Joy of Podfic

Jul. 30th, 2025 12:26 am
mific: (palette)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] drawesome
Title: Joy of Podfic on AO3
Artist: [personal profile] mific
Rating: Gen
Fandom: Multifandom
Characters/Pairings: n/a
Content Notes: Drawn and coloured in Procreate, because podfic - listening to it and making it, makes me happy.


Book Review: Enchanted Cornwall

Jul. 29th, 2025 08:20 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Daphne du Maurier’s Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir is a little bit a memoir about du Maurier’s life, but mostly about her lifelong love affair with Cornwall and the many books that she set there. The book was published near the end of her life (perhaps posthumously?) and is thus padded out with long excerpts from those books, most of which I skipped because either (a) I had read the book and therefore didn’t need to reread the excerpt, or (b) I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to be spoiled, but nonetheless a good read because it’s full of interesting tidbits. For instance:

J. M. Barrie was du Maurier’s uncle and her older sister Alice played Wendy in one production of Peter Pan.

(There are some other connections that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it certainly confirmed my feeling that the entirety of the early 20th century British art world - art encompassing theater, painting, writing, etc - was in fact one extended social network where everyone knew everyone and half of them were related by marriage.)

During the filming of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock referred to the (nameless) main character as Daphne de Winter, an identification which du Maurier cheerfully accepts.

Although the grounds of Manderley were based on the grounds of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly, the house itself was based on a different country house, Milton.

Although du Maurier recounts her courtship with her husband (which seems to have loosely inspired Frenchman’s Creek), the real love story of this book is with Menabilly. Du Maurier devotes an entire chapter to wooing and winning the house. The distant glimpses from sea and land. The first visit, cut short when an early darkness descends while du Maurier and her sister approach the house on the winding forested front drive. The second visit, when du Maurier rose before dawn to approach by the sea. Repeated visits to explore the grounds, culminating at last in a visit where du Maurier found a window open, and climbed in to explore the crumbling abandoned house…

All this culminated in du Maurier securing the house for a twenty-five year rental, begun during World War II. Everyone told her that she’d never be able to repair the roof, get electricity installed, or otherwise render the place habitable, and she proved all of them wrong.

Du Maurier considered Frenchman’s Creek her only really romantic book. So if you’ve ever read her other books and wondered “Am I supposed to consider this horror show of a couple romantic?”, the answer is apparently no!

(no subject)

Jul. 29th, 2025 09:40 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] opusculasedfera!
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/116: The Friend — Dorothy Koomson
Yvonne began to laugh. ‘You’re all so funny!’ she screeched. ‘You all act like you’re best mates, but really? You’re all so fucking pathetic with your stupid secrets and lies. I bet none of you know what I know about all of you.’ [loc. 5920]

Read for book club. Cece Solarin has just given up her job and moved to Brighton with her huband Sol and their three children: Sol's been promoted, and is seldom around. On her boys' first day at school Cece discovers that a popular parent, Yvonne, is in a coma after being attacked one night in the school playground. The brittle, fearful, suspicious atmosphere makes it even harder than she expected to make friends and connections, but she becomes friendly with three other young mothers -- Maxie, Hazel and Anaya, each of whom was friends with Yvonne, and each of whom has a Big Secret in her past.

Read more... )

Daily Happiness

Jul. 28th, 2025 09:21 pm
torachan: arale from dr slump dressed in a penguin suit and smiling (arale penguin)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Well, the new store did not calm down at all today. No one was expecting this. Off the chart sales, which is amazing, but we were not prepared in terms of staffing and everyone is running ragged. I at least don't have to go help today, so I could have a more restful day, but I will go help out at least another day or two later in the week.

2. I got my hair cut this morning. That always feels nice.

3. Look at that cutey chin!

Trivial life stuff follow-up

Jul. 28th, 2025 07:47 pm
sholio: outline of Alaska with aurora colors (Alaska aurora)
[personal profile] sholio
I FOUND OUT WHAT HAS BEEN EATING MY GARDEN

I became even more convinced it was a moose after discovering this morning that some of the remaining pea vines were decimated in the night, evidently from the tops. So I was out there this evening picking the rest of the broccoli (so far untouched) ...

And all of a sudden, with no warning, a GROUNDHOG exploded out of the broccoli plants at my feet. (Definitely a groundhog/woodchuck. Not a marmot, not a ground squirrel. A groundhog. We do have them in Alaska, and this isn't even the first one I've seen here, but it's certainly the first one I've caught in the act of SHAMELESS GARDEN BANDITRY.)

They're reddish colored and large, about the size of a big cat. I screamed, because I was not expecting LARGE MOVING THING IN THE BROCCOLI. I'd had no idea it was there. It spend past my feet and under one of the cars and vanished.

So the culprit has been identified, and it's definitely coming back every day now. They can dig and they can also climb (jerks), so building a groundhog-proof fence would be a heck of a job. I asked Orion for ideas. He asked me if I mind if he pepper-sprays my garden, because he has some expiring bear spray and he wants to find out what using it is like just in case he ever has to use it for real. I'm like, sure, why not. I gave him some guidelines (don't spray anything I plan to eat, lower leaves only, etc) and went into the house to be out of the literal line of fire.

