I wonder why I stopped getting LJ notifications last night. Kef says she's getting all her notifications. I've had to check out my opening LJ page to find people commenting to my LJ. I have no idea if it also affects people answering comments I left on other people's LJs.

• 11:03 Bigelow Nutcracker Sweet tea is delish. Chases away the brrrrr. #

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Happy birthday to lostakasha she of the luscious prose and devious mind!

One of the things I enjoyed doing last year and then stopped was just writing up my thoughts about the various media I ingested. None of this is going to make the world turn on its axis, obviously, but I'm pretty sure it does that on its own. :) First four movies of 2010.

( Sherlock Holmes (no spoilers) )

( Up in the Air (very minor spoilers) )

( Taking Woodstock (no spoilers) )

( Whip It (very minor spoilers) )

So, a billion years ago, someone on my flist (and I no longer remember who) posted a recipe. I use that word kind of loosely because her recipe had no measurments or quantities, just a list of the ingredients, with no real proportions. And so I've been tinkering with it every since, intrigued by it's potential while never feeling like I've gotten it quite "right".

Edit: I apparently ganked it from pekover; many thanks to her!

The thing is, I feel like even at its worst, it's a delicious, incredibly flexible, super easy recipe that offers itself to a lot of adaptation.

The original recipe had chickpeas in it, which is what drew me to it, but after messing around with the recipe a lot, I find I don't really like the backtaste the chickpeas gave the overall dish, I like it much better without. The original recipe also didn't have feta, but I really like the punch it gives the flavors.

Anyway. The basic recipe:

( The casserole. )

I made this recipe again today and mixed in sweet potato with the white. It was still good, but I felt like the sweet potato softened the flavors too much, made it more bland. I had to add more salt. It works as a side or main dish and I'm thinking about seeing what it's like if I add chicken or maybe sausage. I will keep experimenting.

Happy birthday to meyerlemon, off having a RL with babyLemon and sahsedalia! A most wonderful day to both of you!

Well, I caved and signed up for Sex is Not the Enemy.

Then, in a fit of crazy optimism and outpouring of fannish hopefulness, I signed up for au_bigbang. Not, as some of you were hoping, to write AKB Kane's backstory. Instead, I think I'm going to use it to finish The Last Kings of Sateda. I've always thought it would be a decent length story, 10K or longer, if I was going to do it justice. And I very much want to do it justice. The other really strong contender was The Romancing the Stone AU that I've been wanting to do forever, but I feel like LKoS is the story that I have a stronger grip on and I feel like I'm too uncertain in other areas of my writing enough that I don't want to flounder around in the plot, too.

And now I need to stop signing up for stuff.

In actual writing news, I did some work on Appetite today. Not much and it's yet another rewrite of The Scene I Can't Make Work, but the fact that I was working on it at all feels like something. Now if I can just continue, instead of playing all day with my new Nook.

Bergdorf Goodman has taken 95% of its Christmas windows down while Saks has removed all of theirs, and, even more disappointingly, the windows are all shrouded in full-length black curtains. You know I like to catch windows in progress.

Today was my first day out with the new camera. Since it was so cold, I took all of these wearing my glove/mittens with only the right-hand thumb cap off. So handy! I don't know if the very strong window reflections on so many of them come just from today's very intense sunlight or the new camera focusing more on the window than what's beyond it. The photos are also fuzzier, perhaps from how the camera often requires a double tap on the button to shoot, leading to more shake in my hand, and perhaps from something within the camera working as it will since it's another point-and-click. It'll take more work. ( photos )


Zoom! I'm still working out the setting it looks sharpest in. ( photo )

Dammit. ( My hair loss is worsening again. )

My f'list is large, and my mind can be like a sieve, so I no longer remember where I read someone feeling uncomfortable about Archive of Our Own publicly displaying hit counts on their fic. This is unfortunate, because if I remembered where I could tell this person that AO3 has an option where an author can turn off public displays of the hit counts. I just found out tonight. Dang.

Happy birthday to merihn and ebonypsyche!

Oh, I am really tempted to pick up a prompt from villainny's Sex is Not The Enemy fest. I'm doing my usual rationalization of "Oh, but it's just 500 words..." but I also know how seldom it actually ends up being "just" 500 words. *chews lip*

Speaking of fests...it looks like the greatest number of people want February for the JDM fest. My goals are kind of two-fold with this: I want to make it as easy as possible--on everyone, including me!--and I want it to be as inclusive as possible. So, my thoughts are these: I'm thinking that, starting next week (Jan 11), I'll put up a post for people to leave prompts for those that want them. The prompt post will stay open for a week and then, starting Jan 18, people can start to claim posts if they want to, even if they don't plan to start writing right away. Those of you who are freestyling can start whenever you like, obviously! Let the writing go through February and then I can put together a master post of everything everyone's created, on March 1.

How does that timeline grab ya?

