choco_frosh | Reading

Shortly after we had headed off to collect fish and chips for dinner with my mother,

spatch's delivery of "Frying tonight!" led into my description of Kenneth Williams as the "total package." We had earlier in the day been discussing the cultural relativity of communicating in quotations. At one point in order to indicate that it was time to leave the house, I called, "To the lighthouse!"

(Fresh Pond Seafood gave us extra of everything and I had a lovely interaction with a young trans woman wearing all the jewelry she had been able to find in her newly moved house. The treasury looked spectacular on her, especially the rhyme of the silver heart bangle on her wrist with her heart-framed, literally rose-tinted glasses.)

WERS has introduced me to Muna's "Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)" (2021), which I assume is on rotation either because it's Pride or because it's a banger. I am as incapable of selecting one favorite fictional lesbian as any other single shot, but the first contenders look like the ironclad classics of Florian del Guiz in Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Manke and Rifkele in Sholem Asch's גאָט פֿון נעקאָמע/God of Vengeance (1907), and Corky and Violet in the Wachowskis' Bound (1996).

Current Music: Muna, "Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/16/tiny-sea-ott-noms-a-tiny-treat

Via VAMMRS

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/16/tiny-sea-ott-noms-a-tiny-treat

sovay

I wish to express my strenuous distaste for this week starting off with the curtain rod falling onto my head as I stepped into the shower with such force that

spatch heard the noise of stainless steel onto skull from the bedroom. It hurt appallingly. It still doesn't feel so hot. I called after-hours care and was duly presented with a checklist of symptoms of concussion and brain bleed to watch out for, an activity not exactly compatible with attempting to plunge myself into unconsciousness for the few short hours before I need to be functional for already scheduled calls and appointments. I would like to know who I need to sacrifice to get a break. I always liked haruspicy. I know it's your own liver that counts.

Current Music: Laufey, "Silver Lining"

sorcyress

I have two days left of school, which is probably good, and then I slam into summer with several weeks of Very Exciting. I'm going to drive to MD and back in the span of about four days. Somewhere in here I need to finish preparing for my ESCape classes. I have to pack?!?! Maybe all my stints on crew mean I'll be able to pack a lot lighter than usual for ESC/Scots (lolno).

Tomorrow I should figure out everything that needs to be done in the school building before I depart for the year. Packing up. Printing things. Recycling many many pieces of paper. Submitting grades and paperwork and the like. (The printing things is sneakily a "prepare for ESCape" thing to do --I want to have some properly formatted dances or What Have You. I seem to recall I did quite a lot of this as a work-in-company with Veronica last summer, I probably won't have the MD time to do that again, but it's worth noting that MD does have printers. And so does MA. It's not the end of the world if I fail to print things, is what I'm saying.)

I've been playing lots of Stardew Valley, which I'm quite into, even if I'm getting a little stuck on some of the plot bits. Not looking anything up is a bit of a drag, but also feels very very good when I do figure things out myself. I am glad to have realized I can go back through the library and reread the books I've found --I was worried those were one shot readings, and I'd forgotten the early ones. Anyways, no spoilers, I'm a bit into my second summer.

Went to service ringing today, for probably my last bells for a month. So that's...a lot. Luckily it did not emotionally overwhelm me, maybe partly because I've had a low-key headache for a few days now. I arrived at Advent in time to help ring down, and then we did a mostly nice extent of Cambridge at Old North. (It was only mostly nice because everybody spontaneously exploded when we got to the plain course, and we limped through and barely made it. Sigh.)

Yesterday was pride and I wrote up a bunch of thoughts and should probably post them somewhere, instead of just manually sending them to various partners who like hearing about my life. I suppose there are others of you who like hearing about my life as well or whatever.

I finally picked back up the Endless Photo Organization Project the other day, and sorted a handful of photos. I forgot to note the number at the beginning, so I have no idea how many things got tagged. It's nice to get back into the swing of the project, and extremely nice to have set the whole thing up on the external harddrive, so switching it from old computer to new was essentially trivial. I wish I could figure out a few more keyoard shortcuts to speed things up a tick, but I'm feeling pretty okay with the mousing that has to be done.

Having finished words, I should do at least one of the dishes and going to sleep. Goodnight!

~Sor

MOOP!

