kevin_standlee | Network

Posted by Doug Muir

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/08/20/pop-culture-history-from-kennedy-to-lois/

There’s been a lack of cheer on this site lately. The obvious response: some analysis of trivial, ephemeral pop culture.

So, a question before the jump: If I were to mention “the MacBride and Kennedy stories”, who would raise a hand and say “I know!” ? — It’s okay to say “no idea”, btw. This is a fairly deep cut. But here’s a hint: it connects to a recently released summer blockbuster.

Okay then, MacBride and Kennedy. Back in the 1920s and 30s, there was a writer named Frederick Nebel. He wrote for the pulps for many years. And he was one of those ridiculously prolific pulp writers — thousands of words per day, for years. He ended up writing hundreds of short stories and several novels.

Kennedy & MacBride was a series by Frederick Nebel that appeared in ...

As with a lot of these guys, if a story was popular, he’d quickly write more with the same protagonist or setting. So before long he had a whole stable of characters (Jim Cardigan, Sergeant Brinkhaus) and settings (the “Northwest Stories”). You can find a *very partial and incomplete* list here — it’s just recent collections of his more popular stuff, doesn’t include his novels or romance stories.

Nebel is of course almost completely forgotten today, except by aficionados of pulp. But back in the 1930s, he held some moderately popular and successful IP! Including his most popular: the MacBride and Kennedy stories. These were, if not household names, at least somewhat known outside the confines of pulp.

MacBride was a tough cop in a noir-ish world. Kennedy was an alcoholic but brilliant journalist. Together, they solved crimes! And the combination of noir MacBride and comic relief Kennedy, two-fisted hard cop and tipsy clever reporter with a nose for a scoop, was a modest hit. So Nebel ended up writing lots of MacBride and Kennedy stories.

Raw Law: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 1: 1928-30

Raw Law: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 1: 1928-30

But Nebel wanted to move up in the world, from the pulps to better-selling stuff. This turned out to be writing drama and romance for Colliers and such. Basically he went from genre to slightly more respectable and better-paying genre. So he sold MacBride and Kennedy to Hollywood and walked away. Lump sum, I’ll take the money, all yours.

(And credit where it’s due: Nebel was on the very short list of pulp writers who not only survived to retirement age, but actually retired. That’s a small group. So, dude was no fool.)

Hollywood being Hollywood, they decided it would be more interesting if they made Kennedy female and also added a will-they, won’t they romance subplot. So alcoholic male journalist Kennedy became somewhat tipsy female journalist Torchy Blane. She was, of course, blonde. But to be fair, Torchy was still very intelligent and had a nose for a scoop! For some reason, 1930s media allowed female journalists to be both single and competent. So Torchy was one of a constellation of smart female journalists who appeared in 1930s Hollywood, many of them in romantic and/or will-they won’t-they relationships with more down-to-Earth males.

The first Torchy Blane movie was literally called “Smart Blonde”. I say “first” because there ended up being like ten of them.

Torchy Blane in Panama (1938) — The Movie Database (TMDB)

Torchy Blane in Panama (1938) — The Movie Database (TMDB)

Torchy Blane, the Adventurous Blonde (1937) - Turner Classic Movies

These were moderately but consistently popular B-films. They were made on the cheap, with predictable plots, but they were a pleasant enough 90 minutes — some action, some drama, some comedy. The character of Torchy wobbled around a bit, but she was usually allowed to be smart. (If not wise — “Torchy figures something out using clues and her wits, but then gets in over her head and has to be rescued by hunky MacBride” was a recurring theme.) And by all accounts Glenda Farrell’s depiction of Torchy Blane was very solid. — Glenda Farrell, btw, had a moderately successful career in movies theater and TV for 40 years. She never quite broke into the big time, but was still in the game right up to the end. She picked up an Emmy late in life, and if you’re of a certain age you might remember her guest turns on a bunch of 1960s TV shows, from Ben Casey to Bewitched.

