It is quite the change, to have no AO3 kudos emails to wake up to for the foreseeable future! I'm wishing fortitude and deep breathing and good tea to the people who work on the site because from what's been said, it seems like they've got a lot of work and a big ole headache ahead of them. I do wish that a lot of the resulting discourse about the outage was less about readers panicking about and hoarding "content" and more about finding ways to sustain community and creativity, but so it goes, I guess.

( Crooked Hearts )

( Daughter of Shanghai )

I've decided that I'm going to put the October recs together but not post them until AO3 is back - there's no reason to do it now if people can't click on the links.

I ended up opening a new browser window and opening all my usual (non-AO3) tabs in it and leaving all the fic tabs open in a window by themselves. Hopefully nothing happens to them and they just hang out until AO3 is back.

In the odd event that someone is looking for something to read in a fandom I've written in, most of my fic from 2009 - 2023 is here in my DW, tagged by fandom and pairing or character. Pre-2009 stuff may or may not have been ported over back in the day, but I'm glad now that I never stopped cross-posting here.

In other news, I did get allspice on sale with my Stop and Shop order this morning, and then my original Penzey's box showed up...WITH ALLSPICE INCLUDED. So now I am well stocked on it for a very long time. I'm not sure why it wasn't included in the replacement box, but it's all good now.

Speaking of allspice, I use it in the oatmeal cookies I like, and I just discovered that that recipe has been memory-holed on the KAB website and when I click the link for it, there's some other oatmeal cookie there instead! And you might think, "well, how can she tell? aren't oatmeal cookie recipes all pretty similar?" but the one I like has boiled cider and rum in it! (nb: I never use the rum but I remember it's on the ingredients list.) And the one now living at the link does not! But the one I like is still available in the wayback machine here: tender cranberry raisin oatmeal cookies. I also saved it as a PDF (and of course, I handwrote it in my notebook the first time I baked it) so I will have it available when I want it, regardless of what King Arthur does.

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Ugh, AO3 down 2-4 weeks and now the news that Patrick Stewart has died? What a terrible day! (And RIP Walter Koenig, earlier this week!)

So I was going to do the monthly recs update tomorrow, but is there a point when people can't get to any of the stories? I haven't missed a month in 23 years, so I will probably do it, but it will be weird. I guess I can link to it when AO3 comes back up? idk idk.

Congrats to the Brewers! I'm so happy for them and their fans and devildoll.

In other news, this was a fascinating (and infuriating) read: The Chocolate Conspiracy Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why. by Rachel Handler - it's a gift link, for anyone who hasn't already read it. Sigh.

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I'm irritated because I've been starting to enjoy the look of the hairs that started to really grow out on my chin- since I started to shave that area of my face, buuuuut of course I can't keep them since I don't feel that it would be safe to come out at work when most of my co-workers are all Conservative. >:[

Yesterday, I got a wild hair and made 86 chocolate chip cookies from this recipe - I had a can of sweetened condensed milk approaching its use-by so it seemed like a good idea, though I had never heard of subbing condensed milk for eggs in chocolate chip cookies before. They seem all right - I have two trays of dough balls in the fridge, waiting to be transferred to the freezer so I can bake them off when I'm ready to put the cookie boxes together, but they're also kind of a just in case one of the other cookies doesn't work out. They were really easy to put together even if it makes enough cookie dough to make even my 6qt KitchenAid work a little harder, and would have been even easier if I hadn't come to this decision during the process of making my own pasta for the first time. *wry*

I put together the dough for these cavatelli pretty easily (I did not knead by hand for 15 minutes, just used the dough whisk to get it started and then the KitchenAid again to do the kneading), and they were resting for 30 minutes when I decided to also make cookies. *hands* Dinner was a little later than expected, but it was good! I think I made the individual cavatelli too big, even with using a ruler (perhaps unsurprisingly, I have become a person who keeps a ruler in the kitchen for these occasions) to cut them to 1" - they really puffed up in the boiling water! Tasty, though. And a really easy first go at making pasta. I still have the pasta-maker I got a couple years ago in the box, but I keep getting intimidated and talking myself out of using it - usually by picking a different cooking project to work on. Maybe I will finally get it together and use it after all the holiday baking is done.

Anyway, I slept terribly last night and it was so cozy once I finally got to sleep that I did not want to get out of bed. Sigh.