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/15/wheres-the-rest-of-your-raft-sea-otter

Via Eric Ellingson

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/15/wheres-the-rest-of-your-raft-sea-otter

sovay

Being left to my own devices this week with a pile of unfamiliar Agatha Christie, I naturally read them one after the other. I have nothing especially to note about Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1934) or The Sittaford Mystery (1931) except that it turned out to be a duplicate of the US-titled The Murder at Hazelmoor and I swapped it out for Dolores Hitchens' Cat's Claw (1943), but Christie's They Came to Baghdad (1951) is a reasonably wild ride of a novel which mixes several different flavors of spy thriller with a romance conducted on an archaeological dig at Tell Aswad, which I didn't even need to bet myself had been excavated by Max Mallowan. Minus the nuclear angle, its global conspiracy is right out of an interwar thriller—Christie to her credit defuses much of the potential for antisemitism with references to Siegfried and supermen instead—as is its Ambler-esque heroine gleefully launching herself into international intrigue with little more than her native wits and talent for straight-faced improvisation, but its spymaster is proto-le Carré, the chronically shabby, fiftyish, vague-looking Dakin, a career disappointment rumored to drink who never looks any less tired when dealing with affairs of endangered state. He gave me instant Denholm Elliott and never seems to have recurred in another novel of Christie's, alas. I made scones with candied ginger and sour cherries and lemon tonight.

Current Music: Fontaines D.C., "It's Amazing to Be Young"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/14/sea-otters-maybe-had-too-much-caffeine

Via James Maughn

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/14/sea-otters-maybe-had-too-much-caffeine

rocksinformation

I haven't posted on my blog here on Dreamwidth in a while. I no longer live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I moved back to mom and dad's house on Long Island, also the house I grew up in, but I have taken hold of a different set of rooms that is across the hall from my childhood bedroom that is about the size of the apartment I was living in in Cambridge, so Murray the cat is right at home and he doesn't even have to interact with mom's dog, whose bark clocks in at 120dB or something fucking ridiculous like that, seriously, I measured it.

I have been taking classes at Queens College nominally to try to finish my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science but like I'm having the usual struggles and have gotten a couple bad grades, so I'll need to do some extra shit to be like, hey please don't kick me out because of my bad grades. It'll probably be fine but it's a pain and my tolerance for stressful unpleasant things like this is like, really low right now.

I'm very fortunate to be living the life I'm living*, but I'm really tired a lot and, as much as I would like to redo my childhood and adolescence down here, I really would prefer to move on and be an actual person in the world on my own terms.

* I have a car to drive myself places now. I have some thoughts about this that I may write down and share later.

Current Location: Long Island

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/13/dunks-on-dunks-on-dunks

Via Oregon Zoo, which writes, “Positive-reinforcement training like the sea otters' basketball routine plays a critical role in animal well-being. And while the shoot-around is mostly an enrichment exercise now, veterinarians say it could have additional health benefits as the young otters get older, staving off stiffness and arthritis in their senior years. Ottermatic all stars!”

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/13/dunks-on-dunks-on-dunks

sovay

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt.

spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

Current Music: Nation of Language, "Inept Apollo"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/12/you-look-like-you-could-be-interesting-human

Via British Wildlife Centre

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/12/you-look-like-you-could-be-interesting-human

sovay

I got home to find the day's mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #83, containing my poem "Below Surface." It is a poem of empire; I wrote it at the start of the third week in January after shouting, "I ran out of curse tablets!" It bears about as much relation to the realities of the Emperors who died at Eboracum as the medieval Welsh legends of Constantius and I see no reason that should impair its efficacy. The issue it belongs to is gone, showcasing the elusive fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Christian Fiachra Stevens, J. M. Vesper, Vincent Bae, and more. John and Flo Stanton contribute interior art as well as the reliable spirit photography of their front and back covers. You might as well pick up a copy before it disappears.

I photographed some ghost windows. I bought myself some white chocolate peanut butter cups.

selkie's gift of tinned mackerel with lemon did not survive the night.

Current Music: Billy Bragg, "A Pict Song"

choco_frosh

Waitasecond wtf.
Boris &^(*&%ing Johnson is descended from E.A. Lowe, a.k.a. mentor of my paleography mentor?????

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/11/just-a-little-passing-by-blep

Via NY Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/11/just-a-little-passing-by-blep

sovay

Under the circumstances, I had different weird dreams than I would have expected: writing a poem, watching some incredibly threadbare film noir with no waking equivalent, hearing a performance from a musical theater star ditto. I am beginning to think the pop culture of my dreams actually is the hell of a good video store next door, leavened in the last few nights by dreams of re-reading real-life authors currently in storage like P.C. Hodgell or Joan D. Vinge. I remain physically fried, news at nowhen. At least the rain seems to have kept off the neighborly leafblowing which perforated so much of yesterday. The news continues to feel like stupidly lethal cosplay, which I remember from the last round of this administration, which doesn't make me hate it less.

Current Music: The Lumineers, "Same Old Song"

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/10/wow-look-at-all-that-fun-stuff

Via NY Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/10/wow-look-at-all-that-fun-stuff

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/9/sea-otter-takes-a-pic-with-his-snack-before-tucking-in

Via Oregon Coast Aquarium

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/6/9/sea-otter-takes-a-pic-with-his-snack-before-tucking-in

sovay

It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.

Current Music: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, "Idiot Box"

sovay

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.