Laghail

In defense of goblin days, sometimes they happen. Dunno the science behind needing the occasional day of your id driving your dietary decisions, but personally I think 1 or 2 days in 30 is a nice balance for me. 🤷‍♂️

Congrats on being decisive and kind to yourself. Fingers crossed for ob-gyn surgery!! 

Sorry about the fatigue and congrats on the gorgeous puppy. Funny how those two always go together. Can you share your dogfood recipe?

Paula Poundstone is a mostly forgotten slayer who made her mark in the post-cold war era of American political humor. If Hoodo Hersi is the face of Zennial comedy, Paula Poundstone is a Gen X old guard who slayed in the shadow of Jay Leno, George Carlin, and Robin Williams. A trailblazer for slayers, but sadly her 80's and 90's stand-up don't translate well anymore; jokes about airline food and LA traffic did well in their day but we've mostly moved on. I had mentally re-assigned her to a successful second career in comedy podcasts and voice acting, until I found her brilliant 2006 special. 18 years isn't exactly contemporary, but it at least translates beautifully and her crowd work kills me. 

Our slayer's 43:49 special from 2006, "Look What the Cat Dragged In"

Our slayer's breakthrough 5:31 set on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in 1987. 

[AI images generated via Dezgo AI with the prompt "The comedian Paula Poundstone as a vampire slayer. She is wearing a sports coat and wielding a crossbow."]

Slayer Training

• Lore 
  • Reading in bed by 11pm - 5x/week
    • ✅🔲🔲🔲🔲  
• Meditation
  • Ass on meditation pillow - 5x/week

    • ✅🔲🔲🔲🔲  

  • Bodhrán meditation 3x/week

    • 🔲 🔲🔲 

• Strength
  • Deadlift - 60% 3x5
  • Chinups - 3x3
  • Yoga

Life Stuffs

• First deadlifts since March! Kept it light and wore sweats to give my leg more padding post-tattoo, just in case, but the bar contact happens over the adductors more than the quads with sumo style and I felt golden.
• I'm annoyed at the aphorism, "keep meditating until you can meditate," Annoyed because it's mostly accurate. After 30ish days of forced sitting, things are starting to feel good when I'm sitting. I'm grateful but I'll express that gratitude as grumbling.
• Weltschmerz is real. I'm open to the idea that brain chemistry post-lexapro has a non-zero amount of responsibility, but things in the news are bad. Depressing politics and humor discussion below - TW for ethnic cleansing and sexual violence:
  • Spoiler

    Simon Wiesenthal is on my mind these last months as we watch the second holocaust occur in real time on live TV: "Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them." Jokes that don't revolve around pain, those don't interest me lately. If there isn't a bleak understanding of sexual violence, the extermination of humans for corporate profit, or dehumanizing suppression of thought and art by American fascism - I can't be bothered to care. I think it's why I find women in general funnier, y'all are generally more vulnerable to violence than men, and the bleak humor y'all create and then subversively stuff in the cracks between jokes ostensibly about cosmetics and boyfriends, it's a work of resilience and resistance.

     

    The clip below is Taylor Tomlinson joking about teaching a straight white cis guy in American how to care about other people. The punchline is something like the guy forgot her birthday, but the whole act takes place under the shadow of sexual violence. Joking about how to teach your partner not to assault you / joking about how your country will let you die for a nickel, I don't know that comedy has any job more important.

     

     

7 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

Sounds like you had a super week. Glad you guys found a house that fits you (drum circles sound amazing by the way). 

Drum circle is amazing! Got a gen x hospice nurse that runs it and she brings a lovely grounded note to us wooly woo-enthusiasts. Houses are all potential while Liam is job hunting, but waiting doesn't feel hard while we watch American housing prices and interests rates climb to ridiculous levels; there's a planned interest rate cut in July, and a forecasted housing market price drop in November after the American Presidential election. 🤷‍♂️

7 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

glad the banjo is coming on so well. If where you are is anything like here at the moment a ton of people sell decent instruments secondhand on facebook, so that might be a good place to have a look. 

Absolutely!

12 hours ago, Sovalis said:

We just watched Taylor Tomlinson’s new special on Netflix and chuckled a bunch. I really enjoy her. 

Right?? Relatable as hell.

On 4/17/2024 at 5:47 AM, Sea-to-sky said:

Beautiful plants!

On 4/17/2024 at 5:47 AM, Sea-to-sky said:

Need to read more physical books. Have lisa kleypas’s “worth any price” on my bedside table as well as “latés and legends”. 

Latés and legends is quality. It's not like, a plotty book, or one you have to think hard about; instead it's deeply wholesome and cozy and gentle. It will make you want biscotti, fair warning.

