sjgochenour

@sjgochenour@mastodon.social

Author and illustrator, currently of queer fantasy romance.

I care a LOT about cheese.

the Goch on twitter.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sjgochenour, to random

Right, so I'm reading a paper book for the first time in ages (Spirals in Time, by Helen Scales.) This book is about MOLLUSKS, and THINGS ADJACENT TO MOLLUSKS

From the last chapter I have learned the following:

  1. land-going hermit crabs prefer to move into second-hand shells which other crabs have already remodeled to make more spacious and lighter.

  2. a scientist PUT HERMIT CRABS ON TINY TREADMILLS to prove that carrying a remodeled shell uses less crab-energy than carrying a new shell.

sjgochenour, to random

had a long dream about a place I sublet in the Boston area that was so detailed that it took me several minutes after I woke up to definitively determine that it didn’t exist and didn’t happen.

sjgochenour, to random

I cut into my would-be gorgonzola and it is not bad-tasting (very sharp, a touch cheddary) but whoo boy this process needs some work. We’ve got some dramatic cracking throughout the cheese, unwelcome white molds colonizing some of the P. roqueforti cracks, and also a weird yellow mold in one corner???? I sliced off the bits which looked questionable but clearly I need to be more careful with the humidity next time.

#cheesemaking

two crumbled chunks of blue cheese with a granular white mold over the blue mold crevasses

sjgochenour, to random

One of the blue camemberts has been COMPROMISED (with a mold it's not supposed to have)! I will be taking emergency measures when i get home (which make include sacrificing that one to see what the inside looks like and make a judgment call about the other one.)

lilithsaintcrow, to random
@lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com avatar

Look, if I find out you’re using ChatGPT or Dall-E or any other flavour of plagiarism pink sauce in ANY part of your work, it’s going to irreversibly taint the whole.

You know what it is and what it does. Continuing to use it means that shit is okay with you.

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow see, my personal “oh hell the fuck no” trigger is when an author has an obviously AI cover. so you definitely wrote all those words yourself, huh? didn’t take any shortcuts? cool. right. I’m never going to find out, and i’m going to bring up that cover when other people are talking about your book.

sjgochenour, to random

Anxiety attacking again! (I feel like I should tag this as "writer life.")

sjgochenour, to random

aside: I need to do another tour of mastodon looking for people to follow who are active over here. I feel like there have been a couple non-representative bursts of activity since birbfail, and now my feed is only a handful of people (delightful people! but I like variety.)

sjgochenour,

I am enjoying bluesky, but choices made by the dev team make me suspect it is not a platform long for this world.

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow It’s aggravating as hell. Unfortunately I think that in the current landscape there’s an unresolvable tension between platforms which are less accessible (masto) to a large number of people, and those which are more accessible and therefore are just an engine for exploitation by venture capitalists, private equity firms, and their ilk (bluesky, threads).

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow I believe people when they say mastodon doesn’t work for them for whatever reason — I mean, tiktok makes me a little sick to my stomach, but I seem to be very much in the minority there.

I do think my comfort here is largely due to being willing to ignore stuff that doesn’t work for me. I didn’t go looking for the ideal server because I deeply don’t care; I don’t trigger warning food because that is not good for my mental stuff. I block furiously. And it’s been okay!

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow the most positive online experiences I’ve ever had were on a forum with a multi-page language policy where people often wrote posts which were thousands of words long; the worst online experiences I’ve had have been on twitter, where there were extensive social norms which you had to intuit, and virtually nothing could be fully explained.

