Daily Happiness

Jun. 16th, 2025 11:20 pm
[personal profile] torachan
1. It seems like there was a lot more foot traffic in Little Tokyo today, so hopefully our sales will pick up this week. And this afternoon they announced the curfew has been pushed back to 10pm from 8pm, so we can keep the store open till nine.

2. Carla is home safe and sound.

3. I had a nice dinner at DCA tonight before picking her up from the airport. Very warm and muggy this evening, though, which I could have done without!

4. Neighborhood Watch! Gemma is on top of it.

[syndicated profile] erinptah_feed

Posted by Erin Ptah

Leif & Thorn
2025 be like– (sketch | Leif, Kale | worksafe)
Handstand redux (art | Thorn(/Leif/Kale) | worksafe)
Tidal Russet (art | Russ | worksafe)
Rosy clouds, two hands (art | Leif/Thorn/Kale | worksafe)

Moon Knight
Hanging moon (art | Marc/Steven | worksafe)
Sunset polycule (art | Marc/Layla/Steven/Jake | worksafe)
Moonlight temple (art | Steven | worksafe)

Moon Knight/other Marvel
no one could blame you, chapter 2-6 (fic | Elias, Wanda, Marc/Steven/Jake | T)

broken
somewhere the sky is still blue (art | Huvrye, Yin | worksafe)

General/Miscellaneous
he won’t tell you he wants them, but– (art | beanie babies | worksafe)

This Week in But I’m A Cat Person:

Annotated reruns of chapter 29, in which Henriette meets a big bird.

This Week in Leif & Thorn:

The next act of Magical Thorn, wrapping up chapter 8! Kid Thorn is finally home. Now if only Kale can stay focused enough to get him re-integrated…

Bundle of Holding: Troika Warehouse

Jun. 16th, 2025 02:27 pm
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Many supplements and adventures for Troika!, the acid-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Melsonian Arts Council.

Bundle of Holding: Troika Warehouse

Clarke Award Finalists 2001

Jun. 16th, 2025 09:48 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2001: Labour narrowly wins a second overwhelming victory, Simon Darcount finds his calling, and Jeffrey Archer distracts people from that time he was accused of stealing three suits.

Poll #33257 Clarke Award Finalists 2001
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58


Which 2001 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
39 (67.2%)

Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
24 (41.4%)

Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod
17 (29.3%)

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
28 (48.3%)

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
18 (31.0%)

Salt by Adam Roberts
4 (6.9%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2001 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Salt by Adam Roberts

Epilogue p11-12

Jun. 15th, 2025 11:46 pm
[syndicated profile] unsounded_feed

LATEST UPDATE HERE

Two pages today! I’ll post Wednesday to finish this scene but then skip Friday, I think, thank you!

-Ashley

••••••••••••
Discuss the comic on Discord or Reddit

Daily Happiness

Jun. 15th, 2025 09:32 pm
[personal profile] torachan
1. I walked up to the neighborhood grocery store this morning thinking to buy some roast beef for a sandwich for lunch but on my way there I remembered they have grills out in the parking lot on the weekend and sell sandwiches and meat there. I was worried it might be cash only and I didn't have cash, but they take your order and you just take the order sheet inside and pay at the register, then pick your food up outside, so I got a tri-tip sandwich and it was so good. It was also huge, so I had half for lunch and half for dinner. Planning to get it again next weekend when Carla's back so we can split it.

2. Speaking of which, Carla will be home tomorrow night. Her flight's getting in around 9pm, so I am going to head down to Disneyland after work and then down to the airport after that (she's flying into the airport in Irvine because it's much more chill than LAX).

3. The Little Tokyo store was able to open up today with no issue. I doubt there were a whole lot of customers, and the curfew is still in effect so we have to close at 6:30pm until that's lifted, but I'm very glad we were able to open and that there was no damage to the store (not even any graffiti, apparently). I'm going to stop by tomorrow and check things out, since I don't have any meetings or anything planned for earlier in the day.

4. All tucked in!

[syndicated profile] erinptah_feed

Posted by Erin Ptah

Video for all of them, too, that’s impressive!

I recognize a couple of the early ones (1937 was the Jeeves & Wooster theme song, and 1939 was Somewhere Over The Rainbow), but it’s not until 1960 that a switch flips and I go “oh, okay, I’m familiar with all of these.” (Doesn’t falter until the ’00s, when I start not knowing some of the rap/hip-hop songs, and then in the past 10 years I guess I’m just not listening to new music enough.)

The Beatles have the most winners, they’re in here 4 times. Fred Astaire has 2, Judy Garland has 2, Elvis has 2, Queen has 3, Eminem has 2…probably a couple other repeats I missed, there doesn’t seem to be a text list. Genuinely surprised Taylor Swift never shows up — her output as a whole has to be a bigger deal than a lot of the winners from the past 2 decades, they just had at least one breakout hit each.

