Kindred Spirits

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e.l.f. Cosmetics

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/elfcosmetics.asp

We address the rumor that e.l.f. Cosmetics has been bought by a major department store chain.

Okay, so the government's going to indict this anti-Semitic bloke...
There's just one little problem...

( He's the President of Iran. )

So, Mr Rudd, do tell... once you've got all the legal niceties taken care of, how are you going to make him front up for his day in court?

Finish Line

http://xkcd.com/423/

The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said.

Joyce Lin added you as a friend.

http://www.facebook.com/n/?reqs.php

Joyce Lin added you as a friend.

what you can't help doing

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/05/what-you-cant-help-doing.html

Sorry about the font-mess of yesterday's post. I did it using Safari on a PC, and the result was hellish. Obviously these are not two things that work well together when playing with Blogger. And each attempt to clean it up on my part made it worse. (Thanks to the Web Goblin for fixing it.)

I did a second draft of the Waterstones "What's Your Story?" story (only a few words I wanted to change, but it meant handwriting the whole thing out again), and FedExed it off today.

My thanks to the Eagle Award voters -- I was thrilled that Absolute Sandman volume 2 won an Eagle Award for Best Reprint. (Last year it was Absolute Sandman volume 1. Next year the vote will probably be split between Absolute Sandman volumes 3 and 4, and something else entirely will win.)

(I was looking to see if there were covers for Absolute Sandmans 3 and 4 up yet at Amazon, and noticed that volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all on sale for $62.37 [and that they are going to weigh a grand total of 29 lb altogether] and the last two have 5% preorders discounts up as well. Which I mention mostly for those people who write to me and grumble about the Absolutes being $100 books.)

Not sure if the cover for Absolute 4 is a mock-up or the real thing. I suspect it's not the final, mostly because I'm pretty sure that face is from Sandman #1, and for Absolute 4 we'll be taking a cover portrait from somewhere in the last 20 issues.

...

Regarding the Julie Schwartz Memorial Talk at MIT on the 23rd of May: To reiterate from the other day -- over at http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/tickets.html we learn that Tickets to the event are $8.00 and will be available at the door, pending availability. There won't be any available on the door, because they have almost all sold out. The website has a list of places selling the tickets -- yesterday there were about 60 tickets still out there. So this is a sort of a last call -- you can try phoning the places at the website to see if they still have tickets...

...

An ebay auction with a story... I've been rereading some old Batman comics recently, although I don't think I'd want these. But the story that comes with them is wonderful...

I'm worried and upset about the earthquake in China. From Nancy Kress's blog I learned that at least some of the friends we made in Chengdu last summer are okay -- and so are the pandas.

...

Rice pudding re-prompt! Once you get home to proper milk, of course. "Your general guidelines for a batch of rice pudding please, Mr. Gaiman!"Thank you!! ^_^b

I'm working on it, honest. Decided to figure out the proportions I'd used by a) finding a very similar recipe on the web and starting from there and then b) fiddling with it.

Two night's ago's rice pudding (the web recipe) was much too salty and wrong. I fiddled with the proportions and last night's was a lot better but now too sweet. Tonight's rice pudding would have been perfect I have no doubt but I forgot to buy more milk, so I didn't actually make one.

Dear Neil,

The press down here in Brazil have enthusiastically announced you'll be here for the Paraty International Book Fair, first week in July. But since you're also scheduled to lecture at Clarion, I'd like to ask if this is true. Or maybe you have a doppelganger. Or maybe the organizers here had a dream. Or maybe you're taking a weekend of from Clarion down here in Rio (if so, it'll be winter here, and rainy, not the best time to come...) Best regards,Eric

That sounds right, yes. (I teach Clarion the 3rd week in July.)

Hello hello hello,

To quote one of your other fans, “I have a question for you about writing”. I find that my own writing will echo the style of which ever author I am currently reading. Any idea how I might get around constantly mimicking others?

