mindstalk | Entries tagged with qotd

questionoftheday asks: Does your family have any unique holiday traditions? What's the story behind them?

My answer:

The properly non-standard one was my birthdays when I was a small kid. My parents had created our own maypole, painted and with tassels, and I and other kids would run around under it in a circle. Or something like that; I haven't thought about that in years.

A stronger memory is the food. Instead of cake and ice cream, we would make wontons -- bought the wrappers, but made the stuffing and stuffed and fried them -- and chocolate mousse (two flavors, rum and orange). Compared to most birthday cakes, I feel I got the better deal. Sadly, I never got the recipes for these. I can say that the wontons were much more stuffed any any store ones, bursting with chicken and green onions and what not, vs. the more common "fried dough with some microparticles of meat".

Christmas was Christmas, insofar as atheists have a tree and gifts, though we also did some Hanukah stuff out of some cultural reflex of my mothers. Dreidel, yarmulke, kid me lighting candles and reciting Hebrew I didn't understand or believe in. Eventually that just stopped. Later my father refused to drag a Christmas tree home by foot or bus anymore; my mother was sad but I supported him. We still had gifts and possibly even fruitcake... I don't remember what Christmas meal was, I'd guess roast beef and vegetables most often.

Icon appropriateness: hi

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/515834.html

questionoftheday asks: Is there a fictional world that feels like your home away from home? What is it and why does it appeal so much to you?

My answer:

Strictly speaking, no, that is not a thought I have.

More loosely speaking, Nanoha. It has the most fanfic I have actually written down, not just cycled in my head, and I think the most characters whose POVs I've thought about, and my own OCs. Although these days I've been reading more elsewhere, especially Valinor and Silmarillion fics, Nanoha is like a mental home space for composition.

Why? I like the characters: their good will, determination, prettiness, and yuri subtext. I like the optimistic magical Starfleet full of second chances and adoption, struggling to survive in a post-post-apocalyptic universe. I like the second communication channel of mental telepathy (Madoka has this too, and some brave Macross Frontier fics) and the games you can play with that. I like that I can justify some of the characters being immortal. I like how the various artificial beings raise various issues of ethics and identity, like some SF, only with a more engaging milieu and set of characters than most transhumanist SF.

And on the reading side of things, it's had quite a bit of good (re-readable) fic: funny gen fic, interesting worldbuilding gen fic, hot (to me) smut fic. Though not enough of the stuff I most want. The one (gen) which I know has amused multiple people who knew nothing of the franchise is Ready, Sette, Go.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/514887.html

questionoftheday asks: What is your least favourite thing about each season?

My answer:

I'm not going to try to come up with something against spring and fall.

Boston summer: when it's hot and humid, obviously.

Boston winter: there's the usual cold and snow and ice, especially ice. And the short days, sun going down at 4pm because Boston should be in Atlantic time (which still would mean 5pm...) But my most unusual complaint is the sun *angle*: it's so low even at mid day, often in my eyes, and my summer hat wouldn't help even if temperatures were warm enough to wear it.

Getting extra sun from snow is an added 'bonus'. But yeah, the angle. Sun should not be in my eyes between 10 and 2.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/514650.html

questionoftheday asks: What is your internet history? What websites were you a part of that might not be around anymore, and do you have any fond memories of them?

My answer:

Got to college, was given a shell account with email and such. And talk/ytalk, I could communicate with friends across the country, for free! Like a long-distance phone call, but typing and free! Somehow found people purely online, too, chatting with some girl at an engineering college. Found Usenet, spending many years on the B5 newsgroups (I think I coined 'battlecrab' for Shadow ships) and rec.arts.sf.written. Mailing lists: extropians, cypherpunks, Julian May, Deryni (that might have been Usenet), Buffy.

Oh, and the early web, getting on with NCSA Mosaic, and Netscape Navigator, and I have web pages dating to 1995, if not earlier.

Early webcomics I forget the names of. Doctor Fun, User Friendly, Sluggy (still going!) Writing my own comic-scraper to generate a local page of updated comics, because RSS hadn't been invented yet.

A girlfriend found me via Orkut, I think. Was on that and Friendster before Facebook killed them. Technically am still on Livejournal, crossposting from here.

I sort of miss people *having* personal web pages. Or adding anything to mine.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/514353.html

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Rich and Strange Aeons

Entries tagged with qotd

qotd: holiday/birthday

qotd: fandom 'home'

qotd: seasons

qotd: internet history

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June 2025

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