Geese
Sep. 11th, 2025 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI can hear lots of geese honking overhead. I'm so jealous of them getting to warmer and brighter places for the next six months.
cosmolinguist
(no subject)
Sep. 11th, 2025 02:32 pmmajuAll the girls were tired yesterday morning and slow to get moving, but by the time they came home from school they were all feeling much better - except Aria! Aria was in an extremely ratty mood, throwing a tantrum about eating mashed potato (she wanted sweet potato!) and later literally screaming at her sisters to go away even though they were sitting at the dining table and she was standing at the edge of the room. Her mother managed to calm her down eventually, but I thought she must be coming down with something because she was so very out of sorts. However, after she finally ate her dinner she seemed much better and she went off to school as usual this morning.
So far nobody else has come down with whatever Violet and her mother had last week. I hope the danger period is past and the rest of us escape it.
It's a much prettier (and slightly warmer) day today, and I walked to the bank to get some cash and then walked home a longer way around because it turned out to be barely 3 km/under 2 miles to the bank. By taking a longer way home I covered about 8 km/5 miles.
So far nobody else has come down with whatever Violet and her mother had last week. I hope the danger period is past and the rest of us escape it.
It's a much prettier (and slightly warmer) day today, and I walked to the bank to get some cash and then walked home a longer way around because it turned out to be barely 3 km/under 2 miles to the bank. By taking a longer way home I covered about 8 km/5 miles.
Check-In Post - Sept 11th 2025
Sep. 11th, 2025 07:14 pmbadly_knitted posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
get_knittedHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: Share your favourite crafting tip, if you have one.
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
Two evils.
Sep. 12th, 2025 04:12 amalisxThe pattern is so consistent it’s almost funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.” Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it’s 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.
Want to know how many times conservatives successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero. Want to know how many times fascists purged the conservatives after taking power? All of them. Every single time. [. . .]
The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process.
Chris Armitage on .
FAKE Ficlet: Cracked
Sep. 11th, 2025 06:44 pmbadly_knittedTitle: Cracked
Fandom: FAKE
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ryo, Dee.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 952
Setting: After Vol. 7.
Summary: Ryo’s been injured, and yet he seems oddly happy about it.
Written For:
mikogalatea’s prompt ‘any, any, bone fracture,’ at threesentenceficathon.Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
( Cracked... )
Fic: Making A Commitment
Sep. 11th, 2025 06:33 pmbadly_knittedTitle: Making A Commitment
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Jack, Ianto.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1884
Setting: AU set sometime in Season 2.
Summary: Jack decides he needs to erase any doubts Ianto might have by making a commitment to the man he loves.
Written For: Weekend Challenge at
1_million_words.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Dark Shadows: Mysterious Circumstances by WickerManStudios
Sep. 11th, 2025 09:53 ampronker posting in fancakeFandom: Dark Shadows
Pairings/Characters: Roger Collins, CC Female, Which Would Give Away Too Much If Named
Rating: G
Length: 2,394 words
Creator Links: AO3 Profile
Theme: Food & Cooking
Summary: Roger meets a friend for dinner who shares his discomfort regarding marriages.
Reccer's Notes: Roger remains one of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, acted superbly by Louis Edmonds, a veteran of stage costume dramas. He always wears period clothing with impeccable insouciance despite figure-hugging trousers, wing collars, and Victorian handlebar moustaches. In this fic, we see how much food presents an opportunity for revealing, soul searching reflections with a sympathetic friend, in fact so much that they don't even eat until the last paragraph or so. The universality of sharing food provides a letting down of the hair, so to speak, voluminous in his friend's case and not-so-much in his. There's an absolutely delightful twist at fic's end. Also, the AO3 profile mentions Author's website, WickerManStudios which contains stories along with more personal content.
Fanwork Links: Mysterious Circumstances
Pairings/Characters: Roger Collins, CC Female, Which Would Give Away Too Much If Named
Rating: G
Length: 2,394 words
Creator Links: AO3 Profile
Theme: Food & Cooking
Summary: Roger meets a friend for dinner who shares his discomfort regarding marriages.
