1) I'm planning on doing Yuletide this year! Probably! Maybe!

In any case, I've nominated some fandoms. Links to my fandom promotion posts:

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature (Podcast)

World Gone Wrong (Podcast)

Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961) - The Weakerthans (Song)


2) I've been listening to a lot of What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law in the last couple of weeks. This podcast began in 2017 as What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, in which Mars discussed Trump's various shenanigans with constitutional law professor Elizabeth Joh. The podcast got renamed in 2021 but continued sporadically, and is now picking up the pace again.

It's highly informative (Joh's very good at explaining complicated legalities clearly), and I feel like I understand a lot of current issues better. I'd recommend it for (a) any US citizen or resident, and (b) anyone who wants to understand why the fuck the US is in the state it's in.

A few particularly useful episodes:

"Fishy Deep State" (27 August 2024), about the dismantling of the "administrative state" apparatus that allows the regulation of e.g. pollution, workplace safety, food safety, etc. by the Supreme Court.

"Law-Free Zone" (16 July 2024), about the Supreme Court's recent grant of near-total legal immunity to presidents.

"The Disqualification Clause" (18 December 2023), about banning insurrectionists from public office.

"Comstock Zombies" (13 May 2023), about the Comstock Act (passed 1873, still law) and the future of reproductive rights after Dobbs. There's also an earlier episode specifically about Dobbs, but I think this one has the advantage of a little distance that allows Joh and Mars to dig deeper into consequences.

"The Second Amendment" (7 June 2022), about the constitutional right to bear arms, and what it means. If you only listen to one episode, it should be this one. I continue to be shocked at how extremely recently the Supreme Court ruled that there's even an individual right to bear arms at all (2008, District of Columbia v Heller, majority opinion written by Scalia may he spent eternity being shot by assault rifles in hell). Before this decision, states had a lot of power to regulate gun ownership. Now they have almost none.

1) Health.

My back continues to be more of an issue than I'd like. My healing seems to have plateaued; I'm seldom in a lot of pain, and I can function, but I'm seldom completely pain-free either. Plus I get fun little incidents like the other night, when I felt pretty okay when I went to bed, but woke up at 2 in the morning in more pain than I've had in a while. (Yes, my bed is probably a factor. But I really don't want to spend a couple of thousand dollars on a new one.)

Another delightful plot twist follows,

under the cut because potentially TMI

.

Around the beginning of this month I started having UTI symptoms. Very mild at first, and I thought it might resolve on its own. It did not. This left me trying to get medical care during Labor Day weekend (a big holiday in the US). I went to urgent care on Sunday Sept. 3, after work, but the clinic I went to was too busy and I couldn't get in. (I didn't want to try another clinic because this is the urgent care I usually go to, and I didn't have the energy to try a totally unknown one.) On Monday (Labor Day), I thought about going back, but a bit of googling showed that most of my local pharmacies were closed anyway or on such reduced hours that by the time I finished work and went to the clinic it would be too late to get my prescriptions that day.

This whole process confirmed the wisdom of my pill-hoarding tendencies. I had some phenazopyridine left from my last UTI. It doesn't treat the infection, but it reduces the symptoms while you wait to get antibiotics/wait for them to kick in. It was all that made things tolerable.

Anyway, I finally got to the clinic on Tuesday Sept. 5 and got a 10-day megacourse of antibiotics which I'm still taking through tomorrow. And--this is how it's relevant to my back--the nurse agreed that the prednisone I had to take for my back probably contributed to the UTI: prednisone is an anti-inflammatory because it's an immune suppressant.

And here's a fun fact: after googling, I discovered that in people with a vulva, having low estrogen levels (if, say, you're post-menopausal, or a trans masculine person taking testosterone) makes UTIs vastly more likely. Did anyone ever explain this to me? Fuck no.

Another thing I only learned from google: don't buy lube made with glycerin. It's sugar-like enough to feed bad bacteria a lovely meal.

*sigh* I don't like bringing up genital/sexual stuff with medical people. It's uncomfortable, especially now that I'm out as trans. I wish they would bring it up and give me useful health information--in a nice, matter-of-fact professional way, not in the way like my previous pcp who was a little too curious about my sexuality. My current provider is pretty good, but a bit silent on the subject; I wonder if it's too personal for her because her son is a trans man (she mentioned this to me, with his permission).

