welcome to camp telophase

Would anyone here be able to point me to curtains that have a pattern similar to this wallpaper, ideally with a dark green background?

https://paintedpaper.com/collections/black/products/tina-floral-wallpaper

I like the art style and spacing between the flowers and the general scale (so you don’t see a small repeating pattern when you step back) and the delicate tracery of the stems between the flowers and the dark background. This would be going into a moody, dark green office area and a light background wouldn’t work for me.

One request: if you’re going to suggest something general like “Have you tried Etsy/Amazon/Wayfair/Spoonflower?” then suggestions for the search terms would be more helpful since yes, I have indeed tried those sites and a number of others but haven’t been able to find anything that hits my buttons. (edit: also, Pinterest is overrun with AI-generated crap so difficult to search.)

In other news, we’re living in a sea of boxes at the new house and have one more trip back to our former city to pick up the last straggling items that didn’t make it onto the moving truck.

We have a lot of a nice homemade mayonnaise in the fridge because it was simpler to make it than to go back out to the store.* And there’s a lot, like close to 2 cups, because I couldn’t make less. I tried, and it failed to emulsify.

So! What do you cook that takes a lot of mayo besides potato and egg salad? We have favorite recipes for those already. I can’t use it for sweet things like mayonnaise cake** because it’s lightly flavored with garlic.

*Power was out for a good 12 hours or so at the house while we were gone, and there’s various things in the fridge that I didn’t trust, including the opened mayonnaise. The door would have been opened by the petsitter getting the open can of cat food out.

** If you’re not aware of mayo-based baking, the resulting things do not taste of mayo. It basically replaces the fat and some liquid in the batter.

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I've been watching my brain start to slide into Revisions Mode as I near the end of Deadwater--my plan is to give myself a couple of weeks if I possibly can,* then print it out and read it all together as a book, making notes, before I swing into revising.

*I know months is often recommended, but ADHD. Sorry.

Anyway, I'd really like to play up moments of the sublime, numinous, and eldritch as much as I can, and thus I seek recommendations from you as to prose, fiction or nonfiction, that evokes those feelings in you. (Music and art recs also appreciated, but it's not my primary focus as I'm trying to feed words into my brain for this.)

Sublime, in the general Romantic (not little-r romantic) sense that's embodied in Kaspar David Friedrich's landscapes (7-min video on Friedrich here, article on the sublime in philosophy here), the sense of awe, respect, immanence and maybe even terror at perceiving things greater than yourself (which is why I think the eldritch is part of this). I tend to get it from contemplating deep time, deep space, and the nature writing of Robert MacFarlane, among others.

I also get it from that breed of manga and anime that slowly explores small mysteries, like Mushishi, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Aqua and Aria (the ones set on a Mars that's terraformed to look like Venice).

The numinous (Wikipedia link) is closely related to the sublime, but for me it seems a little closer to the religious or sacred in that the sense of awe is related to other beings or intelligences, instead of just all things greater than oneself, if that makes sense. The "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," chapter in The Wind in the Willows, Mushishi, Mononoke (the stylized anime, not Princess Mononoke, although PM has its moments of that near the end with the forest spirit). Many parts of the Moomintroll books also have this.

Eldritch is of course on the awe-ful (in the old sense of the term) side of the sublime, and I'm looking for subtle eldritch, not the full-on ZOMG THE SOUL-CRUSHING TERROR, THE TENTACLEs, THE TENTACLES!!! that you get in full-on Lovecraftian pastiche, more the gnawing sense of creep you get when something is not right. While I appreciate T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones and the like, I'm looking for stuff that's more like the bits near the beginning, where the MC is just starting to feel things are off, and not the middle and end when the MC is smack in the middle of Weirdland.

Anyway, throwing that out there and seeing what y'all can come up with. Now it's back to the word mines to see how much of this story I can produce today. Woo!

Some time back I expressed my frustration at not being able to find a stock photo of a certain type of landscape--essentially, a place on the coast where a gorge meets the ocean, where the gorge widens out. And where the photo is taken from the ocean, looking towards the shore.

I think I've finally managed to find the closest thing I'm going to get to it. Preveli Beach in Crete has the sort of geography I want, with a gorge that widens as it meets the ocean. There's even a river running through it! (The river is, as rivers do, running along the bottom of the gorge and not a waterfall, but that's something I can composite in.) It's taken from a drone over the ocean and at a little higher angle than I really want, but I can't complain too much.

The photo in question. You can see the scale better in this image, which isn't a stock image but comes from this tourist page. The Butterfly Valley in Turkey is a close contender, but suffers from a lack of ocean-direction photos, as well as being a bit narrow.

...I'd put "edit" here but I haven't hit "post" yet. Here's a panoramic view from the right direction and angle. Hopefully I can correct the distortion in Photoshop. :)

Anyone know of someplace online that sells nice Christmas-themed things, not the plastic stuff I can pick up in Michael's or Joann's but stuff you'd see in Christmas/Kristkindl markets? The big Christmas market that normally shows up in our area sells a lot of stuff from a German company that has an online presence...and charges FORTY-NINE EUROS for shipping to the US.

myrialux and I have a tradition of buying a Santa figure every year and obviously we're not getting out to buy any in person this year. I'd like something kind of nice (and willing to go up to $100 or so) but I'm not willing to pay FORTY-NINE EUROS SHIPPING for the thing.