Reccer's Notes: Roger remains one of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, acted superbly by Louis Edmonds, a veteran of stage costume dramas. He always wears period clothing with impeccable insouciance despite figure-hugging trousers, wing collars, and Victorian handlebar moustaches. In this fic, we see how much food presents an opportunity for revealing, soul searching reflections with a sympathetic friend, in fact so much that they don't even eat until the last paragraph or so. The universality of sharing food provides a letting down of the hair, so to speak, voluminous in his friend's case and not-so-much in his. There's an absolutely delightful twist at fic's end. Also, the AO3 profile mentions Author's website, WickerManStudios which contains stories along with more personal content.
Fanwork Links: Mysterious Circumstances
Book Review: Account Rendered
Sep. 11th, 2025 01:20 pmosprey_archerIn the afterward to Max in the Land of Lies, Adam Gidwitz mentioned Melita Maschmann’s Account Rendered: A Dossier of My Former Self as one of the most important sources for the book, and also a book that he would urge everyone to read. Of course I had to try it, especially given that Gidwitz’s Melita Maschmann is one of the most likable characters in Max in the Land of Lies, for all that she is a true believer Nazi who, moreover, gets only very limited pagetime.
Now I realize some people may object to the idea of a likeable Nazi true believer, but I believe in order to understand evil one of the things we have to let go of is the belief that there’s any clear relationship between likability and goodness. If you will excuse a digression into quadrant theory, likability and goodness are two separate axes, and most of us are happiest with the “likable and good” quadrant and the “unlikable and bad” quadrant. Neither of these create cognitive dissonance. We want the people whom we like to be good and the people we hate to be bad.
But “unlikable and good” and “likable and bad” can both be a torment. You know that you should like so-and-so, because they’re so useful and helpful and have all the right opinions, but really you would climb out a window rather than spend an hour alone with them because they just grate on you. Or, you like so-and-so a lot, because they’re so funny and charming, and when other people say they’ve done bad things it’s probably lies, or jealousy, or a failure to understand the complexity of their character, or… oh God what if they are bad. You like them so much and they’re bad?? What does that say about you??? NO the accusations of badness are LIES.
(Or else, you insist that you never really liked them THAT much, like my friend with the Harry Potter tattoo who insists she was never THAT into Harry Potter.)
So: Melita Maschmann, likable Nazi true believer, who very slowly after the war began to look back on her former self and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?” This book, written in the form of a letter to her former best friend, a Jewish girl who had to flee Germany, is Maschmann’s attempt to figure out what, in fact, she was thinking.
The idea of the book as a letter is sometimes slightly alarming (can you imagine handing someone a book-length manuscript and saying “This is why I was a world-historically bad friend”?), but as a literary device it’s useful, because it gives Maschmann an imaginary interlocutor to pull her up short whenever she reaches a particularly “But didn’t this make you rethink your choices?” moment. Kristallnacht? The starving Poles when you were first posted to Poland? The time the local German army didn’t have enough troops to evict the Poles from their village to make way for German settlers, so you had to help? Maybe the time that you drove a truck around stealing furniture from the local Poles to give it to a German family that had settled in one of these newly emptied villages?
This last in particular was not merely wrong but also illegal even at the time, but rather oddly it’s also the only one that Maschmann didn’t have a single qualm about when she did it. The rest of these events did give her pause, but at the end of the day there’s a vast gulf between being taken aback and actually rethinking the ideology that has shaped your entire life.
Maschmann turned to National Socialism because she was an idealist who loved the idea of the National Community that cuts across classes and binds everyone together and fixes the poverty and shame that have crippled her country since the Great War. It was a way of rebelling against her parents that nonetheless embraced many of their beliefs: not only the sense that democracy had failed, but also the belief that violent competition among countries is inevitable, so although you might flinch from things you saw while invading Poland, if you didn’t invade Poland then Poland would assuredly invade you.
By this point you, my imaginary interlocutor, may well be asking, “But what part of this is likable, you monster?” Well, part of it is the fact that Maschmann had the strength of character to look back afterward and try to make sense of what she had done. This is something that most human beings seem to find almost impossible even when there aren’t war crimes involved.
Her account is clear-eyed, both in the sense of sheer observation - there’s tons of interesting detail here about life on the ground during the invasion of Poland, for instance - and in the sense that she’s trying to look at these events squarely, to explain without justifying, to say “this is what we were thinking” and hope that this might help turn other people aside if they find themselves straying into a similar path.
