Last Post of September Stampede
Sep. 27th, 2025 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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If you've been using the table and tackling something each day, feel free to tell us all about it this week. If not here's the table and pick up with today's (or any other day that suits) and tell us about it when you can - This will be the last post for September so feel free to tell us about your most recent achievements or about the month as a whole.
Remember this is supposed to be a low-stress challenge - if you miss a day, it doesn't matter, if the day's challenge doesn't suit, repeat the day before or start on the next day's. With the exception of two days, the challenges should take about 10 minutes, if you want to spend longer that's great, judge by your personal available time and energy.
To make it easier to take part and not be held up by time differences and days when I'm not able to post, all challenges will be posted in the table below the cut to aid both those taking part and the daily poster.
My biggest request for the month is that, whenever you can, you join in the chat - even if you haven't done the day's challenge come and cheer for others. We're here for the ups and downs this month so you can tell us when you're struggling as well as celebrate your successes.
( Daily Challenge Table shown below the cut )
And so today's challenge is, depending on where/when you are reading this (but I'll go with the 27th/28th) to either dusting skirting/baseboards or time finishing something you started but didn't quite finish previously.
My final thought for this post is one of looking forward to October. As my current situation is unlikely to improve next month, would it work for everyone if we have a similar plan for next month? Maybe have an 'Organisational October'? If that would work for you, please comment and feel free to leave some suggestions of things we could organise.
Good luck and enjoy what's left of your September.
"Don't get vored"
Sep. 27th, 2025 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Look, I just love its whole vagina dentata/Venus fly trap/ribcage/entire-body-as-maw/spine-snapping-backbends thing, okay? And it’s a fun fight, despite its absurd number of hitpoints and ability to kill you if it bumps you with a leg while it’s charging.
For anyone curious about how the process of figuring out a Dark Souls boss fight can go, some samples:
https://youtu.be/nnZP6WkKRpg?si=M3abOUFachMgs6cP&t=1143
https://youtu.be/u2U5mlfI6zM?si=Scx5xCM_Z7lB4bbX&t=5560 (after getting Capra on the second try, Mapocolops enters the Montage Of Despair zone)
Important context for some of what’s happening: Dark Souls has no animation cancelling, so if you press the “light attack” button twice, your character will swing twice, and if you press the “heal” button they will start the (slow) flask-drinking animation, even if you’ve subsequently realized this was a terrible idea and are now frantically pressing the buttons to dodge and screaming at your character to move. This is part of what requires you to be more deliberate and tactical; you can’t button-mash your way through even if you can mash buttons quickly.
(Also, both Reggie and Mapo started off summoning an NPC for assistance, but the trouble with it in this fight is that the NPC AI is not very bright and tends to stand in front of the dragon and get eaten early, leaving the player dealing with a boss that still has the extra HP to make up for the summons.)
Conversely, after having an un-fun time with Capra, Symbalily reads the fight near-perfectly on her first try: https://youtu.be/ByTGX1NRFs0?si=VBbn5DLh0hK-Gqp5&t=3183
(Team Halberd for the win; that two-handed R2 is so good.)
Summer’s end
Sep. 27th, 2025 07:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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We put up ten pint jars and three quart jars of tomato sauce. Salsa was made from the remaining green tomatoes which wouldn’t ripen: two pints canned and a quart-and-a-half refrigerated.
Onto planning 2026!
a ST: TNG AU fic
Sep. 27th, 2025 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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AO3 was down on friday for updates, or maintenance, and someone threw this community together for those who want to write & read something while it was down. i don't know if they will continue with it after this or not.
and because the rules are in the style of
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the community is closed to prompts now & you only have a week to fill any prompt that you want.
( Any, Any, Canon Divergence )
Texts You Should Send Me After We Hang Out
Sep. 26th, 2025 01:01 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Hey, thanks so much for coming tonight. I’ve just checked with everyone else at the party, and we’re all in agreement that you behaved really normally and didn’t say anything weird or worrying at all.
Even though your face looks alarmingly like a mole’s in that picture I just tagged you in, at no point in the course of the evening did I look over at you and think, “Wow, she looks like a mole.”
It’s been on my mind and I need to apologize: I’m sorry I didn’t laugh at that joke you made about how your emails should be called “me-mails.” It’s because I was achingly jealous. And just to clarify, re: any other jokes I didn’t laugh at—I didn’t hear them. You were right to repeat the jokes twice.