You write more.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying other people's styles -- it's a skill you'll need, after all. Many actors begin as mimics. You don't worry about it, and keep writing, and after a while you'll have written enough that you can't help sounding like yourself, whether you want to or not.

Style is what you get wrong, that makes what you do sound like you. Style is what you can't help doing. Style is what you're left with.

(I just googled "style is what you can't help doing" because it sounded half-familiar, and I wondered who said it originally, and discovered that it may actually have been me, as I found myself looking at an extract from a speech I gave to an audience of comics artists and writers in 1997 at ProCon in Oakland:

We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there’s a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.

I don’t want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. "Be you." "Be the best you that you can be." But this is really important. It’s something that we mostly lose track of when we starts, because when we start in comics we’re kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.

Young artists want to be Rob Leifeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont or, well, Frank Miller. You’ve seen their portfolios. You’ve read the scripts.

We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that one-one else could have done, but you. Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art-school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave’s paintings—"That’s a really good Bob Peake," he said. "But why would you I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peake."

You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Leifeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no-one wants a bargain basement Rob Leifeld clone any more. Learn to draw like you. And as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help but tell, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world. It’s the point I think of writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.

Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you’ll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don’t worry about whether you’re "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

If you believe in it, do it. If there’s a comic or a project you’ve always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you’ll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.

And it's still true. (That speech is, along with another speech about tulips and comics, and an essay on how to do successful signings, available in Gods And Tulips, illustrated by Chester Brown, price $3 from the CBLDF commercial website.)(And for those of you after instant webby gratification, the whole Procon speech is up at the Magian Line archives at http://www.woxberg.net/gaiman/magian/3-2.html. But the CBLDF Neil Gaiman store one has a pretty Mike Kaluta cover of me being dead on it. And it's cheap...)

Like I need more work...

... but I need something to avoid work, so y'all can help. I got some feedback that has me pondering Breadbox Editions and what I could do with them in the future. I might go back and catch a few back episodes when the Muse ~~bitchslaps~~ strikes me, but nothing's calling to me at the moment.

I keep saying I'm going to do Ark of Truth. I think I could get pages out of Teal'c's "The Hill's Are Alive with the Sound of Helicopters Filming This, It Costs So Much, Let's Use It For the Opening Credits" thing, with a Teal'c version of Shaft as the soundtrack, but... meh. I think a lot will hinge on whether or not Continuum turns out to be a total Temporal Wankfest or not. I'm still undecided if that's good or not. Good movie or good parody material? There really shouldn't have to be a choice.

I've also done parodies of the craptastically bad Sumuru and Mega Snake (glad you got your work visa, Michael; I got brain bleach!), and I know many of our other Stargate alumni have done many craptastic films too, and I don't want them feeling left out.

The one that jumps out at me is Hewlett's Boa vs. Python, and no, it's not only because I like the longer hair, scruff and David dripping wet. Well, not only because. It's the kind of schlocky movie that's funny because it's pretending to be serious while not taking itself seriously. And I could totally get a trilogy claim out of it with Sumuru and Mega Snake also having giant snakes in them. But Betty wins, hands down, tail down, whatever.

Any other title suggestions out there to toss at the feet of the Muse? Keep in mind these criteria:

Is it on DVD or ::ahem:: otherwise accessible for easy rewatching?
Is it a so-bad-in-a-trainwreck sort of way movie? You just can't help but watch, even as you can practically hear your own brain cells dying.
If it's really supergross horror, um, I might have to pass, kthxbye. Some things don't bother me (I've watched Aliens eleventy billion times, and not because Michael Biehn is hot like a hot thing), but blood and guts horror is a no-fly zone. Nialla does not want to be having nightmares while trying to write parody, 'K?
Does the Stargate alumni survive a significant portion of the movie? Very critical here, as many of them have had their roles cut short (in half, you might say in some cases *g*) and/or are only in a scene or two. The more time and dialogue they have, the more the Stargate Fan Movie Nite can do with it. If they're a monster snack before the opening credits roll, it's probably not a good candidate.

