is a blog by Brendan
Spurred by my threat to kill off Marlo and saved from the LJ feed, Ben bends Anacrusis to his will:
Suddenly Millicent started moving again!
“Awwwww” said Cosette, lovingly. She squeezed her sweet adorable fuzzy wuzzy kitten with marble eyes tightly. Millicent purred.
Rob cheered up!
Holly cheered up too!
South settled down!
The Chosen Ones remained awesome!
The Justin finally defeated The Man!
Everyone danced for the next fifty words!
Last week, William challenged me over the Miranda story; took a while to figure this out, but I got it. Your serve, sir.
They don’t even check whether you’ve got an emergency shunt or cutout: either you do or you’re here because you don’t. Took Miranda months to find them. They don’t exactly advertise.
It smells like smoke and nerves. “Ready,” says the tech, then kicks the starter and scrambles back to his place in the circle. Miranda’s already got a sweaty hand in each of hers. The multiplier cycles up, rattling, as the tech leans forward for a bite of chocolate.
Overload. Miranda gasps in joy, in pain, in joy, in /
/ the bathroom, at home, Zeke shakily cuts her ring off his finger.
UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:
Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.
The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.
And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.
There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?
The Mayan Gypsy, probably our favorite restaurant, gets a nice writeup from the deplorably-named Louisville HotBytes (the closest thing we have to a Zagat’s). The critic (Paige A. Moore, according to the reprint in LEO) even praises the famous Beef and Shrimp Diablo.
Man, we haven’t been back there in a while. Want to take some guests next weekend, Maria?
Will trashes Lyle’s assumptions with another sequel from the LJ comment feed:
“Elaine groans as the dripping ceiling becomes a trickle onto her math homework: melting clouds are not conducive to learning. She hasn’t actually gone to classes in two weeks, though; hasn’t gone outside. She’s afraid of what’s up there. Or what might be up there.
When the wall between her burrow and the next collapses Elaine builds a fort out of borrowed furniture, reads by the weird light of a shard of broken sky. This lasts two days, until Dave asks for his sofa cushions back–and by that time she needs to use the bathroom anyway.
She looks up, gasps:”
OKAY LISA, my first Flickr set is up. Apparently I do not have very steady hands!
I made brownie pie and we ate Spinelli’s. DC and Beth got me a book and a bunch of great Actors Theatre stuff, and Yale got me some stuff he found in his car, and he, Ken, Kyle, Scott, Lisa, Monica, Mom, Ian, Maria’s family and especially Maria got me a present I would never have let myself buy: a real camera.
Thanks, ballers.
Saved from the LJ comment feed, here’s William’s follow-up to Winter:
Spring falls hard, sprawls awkwardly on the ground. “Goddamn it,” he mutters. Then louder, to the air in general, “this better not set a theme!”
Caleb helps him up, his face full of apology. Spring swats him away, muttering about ‘respect’ and ‘kids these days’. He brushes the dew from his trousers and winces.
“Are you okay?” asks Chyler.
Spring doesn’t respond: he’s just noticed the stains on his suit. He looks like he’s about to have kittens.
After about a second, they realise he’s forgotten they’re there. They hurry off, feeling slightly uneasy.
“Aw, man,” Spring mourns. “These were new.”
I am a big fan of refurbished electronics and appliances, despite the fact that they are maybe the worst things to get refurbished (rapid depreciation, complicated things that if they broke once, etc). I also display a startling brand loyalty to KitchenAid. Thanks to Simply Recipes, I found a refurbished, fairly high-end KitchenAid blender on Amazon for less than half price, with free shipping. You can guess the result.
Tuesday everybody brought stuff to try in smoothies, and Wednesday Maria and I experimented with chocolate pseudomalts and strawberry-orange slushies. Last night I found it difficult to establish a decent texture for a real milkshake; Maria found recommendations online that say if you’re using skim milk (we do), stick it in the freezer for ten minutes first. I firmly intend to do so.
Basically, I’ve enabled myself to drink ice cream. If I were a betting man, and I were in a boxing match against getting fat? I would put my money on getting fat.
Sometimes, awesome things happen! One such thing is Mr. Andy H.’s timeline of the Holly stories, which is really more complete than it should be. I consider it totally canon (your personal canon may vary), with one minor exception: Holly and Rose aren’t trying on bras, exactly. More the opposite.
Thanks, Andy!