Let’s hop on a video call this week so you can ask me any questions you have about my offhand comments. I can carve out forty-five minutes to explain what I really meant when I said that thing about your inner child.
[Reassuring platitude.] [Reassuring platitude.] [Reassuring platitude.]
After what happened tonight, I’ve decided to name my firstborn child after you. I’m sure you can understand why.
I did see that bit of spit that landed on your chin when you bit into those pistachios, but I didn’t find it gross. If anything, it was endearingly human.
I know we’ve been friends for ten years now, so I can understand your need to hear this: I like you and enjoy your company.
When you interrupted my story with a story about yourself, I was so, so glad.
It is the human condition to agonize about the vast gap between who you want to be—who you think you are—and how you actually come across. I will not reduce you to the things you said over the course of a single evening, or that weird laugh you did after the pistachio-thing. I understand that you are not a decision you have made about yourself. And yes, you can take back the chips you brought that we didn’t get around to opening.
Tonight was fun—let’s do it again soon!
Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Charles Johnson
Sep. 26th, 2025 09:02 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Places Charles Johnson’s drawings appeared when he was a young cartoonist:
- A catalog for a magic company
- Mimeographed church bulletins
- The Daily Egyptian
- The Southern Illinoisan
For more than forty years, Charles Johnson has been a fixture on the literary scene in Seattle, along with two other African American writers, both transplants: the late Octavia Butler and the late August Wilson. Like they did, Johnson has produced work his own way, avoiding the expectations that many would impose on a Black writer. This journey of distinction for Johnson began in 1982, with his second published novel, Oxherding Tale, a quasi–slave narrative and rogue’s narrative steeped in both Eastern and Western philosophy. Johnson has since published twenty books, and has received numerous accolades for his work, including the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Middle Passage, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Born in 1948, Johnson grew up in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, home of Northwestern University. He first came to prominence as a political cartoonist and illustrator when he was still a teenager: At the age of fifteen, he was a student of cartoonist and mystery writer Lawrence Lariar’s. In 1969, he attended a lecture by Amiri Baraka, which inspired him to draw a collection of racial satire titled Black Humor, which was published by Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of the widely read magazines Ebony and Jet. A second collection of political satire, Half-Past Nation-Time, was published by Aware Press in 1972. During this period, Johnson earned a BS degree in journalism at Southern Illinois University. He then went on to earn his MA in philosophy at the same university, while taking fiction-writing classes with the legendary John Gardner. In 1976, Johnson joined the faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington, where he taught until his retirement in 2009.
I sat down with Johnson on a mild afternoon at Third Place Books in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood, not far from Johnson’s home. To take advantage of the weather, we opted for an outside table, where we enjoyed good coffee, good food, and good conversation. Preferring the nickname Chuck, Johnson is confident but humble and soft-spoken; his eyes sparkled with intelligence. He keeps his hair in a short Afro, completely gray, with a well-groomed halter-like connected beard, also gray. As we spoke, I observed something of the scholar about him, in the way that his spectacles dangled against his chest from an elastic cord encircling his neck.
—Jeffery Renard Allen
I. TWIN TIGERS
THE BELIEVER: How do you define yourself as a writer?
CHARLES JOHNSON: I don’t call myself a writer. One of my books is titled I Call Myself an Artist.
BLVR: So you’re an artist?
CJ: Yes.
BLVR: I’m going to phrase the question differently. Would you call yourself an experimental writer in the usual sense of whatever that term means: someone seeking to innovate, break rules?
CJ: I’m a philosophical writer because my background is in philosophy. I work with different forms and genres to realize, I hope, fiction that is philosophically engaging and capable of transforming our perception in some way. As for experimentation, Clarence Major—he’s an experimental writer. And Ishmael Reed is as well. I’m not an experimental writer. The thing about it, too, is I started out as a cartoonist, as a visual artist and journalist. When I was in my teens, drawing was my first passion. Still is to a large extent. So I’ll say I’m an artist. Today I might be doing visual art. Tomorrow I might be doing literary art. Last night I got together with some old buddies for Wednesday-night martial arts class. We’ve been doing this since 1981, training together, every Wednesday night. As an artist, there are different ways to express myself.
BLVR: You see martial arts as a form of self-expression?