Shortly I heard coughing and sneezing and he came into the house eventually to report that bear spray is highly volatile and prone to floating on the wind. Good to know. A few minutes later, *I* was coughing and sneezing too, because it turns out it also sticks around on clothing and skin. (I didn't get it nearly as bad as he did, just a coughing fit and some running sinuses, but COME ON.)

He has now thoroughly showered.

And that's the story of how we bear-sprayed ourselves while trying to bear-spray the garden.

(He reports that bear spray tastes like very spicy food. Apparently the active ingredient is capsaicin, so it's not toxic. I didn't get enough of it to actually taste it.)

I guess we're about to find out if groundhogs enjoy spicy food.

Finally the rain stopped

Jul. 28th, 2025 09:24 pm
cornerofmadness: (Default)
[personal profile] cornerofmadness
I don't even want to think about the damage waiting for me down home (it'll still be a few weeks before I see it) Here it wasn't so bad in WV. The sun came out enough for me to get into the pool. Now I want to buy a few bags of ice to throw in my brother's pool. It's 94 degrees. I might as well be taking a bath.

I went to Leonardo's in Steubenville for coffee and writing. Both went well but that is a very old building and either it doesn't have a/c (but I don't remember it being like this last summer) or it was broken because it was HOT. I was dripping. (and came home and jumped in the bath-pool)


Finally bought my Key city Steampunk tickets. It's the first weekend in August. I also plan to take a day and a half to go to Hershey (not the park but the museums, I haven't been there since I was 13 I think. Been a while)

It's music monday. Please drop your music in the comments. We're doing the alphabet (I'm doing only from the last 5 years) and we're up to Q & R because I have no Qs.


I don't even have a lot of Rs either, just this one in fact




Have some Ps I forgot last week )

Lake Lewisia #1283

Jul. 28th, 2025 04:36 pm
scrubjayspeaks: Town sign for (fictional) Lake Lewisia, showing icons of mountains and a lake with the letter L (Lake Lewisia)
[personal profile] scrubjayspeaks
A sphinx has taken up a guard post at the intersection of 24th and Purslane Street and is challenging passers-by to riddle contests. The community college is working on assembling a team of logicians and philosophers to hopefully defeat the sphinx in intellectual combat. In the meantime, affected businesses are asking customers to come equipped with one or more knock-knock jokes when shopping, as these provide a vexing distraction for the sphinx as it attempts to rigidly define a true riddle.

---

LL#1283
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I sent this post in memoriam Tom Lehrer to [personal profile] selkie, after which it hit me that the funniest part about Lehrer working for a born-secret agency was that he said as much in public. It's in the Revisited introduction to "The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be" (1960): "Now if I may indulge in a bit of personal history, a few years ago I worked for a while at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. I had a job there as a spy. No . . . I guess you know that the staff out there at that time was composed almost exclusively of spies . . . of one persuasion or another . . ." It's a hit with the audience, who did not have a chance of knowing for another thirty-odd years that he meant it. What Lehrer actually did for the NSA still appears unconfirmed, but writing in the second edition of Quantum Profiles (1991/2020) his one-time fellow Harvardian Jeremy Bernstein guessed—the classical combination of mathematical skill and being an absolute weirdo—"probably codebreaking." I'd never thought about it and I'd believe it. That line run on the audience in MIT's Kresge Auditorium in 1959 is a cryptographer's joke: it works in its own right, but to get it properly requires a key. Jesus, can you imagine him and Leo Marks in a room together? It would have been an arms race which of them could be self-deprecatingly funnier without giving a thing they didn't want to away.

第四年第二百天

Jul. 28th, 2025 06:18 pm
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] guardian_learning
部首
讠 part 5
证, certificate/proof; 评, to comment; 识, knowledge pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrads=149

语法
是...的 vs 了
https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/shi-de-vs-le/

词汇
香, fragrant; 香蕉, banana pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-3-word-list/

Guardian:
有照片视频为证, I have photos and video as proof
你妻子发生这样的事情是谁也预料不到的, no one could have predicted that such a thing would happen to your wife
花很美,很香, flowers are lovely and fragrant

Me:
用你评价吗?
他为早饭平常会吃香蕉和酸奶。

a productive day

Jul. 28th, 2025 05:13 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I just got off the phone with a (genuinely) helpful person at Amalgamated Bank.

I've been talking to them in order to close a joint account in my and my mother's names, and the bank told me in June that the easiest way to do this would be to withdraw all the money and then have them close the account. In order to do that, I had to set up online banking, but only after adding my phone number to the account, which I did in June. Apparently the reason I couldn't log in to the online account after setting it up was that I'd written the password down wrong.

The person at the bank reset my password for me, and then told me how to link this account to an account at another bank. I'm waiting for the test deposits to hit my account, which may take a few days. After than, I can transfer the rest of the money.

Also, I got up in time to go for a walk this morning, to the grocery store and back, before it got too hot. It's a hot day in July, so the six things I bought included ice cream, Italian ices, and fresh blueberries.
but_can_i_be_trusted: (Writing)
[personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted posting in [community profile] 100words
Title: 'Hot Food'
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda (Reference to either 'Breath of the Wild' or 'Tears of the Kingdom')
Rating: G
Notes: Crossposted to [community profile] drabble_zone

Hot Food )

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just another fork-tongued dragon lady

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