Thursday, August 14th, 2025 01:00 pm

Posted by Jen

I know it can be scary asking a bakery to do something custom, like, say, a school or brand's logo.
But DON'T PANIC; I'm here to walk you through it.

First, print out a nice, clear image to bring in as a reference:

 

With something as simple as this Chanel logo, you can be sure there is simply NO WAY...

...that the results won't be hysterical.

 

When ordering a Saints logo...

 

...it helps to have the patience of one.

 

Oh, and when you give the baker your reference image, be sure to mention how closely you want your cake to match; some bakers take it more as a "guideline" than an actual rule.

"Why'd you use the S?!"
"Because I don't know what the F is going on!"

 

Still, the most important thing, my friends... is to be glad you aren't ordering a Texas Longhorns cake.

Because seriously, that thing is the Kobayashi Maru of cake orders:

...you can't win.

(But hey, at least this one's got heart!)

 

Thanks to Amy B., Ashley B., Candace F., Amy B., Allison, & Chris L. for getting that last one off his chest.

*****

Because some days call for more than coffee:

"Probably Whiskey" Enamel "Coffee" Mug

(The listing really does have "coffee" in quotation marks, ha!)

*****

And from my other blog, Epbot:

Thursday, August 14th, 2025 02:36 pm
Cosmos, Holme 2

Took the newly-acquired secondhand zoom lens to the gardens at Holme, to try it out. It wasn't a successful day for flower photography - the light was too bright, and a stiff breeze was making the flowers bob about. But I followed the path that leads through the orchard and by the edge of the woods - lonely parts of the garden I had overlooked in the past - and came across some new-to-me plants, which is always exciting.
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Thursday, August 14th, 2025 08:39 am
I'm at the tedious gathering sources stage of things. I think I'm not going to use upscales of DS9 and Voyager (imho they look a bit too uncanny valley for my taste, even at 720p).

Any recs for covers of Getting Bi with a female singer? (I'm not sure if there's a Jadzia Dax vid to it already, but I kinda want to make one).

Also, I'm wondering if I might need songs about being parted and reunited. I was throwing some stuff on a timeline and noticed there's a lot of breakup and partings w/r/t queer characters (even with mirror!Ezri and mirror!Kira) and it might be neat to contrast that with the post-Berman era stuff (even though those still include some breakups).
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 08:13 pm
I posted about watching my brother's first feature-length film Hungry Ghost Diner (2023) under access lock, but then found out it's available in the US/UK on Apple TV and Prime Video. I feel like my DW network has quite the concentration of people interested in c-ent, so thought I'd post publicly to draw some attention to it!

Hungry Ghost Diner is a supernatural family drama/comedy about a food truck operator, Bonnie, who has a difficult relationship with her dad, and has to balik kampung/go back to small-town Perak, where her dad runs a kopitiam/coffeehouse, when her uncle dies. Her dad is closing down the coffeehouse; it's Hungry Ghost Month and there are lots of ghosts about, and family issues that need resolution ... It's unusual among the c-ent you might have watched before in that it's Malaysian, so features multiple languages -- I think Cantonese gets the most screen-time, but Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien, English and Malay are also spoken.

I am obviously not remotely objective, but having just finished watching it yesterday, I thought it was good and if anything I felt one might enjoy it even more if one was not related to the director lolol. It got a positive critical reception in Malaysia when it came out a couple of years ago and has won awards at film festivals, and you can see why. It's beautifully shot, quirkily scored, and very Malaysian -- the charm of the accumulated details of (Chinese) small-town Malaysia is impossible to resist if you have any connection to such places, and probably still hard to resist if you don't know Malaysia personally. I thought the cast all delivered strong performances. I was particularly taken with the lead's sweet maternal uncle (played by an actor who sadly died suddenly not too long after the film was released). The lead was impressive, too: she played the main character with directness and sincerity.

And the film's such a heartfelt homage to Malaysian Chinese culture, from the beverages ads in Bonnie's dad's kopitiam to the Potehi glove puppet performances (I found these very interesting, I'd never seen them before). I think it's a film that would interest anyone who follows me on DW, or has read my books, or is generally interested in world cinema!
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 08:08 am
I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World (translated from German by Jane Billinghurst) as a sort of follow-up to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Although they are coming at the question from different angles, both books make the same point that plants are, like, alive??

On the one hand, this is something that I think most people vaguely know. But it’s still startling to discover the plants communicate with each other through their root systems, and can send sugars through those roots so effectively that other trees can keep a tree trunk alive for centuries after its crown has died.

