superborb | Entries tagged with topic topics february

brownbetty prompted: Talk about relationships and dynamics you find compelling in fiction? Specific examples? Romantic very much optional

The kinds of relationships that I tend to find the most compelling are ones where the characters have conflict that may or may not be resolvable, but at the same time deeply understand each other in some core way.

So I really like family relationships, but if it's conflict-free supportiveness, that's fine and all, but it's not something I'll turn over in my brain for ages afterward? I guess a lot of 'coming of age' stories like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn have that built in parental conflict where the child grows into teenage rebellion and then into adulthood. Or how I found The Will of the Empress really compelling, despite feeling like I had aged out of other YA-- even though the core quartet aren't siblings by blood, the navigating of their relationships now that they're no longer children was so good.

And friends to enemies is really the best when the initial 'friends' stage was a really close, sibling or best friend bond. Yes, my platonic ideal MDZS fic explores the Jiang Cheng - Wei Wuxian relationship, why do you ask. The stage of the Catradora relationship (from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) when they were enemies was A++ my jam. And Professor X/Magneto definitely has this appeal in spades in canon, though I think fic generally does not focus on this aspect of their relationship, which is probably why I never fully got into that fandom.

Perhaps all of this is due to early sports anime influence though, where RIVALRY is such an important relationship. Hikaru/Akira (Hikaru no Go) is still my top OTP because of that element of rivalry even after they're good friends. I guess even in teammates in sports anime though, there is still that element of conflict where they push each other to get better, even if they aren't in direct competition. I can't name examples, literally every sports anime ship probably has this element hahahaha.

Any recs for ships that fit this dynamic? Or do you find this dynamic compelling too?

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cortue prompted: Thoughts about "balancing" the amount of time spent on the internet during isolation

tl;dr, I don't tend to think of time on the internet as differently allocable than other time.

I think there are obviously modes of human interaction that are not well replicable on the internet: casual interactions tend to be a lot more superficial without body language, and it's much more difficult to have the large group splitting into smaller conversations experience with any of the existing platforms. While you might split off a thread or get distracted with another platform, this drops any other conversations in an opaque way.

Meanwhile, there are modes of interaction that are better done on the internet: updating all your friends at once, staying in contact with acquaintances you don't see regularly, and of course, meeting people who you normally wouldn't have met (e.g. in fandom).

All of those kinds of socializations and like, chatting with friends in general, I don't really feel bad about "wasting time on," because I definitely by default spend less time on it than would be optimal for my socialization meter? I'm sure this is not true for everyone, but I am (and have always been) less inclined to reach out and maintain friendships that I /know/ I would enjoy and be happy doing. So if socializing on the internet lowers that barrier, I'm all for it.

I also heavily curate my various social media and will unfollow people readily if it doesn't seem like following through that platform feels social, which is, of course, not a judgment on anyone's use of a platform for their own needs. If a person is more non-socialization informational stuff, I prefer to subscribe through my RSS reader, to better separate those streams. (And obviously all of that is fuzzy choices.)

In non-social uses of the internet, the aforementioned RSS reader is where I get most of my news. It turns out, interesting and informative feeds are so difficult to find that I rarely worry I spend too much time there. It helps that it's easy to flick through after reading a title if it's not a subject I care about at that moment, and that it's super asynchronous and can wait until I have time.

There is /one/ part of the internet I know I'm in trouble when I start lapsing into, and I try to avoid, which can be summed up as "low quality, I just want to read anything." But it's not exactly something I want to balance, as it's usually a sign I'm depressed. This is if I'm reading fics on AO3 that I don't even find compelling, but are words I can stuff into my eyeballs, or if I've fallen into the depths of YCombinator Hacker News or Reddit. I guess other people doomscroll, but I don't have social media feeds that are deep enough for me to do that? At the beginning of isolation, I was totally in that mode for MDZS fics; I was reassuring bf that this was total normal behavior for me, but it... was normal /depression/ behavior. Anyway, that's time badly spent.

So I suppose it's not really that I think all time spent on the internet doesn't need balancing, but that I want to spend my time on things that are enriching, and if I'm filling those needs on or off the internet, it doesn't matter which? Not all needs can be filled on the internet, but for example, I'm just as happy to read books on the internet as off.