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That Would Be An Ecumenical Matter
The Pitt | Jack/Robby | ~18,800 words | Thanks to sheafrotherdon, kass, and ghostalservice for betaing.

(Also on AO3)

( 'Just so we're clear here,' Robby said. 'When you two said you'd summoned an actual demon...' )

I spent most of the day making cookies:

- first up, Dorie Greenspan's Lenox biscotti - I added dried cherries in addition to the slivered almonds, and I think it could have used more than 1/3 cup of fruit, tbh. I tested out the suggestion executrix made to do the first bake in muffin cups, and it worked well, though I will probably go the traditional route of baking them in a big log for the first go round and then slicing it for the second bake for the cookie boxes. I got 24 cookies out of it this way, but I also maybe put too much cookie dough in some of the cups (I used a 1/8 measuring cup to portion it out).

- Then I toasted some sesame seeds and made sesame seed cookies - I went with lemon zest (I believe the traditional flavor would be anise, but I don't like that and don't have it in the house; I honestly don't remember them tasting like anise from the bakery, so I could be conflating them with S cookies, because this recipe has vanilla and then suggests lemon or orange or almond as variations) since I had just done almond in the biscotti and want to present a variety of flavors. The lemon works really nicely, though I maybe could have left the cookies in the oven another minute or two. Also, I'll have to double the recipe for gifting, since it only made 20 cookies.

- And finally, I made these King Arthur Flour Baking orange cranberry cookies, though I only dipped the first couple in sparkling sugar, since for my personal use, I don't need it, but I will include it for gifting. I used a teaspoon scoop and got 50 cookies with it, but some of them are really small. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with a tiny perfect gem of a cookie, so... these are definitely in, regardless of whether I make them slightly larger next time.

I posted pictures here. I absolutely recommend those cookie sheets, btw. They fit in my tiny oven perfectly and are so far a little too nonstick (i.e., the cookies slide around if you are not careful when removing the tray from the oven), and you're supposed to brush them with a tiny amount of butter or oil, which I was skeptical of, but it works. And that makes them really easy to clean, which is good, because of course, they are hand-wash preferred.

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Title: The Well
Fandom: NCIS: Hawai'i
Music: The Well by The Crane Wives
Summary: 'all the words I couldn't say to you/ fill up the spaces in my chest'
Notes: Premiered at CONfabulation 2026!
Warnings: blinking and flashing lights, quick cuts, violence

AO3 | bsky | DW | tumblr | YouTube

My latest package from Penzey's was delivered yesterday...but not to me. I emailed them and they are shipping me a new box, which hopefully arrives here instead of in some other building, 508 feet away (this is apparently where UPS told them it was; people and packages sometimes go to the wrong address because they mistake an 8 for a 3, so that's what I'm guessing happened here). I hope whoever got it enjoys the allspice and cinnamon sugar!

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I don't know how many of you subscribe to Elie Mystal's substack/newsletter thingy, but I recommend it because he is the BEST, and today's newsletter said this about that godawful Microsoft Copilot ad:

The point of AI is not to enhance your own work like the tech-bro mafia keeps insisting. The point of AI is to steal somebody else’s work, potentially everybody else’s work, and pass it off as your own. What the other guy (who happens to be Black) did with talent and hard work, you can do in a day with AI and no skill but metastasizing jealousy. The ad is promoting the fact that AI allows you to be the worst version of yourself.

I could not agree more. Every time I see the ad, I'm like, why would I want to be the asshole who steals my co-worker's work (among other people's)???

I know I'm preaching to the choir here on LLMs, and I can even admit there could be some use cases for it at work (they are pushing it so hard! our interim CIO wants to give me an enterprise license to test it out, since he knows I break every new thing they give me in weird and unrepeatable ways, and that would be useful for them, but I've said no three times now!), though the only one I could envision myself using it for is to make certain charts or graphs in Excel or Powerpoint that I only make once in a very long while and can never remember how to do because they require a lot of fiddling and customizing.

Anyway, I am very glad it's the weekend. This afternoon felt like it was never going to end, but it finally did, and I took a 45 minute nap and felt a little better about everything afterward.

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( Slow Horses, S6 )

( The Traitors Ireland, S2 )

I've also watched the first two episodes of Yaga, and it's got potential to be a very watchable throwback to the heyday of the CW, only able to show more butts. As of right now, I'm on board for the rest of the season.

Just got an advertising email from King Arthur Baking about brown butter cream cheese frosting. I could have used that on Monday in place of the frosting I did make. Sigh.