Titles? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Let me put a caveat on this by saying not to expect anything in the immediate future, because I've got multiple work projects this summer (summer reading and giant killer book sale, OMFGPanix), and at least two con trips (Is it Shore Leave yet? [pause] Is it now?).

Writing one of these actually takes quite a bit of prep if you're starting from the ground floor, so if a movie you'd like to suggest has a transcript online somewhere, that makes it a lot easier than having to transcribe it while translating it into parody. I already have one for Boa vs. Python. [points and laffs at eviljr, who never realized her hard work was going to enable me to commit parody]

Hello! I've um... actually been lurking around for quite a while now... ehehehe...

In anycase I found this over at

cat_macros! It's just cute so I thought I'd show it to you guys ^^

( cut just in case the picture is too big ^^ )

To my Olde Lady.
Dear Enid Olde Lady,

I so adore you and I'm glad I rescued you from certain death and took you home to live with me. I have one request, though: Please stop peeing on stuff. I know you're a good kitty, you love lap cruising when the roomies and I are sitting around, you don't freak out and attack us, but the peeing has got to stop. I'm not sure what your issue is with the bed in the guest room, but that's not your litter box and neither is the rug in the band room. I love you dearly and I wish I could spend all my days just cuddling you, but please keep your waste limited to the litter box.

Your loving mommy,
A.

Current Mood: calm

Captive giant pandas found safe in China

http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/05/captive-giant-p.html

After that devastating earthquake, that's some good news, People. News via CNN.

This can only mean more snow rolling in preparation for the Olympics.

Su playing in the snow, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

Su really loves snow!, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

Yoga Master, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

Hilarious Su Lin, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

Rolling around in the snow, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

That's one happy panda!!, originally uploaded by kjdrill.

New Soylent Screen Up!
Two reviews in a row where I actually liked the movie!

Read my review of The Descent at Blood Blade and Thruster.

alienz be aductin meh!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/289791395/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=51210

kitty

alienz be aductin meh! HALP!

alienz awlso liek turtels 2.

picture: Junku. lol caption: greydragoness

» Recaption This

Whaaaaat's uuuuuuuuuuup

http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/05/whaaaaats-uuuuu.html

Seriously, what's aaaap. Oh, and pass me a beer.

TimesOnlineUK Slide show, that's what!

Searching for a lost fic!
I don't remember the author or the title of the fic, and I really should have saved it when I found it before... I'm a bad person. v___v'' Anyway, what I remember of it was that Crowley had gone to the trenches in WWI with orders to get as many of them hell-bound as possible. He had a bit of a tough time with it, though, for personal reasons, and when he came back he stayed with Aziraphale for a while. The big thing I remember is that when he came back he went to take a bath and kept thinking that his hands were still filthy, and he had a Macbeth-complex kind of thing going on until Aziraphale stopped him. Does it ring any bells for anyone? ^__^''

Dear Lyric and Lyre,

Welcome to the family! I know you're still a bit scared of me since I just adopted you today, but I promise I'm not trying to scare you. Give me a chance, and I promise to give you your space while you get used to a new place. And about locking you in the bathroom while I went to work - that is not going to continue forever, hopefully not for long at all. However the first several times you explore my apartment I want to be with you, not stuck at work. I have a day off on Friday. After that we'll see if I still the need to put you in there a bit longer or not. I did provide you with a bed, toys, food, water, and a litter box in the bathroom though. It can't be that bad in there.

To Lyre specifically: you seem a lot braver than your sister, and you let me pet you more. Please tell her it's okay to come out of hiding, and that she doesn't have to jump every time I reach my hand out.