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dragongirlg prompted: Potentially harmful cultural misconceptions or erasure in cnovel fandom and how to have productive conversations about them

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halfcactus prompted: CATS (your fav colorings/encounters/behaviors/whatever AND fav cat-related media, whether the cat is the central character or not). Would also like to know about how you got into Cats (musical) 👀 Who was your fav cat, what was your fav song

I am into Cats (musical) because my mom always had the cast recording in the car! Her ringtone is still Memory. STIFF COMPETITION for favorite cat or song!!! I cannot decide...

1. When I was little, after I woke up, I'd sit at the top of the stairs. (Hilariously, my little brother did that too, despite being enough younger than me that he couldn't have learned the behavior from me.) So my grandpa would call me a gumbie cat, after the line in The Old Gumbie Cat, "She sits and sits and sits and sits." I was surprised to learn as an adult that gumbie cat is not, in fact, well known slang hahahaha.

2. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer have such a good song and they're so fun haha. I think they were my favorite as a kid because their song is bouncier?

3. Mr. Mistoffelees when the song is sung by Rum Tum Tugger is, of course, classic and amazingly shippy. Yes, do sing about how magical Mr. Mistoffelees is some more, after he describes you as a terrible bore. Excellent.

I am still sad my mom didn't bring me with her to see the Broadway revival, but I /did/ see it during a China tour and it was great. I love that the costuming goes all in on the makeup. I love the dance and acrobatic elements! It's probably still my favorite musical.

In non-musical cats, after reading Diane Duane's Feline Wizards trilogy, I was seized with the strongest desire to be able to lick my own nose. The cats in her books just kept licking their noses! What would that be like... The first book is the strongest, IIRC, but generally not her best works. The alienness of being from the PoV of a cat and the cat behaviors were well done though!

In ficly cats, I think it's very funny that

lazulisong keeps turning characters into cats-- full series of all of them here.

(

halfcactus, now that I'm thinking about it, Chi's Sweet Home reminds me a bit of Legend of Luo Xiaohei-- it's also a bunch of very short episodes about a cat being adopted into a family.)

In real cats, solid gray cats have usurped calico cats as my favorite. They're so dignified looking! Also, there's a friendly tiny gray cat in my neighborhood that'll come when you call! But I think it doesn't spend as much time twining around your legs after you don't feed it enough times ^^;

I like when cats try to sit in drawn boxes and when they put their paws over their faces! And fluffy cat bellies, of course.

Cats! So good!

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momijizukamori prompted: Coding pet peeves

I don't really have strong or verbose opinions on this, but it might be bad variable names. Because unlike poorly documented or unreadable code, which are problems that take effort and time to fix, the really bad variable names could be fixed by like, one second of thought?? 'Purple' is a terribly unhelpful name! Something that hints towards the purpose of the variable while disambiguating it from similar variables, please.

A close second might be people who refuse to use functions and all their code is one enormous serial chunk.

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theladyscribe prompted: What's your go-to low spoons/bad day food? The kind of thing you can make on autopilot.

I'll do three because that seems like a good number. Note that my 'low spoons' tends towards forgetting/procrastinating prepping food, so all the prep for these happens immediately before cooking and eating. Like, I WILL forget to put rice in a mere 40 mins in advance of dinner.

1. Rao's pasta sauce + pasta + frozen veg. This is my default, because it is all pantry or freezer staples, you just chuck everything in a pot and boil for a while (so minimal attention needed), and the Rao's is good enough to make it tasty without any effort. The main drawback is that Rao's is on the pricey side for pasta sauce; for the convenience though, I tend to stock up when it's on sale. I haven't found a miss from them yet, but their arrabbiata is my current favorite.

2. Panfried dumplings (from frozen). A little more effort is needed to make sure it doesn't burn, but it's still pretty low effort. Just fry, add some water and cover for ~10 min, then fry again. Then serve with some Chinkiang vinegar! Requires some forethought to either make or buy dumplings, but it's from the freezer, so I usually always have a bag or two for backup.

3. Asian wheat noodles with canned dace and bok choy. There's a variety of 'topping' like sauces you can put on carbs to immediately make them delicious, but I especially like canned dance with black beans because the fish makes it feel more meal-like. The noodles cook faster than any other carb, only needing a few minutes of boiling. And for the final component, stir frying just takes so much less time to heat up the cooking vessel, then the food cooks quickly. I like a lot of Chinese veg because you can so quickly stir fry and have it ready in 5 min. (Plus time to wash and prep as necessary.) Bok choy is the tastiest in this combo IMO, but napa cabbage has longer fridge life. Just stir fry the veg, add a little salt at the end, then serve with noodles and dace.

