Cool pix – Allegra Sloman's blog

fun pics

These are from RD Tool https://karlsims.com/rdtool.html

like a hand grasping limitless space

The pillars of creation: (click to embiggen)

don’t break the internet while I’m gone

7539 words, no kudos. Felt absolutely terrible yesterday until just before supper time, at which time I felt much better (I’m assuming it was food rumblies based on, er, throughput and truly remarkable pain) and I’ve felt better ever since. Got my prescriptions delivered and we paid our rent. I also fell for NO FEWER THAN three April fool’s jokes, I must have looked batty to my friends.

For the first time since I stopped withdrawing money from what’s left of my retirement savings, the dollar amount has gone down. THANKS VLAD YOU ASSHOLE

Theo Moudakis of the Toronto Star made this thing:

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws. (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last. Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’ migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

Sleep’s messed up

Off to the library to pick up a book I reserved in July, lol. I was, like, 85th in line.

Galileo drew these after his first glimpse of a moon through a telescope.

The Ukrainian tax office, taking a leaf from its comedian president, has issued a statement about the tax implications of acquiring a Russian tank. Don’t worry, they assure the populace; by the time you get it, it’s not worth much (implication being that it’s been blown to pieces) and it’s not considered a taxable good. Full marks for straight faced ludic nonsense.

More reports of Russians refusing to fight, but the big news is the lengthy file of tanks, half tracks and trucks going into Kyiv, and not moving. Apparently supply is an issue, but what I keep hearing is that Russian boys are holing their gas tanks for the privilege of staying put.

The Russian military is using vacuum bombs (thermobaric bombs) on civilian areas. Mostly people have evacuated but not everyone can. These are bombs that basically turn everything to mush and fix it so even if you’re protected by a wall or building your lungs get mushed.

Reports are overwhelming that Black people who were going to school in Ukraine (a popular destination for med and engineering students from Africa) are being refused entry, food and medical attention at the Polish and Romanian borders. Some of the stories are nauseating and heart-wrenching.

One of the self-funded reporters in Kyiv is a Black man from Chicago, Terrell Jermaine Starr. The amount of racist abuse he’s getting in Kyiv (there are civilians with guns everywhere in town and Ukraine is just as racist as anywhere else) is still less than the fucking bullshit that racist armchair pundit warriors are giving him on twitter. Anyway, we’re into our seventh day of the invasion, and he says he has PTSD already and people MOCKED HIM. Like wtf you got brain maggots er what? If someone shoved a gun in my face I’d be unhappy, and if ten seconds later that gun went off (not pointed at me) because the civilian left the safety off, that would definitely fix me for not sleeping soundly for the next little while.

1594 words so far on the new story, one little kudo last night on the second last story.

Must finish leftovers! No more cooking til leftovers done!!

A link to Zelenskyy dancing with his comedy troupe in black pleather (as a parody, apparently) has caromed around the internet. Here’s the translation, scanged from u/viciuniversum on reddit, unitalicized words in brackets are the translator’s, italicized words in brackets are my explanatory notes:

“Let’s pour a shot of martini
Bud’mo hey! (Cheers!) (Bud’mo, pron bood mor LITERALLY MEANS LET US BE can you imagine being from a country whose nominal drink clinking words are literally ‘let us be’????)
For freedom, for destiny, for truth!
Bud’mo hey!
One shot, two shots, three shots!
Bud’mo hey! You are gay!
For Yura, for Yulya, dulya [hand gesture] for Lyashko! (saints and heros and politicians of yore)

Here’s my bulava (Ukrainian weapon and traditional symbol of power, a short handled round mace) my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites (Russians)
We will dance Gopak (Ukrainian national dance, began in 16th century, men returning from battle would re-enact and perform feats like the balletic leaps the dance is known for. Dance is also popular in other slavic countries), we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we keep drinking well:
Borsht, salo (smoked pig fat), onion, bread, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

Lovers,
Those who were sent here (spies),
They are covered in glitter,
We spit on them.
Artists, stylists, move aside [can’t tell]
Lip-stick, gay-parades, and in Rada (Ukrainian parliament) everyone is like that.
I don’t want to, I can’t, but for salo, let’s do it.

Here’s my bulava my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites
We will dance Gopak, we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we have salo!
Borsht, salo, onion, horseradish, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

a couple of pics

someone pulled a Mantis on a piece of starbucks internal propaganda

Below is an ‘apartment for Yorkies’ put underneath the stairs in a house

where no good deed is punished HEY mOm

Jan says through Instagram OMG allegra.sloman This is the best package of fabric off cuts EVER! Holy crap, my brain is spinning with all the things I can do with these… thank you, my darling, for a much needed surprise and the excellent mood elation! So gorgeous and rich. I will do your mum proud.

And now I must ponder how to best utilize the space babes…

here’s the pic, photo credit J Maxwell, from instagram

Hey mOm isn’t that a little shot in the arm!? I decided I wasn’t going to do anything with and actually gave it to someone who could and the world is now officially a better place.

aw shucks there’s more

she says she’s rich with opulent schmatta, these fell behind a chair LOLOL how can you tell she’s my fRiend

Penrose tilings

I frequently repost mOm’s Penrose tiling comfort quilt

on social media. mOm secretly resents this but doesn’t complain because she’s not actually being injured also it gives me a thrill to see which of my friends likes it this time. I love how it’s mostly quite muted, but also BUSY.

Anyway, a whole documentary fan squee about Penrose tilings.

Destiel round up (pretend this is a Private post)

sane people, pls leave – this is in response to Despair ep 18 of the last season of Supernatural.