That said, these days the Torchy Blane movies are quite gone. You can find them complete on YouTube, which is generally a strong indicator of a dead IP. As far as I can tell even Turner Classic Movies doesn’t show them any more.

So what’s the point of all this? Well… a couple of things.

First, Torchy Blane is forgotten, but she ended up inspiring two young guys named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to add a smart, diligent female reporter as a foil to a character they were creating for the comics.

Yes: Torchy Blane was the direct inspiration for Lois Lane.

More on this shortly. The other things is, the MacBride and Kennedy stories are completely dead IP. They’re mostly out of copyright, and… nobody cares. They have fallen over the cultural event horizon. But they led to Torchy, and Torchy gave us Lois, and Lois is very much still with us. Pop culture is an ourobouros, a compost pile. Stuff is always being repurposed and recycled; one thing leads to another.

Right, so. How /is/ Lois Lane doing these days?

Well, a new Superman movie hit theaters, and it’s doing pretty well. But for the last few years, the most widely viewed version of Lois is the one in My Adventures With Superman, which is an animated cartoon aimed at tween kids.

My Adventures is — for a kids cartoon — a pretty serious hit. It’s on its third season with solid ratings, a bunch of award nominations, and a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s about young, vaguely college-age Superman just starting his career, but it’s mostly told from the POV of his journalist friends: young Jimmy Olsen and young Lois Lane.

My Adventures With Superman Makes 4 Key Changes to Lois Lane

So an obvious interesting choice here: they changed the races of both Lois and Jimmy. Lois’ appearance has changed a lot over the years, but the basics were consistent: she was a white woman with dark brown or black hair.

Lois Lane

The Lois of “My Adventures” is mixed-race: her father is an American military officer, her mother is Korean. And this is absolutely a plot point! Multiple episodes deal with it. This version of Lois had a distant, strict father who was struggling with PTSD and a loving mother who died young, and she’s definitely what is known in the business as a Third Culture Kid. (Former professional expat here. My kids were/are Third Culture, and so are most of their friends.) Like a disproportionate number of 3Cs, Lois is a driven overachiever who secretly struggles with insecurities. Even as an intern, she’s already very good at being a reporter —

Why My Adventures With Superman's Lois Lane Is The Best Incarnation In ...

Why My Adventures With Superman's Lois Lane Is The Best Incarnation In ...

— but she also is perpetually concerned about impressing her boss and more senior reporters. And she is — shades of Torchy Blane — somewhat obsessed with getting “scoops”.

The show actually sets competent-and-driven-but-insecure young Lois as a compare/contrast with Superman-but-also-dweeb-from-Kansas Clark Kent. Which is some fairly nuanced writing for an adventure cartoon aimed at tweens, but then I’m on record as saying there has been some /darn/ interesting stuff going on in American kids’ cartoons in the last couple of decades.

So: did this version of Lois Lane attract much pushback? No, not much. There was more fannish butthurt about Jimmy Olsen from the usual suspects, of course.

This is Superman? This is what... - These memes are canon

Which is weird, because while Lois’ background is repeatedly important to the story — like, in one episode it’s a plot point that she knows how to handle a gun because she’s an Army brat, and going to the shooting range was one of the few ways she could bond with her Dad — Jimmy’s background firmly is not. Jimmy’s blackness is just a palette swap. Otherwise, he’s pretty much the same earnest, slightly annoying Jimmy Olsen he’s been since he first appeared on the radio back in 1940.

163 - First Jimmy Olsen? - Comic Book Archaeology

So the African-American male character is palette-swapped non-threatening comic relief, while the Asian-American female character is complex and interesting in ways that are essential to the story, and… hey, kids cartoons! Silly stuff, am I right?

More seriously, I think there’s room for several long essays on these topics. But I’m imposing on the patience of our readers enough, I think. But here’s a takeaway: the through-line that has lasted for 100 years now is “smart journalist chases scoop, finds trouble — story ensues”. That’s a good, solid story engine! It’s carried us from Frederick Nebel’s tipsy Kennedy, to Glenda Farrell’s clever-but-not-wise Torchy, to an animated mixed-race Korean-American service brat. Probably it’ll still be with us, in some form, for a long time to come.