Anyway, enough of this. Here's hoping I don't get a third UTI this year; that's the point where it's officially considered chronic.

2. After temporarily losing interest in it, I've been watching a lot more Taskmaster. In fact the word "bingeing" might be appropriate. I'm most of the way through S07 now, and feeling twinges of obsession. I blame, at least in part, Greg Davies' decision in the hiatus before S06 to get glasses and grow a beard, and therefore become hot to me as he has never been before. Alex has always been hot to me; skinnyish, socially awkward, clever boys push my buttons, as does the whole stage-gay "Alex is slavishly, erotically devoted to Greg" thing. And beards.

I'm again noticing how much of the show's general enjoyability depends on the vibe of the contestants. The S06 people were mostly uninteresting, except for Liza who was both competent and likeable, and Tim Vine, whose every moment on camera was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Then S07 brought in absolute loons like Rhod Gilert and James Acaster, and varied interpersonal dynamics played up to the hilt by the whole batch of drama queens, and it's much more fun to watch. (Apart from having to look away to spare my eyes from Phil Wang's skin-tight yellow bodysuit.)

Mostly the show does not ping my embarrassment squick, thank heavens. (Mostly. I could live without any more impromptu songs, though I would hate to have missed the sheer delight of that moment in S06 when Nish Kumar and Mark Watson's song was actually really good.) I do have to remind myself often that Alex Horne created the show and writes at least some of it, so nothing is happening to him that he hasn't okayed. He consented to sit bare-bottomed on that cake/be cuddled by every contestant/have Rhod Gilbert turn him into a water feature.

And then there's the Greg/Alex stuff.

Under a cut, for sort-of spoilers I guess, as well as being long and containing musing on stage gay, power differentials, etc.

I didn't expect them to actually kiss. Even about a second before they did, I thought it would be a fake-out and Greg would pull away or something. But no, they kissed rather sweetly, to the loud approval of the audience and most of the contestants. (I wish the camera would quit cutting away from the most highly charged Greg/Alex moments to show dubious reactions from the cishet male contestants, though.) The explicit eroticism has mostly been toned down since the kiss, which I guess makes sense since there's not much further they can go with that unless the boys are going to make out on stage, which presumably is further than they and the bloke-centric Dave network want to take it. Though in S07 Alex did make that rather startling reference to Greg's "special spot" and the letter G, fuelling all kinds of potential speculation.

. . . I just really enjoy stage gay. Especially when it's played, er, straight, from the whole chest. (For a while I thought Greg was gay, based on a couple of things he said on the show. But Wikipedia tells me he had a long-term relationship with a woman. So I've decided he's bi until proven otherwise. Alex is married to a woman and has kids. I've decided he's bi too.) To repeat, I know it's stage gay, but I enjoy the game/performance of queer desire (when it's an acknowledged game and not e.g. queerbaiting in fictional media) without the disavowing wink and nod. I like that both Greg and Alex just go with it--the erotic implications are played for comedy, but the joke is not "OMG that's gay!" Usually it's more like "OMG that's fucked up, Greg, stop that and be nice to Alex." I enjoy the very rare moments when Greg genuinely is nice--the bits of background business when the focus is on the contestants and Greg and Alex start holding hands.

And of course I enjoy the whole glorious spectrum of ways Greg finds to bully Alex. It's sometimes a bit of a fine line for me, because humiliation is deeply not my kink, but it's so clearly stage-Alex's that I can enjoy his delighted misery. No usual form of BDSM is really my kink, but I love a power differential and I love devotion. So the idea of Alex worshipping Greg Davies--moderately successful comedian and host of a light entertainment show--like a god on earth, making his bed and sleeping at his feet and surrendering to his every sexual demand, unfazed by any amount of ingratitude, exploitation, and downright cruelty from Greg, kind of does it for me. But I must admit that, as usual with me and power differentials, what I would want from a fic is to see the relationship become more equal. (The big exception to this trend for me is Izzy Hands from Our Flag Means Death; Izzy is such a shithead and a fuckup that to the extent I can imagine a happy ending for him, it looks more like a pornographic fever dream version of Greg/Alex than like Ed/Stede. Izzy should never be allowed to make meaningful decisions about his own life or anyone else's, ever again. Alex, by contrast, should be cherished.)

