How is it that I haven't posted a post here since 2020? OMG. Anyway.

I made a Recipe yesterday, because I had a craving and decided to look up recipes and decided that they didn't all suit either my craving or my typical way of cooking.

Being fall, the veggie situation at the Greenmarkets (I regularly visit 2) has transistioned to potatoes, sturdy hard-shelled squashes, leeks, beets, parsnips, cauliflower and apples. Oh so many apples. But I digress.

A few of the farms are from south New Jersey, so they have greener produce for longer. I bought green beans just last week! Still tasty and good! And broccoli, and zucchini. And tomatoes? I don't trust fall tomatoes. They never ripen up properly at home. SO that was the root of my craving: green tomatoes. 

I didn't grow up with southern cooking, or green tomatoes. I'm not usually thrilled with the pinkish unripe tomatoes one gets in burgers and salads most of the year (which is why I stan grape tomatoes). But I became convinced that what I wanted to cook was a green tomato coconut milk curry. Why! DON'T KNOW. Never had such a thing in my life! I cook a fair amount of mock-Thai curries using jarred curry paste, but never this. 

So I bought a few very small green tomatoes several weeks ago, and didn't make the curry, so two of them got very pink, so I finally sliced them thickly and cooked them alongside some pork chops (and other veggies I forget). Freakin' delicious! Tart, juicy, exactly what I had in mind for the curry! 

So I finally made the curry. This is the non-intuitive version of the recipe. I never ever measure my ingredients! I usually eyeball the veggies and go, eh, half the onion is enough, half the zucchini, hmm small pepper so use it all...

The small cans of coconut milk are perfect for 2-person meals. I stock up whenever I find them. 

ELENA’S AD HOC GREEN TOMATO CURRY
Serves 2 (double everything for 4 servings)

½ cup chopped onion

½ chopped bell pepper

1 tbsp Coconut oil

2 tsp green Thai curry paste

½ cup chopped zucchini

2 cups sliced napa cabbage

1 tsp Fish sauce

1 small can coconut milk

1 cup chopped green tomatoes

1 cup diced cooked chicken

Heat coconut oil in a medium pan. Cook onion and bell pepper until becoming tender, about 7 minutes. Add the Thai curry paste and stir well until evenly distributed with the vegetables.

Add the zucchini and the Napa cabbage, stir well. Douse everything with fish sauce. Add the coconut milk (shake it first). Stir well. Allow the coconut milk to cook down for at least 5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, and chicken. Allow 2-3 minutes for the tomatoes to soften and the chicken to heat up. Serve with plenty of cooked rice.

NOTE: the protein can also be tofu, raw shrimp, raw sliced calamari, raw firm fish in small pieces, etc.  If using raw seafood/fish, add a couple of minutes before adding the tomatoes.

I heard that Twitter's dead
Well, I don't care about it
I heard that Twitter's dead
But I don't care about it

It happens anyway
It happens anyway
Thought i'd just buy Twitter
I thought i'd just buy Twitter, oh

I said no fake accounts
Just mark them "parody"
I said no fake accounts
And then I changed my mind
And then I changed my mind
And then you heard me say
"Well, that's the way I like it
Well, that's the way I like it
I like it too much"

So I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum (which is no longer on strike. yay) with a few friends. We saw a cricket cage for cricket fighting, which apparently is a thing. But only for male crickets, which begs the question: how does one tell boy cricks from girls?

Chasing this thread I learned about the Zen-Nippon Chick sexing method, practitioners of which are well paid in the chicken farming world. 

Anyway, go to museums folks. It expands the mind. 

FLEPS is a seismologically unstable planet in the Ventura sector which is mined for its exotic exudations by the Flepsico corporation.  Its history of wealth generation and wealth concentration was fairly unremarkable before the arrival of a few individuals supplied with intellect-enhancing Paraíbite.  Then, though mining and trading and generation of wealth continued, off-world friends and relations soon noticed a difference in the communications they received from Fleps.  Messages became shorter, with more limited vocabulary, and some people stopped writing altogether.  Even more worrisome were the results when people visited Fleps for the express purpose of finding out what was going on.  They seemed to soon forget that intention, and to just settle into a life of being hard-working Flepsies.  It was not until the arrival of an intrepid Paraíbiter from Lestock that the galaxy learned the secret of Fleps.  High-ranking company officers had developed a means of inhibiting the thoughts of the entire population through the transmition of electromagnetic radiation.  Only Paraíbiters were immune.  So there is now very little immigration to Fleps, but its population remains stable, and there are always a few extremely wealthy people who are willing to join Flepsico and make even more money exploiting the hard-working little-thinking Flepsies.

