“President Bush isn’t a fascist, and I can prove it.
“We’ve seen what American bookstores and publications and universities do when confronted with real fascists: they knuckle under. You might not be able to find those Danish cartoons anyplace respectable, but you’ll sure find lots of anti-Bush stuff.
“Ipso facto, America is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.”
— Stephen Green draws a line in the sandIsekai: 3.4
The names hit her like fists, and she dropped the tray in shock. She hadn’t known they were there, had never heard the names I’d given them, but I could see the recognition in her eyes.
“I came back for you as soon as I could. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
“It was thirteen years. The first ten alone, then most of three years with Angel; Ariel joined us a few months ago.”
“I don’t understand. How could you have been there for so long? How could they have even gotten in? How could you have given them real names? Do you even know what we are?”
She was honestly bewildered, and there was panic rising in her voice. She’d walked in certain she was holding a Royal Flush, only to find out we were playing Twister.
“Yeah, I think I finally do. Seeing you drop the slutty valkyrie act was the last piece in the puzzle.”
“You’re a Muse.”
Isekai: 3.3
Ariel suddenly burst into tears and began wailing, a high-pitched, hopeless sound. She was horny, not stupid, and had followed the same chain of logic I had, but to a different conclusion: she was the one who’d be abandoned. Again. We both scrambled to comfort her, ending up in a three-way hug, promising to stay together and somehow make it work.
When I woke the next morning, they were gone. Or maybe they were still there, together, because I was definitely gone. The satin sheets were a pretty big clue, and I had a feeling I knew who they belonged to. Sure enough, my least-favorite favorite redhead showed up as if I’d just rubbed her lamp, carrying a tray full of something she probably thought was breakfast.
Surprisingly, she was fully dressed. I wasn’t, but I’d been bathed and shaved, and all the little scars I’d picked up over the years were gone, like it had all been a bad dream.
She looked at me like she was expecting praise, and I was happy to disappoint her. “Take me back.”
“Wait, what? I told you, I resurrected you to be a hero. There’s no going back, you’re dead there.”
“Not to Earth, to the place where you really found me. The rock in the forest, in the world without people. The world with the only people I care about.”
“Take me back to Angel and Ariel.”
She’s back!
Gastro-astronomy
Dick Blick Ships Quick
No, I’m not buying art supplies now, but the combination of Brickmuppet’s recent Seussian links and Nespresso’s order fulfillment brought that old slogan to mind for some reason; my dad was a regular customer when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of their catalog.
As I’ve started to develop some ability to discriminate between the various available coffee pods, I’ve taken advantage of their new-customer offers to round out my stash. I now have more of Nespresso’s little jewel-like pods than I have of my precious Gevalia Mocha Latte K-cups, although they get consumed faster due to the general lack of calories; two Splendas and a Calf don’t add up to much. So far, Capriccio is the only one I can almost drink black.
Anyway, the order I placed Saturday morning not only arrived before noon on Monday, the pod sleeves were actually all carefully lined up so that all the labels faced the same way when I opened the box. A small touch, but like the free express shipping, a sign that they’re really focused on the customer experience. Important when their closest retail boutique is a good sixty miles away and their branded pods aren’t stocked in any stores near me.
Peet’s has the only good third-party pods in grocery stores, as far as I can tell. I found Illy pods in the Williams-Sonoma at the south end of Monterey, but that mall’s a rare destination for me, and not a place I’d go to stock up on consumables anyway; I only went in out of idle curiousity since I was in the area.
Great Red Spot
I’m not the Instagram-y sort to post pictures of all my food, but it amuses me to post the combined output of my three electric coffee appliances. I hereby present the Mocha-Latte/Red-Eye/Macchiato, in my 20-ounce Bosmarlin mug:
That’s a Peet’s Crema Scura espresso pod, 2 Splenda packets, a 12-ounce strong pour through a Mocha Latte k-cup with the froth packet already stirred into the espresso, topped with 60ml of whole milk run through the foam-as-a-service gadget on its “Latte Macchiato” setting (yes, vibration control seems to be the key to using less than the recommended minimum volume). ~125 k-cals.
Normally I do 14 ounces through the k-cup and add two Calfs, but I figured the milk I needed to use up would compensate, and it did. Previous attempts to add a 40ml espresso shot and a full 100ml of foamed milk on top of that had proved too substantial, both for the mug and for the first drink of the day, so I was up for expanding my FAAS testing parameters.
