Thursday Word: Kourabiedes

Sep. 11th, 2025 10:33 am
calzephyr: MLP Words (MLP Words)
[personal profile] calzephyr posting in [community profile] 1word1day
Kourabiedes - noun.

The inventor of kourabiedes couldn't know they had a smash hit on their hands back in the 10th century with a confection popular throughout the Mediterranean and West Asia. There are as many regional variations for this almond-loaded shortbread as there are names--qurabiya, ghraybe, ghorayeba, ghoriba, ghribia, ghraïba, gurabija, ghriyyaba, and kurabiye, to name a lot!

Kourabiedes is the Greek version, often shaped into balls or crescents and dusted with icing sugar. They are popular at Christmas and other special occasions.


Kourabiedes platter 2008 01 08.jpg
By Jastrow - Own work, CC BY 2.5, Link


(no subject)

Sep. 11th, 2025 09:34 am
[personal profile] martianmooncrab
the rash is inverse psoraisis... and I have taken the blood screen tests (7 vials of blood!) if my blood chemistry is within specs I am might get a biologic treatment, but, then, Pharmacy has to approve it, and considering their track record in trying to kill me, I not getting my hopes up.

my 2nd CT scan was ambigious and I seeing pulmonary on monday, so they calling it ground glass opacity for now which is medical jargon for... yeah, something there dont know what it is... sigh.

still struggling, still depressed...

Quick note — comments

Sep. 11th, 2025 05:26 pm
dolorosa_12: (sister finland)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
Unfortunately I need to take a preemptive (and hopefully temporary measure): screening all comments made by people not on my access list on most of my journal posts. This is because the level of filters available for comment screening are none, all, or non-access list only.

I'm hoping that this will only need to be a temporary thing and I can revert back to normal, unscreened settings, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to check if anyone subscribed to me, but not on the access list wanted to be granted access.

The vast majority of my posts have always been public, and I want to keep things that way, and I tend to defer to other people's preferences when granting access (i.e. if someone adds me as the result of e.g. a friending meme, if they subscribe only, I reciprocate, and if they grant access, I reciprocate in that way as well). But I'm not precious about this, and don't expect reciprocity.

If you're already on my access list, nothing should really change and you should be able to comment on most posts as normal. If you would like to be granted access, please comment on this post (here all comments are screened) or send me a message. If you're happy with things as they are, do be aware that future comments of yours may be screened, but I'll try to unscreen them at the point at which I reply.

I hope this makes sense — feel free to ask for clarification in the comments if you're not sure what I'm explaining here.

Horror, Contemporary Romances, & More

Sep. 11th, 2025 03:30 pm
[syndicated profile] smartbitches_feed

Posted by Amanda

Under Loch and Key

Under Loch and Key by Lana Ferguson is $1.99! This came out last December.  I remember reading this one and found it had a little too much going on for me.

A woman discovers that not all monsters are her enemy—the opposite, in fact—in this new paranormal romance by Lana Ferguson, author of The Fake Mate.

Keyanna “Key” MacKay is used to secrets. Raised by a single father who never divulged his past, it’s only after his death that she finds herself thrust into the world he’d always refused to speak of. With just a childhood bedtime story about a monster that saved her father’s life and the name of her estranged grandmother to go off of, Key has no idea what she’ll find in Scotland. But repeating her father’s mistakes and being rescued by a gorgeous, angry Scotsman—who thinks she’s an idiot—is definitely the last thing she expects.

Lachlan Greer has his own secrets to keep, especially from the bonnie lass he pulls to safety from the slippery shore—a lass with captivating eyes and the last name he’s been taught not to trust. He’s looking for answers as well, and Key’s presence on the grounds they both now occupy presents a real problem. It’s even more troublesome when he gets a front row seat to the lukewarm welcome Key receives from her family; the strange powers she begins to develop; and the fierce determination she brings to every obstacle in her path. Things he shouldn’t care about, and someone he definitely doesn’t find wildly attractive.

When their secrets collide, it becomes clear that Lachlan could hold the answers Keyanna is after—and that she might also be the key to uncovering his. Up against time, mystery, and a centuries old curse, they’ll quickly discover that magic might not only be in fairy tales, and that love can be a real loch-mess.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

A Lady’s Guide to Scandal

A Lady’s Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin is $1.99! I think this deal is only available at Amazon, but that may expire soon. Have you read this one?

