lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-14 06:14 pm
Entry tags:

Trail Cooking Clean and Green

I finished textually transcribing and posted Ro and Joanna Piekarski's zine, Trail Cooking: Clean and Green, published in 1995 and seemingly impossible to find. I found it in a free box, and while the Piekarskis are apparently the kind of people who categorize raisins and unsweetened carob chips as "dessert," their thing about light, cheap, vegetarian backpacker food seemed like it shouldn't be totally lost to the void.

Check it out if that interests you!
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-13 08:42 pm

Comic: Kissing

The winner of the fan poll, supported by fans like you on LiberaPay and Patreon!

Mori goes to Rawlin and says, 'Dunno if I like proper kissing. Can I give it a shot?' Rawlin chuckles placidly. 'Sure.' Mori leans in to kiss her, only for her eyes to go wide and her fur to involuntarily fluff. Not noticing, Mori pulls away. 'Hmm... still not sure... might need more trials... you?' Rawlin touches her lips with her gloved hand and just says, '...I like it.'
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-13 08:14 pm

Killing God is a Skill Issue

Original posts by Phosphor of Hungry Ghosts here, used with permission: https://nightfeather.cafe/notice/AuOng8NknA7IRvgusi

A janky GIMP pen drawing of Mori shrugging. In her speech bubble is a post from Phosphor of Hungry Ghosts: "'that's like saying God should not treat his creations however he sees fit--' well, you see, if god was real I would simply kill him. skill issue."

A much sketchier drawing of Mori smirking dramatically, one hand to her chest, the other thrown out with a flame at one fingertip. She oversees a burning fire, and her speech bubble contains another Phosphor post: "maybe YOU can't kill god. but lbr. that's a you issue, my friend, not a me issue"
dorchadas: (FFIX Vivi No More)
dorchadas ([personal profile] dorchadas) wrote2025-06-13 04:17 pm

The bell curve of interest

After nearly 200 hours, I'm finally at the point in Vintage Story where I'm in a position to to the (vintage) story. I have some teleportation stones (from the Ruststones mod) charged up so I can make the dozens-of-miles-long trek north to the Resonance Archive to figure out what's going on with it. I'm glad I discovered there's an overland route, so I don't have to make a canal to the northern ocean. In a couple weeks, I should have a review and I can move on to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. The real reason is that I'm hitting the same wall I usually hit in these long games. It happened when I played my heavily modded games of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (each of which took about 200 hours), it happened in Stardew Valley, it happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it's when I start off very excited, and I make big plans, and I stretch out the gameplay as long as I can, and then there comes a time when my motivation just...peters out, and I start rushing headlong toward the end so I can finish. There's no specific point where the switch is thrown, and I can predict when it will happen. In Vintage Story, I had a bunch of plans for what I was going to do when spring finally came again, all the crops I would plant and the upgrades I did to my greenhouse to prepare for it, and now it's looking like it'll be pointless because I'll beat the game before it's warm enough to put any seeds in the ground.

Some of this is just that I'm doing too much of the same thing and want a change. For example, it didn't happen in Baldur's Gate II. Maybe because I played it in bits in between the other things I'm doing. On the other hand, even though there's a whole route and revamped content in Night in the Woods that I haven't done yet, I haven't gone back to it yet after eight years. And this is in contrast with literature--there I often don't want a book to end, and I know some of that is because I write reviews of all the books I read so finishing a book means I have homework, but I also write reviews of all the games I play so there's no difference there. And of course, books obviously don't take 200 hours to read unless you're reading the Talmud or something, and Daf Yomi means you stretch that out like I stretched out my Baldur's Gate II playthrough. So what is it?

Okay, between this paragraph and the previous one I stared out the window for a while and you know, I actually thought of a possible explanation--action. Video games are an active medium, they require you to do things to complete them. Even the most text-heavy visual novel requires you to make a plot-relevant choice occasionally. Books (and TV shows etc) don't require any action, they just require absorption of information. So maybe what I'm actually getting sick of is the repetitive actions, and what's more, the constrained possible range of actions. In Vintage Story I can move blocks around, explore, craft, fight monsters, farm crops, and so on...but there are very few NPCs to talk to, no character sheet to level, no job classes to pick, etc. The mechanics have been basically the same for those entire 200 hours and what I really want is a set of new mechanics. Order of Ecclesia has platforming challenges, gimmick boss fights, and killing monsters for their glyphs. Vintage Story has...well, I've heard it does have a gimmick boss fight but it doesn't have any of the rest of those. It'll be a big change.