Here, also on toot.cat just before the deluge. Still on the site that is in an upheaval the Saudis could benefit from to stochastically throw chaos (pronounced "cows") into the murrican discourse just before their big elections.

Not writing anything y'all can see, except an occasional response, due to health. Reading.

One other movie I watched recently was the "Cats" adaptation. I guess I'll just say here that I posted a four-star review of it on letterboxd. One of my friends got me to watch the first two Pitch Perfect movies; the first one was good, but the second one was pretty meh so I haven't gone on to 3 yet.

Of course I've been mostly keeping up on the MCU movies, as they come to streaming, anyway. They've mostly been a little underwhelming (particularly the last Thor and Doctor Strange ones), but I did like "Eternals" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home".  I also liked the (less MCU) "New Mutants" movie, and it may be the best movie adapted from the X-Men universe.

Pixar has been a bit more of a hard sell for the kids, though we did all enjoy "Encanto", and "Turning Red" was pretty good. "Onward", "Toy Story 4", and "Frozen 2" were middling.

But it has been hard for me to motivate myself to watch movies. "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is the only time my wife and I have been out to see a movie in a theatre during the pandemic (in very uncomfortable CAN99 masks), and it's hard to carve out a movie-sized block of time without feeling antsy about wasting two hours I could have spent doing something else more fun on my computer. So in my head the expected return of enjoyment from watching a movie is just too low to be worth it.

I read a book a while ago talking about "explore vs. exploit"--how one chooses between trying new things and revisiting old things. And part of the heuristic is the factor of how long you have to choose things. As someone who entered his fifties last year, it almost feels like "explore" time is over. Maybe I should just rewatch, reread, and relisten to known quantities.

Okay, maybe I'm not quite there yet, but it feels like I'm ramping up to it.

Still been watching more TV than movies for the last few years. Though "Knives Out" and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" were fantastic.

We got Disney+ to watch "Wandavision" and "Loki"; also made it through "What If", "Hawkeye" and "Obi-Wan Kenobi".  I watched one episode of "Falcon & The Winter Soldier" but mostly gave it a miss. The Marvel shows are interesting but uneven, and watching Star Wars shows reminds of how little I really care about it any more.

We put Disney+ on pause when we got Prime and Netflix to watch "Wheel of Time" and "Sandman" with the family. "Wheel of Time"...I'm not quite satisfied with the adaptation, though not for racisty kind of reasons. The casting is not a problem. But they just played too fast and loose with the story, particularly near the end of the season, until it just wasn't the story I wanted to watch any more. Admittedly, the first book was never my favourite, but I just hope they don't screw up the later stuff. "Sandman" was better, though I'm still That Guy who mostly focuses on the things they did differently. Maybe I'm just doomed to always be disappointed by adaptations unless they're word-for-word identical.

With the family we've been watching Babylon 5 on a weekly basis; we're up to Season 5 now. At some point in the past I'd thought to myself, "Simon will have graduated from university before we finish. I wonder if we'll make it through?" But Simon is still job-hunting, and not eager to move out in a pandemic, so maybe we'll make it.  We also started belatedly watching "The Good Place", which we've been alternating with B5, mostly two episodes a week, and we're only two from the end. That is a great show, and it is good to know I'm not completely unable to like new things.

With my wife we've been making our way (slowly) through a number of shows. We're two episodes into "Rings of Power", two episodes from the end of S2 of "Star Trek: Picard", two episodes into the new "Quantum Leap", one episode into S3 of "Star Trek: Discovery" (but we haven't watched it in a while). We had been watching Doctor Who with two of the kids, but they bailed after the end of Tennant, so it's just been the two of us watching Matt Smith. (I've already watched to the end of Smith, and I stopped there so the others could catch up.)  We just finished "The Pandorica Opens" there.

And myself I've been rewatching a lot of stuff--I finished making my way through Star Trek: TOS and have started on the animated series, which is better than I was expecting, and also jumped ahead to TNG (where I'm in Season 3). Also rewatching "The Muppet Show" desultorily, "Friends", "Red Dwarf" (which I've been buying on DVD because it's so hard to find online), "Buffy" (but only to sync up with a podcast I've been listening to), "Lost", and "Lexx". I had been rewatching "South Park" but it disappeared from the streaming service it was on, and I find that I have aged out of its humour or something so I may just give up.