Also, in honor of the cyber truck recall and the very concept of schadenfreude:

12 hours ago, Harriet said:

Did a somatic therapy via zoom. It didn't go well because zoom wouldn't open so I wasted ten minutes on that before the therapist just called by phone. She had only scheduled half an hour, so we did about 25 minutes after the late start. It was okay talking by phone but not ideal. She had some good ideas. 

been there. Sucks losing talk time but I still prefer it over the 60 mins of commuting round trip. 
 

12 hours ago, Harriet said:

i slept badly so the rest of the day was one short walk and then just BG1. I'm torn between the kind of class I want and the kind of sprite (the in game figures with different appearances) that I want. Dilemma. 

last time I BG1’d, i did a Druid and I didn’t mind the sprite options for the class. 

14 hours ago, athousandwords said:

Sounds like a lovely trip. Not to knock the couch, but getting a little travel every once in a while is good for the soul.  

sigh, correct athousandwords is correct

4 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

If more people would "STFU and let me enjoy my chicken." be their life motto the world would be a happier place methinks.

I'd wear that T-shirt

late to the party but here!

2 hours ago, Sovalis said:

I walked to work today for the first time since I started in September! It went well and took 18 minutes. I wasn't particularly hustling, but had a good pace. I wore my Soucany sneakers with my orthotics and my feet feel pretty reasonable. Hopefully I get through my shift with no issues. Would be nice to make this a regular thing in good weather! 

Oooh I love that brand!!

2 hours ago, TimovieMan said:

Flame wars??? 😯

I thought it was just banter... 😔

It is, just teasing you!

Today's slayer is a rare case of a triple threat talent whose slashes are actor/comedian/mathematician. Zainab Johnson first trained as a mathematician before moving into acting and production, then while working on a comedy show as a production tech, she felt the call of the slayer. Years later with comedy credits include Ramy, Black Lady Sketch Show, and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, our slayer earned the crowning jewel of her own comedy special just last year.

Johnson's tight-ten 12:35 set on Don't Tell Comedy 2023

Johnson slaying with an efficient 5:41 set on Seth Meyers in 2018 

A 4:14 clip from Johnson's 2023 Prime special "Hijabs Off"

[AI images generated via Dezgo AI with the prompt "The comedian Zainab Johnson as a vampire slayer, wielding a battle-axe."]

Slayer Training

• Lore 
  • Reading in bed by 11pm - 5x/week
    • ✅✅🔲🔲🔲  
  • Duolingo streak by noon -  5x/week

    • ✅🔲🔲🔲🔲

• Meditation
  • Ass on meditation pillow - 5x/week

    • ✅✅🔲🔲🔲

  • Bodhrán meditation 3x/week

    • ✅🔲🔲 

• Strength
  • Bench 3x3 95% 
  • Chinup 3x3
  • Inverted Rows 3x3
  • Yoga

Life Stuffs

• Too sleepy for this shiz today. Much love, I'm going for a nap.

5 minutes ago, Mad Hatter said:

Noooo I don't need more games.  (Oh no it's on sale.)

It's such a gentle game!!! If you have a crush on any one fantasy race, play a party of just that race and maybe explore what a dwarven princess has to say to a dwarven union organizer in the mines? Okay, 50% of that happens in head cannon, but the other 50% is diegetic!

Here’s the IOU for Jed Clampett

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C50-8UeubKq/?igsh=NTNraGdpcDVyZGZr

Can I drop a brief plug for Solasta for the isometric RPG fans in the room?

Made by a French kickstarter campaign, the games' release predates BGIII by two years but featured increased tactical play / environmental interactions options, only some of which were mirrored in BGIII. The gameplay conceit is that you design an entire 4 person party, instead of just a single player character. Obviously this is going to change how dialogue works, removing any single character as the sole point of narrative focus, it has you select character and conversation traits for all four PC's, and then their differential personalities generate all your possible responses in NPC dialogues. It also handles "companion quests" by assigning a more generic personal quest to each of the 4 pc's, depending on what backgrounds you selected in the 5e char creation process.

Storytelling is a bit more linear that BGIII, and because of the 4 PC thing, I find lower re-playability once I've finished a module. Good news is the game is 3 years old now, but the studio is still releasing quarterly plot/class/race bundles as DLC. This means I re-install the game every year and try the latest goodies, usually while telling a fairly niche story with a party that sometimes is mono-species or mono-class, just to draw out different gameplay approaches. The 3 rangers and 1 green mage party I played through the Lost Valley content, it was a treat in tactical gameplay and ambush setups, and obviously I had the party of wood elves romancing each other as a messy messy polycule (yes the green mage was the party/polycule sub but he resented everyone just assuming that the spellcaster would be the  submissive). 