You know, I didn't actually expect to come up with a real answer when I sat down to write this, but it also explains why I tend to pick very different games. Just look at the list of games I played in 2024 and you'll notice I never played the same type of game twice in a row. The closest were River City Girls and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but the former was a co-op beat-'em-up and the latter was almost a metroidvania, so they were still very different. What I'm looking for is mechanical variety.
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
The Honorable Renaldo E. Gade III D.O. CPA Esq. ([personal profile] renegadefolkhero) wrote2025-06-13 09:03 am
Entry tags:

KDP ID Verification

It sounds like KDP's rolling out ID Verificaton to more North Americans now. Authors are required to submit a government ID for verification.

This is not a new program, it was announced a year ago, yet there are reports of people having their accounts terminated because they can't upload their government ID or get Amazon to recognize it. It's not surprising because Amazon KDP's customer service is notorious for being highly-automated and script-driven.

You already have to give Amazon your tax info to get paid, so this is not a huge ask, and it can potentially curb abuse since KDP only allows people to have one account per lifetime. These days a single person can feasibly run a content farm thanks to AI tools, so maybe this will help with slop, but I feel like it will probably only deter people casually trying (and failing, I assure you) to make a quick buck, and not the organized content farms who are really abusing the system.

I sometimes wonder if banning low content and public domain books outright would help at all. Kobo is reportedly cracking down on restricted content (which also includes partially or completely AI-generated work, but if memory serves they're primarily targeting PD and LC books) and Draft2Digital will not distribute PD books at all. Amazon does scrutinize this content to the extent public domain ebooks are generally considered risky and not worth risking an account ban.

I guess the truth is, the real volume of problematic content is gonna be slop: either AI generated mishmash or machine-translated works that are able to get past Amazon's "content published elsewhere" sniff test. Enough forbidden extreme/taboo content already somehow gets past their content checks, so I'm not sure how good their sniff tests are in the first place, but they're definitely not good enough to reliably sniff out AI slop.

lb_lee: The Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, doubled over laughing. (bwa-hah-ha)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-12 07:57 pm
Entry tags:

VAG MOMO

We were at the nearby Indian grocery store to stock up on yogurt (only they sell it in the giant quantities we require), when Biff noticed something new: enormous Ziploc bags filled with clearly-homemade momo (Nepalese dumplings). There are a few momo joints around here; maybe it's some sort of mysterious shadow kitchen thing?

Anyway, there were tons of these big gallon-size Ziploc bags, crammed full and tersely labeled in Sharpie as to their contents: (halal) BEEF, (halal) CHICKEN, and... VAG (veg).

It's Pride. We bought the VAG MOMO.

And guys, they were delicious. So flavorful! Cabbage, carrot, (probably?) chickpeas, onion, cilantro (we think), herbs and spices. We've bought bags of potstickers from the (southeast) Asian groceries around town, and they tended to be pretty bland. Nice, but bland, so we took to cooking them with sauces to flavor them up. But these? These packed all the flavor they needed. More support for the "ghost kitchen" idea.

They were expensive ($32), but they were so worth it. That bag will last us a long time; we spent half the bag feeding us and two roommates tonight, and we had leftovers, so that's an easy six meals' worth in one bag, a good treat item. And if I'm going to shell out for food, I'm happy to be giving it to my local Indian grocery and this mysterious momo chef!
lb_lee: A colored pencil drawing of Raige's freckled hand holding a hot pink paperback entitled the Princess and Her Monster (book)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-12 09:37 am

Signs of Life, by Barbara Krasnoff

Hey guys! I read a great women’s sci-fi anthology from 1989 in the sci-fi library. It gave me a lot of new additions to [community profile] pluralstories, but one story that really stood out to me (and has no spirited/many-selved content at all) is Barbara Krasnoff’s "Signs of Life." It’s about sign language interpreters in a universe where the Deaf are overwhelmingly the space pilots. Krasnoff had some training in the field (though she didn’t end up entering it) and reading it made my hard-of-hearing ass very happy. I really wanted to share it with y’all, but the Visions and Memories anthology is long out of print and paper-only. Alack!

