mstornadox

[mstornadox]

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Seasons 1 and 2 of Leverage Redemption are now available on Kanopy: https://www.kanopy.com/product/leverage-redemption

Has anyone written some good commentary about how two huge corporate overlords (Amazon and Overdrive) are funding this series? It makes me shake my head, laugh nervously, and doubt reality.

#leverage redemption #kanopy #amazon #overdrive #when corporations fund anti-corporate content

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There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like "actor leaves after 4000 more words" or "topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events" or "lost rights to that reference"

#fanfic #writing prompt

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Ate lunch outside in the sun today. Felt like Zhaan

#zhaan #Farscape #sometimes I feel like a #sentient plant

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I have no idea why I always parse YMMV first as “You Make Me Vomit”, wonder why this neutral term is so negative, and then remember it’s really “Your Mileage May Vary”.

#ymmv #your mileage may vary #misinterpretation #you make me vomit #brains work in mysterious ways

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Feeling better today.

I realized that I have been trying to be perfect in my social interactions.

So.

I now give myself permission to fail at small talk and networking.

Fuck fuck fuck. I’m having a major social anxiety attack while attending a conference. Trying not flinch when I make eye contact with a vendor. Trying to not feel rejected when there is a pause in the chitchat. Trying not to feel like I’m doing everything the wrong way. Trying to not make myself feel worse by listing all of the things I should be doing right now instead of cryng in my hotel room.

I feel like an awkward turtleduck. I don’t want to make a bad impression, but my social butterfly mask no longer fits my face.

Objectively, I know that I am doing what I can. I took my meds this morning. I have attended some sessions. I lasted 30 minutes at the reception. I am good at making small talk in elevators. I had a lunch with a friend who I hadn’t seen in 3-4 years. Other people may feel as lost and lonely as I do. This too shall pass.

Tonight I will take care of myself. I will cry. I will take a shower. I will brush my teeth. I will sleep.

Tomorrow is a new day.

#mental health #permission to fail #stress relief

[mstornadox]

Needed this today

when the story is just not working, but you keep writing anyway

[mstornadox]

Fuck fuck fuck. I’m having a major social anxiety attack while attending a conference. Trying not flinch when I make eye contact with a vendor. Trying to not feel rejected when there is a pause in the chitchat. Trying not to feel like I’m doing everything the wrong way. Trying to not make myself feel worse by listing all of the things I should be doing right now instead of cryng in my hotel room.

I feel like an awkward turtleduck. I don’t want to make a bad impression, but my social butterfly mask no longer fits my face.

Objectively, I know that I am doing what I can. I took my meds this morning. I have attended some sessions. I lasted 30 minutes at the reception. I am good at making small talk in elevators. I had a lunch with a friend who I hadn’t seen in 3-4 years. Other people may feel as lost and lonely as I do. This too shall pass.

Tonight I will take care of myself. I will cry. I will take a shower. I will brush my teeth. I will sleep.

Tomorrow is a new day.

#depression #social anxiety #fuck my brain #yelling into the void

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Is this a new game where I am supposed to guess the prompt that generated this ad?

There are so many conflicting elements. It wants me to use an image-based generative AI to create recipes for when i travel? At least it’s okay with including donuts in my meal plans. Or maybe it’s asking me to make a donut that looks like luggage? “Is it a donut?” instead of “is it cake?”

I am so confused by the disconnects between the images and the copy. Even the date is screwy—this “screenshot” was taken either in 2020 or 2026.

I’m assuming that this terrible ad was created using Copilot. Did someone really consider this a good, enticing example of its output?

Fuck you, Microsoft.

#tumblr ads #copilot #microsoft #ai art #badly done ai work

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Having finished the training, I now have the desire to re-watch Leverage.

i’m doing an online cyber security training. one of the first examples is an email from [email protected].

We are told to look for misspellingsin a phishing email.

Loving the idea that Tumblr is well-known enough that most people recognize tumblr as the correct spelling.

#leverage #social engineering

[mstornadox]

i’m doing an online cyber security training. one of the first examples is an email from [email protected].

We are told to look for misspellingsin a phishing email.

Loving the idea that Tumblr is well-known enough that most people recognize tumblr as the correct spelling.

