VELEŠIĆI is a planet rich with life that once also had a large human population, but pollution damaged most of the arable land.  The centuries of emigration that followed have resulted in more people of Velešići heritage living off-world than on Velešići itself.  A few ancient families remain, within well-defended enclaves.  For although the ecology of the planet was disrupted, many creatures survived and adapted to the polluted land.  Of particular interest are the vukpas, which are very dangerous carnivorous pack animals.  In addition to their teeth and claws, vukpas bear one more unusual weapon:  a virus.  Anyone within shouting distance of a pack of vukpas is at risk of infection, and the primary symptom of uncontrollable laughter serves to both attract vukpas and incapacitate their prey.  Hunting parties on Velešići must be extremely cautious, because he who laughs does not last.

I voted by mail at least a week ago. I like voting by mail. I used to vote by mail in order to volunteer for 866-Our-Vote, but I have not done that since 2016. Many reasons, not relevant here.

Today, I am off the internet, except for the part where all my work is done remotely. Tonight I'm hanging at my favorite bar which is running karaoke tonight, so no teevees. I suppose I'll see some returns without trying, but I'll try anyway.

I always vote. I have often canvassed. I've volunteered. But I have never enjoyed the U.S. tradition of sport in elections, and, for more than 20 years, that tradition has made me sadder, angrier, and increasingly disengaged each election. I do my research; I make my choices; I cast my ballot but I can't care. And I simply will not watch. I will not engage with the game.

It's the tribalism. It's the reactionary "they're all the same".  It's the bluster and shouting, dressing up disengagement with critical thinking as passion. It's the denigration of expertise, service and the refusal to accept that complex problems, large systems—as well as the balancing of differing interests—do not have simple or universally appealing solutions.

So I try to find things which tell me which choices acknowledge that none of this should be a game, none of it should be us vs. them. It's not bon mots, soundbites, zingers or points. It's people's lives and health and well-being. I make my choices; I cast my ballot and I disengage.

I don't know if that's right but it's sustainable in all this despair, rage, helplessness and terror.

TAMBO was founded by an eccentric scientist searching for a way to produce limitless quantities of food.  He found it in a self-replicating catalyst that converts seawater into an edible paste.  This paste is revolting to look at, horrifying to smell, and achingly bitter to taste, but it is edible.  The surface of Tambo used to be over 90% covered by ocean, so now it is over 90% covered by this stuff.  They say that if you strain out the liquid from the paste, you can more easily choke it down with a glass of pure rainwater.  "They" are of course the nonviolent criminals and other undesirables who have been exiled to Tambo from the rest of the Nag sector.  The remorseful scientist attempted to flee, but was located and humanely imprisoned elsewhere rather than subjected to his creation.  His researches are closely supervised lest he achieve similar success again.

I blogged a few years ago on Wordpress about how I was reading. Mostly it still seems to be accurate. Still trying to balance male and female, and add diversity.

One thing I'd done since then was make a separate list of books that I'd basically acquired on a whim, by an author I'd never heard of before, and only had one book by that author. Really, I pulled them all off of my shelves and then ended up stacking them on the disused pool table in our basement. So I added a sixth stroke to the cycle, for trying these books, and giving myself the permission to give up on the book if it doesn't grab me. Because normally I just read the book to the end anyway.

I've found a few decent authors that way, particular Rosemary Kirstein ("The Steerswoman" was great, but I was blown away by the sequel, "The Outskirter's Secret"), Jon Skovron, Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett, Joe Zieja, and Charles Palliser.  I also found a few decent books that I finished but probably won't seek out the authors again, and several duds that I did not get through.

I'm still doing a lot of rereads--doing a lot of series, with some standalones in between, and slower rereads of Discworld, Dick Francis, and Star Trek. For a while it's been less of "series that I enjoy" and more of "series that I haven't read for a long time". Like the Thomas Covenant books, or the Incarnations of Immortality, or the Fifth Millennium series, or, most recently, the Deryni books.

For the record: the Thomas Covenant books seem to have held up pretty well (with the huge proviso that you have to get past the rape in the first book, which not everybody should be expected to do), and I've even started the Last Chronicles.  The Incarnations of Immortality start off well, but I was not imagining the decline, and I had apparently completely forgotten about the pedophilia apologism in the last book; I think I've weeded all but the first off my shelf.  The Fifth Millennium books are mostly pretty good, but I feel like they'd do better if I just took out the first book, S.M. Stirling's "Snowbrother", so we can pretend Sh'kaira isn't a bad person.

I'm still on my Deryni series reread. I know for a fact I got into these because of the mentions in Dragon Magazine, as part of a psionics-focused issue (I believe it was Issue #78), so I've never been able to see the Deryni "magic" as anything but psionics. They came out originally as several trilogies in non-chronological order; I read them in chronological order, with the Camber trilogy first before the original Deryni trilogy (which it precedes by a century or two), and then a sequel trilogy to each. (There's more besides those, but I haven't read them.)

The Camber trilogy was not bad; it gets a little downbeat towards the end, as persecution of Deryni starts, but the frequent high-handedness of some of our main characters feels like ample justification. The sequel trilogy gets pretty dark at times, but it was actually better than I had remembered. The Deryni trilogy itself was...not great. The main characters are not great, and the whole trilogy ends with a major confrontation that...gets wrapped up in a very unsatisfactory way. Like...let's say that ASOIAF ended with the Starks facing off against the Lannisters...and then suddenly one of the Lannisters revealed they'd been a (previously unknown) Lannister enemy in disguise the whole time and they'd just poisoned all the Lannisters and so the Starks got to win.

I've been showing a peculiar dedication to my 100-book-per-year Goodreads goal, too, and I've been trying to set regular reading quotas. Mostly this has been four or five days per book, sometimes more of the book is longer (I took seven days to get through Stephen King's "Duma Key"). You'd think this wouldn't work for reading 100 books a year, but I'm usually done my quota before supper, and then I can snatch a little bit more reading in the evening, like nonfiction books, or comics, and some of that counts as well, so it's mostly been working out.  (And I started off the year frontloading it with a few short novellas, to get an early lead, so that also helped.)

Before I go on to the next Deryni trilogy, though, I've decided to reread "Les Misérables"--even the bits about the bishop and Waterloo and stuff--so we'll see how that works.  I've got like a two-book lead right now. We'll see if that's enough.

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.