CJ: It is. Well, when I was young, back in my teens, it seemed to me reasonable that I needed to develop myself in three areas, to the best of my ability. One was mind, one was body, one was spirit. For mind, I chose philosophy, which seduced me when I was an eighteen-year-old undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. Even though I was a journalism major, I stayed on and got my master’s in philosophy. And then I kept going until I got my PhD in philosophy at Stony Brook University. So that was for mind. For body, I chose martial arts when I was nineteen. My first dojo was in Chicago, and was a little like a monastery. I began working out there, without knowing anything about the world of martial arts. It was a cult in the sense that the members of the school blindly followed the leader, but I didn’t know it. This was during the time of the Chicago Dojo Wars, as they were called. My school was in competition with another school, run by a flamboyant guy who called himself Count Dante. Count Dante. You’d see him sometimes in the martial arts magazines. [Laughing] I don’t know anything about his system or his style, but I do know that somebody from his school came by our school one night to invite us to participate in a tournament. He was really arrogant. He said, If you think you’re up to it, you can come try out in our tournament. Our master wasn’t there that night, but when he found out, he told all of us, Somebody comes in like that again, tell them to leave. They don’t leave, you go over here to the wall and take down a weapon. Give one to him and you take one. Now, these were traditional weapons, Chinese weapons, you know—spears and staffs and swords. And if he won’t leave, kill him. I’m thinking, What? He’s telling us to kill. He said killing was within our rights when somebody invaded our space and we gave them fair warning. It was a rough school. I thought some nights I’d die in there, but I stuck with it until I got my first promotion. Southern Illinois University was about six hours away. I couldn’t keep up at that dojo, but I continued with karate on campus. I went through three karate systems, you know, and then settled on Choy Lee Fut kung fu in 1981 when I went down to San Francisco to work on a Black PBS TV show called Up and Coming. Wherever I lived, I always looked for a school to train at.
When I came out this way, I discovered there were branches of the Choy Lee Fut school, one here in Seattle and one over in Bremerton. I was able to continue training here in Seattle until the one school here closed. After it closed, our teacher, Grandmaster Doc-Fai Wong, gave me and a buddy permission to start classes in Seattle. He gave us the name Twin Tigers. We taught for ten years. My buddy passed away a couple of years ago, but I still get together with a couple of old friends on Wednesday nights. We go through our empty-hand sets. Then we go through our weapons sets so we don’t forget them. Choy Lee Fut has over 130 sets because it combines three martial arts lineages, one from Mr. Choy, one from Mr. Lee, and another one from Chan Yuen-Woo, who taught Fut Gar. Choy Lee Fut is one of the old Shaolin monastery fighting systems.
So mind, body, and spirit. For spirit I chose Buddhadharma. Buddhadharma, for training and cultivating the spirit. I was born a cradle Christian, and I still am to a degree. But the Buddhadharma offered something that was good for me when I was young.
BLVR: How old were you when you were introduced to Buddhism?
CJ: Fourteen.
BLVR: And how did it happen?
CJ: Back then, my mother was an avid reader and a member of three book clubs. One of the books that came into the house was on yoga. I read a chapter on meditation and afterward I told myself, Let me see what this is like. For half an hour, I practiced the method of meditation described in this chapter. It was amazing. My consciousness changed during that half hour of focusing. I’d never done that before, and the experience affected me for life. It made me more conscious of the operations of my own mind and it also made me have more compassion for people around me, more empathy. I began to approach the study of Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies in a scholarly way and read everything I possibly could. As both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I took courses in Hinduism and Taoism.
BLVR: That was back in the ’60s?
CJ: Yes, back then, when there was all kinds of stuff floating around.
BLVR: You mean people like Alan Watts?
CJ: Yes, Alan Watts. And D. T. Suzuki was very important at the time because he interpreted Japanese Zen for a Western audience. He did it in a particular way to make it intellectually interesting to academics. Something I didn’t care for was what I call “fuzzy-bunny Buddhism,” the feel-good stuff. With Buddhism, you must get it right. It’s not any old thing you make it out to be.
Buddhism grows and evolves in every country it goes to. It has a particular flavor here in America, because Americans are very interested in politics and social justice. I think this is because we draw on Christianity’s emphasis on the social gospel about changing the world that had such an impact on Martin Luther King Jr. So there is that quality to the American Buddhist convert community.
BLVR: What impact has Buddhism had on literature in our country?
CJ: There’s very little written about the spiritual register in our literature, especially in fiction. Truth to tell, I don’t know American poetry as well as I know the fiction.
BLVR: In terms of my question, I’m thinking about two aspects of American fiction: the tradition that deals with spiritual questions, and the tradition that deals with philosophical questions. Would you say there’s also a lack in terms of philosophical fiction?
