Stuff and Moonshine

Weekend Report

2026-04-20T16:55:28Z

Yesterday was Bicycle Day, and today is 4/20. I looked up Owsley Stanley AKA “the Grateful Dead’s chemist,” and fell down a rabbit hole of 1960s counter-cultural references. I’d only known of Wavy Gravy by name, but his Wikipedia page is impressive. Also in his Greenwich Village beatnik days he sort of looked like a thinner version of Victor Buono as “Bongo Bennie” on 77 Sunset Strip.

Simon Fisher Turner and others talk about scoring the reissue of The Great White Silence.
Plus you get someone from the BFI remarking “Gaumont, one of the (Terra Nova expedition’s) sponsors, had specifically requested footage of penguins, and by God did they deliver.”

Turner’s Wikipedia page is also a rabbit hole.

L.T.C. Rolt's ghost stories are kind of like M. R. James, except Rolt was an industrial historian rather than a medievalist, so a large number of the stories are about haunted railways tunnels, canals and in one case, a car-racing track. It’s a good thing I watched that video of a foundry a few weeks back, or I’d have had a hard time visualizing the climax of 'Hawley Bank Foundry.'

Even more so than James or other ghost-story writers I’ve encountered, Rolt will give the reader just enough information to guess what likely happened, and then end the story very abruptly, implications hanging. He’s also quite adept at something I’d subconsciously noticed with this genre and still don’t have a convenient name for.

See, the protagonist’s usual job in these stories is to be the witness to/victim of events, so he (the characters are usually men) doesn’t actually do all that much. But at the same time, for the story to be believable we need to believe in him, so he’s got to be characterized economically, yet vividly.

Also the supernatural elements are scarier if our protagonist 'isn’t prone to flights of imagination.' In Rolt’s stories, that means we meet a gallery of veteran railway workers, hard-headed retired manufacturers from the Midlands, etc, along with the usual ambiguously-middle-class urban professionals on holiday. We usually meet them rather briefly.

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Royal Canadian Air Farce, “The Mad Trapper of Rat River”

2026-04-14T17:58:03Z

Lying awake at 4:30am, I suddenly realized how Goon Show-influenced this episode was. Embarrassing that it took me so long, given that one of the performers is straight-up doing the Bluebottle voice.

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Painting Update 2– closer to the Abstract

2026-04-14T17:29:22Z

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Painting Update

2026-04-14T17:26:09Z

The lunchroom at my current job:

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Meadowville, chapter 10

2026-04-04T14:25:12Z

In which Hanna calls in a favour, and plays lawyer.

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YouTuber Tom Scott is posting videos again

2026-04-02T13:46:56Z

Yesterday’s was a trip to Taylor’s Bell Foundry where Anthony and Sam, a pair of large cheerful men who look as though they probably have the upper-body strength of medieval long-bow archers, cast and re-cast church bells while discussing what kinds of cheese everyone would be if they were cheese (“I asked Josh. He’s mozzarella.”)

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Weekend Report

2026-03-30T17:28:19Z

By my standards, a luxurious social whirl.

I’d found out earlier in the week that the Yorkdale Mall has a sushi concession, so I stopped on the way home Friday and, after wandering past enormous stores well out of my price range (props to the shopper I saw wearing Gucci wellies, though), eventually found the food court.

Saturday I did my usual trip to the coffee-shop, then the thrift store. Found several nice things, the best one being a 1970s-style three-quarter-length green print dress that makes me look like a murderous guest-star on Columbo. In the evening I had a weed gummy and painted, while Andrew watched a couple of episodes of Columbo.

Sunday Andrew wanted to go to the Scribe bookshop on the Danforth, and we arranged with Don to meet at the pub afterwards. As it turned out, Line 2 was down and we had to reroute, stopping at another bookshop on College—which ended up being a good thing because Scribe turned out to be closed— they were down at the Old Paper Show & Sale instead. Andrew’d already found a Robert E. Howard hardback for thirty dollars, though, so the only downside was having to wait fifteen minutes for the pub to open (turns out The Auld Spot doesn’t open till 2pm, at least on Sundays). I let Andrew have at least one cider more than he should have had, and we taxied home with Don in tow for more conversation.

I checked oceanofpdf in the hope of finding Lou Rand’s The Gay Detective (1960). No dice, but they do have his non-fiction work The Gay Cookbook.