Once I'm caught up--because I'm so thoroughly spoiler-averse that I don't want to know whether they kiss onstage again, or even whether X contestant does a great/hilarious thing in S11--I intend to read all the fanfic. And probably be disappointed by it. Recs are welcome if you have any; just please let me know where they fall season-wise so I can wait if necessary to avoid spoilers.

3. Yuletide

I think I'm going to participate this year, for the first time since about 2013. I've done two fic exchanges this year, so I feel reasonably confident in my ability to write something and not default.

Our Flag Means Death is of course ineligible. But Taskmater is eligible and I can think of stories I might request. For other fandom requests, I'm thinking about Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (most of the existing fic is Estraven/Genly Ai, for obvious reasons, but the world itself is fascinating and Le Guin leaves a lot of omissions to explore. (E.g. same-sex sex during kemmer, or some people having a preference for whether they go through kemmer as male or female--are there Gethenians with a stealth gender identity?, or for that matter whether Gethenian societies can possibly be as devoid of popular culture as Le Guin makes them out to be. It can't all be work and sex and religion and politics--I want to know what Gethenians do for fun.) Maybe Moby Dick too. And I'm considering some five-minutes fandoms to fill in the gaps. There are a zillion Mountain Goats songs that could make great fic.

If you're celebrating. My plans involve staying home, going to bed early and not answering the door. /Halloween scrooge

I've been doing a bit of cooking and baking. I started some bread dough (to be baked tomorrow), roasted a butternut squash and ate some of it with pasta and blue cheese, I'm roasting some beets right now to go into a mustardy vinaigrette, and I've made up a batch of dough for oatmeal cookies with dried cranberries and dark and white chocolate chips. I'm going to portion out the cookie dough and freeze most of it, some to bring to a little work party later in the week, some so that I can bake lovely fresh cookies whenever I want them!

Tomorrow I'm going to make a beef and mushroom pie with a hot-water pastry. I've temporarily surrendered on the lard issue and bought the smallest available box of supermarket stuff. It'll do for experimenting with, and the next time I see pork fat for sale I'll definitely buy some.

If I'm feeling ambitious tomorrow I may also put together some individual apple pies, which can be stored frozen, like the cookie dough, and baked whenever I get the craving.

Last weekend I neglected to post about the rest of my baking, so here goes! I baked some rye bread (fine, but uninspiring) and some little buns filled with curried potatoes. The latter have made excellent lunches throughout the week--I just take one out of the freezer in the morning, bring it to work in a ziplock bag, and by lunchtime it's thawed and ready. I like this in a lunch, because I do not want to be assembling a sandwich at five o'clock in the morning, so I may adopt filled buns as a lunchtime staple. The buns could be filled with just about anything that's fairly dry and can stand up to 15 minutes of baking: many other curries, or things like ham and cheese, chicken with chutney or pesto, leftover roast beef with mustard . . . yum.

Next weekend--really I only cook on weekends now, it's a bit sad--I think I'm going to make a chicken waterzooi, which is a creamy stew. The recipe I have calls for parsley root, and parsley root is currently available in my local market, so I want to make this before it disappears.

Mmm, autumn food, how I love it.


Of course I don't only think about food. I also think about Yuletide. I have what should be a workable idea for my assignment, which I should get started on this weekend so as not to fall into Procrastination Hell.

Other than Yuletide I'm at a bit of a low ebb fannishly. But I'm looking forward to the new Bond movie, and to the gay spy thriller London Spy. There are probably a zillion other great things coming out between now and the new year as well, which hopefully I won't be too busy/exhausted from work to see.

1) Baked some biscotti yesterday. They turned out well, but it has made me realize that I just don't like biscotti enough to want to go to the effort--and it isn't even that much effort--of baking them. Ah, well, that leaves several thousand other kinds of cookies/biscuits to bake.