21 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

My favourite is taking a book and lunch for a walk and finding a nice spot to just camp and chill for a couple of hours. This is very much a summer activity though, due to weather and the fact everywhere looks like a slip and slide round here right now. 

I am not the boss of you, but I vote that one or all of your summer challenges have an outdoor reading component. Something to trick you into shooting us pictures of the Cornish summer countryside. (You're near Cornwall, right? I'm not discounting that pre-coffee Jon is misremembering shiz)

21 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

It was mostly inarticulate yelling, trying to catch my breath and failing,  and saying “fudge” a hell of a lot, does that count? 😆🥶

Yes. I think that's like HIIT swearing. Well done.

21 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

I tend to get local chocolate and their dark options are 60% (which i am prone to inhaling if not careful), 75% (the one i buy most often) and 80%(which i can only eat in small pieces)

I feel that, except about local chocolate. Great tragedy of mine is that local chocolate is Nestle. This is why I start flame wars with @TimovieMan over Danish and Belgian bakery, the only local chocolate here is Nestle. 💀🔫 

21 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

Just checking, but katsup is tomato ketchup, right?

Yeah, "Katsup" is kinda a joke spelling, but turns out there's some history behind UK sailors importing a Chinese fish sauce around 1690, and it eventually hitting the US and UK markets as Catsup and Ketchup, respectively. I guess the TV show Mad Men did some plots around the condiment so people began to again notice the differential spelling, and now we have a boring food anecdote to share at all the parties that we don't attend. 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for the download @ViperN7, I'll look for game 1! And sad day on the limited Chinese content, I wonder if the userbase for English->Chinese are suburban American mom's looking to enrich their kids out of school opportunities? That'd explain the limited content if the course is primarily used by grade-schoolers.

Quote

Amy Silverberg is a writer and comedian based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel "First Time, Long Time" is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in 2024. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, where she teaches.

 

Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. Her short story "Suburbia!" appeared in Best American Short Stories, and is currently optioned for a tv show. Amy also writes for television, most recently "The Movie Show" on the SYFY Channel.

 

Amy's stand-up comedy has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, NPR, and Amazon Prime. She was selected as a "New Face" at the prestigious Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal.

Slaying for 7:35 on comedy central in 2020

2024 set of our slayer killing for13:39 on Comedy Central

[AI images generated via Dezgo AI with the prompt "The blond comedian Amy Silverberg as a vampire slayer, wielding a microphone as a weapon and wearing an oversized LA dodgers jersey."]

Slayer Training

• Lore 
  • Reading in bed by 11pm - 5x/week
    • 🔲🔲🔲🔲🔲  
  • Duolingo streak by noon -  5x/week

    • 🔲🔲🔲🔲🔲

• Meditation
  • Ass on meditation pillow - 5x/week

    •   ✅🔲🔲🔲🔲

  • Bodhrán meditation 3x/week

    •    ✅🔲🔲 

• Strength
  • Travel weekend

Life Stuffs

• St. Paul was lovely and the friends who hosted Liam and I were so gracious. Actually our first weekend away as a couple; some combination of extreme his and his introversion, and we started dating just before covid, it means the couch is everything in our relationship. I'd normally assure you that I am in fact a fun person, but that is a lie. I identify as a bummer and I mostly hate travel.
• Road trips mean audiobooks and we finished this Kingfisher novel and it was a delightful take on the fall of the House of Usher, with some Jeff VanderMeer influences.
  • 
• Road trips mean audiobooks and we did 60% of the below Emrys and this book makes me angry at other sci-fi that wastes my time, by comparison anyway. It's beyond good, it's beautiful and human and haunting and funny and a glimpse of what we could be as a species.  
  • 
• Some family emergencies had us head back a day early and our hosts were so gracious with the plan changes. But before we left, we took in the Walker Art Center and some lovely exhibits in their sculpture garden below. Also, I hate hate most plaques in a sculpture exhibitions. I want to know the medium, the artist, and maybe factual details I might have missed because I went to a state college and watched too many cartoons to know who is being referenced in the installation. I don't want to be told how a 7.5 meter blue chicken can stand for all kinds of things in the viewer's life. STFU and let me enjoy my chicken.
  • Spoiler

    

     

    I hate whoever wrote the shit below. They are dead to me.

