keri

@keristars

I love museums and history. ★ bed-tethered disabled! AuDHD, POTS, MCAS, and ME/CFS. ★🧑‍🦽★ I miss traveling and being in nature and sewing. #1 Lizzie W. Champney fan (2025) location: Jacksonville, Florida

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keri@keristars· Jul 13

I've been harvesting these guys for my salad, too! I used another long one just now, and there's still two more lol

Photo from mostly above, looking down at a kitchen counter. Central is a soup bowl with handles, containing noodle salad. To the side of the bowl is a trap water glass with several green onion stalks. Two of them stretch far to the side, above and over the bowl, much longer than it is wide.

keri@keristars· Jul 11

If you want to try my new very favorite, very easy to mix up dressing, here's the quantities I've been using. i misread the vegetable oil volume in the recipe I copied from, but tbh I think 1/3c is plenty. I usually go scant on the vinegar and a little more ginger, like 1.5-2 teaspoons.

I use a bonne maman jam jar

1/3c vegetable oil
3 Tbsp rice vinegar
3 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp ginger (fresh or ground)
1 tsp+ minced garlic or 1 clove
1/2 tsp Accent or 2 Tbsp less sodium soy sauce (i can't eat soy sauce)

optionally, add 1Tbsp lime juice, 1 tsp sriracha to taste (i think the ginger has enough kick!)

keri@keristars· Jul 10

i really am enjoying the Retired Assassin's Guide series, but it is *so* ridiculous in places. this entire page had me laughing at the CSI "enhance - enhance!" feel. (Those gloves she puts on were the same ones she used to split an orchid two days earlier! I'm sure her hands are cleaner)

Fiorelli’s gaze intensified. Now, she looked like she wanted to snatch the notebook out of its padded case. Instead, she delved into her shiny black handbag and came out with a pair of fawn leather gloves. “An academic’s habit. We must preserve the pages, yes?”

“We believe the notebook contains the key to something important,” said Eleanor, “but we can’t figure out if there’s a hidden message — or not.”

“May I?” Fiorelli’s gloved fingers reached out towards the notebook.

“Please,” said Avery.

Fiorelli ran her fingers over the notebook’s cover, then gently picked it up. “Buckram binding, hand-stitched pages, silk headbands and inbuilt ribbon bookmark, rag paper, hand-cut edges. This notebook is old — it could easily date back to the 1850s.”

“So you think it’s…” Avery’s voice trailed off.

Fiorelli opened the notebook. Her eyes narrowed as she saw the first beautiful drawing of an orchid. “It is Albarelli’s penmanship. He used a steel nib dip pen, iron gall ink, and this is his distinct radial crosshatching. We have here one of his notebooks from the Florida expedition.”

keri@keristars· Jul 9

I used the wrong kind of fabric for the white parts and hadn't got the hang of accommodating how the folds reduce the width, the more cuts you have, so it was *quite* a learning experience 🤣 This is one I really love, and I keep wanting to make the inverse of, some day. no glamor pics though :(

A large, simple square for a baby quilt. It's mostly medium warm grey. In the top third, a few inches from the edge, are 4 stripes of candy color - red, yellow, lime green, and teal. Each horizontal stripe is about half an inch wide, with three times as much grey separating it from the next.

Again about a third of the way from the left, each stripe has a wide triangle descending through the gap to just barely touch the next stripe. It's sort of like a series of flags or almost like tabs on file folders, except they all line up.

It's a minimalist, modern design.

keri@keristars· Jul 9

my profile header is one! it's a square for a pocket pillow i made for my niece. (pillow cover with big pocket for traveling stuff like books, snacks, etc) This is the very first one I made (before I put the back on) for my very first nib! I started on a challenge, with those log cabin corners lol

A 2 by 2 square quilt. There are two patterns used, each one twice, in aqua, coral, and gold solids and prints.

Top left and bottom right is a sort of plaid stripe. A stripe made of 3 solid colors crosses with another in different colors, off center. Where they cross the solids switch to prints, then continue as solids. The crossing is in the quadrant near the outer corners of the quilt.

The bottom left and top right squares are also the same and mirror each other. They are mostly white with a triangle in the bottom left and top right corners (about half the width/height of each side of the square). The triangles are the log cabin pattern, alternating prints and solids.