CJ: Going all the way back to the nineteenth century, Americans have been anti-intellectual, very suspicious of intellectuals, particularly of European intellectuals. The emphasis is on the common man, so to speak, right? You see that bias starting with Jefferson in the eighteenth century. The century that followed gave us philosophically interesting writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson the transcendentalist. But then something happens around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of naturalism. Our writers become less philosophical and less focused on the spiritual register. Part of that has to do with the fact that naturalism in fiction is a subset of naturalism in science and sociology. Naturalism does not involve spiritual experiences. Of course, naturalism offers a deterministic view of the world. Biology, the environment, cause and effect—that’s all that really matters in the naturalistic orientation.
I think there’s more to human experience—and that experience is much, much larger than that.
In the twentieth century we don’t have much in the way of a spiritual/philosophical register in American fiction. William Gass, a trained and important philosopher, was one such writer. My former teacher John Gardner wasn’t a trained philosopher, but he explored ideas like Sartrean existentialism in his novel Grendel.
And then among Black writers I would say that Jean Toomer is philosophically interesting. Toomer was a follower of Gurdjieff. I wrote a preface for Toomer’s collection of aphorisms, Essentials, which was edited by the late Rudolph Byrd. Richard Wright is also interesting, even if he was largely a Marxist thinker.
BLVR: I would argue that Wright became an existentialist.
CJ: He was by the time he moved to France. Of course, over there he hung out with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And he started getting into phenomenology. He owned a copy of a philosophical work by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. I read, in fact, that he worked with it so much he had to get another cover for it because it was falling apart.
Ralph Ellison is also worthy of attention as a philosophical writer. In Invisible Man he addresses Marxism and existentialism, then plays on Freud, and so forth.
BLVR: Ellison seems to define the idea of race and racism as ultimately absurdist in an existentialist sense.
CJ: His novel is absurdist. Those writers to me are the ones I found to have a philosophical kind of register. Still not, though, a spiritual register. Not in Wright, not in Ellison. Only in Toomer.
A Secret Shopper Thinks He’s a Character in a Paul Schrader Film
Sep. 26th, 2025 08:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
How you do anything is how you do everything.
If you don’t put your best foot forward at every single opportunity, then you are wasting the precious few steps you have on this earth. You can’t half-ass things. Everything you do, do it with your best foot and your entire ass. Maybe also use your arms. Both of them, if needed, including the hands. And any other parts that are necessary to complete the task, whatever that task may be.
Nobody wants to hear your excuses. You know what they say about excuses, right? They’re like assholes. A hole of an ass is even worse than half of an ass. Because a hole is nothing, and that’s exactly what your excuses are worth. Everywhere I go, I look around and I see someone with an excuse. To me, they look like nothing. “How do you see them, if they look like nothing?” you may ask. “You know what I mean, don’t be obtuse” is my response to those asking that question.
When you are at your job, it does not matter what your passion is outside of your job. It does not matter if you have a “gig” with your “Guns N’ Roses tribute band” later tonight. You’re at work, you shouldn’t be thinking about the face you’re going to make during the guitar solo for “November Rain.” Would fake Alex Rose and pretend Duff McKagan like it if you were thinking about upselling an unlimited data plan with 5G coverage in the middle of shredding? Does your employer not deserve the same respect as a guy named Carl who refuses to answer to “Carl” when he is dressed up like Izzy Stradlin?
It does not matter if you see this job as just a temporary stop on your way to something bigger. Our entire lives are but a temporary stop on our way to something bigger. That does not mean we simply brush past them to get to the great beyond, floating through life like spores in the breeze. We are not tree cum jizzing up the earth, planting ourselves in the ground to grow, or landing in my nose to flare up my allergies. We are more.
We must take pride in what we do. Because what we do is who we are. We may think that we are our ideas, or our ambitions, or our morals, or our principles, or our hopes, or our dreams, but we are none of those things. If we were those things, then I wouldn’t be a Secret Shopper. I’d be a pizza restaurant that teams you up with other solo diners so you can save money by going splitsies on an entire pizza instead of ordering by the slice (my idea, don’t steal it, I already mailed it to myself). Or I’d be a guy who, through some loophole in the NSDA, has a year of eligibility left for the high school debate team even though he is in his mid-forties, and I can go back and dazzle them all (my dream). Or I’d be the branch manager for the Greater Delaware County Secret Shoppers local office (my hope, also my ambition). But I’m none of those things. I am only my actions. By taking pride in our actions, we take pride in ourselves.
