You Gotta Eat, by Margaret Eby
Aug. 20th, 2025 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runpunkrunYou Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible, by Margaret Eby:
A gentle and funny book about how to feed yourself when that seems impossible.
This book offers three things: permission, inspiration, and recipes, in about those proportions if this were a list of ingredients. The chapters are arranged in increasing order of effort, from, basically, eating straight out of the fridge, right up to chopping stuff up and turning on the oven.
Each chapter starts with a theme and a bunch of ideas about how to turn things like eggs, greens, beans, noodles, dumplings, and canned foods into a meal, then finishes with one or two basic "do exactly this" recipes. The permission is throughout. Yes, it's okay to eat popcorn for dinner. Yes, a dip is a meal. Yes, you can just eat cheese with your hands. I gotta say, though, there is A LOT of cheese and dairy in this book. And, it's true, if I could eat dairy, a lot of my eating problems would be solved, but alas.
Still, I love the energy of the book and how funny and relentlessly kind Eby is. From the introduction:
This is more of a survival guide than a cookbook, though, as some of the cooking advice is a bit on the thin side, and if you're new to cooking, you might not know, for example, that you'll want to undercook pasta if you're putting it into a casserole, something Eby fails to mention. The book is probably best for someone who already knows the basics, but just can't imagine lifting a spoon or picking up a frying pan. Eby has a lot of suggestions for things to cook in the toaster oven and the microwave, and the most involved this book gets is casseroles and stirfrys. There are even two (2) quick desserts.
Recommended! Though if you have dietary restrictions, you'll have to do the extra work yourself to make this book work for you (just like every other day) and large sections of it might not, but I think it's still worth it for the inspiration and the reminder to go easy on yourself. You're doing the best you can.
A gentle and funny book about how to feed yourself when that seems impossible.
This book offers three things: permission, inspiration, and recipes, in about those proportions if this were a list of ingredients. The chapters are arranged in increasing order of effort, from, basically, eating straight out of the fridge, right up to chopping stuff up and turning on the oven.
Each chapter starts with a theme and a bunch of ideas about how to turn things like eggs, greens, beans, noodles, dumplings, and canned foods into a meal, then finishes with one or two basic "do exactly this" recipes. The permission is throughout. Yes, it's okay to eat popcorn for dinner. Yes, a dip is a meal. Yes, you can just eat cheese with your hands. I gotta say, though, there is A LOT of cheese and dairy in this book. And, it's true, if I could eat dairy, a lot of my eating problems would be solved, but alas.
Still, I love the energy of the book and how funny and relentlessly kind Eby is. From the introduction:
When food felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: the best food is the food that you'll eat. This is the mantra of this book. Michael Pollan famously had three rules for eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That's nice for him! Here, we're gonna stop with the first one. And we're going to make it easy.And there are a lot of easy ideas in here! Frittatas! Hummus! Smoothies! For when you're too tired to even chew!
This is more of a survival guide than a cookbook, though, as some of the cooking advice is a bit on the thin side, and if you're new to cooking, you might not know, for example, that you'll want to undercook pasta if you're putting it into a casserole, something Eby fails to mention. The book is probably best for someone who already knows the basics, but just can't imagine lifting a spoon or picking up a frying pan. Eby has a lot of suggestions for things to cook in the toaster oven and the microwave, and the most involved this book gets is casseroles and stirfrys. There are even two (2) quick desserts.
Recommended! Though if you have dietary restrictions, you'll have to do the extra work yourself to make this book work for you (just like every other day) and large sections of it might not, but I think it's still worth it for the inspiration and the reminder to go easy on yourself. You're doing the best you can.
Aaaaaahhhhh!
Aug. 20th, 2025 12:05 amsoc_puppetClasses start up again on Monday!
Okay, I'm cool, I'm good, I'm collected; I can do this.
Right now I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to me to start taking the bus to and from classes. There's a specific bus that goes from my hometown to the college campus I'm attending, a thirty minute drive away, and financially it might be a good idea overall. It's just that one of the classes I'm taking would have me out the door by 8:30 AM, and that's a smidge earlier than I like to get up these days 😅
Still, it's doable! The bus stop for the in town bus is under a block from my house, so it's not a particularly arduous walk—or at least it's not too much worse than just walking to where I've parked my car. It would be better for the environment and would save wear and tear on my (aging) vehicle. Even taking the bus three days a week might be good enough.
So my plan is, probably on Thursday and maybe on Friday as well, take the (free) in town bus to the interchange and then back home. If I really want to give a solid go of it, I'll also give the town-to-campus bus a try, but we'll see how I feel about spending $7 on that. I'll also want to start turning the lights out earlier, preferably tonight.
