Metafandom

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Helsinki just went a full year without traffic fatalities — here's their secret

In the United States, traffic incidents are a leading cause of death, with an average of 120 people dying every day due to motor vehicle collisions.

On a global scale, a person dies from a road-related accident every 24 seconds.

But Finland’s capital city of Helsinki has pulled off something astonishing — the last recorded traffic-related death was over a year ago, in July 2024.

( Read more... )

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Astronaut Jim Lovell has passed away. He flew four missions, including the famous Apollo 13 in which the crew narrowly averted disaster.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

( Read more... )

Suspension of disbelief = I will not start verbally poking holes in the physics of this action movie until we are out of the movie theater

Suspension in disbelief = a frozen state of constant WTF

( Mostly criticism, you stand warned )

Today is sunny, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the patio plants and the new picnic table garden.

I picked a red cherry tomato.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the savanna seedlings.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and the septic garden.

I found a baby preying mantis on the burn barrel and moved it to the barrel garden.

Cicadas and crickets are singing.  I've seen a few fireflies.
 
As it is now dark, I am done for the night.

Today's theme is Icons, a very popular topic on Dreamwidth with several high-traffic communities.

( Read more... )

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

We went out thrift shopping today.

( Read more... )

This student's life-changing injury made him realize how 'outdated' traditional casts are. So he 3D-printed a better one
AUG 7, 2025 12:34 PMPT

It’s an injection-molded lattice forearm cast, made with durable Nylon material that is lightweight, fully breathable, and a lot more comfortable than traditional fiberglass casts.

( Read more... )

Illinois is home to one of the ‘world's best fossil sites': Field Museum

"These fossils tell the story of an ancient inland sea, home to alien-looking plants and animals such as squid-like cephalopods, sea scorpions, and the bizarre-looking state fossil of Illinois, the Tully monster," said the release.

Figured I should write a post about this movie before I go see the next one.

Short Preamble About The Box Office

…I’m so surprised this didn’t make more. It got much better reviews than Brave New World, but last I checked, it made about the same amount?

This more than anything has made me think these films are reaching a General MCU Audience. People aren’t thinking “does this individual film/premise/team/audience reaction sound good,” they’re thinking “am I the kind of person who goes to see every Marvel movie in theaters, or am I not?” And the pool of reliable-Marvel-moviegoers has only been shrinking over the past five years.

When The Marvels got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been any combination of racism, sexism, and the strike disrupting their usual promo tours. (The movie itself was excellent. None of the criticisms that people held up as Terrible Flaws ever made sense.) And when BNW got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been because the movie itself was Just Okay.

But Thunderbolts is another genuinely excellent movie! And it has multiple white guys in leading roles! So what gives?

I really wish this had come out years ago. Should’ve been the big team-up finale of Phase 4. Instead, in the meantime, the MCU burned a bunch of its regular viewers by making them sit through hot messes like Quantumania or MoM, and now even the real gems aren’t bringing them back.

Spoiler-Lite Actual Reaction

It’s good!

And specifically, it’s good in ways that cater to transformative media fandom, which you’d think would be a gift. The main characters are a Sad Blorbo Variety Pack. All of them are murderers with tragic backstories, mostly involving kidnapping and/or brainwashing. One has the extra burden of dealing with her overenthusiastic cringe dad, who is also a murderer with a tragic backstory. Everyone is trained in all kinds of cool deadly fighting styles, but completely incompetent at making friends. The premise is about forcing them to work together! The villains are “the embodiment of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss” and “a floppy-haired man with a stutter and sweater paws who just wants to be a hero.” Everyone has a traumatic childhood and everyone needs a hug. A critical plot point hinges on how desperately they all need a hug!

It’s one of those movies with a big cast, and almost all of them started as secondary characters in somebody else’s movie/TV show — but the writing does a great job of re-introducing them, giving you regular tidibts of exposition and recap, in ways that fit organically with the banter the characters would be doing anyway. Bucky is a bit of an outlier — he’s the most well-established character here, they expect you to basically know what his deal is, they only drop enough tidbits to jog your memory. Based on audience reaction, I think that was the right call.