#tumblr hellsite #tumblr hellsite (affectionate)

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One of the answers for todays’s NYT Spelling Bee is … fanfic

I’m always amused when fandom terms show up in mainstream games and games shows.

#spelling bee #nyt spelling bee #spoliers #fanfic #fanfiction #fan fic #yes I felt the need to tag the variations

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Although my dad was super proud of being Irish American, he did not appreciate Irish cuisine in the slightest. One of his favorite jokes was “there are only two words in the Irish cookbook: Boil It.”

As a child, it didn’t seem odd that a major part of the culture—its food—was ignored. My mom made corned beef a couple of times for St. Patrick’s Day. Instead I grew up with Irish beer and Irish crystal and Irish poetry and Irish lace and Irish maps. The idea of Irishness, not the particulars. I feel a little cheated.

Food on St Patrick's Day (in the USA)...

...is usually Corned Beef & Cabbage, which is the Irish-American version of the original Irish boiled bacon & cabbage, but while the celebratory Irishness is still going strong, try something a bit more authentic.

A nice warm coddle. Not cuddle, coddle, though just as comforting in its own way. (Some sources suggest it's a hangover cure, not that such a thing would ever be necessary at this time of year, oh dear me no.)

Coddle is a stew using potatoes, onions, bacon, sausages, stout-if-desired / stock-if-not, pepper, sage, thyme and Time.

You'll often see it called "Dublin Coddle", but my Mum made Lisburn Coddle lots of times, I've made West Wicklow Coddle more than once, and on one occasion in a Belgian holiday apartment I made Brugsekoddel, which is an OK spelling for something that doesn't exist in any cookbook.

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I do remember one amendment I made to Mum's recipe, which met with slight resistance at the time and great appreciation thereafter.

Her coddle was originally cooked on the stove-top, not in the oven, and nothing was pre-cooked. Potatoes were quartered, onions were sliced, bacon was cut into chunks and then everything went into the big iron casserole, then onto the slow back ring, and there it simmered Until Done.

However, the bacon was thick-cut back rashers, and the sausages were pork chipolatas.

Raw, they looked like this:

...and the bacon looked like this:

Cooked in the way Mum initially did, they looked pretty much the same afterwards. The sausages didn't change colour. Nor did the bacon.

While everything tasted fine, the meat parts always looked - to me, anyway - somewhat ... less than appealing. "Surgical appliance pink" is the kindest way to put it, and that's all I'm saying. This is apparently "white coddle" and Dubs can get quite defensive about This Is The Way It SHOULD Look.

I'm not a Dub, so I persuaded Mum to fry both the bacon and sausages first, just enough to get a bit of brown on, and wow! Improvement! I remember my Dad nodding in approval but - because he was Wise - not saying anything aloud until Mum gave it the green light as well.

Doing the coddle in the oven, first with lid on then with lid off, came later and met with equal approval. So did using only half of the onion raw and frying the other half lightly golden in the bacon fat.

Nobody quoted from a movie that wouldn't be made for another decade, but there was a definite feeling of...

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There are coddle recipes all over the Net: I've made sure that these are from Ireland to avoid the corned-beef-not-boiled-bacon "adjustment" versions which are definitely out there. I've already seen one with Bratwurst. Just wait, it'll be chorizo next.

Oh, hell's teeth, I was right. And from RTE...

Returning to relative normality, here's Donal Skehan's white coddle and his browned coddle with barley (I'm going to try that one).

Here's Dairina Allen's Frenchified with US measurements version. (I feel considerably less heretical now.)

And finally (OK, not Irish, but it references a couple of the previous ones and is a VERY comprehensive write-up, so gets a pass) Felicity Cloake's Perfect Dublin Coddle (perfect according to who, exactly...?) in The Guardian.

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Returning to the beginning, and how boiled bacon became corned beef (a question which prompted @dduane to start an entire website...!)

The traditional Irish meat animal for those who could afford it was the pig, but when Irish immigrants (even before the Great Famine) arrived in the USA, they often lived in the same urban districts as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

For fairly obvious reasons pork, bacon and other piggy products were unavailable in those districts, but salt beef was right there and far cheaper than any meat Irish immigrants had ever seen before.

Insist on tradition or eat what was easy to find? There'd have been contest - and do I sometimes wonder a bit if sauerkraut ever came close to replacing cabbage for the same reason.

