Tuesday DE

Jun. 10th, 2025 07:46 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Would your pup ever want things to be boring?

Daily Happiness

Jun. 9th, 2025 10:54 pm
torachan: jason momoa/ronon smiling (ronon)
[personal profile] torachan
1. A few months ago I started having problems with itunes where every time I tried to add a song to a playlist it froze. I tried a few solutions I found online and nothing worked, so I just stopped listening to music at my desk and basically only listened to it in the car through Apple Music. Finally the other day I just gave up and uninstalled itunes and reinstalled it again, and at first I was really regretting my decision because even after logging in, it wasn't showing any of the music I'd downloaded over the past few years from Apple Music, only my library on my HD, but then I logged out and logged in again and everything showed up, and adding songs to playlists seems to work again, so maybe now I'll actually get back to listening to music at home.

2. There is DLC for Sea of Stars, a whole new quest that I've seen a few reviews say is about eight hours or so of gameplay. I started it the other day and am enjoying it so far. Sea of Stars is definitely one of my favorite games from the past year or so, so I'm excited to be able to play more of it. (In between Mario Kart World, of course.)

3. Our Little Tokyo store is right next to city hall, so things have been kind of rough down there the past couple days with the protests. Both yesterday and today the store had to close early so employees could get home safe. This morning there was a ton of graffiti (all varities of "fuck ICE") along the windows of one side of the building, but thankfully no actual damage to the store and the property manager was able to get it cleaned up easily.

4. Chloe also says "fuck ICE"!

Monday DE: Heads down

Jun. 9th, 2025 05:33 pm
splash_of_blue: I'm a girl from the Rift City (Default)
[personal profile] splash_of_blue posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
...whoops.

As I revise for tomorrow's Welsh exam: how is your pup under pressure? Do they prefer coursework (ongoing regular study with a project to complete by the end) or an exam?

Daily Happiness

Jun. 8th, 2025 08:41 pm
torachan: karkat from homestuck headdesking (karkat headdesk)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I had another quiet day at home, though I did go out for two nice walks, including a longer one in which I stopped for ice cream to cool off. (It wasn't that hot today but it was late afternoon and quite sunny and muggy.)

2. Molly is a super cutie.

Birthday weekend

Jun. 8th, 2025 09:19 pm
ceitfianna: (dreams)
[personal profile] ceitfianna
This weekend was lovely, my parents and I headed out to Gloucester for the Peabody Essex museum, Hammond Castle and getting rained on a lot, but it was a nice break. Today started early and I ended up actually having a quiet day after getting on the road as I've felt sick most of the day. Which is annoying as today is my actual birthday but I'm from a family where birthdays spread out.

I have things that will make it last in great ways like a Lego to put together and money to spend on books and other fun stuff. I'm tired but hopeful as I watch the Tonys and head into my next year.

Nintendo Switch for sale

Jun. 8th, 2025 03:16 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
Anyone in the US interested in a used Switch? No original box, but I've got the dock, AC adapter, HDMI cable, two sets of joycons (black and red/blue), the holder thingy that turns the joycons into a regular controller, one set of wrist straps for the joycons, and a charging station. It also has a memory card already installed.

I'm looking for $100 including shipping.

Daily Happiness

Jun. 7th, 2025 08:53 pm
torachan: (rainbow avatar)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Had a pretty chill day at home. Didn't go anywhere other than the farmers market and library.

2. Jasper is suuuuuuuper snuggly with Carla gone. He's come and cuddled on my lap three times today.

3. I got the Switch 2 set up! I don't know why the downloads are so slow today but it's taking ages to download Mario Kart World and the updated versions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but Mario Kart did finally finish so I got to try that out and it's so good!

4. After saying that about Tuxie the other day now he's been here every day for the past week, so maybe he's decided he likes it better here than wherever else he was going after all.

Weekly Reading

Jun. 7th, 2025 04:43 pm
torachan: close-up of a sleepy kitten face (sleepy molly)
[personal profile] torachan
Currently Reading
Murder in Season
33%. Most recent in the Lady of Letters series. Still enjoying this series, but compared to other recent historical mystery series that I'm also following, this one is very noticeably lacking queer and non-white characters. I also don't love the style of writing (everyone's eyes are always changing color with their emotions and the love interest is a former sailor so the MC is always describing his scent with ocean-y words but he literally has not been out to sea in ages so it makes no sense), but the mysteries are fun.

Riding the Rails
20%.

How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
37%.

Red Hail
57%.

Architectural Follies in America
73%.