+1. Just drain and serve silken tofu with some sliced century egg (optional), soy sauce, and sesame oil. Tofu has a long refrigerator life, but this feels much nicer to serve in the summer when the coolness of the tofu is appreciated.

I'd be especially interested in other people's quick meals too!

(Unrelated: is anyone else having trouble getting DW comment notification emails? I lost a few earlier today.)

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forestofglory prompted: A favorite food from your childhood?

One of my favorite foods as a child was black sesame tangyuan. They're black sesame paste surrounded by a sticky rice wrapper (like mochi, but boiled), and my grandma served them with osmanthus flowers in the hot, slightly thickened water used to boil them.

Today is the Lantern Festival, when traditionally, tangyuan are eaten. (Date chosen on purpose, obviously.) In Chinese, one of the names for the holiday is Yuanxiao Jie; while technically yuanxiao are not the same as tangyuan, they're pretty similar. (Yuanxiao are formed by shaking the filling in the sweet rice flour to form layers of the outside; tangyuan are formed by wrapping the dough around the filling.)

As a small child, I didn't know what tangyuan were called, but I DID know the insides and outsides were distinct and the inside especially was delicious. So I called it 东西里的东西 'the stuff inside stuff'. (I also didn't know what nori was called, so I called it 绿的辣辣 'the green spicy'. I do not know why I thought nori was spicy?)

TBH, after several homemade batches--where objectively the elements are better than storebought, the sesame paste more roasty toasty, the wrapper more delicately tender--I've decided that I should probably just buy storebought because I think that's what I actually want. Possibly if I use the Nice Lard my mom renders, that would tip the scales? But I’m using butter in lieu of mediocre storebought lard, and it’s just so... buttery. I made the fillings here around half the size they ought to be to compensate.

( Pics of today's tangyuan )

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shati prompted: Any new/recent (however you want to define recent) favorite foods? To eat, to make, whatever

I have three for you!

1. Okara / soy pulp pancakes. I loooooove fresh soy milk; if you've only had the boxed stuff, it's a totally different flavor! But none of the grocery stores near me sell the fresh stuff, so I have to make it myself. While you can make it with just a pot and a blender, it likes boiling over; a soy milk maker is a set-and-forget. Combined with the beans being pretty shelf stable and wanting to reduce dairy consumption, it would seem a no-brainer to make it all the time, BUT it always felt so wasteful to have all the soy pulp left over! There's only so much stir-fried okara and hiding it in breads that can be done before I'm totally bored with it. It's also very perishable unless you freeze or dry it.

Enter: okara pancakes. To one batch of okara (~3 cups, not particularly well drained of the soy milk), add 1 c flour, 1 heaping spoonful cornstarch, and whatever diced vegetables and flavorings suits your mood. I usually default to Thai red curry paste with onions since it's super convenient. Then in a well-oiled pan, fry them on both sides until browned, and drain on paper towels.

They're satisfyingly hearty and flavorful. I don't think I'd make soy milk just to have them, but at this moment in time, they're by far my favorite way to use up the leftover okara. And now I can have salty soy milk for breakfast without any guilt about letting the soy pulp go to waste!

2. King Arthur's Easiest Loaf of Bread. My current favorite bread recipe! This recipe creates finer bubbles in the bread, with just enough of a crust for textural contrast without being tough. I'm sure my Bread Opinions will change with time, but this is the current champion! It unseated the KA no knead bread, which kept coming out with bubbles of uneven size and ever so slightly sour in a bad way. This one is more consistent in texture.

3. Serious Eats' Tomato Soup. The baking soda trick is a GAME CHANGER. Cooking it down for hours is pretty annoying, but I regret to inform that it really does make it more delicious as the tomato flavor develops. Actually I feel that way about the ingredients too-- I'm usually a 'whatever, just substitute something else' kind of cook, but all the perturbations I've tried for this recipe have ranged from 'meh' to 'not quite as good'. An energetically stable point on the food landscape.

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spatz prompted: Favorite/least favorite cdrama? Or if that's too hard to pick, favorite rewatch/favorite one to recommend?

I find it very easy to drop cdramas (and I know a lot of people who simply never finish any cdramas, but start plenty, so it feels a bit inherent to the medium?), so I don't think I want to say anything is a 'least favorite'! If I finished it, there was /something/ redeeming about it, even if it fell on its face in the end.