The pre-Famine Irish palate liked sour tastes: a German (?) visitor to Ireland in the mid-1600s wrote about about what were called "the best-favoured peasantry in Europe", and mentioned that they had "seventy-several sour milks and creams*, and the sourer they be, the better they like them."

* Yogurt? Kefir? Skyr? Gosh...

Corned beef and Kraut as the immigrants' celebratory "Irish" meal for St Patrick's Day? Maybe, maybe not.

Time for "Immigrant Song" (with kittens).

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Corned beef got its name from the size of the salt grains with which the beef was prepared. They were usually bigger than kosher salt, like pinhead oats or even as large as grains of wheat, and their name derived originally from "corned (gun)powder", the large coarse grains used in cannon.

BTW, "corn" has been a generic English term for "grain" for centuries, and "but Europe didn't have corn" is an American mistake assuming the word refers to sweetcorn / maize, which it doesn't.

Lindsey Davis, author of the "Falco" series, had a couple of rants about it and other US-requested "corrections". As she points out, mistakes need corrected but "corn" is not a mistake, just a difference in vocabulary.

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In Ancient and Medieval Ireland pig would have included wild boar, the hunting of which was a suitable pastime for warriors and heroes, because Mr Boar took a very dim view of the whole proceeding and wasn't shy about showing it (see "wild boar" in my tags and learn more).

Cattle were for milk, butter, cream and little cattle; also wealth, status, and heroic displays in their theft, defence or recovery. It's no accident that THE great Irish epic is "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley" / Táin Bó Cúailnge (tawn / toyn boh cool-nyah).

Killing a cow for meat was ostentation on a level of lighting cigars with 100-, or even 500-, currency-unit notes. Once it had been cooked and eaten there'd be no more milk, butter, cream or little cattle from that source, so eating beef was showing off And Then Some.

Also, loaning a prize bull to run with someone else's heifers was a sign of great friendship or alliance, while refusing it might be an excuse for enmity or even war. IMO that's what Maeve of Connaught intended all along, picking undiplomatic envoys who would get drunk and shoot their mouths off so the loan was refused and she, insulted, would have an excuse to...

But I digress, as usual. Or again. Or still... :->

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For the most part, "pig" mean "domestic porker", and in later periods right up to the Famine, these animals were seldom eaten.

Instead, known as "the gentleman who pays the rent", the family pig ate kitchen scraps and rooted about for other foods, none of which the tenant had to grow or buy for them. These fattened pigs would go to market twice a year, and the money from their sale would literally pay that half-year's rent.

For wealthier (less poor?) farmers, pigs had another advantage. Calves arrived singly, lambs might be a pair, but piglets popped out by the dozen. A sow with (some of) her farrow was even commemorated on the old ha'penny coin...

What with bulls, chickens, hares, horses, hounds, pigs, salmon and stags, the pre-decimal Irish coinage is a good inspiration for some sort of fantasy currency.

But that's another post, for another day.

#irish cuisine #dublin coddle #irish american cuisine #normal is overrated #also #I may be reblogging this post for a second important reason: #viking kittens

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This is blatant The Eliminator (1997) erasure. It was a sci-fi spy action zombie comedy low budget masterpiece. So what if it only appeared on the festival circuit, was never commercially released, and has been essentially lost. It had zombies, so it counts.

#the eliminator #irish film #horror comedy #lost films

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This prompt seems tailor-made for TJ Alexander

I attended a seminar on Legal Issues and the LGBTI community and one HILARIOUS side effect of same sex marriage getting legalised was in reality…horrible for estate planning and property disputes, but also sounds like an incredible fic premise

Before same sex marriage was legal a fair few gay couples got married in foreign countries; it had no effect in Australia but it was the principle of the thing. When it became legal, their marriages took effect in Aussie too.

This was wonderful for couples who were still together, but for couples who had broken up, and hadn’t bothered to go back to that foreign country to get divorced (and they rarely did)…they suddenly found themselves married again.

#shouting into the void #tempting the universe #fic ideas

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New Zealand posters from Flight of the Conchords

#flight of the conchords #fake travel posters #new zealand

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oh when I tell you I need all of these [x]

#libraries #library life #library humor #pins