And that’s all.

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/08/20/pop-culture-history-from-kennedy-to-lois/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=54252

pauraque

Set in a future where the galaxy is dominated by a massive colonialist corporation called Umbai, this complex space opera novel centers on Nia Imani, the captain of a commercial freighter. Nia is an emotionally guarded woman who has trouble making and keeping connections, but when she meets a mysterious boy whose escape pod crashed on a farming colony planet, she finds herself drawn to him. But he also captures the attention of a powerful figure in Umbai who believes the boy may unknowingly hold the secret to instant teleportation without relativistic effects, which could revolutionize space travel and further consolidate corporate control.

Time distortion is a theme running through every level of the book—literal, figurative, structural. Relativistic time dilation heightens social disconnectedness, as a space traveler who leaves a planet for mere months of their own time will find friends are decades older when they return. A person may live for hundreds of years and remember ancient ways now lost, yet find the spectre of their past mistakes are still painfully present. The book's narrative style reflects this warping of time's fabric, lingering in detail over certain moments but at other times fast-forwarding through years in a paragraph. All this underpins the exploration of connection and loss, as well as questions of how many times you can start over, what you bring with you, and what you leave behind.

I found the first third or so of the book to be the strongest. Like Jimenez's second book The Spear Cuts Through Water, it paints a clear picture of the universe as made up of diverse and interconnected lives, where the camera could turn and follow anyone and find a story just as rich as the main protagonists'. I also appreciated the deeply anticapitalist and anticolonialist themes, which reminded me of Ann Leckie in the way the human costs of imperialism are built into the story.

The book is extremely ambitious for a first novel, and in the end I think it reaches a little beyond its grasp. After a while the epic scope, large cast, and unconventional pacing began to make me feel that some aspects were rushed and underexplained. Sometimes we don't see a character for a long time, and by the time we rejoined them I'd lost the thread of what they were doing and why. There are also some characters whose motivations are never revealed and some plot questions that are never answered, which made the last section feel like a shaky landing. When I noticed there were only thirty pages to go I was like, "How the hell is he going to wrap all this up?" and the answer is he kind of didn't.

I found The Spear Cuts Through Water more fully realized and satisfying, but he wrote that after this, so if trends continue I'd say he's on the right track. I'll keep an eye out for what he does next.

(Content notes include child abuse, torture, climate change apocalypse, and the fact that the title is literal—the worldbuilding involves the extinction of all Earth's birds. 😭)

james_davis_nicoll

What dire motivation drove beautiful, rich Tsuki to marry a pitiful wretch like Ryudo?

Steel of the Celestial Shadows, volume 1 by Daruma Matsuura (Translated by Caleb D. Cook)

troisoiseaux

Read The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which is quite fun when approached with the knowledge that this is entirely the author's self-indulgent self-insert time travel AU The Terror fanfiction; I was willing to forgive various things which would annoy or disappoint me in a novel I took more seriously. Like, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a novel in which the protagonist bangs real historical figure Captain Graham Gore (1809-1848) of the HMS Terror (he's been brought to modern-day London through a top secret experiment in time travel! she's his government-assigned guide to the 21st century! they have to live together, for reasons! obviously!) and keeps quoting Tumblr memes and it was on Obama's summer 2024 recommended reading list. Live your dreams, Kaliane Bradley.

Current Music: Indigo Chateau - Autoheart

bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/subverting-aiops-systems-through-poisoned-input-data.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70601

In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools:

AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out corrective actions. The likes of Cisco have deployed AIops in a conversational interface that admins can use to prompt for information about system performance. Some AIOps tools can respond to such queries by automatically implementing fixes, or suggesting scripts that can address issues.

These agents, however, can be tricked by bogus analytics data into taking harmful remedial actions, including downgrading an installed package to a vulnerable version.