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Meadowville, Chapter 9

2026-03-29T11:37:49Z

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/215938916

Walter and Livia continue their adventure underground. Hannah’s search for them takes her to an unexpected place.

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Weekend Report

2026-03-21T20:21:45Z

The world continues to be lousy, but at least winter is drawing to an end.

On a self-centred level, I’m happy to finally have a paying gig for a bit. The assignment is officially for about two months, but the agency said it might get extended, and the temp I’m replacing has been there since last August and is leaving now only because she got a permanent offer from a different company closer to her home in Oakville (and in trucking logistics, which is her chosen specialty). She told me it’s a pleasant work environment and the staff are all pretty nice; adding “and I’m a real bitch, so I don’t say that about just anybody.” My first week seemed to bear this out. Also the employee kitchen has good snacks (keeping it stocked is one of my duties): fresh fruit, granola bars, yogurt cups, instant oatmeal packets—so I won’t have to pack or buy myself any breakfasts as long as I’m working there.

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Dream Report

2026-03-15T16:23:41Z

Had several dreams, including one in which sovay and I were watching an old movie titled, iirc, Coral Island, though it had nothing to do with the Edwardian boys’-adventure novel of the same name. I’m pretty sure Robert Newton was in it, though his character disappeared from the plot midway through.

sovay then learnt of some recently-discovered footage in which the camera had been kept running between takes, and the chatter of the actors was audible. In the manner of dreams, the footage was immersive, and we could walk into it. Apparently we were visible to them, though they took us for extras and mostly ignored us, except for somebody from Wardrobe who ran up and handed me some more-appropriate stockings and shoes.

Somehow this then segued into a different dream in which I was editing/writing speeches for the Democrats. I kept telling anybody who’d listen that I was Canadian and I wasn’t sure if I could legally work for them, but nobody paid any attention. Also the speech I was writing eventually turned into a script about the protagonist seeking advice from a magical cat.

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Meadowville, Chapter 8

2026-03-15T16:05:13Z

Livia is Missing

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Friday Update

2026-03-13T23:22:07Z

Got a temp contract starting Tuesday, as an admin assistant at the offices of a construction company. I plan to overdye my hair back to brown till I can figure out what the unspoken dress code is—“business casual” can mean just about anything. Mind you, at my last long-term job, also construction-adjacent, the head of Payroll mainly wore hoodies with classic-rock logos on them and had both his ears pierced. In any case I feel like changing up my hair a little. Was going to dye it today but the weather dissuaded me from shopping.

Watched the National Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest last night. It’s up on YouTube till the 18th if you want to watch it too. Heard of it because Ncuti Gatwa plays Algernon, and he’s excellent, but Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell is amazing.

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Weekend Update

2026-03-08T03:04:16Z

Posted more Meadowville and Gentleman of the Shade.

Watched the first couple of episodes of Bookish, starring Mark Gatiss as Gabriel Book, who runs Book’s Books and solves mysteries on the side in 1947 London, along with his wife Trottie (Polly Walker) and assorted other characters.

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More Stuff

2026-02-19T00:15:46Z

Yesterday I disassembled the too-wide bed frame and assembled a new one that’s the same length but a foot narrower, so Andrew has room to get into it from the side. I then packed the big frame into the new frame’s box, with the instructions, screws, and alan key, and took it down to the recycling room in the basement of our building. There’s a section there for people to leave stuff that other residents might want, so I set it there. Someone else had left a “Phantom-Line 100,” a vintage device for superimposing ruled lines on paper when doing calligraphy. I took it home, on the suspicion that it was a type of camera lucida. It sort of is—I would have to invert it and mount it at eye-level to use it as such, but in the meantime I’ve had some luck with balancing this tablet on it and using it to trace images from the screen onto a surface.

The device flips the image from the original.

Monday Andrew had been watching Blackadder, and I’d remembered that Rowan Atkinson had played Inspecteur Maigret a few years ago—ten years ago as it turns out. I’ve only been able to find two of the four tv movies they did before they pulled the plug. We watched Maigret Sets A Trap, and we’re saving the other for later. Nice work by Atkinson in a serious role. Budapest stands in for 1950s Paris. Very different plot structure from the police procedurals of the last twenty-odd years, in which the murderer is nearly always someone who shows up in the first fifteen minutes—Maigret and his detectives don’t find their suspect till the third act, and then it becomes a matter of how to confirm it.