The service I received today at the T-Mobile store at the Cherry Hill Mall displayed absolutely zero pride, passion, or respect. Not only did it lack respect for me, the customer, but it lacked respect for the T-Mobile corporation and, most importantly, for Kyle S., the representative I was unfortunately paired with during my shopping experience. I would go as far as to say that it’s almost as if Kyle S. did not care if I bought a phone or did not buy a phone. Does Kyle S. not work on commission? Does he not need the money? Is the “S” short for “Salim,” making “Kyle S.” actually Kyle Salim, an heir to Indonesia’s biggest conglomerate, the Salim group? Kyle S. didn’t look Indonesian to me. If George Washington treated his job the same way Kyle S. treats his, we’d all still be singing “God Save the King.” The only King I want to save is Burger, as a little treat for myself after I finish this report.
It is my professional opinion that Kyle S. should receive disciplinary action commensurate with his previous record, whether that dictates a write-up, second write-up, warning, final warning, or dismissal from his responsibilities as a representative of the T-Mobile corporation. It brings me no pleasure to issue this report. As a matter of fact, there isn’t much that brings me pleasure these days. Pleasure evades me, and frankly, I fear it.
But I don’t need pleasure, because I have purpose. And that purpose is pretending to be a real customer when I’m actually there to snitch on service workers to their corporate masters. I fulfill that purpose with pride, and my best foot, and my whole entire stinky ass.
friday 5; housework
Sep. 25th, 2025 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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1. Do you consider yourself to be a good housekeeper? Why or why not?
the place is not a pigsty, but i could do better.
2. Are there any household chores that you enjoy doing? If so, what and why?
people enjoy chores?
3. Which household chore frustrates/angers you the most?
doing dishes. i wash by hand & no matter how much i scrub around, there is always a spot that got missed.
4. When doing household chores, what do you do to make them seem less of a "chore"?
nothing. i just grit my teeth and get it done.
5. Which chore do you find yourself doing most often, and why?
probably washing disses. nearly every meal requires something to make the food in/with and something to eat it on and with.
other answers are over here.
Tonight’s Performance Wouldn’t Be Possible Without…
Sep. 25th, 2025 07:30 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Well, here we are. Although many believed that aggressive cuts to our country’s arts funding and national granting organizations by our current administration would have made it impossible to continue to mount adventurous performances of creative merit, we are overjoyed to present this piece tonight, thanks to the incredible support of institutions small and large who have stepped up to the plate to fill in the current void in arts funding.
Tonight’s performance wouldn’t be possible without the support of:
- The Doohickey Fund
- NYSPBTHA
- The MCAS Exams
- The Fjord Foundation
- Johnny Shotput’s Remote Detonation Organization
- The Mr. and Mrs. Met Institute
- The International House of Generational Trauma
- Land Acknowledgment Debate Club
- The King Richard’s Faire
- Rich Aunt Jane (love ya, Jane!)
- Disturbed Uncle Jim (there there, Jim…)
- The Heartfelt Apology Union
- MRSA
- The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
- The National Ruffle Association
- Viewers Like You
- The Clippy Home for Retired GIFS
- Haliburton
- The Where’s Waldorf School of Middle America
- Tony Romo’s Fine Arts Dojo
- The Telluride Tableside Guac Fund
- NYSHPA
- The CCR Institute for Unfortunately Gifted Sons
- Two-Factor Authentication for the Arts
- Bloin Capital
- MoviePass
- Nancy Pelosi’s Stable of Underfed Texters
- NEA: SVU
- Paulie’s Stools for Polycules on Route 9
- The Scholastic Book Fair
- MRNBC
- The Ms. Frizzle Memorial Trust
- A bank
- The National Endowment for Sick Air Bro
- The Jamie Kennedy Center
- NYFFS
- Underachievers Anonymous
- The Spleen Actors Guild
- PERVA
- The Homeopathic Raves Review
- The AFLAC Duck Cash Mattress
- Foul Language investments
- Michelle Corporation
- Chase Fraudulent Activities Missed Calls
- Quibi
- The New York Foundation for Deez Nuts
celebrity20in20 Round 17
Sep. 25th, 2025 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Link: Round 17 Sign Ups | Round 17 Themes
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Schedule: Round 17 sign ups are open NOW. Icons are due October 13, 2025.