…ould make a video lol, but see here for an idea of the technique). A short comment on the flour: I use T45/T55 flour with around 10% protein content, I’m guessing the US equivalent would be all purpose flour, and the UK equivalent plain flour. There’s no need for bread flour (the higher protein content of the bread flour is mostly wasted on stuff like this, which isn’t meant to rise: it makes the tortillas marginally more chewy but I should think…

…FYI…: RL + dayjob is eating my brain It’s Xmas soon and I’m completely late for everything I have a 25+-people party coming next week I’m getting massively spammed by bots in the comments of the website All of this concurs to explain why I’m not going to be very fast on my feet, and don’t hesitate to holler if you think I owe you anything and haven’t delivered……

…er than a writer, Tove Jansson will always be remembered as one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest writer of children’s books of all times. You are also a lot like Philip Pullman. If you want some action, try Gene Wolfe. If you’d like a challenge, try your exact opposite, David Eddings. Your score This is how to interpret your score: Your attitudes have been measured on four different scales, called 1) High-Brow vs. Low-Brow, 2) Violent vs. Pea…

…’m told is much better). Similarly, a lot of my speculative fiction didn’t come from comics, but from bandes dessinées (BD), the French comics (sort of. There are big differences, mainly about mainstream acceptance of BDs in France, but I won’t go into them here). I read Yoko Tsuno, about a Japanese tech in Brussels who faces down aliens, time-travelling megalomaniacs and weird creatures (it’s unabashedly centered on Yoko herself, to the point tha…

…but I have this sinking feeling I put way too much in this, and that it’s really a novel in disguise. I’m also fighting my own genre pre-conceptions with this: I wanted to do a generational tale on a space station, focused on the troubles of a family in the wake of a civil war (basically, Dream of Red Mansions rather than Three Kingdoms), and my brain keeps insisting that I’m doing unimportant fluff, and that there should be explosions and battle…

…initely less confused after their surgery. I don’t like posting this because I hate spoon-feeding interpretations of my stories to the reader, but I felt it had to be said lest people take away the wrong idea altogether. ETA of ETA: I saw some reaction from Bogi Takacs, and realised that she was right, and that I’d been thinking about completely binary gender lines when I wrote this postscript, as if I were still stuck in the world of the story. H…

…of the novel, and that Liu Bei himself seems completely detached from the realities of the world (ie, trying to establish his own kingdom without resorting to trickery…). In other news, did some light editing on “Shipbirth”, a short I’d written a while about about Aztecs in space (well, sort of). Working on another short involving steampunk and fallen gods, and my brain’s currently trying to decide between three different short stories. Also edit…

…t entirely inaccurate… -(via Charles Tan) “Falling from Grace”, a romantic comedy that apparently couldn’t sell in the mainstream–because the main character is Asian, and they’d have had to pigeonhole it under “Asian-American movies”. I have watched the trailer, and cannot for the life of me fathom why the Asian thing would be a problem. It doesn’t even seem like her private life is particularly and spectacularly “Asian” (whatever that would mean)…

…utal truths. Blindsight, Peter Watts. I picked this one up mainly on the recommendation of the BF, who heard Peter Watts speak in Montreal and was apparently very impressed by what he had to say. Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of miniature objects survey the planet. A mission is hastily put together to see what the aliens could possibly want: headed by a genetically engineered vampire, Theseus aims to achieve first contact…

…tes Dario Ciriello, Juliette Wade and Janice Hardy (and lots more whom I’d really have liked to see). But one transatlantic con for two people a year is quite enough for the budget, sadly. Fun experiences of the day: I ordered a book on a German bookstore’s website (volume 5 of the Utena manga, in case you’re curious–I’m not clear why there are so many copies of vol 1-4 around, and vol 5 just seems to have vanished from about every single English…