Agents of chaos going out through the world

Tonight rushthatspeaks and I made saffron rice with barberries, Quorn (in place of chicken, so that we could feed it to gaudior) braised with shallots and more saffron, and soft-boiled eggs. This would have been an ideal dinner if the recipe for the rice had not one hundred percent lied when it said it took an hour. We ate around ten o'clock at night. The crisp golden crust at the bottom of the pot would almost certainly have worked better if we'd had basmati rice instead of glutinous, but it seems to have tasted good to the people who could chew it. Oh, and we have leftovers because we accidentally made at least twice as much as we needed for three people. Really everything about this recipe went wrong except that it was delicious. I suppose that is the important part.

1. I haven't a clue if it's any good, but this gifset makes me want to watch The Librarians (2014–). If anyone has recreated the Labyrinth of Minos in a skyscraper in Boston, I want to know about it.

2. So through most of high school and into college I believed that all of my favorite characters were doomed. Bad luck, bad choices, bad plotting, whatever. If a character caught my interest, I could feel confident they were headed for a bad end. As it turns out, the vast majority of characters for whom I have felt an affinity across the years do not die or even meet with tragedy in the course of their stories, but I understand how I got the impression: in high school, I was heavily into Babylon 5 (1994–1998). Also I suspect in hindsight that a preference for morally ambiguous characters and outsiders of all kinds may have weighted the scales a little. But I came to understand that it was a mistaken belief, and I was all right with that, and anyone played by Elisha Cook, Jr. should not be taken as an argument to the contrary. I just found that out that a character who featured in the last Magic expansion block I really paid attention to—right around the time they were starting to play with story arcs; he had an interesting face in several illustrations and all his flavor text was cynical—has a horrifically depressing storyline if you follow it through, which I didn't, because I lost track of the game around the time I started college. Maybe high-school-aged me was on to something after all.

3. What with all the film noir recently, I seem to have compiled a short list of songs I associate with the noir aesthetic, despite absolutely none of them having been written in the appropriate decades. More accurately, they've been changing off in my head for the last couple of days and I am hoping this will exorcise them. Enjoy.

Michael Penn, "Walter Reed"

All I want to do is hide
It's graduation day
And everything I learned inside
Didn't seem to pay
I've had my fill of palm trees
And lighting up Grauman's Chinese

Thea Gilmore, "The Wrong Side"

It's a hard case to make
And I'm hard news and I'm going to break now
They got you walking on the wrong side
They got you walking with me

Saint Eve, "While the City Sleeps"

Right on time—think fast
It happens in a flash
A lifetime of regret begins ten seconds in the past

Timber Timbre, "Bad Ritual"

There's a history in pictures
There is evidence in boxes
There is proof of your love for him long after it's dead

Tom Waits, "Gun Street Girl"

Now the rain like gravel on an old tin roof
Burlington Northern pulling out of the world
Now a head full of bourbon and a dream in the straw
And a Gun Street girl was the cause of it all

Beady Sea, "It'll Be Alright"

If you can't go around, you have to go through
If I can't have her, then I guess I'll take you
So breathe it deep, it'll be all right
One more time, it's going to be all right

How's the ending go?

It is my second anniversary with derspatchel. I do not know how to talk about this past year. I am still here, and so he is, and so are our cats. We will do something nice with the day.