When shy Miss Eliza Balfour married the austere Earl of Somerset, twenty years her senior, it was the match of the season–no matter that he was not the husband Eliza would have chosen.

But ten years later, Eliza is widowed. And at eight and twenty years, she is suddenly left titled, rich, and, for the first time in her life, utterly in control of her own future. Instead of living out her mourning quietly, Eliza heads to Bath with her cousin Margaret. After years of living according to everyone else’s rules, Eliza has resolved, at last, to do as she wants.

But when the ripples of the dowager Lady Somerset’s behavior reach the new Lord Somerset—whom Eliza knew, once, as a younger woman—Eliza is forced to confront the fact that freedom does not come without consequences, though it also brings unexpected opportunities . . .

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

32 Days in May

32 Days in May by Betty Corrello is $1.99! Elyse recommended this one on a Rec League for Grumpy/Sunshine Romances with Grumpy Heroines. She also mentioned that the heroine has a chronic illness.

Return to the Jersey Shore with a new romance by Summertime Punchline author Betty Corrello in which a young woman recently diagnosed with lupus attempts a no-strings fling with a former television star, perfect for readers of Elissa Sussman or Tia Williams. 

Nadia Fabiola wants to lose herself in Evergreen—the Jersey Shore town where she grew up vacationing with her family—and never look back at her glamorous, gainfully employed former self. After a shocking lupus diagnosis turned her life upside down, she’s desperate for a sense of control over her body, her life, and her mental health. Nadia plans on keeping her life small and boring, while continuing to ignore her sister’s relentless questioning.

Nadia’s sister isn’t the only person worried about her. When her rheumatologist not-so-subtly sets her up with his infamous former-actor cousin, Marco Antoniou, Nadia is skeptical. But Marco is gorgeous—despite carrying his own baggage from a very public burnout. After a messy (but fun) first date, they decide that a May-long fling could be just what the doctor no commitment, no strings, just one month of escape.

Their undeniable chemistry starts to feel a lot like something more and while Marco pulls Nadia deeper into his life, she is dead set on keeping her diagnosis from him. But there are only so many days in May, and only so much pretending she can do. As the stress of their whirlwind romance takes its toll on Nadia’s health, she’s forced to decide if a chance at love is worth the risk of trusting someone new.

Travel from the Jersey Shore to Rome and back in this delightfully funny, beautifully honest exploration of love, intimacy, and vulnerability while living with a chronic illness.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Starving Saints

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling is $1.99! I mentioned this horror novel on a previous Hide Your Wallet post. If you’re looking to stock up on spooky reads, maybe grab this one.

From the nationally bestselling author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, a transfixing, intensely atmospheric fever dream of medieval horror.

Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.

Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.

As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
[personal profile] halfcactus
1.
Some manhwa I read at the end of August:
Shall We Bathe, Your Grace?; Savor the Taste; Live Happily Ever After With My Ex's Uncle (DNF)

All on Manta:

Shall We Bathe, Your Grace? (m/f, complete): Short, cracky, fairly standard romance, tropey villains. Plot gets progressively mediocre, the bigger it becomes, but it's short. The FL gets transmigrated to a pseudo-European fantasy world and struggles with the lack of hygiene and sanitation standards. Although her new family is very loving, they have also forbidden her to bathe, citing bathing as the cause of her illness. She finds a kindred spirit in the duke who is notorious in high society for being scrupulously clean and obsessed with bathing. The obvious solution is to marry him and get unlimited access to baths. Eventually they become a power couple that changes the world, one hygiene practice at a time, fighting scientific misinformation by... equating water and bathing with divinity.




Savor the Taste (m/f complete): As always, the initial cooking plot is pretty fun, and the transition to romance and Big Plot is meh, but it's also fairly short. Plot: the ML is cursed so all food tastes bad to him (...which reminds me of Covid) so he avoids eating. The FL, a transmigrator from the modern world, is about to executed as the princess of a subjugated nation, but because she's Quirky, she brought a snack as her last meal, which she offers to the ML. Unexpectedly the ML finds it delicious and this gives her a path to survival: he delays her execution, brings her back to his estate to cook for him, and falls in love.