It's kind of hard to describe the details of the quilt, but generally it's a lot of white space with cheerful color and geometrics.

keri@keristars· Jul 8

so hideous i adore them (photo from www.eurekalert.org/news-release... )

A parent Yunnan snub-nosed monkey and her baby. They have like no nose, just slits in their faces. Also enormous lips. Kind of like Michael Jackson, but furry? The baby also has enormous ears.

keri@keristars· Jul 7

i guess it's more colorful than last time, with the green lol also, check it out! it took a few days but my green onions perked back up :)

A big bowl of noodle salad on a countertop. The ingredients are all nicely separate for maximum glamor shot. There's ramen noodles, carrot shreds, and slices of green and red pepper. Next to the bowl is a jam jar with several baby onion stalks, all of them looking crisp and green.

keri@keristars· Jul 7

making noodle salad for dinner again would you like to see my ingredients mise en place Also i love watching all the layers separate as you add them, that's why the jam jar isn't shaken up in the photo 😂

A bunch of bottles and jars. The angle makes them look like a band on an album cover. There's honey, vegetable oil, sesame oil, rice vinegar, water, ground ginger, minced garlic, MSG, and a chunky sesame ginger seasoning.

keri@keristars· Jul 4

my dinner :) (and supper lol) i couldn't get the best glamor shot because the noodles keep tangling and hiding the veg! the green onions are also possibly beyond crispness, alas but the salad tastes so good, it's refreshingly chilled too

In a dark blue bowl is a colorful mix of curly ramen noodles, slices of red pepper, and orange carrot shreds. They're shiny from the vinaigrette, which also contributes the sesame seeds that speckle the food. Off to the side in the background is a glass with faded green onions sitting in water.

keri@keristars· Jul 2

ok here are a couple quotes about that first post here, though let me know if the first one needs more context to make sense! The second directly follows, I just made 2 screencaps for easier reading. (the quote on the next page is "there was no other cause [for the war] than slavery."

Here, then, the moral complexity of the cotton crise: on the one hand, the cotton which the French economy so depended on was a direct product of slavery; on the other, the shortage of cotton was spurring the influx into Paris of young women who were themselves sold into the servitude of prostitution. If Manet was aware of Glaize’s Pourvoyeuse and Maxime Du Camp’s assessment of it—and why would he not have been? his Guitarrero was hanging in the same Salon even if Du Camp chose to ignore it—then here, perhaps, is the moment of Olympia’s birth and the first statement of her mission, an unknowing revolutionary determined “to ruin and cretinize” the haute bourgeois visitors that four years later would stand before her.

However horrible the French considered slavery and however their economy depended on cotton, thus allowing them to sidestep the question of slavery for economic reasons, they hotly debated whether slavery was really what had motivated the Civil War in the first place. In the opinion of most, as Philippe Roger has summed it up, “the abolition of slavery was a false pretense”: The Civil War was “in no way . . . a high-principled, liberating crusade, but rather a pitiless attempt by the North to politically and economically subjugate the South. . . . The North was much less interested in freeing the slaves than in making sure its manufactured goods could circulate freely throughout the continent and that it could continue to tax its rivals at exorbitant rates, even if the South’s agricultural economy was damaged by inevitable retaliatory measures from Europe.”29 When, for instance, as late as January 25, 1864, the anticlerical and Saint-Simonist Adolphe Guéroult (not coincidentally also founder of L’opinion nationale, for which Malespine served as editor) argued in the French Corps législatif that slavery was the cause of the war, he was still greeted with jeers: “Whatever may have been said of it,” he stated,

keri@keristars· Jun 29

i can't even. this is the end of the book, except for a hymn (I think?) and an appendix about some of the history it's wrong in so many ways 😬 a great story, though, except for the wrong bits!

The Viceroy little suspecting that Fray Ignacio still lived on the lonely rock of Acoma, turned his attention particularly to the Californian Indians, who, he thought, would be more kindly disposed toward the Spanish religion, since they knew less of Spanish cruelty. To California he sent that most remarkable man, Father Salvatiera, — of whose wonderful labors and successes Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson has told us with such eloquence, — while the Pueblos of New Mexico waited and still wait for the Gospel.

The Mesa Encantada still stands on the wind-blown prairie, — a monument, not to Monita alone, but to a wronged and patient people, who have received nothing but violence, treachery, and fraud from the white race (except from the handful of missionaries whom they slew in their blind struggle for independence).

But who shall say that the missionary zeal of those early martyrs, the Franciscan friars, was wasted ? Some haunting memory of their teaching remains, and makes the re-conquest of the country for Christ an easier thing than it would otherwise be ; and still the Pueblo Indians stretch out their hands, asking for justice as well as religion.

keri@keristars· Jun 29

Here is Monita's last words before her tragic death i think maybe Champney was trying to resolve her own Christianity and support for the boarding schools with the story she had told that rejects those things? maybe?