Recently Finished
Murder in Masquerade

Falls to Pieces
Thriller about a woman and her daughter who are on the run from her abusive ex-husband and have been living under new names for the past two years. But then her fiance goes missing, and then her daughter, and she's convinced her ex is behind it. This had some interesting reveals, but mostly it just felt like too many, where each new reveal was like, and now THIS guy can't be trusted and THIS guy is acting shady, etc. It was fine, but I won't be rushing out to read more from this author.

I Hate This Place vol. 1-2
Two volume graphic novel series about a lesbian couple who moves to an isolated farm that one of them has inherited. Farm turns out to be mega haunted and they can never leave the premises again. I liked this quite a lot.

Rock wa Lady no Tashinami Deshite vol. 1
Manga about a girl whose mom remarries into a wealthy family and she's sent to a fancy all-girls school where all the students are super sheltered. In order to become the perfect young lady and make her new family proud, she's determined to leave behind her love of rock instilled in her by her musician father, but then she meets another girl who secretly plays the drums and they decide to form a band. Sounded like a fun plot but the setting was too ridiculous. I don't think I'll be continuing with it.

Bokura no Hentai vol. 1-4
I stumbled across this on an Amazon Japan sale (first volume was free and the rest are all 55 yen each). Reminds me of Hourou Musuko. This focuses on three middle schoolers who meet on a crossdressing forum and then decide to meet up offline. One crossdresses because the boy he likes is only into girls, one because his mom kind of lost it after his sister died and insists that he's his sister so he wears her clothes at home, and one who is trans. (Another character is introduced later who wears a girls' uniform at school just because he prefers it.) I'm really enjoying this one a lot.

Daily Happiness

Jun. 6th, 2025 10:44 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Got up early to take Carla to the airport this morning. She's going to be visiting family for the next week and a half. She flew out of one of the smaller local airports rather than LAX, which means it was a longer drive to get her there, but it's just so much easier all around. Waaaaaaaay less crowded and much more chill. And not only did she have an easy check-in experience, but the flight arrived in Chicago half an hour early! Plus it's not that far from Disneyland so while I couldn't stop by there today after dropping her off, I will be able to stop in after work before picking her up when she comes back.

2. Last night the power went out at two of our stores, and while one of them came back on during the middle of the night, the other was out until around noon today. Thankfully they were able to keep loss to a minimum with dry ice, but it was a pretty hectic day. One of the things I most like about being the area manager rather than the store manager is that I'm no longer the one who directly has to deal with stuff like this when it happens.

3. When I took a walk around the neighborhood this evening I noticed that the junior high a couple blocks from us has a huge Pride flag out front. And there's a church down the street with one, too.

4. Very glad it's the weekend. Since it's just me, I'm going to save my Disney trips for after work next week (easier to coordinate going directly from work when it's just me) and just stay home and relax during the weekend.

5. This is one of my favorite pictures of Ollie and Jasper ever. Ollie loves plopping down next to (or sometimes on) Jasper and snuggling, and Jasper is not always that into it, but he can be pretty tolerant. He actually stayed like this with Ollie for longer than I thought he would.

(no subject)

Jun. 6th, 2025 08:18 pm
skygiants: Autor from Princess Tutu gesturing smugly (let me splain)
[personal profile] skygiants
A while back, [personal profile] lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that [personal profile] lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

Daily Happiness

Jun. 5th, 2025 09:02 pm
torachan: tavros from homestuck dressed as pupa pan (pupa pan)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I had a nice work from home day. Pretty chill. Got a lot done.

2. My Switch 2 arrived this afternoon! I have not taken it out of the box yet as I do not have time to set it up and transfer all my stuff from the Switch, so I will do that tomorrow or Saturday.

Last night Carla decided to swing by Best Buy just to see what the situation was, thinking that the store would not open until midnight, but actually they were opening at 9pm (midnight for east coast stores). She went by around 10:30, saw a bit of a line but not much but didn't want to hang around until midnight (we still thought that was the timeline) so she came home, and then ended up going back about an hour later to see if they were still open. They were, and they did not have the bundle left, but did have both the system and the cartridge version of Mario Kart, so she got both. Now we both have Switch 2s! Really surprised it was so easy to get one after all the fuss with the preorders. Since she is going out of town tomorrow, she didn't end up setting hers up yet either lol.

3. Gemma is so cute! How is she so cute!?

Thursday DE

Jun. 5th, 2025 10:32 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Oh hey, it's Thursday isn't it? Sorry I'm late.