So I found Krasnoff online and asked about it, and she posted the story on her blog, so now I can share it with everyone! Hooray! Here it is: https://krasnoff.wordpress.com/signs-of-life/

That anthology was really ahead of its time, and I’m glad some of the stories are finding new life (and hopefully new audiences)! I hope y’all like it!
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
The Honorable Renaldo E. Gade III D.O. CPA Esq. ([personal profile] renegadefolkhero) wrote2025-06-12 07:51 am

Obsidian Get!

In the spirit of trying new things, I once again tackled the problem of writing on the go. Last year I resisted expanding my writing time, but now that writing is a "hobby" (lol) and I have a better handle on my time management, I decided it would be a more fun way to spend downtime than doomscrolling my feeds.

ExpandRead more... )

Obsidian is not Scrivener

I'm convinced that adopting Scrivener made it possible for me to finish novels. I simply could not wrap my brain around the story when I used a word processor, and the visual organization of the Scrivener binder, plus the ability to have side notes, was a game-changer. Now I think Obsidian is going to make more complex books and series possible. I'm simultaneously outlining book one and the full series right now, and I'm powering past the points where I got stuck before because I was just so goddamned overwhelmed by the volume of stuff I was juggling.

It's the links, folks. It is EFFORTLESS to link and track data in this tool. Need to rework a bit of lore? Toss in a [[TODO]] link with a brief sentence explaining what needs to be done. Need to fill a placeholder? Drop a link to the placeholder link in the outline. Having a dynamic TODO list that I don't even think about, that is always updated and links right to the spot I need to make the change, is chef's kiss

Obsidian's other big strength is layout flexibility and unlimited split panes. Scrivener only allows a single split pane. Most of the time, this is fine. But in the planning stages, being able to have chapters, series notes, outline notes, and wiki notes all open as needed in various panes has really helped.

Scrivener is gonna come into play after the rough draft, when I'm splitting and moving big chunks of text around, running my various editing tools, and getting ready for epub output.


Anyway, writing Baby's First SeriousBook Series is kinda scary! D: I'll talk about that next time. But I feel a lot better now that I have ways to organize that seem to be working.

lb_lee: A pink sketchy heart (heart)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-11 05:11 pm
Entry tags:

Thank you, kind stranger!

Rogan: so, today was rough, but a kind stranger made it much less bad than it could’ve been!

ExpandRead more... )
dorchadas: (Maedhros A King Is He (No Text))
dorchadas ([personal profile] dorchadas) wrote2025-06-06 04:11 pm

Your friendly neighborhood school

Today was the parental information session for new families at Laila's new school, and while I couldn't go, I watched Laila while [instagram.com profile] sashagee went. It ran over the hour they had set and [instagram.com profile] sashagee didn't get to grab any coffee before she came home, but she took copious notes. Among those notes:
  • It's an International Baccalaureate school, so it follows a standardized curriculum through all of its instruction (preschool through middle school).
  • The school has a whole system of communications that goes through tiers, from emails and website announcements and fliers home and so on.
  • There are a bunch of parent groups you can join, including some Facebook groups she said I should join.
  • Breakfast and lunch are offered but optional, important because [instagram.com profile] sashagee wants to make meals for Laila.
  • There will be a "welcome back" day where we can take a tour of the school.
Something else that stuck out in her memory was overhearing a conversation about the condo to the south of us that was just on sale. A month or so ago, we were walking out on the sidewalk and I heard some people outside the condo showing say they already had twenty offers. Today, [instagram.com profile] sashagee said she heard other people talking about wanting to move into the neighborhood to secure their kid a spot at the local school for kindergarten since if you're already in the school you don't have to change mid-year and it's possible that you'll get to stay in future years (depending on the school administration, how many students the school has, their admissions policies, the phases of the moon, and so on), and that the same condo had closed with over thirty offers and gone for 120K over asking price! Once again, me being very lucky has worked out in my favor--just a few blocks over and we'd be in another school district, none of which are as good as our local one.
lb_lee: a penguin saying "Just because you decide to sell out doesn't mean anyone's going to buy!" ($ellingout)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-09 03:04 pm

Happy Pride, have a crisis zine

So, that's two events in a row that've been financial busts, and regrettably, between moves and stuff, we have no Pride events lined up.