But even in Maschmann’s younger self, there are many appealing qualities. She was an indefatigable worker with a yearning to help people, an idealist who latched onto absolutely the wrong ideal. If she had latched onto a different ideal –
Well, the twentieth century was not short on ideals that led to mass destruction, so if Maschmann chose a different ideal, she might have been just as destructive in a different direction. Why do I find something so appealing about idealists, when ideology is used to create and justify so much suffering?
Now I realize some people may object to the idea of a likeable Nazi true believer, but I believe in order to understand evil one of the things we have to let go of is the belief that there’s any clear relationship between likability and goodness. If you will excuse a digression into quadrant theory, likability and goodness are two separate axes, and most of us are happiest with the “likable and good” quadrant and the “unlikable and bad” quadrant. Neither of these create cognitive dissonance. We want the people whom we like to be good and the people we hate to be bad.
But “unlikable and good” and “likable and bad” can both be a torment. You know that you should like so-and-so, because they’re so useful and helpful and have all the right opinions, but really you would climb out a window rather than spend an hour alone with them because they just grate on you. Or, you like so-and-so a lot, because they’re so funny and charming, and when other people say they’ve done bad things it’s probably lies, or jealousy, or a failure to understand the complexity of their character, or… oh God what if they are bad. You like them so much and they’re bad?? What does that say about you??? NO the accusations of badness are LIES.
(Or else, you insist that you never really liked them THAT much, like my friend with the Harry Potter tattoo who insists she was never THAT into Harry Potter.)
So: Melita Maschmann, likable Nazi true believer, who very slowly after the war began to look back on her former self and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?” This book, written in the form of a letter to her former best friend, a Jewish girl who had to flee Germany, is Maschmann’s attempt to figure out what, in fact, she was thinking.
The idea of the book as a letter is sometimes slightly alarming (can you imagine handing someone a book-length manuscript and saying “This is why I was a world-historically bad friend”?), but as a literary device it’s useful, because it gives Maschmann an imaginary interlocutor to pull her up short whenever she reaches a particularly “But didn’t this make you rethink your choices?” moment. Kristallnacht? The starving Poles when you were first posted to Poland? The time the local German army didn’t have enough troops to evict the Poles from their village to make way for German settlers, so you had to help? Maybe the time that you drove a truck around stealing furniture from the local Poles to give it to a German family that had settled in one of these newly emptied villages?
This last in particular was not merely wrong but also illegal even at the time, but rather oddly it’s also the only one that Maschmann didn’t have a single qualm about when she did it. The rest of these events did give her pause, but at the end of the day there’s a vast gulf between being taken aback and actually rethinking the ideology that has shaped your entire life.
Maschmann turned to National Socialism because she was an idealist who loved the idea of the National Community that cuts across classes and binds everyone together and fixes the poverty and shame that have crippled her country since the Great War. It was a way of rebelling against her parents that nonetheless embraced many of their beliefs: not only the sense that democracy had failed, but also the belief that violent competition among countries is inevitable, so although you might flinch from things you saw while invading Poland, if you didn’t invade Poland then Poland would assuredly invade you.
By this point you, my imaginary interlocutor, may well be asking, “But what part of this is likable, you monster?” Well, part of it is the fact that Maschmann had the strength of character to look back afterward and try to make sense of what she had done. This is something that most human beings seem to find almost impossible even when there aren’t war crimes involved.
Her account is clear-eyed, both in the sense of sheer observation - there’s tons of interesting detail here about life on the ground during the invasion of Poland, for instance - and in the sense that she’s trying to look at these events squarely, to explain without justifying, to say “this is what we were thinking” and hope that this might help turn other people aside if they find themselves straying into a similar path.
But even in Maschmann’s younger self, there are many appealing qualities. She was an indefatigable worker with a yearning to help people, an idealist who latched onto absolutely the wrong ideal. If she had latched onto a different ideal –
Well, the twentieth century was not short on ideals that led to mass destruction, so if Maschmann chose a different ideal, she might have been just as destructive in a different direction. Why do I find something so appealing about idealists, when ideology is used to create and justify so much suffering?
Mapped: The Number of Farms in Each U.S. State
Sep. 11th, 2025 02:27 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
visualcapitalist_rss_feed
Mapped: The Number of Farms in Each U.S. State
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
Key Takeaways
- With 1.88 million farms across all of America, Texas has the most of any state at 231,000.