2) Also yesterday, used my new soup pot for the first time. I made some chili, because for about two weeks I've been craving it. And not proper Tex-Mex chili, which is made with just meat and chiles and absolutely NOT beans. No, I wanted midwestern chili, made with ground beef and kidney beans and tomatoes, mildly spiced. Like my mom used to make, only better, because my mom wasn't much of a cook really. In the end I did a few slightly fussy things--I used ancho chile powder (because I couldn't find whole dried anchos) and a couple of whole, toasted, soaked, chopped up guajillo chiles, and freshly-ground cumin seed and Mexican oregano, and I added a bit of espresso powder and cocoa powder for depth, and some worcestershire sauce because it needed a certain something, and beans I'd previously cooked and frozen instead of beans from a can--but I got the result I wanted. And now I have lots of leftover chili in the freezer. I like having food in the freezer. Convenient + anxiety-easing.

3) Have finished watching Rejseholdet. Am pleased with highly slash-friendly ending. Am wondering if slashiness was deliberate on writers' part, because WOW. Am amused that around the middle of S3, the cinematographer discovered the blue filter and the whole look of the show changed, and also all the characters started wearing all black all the time. Still recommend it to those who like police drama, strong m/m slashiness, nuanced female characters, and strong female friendship with slashy potential; all previous caveats apply, however.

Definitely requesting it for Yuletide.

4) Two of my Yuletide nominations (Grantchester and The Thrilling Adventure Hour) have been approved. Still waiting on approval of the Bake Off.

5) Speaking of the Bake Off, ( spoilers for the semi-final )

st_aurafina made me watch The Great British Bake Off (she flew all the way from Australia to twist my arm until I surrendered!) with two results: (1) I'm now a slightly obsessive fan and (2) I want to BAKE ALL THE THINGS.

So I tried, for the first time ever, to make a proper layer cake with frosting and everything. I was cautious and used a recipe actually designed for the altitude at which I live (7000 feet or 2100 meters, which has big effects on baking). The end result was ( sort of a hilarious disaster and sort of a triumph )

This half-failure half-triumph has whetted my ambitions, so for my next trick I intend to make a variation of the same cake recipe (with the right amount of buttermilk this time!), only with each of the two layers split in half, the whole thing filled with homemade lemon curd and then topped with a light lemon glaze instead of frosting, because the cake and the lemon curd are probably quite rich enough.

I also want to try making biscotti, which held no interest at all for me until the second Bake Off episode. I've always thought of them as nasty stale things that coffee shops overcharge you for, but the ones on the Bake Off all looked really good. I'm thinking of cranberry, orange zest, and (maybe) crystallized ginger for my attempt. I'd like to have hazelnuts but they're awfully expensive, especially for a first try at something.

I only wish you all lived close enough that I could invite you over to help me eat all the cakes, etc. I'd like to bake. And not only out of the desire to share--frustratingly, my baking is still limited to things that will keep for at least several days, as I hate wasting food and bringing stuff to work has limited appeal. I do it sometimes, but I'd rather share with friends, and plus too much of that sort of thing can give you the reputation of being the workplace mom, which I really really don't want for all kinds of reasons.

By the way, on the subject of baking, can anybody recommend a good book on baking techniques that's preferably geared towards the home baker rather than a professional or would-be professional? I want a book that will tell me how to make basic components like a sponge or puff pastry or a pastry cream and how to combine those components into a variety of tasty things, but that doesn't assume you have a professional oven and so on. It's bad enough that all baking books assume you have a stand mixer. So far the most helpful book I've seen is my old Joy of Cooking, but it doesn't go far enough, and other baking books I've seen all give plenty of recipes for specific cakes or pastries but don't generalize their instructions or contain much if any focus on technique.


My life has not been entirely consumed by baking, of course. As always I'm reading a ton of things, most of them not especially worth mentioning. I've been wanting to read more history and, of all things, philosophy, for which I blame the In Our Time podcasts, but the local library system is underfunded and I think has sometimes made bad choices with what funds it does have. I understand that public libraries have to respond to public demand, but it's a bit shocking that there are so many diet books and new age woo-woo books and practically nothing on, for example, German history apart from the Nazi era. And no biography of Frederick the Great apart from one written by a Mitford (Nancy?) in the early 1970s, which I can't imagine will deal sensibly with his sexuality.