Monita lay on the cliff and thought of her unhappy people and the Spaniards, but chiefly of Popé and the Geronima Montezuma, — the Indian blindly struggling for the independence of his people against the Spaniard, the Spanish girl as blindly groping for a way to help the Indian. "If I had lived," she thought, "I might have brought them together ; and now they must remain enemies. Perhaps, after all, the task was too great for me ; there are too many Indians like Popé, too few Spaniards like Geronima." She thought of Fray Ignacio and the religion which he had brought to the Indians, of Christ and Montezuma ; and she lifted her heart to the Great Spirit whom Spaniard and Indian alike adored, praying him to send Montezuma again to the Indians, and Christ once more to the Spaniards who so poorly followed his example, — a Saviour to save men from sinning, it mattered not by what name they called him. The old prayers and hymns which Fray Ignacio had taught her floated confusedly through her brain, — " Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem."

keri@keristars· Jun 29

but getting back to where i started today's musings, about the anti-catholicism of this book. but "to this day" - that includes the Americans, Champney's compatriots, mostly Protestant 🤔

The morning of San Lorenzo dawned bright and peaceful ; but on that day twenty-two Franciscan friars were almost simultaneously martyred. More than one, as he bowed his meek head to the death-stroke, murmured, in imitation of his Lord, " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." Poor frenzied barbarians, they knew thus much, — that they were rejecting a religion which, whatever might be its merits, was offered them hand in hand with injustice and villany. Have Christianity and civilization been presented to them in any other way to this day ?

keri@keristars· Jun 29

it goes on! I'm honestly not sure what Champney is doing with this, except that she's anti-war and Monita is the heroine of the story. (and has spent several years being educated in Spain while hoping to make pilgrimage to Zaragoza to heal her leg)

''But, Popé, why need they be killed?" Monita still besought. '' If they will consent to leave our country once and forever, will not that serve the same purpose ? It may be too late to save the missionaries and settlers scattered so widely in the different pueblos; but when Santa Fe is in your power, — that great town, with all its women and children, who are not all wicked, — promise me. Popé, that they shall be sent back to their own country unharmed."

Popé was silent ; all his wrongs clamored within him for revenge. At length he spoke slowly and unwillingly : " I am not the only one. You see this great band of warriors, — they are but a small part of the army which is collecting. They have all suffered cruelties which they are burning to revenge. Do you imagine that when their blood is up I can hold them ? "

"Yes," Monita replied, steadily; ''you have incited them to this, and you can hold their hands. See, even the dance cannot go on without you ; the warriors are standing about waiting for you to lead them. We will have nothing to do with these wicked white people who rob and murder us and make us their slaves, and who send their priests to teach us to be patient and submissive. We will have none of their false religion, and we will have none of their vices either. We will not steal or murder children because they have done so. I have come back to you, Popé, to labor with you for our people till Montezuma comes ; but unless you promise to show yourself merciful in victory, I will not stay."

keri@keristars· Jun 29

what the hell is this lie about San Juan (Ohkay Owingeh) Pueblo DID participate in the revolt. The Pueblos that didn't were all further south, further from Santa Fe. what is the purpose of lying about it like this??

It has been said that I have had opportunity to know in Spain that the Spaniards' religion is a lie. I will not deny this. Let us prove our own religion more merciful. If the priests have taught us false things, we know that they have themselves been true. I call upon you to remember Fray Ignacio, and I ask which of you will vote for his. death ? In my father's stead I have a vote, and I vote against the untying of this knot."

There was more debate, the discussion was long and heated ; but a majority of the voters were won over to Monita's side, and the messenger was sent away with the word that San Juan refused to join the conspiracy. It was the only pueblo which stood aloof in the great uprising, and by so doing it gained for itself a new title from the Spanish chroniclers, — San Juan de los Caballeros, " St. Jolm of the Gentlemen," a name of which it is proud to-day.

keri@keristars· Jun 22

BUT the very next day is an auto-da-fé. "It was a shocking spectacle: four victims were strangled, and then burned at the stake; a fifth, [a pirate] and a heretic, was burned alive." And then Champney is even more blunt with the comparison! (I think it's mostly anti-Catholicism, tbh)