The paper: “When AIOps Become “AI Oops”: Subverting LLM-driven IT Operations via Telemetry Manipulation“:

Abstract: AI for IT Operations (AIOps) is transforming how organizations manage complex software systems by automating anomaly detection, incident diagnosis, and remediation. Modern AIOps solutions increasingly rely on autonomous LLM-based agents to interpret telemetry data and take corrective actions with minimal human intervention, promising faster response times and operational cost savings.

In this work, we perform the first security analysis of AIOps solutions, showing that, once again, AI-driven automation comes with a profound security cost. We demonstrate that adversaries can manipulate system telemetry to mislead AIOps agents into taking actions that compromise the integrity of the infrastructure they manage. We introduce techniques to reliably inject telemetry data using error-inducing requests that influence agent behavior through a form of adversarial reward-hacking; plausible but incorrect system error interpretations that steer the agent’s decision-making. Our attack methodology, AIOpsDoom, is fully automated—combining reconnaissance, fuzzing, and LLM-driven adversarial input generation—and operates without any prior knowledge of the target system.

To counter this threat, we propose AIOpsShield, a defense mechanism that sanitizes telemetry data by exploiting its structured nature and the minimal role of user-generated content. Our experiments show that AIOpsShield reliably blocks telemetry-based attacks without affecting normal agent performance.

Ultimately, this work exposes AIOps as an emerging attack vector for system compromise and underscores the urgent need for security-aware AIOps design.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/subverting-aiops-systems-through-poisoned-input-data.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70601

spikedluv

What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Answers in the Ashes (The Inn at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley, Once Upon a Mystery (The Bookstore at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley, Halloween Moon & Thanksgiving Past (The Cottage on Goosberry Bay) by Kathi Daley, Opera and Old Lace (The Bistro at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley, and some fanfic.

What I am Currently Reading: Still working on The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney. I also started An Archer's Awakening (Of Crowns & Quills) by Casey Morales as my ‘light’ reading to go with the heavier reading of Hatshepsut.

(Funny thing, I didn’t remember the book when I read the blurb, but apparently I’ve already read it. o_O Some of it came back to me when I started reading it, but not enough for me to feel comfortable going on to the second book. So I’m actually re-reading this one. So many books, too little brain.)

What I Plan to Read Next: I have some library books out, so one of those. Probably the next Amelia Peabody.

siderea

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.
So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

oursin

Happy birthday,

gmh and

ravurian!

spikedluv

I hit Price Chopper while I was downtown and got in a walk around the park.

I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND folded, though I had to make myself complete the task), hand-washed dishes and did a load in the dishwasher, took Grant for a short walk, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter.

I also hit the bank on my way home from mom's and browned ground beef to put together chili for tomorrow’s supper. Tonight, at Pip’s suggestion, was sausage and eggs.

I visited mom, read fanfic, and typed in ~1,200 more words on my fic! Finally! It’s been a while since I’ve typed in anything.

Temps started out at 48.9(F) and reached 75.4. Today was not nearly as nice as yesterday because it was very cloudy all day. There was some spots of blue sky and hints of sun, but overall, clouds. We’re supposed to get rain starting at midnight and lasting all day tomorrow through to 8am Thursday morning. We’ll see.

Mom Update:

Mom was doing okay today. ( more back here )

rmc28

I joined the university open practice last night, after encouragement from my friend who is actually part of CUIHC (I was in the club, I dropped out two years ago, I plan to rejoin again this October but right now I'm in a weird limbo - eligible to play, lots of friends among the players, but not on any of the membership mailing lists or groupchats). 15 minutes or so warmup and then a scrimmage, with a spanking pace set by the Men's Blues players. It was enormous fun and a reminder of why I do these mad late nights etc. And I got a goal! Put myself by the back door and picked up a rebound, absolutely textbook stuff, very happy with it.