- Many of Texas’ farms are ranch-style operations, focused on cattle and hay, which tend to be smaller and thus more numerous than large single crop farms.
- In terms of farmland, Texas still leads with 125 million acres, followed by Montana (57.4 million acres) and Kansas (44.8 million acres).
Today, the average farm in America stands at 466 acres, but there is wide variation across states.
In Rhode Island, the average size is 60 acres—but this jumps to 2,743 in Wyoming. Not only does this highlight the dominance of big farms, but how state economies and different types of agricultural production influence the size and scale of farmland.
This graphic shows farm counts by state, using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Texas Has More Farms Than Any Other State
In the table below, we show the total number of farms in each state in 2024:
| State | Number of Farms |
|---|---|
| Texas | 231,000 |
| Iowa | 86,700 |
| Missouri | 85,700 |
| Ohio | 74,000 |
| Illinois | 70,000 |
| Oklahoma | 70,000 |
| Kentucky | 69,100 |
| Minnesota | 65,300 |
| Tennessee | 62,900 |
| California | 62,500 |
| Wisconsin | 58,200 |
| Kansas | 55,500 |
| Indiana | 52,000 |
| Pennsylvania | 48,800 |
| Florida | 44,400 |
| Nebraska | 44,300 |
| Michigan | 44,000 |
| North Carolina | 42,100 |
| Virginia | 39,000 |
| Georgia | 38,300 |
| Arkansas | 37,200 |
| Alabama | 37,100 |
| Oregon | 35,500 |
| Colorado | 35,000 |
| Washington | 31,800 |
| Mississippi | 30,800 |
| New York | 30,500 |
| South Dakota | 28,300 |
| North Dakota | 24,800 |
| Louisiana | 24,600 |
| Montana | 23,800 |
| South Carolina | 22,600 |
| West Virginia | 22,600 |
| Idaho | 22,500 |
| New Mexico | 20,800 |
| Utah | 17,300 |
| Arizona | 15,100 |
| Maryland | 12,600 |
| Wyoming | 10,500 |
| New Jersey | 9,900 |
| Maine | 7,000 |
| Massachusetts | 6,900 |
| Hawaii | 6,500 |
| Vermont | 6,300 |
| Connecticut | 4,900 |
| New Hampshire | 3,850 |
| Nevada | 3,100 |
| Delaware | 2,150 |
| Alaska | 1,200 |
| Rhode Island | 1,000 |
With 231,000 farms, Texas has more than double the second-highest state, Iowa.
Across Texas, 2.3 million people are directly employed in the agricultural industry, largely focused on cattle, hay, milk, and corn. Altogether, the industry drove almost $868 billion in economic output last year.
In Iowa, farmland covers 84% of the state’s land area—one of the highest nationally. On average, farms are 346 acres in size, with the state being the largest producer of corn and eggs nationally.
California, meanwhile, is home to 62,500 farms, with dairy production topping $8.6 billion in 2024—the state’s most valuable commodity last year. Additionally, California produces almost 75% of America’s fruits and nuts and over one-third of its vegetables.
On the other end of the spectrum, Rhode Island has just 1,000 farms given its small land area and high population density. Similarly, Alaska (1,200) and Delaware (2,150) each fall at the bottom of the rankings.
Learn More on the Voronoi App 
To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the share of farmland by state.
Thursday Word: Kourabiedes
Sep. 11th, 2025 10:33 amcalzephyr posting in 1word1dayKourabiedes - 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.
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.
By Jastrow - Own work, CC BY 2.5, Link
Quick note — comments
Sep. 11th, 2025 05:26 pmdolorosa_12Unfortunately 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.
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 pmsmartbitches_feedUnder 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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
Gallery Day, apparently
Sep. 12th, 2025 01:33 amtygerMet up with A for lunch! :D We ended up going to two galleries - A had some stuff to drop off for a friend at the first one (more stuffed animals hahahahhaha), and then we were close to the second so we poked our noses in there, too. Some super cool stuff!!! :D
Other than that... I got snacks! I kinda ate all the ones I had, so... yes. Snacks important. That's pretty much all I did today, though, kinda just passed the fuck out when I got home, as usual, and just a bit of minecraft this evening.