The storyline with the FL's half sister is actually pretty good! Her sister is a beautiful and honorable princess, and the reason where their nation is conquered in the first place. The emperor courted her, was rejected, and decided the best recourse was to take her nation, kill her family, and keep her as a caged bird. This puts the FL at odds with her: her sister wants to avenge her family and take the FL with her to protect her, not knowing that the FL has fallen in love with the duke. It's resolved in a bittersweet way that I really like, even though I find the plot unimpressive (they add it some stuff about witches too which I don't think blends well) and the romance too bland to warrant the drama.


Live Happily Ever After With My Ex's Uncle (DNF): Misleading teaser which makes it seem like the ML is happy to be used by the FL. Atrocious translation (I think this might be Kuaikan's own translation, and Manta is only distributing it). Dogsblood. You're better off reading Marry My Husband.


I also finished Semantic Error, which I loved all the way to the end, even though I needed a few more chapters for closure. It's the first time I've been disappointed in a manhwa for not having extras. I wanted to know more about Sangwoo (MC)'s family relationships and previous romantic relationship. All you get from the manhwa is that he does have a family, and he did used to date, but none of these are ever shown or treated as relevant information Still, it was a lot of fun, and all those scenes where Jaeyoung (ML) calls Sangwoo and prompts him to tell him all about his day felt like food for my heart.

2.
Into the Woods
Oh, if life were made of moments / even now and then a bad one—! / But if life were only moments / then you'd never know you had one

Saw a local staging for Into the Woods. It was my first time experiencing the musical in any form, and I enjoyed every moment. Read more... )


I Am Setsuna
A year ago, I started this song purely because the Spotify algorithm played me this song:


I've been playing it on and off ever since, and when I finally heard the song in the game, at the very end of the story, you bet I teared up. I'm glad I finished it and got my catharsis! I was pretty ready to DNF it because I found it to be kind of a slog—the characters felt deliberately familiar as the entire game is modeled on classic JRPGs, but nothing about them was individually compelling. Gameplay-wise, I don't think I really enjoyed it until almost the end when I got access to the MP-recovering Spritnite (Gagnrath) and settled on a rotation of characters (Endir, Setsuna, and Nidr/Aeterna). On the plus side: it is so short and linear and totally finishable! And yeah, pretty nostalgic! I was worried about getting lost in dungeons because there were no maps, but non-random encounters made it easy to tell if I've been through an area or not. ^^;

My final party was Endir (lv 60), Setsuna (lv 56), and Aeterna (lv 53)—I spent an hour repeatedly challenging the Stoniel trio in the Last Lands and losing before realizing that the answer to all my problems was simply the Grand Cross triple combo. With Aeterna's crit rate boosted by her weapon and combo damage boosted by one of the Spritnites, none of the regular bosses in the final dungeon stood a chance. I was probably also over-levelled by the end of the game, which helped?

random notes about the game—contains endgame spoilers )

a very brief post

Sep. 11th, 2025 09:06 am
lirazel: the worlds "care and freedom" in various shades of blue ([misc] care and freedom)
[personal profile] lirazel
I just need to get this out.

Cut for US political talk.

I am not sorry that Charlie Kirk is no longer part of this world. But now he'll be a martyr, and martyrs are dangerous. He will probably be every bit as dangerous in death as he was in life. I don't see how this improved the world. And I am just so fucking sick of guns.

It's not that I'm never against killing dangerous political leaders. The world would have been a better place if certain dangerous but powerful people had been killed (right now Netanyahu comes to mind). But I think that it's genuinely more constructive to figure out other ways to temper or undermine their power than to resort to violence--I really just think that works better. And of course the true goal should be to keep these people from gaining power in the first place.

I don't know, y'all. Things in my country just seem very, very dark right now and this doesn't feel to me like this made it any brighter.
[syndicated profile] snopes_feed

Posted by Jack Izzo

A Facebook post claimed McDonald's was testing the dining option at a location in Branson, Missouri.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A woodcarver's foster daughter sets out to free a maiden from a magical tower prison, just the sort of thing that always works out exactly according to plan, without unforeseen geopolitical complications.

