Winter stew recipe #1 (yes, there are other stews ^^;)

If you've known me online for a while, you know how rare it is that I'd say something like this, but - it's kind of sad comment threads on lj_maintenance cannot be f_wanked, due to not being fandom-related strictly speaking.

(These days I tend to assume Livejournal == Fandom, The Thing Itself. But that's just my paradigmatic bias.)

For a change, food! I talk constantly about cooking for my friends but never post any recipes, due to the fact that I don't umm have or follow any recipes. ^^; Sometimes I print recipes out from the Internet and change half the ingredients. Then I have trouble remembering what I put in, since I do not really have a grasp on what constitutes a "cup" or a "tablespoon". I cannot bake for the life of me, as you can deduce. However the following is a sort of soup-stew. I made it at Justin's place a week ago. For the past several months we've been getting together loosely once a month in order to cook and talk about Deeply Pretentious Matters, the talk being triggered by the fact that we break out the bottle of wine as we're cooking, and there's typically a third of it left by the time we sit down to dinner.

( winter stew #1 )

Sometime that evening Justin quoted someone at me, I don't remember whom. "All true stories," he said, "end with death." I said that was very poetic, but from my writerly point of view not necessarily true: it depends on the scope of the story one sets out to tell. If one is telling the story of a life, then yes, it should end with death - or at a point after which nothing of importance happens to that character anymore. I don't think it's too optimistic to say that the two things are not one and the same.

ObFandom post of evening

( Narita Yuzuru is actually... )

Halfway through book 9. Plowed through the backstory concerning the slaughter of the Araki clan in the metro home, after a hearty dinner with Ced at Lola Rosa (cosy vegetarian student hangout near McGill, serves what turned out to be wonderfully flavoursome South American food and the best nachos of all time), and wished I didn't. Read it after dinner, that is. There would be more here about Yuzuru in books 6-8, including my fondness for Date Kojirou essentially because he ummm subconsciously reminds me of Yuuta out of Prince of Tennis which inevitably makes O-Ran Mizuki, which makes sense, and how T and I laughed ourselves into agony at that scene in the anime where Ranmaru "awakens" Yuzuru's powers because it was GAY SO GAY IT SHOULD BE AGAINST THE RULES FOR A SERIES WITH CANON M/M TO HAVE THAT KIND OF MISTAKEN ACCIDENTAL GAY IN IT, and the illo in the novel is almost worse - but I have to go to bed, so will leave it at that. Kuwabara does not use emoticons in her afterwords obviously, but when she mentioned that illo you could hear the string of "XD XD XD" appended. Thus it's not really accidental, but whatever.

I, too, would like to have a ninja who will serve me coffee.

EDIT -- post scriptum must mention before I forget again that I was on a J-fansite that said Kuwabara-sensei's been going about reccing Peace Maker Kurogane, which surprises me not in the least but kind of unnerves me, as she and Kurono-sensei are basically clones.

***

In other news, within the space of about a week I have gone from complete tepidness on the Arcade Fire to absolutely loving them, i.e. there is reason to the mad hype after all (and it was mad. The day their album dropped I dled half of it, not because I was trying or looking but because everywhere I went on the Internet people were posting Arcade Fire tracks accompanied by a blurb saying "OMG BEST SONG EVAR!!!11one!"). It's all due to this song. XD There are layers and layers of metaphor to it, but purely on the surface level this song is exactly what the Ice Storm felt like. Apocalyptic, the world ending in electric sparks and cold moonlight. I wouldn't have said the feeling was capture-able.