But I think I have different favorites vs rewatches vs recommendations! ...okay by splitting hairs, because obviously those are overlapping categories.

Favorite: Qi Hun (my review). An adaptation of Hikaru no Go, but one that took enough creative liberties to feel fresh. The premise is sports anime vibes, where the sport is go/weiqi: Shi Guang discovers a haunted go board that gives him a go playing ghost that pesters him to play all the time. The show tracks his growth as a player into more elite circles of go and the friends (and RIVAL) he makes along the way.

Hikago was the first fandom I was in, and Qi Hun is arguably the fandom I'm currently the most active in, because I mod a discord server for it, so I have a lot of FEELINGS about like, the fandom around the show if that makes sense? And those interactions enrich and add layers to what might otherwise just be a very good show. Certainly there are frustrating issues (definite pacing problems, potentially censorship caused plot holes), but I just love the characters so much.

Rewatch: Nirvana in Fire. Revenge, politics, and conspiracies, what more could I ask for? Mei Changsu is bent on getting redemption for the unjust dead, so that justice will prevail. Step one: getting his former BFF, the emperor's least favorite son declared crown prince. Very good balance of political intrigue with harem drama, and enough outrageously improbable "MCS wins by having all the people" to lighten the mood.

I rewatch shows rather infrequently, but despite seeming like intrigue might not have a lot of rewatch capacity, this show really stands up to it, because ultimately the character interactions are the core of what is so excellent about the show and that never gets old. TBH, the plot is not /that/ complicated (people are on the side of justice or MCS, and it's a matter of them falling in line or being creatively manipulated to fall from grace), but the balance of character personalities is so good.

Recommendation: Imperial Coroner (my review). Mystery period drama is still how I'd sell this show. Excellent core group of four main characters, whose interactions are so fun, and a solid mystery to investigate, with many parts to solve.

The reason I tend to recommend this first is that it is well paced and is not too complicated, making it a good starting point for those who might expect... 76 episodes of intricate plot and character development. 36 episodes is long enough to sink into, while being not a huge commitment, and it really does move quickly so it's easy to keep watching. And the framework of the mystery means that it's pretty easy to keep track of what the goal is.

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extrapenguin prompted: Thoughts on how fannish platforms/site structure affects fannish expression (e.g. DW vs Twitter)

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chestnut_pod prompted: Thoughts/opinions/knowledge on The Publishing Industry. (/Industries.) Whatever that looks like -- ebook pricing? abominable translation practices? fact-checking in non-fic? changes in YA style over the last 20 years? Chinese specific as received in the Anglosphere? literally anything

I thought a bit, and I don't have any entire post length thoughts, but I DO have three bullet point thoughts.

1. Isn't the entire phenomenon of webnovels so interesting? (I'm only passingly familiar with the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese varieties.) You could argue they draw influence from the serial novel, but it's also a response to a niche for lighter fare (e.g. cell phone novels) opened up by the possibility of micro-transactions funding authors. English webnovels don't have the same market share; Kindle Vella does not seem to be super popular AFAICT. Is it the normalizing of sending small amounts of money? (But we do have ko-fis and Patreons?) Or is it something about how readers in English envision themselves? Less of a taste for a bazillion word length novels? The niche being filled with easily discoverable fanfic already?

2. I was never quite sure what the distinction between YA and MG (middle grade) was, and I kind of fell into a reflex of thinking that if I liked a book intended for a teen, it must be MG. Of course formally, MG is for a younger audience than YA, but the way that these categories have kind of solidified into particular tropes is so odd. Why did that happen? Is it because of the 'one book sells well, then everyone follows' phenomenon of a genre in WAY too close contact? Is it the genre-ification, where before books might be more nebulously for children or teens? (Or am I just too old now--)

3. I don't like that authors have to do all this marketing on twitter and can't help but feel that it's a result of not enough support from the publishers. (See also: not enough editorial support from publishers, especially for debut authors.) I honestly typically want a BIG separation between the author and the work, so I can evaluate the work on its strengths only. Exceptions exist, but mostly when there are other works to read in conversation with that work. Of course, I can find reading author blogs fun and interesting, and obviously, I have friends who are authors, but the overall balance has tilted too far into requiring authors to be influencers IMO.

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nnozomi prompted: Anything to do with translation issues (cnovel or otherwise)

I think that translation requires choices, so any good translation must by nature engage with its choices. Not /defend/ exactly, but persuade that those choices are shedding light upon its source. There's two 'choices' that I'm interested in discussing (today) (lol): foreignization (wait, don't go away!) and Nachdichtung and other transformations.