“Link the most-recognizable song from the year you were born” could be a fun meme…except that if I link mine, you’ll think I’m kidding.

[personal profile] erinptah

Video for all of them, too, that’s impressive!

I recognize a couple of the early ones (1937 was the Jeeves & Wooster theme song, and 1939 was Somewhere Over The Rainbow), but it’s not until 1960 that a switch flips and I go “oh, okay, I’m familiar with all of these.” (Doesn’t falter until the ’00s, when I start not knowing some of the rap/hip-hop songs, and then in the past 10 years I guess I’m just not listening to new music enough.)

The Beatles have the most winners, they’re in here 4 times. Fred Astaire has 2, Judy Garland has 2, Elvis has 2, Queen has 3, Eminem has 2…probably a couple other repeats I missed, there doesn’t seem to be a text list. Genuinely surprised Taylor Swift never shows up — her output as a whole has to be a bigger deal than a lot of the winners from the past 2 decades, they just had at least one breakout hit each.

“Link the most-recognizable song from the year you were born” could be a fun meme…except that if I link mine, you’ll think I’m kidding.


[personal profile] umadoshi
Eating: This weekend is [personal profile] scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.)

Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.

I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far.

Watching: Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that, [personal profile] scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.

Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to [personal profile] wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as [personal profile] scruloose and [personal profile] wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.

We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4. [personal profile] wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.

But last week, [personal profile] scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.

Daily Happiness

Jun. 14th, 2025 10:53 pm
[personal profile] torachan
1. The other day I bought some golden kiwis and they are so good. I like kiwis a lot, especially the golden ones, but these have got to be the best I've ever had. Perfectly ripe and so flavorful. I got them from work, so I'm gonna have to check on Monday and see if we still have some.

2. From the sound of things the No Kings protests around the country were a huge success. I hope that it can actually lead to some change. The ones in downtown LA seem to have been relatively peaceful as well, so hopefully we'll be able to open the store tomorrow morning without issue.

3. Molly's just waiting for a moment of privacy to start splashing around in her water bowl.

Weekly Reading

Jun. 14th, 2025 10:35 pm
[personal profile] torachan
Currently Reading
A Botanist's Guide to Rituals and Revenge
6%. Newest mystery in the series and my current audiobook. This series has developed more of an overarching plot than just stand-alone mysteries and I do not remember much of the book before this but hopefully it will come back to me.

Break in Case of Emergency
8%. YA novel set in the mid 90s about a girl living on her grandparents' farm after her mom dies, reunited with her estranged father who turns out to be gay. Sounded interesting. Just read the first couple chapters so far.

The Fourth Girl
35%. Twenty-five years after their friend disappeared on prom night, three women reunite in their home town on the anniversary of the disappearance. But when someone else connected to their missing friend dies on that same day, it seems like more than a coincidence. This is pretty good so far.

Horrorstör
10%. This is the second horror novel I've read set in an Ikea-type store. I've had this on my to-read list for a while and just happened to find it in a neighborhood Little Library so now seemed like a good time to read it.

Riding the Rails
39%.

How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
52%.

Recently Finished
Architectural Follies in America
Finally finished this! This is such a short book and has pictures so I thought it would be a quick read but honestly it turned out to be kind of a slog. There are not enough pictures, so a lot of it is just reading about these supposedly interesting building but now getting a visual representation. And the pictures that are included are all black and white, and some are not the best quality. This seems like someone's hobby project, so I guess they couldn't put a lot of money in it, but it could have been a much better book than it was.

Red Hail
This was pretty interesting!

Murder in Season
Well, I take it back. After mentioning last time that this is one of the few historical mystery series I've read lately that doesn't have any queer or non-white characters, this book did turn out to have a gay character (and he wasn't the murderer).

Murder at Hambledon Hall
New Cleopatra Fox book! This was a good one. And there was an announcement at the end that the next book will be out by the end of the year. This author has multiple series going, so I don't know how they manage it, but I'm not complaining.

Baby Drag Queen
Grabbed this off the Pride display at the library last week as it looked interesting and is very short so would be a nice quick read for a time when I needed one (I read it in about half an hour this morning). It's about a trans boy who is interested in doing drag, which is not a topic I've seen in other books with trans characters. But the book itself was a huge let down. The writing is very stilted (especially noticeable with the dialogue) and there were so many things that made me go ??? that I couldn't get into the story because I kept trying to figure out why the author was making these choices and at some times trying to figure out what was going on altogether. One big one is that the character is referred to by a male name throughout, but his mom does not know he is trans. So I was left wondering if it was a writing convention where the mom is really calling the character by another name but the author is using his preferred name instead, or if the kid has requested to be called a male name and the mom has gone along with this to the point of getting it legally (?) changed (the kid goes to school using that name and also gets multiple jobs under that name, with no one noting anything about a different legal name) but still is completely gobsmacked when the MC says he's not a girl. (It's definitely not a situation where that would ever be the name his parents gave him.) I just could not stop wondering what was going on with the name throughout the book, but there were a bunch of other smaller things, too.

