modesty Blaise, Young Guns, Bowfinger, Wanted, the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, The Adjustment Bureau, Miss Peregrin's Home For Peculiar Children, and more. His final film was Last Night In Soho (2021).

THREE volumes of memoirs, a novel, and a cookbook were also amongst his accomplishments. His voiceover work included Elder Scrolls IV, Halo 3, documentary voiceover work, and music video appearances. He shared a house with Michael Caine before they both made it big! His brother, Chris, was a rock music producer and manager and was largely responsible for bring The Who to prominence! That's more of an interesting footnote since Terence probably didn't directly have an effect on that event. OR DID HE?

Among his awards and nominations were a Golden Globe Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and a Silver Bear (German) as well as nominations for an Academy Award and two BAFTA Awards.

He was a busy man.

https://gizmodo.com/superman-and-star-wars-actor-terence-stamp-dies-at-age-87-2000644162

thewayne

Some very interesting news from King's College, London. They've developed a new toothpaste based on keratin, rather than fluoride, extracted from sheep's wool, and found that it restores teeth and builds better protection. The restoration process builds a scaffold-like structure on the teeth that attracts calcium and phosphate ions, building a calcium-like compound on the teeth, restoring protection.

Fluoride only slows the wear and tear on the teeth, it doesn't do anything to rebuild it.

The best thing is that this toothpaste could be on the market in 2-3 years!

https://gizmodo.com/toothpaste-made-from-hair-works-better-than-fluoride-scientists-say-2000643763

princessofgeeks

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kaberett

Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Stuart Adlington, Liam D'Arcy + Grace Hall, Rosie Reynolds, Helena Attlee, Jeannie Di Bon, Mary Jane Paterson + Jo Thompson, Raymond Blanc )

Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.

Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).

My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!

Allotment apples and tomatoes.

Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!

Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.

elynne

The mystery of Soo's nature and origin continues, but is sidelined by a new problem.

( Read more... )

ninetydegrees posting in

onesongaday

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trobadora posting in

sid_guardian

Welcome aboard for this week's extra in our Guardian readalong!

are last week's extras. You can find all previous discussions on the schedule posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5), or via the !readalong tag.

Summary: Jianghu wanderer Shen San is injured while saving someone, falls down a cliff, and finds himself in the care of a beautiful ~~immortal~~ yao, who nurses him back to health. He soon finds himself entirely smitten. Returning as promised after taking care of unfinished business, he finds the cottage empty. Three years later, having made a home there, Shen San discovers his yao-xiong has been secretly around all this time. They settle into domesticity, disrupted only by a book of erotica and Shen San falling ill. Before Shen San dies, he promises to come back in his next life and find him again. Afterwards, the newly-named Shen Wei hunts down the original Soul-Guarding Order, which Shen San had given away, and unseals Daqing so Daqing can take care of Kunlun's reincarnations.

The corresponding part in the Chinese version/the fan translation is the "Shen San" extra.

Excerpts:
I could have quoted everything! But I managed to restrain myself. *g*

( 1) Shen San, jianghu wanderer )

( 2) Human, immortal, yao? )

( 3) Shen San has a revelation )

( 4) High literature )

( 5) A promise )

Questions:

What do you think about Shen San? How much is he like Kunlun, or like Zhao Yunlan? Do you think Shen San and his yao-xiong ever managed to make proper use of that book of erotica? *g* How do you feel about the tragedy of it all? Should Wei have resisted harder? Can you make sense of how the parts about the Soul-Guarding Order fit with everything else? Which parts of this extra have parallels in the drama?

(As usual, these are just conversation starters - feel free to answer all, some, or none, and to say as much or as little as you like!)

Our schedule - only one more extra to go! Sign up if you'd like to host it!

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/none-kitchen

Kokera sushi

Kokera sushi may be the rarest sushi you have never heard of.

Only available fresh on Saturdays (from around 9:00 to 12:00) at a small morning market in the seaside town of Toyo, kokera sushi is unique to this region of Kochi Prefecture, and most closely resembles a “sushi cake,” where the ingredients are layered and then pressed in tall, specially-made wooden boxes.

The rice used as the base for this “cake” is mixed with juice from yuzu (a sour citrus fruit that grows rampant across the prefecture) and flaked mackerel. On top the design is created by placing slivers of omelet, shiitake mushrooms, and both carrot rounds and tops. To finish it off and make sure the mosaic of ingredients is securely pressed down, the cook then places a thin wooden board over it, and then does the same for the next layer. A thick wooden cover is used weigh down the top of the special kokera sushi box, and they allow it to sit for a couple hours.