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Slow Horses
( spoilers for all of season 6 plus the season 7 preview )

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My youngest sister officially got engaged this afternoon. :D

According to my mom- she'd told her she only would have said no if he had proposed where he'd originally been joking where he would have: the drug rehab center where they first met during work shifts.

I watched them raise the Knicks' championship banner and that was nice. I still don't care that much about regular season basketball.

I brought 120 cupcakes to work this morning (the 3 trays I linked to a picture of yesterday, plus a 4th tray of mixed apple cider/cinnamon brown sugar) and they were all gone by 3 pm. More people were in the office than usual, I think, but still, there are frequently leftovers and today there were none. Several people told me this was the best batch yet (!!!) and that they did not think the cinnamon brown sugar cream cheese frosting was too sweet, so that was nice. Maybe the refrigeration helped ameliorate the sweetness - cold tends to mute flavor - but I didn't bother having one when there were still 2 orange cranberry left. *g* the apple cider went first, which was not a surprise, really. I'm thinking about swapping it in for my current apple cider recipe for Christmas, since I also liked it better than that one, which always seems a little dry. I guess we'll see!

This weekend, I am going to focus on cookies instead, I think - cherry almond biscotti and orange cranberry cookies. Though it's only Tuesday, so plans could change!

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I spent most of yesterday making cupcakes to take to work tomorrow. I ended up making cinnamon brown sugar with cinnamon brown sugar cream cheese frosting (which is way too sweet, imo, though thankfully the cupcakes themselves are not particularly sweet), a new-to-me recipe for apple cider donut muffins dipped in cinnamon sugar, and orange cranberry with orange Swiss meringue buttercream (I love these and I made them the first year I made cupcakes for Christmas, but no one else seemed to like them as much as I did, so I swapped them out for lemon, then peach, and now strawberry; I do like the strawberry ones quite a bit, but not as much as these *hands*) (pics).

Now, I am le tired.

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My niece asked for some (audio)book recommendations because she is trying to switch to not doomscrolling on her phone before bed, which meant the books also need to not be too terribly dark or sad, so I was like, "you should read Discworld," and she made some skeptical response, and I was like, "no no, don't start at the first book! You won't like it. Start with Wyrd Sisters." And I explained how there were several separate series within the larger series, and this was a good place to start. She was like, "okay, aunt victoria, I'll try it out," and the next morning, she texted me with, "You didn't say it was funny! I'm enjoying it." so that worked out. And also I reread it so it was a win all around. I don't know if she'll stick with it, but I hope so!

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Did you know that Vienna Teng has a spreadsheet with links to videos of all the songs she's performed in her "Live@Home" concerts and she made it public (until November 1)? I did not until this morning, but I'm enjoying poking around and listening. It's linked here on her patreon.

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With the Stop and Shop website down all week and all online orders cancelled, I turned to Instacart for my groceries yesterday, and it was fine except...somehow, I did not get the eggs I ordered. They were just left out of the delivery though I was charged for them. I unfortunately didn't realize it until much later, and it sent me into a little tizzy, because I had baking plans for this weekend that involved a lot of eggs. Twenty-two eggs to be exact, and I only had 20 in the fridge, hence the inclusion of more in my grocery order. I thought about doing another order - I can always cobble together the bare minimum of stuff to buy, even if it ends up costing more - but then this morning, I was like, I don't need to make 2 different kinds of Swiss meringue buttercream. I can make one batch for the orange cranberry cupcakes, and then do brown sugar/cinnamon cream cheese frosting for the brown sugar cupcakes, and that pivot made everything work out just fine.

I made the orange buttercream this afternoon, and tomorrow I will bake the orange cranberry cupcakes, the brown sugar cupcakes, and a new-to-me recipe for apple cider cupcakes. Then on Monday, I'll make the cream cheese frosting, put it all together, and schlep it to the office on Tuesday. I figured I'd lean into some fall flavors this time around. We'll see how it goes.

For dinner tonight, I made bacon onion flatbreads from a Milk Street recipe (paywalled, so included below the cut) and they are delicious and I have another one that I will have tomorrow night for dinner. The only thing I really did differently was I used one of those garlic and herb cheese spreads instead of crème fraîche. (I ordered the 8 oz package of Alouette and got the 5 oz package of Boursin so it wasn't quite enough to cover both flatbreads, but it was still delicious.)

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( recipe )

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