But this only occurs in trees in naturally occurring forests. When humans dig trees up to transport them and plant them where we want them, we sever the root tips, and trees never recover the ability to interface with other roots - even if there are other trees available to commune with, which there often aren’t if a tree is planted, for instance, alongside a street.

This helps explain why trees along streets and trees in tree plantations tend to be, in tree terms, quite short-lived. Also, Wohlleben points out, the qualities that humans consider “good” in trees are usually not the qualities that are actually good for trees. For instance, humans like to see trees growing fast, and sometimes point at the quick rate of growth in spruce plantations as proof that these plantations are actually good for trees.

But in fact fast growth is dangerous for a tree, as it creates structural weaknesses that will often kill a tree when it’s around a hundred years old. For human foresters, this is fine, as that’s about as long as we let plantation trees grow anyway, but from a tree’s perspective, 100 years is not a long time at all.

In Wohlleben’s view, humans struggle to understand trees because their perspective is so alien to ours. They’re stationary. Their senses and methods of communication are so different from ours that we struggle to believe trees have senses at all. (“In Wohlleben’s analysis, it’s almost as if trees have feelings and character,” says the incredulous author of this Guardian article, apparently unable to grasp that Wohlleben is arguing that trees DO have feelings, no “almost” about it.)

And, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The modern industrial lifestyle depends on seeing not just trees but the entirety of the natural world as raw materials we can dispose of as we will. Now, of course we’re capable of accepting that trees have feelings and then blithely refusing to change our behavior on account of that fact: after all, we do this with other humans all the time. But why bother embracing extra cognitive dissonance? It’s just easier all around if we continue to see trees as technically animate but more or less inert objects.
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 06:57 am
Air temperature 68 F, wind near calm, fog at the airport for visibility about a mile. Not seen here, but the radio towers seem to have vanished. They have offered us a chance of showers or thundershowers, but the only green globs on the weather radar are well north of here. Should be able to get out for a walk.
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 08:41 pm
Fandom: Red White and Royal Blue (RWRB)
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Alex/Henry
Content Notes/Warnings: not really NSFW, but naked torsos, even if disguised by sparkles
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: shirmirart on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A RWRB version of the popular pic of gay dancers, complete with barely-there crowns and glitter. Sappy, but beautifully done.
Link: heavy is the head that wears the crown
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 11:27 pm
Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 07:24 am
 A wild party. A young man is showing his penis to the girls- who titter. I turn to the person next to me and say, "I am pretending to disapprove."

The dog is unhappy. It opens its jaws and I see it has a wrist watch stuck to the roof of its mouth. I remove the watch
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 06:07 am

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.


Over the last week...

Commented on [community profile] common_nature.

Chit-chat on [community profile] booknook.

Promoted [community profile] fan_writers to potentially interested folks >:D

Signal boost:

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 11:51 pm
Clearly a portmanteau of "side effects / consequences."  I like it.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 09:27 pm
1. We got Indian food from the same place as we did a couple weeks ago and this time both our main focus was the batter fried paneer sticks lol. I just ordered them on a whim last time (they're called paneer pakora so I was expecting more of something filled with cheese rather than what it was) but they were so good. (The other food we got was good, too, but these would be hard to top.)

2. I am so glad I spotted Ollie like this and was able to get some photos. Truly a sight to brighten any day.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 07:33 pm
Just Finished:. Gifts by Ursula LeGuin, the first of the Annals of the Western Shore. A re-read, but it had been probably 15 years since I first read it, so it was good to visit again. Such creativity, such a wonderful voice, such marvelous characters, even if so much of the content is grim (as it involves using supernatural gifts for power and violence). Good stuff.

Now reading: Voices, the 2nd of the Annals. And The Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer, on audio. This one is remarkably charming and I am definitely enjoying it.

Up next: The Scarlet Pimpernel, for book club (on audio from Librivox), and Powers, the finale of the Annals of the Western Shore.

****

Today I was in a meeting with many people from around the organization, strategizing on how to spend $100M, and there were 10 people on the call and I was the only woman. Joy.

I had takeout Thai on Sunday when I hosted two friends, and ended up with a small container of leftover peanut sauce. So tonight I mixed it with extra olive oil, garlic, rice vinegar, and peanut butter, and stretched it enough to make it into salad dressing. Very tasty! I recommend.

In a few minutes I have to get up and make a tray of dessert for the division summer BBQ on Friday. I think I shall probably make these.

Work is entirely out of control. Apparently I could ask for OT for some of this work but I just cannot bring myself to do any more than I have the time to do in a 40-hour week. And if not enough gets done, well, that's just not my problem.