( Caveats )

( Foreignization )

( Nachdichtung and other transformations )

china_shop prompted: Something about AO3?

Just to uh, calibrate expectations: this is an observational ramble, without a thesis.

From my time and experiences in fic fandom, AO3 represents a particularly unique phenomenon: a centralized repository that nearly everyone uses. You might think, oh, but FFN was just as dominant, but no! For at that time, a significant portion of anime fandom resided on private or communal websites; some of those websites may have encapsulated entire canons or ships, or we might count mediaminer, which served as an alternative FFN-like archive for anime fandom. And jpop and kpop fandom was so locked down that I don't think any of it really lived on FFN. Alternatively, you might argue from the other direction: significant portions of fic fandom live on Wattpad or scattered on threadfics on twitter or one offs on tumblr etc etc. True! But the gravity of fic fandom is towards AO3, in a way that no other archive managed /in my experience/.

This has significant upsides: for all the lack of an API, encoding troubles, tagging battles, a centralized interface is so much easier to navigate. You can just reskin everything permanently! You can easily navigate to all the works by an author without having to figure out where their masterlist is, or how they tagged their fics in their LJ. And it's significantly easier for authors to navigate too, having to figure out how to upload once and not fighting html unless they want to.

On the other hand... centralization shoves everyone together and makes it hard to establish norms and boundaries. Having no social media directly attached makes some problems easier (harassment is harder and it's easier to disengage), but some problems harder (really difficult to establish norms when there's no place everyone hangs out hmm). And I say boundaries because it's really clear that different circles of fandom have wildly different norms-- and now we've all been shoved together and those edges are sharp. How much easier would it be to avoid t/b wank if we just had separate websites / comms / mailing lists we hung out on? (Though that's also a tumblr-and-twitter caused problem, not unique to AO3.)

Also we come to the problem with centralization that it makes it hard for alternatives to spring up. If people still regularly posted their fic elsewhere, would those places be more vibrant from the extra foot traffic? Yeah, I know there are AO3 clones running around etc, but would fandom be more flexible from the choices offered? Maybe not, fandom is so big now that it seems that there ought to be enough people who'd try out a new platform and bud off if it offered something better. But are people still interested in trying new ways to post fic? People are dissatisfied with any given social media platform, so move from tumblr to twitter to discord, but every complaint about AO3 and suggestion to 'make something new' tends to be very... AO3 like in structure. Add tags! Add warnings! Change how fandoms are grouped! Get rid of tags!

(OK I am still partial to June's suggestion of getting rid of all stats like things to make AO3 a more pure repository of fic.)

Still, with fandom scattered on social media, it's nice to have one place where people can mingle, such as it is. It used to be (...still is, apparently) that to get on jpop LJ comms, you'd have to submit an essay. With people increasingly turning to more closed social media (private discords, locked twitters) (just in my observation, obviously), AO3 remaining public is nice to serve as a connectivity point between all these different fandom circles, even if it sometimes feels like, once again, you have to submit an essay to join.

Back to masterlist <- Also, there's still space if people want to give prompts!

cortue prompted: Do you have any feelings about sci-fi as a person working in STEM? Do you want things to make actual sense or prefer they don't even try? Is there any way you'd like STEM stuff to be depicted differently in fiction?

I think my main feeling about sci-fi is that it ought to be internally consistent. So, I can roll with soft sci-fi or hard sci-fi as long as it doesn't ret-con how technology works in universe. (If your explody improv weapon could not explode earlier, it is not nice to have it be so when plot convenient.) I have higher standards for hard sci-fi though, I want it to follow through and be correct. Otherwise, what was the point? For soft sci-fi, I prefer no gibberish, just take the fantasy 'this is how it works' matter of fact approach.

Of course, the works that really try to imagine the world within the bounds of science, either of the future or of the 'one thing is different' version, deserve extra praise for the attention to detail and research, but I guess it's not really what I'm reading fiction for, you know? I'm here for the story.

It does annoy me when basic things are wrong and it's clearly the author / producer / whoever not paying enough attention. Most commonly physics because it's the one most likely to be violated in this way-- when the ship loses propulsion or stops spinning or whatever and then it abruptly comes to a complete stop and slams people into walls, that sort of thing. But I guess this does tend to be more common in movies, probably because books have different sets of fact checking norms?