Oh, wait, no, I got another call from a recruiter! This one I think I did pretty okay with, so fingers crossed I'll at least get an interview! >: >: >: (Gonna have to brush up on React stuff, though, heh. Which I should probably do anyway, React is... very popular. Sigh.)
If the end is right, it justifies the beans.
Sep. 11th, 2025 04:48 pmhalfcactus1.
Some manhwa I read at the end of August:
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
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 )
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 )
Mapped: Housing Affordability Across North America in 2025
Sep. 11th, 2025 12:11 pmvisualcapitalist_rss_feed
Mapped: Housing Affordability Across North America in 2025
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
Key Takeaways
- Vancouver, Canada is the most unaffordable housing market in North America.
- Los Angeles follows next, where a typical home costs nearly 11 times higher than median household income.
- This gap falls to 7.7 in New York, based on data as of July 2025.
Many cities are seeing a widening gap between wages and home prices, making them “impossibly unaffordable.”
Not only that, U.S. home prices are more unaffordable than the run up to the 2008 global financial crisis. Driving this affordability crunch is the combination of elevated interest rates and soaring home prices in the post-pandemic boom, although some markets have seen slowing growth in recent months.
This graphic shows housing market affordability in North America, based on data from the Globe and Mail via Hanif Bayat.
The Housing Affordability Crunch in 2025
Below, we compare benchmark home prices as of July 2025 to gross median household income across major metro areas in North America:
| Metro Area | Home Price-to-Income Ratio |
|---|---|
| Vancouver | 13.5 |
| Los Angeles | 10.7 |
| Toronto | 10.4 |
| San Diego | 9.2 |
| San Francisco | 9.1 |
| New York | 7.7 |
| Montreal | 7.2 |
| Seattle | 7.0 |
| Inland Empire (covers San Bernardino and Riverside counties) | 6.8 |
| Boston | 6.8 |
| Miami | 6.4 |
| Denver | 5.8 |
| Phoenix | 5.4 |
| Orlando | 5.2 |
| Tampa | 5.1 |
| Washington | 4.9 |
| Charlotte | 4.9 |
| Philadelphia | 4.6 |
| Atlanta | 4.6 |
| Baltimore | 4.4 |
| Dallas | 4.4 |
| Minneapolis | 4.2 |
| Chicago | 4.1 |
| Houston | 4.0 |
| Detroit | 3.8 |
Gross median household income as of 2023, the latest data available.
With a home price-to-income ratio of 13.5, Vancouver, Canada’s housing market is extremely out of reach for most residents.
Today, it surpasses all other major American cities, where the average price for a detached home often exceeds $1.4 million–up from around $250,000 in 2000. Similarly, home prices in Toronto are more than 10 times higher than the median household income.
Meanwhile, the West Coast metros of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco are the most unaffordable in the U.S. given high demand, supply shortages, and for the latter, proximity to Silicon Valley.
Falling near the middle of the pack is Miami, where home prices are 6.4 times the median household income. While home prices have fallen moderately over the past year, they have jumped 61% higher since July 2020—increasing affordability concerns.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the world’s most unaffordable housing markets.
(no subject)
Sep. 11th, 2025 09:39 amseekingferretThe Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
This year's Book I Read Because Multiple People Raved About It in the Worldcon Discord. The first book in a secondary world fantasy series with lots of complicated political intrigue, the rave reviews were extremely enthusiastic but also quite vague. And now that I have read it, I understand the vagueness. It's a hard book to describe. It's constantly shifting and transforming, with twist after twist leaving you constantly unsure what the book is actually about and where it is going. But the twists are solid and well supported and never pull you out of the world of the book. But it was an exhilarating read and I highly recommend it.
This year's Book I Read Because Multiple People Raved About It in the Worldcon Discord. The first book in a secondary world fantasy series with lots of complicated political intrigue, the rave reviews were extremely enthusiastic but also quite vague. And now that I have read it, I understand the vagueness. It's a hard book to describe. It's constantly shifting and transforming, with twist after twist leaving you constantly unsure what the book is actually about and where it is going. But the twists are solid and well supported and never pull you out of the world of the book. But it was an exhilarating read and I highly recommend it.
a very brief post
Sep. 11th, 2025 09:06 amlirazelI just need to get this out.
Cut for US political talk.
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.
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.