I'm also watching "Glee" (into Season 3, now, I think), and "The X-Files" for the first time. I avoided "X-Files" first time around because I think UFO mythology is stupid, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and I find that I mostly just like the Mulder-Scully dynamic.

There are of course also a few that I've tried and given up on. I got four episodes into "Yellowjackets" before deciding I didn't care about it any more, and two episodes into "Only Murders In The Building". I've watched two episodes of "The Man In The High Castle", at least partly because one of my friends is in it, but it's just too bleak for these days so I doubt I'll keep up. We tried "Resident Alien" but haven't gone back to it, and I wasn't impressed by the first episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" so I haven't pursued it either.

I stopped "Torchwood" after the end of Season 2 because they just decided to kill off half the characters; we stopped "Angel" after Season 4, though we haven't quite given up on it yet. (I mean, they did get rid of Connor, but it doesn't sound like we're getting Cordelia back, and Whedon's star is on the wane, so enh.) We never did get back to "Supergirl" after "Man of Steel", and we don't find ourselves missing it either.

Then there are things we mean to watch sometime. I'm very curious about "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", and I enjoyed the first two seasons of "The Orville" and want to continue that. The kids evinced some interest in "Stranger Things" so maybe we'll try that while we have Netflix (which may not be forever). We watched "Good Omens" on DVD but Jinian wasn't old enough yet and keeps bugging us about watching it. And there's tons of other stuff too. "The Witcher", maybe, or "Andor", or "The Mandalorian" (though see above re: Star Wars), or "Orphan Black" or "The Librarians" or "The Magicians" or...who knows what.

But we are not binge-watchers. With the family, we can manage our one night a week, most weeks at least; with my wife, maybe we can manage one more hour of TV a week. And by myself, it'll depend heavily, but I hardly ever will manage to watch an hour of TV every night. So we will never catch up. There will always be more stuff. The FOMO is real.

I still exist. Keep meaning to swing by more often. Most likely I'm here because of the current Twitter instability. Maybe I should spend more time browsing blogs. After all, I do lurk on tumblr.

Started working from home in March of 2020...but now I've been back in the office for a month. I do not feel particular safe there; I mask all day except when I'm eating or drinking, even though I have an office to myself. I'm pretty sure the bloody pandemic is not over, thank you very much, despite media and government-sponsored gaslighting, and I would like to reduce my risk of Long Covid as long as possible. Though I do miss karaoke something awful.

Haven't been blogging much. On my Wordpress blog I've mostly been talking about my chronological journey through my music collection, though I did also do a pass through my favourite Crusader Kings II/Europa Universalis IV game sequence. Twitter (and tumblr) I've mostly been browsing to find entertaining things to read to my wife while she cooks; most of my tweets have been about music, still my main obsession.

Watching a modicum of TV, but maybe I'll save that for later. Increase the changes I'll come back.

Nos et mutamur in illis.

I started hanging around Metafilter in law school, late 90s. I was a 10ker who managed to snag an account during the wild days of sign-up windows, which were randomly open for very short periods of time.

For years, I was a monthly subscriber and a regular member of local meet-up host committee. I spent a lot of time on Metafilter, for twenty years nearly. I have remained logged-in but not actually looked at anything over there in years; early pandemic, I think, is what finally drove me away for good, including ending my subscription.

Now, it seems, the financial situation is dire and the place may shutter. Which seems about time to me. Not because Metafilter has changed—though it has—but because the internet has.

A friend (a 1ker) has always said "Never read the comments, including at Metafilter." And he's right. When I first went there and stayed, the comments were irrelevant. In 1998, the internet was random and hidden.

In 1998, you went to Metafilter because the front page was the fruit of people spending hours, clicking random links and find that place where a person posts her daily ode to today's random insect or that place where another person is documenting every published photograph of Cher's knees or a grand conspiracy theory about Violet Beauregard. Finding fabulous things you would never have stumbled across on your own. Gawping at strange obsessions. Laughing with the wonderful things people do when they are doing them for self, not audience.

This is not the internet anymore. Everything now is someone's pitch, someone's product, someone's public face. Curation not needed any longer. Whatever the internet is now, it's not random. It's not personal. Treasures are not hidden. Back then, when they were hidden, Metafilter found them and shared them. It was invaluable.

But the internet changed; Metafilter changed, more or less successfully. And Metafilter—for me—lost its purpose as it became about the discussion, the conversation, the community. I can't imagine going back.

Not sure who really cares about main stream social media in this sphere but this article, *chef's kiss*, spins a hilarious tale of a truly dumbass rich person.