The 'internally consistent' preference also extends to other forms of fiction; it doesn't bother me that much when they're like, doing the enhance on four pixels or getting results from forensics ridiculously fast because it's blatantly for the plot. It does pose a problem when people think that science works that way IRL, but I think most people understand that it's fiction, and the science is just as much fiction as the characters. Though I do think it's funny when e.g. in ReGenesis, which had pretty good fact checking, a work is so focused on being accurate for that time period that it becomes obsolete as technology improves.

I guess I don't really have that many broader thoughts on this! I mostly get annoyed at one-off inaccuracies hahaha.

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silveredeye prompted: A long form news article you really like (and why you like it).

China's Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class, by Peter Hessler

I've read Hessler's older articles on Egypt and China before, but this one was the one to make me look for one of his books! (Which I blogged about in January's Media Diet.) In the 90s, Hessler was an English teacher in Fuling, China through the Peace Corps; now, more than two decades later, Hessler recounts the paths some of his students took. Because of the personal nature of these anecdotes and the good job Hessler does at being open and curious, I think it's an interesting snapshot no matter how much recent Chinese history you know. It's a snapshot of a particular group: nearly all grew up in rural poverty, made it to college, and benefitted from the staggering rise of living conditions and income of the 90s and 00s. But for all its specificity, I think it illuminates why a particular generation might think the way it does-- and why the 90s and 00s generation would hold such different views.

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momijizukamori prompted: Favorite/least favorite c-novel tropes?

I have to caveat that I have not read cnovels widely at ALL. So like, there's a whole bucket of genres/tropes that I have very little exposure to, PLUS I don't have a good sampling of the genres I have read to have a good sense of how they're situated in the genre and/or how they're responding to the zeitgeist.

So at this moment in time, I'd say... It's not that I intrinsically don't like transmigration / portal fantasy / rebirth; it's actually a set of tropes that I am drawn to! (Transmigration is when someone is moved to a new setting, with tons and tons of variation. Portal fantasy is similar with an implication of being able to go back to the original setting. Rebirth involves dying and time travel to an earlier point.) I put them together because they have that similar core of a built in PoV character, who either is providing an outsider perspective or has some built in knowledge of the world.

It's just that-- often it's not saying much new at this point? Plenty of cnovels like to play with trope subversion, of course, but even subverted transmigration often doesn't quite hit the freshness of ideas that I look for in original works. I guess it's a matter of, what does inserting this mechanism add to the story? And sometimes it just feels like, self insert done poorly? It is one of those tropes that can work better for me as a fic, where small incremental newness is perfectly worthwhile reading, vs as an original work, I want more meat on the worldbuilding.

OTOH, I've fallen back in love with political intrigue, because I'm reading the cnovel version of Nirvana in Fire. I prefer my political intrigue as a careful balance of the estate/harem drama with broader political implications; when it's just estate stuff, I get bored, but only political stuff has... too few women. I think it's having that balance of interpersonal drama with broader stakes? The broader stakes seems critical for my enjoyment: purely estate intrigue or like, mythological genre where it's all immortals in their own immortal world, only holds my attention for so long. So lower stakes stuff either needs to be less intrigue heavy or shorter? In any case, political intrigue is a staple genre for a reason, I guess :P

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silveredeye prompted: Birds? :D

Birds are actually a relatively new joy in my life! The downfall was the discovery of borbs (through a fic, haha), and the realization of HOW CUTE THEY ARE.

The best bird season is late fall, when it's cold enough that the little birds get all puffed up for warmth. Second cutest is when you walk by a bush full of chattering birds and then they go silent. I know you're there!

The prettiest bird I've ever seen might be a Steller's jay; the iridescence of its feathers was incredible. I have a Steller's jay feather on my desk and it's so interesting to look at the color shifts.

However, if I look at pictures I've taken of birds... Herons and egrets definitely are the bulk! At least of the pictures that are IN FOCUS, because I'm not great at fast focusing. (What /is/ the trick that wildlife photogs use? I ought to fiddle with this some more.) Those fishing birds just stay so nice and still and let you slowly get them into focus haha!

Below are five pictures from last summer in Portland, Oregon.

( Read more... )

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I know this is a meme that most people do in December or January, but February always seems kind of slow after the rush of Snowflake! Also I couldn't do January anyway.

Give a topic and (optionally) a day, and I'll ramble for some undetermined number of words on said topic.

( Dates+topics! )