Mackenzie Crook has ventured further into magic realism with Small Prophets, and I just watched the first episode of…six, I think? The best part so far is Michael Palin as the protagonist’s father, building Rube Goldberg machines in the common living-room of his care home. This is, so far, the kind of show where much of the storytelling is done through the set dressing—there’s a wordless scene that made me say ohh, out loud, because it’s so sad and it also makes it more believeable that the protagonist will (spoiler, but nothing that doesn’t come up in the trailer and most reviews) ( Read more... )

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Another chapter of Meadowville posted

2026-02-16T23:50:01Z

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/209128806

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Weekend

2026-02-15T18:08:24Z

I’ve been chickening out and trying to avoid reading online discussions about the shooting in BC—IYKYK.

Touch wood, but I think our apartment may be in remission from the Unpleasantness.

Andrew and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day, but e came with me to the mall yesterday—I needed to buy a broom and some groceries—and we had slushy fruit drinks and bought a small toy for the cats in the shape of an ice-cream cone. It seems to have gone over well.

Finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the sequel to Children of Time and just as enjoyable. Except for Dr. Avrana Kern, this one features a whole new cast of characters: humans, spiders, Humans, octopus, AIs based on humans, and one of the more frightening alien entities ever written, Us-of-We. Does Tchaikovsky count as hopepunk? He should: despite the many grim and horrifying things that happen in these books, they’re touchingly optimistic that peace, or at least detente, is possible if all sides can just communicate.

I did feel like most of the octopus characters were a bit underwritten, but that’s partly because it’s a plot point that their minds are even more different from human minds than the spiders’ are. That said, the scene in which the octopus flickers in response to Senkovi’s corny jokes, even though it doesn’t understand them, because it’s happy that he’s happy that he’s happy, is both touching and also a clue that they respond primarily to the emotional content of a statement. Sort of like how I’m told this song is a collaboration between Poland’s two best-known folk-punk groups/artists, and while I don’t understand the words, the tune is very catchy.

Other musical links: I’d heard of Viv Stanshall’s album Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, but I’d never listened to it till this week, and it’s incredible—imagine if Eric Idle and Tom Waits got drunk together in a dive bar in Lagos.

Also—this M. R. James-esque report from the BBC on an apparent case of black magic.

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On a happier note

2026-02-08T02:46:57Z

Meadowville, Chapter 5

Apparently one of the possible Eurovision entries for 2026 is this band made up of firefighters? Idk if they’ve been definitely selected yet as Sweden’s entry.

An Australian talking about spiders in the most soothing and lyrical voice imaginable.

A 19th-c Portuguese estate with a lot of dramatic Masonic imagery.

Angine de Poitrine. Not sure how to describe this band. Sort of like Daft Punk but acoustic and polka-dotted?

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Weekend update

2026-02-08T02:30:56Z

(Text behind cut for mention of bedbugs)( Read more )

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Writing Update

2026-02-07T00:22:31Z

Just posted another short chapter of Gentleman of the Shade.

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Diminuendo

2026-01-31T16:32:26Z

Local musical legend and TTC busker Jeff Burke is no more, and Toronto is a little duller without him.

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Meadowville, Chapter 4

2026-01-26T01:29:27Z

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/205185051

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Writing update

2026-01-20T20:50:52Z

Finally put up a new chapter of WWMBD? (Ao3’s going down for a few hours tomorrow, for a code update or something, so read it tonight or wait): WWMBD (15246 words) by moon_custafer
Chapters: 10/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Musicians, Academia, Romantic Comedy, Rock and Roll, Age Difference, 1990s, Smoking, Bodyswap, Trans Character

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Monday Update

2026-01-19T22:25:23Z

First spray treatment for the bugs appears to have gone ok. Wrestled the cats into carriers and camped out in the building lobby for a few hours. Beatrice (the semi-feral) gave me a small scratch on the face, voided her bowels, and bellowed with rage and fear, but she and Nana were both pretty quiet in the lobby (there’s a gas fireplace, and we think they liked the warmth) and both appear to have now forgiven us (Beatrice came over for scritches a couple of minutes ago) although now I think I hear them growling and hissing at each other.

Tomorrow morning have to clear out the front closet/laundry room so someone can come clean out the ducts.

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Meadowville Ch 3

2026-01-17T19:14:48Z

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/203932646#workskin

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Gentleman of the Shade

2026-01-12T01:30:09Z

Finally posted a new (short) chapter! https://archiveofourown.org/works/55953232/chapters/202134506

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