Comics Update, and not really a good one.
As you may have noticed, my comics have trickled to a stop. Not for lack of motivation or want, but because, well, I'm kind of broken.
I have a pinched nerve that makes sitting down to do art painful for longer periods of time, my eyesight, which took a huge hit after my big Ketoacidosis crisis, never really recovered, and so between blurred vision and searing pain, the comics have stopped.
I don't want to stop the comics, though. But I also dont have the money to hire an artist, either.
But what I can do, is move to writing it in prose. Maybe an "illustrated novel" type situation with a few sketches thrown in.
Would you continue reading the "comics" if they moved to a prose format?
At this point, Closetspace is about 66% done. And A Wish for Wings about 75%....
Last Week's Meals: Chicken Picatta
Sorry about getting this out late, but life is busy and tight on time.
Ever wondered what Lemon Chicken would taste like if it iwas salty and not sweet? Well, here you go. A lovely dish, and actually pretty easy to make. Buttery lemon flavored savory chicken.
Title: Chicken Piccata
Yield: 5 servings
Cooking Time: 40 minutes
Category: Entree
Cuisine: Italian
Rating: 4/5 stars
Source: America's Test Kitchen: Let's Get Cooking
---
Ingredients
---
1 whole shallot
1 clove garlic
1/2 large lemon
3 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
32 ounces of boneless chicken thighs
salt
pepper
4 tbsp of vegetable oil
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp rinsed capers
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
---
Instructions
---
1 - Use a paring knife to remove the peel.
2 - Mince the shallot into 1/8-inch or smaller pieces
3 - Next, mince the garlic. Use the side of a chef's knife to gently
crush the clove. The skin should slip right off.
4 - Once the garlic has been peeled, we like to use a garlic press to
mince it. A garlic press ensures that the pieces will be very fine.
5 - Trim the ends of the lemon hald, then slice crosswise into 1/4
-inch-thick half moons.
6 - Cut the butter into 3 pieces and chill until needed.
7 - Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to
200 degrees.
8 - Spread flour in a shallow dish.
9 - Pat the cutlets dry with paper towels, then season with salt and
pepper.
10 - Dredge through the flour to coat and shake off any excess.
11 - Heat half of the oil in a 12 inch skillet over medium-high heat
until just smoking.
12 - Add half of the cutlets until light golden brown on botrh sides,
about 4 minutes.
13 - Transfer to a plate and keep warm in the oven. Repeat with the
remaining cutlets.
14 - Add the shallot and garlic to the oil left in the skillet and
cook over medium heat until softened, about 2 minutes.
15 - Stir in the broth and lemon slices, scraping up browned buts, and
simmer until slightly syrupy and reduced, 8 minutes.
16 - Stir in the lemon juice, the capers, and any accumulated chicken
juice.
17 - Turn the heat to low and whisk in the butter, one piece at a
time.
18 - Off the heat, stir in the parsley and season with salt and pepper
to taste.
19 - Spoon the sauce over the chicken before serving. It's ready to
eat!
---
Notes
---
Makes 5 servings at ~533 calories per meal.
Calories 516
Total Fat 33g
Total Carbohydrates 14g
Protein 34g
Normally makes 4 servings.
Prompted by his meeting with Vladimir Putin, yesterday Trump declared his intention to end mail-in voting in the U.S. But let's not be fooled, this isn't just his latest gambit to ensure Republicans hold the House. It's pure Trumpian authoritarianism, and it should alarm us all. https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-mail-vote-outlaw
Last week trump announced plans to "review" 8 Smithsonian museums. Today he doubled down, very explicit about the intent to revise history to reflect the ethno-nationalist fantasy of US history.
You can do something about that! We are backing up the digital archives of those museums on sciop: https://sciop.net/tags/smithsonian
You can take direct action to preserve the historical artifacts the right wants to destroy:
1) you can download a copy and seed it, every seeder counts. Subscribe to the smithsonian RSS feed to auto-download torrents as they are scraped.
2) we have also written a crawler connected to sciop that distributes the scraping work, and automatically creates and uploads a validated torrent that piggybacks off the s3 bucket as a webseed source while it lasts (instructions in reply).
The data from the 8 threatened museums is on the order of ~10 TB, and we have split it up by jpg/tif so people without much spare storage can join in on the jpg's at least. The full contents of the public smithsonian bucket is ~700TB, so if we want to have a full independent copy we'll need lots more seeders.
All this code is being written flat out, on the run, as it's needed by volunteers with exactly zero resources, so it's not polished or well documented, and if you're interested in helping damp the flames of the book burning by contributing to any of the code or docs, we'd love to have you.
- Artist for Closetspace and A Wish for Wings
- Associate Narrative Designer for Magic: The Gathering - Universes Beyond
- Writer for Sea of Legends
- One Enchilada Short of a Mexican Platter
- Opinions My Own