Well, since I am about to head to lunch and it is burrito day at work, which is your pup's go to, tacos or burritos?

Daily Happiness

Jun. 4th, 2025 09:18 pm
torachan: my glitch character (glitch)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We finished another puzzle today. This one was a lot of fun!



2. I got the shipping notification from Best Buy on my Switch 2! It's supposed to arrive tomorrow, which I was not expecting at all because when I did the preorder they weren't guaranteeing launch day delivery. I never did get an email from Nintendo about preordering directly from them, so we're planning to check out Target tomorrow and see if they have any for sale in store, so we can each have one.

3. We had a nice morning at Disneyland. It was a little muggy but the temps were fairly low and it was nice and overcast. Started to get busy as we were leaving, but it wasn't very crowded at all earlier, which was nice.

4. Uploading the picture of the lego shelf yesterday made me realize I still haven't posted pics of the inside of the garage since it's been completed. It's still got a ways to go decorating-wise. We've got art we want to put on the walls, and more stuff to display, and it could use a few more pieces of furniture, but it has enough that it feels pretty lived-in now. I use it every day for the exercise machine and working on puzzles, and Carla goes out daily to read and listen to music (and also work on puzzles).

Read more... )

5. The other day I looked in the cat tree and saw Chloe was lying on her back in one of the cubbies like a silly girl.

(no subject)

Jun. 4th, 2025 08:47 pm
skygiants: Jane Eyre from Paula Rego's illustrations, facing out into darkness (more than courage)
[personal profile] skygiants
Over Memorial Day weekend [personal profile] genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by [personal profile] genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that [personal profile] coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

2025 Disneyland Trip #38 (6/4/25)

Jun. 4th, 2025 05:55 pm
torachan: a cartoon owl with the text "everyone is fond of owls" (everyone is fond of owls)
[personal profile] torachan
Today was an early morning trip, so I took my magic key in, in hopes of finding all the rest of the stations and unlocking it today.

Success! )

Wednesday DE: midnight snack

Jun. 4th, 2025 10:51 am
thebattycakes: (gigglefit Pika-style)
[personal profile] thebattycakes posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Helllllooo Milliways, it's Wednesday. I almost forgot, but then I didn't!

Today's DE:

It's 12 AM. Your pup is hungry. What are they gonna eat?

(no subject)

Jun. 3rd, 2025 09:03 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. The bathroom faucet was dripping for a couple days and could not get it to stop, but it miraculously stopped dripping yesterday. Not sure why, but I'm glad.

2. I have been meaning to upload a picture for a while, but I have pretty much completed my flowers & nature lego shelf in the garage. There are still more nature sets, so I will probably remove some things and put out others eventually, but for now this is all of our nature-related stuff. I really like how this looks together.



3. I was not expecting rain today but it rained a bit! Not a ton, but it did get things damp. No rain tomorrow, though, which is good because we're going to Disneyland.

4. I decided to take tomorrow off. No reason. My usual Wednesday meeting was cancelled and we'd been planning on going to Disneyland tomorrow as Carla's last visit before she'll be out of town for a week and a half visiting her family, so I just decided what the hell, why not just take the day off.

5. Molly's getting that sun!

Tuesday DE: I love you man

Jun. 3rd, 2025 09:25 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
How does your character(s) feel about being intoxicated?

Daily Happiness

Jun. 2nd, 2025 10:47 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I have been meaning to sign up for Venmo because I've been encountering more and more times when something that used to be cash only now has a non-cash option but only Venmo or other online payment services. I finally got around to setting up an account yesterday and then today I found myself in an unexpected situation where it was my only option to pay! I got my hair cut this morning and the salon was having issues with their payment software and could put the actual cut itself on the card they have on file for me, but not the tip. The only option for tips other than cash was Venmo. Now, I am a regular at the salon now, so if I hadn't had Venmo set up, I could have just told them I'd tip her double next time and I'm sure it would have been fine, but this was a great opportunity to practice using the app. We've been going to the farmers market a lot lately and most stalls do take credit or ApplePay these days but a few are cash only or Venmo (including the rhubarb seller from this past weekend), so now I have another option there, too.

2. Jasper is such a cutie.

splash_of_blue: (Gay agenda? In *my* TARDIS? Yes plz!)
[personal profile] splash_of_blue posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Welcome to Pride Month, Milliways!

Don we now our gay apparel, etc. etc., and let's kick off the month with a Queen song. <3

Who is your pup's best friend? Why?

Is there someone (maybe from another canon entirely) who you think they would be best friends with, but haven't met yet?