When Johnette Napolitano is firing on all cylinders, she's great. But when she's bad and/or self-indulgent... lordy. Unfortunately, Scarred is an album mostly full of the second category. Lyrically, this album can mostly be summed up by "You're awesome, and I suck." Her voice sounds seriously distressed here, which makes the songs about being old, rundown, and an alcoholic/junkie sound a little too embarrassingly close to the bone. Some of this stuff is sung like she's a done-in alcoholic. Or she half-speaks things, which generally sounds more pretentious. In "My Diane," her sung lyrics in the chorus keep running over the music in ways that sound highly unprofessional instead of poignant. Johnette, did you really have to put "heya, heya, heya, heya" at the end of the already often cringeworthy "Poem for the Native"?

The catchiest song here is "Amazing," which unfortunately has some of the most embarrassment squick lyrics possible in the stanzas. If you want an idea, think of someone with absolutely no self-esteem and a crush on someone so intense you feel pity for her/him. There you go. The sung chorus to the otherwise spoken word "Poem of the Native" is also catchy.

There are lots of great moments musically, but the lyrics and--I hate to have to say this for things Johnette sings--voice are often such a problem.

There are two cover songs here. One is an unpretty and occasionally twee cover of Coldplay's "The Scientist" that'll make you wish you were listening to the original instead, and the other is of Lou Reed's "All Tomorrow's Parties," in which Johnette's voice is so ragged, frail, and misused that I can't even listen to it all the way through.

Damn, this is a bummer. I loved her work in Concrete Blonde and with the Heads, so being disappointed by this album is even more disappointing.

I'm still working on GH and almost ready to post the next part. What's holding me back is making a decision on which way something will go. I'm still weighing it in my head.

Weiß Kreuz slash: “Burning Bright”
RATING: PG-13; Farfarello/Schuldig.
SUMMARY: Farfarello doesn’t take care of himself, so Schuldig does it for him.

Happy birthday greedy_dancer, flipmontigirl, who has not been seen in these parts for many a moon but is off living a happy life somewhere, and the always delightful apieceofcake! A joyous day and year to you all.


Chinese New Year is on Feb. 14 this year. red_packet is a multifandom community for fanworks revolving around or involving the Chinese New Year. Feed the birds, boost the signal.

An errant whistle from the muse has me blowing the mothballs off The Last Kings of Sateda, a Sateda Dean...no, in some ways I feel like this is the Sateda Dean piece; not the big long epic that takes place during the canon of SGA, but the momentous, fraught relationship that takes place in the last days of Sateda itself, two ridiculously young boys ridiculously in love and poised, unknowingly, on the cusp of their entire civilization's destruction. I don't know if I'm going to get through the whole thing right now; it's a story that's always felt somewhat epic in scope (though, after AKB, I suppose I have to resize what I consider 'epic') and there's a lot that happens, a lot of history to cover and I'm torn between glossing over all of it to get it all out or letting the story unwind more slowly. Though I think I'm avoiding the next chapter of AKB a little bit (this writing stuff is HARD, yo) I don't want to get too far away from it and lose the momentum there. So I dunno. I guess we'll see.

For anyone that was paying attention/interested, I did get to my 100 (new to me) movies in 2009 goal: ( The Big List of Movies )

I enjoyed keeping track of the movies so much that I'm going to do it again this year, though I don't really have any specific goal in mind. Maybe I'll try and do 101. One of the things that was probably the most fun about it was that the "pressure" to make 100 movies led me to some movies I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. A lot of them were schlock and bad schlock at that, but there were also some hidden gems that I got the chance to see. I'd like to also get more into the habit of blogging what I thought about various movies and books...but I know myself well enough that I won't commit to any such thing. For 2010, I'm already up 3 movies and if this lack of new TV keeps up for much longer, that's likely to inflate very quickly, very soon. *sighs*

Something I would like for new Doctor Who would be more than one companion at once and not have all of them be our world and era ones. Jack Harkness has been the only exception who wasn't a one-off modern Who has done. It's fun to watch companions allying or disagreeing or banding together against the Doctor. I don't know if Martha would have survived "The Sound of Drums" without Jack around, since the Doctor was totally focused on the Master.

Let's have more guy companions again too and not just ones who can fall in love with the Doctor. I hope Rusty leaving will cut down on the gooey All Must Pine for the Doctor vibe for companions (even Donna was embarrassingly all over the Doctor about how great he was at times).


ETA: Some spoilers for "The End of Time part 2" in the comments.

• 17:40 At Denver Nuggets game! #

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Happy birthday to kerrikins and shrift! May your day be mighty and excellent!

Okay, so. This JDM ficathon. It's January now and hopefully all you eager young (or not so young) things have wandered back from your Winter Holiday of Choice vacations... So would it be better to do this now/soon, in this month, or are we all tuckered out from Yuletide and in need of a little breathing room (so, like February)?

Poll #1506800 Jeffrey Now or Jeffrey Later?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

When do you want to do this thing?

I think the idea of having prompts for those who want them and letting those who want to freestyle do so is probably the best way to get the most response. Anything that gets us more Jeff stories is something I'm down for! But what do you guys think about throwing it open even further, to stuff like fanmixes and artwork and vids (or whatever)? Stuff in the spirit of?