     

    Quote

     

    Germany, b. 1956

    fiberglass, polyester resin, stainless steel, paint, artist-designed painted steel pedestal

     

    Towering nearly 25 feet over the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Katharina Fritsch’s blue rooster is at once lifelike and completely unreal. Animals and everyday objects have long been subjects for the artist, who makes them otherworldly and extraordinary through bold shifts in scale, color, and material. The rooster can be a symbol of pride, power, and courage or posturing and macho prowess. Fritsch has admitted that she enjoys “games with language,” and the sculpture’s tongue-in-cheek title knowingly plays on its double meaning. Like Spoonbridge and Cherry, Hahn/Cock presents an unexpected take on the idea of a traditional public monument. Together, these two landmarks show how ordinary objects can become iconic and deeply symbolic.

     

  • Spoiler

    

    

     

    

     

    Perfect informational plaque below. 5/5 stars. 

     

    Quote

    US, b. 1973
    brick, granite, Cor-Ten steel, concrete statue of Saint Laurence
    Standing more than 20 feet tall, Black Vessel for a Saint takes the form of a tempietto, a small, circular Renaissance temple. The bricks of its curved walls were custom-made using leftover materials from the brick-making process. This method of recycling reflects Theaster Gates’s practice of transforming humble, everyday items into new forms.
A statue of Saint Laurence, the patron saint of librarians and archivists, is housed inside the structure. Much like the bricks, the object was reclaimed, in this case salvaged from a church in the artist’s home city of Chicago. Gates describes his sculpture, designed specifically for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, as a secular sacred sanctuary—a place open to all for gathering and reflection.

  • Spoiler

    

     

    

    This plaque can be forgiven for saying too much. In this case, there was a lot to say.

     

    Quote

    The Netherlands, b. 1968
    bronze

     

    Mark Manders combines human figures and architectural elements to evoke the past and present, the familiar and unfamiliar. Three monumental heads recall classical Greek sculpture, yet seem to be trapped between boards or beams. With their delicately textured surfaces, these pieces at first appear to be modeled in wood or wet clay, but are actually cast in metal. The title September Room suggests a living space, which Manders also hints at by including more domestic items, such as a trio of chairs and a record player. Visitors are invited to take a seat to experience the sculpture and become, for a brief time, a part of the artist’s imagined room.

  • Spoiler

    

     

    An amazing piece and a mediocre plaque. I won't swear vengeance on the writer, but did you need to tell me how the figure appears?? I have eyes, fuck you. Maybe he doesn't appear proud or derelict to me, maybe he appears at peace and rejoicing over the process of surrendering his form to oxidization and erosion? Either way, fuck you, but I suppose this plaque could have been worse.

     

    Quote

    US, b. 1972
    bronze, stainless steel

     

    Drawing on such varied sources as archaeology, philosophy, history, and literature, Matthew Monahan creates sculptures that recall the symbols and relics of ancient civilizations. Standing 12 feet tall, Hephaestus portrays the Greek god of fire, metalworkers, and other craftspeople. With the gentle features of its mask-like face and outstretched arm beckoning to the viewer, the figure appears both proud and derelict. This sculpture anchors a grouping of works along this path by artists from several generations who have explored the human figure in their work.

     

• IOU a version of Jed Clampett tonight. I traveled with my banjo but didn't get a chance to play this entire weekend and I could use the motivation.

1 minute ago, Harriet said:

 

Happy tears, I hope. I can't really see the object as it's too small but it looks like it's carved to look like a twisted sweet wrapper over a spherical giant toffee (I mean, it could be chocolate. Or a rock. But I think toffee.)

Sorry! Poor quality pic. Here's a closeup of a similar piece from Tanaka Yu. It's just clay and 4-6 layers of glaze. 

On 4/12/2024 at 10:40 AM, Harriet said:

The ceramics are incredible. 

They made me cry. This past weekend, I visited a friend in nearby St Paul to see the Tanaka Yu piece below at the Minneapolis Art Institute, but it wasn't on display. It was kinda fun to email them and ask for a private showing, even when they obviously said no. Felt like a big shot just for asking lol

23 hours ago, ViperN7 said:

OK, so, I'm going to try to give you the run down here: (This isn't a plot spoiler, it's thematic and mechanical. It just got to be a long explanation.)

Color me interested! Should I start from title 1 in the serioes before I approach the latest game?

23 hours ago, ViperN7 said:

Indeed. Chinese is what I call one of Duolingo's "neglected" courses, lagging several years worth of updates behind their flagship courses. 

Good to know! I had two semesters of Mandarin back in the late 2000's and I daydream about returning to the language. I just found the calligraphy so soothing and the hiphop was very fun. 

23 hours ago, ViperN7 said:

I actually preferred the little kneeling benches (have you seen those?) when they were available, but I have spent many hours (not consecutively!) on meditation cushions! 

Pics plz!

6 minutes ago, Harriet said:

No, 1 & 2! I want to backstab. *Stabbitty stabby*