This creates large large sheets of colorful sushi that can be cut up into rectangular, bite-size sushi and shared with a crowd.

While this may seem very time consuming when compared with the more commonly seen nigiri sushi, kokera sushi was meant to feed big groups of people at festive occasions, such as weddings.

Unfortunately, over the years the number of people who knew how to make this local delicacy started dropping rapidly. In 2018, a group of women came together to preserve their beloved traditional dish, offering classes and selling kokera sushi at None Kitchen, a small roadside market.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/none-kitchen

ysabetwordsmith posting in

birdfeeding

Today is partly sunny and sweltering.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

.

Current Mood: busy

everysecondtuesday posting in

fandomcalendar

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ysabetwordsmith posting in

science

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Current Mood: busy

silveradept

A quick update to start: One of the banks backing PayPal purchases in several currencies has decided to stop processing or accepting Steam transactions, making PayPal unavailable in regions that use those currencies. The slug says that PayPal doesn't support the transactions, but the article is quick to point out that it's actually one of the banks that has withdrawn their support for Steam transactions using PayPal. So we continue to get reminded that if the system of money decides that you're not allowed on their platform, it doesn't matter what the jurisdiction or the law says is allowed or not, you're banned from being able to do anything that involves the banking systems. People in places where cannabis is currently legal have already figured this out, because they continue to be denied access to financial transaction systems, and sex workers and their clients have figured this out, because they're regularly targeted for these kinds of purges and exclusions, but gamers are starting to understand how much their freedom to purchase and play works depends not on the laws or the interpretations of the laws, but on the control exerted by payment processors over the platforms they want to buy and play on.

Valve Corporation said that MasterCard was definitely pressuring them to delist and deplatform adult content, through the intermediaries of the banks and processors, after Mastercard claimed it made no such demands of the platforms. And I'm sure they also didn't say they'd been looking for the excuse once the group that was trying to get their attention did it.And they'd probably deny that they've been at this sex-negative prudery and denying access to their networks for legal, non-obscene content for at least two decades at this point.

A neat thing: a complete run of Computer Entertainer, one of the first video game magazines in the U.S., has been digitized and made available in Creative Commons, by the Video Game History Foundation. Hooray for accessible history!

Also because if you don't have history available to you, you start thinking that the methods of the past are superior to the methods of the present, when what you want is to draw forth the good things of the past into the present. The "90s parenting" being described here is entirely possible in the current decade, without any need for retro objects or such to bring back nostalgia along with what you want to actually do. Such nostalgia often makes people blame things improperly for creating the current world, or to start thinking that simply removing those objects will be enough to bring back the perfect world.

The only way not to build the Torment Nexus is not to build the Torment Nexus, and we have many reasons why we need to stay in the job that's going to build the Torment Nexus. Take care of your souls, and perhaps consider that if you're building the Torment Nexus, you don't have to do it at high speed or efficiency while you look for something that isn't on Team Torment Nexus. (What's also well-noted there is that there are a lot of people on Team Torment Nexus who have rationalized their participation, or who think this really is the way to go,.)

As we move into yet another year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what's been learned and what best practices are good to continue. Including vaccination, even though, as we'll see in the later parts of the post, the anti-vaccination squad are currently running the health house.

A primer on the history of what the phrase "land grant university" means. More often than not, it's "land seized from Native nations, then sold, and the proceeds used to fund the construction and operation of the university" instead of something like "the state legislature granted land for the university from their own stores and funds."

The civility of the women's game (of football) has some fans of the men's game feeling like they're being fed their vegetables with no chance of dessert. We hear that kind of thing in the States as well, even with a top-ranked women's team. Am reminded of statistics I was quoted that suggest most men believe a crowd of about 17% women is 50% women, and a 33% woman crowd feels more like 90% to them. Because they're focused far too much on the thing they don't believe belongs there that they over-represent it in their heads.

( And the rest inside )

Last out, something good in the technology: the engineers behind the Jupiter camera called Juno have been heating and then cooling the components to fix various radiation-related damage that has been seen on images, and the fixes bring the camera back to within specifications, albeit temporarily each time.

And the increasingly misnamed Sacramento Music Archive, and the progress being made on digitization, archiving, and sharing of concert recordings made by one person and/or the collections that have been given to them, many of which are for groups that never made it big, and some of which are previously-unknown performances, demos, or material for very big entities indeed.

