This journal is now largely public. About half of my posts are about Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls (ABJDs), and the other half are about random things like books, art, and knitting. All BJD posts are filtered - comment if you would like to be added to the filter. Comments to this entry are screened.

Thank you!

Don't these look 1. interesting and 2. nommable? I spotted them growing at the base of an oak tree on campus last year (yep, once again I'm epically slow in editing photos). They're chanterelles, which are in fact edible, but I didn't learn that till after the fact. Oh well.

( a few more, plus randomness )

and all the fairy ladies dig her. :B

Crossing my fingers that I'll have the chance to recolor her sometime because lol wtf. Doing some stuff again for the children's library, whee.

Moth enjoys flowers, so of course a mum-filled October calendar page appealed to her. :3

I've missed taking photos for fun, and the light lately has been perfect for photos that don't need any fussing in Photoshop, which are my favorite kind.

( other little things for a happy autumn )

stolen from here
How cute/amazing are these little fellows? They're Clione limacina, a species of sea angel, which is a type of mollusk (specifically, gastropods). We learned about their motor system today, in the class that's my current favorite (integrated dynamics of animal behavior, ahhhhh so cool!). There's a good amount of useful information and several more photos in the blog post where I found the above image.

Fly, little sea angels!

Separately, my roommate sent me this mind-boggling, astounded-gaze-inspiring Wired feature about unusual cloud formations:


Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them

Yes, I has an addiction. My lovely roommate modeled for me this time, which made things 100x easier, too. Click for 'em on Etsy

This semester has been weirdly busy, in part because I've been absurdly indecisive about classes, but I think I'm settled now. (Corollary: Sorry I haven't been keeping up with the f-list; I've been doing the whole reading-but-not-commenting thing.) So many good bio classes this semester! I haven't been back to lab yet, but I have been nibbling at my poetry thesis here and there (when I finally meet my adviser next Wednesday, I might ask her about sneaking in some fiction too), so overall things are looking... okayish. Although I am already massively in sleep debt. lol.

I've been reading from Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, which is cool as all get out. I can see now why my roomie is so obsessed with science writing - I haven't really read anything beyond actual papers and the occasional NYT Science article. :X So reading whole chapters of stuff you're meant to actually understand without reams of background reading and side discussion is pretty refreshing. Makes me wish I were actually good at math, too. oh you rakish biological mathematicians, with your proofs and models!

Today I sat in on one of my roomie's classes (American Women Writers), for the purpose of listening to her professor lecture on Twilight. (She paused at one point and murmured, "This book makes my head hurt.") Fanfreakingtastic stuff. I promised fairnymph a while ago that I would try to pull together an essay on the eroticism of vampires, and the last 10 minutes of the lecture were basically that. *clings to her notes* It was all too glorious! I wonder if she's ever taught a vampire fiction course? xenophobia! class/race tension! queerness galore! Also glorious. Also also, it totally made my day that she referred to "fantasy literature" and "vampire literature."

Also also also, at the end of the class I was writing so quickly that I spelled Edward as "Edwad," which only seems appropriate.

The weather has been sunny and perfect, low 70's to low 80's. But all the bees have mysteriously vanished already, which is strange and upsetting, especially given that the obedient plants are still blooming. There are still a couple of syrphid flies, small butterflies, and skippers hitting up the marigolds and remaining thyme and chamomile blossoms, but they've been ignoring the obedient plants for the most part. ???

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I dunno if anyone likes recipes (errr, scylladakylla, I guess?), but here's an extremely vague approximation of the potato and string bean salad. All of the vegetable amounts are highly adjustable depending on what you like, so I basically made up the numbers below.

- 4 cups potato (russet potatoes are prettiest, since they match the onion and contrast with the beans :P but any type works)
- 1-2 cups string beans
- ~1/4 of a medium red onion
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup vinegar (any type works - balsamic is great)
- Black pepper
- Any herbs you like (I used rosemary, thyme, and chives)
- Several garlic cloves (I actually used pickled garlic because that's what we happened to have)
- ~1 tsp salt, if you want

1. Cut the potatoes into eighths, then into half-inch slices.
2. Cut the string beans into about inch-long pieces.
3. Dice the onion.
3. Boil the potatoes for 10 minutes.
4. Add the string beans and onion to the pot, continue boiling for 5 minutes.
5. Mince the garlic cloves.
6. For the dressing, whisk the olive oil, vinegar, pepper, herbs, garlic, and optional salt together.
7. Take the vegetables off the heat and drain. Let cool for a couple minutes, then transfer by portions into a large dish, adding a little dressing to each portion and mixing as you go.
8. Serve warm or cold.