So we made a Crisis Planning e-zine, which collates and cleans up all our crisis planning essays (and adds a little new stuff besides) and put it up for sale for $5.

Happy Pride.
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-09 02:05 pm
Entry tags:

Crisis Planning: Legal/Medical Stuff

Crisis Planning: Legal Stuff: Wills, Organ/Body Donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST Forms
Series: Essay (Crisis Planning)
Summary: A guide to living wills, health care agents, organ/body donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST forms (i.e., how to make sure you get the care you want and not the stuff you don't when you're unable to make your desires known).
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support my work, join LiberaPay or Patreon and get double-weight for your votes. Also, these crisis plan essays have proven so popular (and regrettably necessary) that we have made a whole ebook of them up for sale for $5 here.

Nobody likes to think about this stuff, but seriously, think it over, especially if any of the following is a concern of yours:
• Ending up under the care of your abusers if medically incapacitated.
• Being denied medical care you need, leading to your “merciful” death.
• Making sure your loved ones know what to do if you’re in a coma.
• Donating your body to science.

ExpandRead more... )

ExpandCitations )
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
The Honorable Renaldo E. Gade III D.O. CPA Esq. ([personal profile] renegadefolkhero) wrote2025-06-09 01:22 pm

The Outer Worlds 2

I said TOW2 was a day-one purchase for me, and I'm gonna have to go back on that promise, but I sincerely appreciate the irony of the Outer Worlds, of all things, being Microsoft's first $80 title.

Come October, I shall play through the first game and associated DLC yet again, and when the sequel invariably goes on sale for $40 two months later I'll be there, slobbering and drooling as I gorge myself on sweet, sweet anti-capitalist jank.

You can be a complete freak about something and still set the price, lads. That's all I'm sayin'.

lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-07 06:28 pm
Entry tags:

Piekarski and Piekarski's "Trail Cooking: Clean and Green"

by Ro and Joanna Piekarski
Illustrated by Cathryn Clark

* total vegetarian, low fat
* hearty, healthful, and delicious
* lightweight and inexpensive
* quick and easy
* no-soap cleanup
* keeps the garbage out of your body, your pack, and the environment

Copyright 1995
Golden Glow
192 Porter Road
Morrisonville NY 12962

Trail Cooking - Clean and Green



You're about to discover that you can enjoy delicious, healthful, quick-and-easy, "all-you-can-eat" food while hiking, bicycling, or canoeing, without any overpackaged, undersized, overpriced prepared "camping foods." All it takes is access to a good natural foods store or coop and some planning.

Table of Contents:
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner:
One-Pot Dinners
Quick-Cooking Grains
Freeze-Dried Tofu
Enhanced Rmane
Other Soup-Based DInners
Instant Taboluli
Instant Hummus
Rojo's Best Burgers and Buns
Cornmeal, Beans, and Salsa
Beverages
Dessert

ExpandBreakfast )

ExpandLunch )

ExpandDinner )

ExpandSnacks )

ExpandBeverages )

ExpandDesserts )
dorchadas: (Maedhros A King Is He (No Text))
dorchadas ([personal profile] dorchadas) wrote2025-06-05 09:34 pm

Let me just go outside and-

Canadian wildfires once again:

2025-06-05 - Weather problems


If you can't read Japanese, that's 154 on the AQI scale, which is moderate pollution (中程度の汚染), which is not good. I haven't been outside since Wednesday and don't plan to go out unless I have, though Laila is getting pretty annoyed about not being able to go outside.

It's supposed to last for the next couple days. Hopefully that's all--two years ago we lost most of the summer to Canadian wildfires. Hopefully our neighbors to the north can get the fires contained soon and not too much damage is done.
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-05 08:16 am

We are Tabling at Anti-Robot Club in Cambridge!

Details here: https://www.anti-robotclub.com/event-details/the-marketplace-cambridge-ma-2


Time: Sunday, June 8, 12-5 pm

Location:
The Foundry
101 Rogers st.
Cambridge, MA

We will have a bunch of short-run prose collections, including Perspichor Freelance Explorer (an asexual monster romance), Disabled Cyborgs, and more! Cone say hi!
dorchadas: (Azumanga Daioh Chiyo-chan big eyes)
dorchadas ([personal profile] dorchadas) wrote2025-05-30 12:24 pm

That was WILD. They can get away with this?