(This is the movie where he’s in Congress. They don’t even try to explain how or why he ran for Congress. He’s just kinda…there. He’s not good at it, he’s visibly not enjoying it, but he sure is there! You just have to go “I Guess???” and roll with it.)

There was one character who, based on the previews, everyone figured was going to die early on. They do, in fact, die early on. If you were personally invested in that character, and excited to see them get more screen time, that sucks. But in general…I do think it was a good writing choice. It’s not a cheap shock-value death! It fits right in with the plot and the themes! It’s “these characters are career assassins, any one of them could’ve gone out that quickly if they had a bad day, is it any wonder they’re all depressed nihilists right now?”

A lot of the plot is about MCU version of Sentry, whose comics backstory is basically a version of what the MCU did with Spider-Man in No Way Home: “he used to be friends with a bunch of the Avengers and personally involved in a ton of world-changing events, but then, for the safety of the universe, his whole existence had to be erased from everyone’s memories.” I’d love to see the version of the movie where MCU Sentry had that backstory too. It could’ve been so fun to see “a montage of pivotal scenes from Phases 1 through 3, now with this random new guy photoshopped in.” And think of all the novel-length “Sentry’s adventures as a critical part of the last 20 movies” fic epics it would’ve inspired.

On the other hand, I get why they didn’t want to just rehash NWH. And I do really like what they came up with instead. The characterization is well-rounded and compelling, the designs for his different forms/powers are original and striking. A big part of his deal is that he’s Cartoonishly Unbeatably Strong, which makes it all the better that they shake up the Marvel “big CGI-heavy final battle” formula, so the win has nothing to do with “who can hit the hardest.”

Between all the different team members, my favorite dynamic is Yelena and Bucky. They never say out loud “so, how ’bout that life as the childhood friend of an OG Avenger, whose iconic heroism you could never possibly live up to even if you didn’t spend all that time as a brainwashed tool of the supervillains, huh?”, but they bring this low-key sense of mutual understanding to all their conversations. Yelena settles naturally into a team-leader role over the course of the movie, while Bucky has the most experience being on a team of Actual Superheroes, which he translates into “advising Yelena about management stuff” in this quietly-supportive way. It’s great.

I know Marvel has a really spotty record of having characters stay friends/partners/teammates from one installment to the next…but I really hope the Thunderbolts (or whatever name they manage to hang onto in the future) stick together for another one.

Today is mostly sunny and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/7/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/7/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/7/25 -- I watered the new picnic table and septic gardens.

EDIT 8/7/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden.

Cicadas and crickets are singing.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

I have found THE WAY to make crispy firm tofu that I will now do forever more (or until I get bored and wander off to my next food obsession): brining it. It takes no longer than pressing it, is less messy, and the results are unbelievably crispy, even still a little crunchy after overnight refrigeration of the leftovers and then microwaving it, neither process designed to encourage that. And far more successful than any baking or cornstarch-dredging that I've tried before; will never go back. Noting here for my memories:

- Bring 4 cups water with 1/4 cup of salt (or, ratiowise, 1T salt for every 1 cup water needed to cover your tofu) to a boil, then turn off the heat
- Plop your cut-up tofu into the brine - the video did sliced planks, I did cubes so I didn't have two separate cutting steps, it came out fine
- Let it sit for 10-15 minutes
- Pan-fry the tofu in a little oil, flipping around the 3-4 minute mark; repeat until tofu is crispy enough to satisfy you.

As for silken tofu, for quick breakfasts/solo dinners, I've been nuking it with butter and soy sauce and a little bit of chili crisp, then topping it with a scallion that I chopped while waiting for the microwave. Maybe grating a little ginger over if I'm feeling fancy, or now that the lemons are slowly starting to come back, squeezing a little lemon over. It's like a hot hiyayakko, and might be more so if I ever remembered to pick up katsuobushi at Yaoya-San, heh.