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow Masto is definitely not specifically engineered to hit my rage button, for which I am grateful, as someone with a pretty viciously addictive personality. I don’t mean to be overly negative, but my suspicion is that as time goes on being able to adapt to new platforms and taking each one for what it can do best, before transitioning to the next one, is going to become more and more important.

lilithsaintcrow, to random
@lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com avatar

This week, in Authors Behaving Badly…

Given how hard it is to keep track of one's own actual socials, why on earth would anyone want to sockpuppet? Just a whole lotta wasted time/effort that would be better spent ACTUALLY WRITING.

https://www.themarysue.com/cait-corrain-goodreads-controversy-explained/

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow or sleep, or cook dinner, or read a book, or —

like I’m too tired to do basic life stuff a lot of the time. it fully astonishes me that anyone could waste their precious minutes on this.

lilithsaintcrow, to random
@lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com avatar

This Vox article is notable for the way it simply refuses to say that women perhaps don't want to be treated as walking wombs owned by some man, their bodies wrecked by dangers doctors ignore, and then cut loose by governments that only want soldiers and consumers. https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow I tried to express this on bluesky a bit ago and had a fucking twat talk down to me about it. The utter repulsiveness of having people ask “why don’t you want to have multiple kids for the sake of an unknowable future economy, the having of which will sharply diminish the chances of you living to see it?” — like, do they hear themselves?

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow “we can’t possibly understand why birth rates are dropping!” let me lay my moral out: if someone’s plan for their retirement depends on forcing other people to bear children, I am fine with consigning them to die in a ditch.

sjgochenour,

@lilithsaintcrow we have to figure out a way to support people who can’t work without subjugating other people’s bodies and autonomy, or what the fuck is even the point?

herhandsmyhands, to romancelandia
@herhandsmyhands@romancelandia.club avatar

Hey, @romancelandia
via long time romance reader Marilyn:"I don't read a lot of contemporaries, but this is a really good romance. Different. And the protagonists are actual grownups."

Emma Barry's Chick Magnet is on sale at just under two dollars, for the rest of November.

#SALE

https://www.amazon.com/Chick-Magnet-Emma-Barry-ebook/dp/B09Y5HHZ6G/

sjgochenour,

@herhandsmyhands @romancelandia also, as someone who grew up in and around a vet clinic, her representation of the veterinary practice is A+.

Private
sjgochenour,

@herhandsmyhands @romancelandia

why . . . are people like this . . .

first of all, pumpkin painting is great fun, and no one needs to prove their authenticity by abstaining from fun activities.

but also: pumpkins have been an important food crop in North America for 5000+ years (possibly as long as 10,000) so why wouldn’t Native kids celebrate fall with pumpkins? such a weird flex.

sjgochenour, to random

I forgot I had to make yogurt before making the gorgonzola! and so: cheese TOMORROW.

sjgochenour, to random

I have to finish my manuscript today to send to my editor, and it’s making me so anxious I feel unwell. FUN.

sjgochenour, to random

Twisted my ankle badly this morning and feeling glum about it. I think it’s going to be okay — 8 hours of compression, ice, rest, and ibuprofen later I can walk on it and the swelling has gone down — but I work on my feet and commute on my feet, so this sort of thing elicits a certain amount of pure terror in my soul.

sjgochenour,

@mikelygee thank you!! me too.

sjgochenour,

@ClH2OArs yeah, today was kind of a bust.

sjgochenour, to random

I need to read. . . more . . .

My book collecting is not as out of control as it once was, but I still have several dozen Very Exciting Yet Untouched Books upon my shelf.

sjgochenour,

SOME BOOKS ABOUT WHICH I AM EXCITED, BUT CANNOT SAY WHEN I WILL ACTUALLY READ:

England’s Apprenticeship 1603-1763, by Charles Wilson, purchased from Grey Matter Books in Hadley, Massachusetts.

I want to write a future arc of books in the Goblins&Cheese verse during a period analogous to the 17th century, when the kingdom of cheese priests is busy repulsing an attempt from elsewhere to colonize them. Thus, I wish to discover the state of ag tech at that time.

sjgochenour,

Xenocultivars: Stories of Queer Growth, edited by Isabela Oliveira and Jed Sabin. I pre-ordered this one when it came out; it's got stories from @SoniaSulaiman and @bogiperson among many others.

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