Bokura no Hentai vol. 5-6
Was not expecting the trans girl to be handled this well, but I was really impressed with the sixth volume.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:03 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Ten books new to me: 4.5 fantasy, 1 horror, 1 mystery, 3.5 science fiction, of which only two are identified as series.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13



Poll #33251 Books Received, June 7 to June 13
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (March 2026)
20 (37.7%)

The Swan’s Daughter: A Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi (January 2026)
13 (24.5%)

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney (June 2025)
27 (50.9%)

The Storm by Rachel Hawkins (January2026)
4 (7.5%)

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (September 2025)
30 (56.6%)

Red Empire by Jonathan Maberry (March 2026)
3 (5.7%)

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O’Keefe (June 2025)
14 (26.4%)

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts by Vanessa Ricci-Thode (April 2024)
14 (26.4%)

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (January 2026)
6 (11.3%)

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2025)
25 (47.2%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
34 (64.2%)

Daily Happiness

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:50 pm
[personal profile] torachan
1. Today was a long day with a lot of meetings, but I did manage to get all the other stuff on my to-do list done in between at least.

2. Most other businesses in Little Tokyo are already shut down temporarily so we made the decision to close our store tomorrow. While the protests (or rather the response to them) has been disruptive to business for that store, it's still been worth keeping it open, but those protests were more spontaneous and the planned events tomorrow for No Kings Day are going to draw a huge crowd. The only business we'd get would be some protestors buying lunch or snacks, and considering employee safety it's better to just shut down. We also had the store boarded up just in case, since one whole side is all windows and a lot of the front is as well. I definitely think closing tomorrow is the right choice, so I'm glad we were able to convince the company president to give us the okay.

3. While Carla's out of town I moved one of the cars all the way up the driveway into the back yard so I don't have to worry about moving it from one side of the street to the other on street sweeping days, and Tuxie seems to like having the car there lol.

2025 Disneyland Trip #40 (6/12/25)

Jun. 13th, 2025 10:59 pm
[personal profile] torachan
I didn't head out from San Diego until around 6pm yesterday so I didn't get to Disneyland until almost eight, which meant the park was already very cloggy for nighttime events, but it wasn't particularly crowded overall, so once I got past the big Main Street clog it was pretty nice.

ExpandDinner and fireworks )
[personal profile] umadoshi
After making calls on Monday, [personal profile] scruloose found a heat pump-servicing company that would do the repair etc. under our warranty from the manufacturer. A service tech turned up on Wednesday (!) at the time he said he'd be here (!) and assessed the situation, sourced the required parts locally (all three units needed their coils replaced, which the manufacturer apparently says was a known issue with models from that year that has now been fixed, so this theoretically shouldn't recur), and came back first thing yesterday morning to actually do the repair (and replace a noisy fan in the exterior unit). Labor and parts=all covered. Things seem to be working fine now. *knocks wood* It was a bizarrely good experience.

The cats were unsurprisingly unimpressed about being corralled in the bedroom repeatedly (both to keep them underfoot and to minimize their covid exposure as much as possible, in addition to all the purifiers running and [personal profile] scruloose rigging the airflow so that the bedroom was pressurized and the tech wearing an N95 mask the entire time), but were mostly polite about it and appreciated the treats they got afterwards.

I just went poking around in the Kobo listings for Adrian Tchaikovsky ebooks, and stumbled over the fact that there's an ebook (Terrible Worlds: Revolutions) collecting his three Terrible Worlds novellas, none of which I've read and one of which is on my wishlist. The collected volume is going for $7.99 Canadian. The individual novellas go for $10.99 each. [EDIT: Regular prices, in all cases.] I don't have a specific way in mind that I think this should be handled, but surely there are better ways to price/label/offer ebooks.

The poking around came after the ebook for Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which Ginny just read and liked, turned up on the on-sale list this morning, so this is also a PSA about that. (At least for the Canadian Kobo site.)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The embittered Martian aerialist and the nonconformist live a thousand-plus years apart, in different solar systems. What, then, connects them?

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi

Daily Happiness

Jun. 13th, 2025 12:20 am
[personal profile] torachan
1. So much ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh work stuff today, but I stopped at Disneyland on the way home and had a lovely dinner.

2. Ollie was just writhing around playing with this blanket for no reason. Super cute.

Epilogue p10

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:56 pm
[syndicated profile] unsounded_feed

LATEST UPDATE HERE

Lemuel says do it! Torch ‘em! Listen to your shoulder devil, it guides us ever true!

-Ashley

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The contents of this blog and all comments I make are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. I hope that name is long enough. I could add some stuff. It could also be a Bring Me A Sandwich License.

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