*

In the meantime, our neighbors had been texting us while we were away about the annual plumpocalypse, and we came home to a carpet of purple underneath said plum tree, despite the neighbors coming by and picking up the excess while we were gone. Right now, we have enough to fill our entire dutch oven, with dozens hundreds more dropping daily. I really need to set up some kind of net situation to catch them before they hit the ground, I have made refrigerator jam literally every day for the last week and a half, and we are not keeping up. (Right now, our total jam despite our attempts to chip away at it fills my second-largest glass storage pan - 11 cups!)

But because my method so far looks like:

* sweep plums into a pile
* scoop plums of various softness into our largest kitchen bowl
* fill plum bowl with water and let it sit (hyounpark says in case there are worms?!)
* sort plums - only the intact ones make it through
* cook plums until just soft enough to pit
* pit
* weigh the puree, add 40% sugar
* cook, skimming off scum, until it passes the spoon test
* cool
* find a storage container to put the jam in in the fridge
* put on yogurt and toast ad nauseum because I have not committed to buying the whole kit for Proper Jam Making that would let the jam last longer than a few weeks in the fridge

At least our neighbors are equally meh about Proper Jamming so I feel less bad about not doing it, LOL. Still, I did take a cup and a half of yesterday's puree and turned it into a plum version of my favorite roasted applesauce cake for yesterday's block party, and it went smashingly; I was barely able to snag a piece for H and I to split!

Between the cake success and the tofu triumph and lovely August tomatoes marinating in a pool of olive oil and mint and salt and their own juices, I'm proud of these recent food feats. Now to figure out what I'm doing with the pork belly (for dinner tonight). Probably something that can get topped with some of the plum jam, heh.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

What I've recently finished reading:

Tombland by C. J. Sansom, the last of the Shardlake books. It's massive, I think the longest of these books, with a very long historical essay at the end which I'm slowly reading through. It's very firmly set within a historical event, namely Kett's Rebellion of 1549. Which is probably why it's so long. While some of the other books in the series include actual events such as the execution of Anne Boleyn or King Henry VIII's Progress to York, those are all mostly backdrop to the mystery plot. Here the plot is interwoven with the rebellion - actually kind of oddly, because it's really plot plot plot plot REBELLION REBELLION plot REBELLION, where suddenly the ostensible activity Shardlake's undertaking is put on the back-burner because of REBELLION, and it's mostly dropped until very near the end where the villain does a somewhat clunky exposition explaining everything. Not the smoothest of these books for sure, but still quite interesting, with great characters as usual.

What I'm reading now:

While I'm waiting for some holds to come in at the library, I started reading George Orwell's 1984, partly because one of the people I subscribe to on Substack (Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance) is hosting a group read of it. I haven't read it since I read it in college, for a class on "Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature", so it's pretty interesting to revisit. (And terrifying. Also, terrifying.)

Still watching:

We're getting close to the end of S2 of Arcane. I amused myself by abruptly recognizing Maddie's voice as Suvi in Mass Effect: Andromeda (Katy Townsend, typecast as a lesbian, I guess!). Then I checked the cast list and realized there are really so many actors I have heard in other things! But the only other one I recognized was Shohreh Aghdashloo, because of course I did, how can you not? (And hee, she was in Mass Effect (3) as well!)

Still playing:

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which is finally getting a little less linear. I set the difficulty one step down (I was on normal=3/5, set it to 2) and it's much kinder - I still get killed a few times by the toughest enemies at the end of each quest before I kill them and prevail, but that's okay.

Islamophobia Research Hub at York U releases report on Canada's anti-Palestine bias

Documenting the “Palestine Exception": An Overview of Trends in Islamophobia, Anti-Palestinian and Anti-Arab Racism in Canada in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.
In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Canada saw a rise in anti-Palestinian racism (APR), Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism (AAR) and antisemitism that affects many areas of life and work for Canadians.

( Read more... )