A supposedly easy method for folding fitted sheets that they do fold appropriately and aesthetically pleasing-ly.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Music: Sweet - Ballroom Blitz

wychwood

I have had a nice restful weekend, in which I caught up with perhaps 1/3 of the chores that I intended to. Oh well. I added a new book to my bedside pile, and then read it; between that and the realisation that my next book group meeting is approaching, I was then inspired to read at least a chapter of each book in the pile, which was nice. I set myself a to-do list target a few months ago of reading at least one chapter of each per week, which would keep me actually moving through even if I didn't then end up picking anything up and reading more of it.

Unfortunately mostly what happens is that the overdue item sits there and stares at me on the list. It's annoying, because I do in fact! want to read all of these books! and also most of the ones on the to-read shelves in the spare room. I just somehow don't. However, I've not been in much of a computer game mood in the last few days, and that's freed up some time for reading that isn't fanfic (not that there's anything wrong with that!).

Basically there is too much stuff in my life that distracts me from reading, and if only I didn't need to e.g. earn money I could finish more books. But then I wouldn't be able to go on book-buying sprees, and that would be sad.

In other news, I ordered my new mattress, just as my old one started causing me actual back issues, so good timing me. It's not due until the end of the month, and I'm very impatient.

oursin

This week's bread(as last week's developed mould): Len Deighton's Mixed Wholemeal from the Sunday Times Book of Real Bread, 4:1:1 wholemeal flour/strong white flour/mix of wheatgerm, bran, and pinhead oatmeal, splosh of sunflower oil rather than melted butter, rather nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, started out as 70/30% wholemeal spelt/einkorn flour but ended up more like 50/50%, maple syrup, ground ginger, quite good.

Today's lunch: diced casserole beef slow-cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and water with star anise, served with sticky rice with lime leaves, cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds, and sugar snap peas stirfried with garlic

bearixt posting in

fandomcalendar

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swan_tower

There once was a writer who wrote,
and wound up with an odd anecdote --
how it happened, who knows,
but she won a Hugo,
for being, of all things, a good poet!

. . . and with that atrociously bad limerick (I decided not to bother trying harder; it accurately reflects the state of my brain right now) [edit: ffs, even in this state, I reflexively went back and revised it to make it scan better], I announce that last night I won the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem! My acceptance speech should have thanked Fluevogs for making heels I could actually walk onstage in without falling over out of shock. I still feel like a newbie in poetry; I only started writing it about four and a half years ago -- January 2021 -- and so to have my fourth published poem ever earn this major of an award is still making me reel. I would have woken up this morning thinking it was a delusion were it not for all the congratulatory messages I'm getting from various directions, which at least assure me that it's a mass delusion, if so.

As I said in my speech, I hope I'm the first person to win this award, not the only one. It's a special award right now because each Worldcon can choose to create a temporary category of its own, but I'm one of the sponsors of the Speculative Poetry Initiative, which has cleared the first hurdle in passing a proposal to make this a permanent category in the awards. So it already feels historic to get the special award, but it'll be even better if I can describe myself as the start of a longer line!

If you have not read the winning poem, "A War of Words" -- or if you would like to read it again -- you may do so for free at Strange Horizons! My heartfelt thanks to Romie Stott, the editor who acquired it, for making this possible.

skjam

Final Encounter (2000) dir. David Douglas. aka For the Cause

It is several centuries into the future. Two human colonies have been established on an Earth-like planet to get away from the constant wars on the mother world. Alas, Brecca and Obsidian eventually turned hostile to each other for reasons now lost to history, and the war between them has been going on for 99 years. Brecca is in rough shape. Its citizens are undernourished, and the attrition among soldiers is high. The recruitment age has been repeatedly dropped, so many of the soldiers are barely in their teens. While they still have advanced computer technology, the understanding of it is limited to specialized female operatives called "witches." Morale is at an all-time low, and the Brecca army spends most of its time fighting its own deserters and separatists. It's estimated that unless the Obsidian forces are somehow neutralized, Brecca will lose the war in a matter of months.

General Murran (Dean Cain) has a plan. There's an ancient superweapon codenamed "Warhammer" that supposedly would disable Obsidian's technology if detonated in their capital city, allowing Brecca to sue for peace from a position of strength. Twenty years ago, his father had attempted to invade Obsidian in strength, only to get almost all the troops with him killed, and the previous general either died or was captured. The components of Warhammer, which had been separated for security, fell into the hands of different factions. So, the components will need to be reassembled, and someone will have to sneak into Obsidian to deliver the device.