SideQuested by K B Spangler & Ale Presser
smallhobbit: (Lucas 3)
[personal profile] smallhobbit posting in [community profile] no_true_pair
Title: First Things First
Fandom: Miss Marple/Spooks
Pairing/Characters: Jane Marple & Lucas North
Content Notes: No warning needed
Prompt: September 11th - weaving

Weaving on AO3

Zine Introduction (+ hello!)

Sep. 11th, 2025 07:42 am
saintofcrowns: (Default)
[personal profile] saintofcrowns posting in [community profile] makezines
Crossposting an entry from [community profile] communal_creators, if that's alright. Some background: I've participated in a lot of zines of varying organization and polish, mostly fandom, and also have helped organize a zine jam every July since 2023. I am working on a TTRPG sourcebook project with friends later on next year, so I'm doing a zine for my own worldbuilding project as a warmup.

To be frank, unformatted worldbuilding is not very interesting for anyone to read. It also isn't very interesting to work on, at least for me. My ongoing project is to lay out my low-fantasy, Chinese alt history setting in the format of a museum exhibition. There be fantastical beasts and nitty-gritty cultural stuff. My setting is not associated with any particular project other than I wanted an excuse to draw lots of gryphons and research early Zhou dynasty. I like the scaffolding of metafiction and in-universe media: ie. creating subway maps and tourist brochures for a completely fictional setting. For this project, it means multimedia with writing and art in the form of artifacts, diagrams, and information plaques. Hopefully this is enough structure to keep me interested and I can (in the future) print if I want. The particular exhibit inspirations I'm drawing from are Guanghan's Sānxīnduī and Chongqing’s Three Gorges Museum.

I'm not a historian or a curator. This made me a little nervous to start this project, but fuck it. You can just do things. For the duration of the next month, I am planning to finish the art and writing for the displays on:
  • information on 3 key historical figures
  • setting, including the specific archaeological site
  • 4 artifacts from this specific era.

I'll be treating it as a zine with deliverables. Feel free to ask about it.

Resources I am using

Layout )

Formatting for print )

Organization )

But really, visit the Sānxīngduī and Three Gorges museums if you ever get a chance. They are both engaging and excellent at telling a narrative. Particularly pay attention to the way halls are laid out to introduce audiences to a concept.

SGA: Battle Potato by fiercelydreamed

Sep. 11th, 2025 11:09 pm
mific: (Teyla serious)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Gen. Teyla Emmagan & Rodney McKay & John Sheppard & Ronon Dex
Rating: G
Length: 7229
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: fiercelydreamed on AO3, anatsuno on AO3, anatsuno on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Food and cooking, Team as family, Friendship, Hurt/comfort

Summary: The thing was, John had never been good at patient, and Teyla looked like okay was a couple galaxies over from wherever she was now.

Reccer's Notes: A touching hurt/comfort story set after the team rescues Teyla from Michael. Although Teyla and her baby are back in Atlantis, she's slow to recover and remains low and depleted. Rodney has a plan to cheer her up, though, involving food, and he ropes John in to help. It was I think written in the hiatus before the last season so a few minor details have been jossed, but that doesn't matter. This is the best sort of found family story, with them all rallying around to support Teyla. Lovely.

Fanwork Links: Battle Potato, and there's an excellent podfic read by anatsuno.

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 05:10 am
[syndicated profile] farsidecomics_feed

“Oh, don’t be silly! No thanks needed. Just take the brain—but tell that doctor you work for not to be such a stranger.”

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 05:10 am
[syndicated profile] farsidecomics_feed

The Zeonions came with the answers to many secrets of the universe. Vern, regrettably, came with thick glasses and his deer rifle.

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 05:10 am
[syndicated profile] farsidecomics_feed

“Hey! You’re not lookin’ to buy anything, are you? … I think you best just keep movin’, buddy.”

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 05:10 am
[syndicated profile] farsidecomics_feed

“You moron! From a hundred yards back I was screaming, ‘Hellhole! Hellhole!’”
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Posted by Rae Deng

Snopes has been fact-checking conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks since they happened in 2001.

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