So my count is now:

2 goals in scrimmage
1 goal (actually an own goal by the opposition) and 3 assists in formal games

I'd love to reach the point where a goal in scrimmage is just another Tuesday, but maybe it's time to start a spreadsheet while I still remember each one individually.

(Other good things that happened yesterday: a coffee with lnr, lunch at the Dishoom Permit Room with Mick and Joye, book shopping with Charles, having the time to just sit and read a couple of books, skating lesson and seeing my friend E briefly afterward. Basically, it was a really lovely day of leave.)

mlerules

ZippidyZipZOOM! Fambily and friends in town in quick succession. Too Much Heat to come. This summer's felt better weather wise than the past several. How izzit nearly Fall? Of 2025? It's been a heck of a year in so many ways. Must needs sleep now...

elisem

Life is certainly enhanced with the improvement of available captioning in real time through various browsers and software. I want to have virtual tea with so many different people! I can see what they are saying! And it doesn't leave me exhausted the way lip-reading so often does. Maybe making a whole bunch of virtual tea dates will be another set of birthday presents. Things to look forward to. Always good.

Also there needs to be some storytelling. Some virtual storytelling gatherings, I mean. Even more things to look forward to. In the meantime, I plan to continue enjoying the next few days as we approach Friday, which is the birthday actual.

If anybody wants to do a kind thing, letting people know about my Birthday Month Sale is a very kind thing indeed, and maximizes the amount of good stuff like bill-paying and bead-acquiring that this Lioness is able to do. <3 <3 <3

LionessElise's Birthday Month Sale:
Sale goes all through the month of August.
As usual, there will be special birthday markdowns on the 22nd.
There will be more markdowns as the month goes on.
Expect the last days to be lively. And the last hours to be very bouncy indeed.
When it's done, anything left goes back to full price.
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise

elisem

[Content Notes: this is a discussion of food and eating, and diabetes and new experiences, and I am a recovering eating disorder person. If that's not what you want to read about right now, please skip with my good wishes.]

Since it's that time of the year, I have been ordering a few things, telling myself that I might as well try them for this birthday rather than wait, because the possibilities of various tariffs may put them out of reach in the future. When I say that the indecision platter is often my favorite thing on the menu, I'm talking about those meals that have samplers of several sort of dish. They are very good for learning about the range of foods sometimes. Also they can be a dopamine hit jackpot, at least for me. (If it's the dopamine that's providing the fun in here, as people who know the recent hypotheses tell me.)

They also save time if I can't make up my mind, which can be handy.

When looking at an unfamiliar menu, do you usually first make note of what you've never had before? Is it even more intriguing if you'd never heard of it before?

The ordering has been proceeding with perhaps too much vigor, but hey. I have so few wild indulgences left on my to-do list these days, or should I say the can-do list? Probably. But I am doing my best to be sensible. I took the canned haggis off the list because I already know I love haggis. I did not take the little durian cakes off the list because although I already know I love durian, they were just a few dollars and MUST HAVE. (Note to self: ask brother-in-law to scope out CostCo's supply again. A year or two ago they had multipacks of durian mooncakes for ridiculously good prices. Om nom nom.) Some of my favorite drinks are coming (Milkis and San Pellegrino pomegranate/orange drink) because I fully expect tariffs to play hob with their prices. Even now they are a bunch higher than they were, but a person sufficiently motivated can make a melograno/arancia drink be the long-lasting slowly savored high point of their day, which is how I'll be approaching those.

There are some garlic sable cookies coming. Garlic sable cookies! I have never! I must! Those are an excellent example of the treasured WTF category. If it makes me immediately ask "Can you DO that??" it's a WTF delight and I want to know what it's like. Or to put it another way, my ignorance has provided endless opportunities for learning, and learning is so often so much fun -- and very tasty.