But this time, it will need to be an elite strike team led by General Murran himself. To join him, he selects Sutherland (Justin Whalin), the most loyal and effective soldier Brecca has left; Stoner (Trae Thomas), a more cynical heavy weapons expert; Abel (Jodi Bianca Wise), Brecca's top combat witch; and Layton (Michelle Krusiec), the next best available witch. Their first action is to rescue Evans (Thomas Ian Griffith), the only man who knows how to safely get through the Wall, a lost technology barrier that prevents ground assaults on Obsidian.

As the mission continues, the team suffers losses one by one. But is this just the normal casualties of war, or something more sinister?

This low-budget science fiction action film was released straight to video. Money was saved by shooting in Bulgaria, using affordable actors and using an in-house computer effects team.

Good: The producers of the film had a background in computer graphics, so the CGI effects are pretty good for the time, and there's an in-universe reason they look unnatural. The setup of the war is interesting, and Bulgaria stands in well for the alien planet.

Less Good: The dialogue is hokey, and the acting ranges from adequate to wooden. The ending is cheesy, and a subplot involving Abel's precocious little sister just kind of fizzles out offscreen.

Funny: Cain and Whalin had previously starred together as Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen respectively in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman which added a certain weirdness to their interactions in this movie.

Content note: Lots of lethal violence. A bone is broken in an unnatural way. A child is lured by an adult in a really creepy way (she's fine.)

This is one of those movies that isn't good, but not bad in a fun way. I found it on one of those multi-film sets at the discount store, and that's about the quality. Mildly recommended if you are interested in one of the actors.

Current Music: "Into the Light: Flower Into Kindness"--Jake Runestad

andrewducker

The Flying Bubble Show was great fun. Kids thoroughly entertained.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

aurumcalendula posting in

baihe_media

I though folks here might be interested to know that

yuerstruly has updated their translation of Burn (烧) by Cho Dao (初岛) and

hazevi has started translating The Moon Above These Lands (山川月) by Su Xian_ (苏弦_)!

profiterole_reads

A Wild and Ruined Song by Ashley Shuttleworth was amazing! It's the fourth and final book of the Hollow Star Saga, a modern story mixing fae courts and Greek mythology.

This was a splendid finale from start to end, tying up many plotlines from the previous novels and making all the protagonists shine at one point or another.

There's a new non-binary main character, major f/f and double m/m, with one of the m/m pairings being ace4aro.

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sraun

November 2024

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Page Summary

thewayne - Zod kneels before the Phantom Zone one final time. RIP Terence Stamp, 87.
thewayne - Toothpaste made from keratin will help rebuild enamel!
princessofgeeks - Mandalorian finale SPOILERS
kaberett - vital functions
elynne - Dreams of Dead Stars, Part III, ch. 11: Dawning Doubts
ninetydegrees in onesongaday - LAKEY INSPIRED - Overjoyed
trobadora in sid_guardian - Guardian Readalong: Vol. 3, Bonus Stories: The Mountain Spirit
atlas_obscura_places_feed - None Kitchen in Toyo, Japan
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
everysecondtuesday in fandomcalendar - Multifandom: Jump Scare
ysabetwordsmith in science - Robotics
silveradept - Another Two Weeks of Stuff Happening - Early August 02025
wychwood - so many good books so little time
oursin - Culinary
bearixt in fandomcalendar - Blue Lock: Allsagi Fanwork Exchange
swan_tower - Hugo!!!
skjam - CRUD Challenge: Final Encounter (2000)
andrewducker - Photo cross-post
aurumcalendula in baihe_media - Translation updates for Burn (烧) and The Moon Above These Lands (山川月)
profiterole_reads - A Wild and Ruined Song by Ashley Shuttleworth

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Style: Sea and Salt for Nouveau Oleanders by branchandroot
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Who I'm Reading Today

Network

Zod kneels before the Phantom Zone one final time. RIP Terence Stamp, 87.

Toothpaste made from keratin will help rebuild enamel!

Mandalorian finale SPOILERS

vital functions

Dreams of Dead Stars, Part III, ch. 11: Dawning Doubts

LAKEY INSPIRED - Overjoyed

Guardian Readalong: Vol. 3, Bonus Stories: The Mountain Spirit

None Kitchen in Toyo, Japan

Birdfeeding

Multifandom: Jump Scare

Robotics

Another Two Weeks of Stuff Happening - Early August 02025

so many good books so little time

Culinary

Blue Lock: Allsagi Fanwork Exchange

Hugo!!!

CRUD Challenge: Final Encounter (2000)

Photo cross-post

Translation updates for Burn (烧) and The Moon Above These Lands (山川月)

A Wild and Ruined Song by Ashley Shuttleworth

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November 2024

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