A couple of good things I've read, or partly read: I got about a third of the way through Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps before I just couldn't go on. It's an excellent book full of first-rate research, and not one of those Holocaust books that are thin excuses for atrocity porn, but by 1938 I was already overwhelmed and the Holocaust per se hadn't even started yet. Knowing it was just going to get worse, I had to stop. But I may go back to it eventually and I recommend it to those with strong constitutions.

I also liked Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, which is about the era just before the First World War. I picked it up off the new book shelf at the library, not realizing it was a re-release. As is my habit, when I got it home I went to the index for something queer-related and looked up what she had to say about the Eulenberg scandal. I was struck by the homophobia of the language, then saw that the book was first published in 1965. In that context the homophobia looked very mild, actually--more like the sort of standard disapproval anyone would have to express lest readers be outraged by its absence. (I've seen a similar level of homophobia in basically pro-gay books from this era written by gay people.) I thought there was an interesting resonance between the (token?) homophobia and the way Tuchman discusses socialism--when she talks about poverty and working conditions etc. she's clearly, strongly in favor of change, but if the dreaded word "socialism" comes up she has to be disparaging about it, because 1965 was the middle of the cold war and socialism was a very dirty word in the United States.

Apart from that I've been re-reading the best of Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries. I might request these at Yuletide, with a focus on Edgar Wield, both because he's awesome and because I want a good proportion of my Yuletide requests this year to be for canonically queer characters. Out of my five likely requests so far, three are for canonically queer characters (Wield, Leonard Finch from Grantchester and Colonel Tick-Tock from The Thrilling Adventure Hour, though he's only strongly-canonically-hinted as being queer if you want to split hairs about it) and two are not (York from Hyperdrive and Tintin and Haddock from Tintin). If we have six requests this year I want to add another canonically queer character. *thinks*


Shutting up now as this post is long enough already.

Yuletide authors have been revealed, so I can now say that I wrote two stories this year, both for the Psmith books by P.G. Wodehouse. Psmith and the Greek Spirit was my assigned fic for Masterofmidgets, and features Psmith courting an oblivious Mike during their school days. Psmith and Jackson, RFC was a treat for halotolerant; it brings the boys into the First World War.

And I can thank my authors by name! halotolerant wrote me two fantastic stories, At Shingle Street and The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and Sheldrake wrote the beautiful Defences. Many thanks to both of you!

Last year I said that every year it seems I know fewer Yuletide fandoms, and this year it was more of the same. Here are a few things I've really liked from the end of the alphabet (and there are a couple of longer fics that I haven't read yet because I prefer to read long fics on my ebook reader).

( 4 recs: Raffles, Rivers of London, Talented Mr. Ripley )

Yeah, no sooner did I post happily about how my internet was back than it went out again. I have no idea when/if it will come back. I'll be around when I can.

In other news, I'm waiting impatiently for The Imitation Game to finally open where I live, and eagerly but nervously for the final episode of Cabin Pressure. And I've been rewatching the early episodes of Lewis; later developments had made me forget how much I loved the show at first. But now I'm up to "Life Born of Fire" and I don't know if I can bear to watch it again. It's so full of fail and ungood weirdness, plus I think of it as the beginning of the show going wrong. Then again, the episode's ending pleases my inner hurt/comfort addict very much.

Yuletide proceeds apace. I've been editing the early parts of my story and I think this morning I finally managed to write it an ending. It's been a struggle, but I'm getting there, and I think I may quite like it once it's done.

Dear Yuletide writer,

First of all, thank you for writing for me. I'm thrilled that you share my interest in one of these fandoms, and I can't wait to read your story.

What follows is a little more information about what I like and don't like. But I want to say right away that I hope you will write a story you find interesting and enjoy writing, even if it goes in a different direction from the things I mention here. It could well turn out to be the story I didn't know I wanted.

( click here for more information and my requests )

These are things I'm thinking of nominating/requesting. Posted mainly for my own benefit, but anyone with thoughts is welcome to chime in.

( under the cut )