I love both of you, and I am thrilled to have cats living with me again.
-Your Food Provider

Butter Bombs

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2008/05/13/butter-bombs/

The main thing I want to say about Playing with Your Food is to please use it. Following on from this please post about using it.* My recipes tend to be full of rather personal asides about my experience of making whatever it is; I would be very happy to see more comments about other people’s experiences about following (or not following) recipes: mine, theirs, and everyone else’s. It is another universal law that cookbooks leave important things out–especially important things about the variability of cooking: barring some acknowledgement of high altitude adjustments, recipes are almost always presented as This Is The Way It Is. Not necessarily. And a corollary to this law is that cookbook writers don’t answer their mail. Well, I can’t blame them, I can’t keep up with my book mail either. But you do sometimes want to know if they meant 1 c of orange juice and 2 c of mashed strawberries in the modest little loaf of quick bread? Or maybe they grow very dry strawberries in their country?

But here we are on a blog or blogs, live, lively, infinitely add-on-able and discussable. And so I hope we will take advantage. How wet are your strawberries? Everybody’s Ingredients Are A Little Bit Different. As I wrote to the Five Heroines a few days ago as we were hustling PWYF the last few tweaks toward opening, when I first moved to England I couldn’t make bread. The flour over here is different and doubtless the yeast and the water are too. I adapted, but it was hellishly unsettling: not being able to make bread was not being me, and there was already too much of that going on with the whole emigration performance. And if what’s in your cookbook doesn’t work, how do you learn to do something you’ve never done before and none of your friends have either? On a blog you can say, help, what did I do wrong? I don’t know if this is practical or not, but one potential new answer to lonely culinary failure out of a book is to ask if anybody out there has a recipe for orange-strawberry bread that works.**

I’m also hoping sooner or later to have a cooking links list–the Five Heroines and I started to discuss this but I think it got lost in the melee–although what the parameters are I haven’t yet decided; there are millions of cooking sites out there and I want a list that will be fun to explore, not that will scare you out of trying.*** But if you have any special, special favourites, either hug them to you for now till we (which is to say I) get a little more organised, or send them along and resign yourself that you’ll probably have to send them again after I lose them. I have started a list, so I do have a place to keep them.

I’m also hoping to have a favourite cookbooks list eventually too. Er, um, have I mentioned that one of the Heroines has also begun to organise Pollyanna’s booklist over on librarything? She is, of course, waiting for my input, but now that PWYF is running maybe I’ll finally get over there to look. The cookbook list may end up there with a link to PWYF . . . or maybe the other way around . . . as Calvin and Hobbes would say, The Days Are Just Packed. Of course Calvin and Hobbes would also say, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.†

* * *

I changed my mind. There are pudding/dessert/sweet recipes that do not contain chocolate that you still, if you are The Right Sort of Person, want to have available to cherish your friends and confound your enemies with.†† This is one of those recipes. It’s a fairly hoary classic so all you dedicated bakers out there will already have versions of it yourselves, but it’s a bit like literary clichés: they got to be clichés for a reason, and it’s nice to see them dusted off and properly applied occasionally. These also make a rather elegant plateful and my kind of cooking is short on elegance. My kind of life is short on elegance but again, occasionally, it’s nice to be able to lay it on.

My original recipe was given to me by a wise and kindly older woman††† when I was still fairly early days in the kitchen; indeed I have quite a few fine old classic recipes from her‡, many of which you will eventually see. I don’t know where she got her Butter Bomb‡‡ recipe from from but mine has oozed on anyway, especially in the matter of frosting. I like generosity in frosting. It’s one of the failures of British culture that the average layer cake tends to have a bit of filling and a meagre scrape of frosting over the top and the sides are left entirely bare. However we will address the cake question another day.

Butter Bombs

1 c (slightly salted) butter

1/3 c confectioner’s/icing sugar

Scant ¾ c corn starch/ corn flour

Rounded 1 c sifted white (wheat) flour

Cream butter and sugar vigorously and thoroughly. Then add corn whatever and flour and mix again very thoroughly. If you have time, you can chill it for a couple of hours before you handle it, but in the first place I never have the time and in the second place why? When you first take it out of the refrigerator it’s so stiff you can’t shape it, it breaks. And after you’ve wasted time trying to make it do what you want it to, it comes back to room temperature and you might as well not have bothered anyway.

