potentiality_26

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

I definitely came up in the "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" school of thought, so the idea of Dating Myself in this fashion is a little scary, but you know what? Let's do this, it'll be fun.

So it all started when I went to boarding school at fourteen. Before that the internet was both a wild confusing place and a boring slog because of dial-up -- but at school I had my own laptop, a class on how to use it, and fast internet. Now I don't remember how I ended up there, but my first fannish activities were those personality quizzes -- like, "Which [fandom] character are you?" but also "Which pairing are you?" Initially these were Harry Potter Quizilla quizzes, but I also remember a Les Miserables website with them that I spent a huge amount of time on. Anyway, I didn't know fanfiction was a thing until one of the quizzes had the question, "Where do you read fanfiction?" And I was like, "???" and ended up on good ol' Fanfiction.net where I read and eventually wrote some stories for -- this will shock you -- Harry Potter and Les Miz.

After a while I didn't use it much anymore, and also I was hiding from an HP chapterfic I had started posting but was never gonna finish (equally shocking, I'm sure), so I let it lapse for a couple of years and I don't connect myself with the FF.net account anymore. (In the extremely unlikely circumstance that you can find said account based on this information, no you can't).

I was in college and the throes of a Stargate obsession when I started my livejournal, and I still use the same default icon I opened that account with to this day. I made it in about ten minutes and it shows, but I can't seem to part with it. That is My Face on the Internet.

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

This is a tough one since I don't often talk about personal stuff on here, so I did as the post suggested and used this random question generator to make a set. 

( Enjoy these puzzle peices from my brain... )

 

That was fun, actually!
  

Hi everyone!

I know I was MIA for a while long before things started to get weird, but current events have really been kicking my ass.  I won't go into too much detail for those who come here wanting to avoid it, but I will say that I'm currently doing okay in all ways except psychologically.  I've let a lot of things slide and it's definitely made me feel worse instead of better, so I'm trying to get back on the social media horse in order to feel less isolated. 

How are you all doing?
  

So I was in a department store the other day, and there was a song playing.  I didn't recognize it but i liked it, so as you do I tried to pick out some lyrics so I could find it again.  I didn't manage it until later that day, and judging from the lyrics and my general memory, I'm pretty sure it was "Bad Moon" by Hollywood Undead.

BUT the song I heard was definitely sung by a woman, slower tempo, and more... pop-y, I guess, than the Hollywood Undead version even though, again, judging by the lyrics I thought it was the song.  So then I figured it was a cover, but no amount of searching has turned up such a cover.  I've found five thousand versions of "Bad Moon Rising" by CCR, but this "Bad Moon" song?  Nope.  And I haven't been able to find anything else with similar lyrics, either. 

Anybody heard of a song like this?  Because right now my theories are basically:

a) The store was playing an obscure cover for some reason, like from someone local, or

b) Mandela Effect type shit happened to me a few days ago.  
  

So...

1) I saw an ad for "Soylent Squared" (protein bars, I guess they are?) and spent the longest time going "is this a joke? or are these people not aware of Soylent Green?"  Now possibly soylent as a name for protein bars predates Soylent Green (possibly it's soy + lentil, I'm not curious enough to check) but like... maybe don't call it that lol?

2) I may have complained about summer too soon.  It's frickin' snowing. 
  
3) The 'e' on my keyboard has gotten weird.  Even the smallest pressure and there'll be six e's.  None of the other keys do it, just that one.
  

I’ve been struggling to post something this week.  I was going to write about episode one of the Les Miserables miniseries now that PBS is airing it, but “is this less good than other adaptations of its kind or am I just bitchy about Les Miz?” isn’t much of an update. 

So anyway.  Here's a post about baking instead. 

I really think bakers make people scared of baking.  Yes, you do have to have a pretty good understanding of how ingredients come together before you can experiment much, but this insistence that unless you follow recipes exactly and measure perfectly it will All Go Wrong is just... a terrible way to get people interested in baking. 

Case in point: I made a chocolate bundt cake the other day and did basically everything wrong. 

The recipe called for creaming butter and sugar, which means room temperature butter.  The cake was an impulse decision, so not only did I not have room temperature butter, I had frozen butter.  No problem, toss it in the microwave.  This part actually went fine; I’m good at getting softened butter without melting it even in the microwave.  But then I got carried away and used all the nice softened butter I had come up with.  That was about four tablespoons more (half a stick) more than the recipe called. 

But I kept going, figuring that since the recipe called for sour cream later I could take the amount out of the sour cream and not destabilize the recipe too much.  The dry ingredients I mixed together and didn’t really fuss with.  But then I had too little brown sugar.  I figured I’d make up the amount in white sugar, added some of that, started to add the rest, decided it was too much sugar, and stopped.  I was supposed to add a full tablespoon of vanilla, but vanilla is expensive now so I used just a teaspoon, and then a full tablespoon of Kahlua because I felt like it.  I had the wrong kind of cocoa, and the wrong kind of chocolate, but I used both anyway.  I used brewed coffee instead of hot water and espresso powder, and yogurt instead of sour cream.  The recipe called for five eggs and at this point I’d gone mad with power so I only added three. 

And my bundt pan was too small, so I filled it about a third of the way (not knowing how much this monstrosity would grow) and then put the rest in a loaf pan.  The batter was quite thick when it was all mixed together- think soft serve ice cream- and I expected the cake to be dry, so after baking I put a ganache glaze on instead of powdered sugar.

But you know what?  That cake was great.  It wasn't dry at all- it was moist and super soft.  The yogurt brought out a fruitiness in the chocolate that was lovely.  It was a really good cake, is my point.  I shared the bundt cake with people and put the loaf cake in the freezer for another time.  I think I’ll try that with a caramel sauce instead of ganache at some point- the flavor of the cake really reminded me of the dark chocolate-salted caramel combo you find in some candy bars and I think it would work. 

I’m planning to make this cake again on purpose next time to see if I can streamline it more, but as it is I'm pretty proud of myself.    

Personal hopes for 2017? (from verdande_mi)

I'm hoping to sell some writing this year- maybe just short stories, maybe something more- or at least make more progress than I have in that direction.  I applied for a writing fellowship during the fall to that end.  I won't get results until April, and it's really a long shot so I probably didn't get in, but... yeah, that would be really cool too.

I still have plenty of room for more questions on this meme, by the way.  Send me some more here if you like!
   

So I got a 24 hour flu.  I still feel a little icky, but it's mostly gone now.  But since I did get a vaccination I definitely feel betrayed.

Ugh.
 

You know I try to avoid too many rl posts, and I'm putting this one under a cut so I don't make anyone who's having a rough day anyway sad.

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