Part of the reason I'll be savoring things slowly is that I'm adapting to living with type 2 diabetes, which I've been dealing with for a year now. I got really, really lucky and got two excellent things from becoming a Metformin taker. One is an effect, and the other is, I think, a side effect. The effect is that it apparently went and repaired whatever sensor in me has to do with satiation, and tweaked the setting some, so I turn out to be done having food now,, thank you very much, earlier than I historically have been. A lot of this is because -- OK, I don't know if anybody else has this, but I used to do comfort eating, where certain things are very soothing. And that's different now. There is no soothing from food. It was pretty startling when I realized it. It's so weird when suddenly it does not work. I mean, at ALL. So that's one thing, and I think it's an effect. The other thing is a side effect, but I do not mind it. It is this: everything tastes wonderful. No, I mean WONDERFUL. Plastic packet ramen might as well be gourmet. But the effect mentioned earlier holds: I don't feel like overeating. No matter how wonderful. I can go "Oh, that was so good," mean it entirely, and then go do the next thing.

It is all so very weird. But it's kind of fun. (I appear to have also lost the ability to fret about food or weight or whatever.) We shall see where it leads.

Right now where it's leading is to ordering some birthday treats and then wondering how long they will last under the new schedule of savoring things. (The only thing I have found that I nom more than I want of is Swedish Bubs in pomegranate/strawberry flavor. Well, and those jelly snails. But those are both texture craving things, and that's a different issue.) Neurodiversity and food stuff is complicated even before getting to the land of Metformin. So far, though, it's better rather than not, even the uncomfortable bits where a coping mechanism isn't any more and needs to change. In the meantime, though, I have durian cakes and garlic sables and fruit-juice-filled gumme koi coming, and life is good that way.

Is there a new-to-you thing you have tasted that was a learning experience? Was it a delight? Was it tasty? Do you have texture cravings? Other cravings? Did you ever do comfort eating and then have it stop working for you? What then? (I find myself going to the workbench more. Which is not a bad result, really. Art is also comfort. Still comfort, I guess I should say. Do you have anything like that?)

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250819.html

Over 500,000 light years across,

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250819.html

ranunculus

Last night was pear pickup down at Pete Johnson's pear shed. Pete is a lovely guy. We loaded up some cardboard boxes for

loup_noir and then stood around talking. Turns out that Pete's Aunt and Uncle ran a lodge up at Denali (Alaska) and that their kids, like M's kids, worked on the railway for the cruse companies during the summer. I swear there is only 2 degrees of separation in this world. Pete had sent of something like 18 tons of pears that day, headed for a Del Monte cannery. We were loading 2nds into our boxes, but they were still lovely pears.

( Cut for medical description. )

After my session Chena & I took the walk that was strongly suggested before getting in the car and heading south to meet with

loup_noir and her husband. Their house is definitely well out toward the very end of the road, so a fun and pretty drive. I very much enjoyed seeing the garden and orchard, not to mention the tutorial on catching gophers. I'll be putting that information into practice very soon. They gifted me with some lovely, and yummy potatoes and a big bunch of equally yummy kale.

The drive home was through Anderson Valley and Boonville which was very pleasant. It is an easier road than highway 20 which I usually take and made sense since I was already quite far south from Fort Bragg. Usually it just adds 25 or 30 minutes to an already long drive.

drglam

My office-mate Victoria, who some of you met at my party, gave me a Sally Ride Barbie https://creations.mattel.com/products/sally-ride-barbie-inspiring-women-doll-fxd77. She didn't expect to be sent three of them when she ordered it, so I've now got two of them, and have the goal of uniting the extra one with the person who really needs it. If you're that person, or if you know that person, let me know!

yhlee

What I do when sick: more spinning.

Now that I can spin wool blends at all, next up: working on consistency.

file770_feed

Posted by Mike Glyer

https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-8-19-25-do-you-really-think/

https://file770.com/?p=124858

(1) SEATTLE 2025 SINGLE PATTERN CONTEST. Kevin Roche has posted the entries and award winners of the convention’s unique contest that had fans pick a clothing pattern and sew it, giving it a sf/fantasy take. The results are highly inventive … Continue reading →

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