Uh, obviously it's all stupidly easy, and you could easily substitute frozen green beans if you can't get any fresh ones... the only part that I think you could mess up is overcooking the potatoes, which I did once when I didn't have enough room to chop the string beans quickly enough. It just turns out as mashed potato salad that way, which tastes fine anyway.

Which quirky, gangly, gayish, usually floppy-red-headed, violin-wielding musician is quirkier, ganglier, more gayish, more usually floppy-red-headed, and more adroitly violin-wielding?


Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy)

- or -


Patrick Wolf?

( more, purely for my amusement )

Once upon a time, I hated New York, but that's only because I didn't know how to get anywhere. :P I went to the Met a few weeks earlier with aihre (!), but went again this weekend with some of my roommates, none of whom had been before. This time I got to hit up the Asian art galleries, the Greek & Roman sculpture gallery, the Africa & Oceania travelling exhibit (magnificently eerie - we saw a hollow-bottomed spirit canoe crewed by spirits, including an immortal turtle and a "malicious, Z-shaped water spirit" - !!!), and the modern art gallery. Then we got exhausted and scurried away to eat and look at pretty clothes.



( Inspiring things, and yummy things )

Unrelatedly, knitting YoSD scarves reeeeally makes me want to pick up some sets of sock-sized double-pointed needles...

At least in Retailville it is. Moar Modcloth ogling. *shrug*


( Two more )

And I have a new layout, yay! Courtesy refuted. It's so hard to find layouts that aren't utterly messed up by the presence of horizontal photos, and I always have to go into the CSS to change the font sizes, at the risk of going blind otherwise.

I haven't been drawing that much again... whoops. Too many other things to do! (For example, someone commissioned another Dr. Who scarf. *head-->desk*) This is from the beginning of summer. It's still available on Etsy, also. Excuse my blatant self-promotion.

Ganked from sailorpenguinz.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly, CLEVERLY, answer these questions. Do not repeat a song title. There is no try.

Pick Your Artist: Patrick Wolf

Are you male or female: A Boy Like Me [...whoops.]

( Continues to be 50% nonsensical )

It was only so long before my glove-making addiction and my ruffles-and-buttons addiction made friends. Yarn by sqwish, vintage mother-of-pearl buttons. Totally indulged myself in the materials on this one, really.

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Firefox-window-shopping on Modcloth. don't mind meeeee



( bubblegum pie, YUM )

Sum up your day in the form of a haiku. Submitted By cpnspuff View 505 Answers

Experiments failed.
I annoyed my professor.
I'm really hungry.

ganked from stereophilic! I haven't done a meme in forever. In fact I think I accidentally deleted my memes tag the last time I was cleaning up my posts, so I might as well never have done any, ever. XP

I had previously mentioned a Big Project that was coming close to fruition - the moment has come to unveil it. :X For the past month and a bit, my partner-in-crime stuffu and I have been working quietly on TheBlackLetters.net, our joint literary blog and general celebration of all things bibliophilic.

As you probably know, we both read a lot, in pretty much every genre (although we're especially heavy on fantasy, sci-fi, and graphic novels), so we'll be filling up the blog with plenty of interesting material; we already have a good smattering of posts to give a taste of things to come. We'll mainly be featuring book reviews, but we'll also have reviews of bookstores and book and author events, fun literary links, and discussion and analysis. In the future we hope to feature author interviews and other such tidbits.


click me!

Take a look if you have the chance; we really appreciate any looks, links, or comments. Hopefully some of you will enjoy this! And thank you - this is our baby and we're way excited to send it out into the world. ;o;

This morning, I

• Ate a cookie and a plum for breakfast
• Went to work late
• Accidentally woke up a squirrel that was sleeping on its belly in a sunbeam

Summer rainstorms make rainbows and amazing sunsets:



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Hmmm... Flight of the Conchords are on repeat in the background, all is well with the world.

These were a slightly belated b-day present for my sushi connoisseur brother. Awesome or what? Made by DirtyAssSoaps @ Etsy, who also does insane waffle, peanut butter cup, NES controller, etc. soaps, many of which I have witnessed firsthand. (get it? get it?)

Ahem.