Send moar spiders, plz
Unrelated silliness from Hoyt.
Isekai: 3.2
It was Angel’s temper that broke first, shoving us both into an icy mountain stream. Mind you, she’d had to trick us into going ten miles out of our way so that there was ice water to be shoved into, but her anger had been building up for weeks.
Central to the epic rant she delivered while we shivered around a fire was the fact that Ariel was obviously going into heat for the first time in her life, and it was obviously my fault because I’d named her.
Guilty as charged, sure, and after the cold shower it was obvious to me, too, but identifying the problem didn’t solve it. Ariel was a cat, and she couldn’t stop being a cat.
But we could stop being together, the three of us. The thought chilled me in a way the fire couldn’t touch.
Isekai: 3.1
Ariel was physically about 17, emotionally about 7, and intellectually a cat chasing a laser pointer. Bright and clever, sure, but severely ADHD. She’d bonded with Angel early in both of their lives, but had been separated from the others a long time ago. Since they never changed physically, they didn’t know how long she’d been alone, but I got the feeling it was longer than I’d been alive. Maybe a lot longer.
Her presence disrupted our comfortable routine. No, that’s not accurate. She disrupted me, with her eagerness for physical contact and her sleek, sexy body. She craved affection, rubbing against us every day and sleeping between us every night. And the fur that covered her just enough for modesty (mine; she didn’t have any) was so soft it got me going even when she wasn’t pressing her firm breasts against me. And she purred; oh, god, the purring.
What made it even harder was that she clearly approved of my interest, and openly flirted and teased. Only Angel’s increasingly-silent presence was keeping me from trying for a piece of tail, and something had to break.
Virginia’s story threw me a curve…
Isekai: 2.8
Ariel wrapped herself around me so tightly that the air rushed out of my lungs and the blood rushed straight to my… just-bitten shoulder, fortunately. At her size there was no safe place for my hands, and she was definitely all woman, and she was purring. The pain wouldn’t keep me down for long, and I desperately needed a distraction.
Which she provided, suddenly leaping back over to Angel with a question that turned our assumptions sideways. “Do names make you grow up?”
It hit her hard. “It… I don’t… maybe they do, for us. Maybe the reason we don’t grow up is because we don’t have names.”
“Or maybe that’s the reason you weren’t given names.”
As if we needed another reason to despise whatever Powers were in charge of there.
Choose-your-own-adventure
Time, Temperature, Foaminess
Okay, even though I bought the foam-as-a-service frother, I decided to go under the hood and record the precise behaviors and results of the various settings included with the Nespresso Barista Recipe Maker. In a spreadsheet, because that’s one thing they’re useful for.
Given the caloric potential, I’m only doing one or two recipes a day. The nominal capacity of the device is 100-250 ml of liquid, 30-90 grams of ice, and 15-40 grams of solids (chocolate squares, in the supplied recipes), which will be optionally heated and whipped into some mix of liquid and foam.
On some settings, it will detect a lack of sufficient liquid, and demand more before continuing. For instance, 60ml of milk wasn’t good enough for the Cappuccino setting, but 70ml was. But the Affogato setting calls for only 40ml of coffee and nothing else, and works fine. Clearly my spreadsheet is going to need a few more columns.
Since it uses a magnetic stirrer, I’m guessing the “add more liquid” warning is triggering on excessive vibration, which offers another testing possibility, and another column.
Isekai: 2.7
Angel moved toward her slowly, talking in a low, soft voice, like she was trying to rescue a lost kitten. Which she was.
“No, honey, you’re not. Virginia’s the big one who liked to break our toys. Do you remember her? Do you remember me?”
The catgirl moved so fast my heart stopped, but it wasn’t an attack, it was an embrace. They clung together for a long time, and then Angel took her hand and firmly pulled her over to me. I did my best not to look like the kind of guy who’d hit a girl, even one with fangs and claws.
“This is Jack, my very close friend. Like you. He was alone for a long time before I came here, because Virginia left him behind like a broken toy. He named me Angel.”
That wasn’t quite the scenario we’d been discussing recently, but there was certainly some truth to it. Not that it mattered, because her ears and tail had shot up at the word named. She looked up at me with huge, hungry eyes, like I was holding a fish just out of reach. Seriously, it was adorable, but I could feel Angel’s eyes as well, a quiet pressure begging me not to screw this up.
“You’re close like sisters, and you move like the wind. Would you like to be ‘Ariel’?”
Catgirls don’t hug, by the way, they glomp.