Fingers crossed for cheap textbooks and sparse homework!
Okay, I'm cool, I'm good, I'm collected; I can do this.
Right now I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to me to start taking the bus to and from classes. There's a specific bus that goes from my hometown to the college campus I'm attending, a thirty minute drive away, and financially it might be a good idea overall. It's just that one of the classes I'm taking would have me out the door by 8:30 AM, and that's a smidge earlier than I like to get up these days 😅
Still, it's doable! The bus stop for the in town bus is under a block from my house, so it's not a particularly arduous walk—or at least it's not too much worse than just walking to where I've parked my car. It would be better for the environment and would save wear and tear on my (aging) vehicle. Even taking the bus three days a week might be good enough.
So my plan is, probably on Thursday and maybe on Friday as well, take the (free) in town bus to the interchange and then back home. If I really want to give a solid go of it, I'll also give the town-to-campus bus a try, but we'll see how I feel about spending $7 on that. I'll also want to start turning the lights out earlier, preferably tonight.
Fingers crossed for cheap textbooks and sparse homework!
(no subject)
Aug. 19th, 2025 09:22 pmskygiantsThe last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.
A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.
( ungenerous readings below )
A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.
( ungenerous readings below )
Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius #21
Aug. 19th, 2025 01:55 pmmarycatelli posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
book_loveAgatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius #21: An Entertainment in Londinium by Kaja Foglio and Phil Foglio
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes
( Read more... )
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes
( Read more... )
1character: a character-focused writing comm
Aug. 19th, 2025 05:33 amgimmighoulcoins posting in fictional_fans
Description: Pick one character as your focus in this fic writing community in the style of
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
1sentence, choose from 1 of the 6 theme sets, and make your claim - then, write 50 one-sentence fic inspired by the prompts to share on the comm! This is an ongoing activity, open to writers for all fandoms, as well as original characters. Claims are good for three months, and you can get an extension of one month if needed.Schedule: Ongoing
Links:
On Dreamwidth:
1character(no subject)
Aug. 18th, 2025 01:32 pmskygiantsObviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.
Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.
Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear
Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it
Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.
Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.
Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear
Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it
Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.
rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.Tags:
Fic: There's No Hippocratic Oath in Xianxia China
Aug. 16th, 2025 09:25 pmsoc_puppetFandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Summary: Shang Qinghua is in a meeting with Mu Qingfang about the innovative new peak first aid centers when they're interrupted by a disciple from the beast peak: Shen Yuan, an otherwise ordinary young man, has discovered yet another treatment for sex pollen that involves neither sex nor involvement with heavenly demons.
Mirrors: AO3 link
Wordcount: ~1900 words
Ships: None
Notes: Inspired by this post on Tumblr:![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
ceramicrambles:
Medical mystery Shen Yuan who literally every checkup has a new thing that should have killed him and Mu Qingfang is incredibly concerned
MQF: Shixiong, why is your blood purple?
SY: Oh right! it’s okay I was hit with the misty eyed-transfusion-curse-of-papapa pollen but I took the antidote so now I sprout a daisy every time I pee. It’s basically the closest thing to a cure haha and the only other treatment is heavenly demon blood so what are you gonna do, amirite?
MQF: what.
mikkeneko: mind you. I'm not saying Mu Qingfang is NOT concerned. But I also think that Known Mad Scientist Mu Qingfang would see an absolute golden opportunity in just following SQQ around with a notebook at this point Thanks to ceramicrambles for both the inspiration and beta reading!
Fic: ( There's No Hippocratic Oath in Xianxia China )
Summary: Shang Qinghua is in a meeting with Mu Qingfang about the innovative new peak first aid centers when they're interrupted by a disciple from the beast peak: Shen Yuan, an otherwise ordinary young man, has discovered yet another treatment for sex pollen that involves neither sex nor involvement with heavenly demons.
Mirrors: AO3 link
Wordcount: ~1900 words
Ships: None
Notes: Inspired by this post on Tumblr:
Post text
Medical mystery Shen Yuan who literally every checkup has a new thing that should have killed him and Mu Qingfang is incredibly concerned
MQF: Shixiong, why is your blood purple?
SY: Oh right! it’s okay I was hit with the misty eyed-transfusion-curse-of-papapa pollen but I took the antidote so now I sprout a daisy every time I pee. It’s basically the closest thing to a cure haha and the only other treatment is heavenly demon blood so what are you gonna do, amirite?
MQF: what.
Fic: ( There's No Hippocratic Oath in Xianxia China )