So on Tuesday, I went with [instagram.com profile] sashagee to get Laila registered for preschool, while Laila was still out at the grandparents. When we got there, there were a bunch of people in line ahead of us, and while waiting in line I realized that we didn't have a printout copy of our proof of income, so I downloaded a PDF on my phone and got ready to argue about access to a printer or an email address to mail it to. Then it turned out when we got to the front it didn't matter--the woman doing the registering couldn't seem to find Laila in the system, and when she started talking with [instagram.com profile] sashagee it seemed there was a miscommunication somewhere. See, [instagram.com profile] sashagee had registered Laila for half-day preschool, and the system--knowing Laila was four years old since this was after putting in all of her information--had let her. At the school, we were told that half-day preschool was only for three-year-olds and that she would have to talk to the Office of Early Childhood Education to get things sorted out.

[instagram.com profile] sashagee was understandably upset by this, and went home and made some calls. A call to the school wasn't returned (I don't think we ever got that email back that we were supposed to get...) but a call to the family hotline told her that since we had applied to half-day preschool, and had received an acceptance notice for half-day preschool, they had to take her. She just might be in a class with three-year-olds.

Armed with this knowledge, [instagram.com profile] sashagee sent off an email explaining things to the contact she had and then she (and Laila since she was back) went back to the school on Thursday to re-register while I was at work. She left fifteen minutes before registration opened (the school is within a few minutes' walk) and was gone until fifteen minutes after registration closed, and when she came back she told me a wild tale. There had been one person ahead of her and the same person doing the registration, and when the person ahead of her was finished, the woman saw [instagram.com profile] sashagee, said hello, and went back into her office and just...didn't come back. After thirty minutes the security guard went back to see what was going on and someone else came out and finished Laila's registration no problem, other than reiterating that she'd probably be in a class with three-year-olds.

Unbelievable. Just wild unprofessionalism. And I bet we'll have to deal with this woman again too, since this is our neighborhood school. Emoji rain Hopefully Laila's actual preschool experience goes better than her registration does!
lb_lee: a black and white animated gif of a pro wrestler flailing his arms above the words STILL THE BEST (VICTORY)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-03 12:21 pm

A new home for Dude and Skeeter (and us)!

Thanks to everyone who took part in the cat fostering! The day before I moved, I got to run by and finally meet Dude and Skeeter, the fluffballs who have occupied so much of my mental real estate.

dreadlordmrson: The Eye of Dread. (Default)
Mr. Son ([personal profile] dreadlordmrson) wrote2025-06-02 05:13 pm

Centaurs and werewolves

This centaur post by Chrysopoeia made me think of an old idea I had for unusual werewolves in a world I haven't worked with in a long time.

The idea was that werewolves and wolves were just... the same thing.

All wolves had both a human and a wolf form. How easy it was to change forms and which form they were more comfortable in, was a result of how they lived.

A wolf who acted more human and civilized looked more human and civilized, and had an easier time staying in human form, and thinking like a human. They were usually shorter and hairier than humans, but within typical tolerances so you couldn't really visually tell the difference between a civilized wolf and say, me (5'2" and a bit shaggy).
A more bestial werewolf on the other hand, who lived as an animal, would be uncomfortable trying to act or look like a human, and would only take human form if they needed to. A naked hairy man showing up at your camp begging for food might be a hermit, but they're more likely a hungry wolf who doesn't want to make trouble.

Every wolf's preferred lifestyle and form would come from a mix of that wolf's preferences, choices, and upbringing. Wolves would typically be most used to the form that made their lives easier and helped them thrive. Though a wolf could always change to the other lifestyle if they wanted to and tried hard.

Writing all this up, I could see how it could fit some sort of racial/racism allegory into it? Or queerness, esp. bisexuality? Or transness? But I was coming at it from the more fantastical angle. That these are literally a shape-shifting wolf-person living in this fantasy world. They hadn't even been meant to be a major part of the story but they're clearly something you could write an entire story around.

I haven't worked on that world in a long time now, but some time it would be nice to go back, or to reuse these wolves elsewhere.