Original creator of the show Eric Kripke (at least I think that’s who it is) with a rainbow flag and the word COPE:

backstory for the above, fans who only like the relationship between the two Winchester brothers are called bibros. Having Cas (canonically his name is CASS but that’s not what we do in fandom, ha ha) an actual life partner – potentially or otherwise – is making them lose their cheese.

Jesus Christ this above noted post made me laugh so fucking hard

the below-noted post IS IMMEDIATELY WHERE MY MIND WENT AFTER THE SHOW WAS OVER

Yeah NO SHIT, love this callback, although Dean didn’t actually get enough time to say anything

no, I really haven’t, because that’s the kind of love it is, and always has been represented that way, and fuck the haters

now in the fandom they’re saying destiel is what makes Putin resign, which when you consider HOW MANY RUSSIAN FANS THERE ARE is quite possibly the funniest thing about this tempest in a teacup

above is shown the catholic reaction….

LOLOLOL this was the Friday after the show/election

SPN fandom above is memeified in the Avengers universe. Cas disappears during the scene, but he’s already been resurrected three times, so…

I think @solarbirdy’s comments on the above noted complete lack of reaction are best, but she’s a filker so I won’t reproduce her speech without permission

In other words, this represents such an upgrade to the notion of queerbaiting they’ll have to throw out their previous thesis. Also, Tumblr as a social media platform was dying and the extra hits they got as a consequence of Supernatural 15/18 were substantial

Destiel fans often refer to themselves as clowns.

the above-noted isn’t exactly what happened either

nope, not this either and anyone who DOES expect skin should probably give their good ol’ head a shake. I want A HUG FOR THE BOYS that means a little more than the ones they’ve given each other so far.

EVERY G.D. WORD O’ THIS ABOVENOTED POST

palate cleanser

LOOK UPON THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD, now we have to survive the next two months OH PS SHE’S OUT ABOUT BEING A SUPERNATURAL FAN but we do not know how she feels about destiel and I would very much like to think that she STANS.

WELL I THOUGHT THAT WAS IT, BUT THERE’S ANOTHER CHASER FOR THAT SHOT

JESUS CHRIST, THIS FANDOM

love this cartoon

@happyroadkill on twitter

@QueenLeets on twitter

Destiel fannage

Added later, watched the Supernatural from last night, it was adorable, there was just so much squee with the boys.

Mailed a letter to mOm and another to Barry. Yes I said I mailed it already. No I didn’t actually until now. Mild chest pain (completely normal at this point) on the way up the hill; the problem is that if I stop I fall down or want to, and it’s been raining, so no work in the garden. I think I’m going to have to get one of those stool canes. I had rocks to sit on in Mt. Seymour but they’re thin on the ground in urban settings. Best part of the walk was no mask.

I should walk some more later, perhaps I’ll be able to talk Jeff into coming. Maybe not so much hillage with the walkage

terrifying podcast about what canada should do in case of political instability before/during/after the election and during the transition period, if any.

This is absolutely terrible but it made me laugh.

Welp, I’m awake. Guess I’m having a cup of tea and some breakfast.

Had a nice long talk yesterday with my mOm about my medical woes. I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine; but my body fell apart after that infection in March, and there’s one symptom in particular that makes me think it’s post COVID, but I guess I’ll never know and should get right with not knowing, while I’m working on improving things.

Here’s Jan M. as a retail worker in 2020

She’s been posting costumes every day on her ‘gram, and some of them have been awesome, why she even did a Castiel the other day. AND I DEAD NOW

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Yesterday and today

I do believe you have to be human to die of COVID so I’m assuming most of these people are safe. Yes indeed Trump has tested positive for COVID. It’s the biggest security risk possible and Pence must be just drooling over how Trump could be permanently rendered unPresidential. I really only care about Stephen Miller. If I could publicly announce what I intend to do if he dies of COVID I’m not sure any of you would enjoy it. Trump needs to stay alive because Pence is worse.

Tom needs a heart valve. Schedule willing and the surgeon don’t catch COVID he’s having surgery next week. Tom is one of my favourite people and I like Peggy even more than that so the stress and confusion and foreboding they must be feeling is something else and I guess today is the day I get off my ass and make bikkies for Peggy.

I had a really productive day yesterday, (I pulled up the dead vines in the garden, still need to finish that) and wrote a letter to a family member and did a load of laundry and rehearsed on three instruments and worked more on You do me Wrong)) and then lost my cell phone. I mean I hiked a reasonably challenging trail with Paul, whose foot seems completely healed. It’s only 3 k, but we went to Goldie Lake, and I took some great pictures, and then somewhere between the last marker post and the parking lot I lost my phone.

Paul took pictures. I’ll keep bugging him until he answers.

somebody shot heroin in Mt Seymour Park I found the needle.

Did I mention in December we have to stop having that little rent break. It was only 25 bucks a month but there’s nothing like feeling you’re putting one over on your landlord.

Now I have to buy a pomodora clock and a proper alarm clock and go back to a paper/electric calendar. Life is twagic.

My phone was set to send me a notification of my meeting with the RN yesterday but it didn’t go off, and that’s another reason I’m glad I lost my phone.

I hated my phone because at this point 3/4 of my calls were spam or phishing texts or women exhorting me in Toisanese or Mandarin.

I’ve actually wanted to stop having that bill every month. Seventy bucks for shitty service and overages after 2 gigs, **** my **** and then there’s the issue of having a cop in my pocket.

I cancelled my service and had to deal with two humans over half an hour to make that happen. I changed the most important passwords just in case there’s something in my phone that will enable them to get my shit. So Google, the blog, my social media accounts…and I went very crunchy and hard and strong on the passwords this time.

Roses are red

Sydney’s in Australia

courtesy of @thesarahyork

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omg @Stonekettle on twitter this morning saying “If you want sympathy look in the dictionary between shit and syphilis” with respect to Trump’s positive COVID test.