Shape it into about 50 tiny heaps on a parchment-paper-lined cookie sheet. They don’t spread, so you can crowd them. I get them all on one sheet. Bake 350° F about 15 minutes, till the bottoms are light brown (this is why parchment paper is good. They may brown too quickly on a naked metal cookie sheet although with all that butter in them they certainly don’t stick).

Let cool and then frost:

3T melted butter

1 ½ c icing sugar

1 ½ tsp real vanilla essence

Mix. You may need to add up to about a spoonful (your mixing spoon, approximately) of milk to make it spreadable. Don’t let it get runny, but these cookies are fairly soft, so you need soft frosting or they crumble.

Frost lavishly.

* * *

* Where things get posted I’m sure is going to get messy. The idea is that original recipes still come here, to Days in the Life, first, and are then copied over into Playing with Your Food. This is in the ‘How it Works’ page. The purpose is that I still want to be able to use recipes as entries.^ Comments on individual recipes after comments here have closed down should attach to the recipe over at PWYF. Comment threads on PWYF stay open indefinitely.

^Days in the Life is a lot of work, you know. I can use all the breaks I can contrive.

** Yes.

*** All right, you should know by now, I scare easily. But the day only has twenty four hours, etc.

† Just another approach to Baked Alaska.

†† Be sure to have the tea party in the front room and leave the curtains open so the latter can languish pathetically in full view of what they are denied.

††† Who was, furthermore, a perfectly normal weight. Now I wish I could ask her if she had any Secrets for Surviving Menopause. Did she have chocolate cravings all the time? Did looking at a slice of buttered toast^ make her gain 1.46 pounds?

^ And just forget the marmalade. Lovely, lovely marmalade, Peter used to make it every February, and I used to help chop. He chopped the rind much too coarsely–and short too, like chopping onions. You want long, slender ribbons of peel. Oh, gods, just remembering Peter’s marmalade is making my belt tighter. . . .

‡ Most of them high-value sugar-shock. See previous footnote.

‡‡ Although almost the first thing I did is rename them.

3:00 snapshot, #305

Ben Bernanke: the music video

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nfsb5HUFMQ0

I'm not sure if this will be better if you haven't seen the original video or not. Either way, enjoy.

Now here's a revolutionary I think we can ALL cheer.
India's green revolutionary back in spotlight
May 12, 2008 - 1:44PM
Source: ABC
Forty years after he helped rescue the world from growing famine and a deepening gloom over the future of food supplies, Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is once again agitating for revolution - this time a perpetual one.

The 82-year-old scientist, dubbed the father of the Green Revolution for helping develop a hybrid wheat seed that allowed Indian farmers to dramatically increase yields, says the current food crisis offers the world a chance to put farmers on the right road to unending growth.

In the 21st century's "Evergreen Revolution", as he calls it, conservation farming and green technology will bring about sustainable change that could allow India to become an even bigger supplier of food to the world.
( The rest behind a cut for length )

I was especially interested in the text I have bolded, the first (ETA: and best) rational criticism of genetically modified crops I have ever seen. All this "Franken-food" scaremongering crap just pisses me off.

Hats off to this guy - we need more of him.

I don't normally steal content from the New Yorker, but...

Phew!

Oscar!
Stop biting your brother on the butt! The vet was not amused!
<3
Mum

Babb Winner
The winner of the Fifth Babb Macro Contest is

canadian_plant with this Happi macro.

Go forth and pay homage!

Current Mood: creative

Part CLVI - head over hills
Don`t forget about the the Fifth Babb Macro Contest.

(link)
(from the author`s notes)
So I thought I'd give you a hand and tell you beforehand how they're pronounced.
Pandora - pan-door-uh (Pandiie for short)
Aphrodesia - afro-day-she-uh (Sia for short)
Belladonna - bell-uh-don-uh (Bella for short)
Arebelle - air-uh-bell (Arrie for short)
( Read more... )

Current Mood: scared a quarter to death
Current Music: Bella reciting her love poem