Simon Magus regarded the spectacle with horror and bewilderment. Fray Isidro had told him that human sacrifices were done away with, and had been shocked that he had burned a fowl to the god of hell ; and yet here was a human soul going forth in flame and torture, a man burned alive to the devil by this very Church of Mary and Jesus, for there stood Fray Isidro with the friars of his Order consenting to his death. The terrible scene was over, the crowd had dispersed, and the processions of friars returned to their convent. Simon Magus followed them, the almoner admitted him to the kitchen, and he waited there for Fray Isidro, who presently came to him. " I thought I told you never to come back here," the friar said, more from apprehension for himself than from cruelty to the poor Indian.

keri@keristars· Jun 21

making poor choices (albeit delicious ones) at 10:30 at night because the craving hits and well the PEM doesn't have me crying while upright at least

Photo of a dim kitchen. A portable hob is front of a regular stovetop oven. The saucepan on top has sliced onions.

keri@keristars· Jun 18

This seems so smart! Also the yikes at the hunters missing them 😬 (is the annual hunt even worth it? plus all the questionable financial entanglements Craig details...)

When Florida officials scheduled the first Python Challenge in 2013, which attracted some 1,500 publicity-hungry amateurs, Mazzotti took three of the live pythons that were turned in. He put tracking devices on them and turned them loose again.

Hunters went straight past the tagged snakes, utterly oblivious. That’s how good pythons are at hiding.

That year, the Conservancy began using this “scout snakes” technique as its primary tool for hunting their targets. They have now equipped a total of 40 snakes with tracking devices, then turned them loose during python mating season.

The tagged snakes — bearing fluorescent orange tags and highly visible scale marks so no human hunter will take them out — follow the pheromones of fertile females.

Their radio signals show the biologists where they’re headed. The scientists can then interrupt their reptilian get-down groove.

keri@keristars· Jun 18

I really didn't know this about the size of the snakes caught during the roundup. Of course, the little ones will eventually turn into big ones, but those big ones are so destructive!

keri@keristars· Jun 14

one of the nicest things about being an auntie/uncle to little kids is the fridge art gallery ngl check out the awesome birthday pictures my niece colored for me, and a card she drew/wrote all by herself! 😍 (i love that she's very specific about what she colors in, often leaving the bgs white)

A white fridge with 6 works of art by little kids. on the freezer door up top is a card that says "I luv u" with a rainbow and a painting of fireworks.

On the bottom, the fridge door has three coloring book pages and an abstract painting. The coloring pages are two birthday cakes and rainbows and a sleeping Stitch. The painting is a mix of blue and pink streaks and scribbles that makes chunks of purple (it's honestly really cool, and painted by a two year old).

keri@keristars· Jun 13

oh also too the conclusion of that chapter I'm not fully sure about the viewer kneeling at the bedside, but tbh it's been 20-odd years since I saw the painting in person, and it's so very large, and I think it is an accepted, common interpretation. Either way, yeah, powerful commentary via art.

Note how formally related are the Billings illustration and Manet’s painting, the curve of the drapery to the left, the window to the right, the presence of the flowers arranged by Topsy. More important is the fact that Manet has reversed the positions of the black maid and the white man in the illustration. In Olympia, the maid stands over the courtesan in the position of the hypocrite, Augustine St. Clare, and we viewers—each of us now, in Baudelaire’s famous phrase, “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”—kneel at her bedside in the position of Topsy. Together with Olympia herself, it is we who are the agents of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice, the agents of what Karl Marx called, in the title of his 1867 book Capital.

keri@keristars· Jun 13

But if Manet wasn't thinking of that illo from Billings, Cézanne almost certainly was in his "Modern Olympia" response to Manet's painting. He swaps the two figures hovering over the reclining woman, but the composition is otherwise too similar to the illo to not be a reference!

Painting:
Very impressionistic, colorful. A faded red curtain and a more vivid red table to the left, green wall and white window center right, and a big vase of flowers further right. At the center is a white bed with a white woman lying on it, looking towards the shadowy man who sits on a couch at the foot of the bed in the shadow of the flowers. Behind the white woman is a Black woman, apparently holding a sheer drapery of some sort.

Caption:
Figure 14 Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia, 1873–1874. Oil on canvas, 18 × 21 ¾ in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. RF1951-31. Photograph: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photography: Hervé Lewandowski.

keri@keristars· Jun 13

Sayre suggests Manet may have had access to either the "Splendid Edition" of the book or to the illustration of Eva's death, due to compositional similarities in Olympia - albeit the Black woman is in place of St Clare rather than kneeling before the white woman. Maybe?

Illustration:
Black and white, an etching. Eva lies dead on a bed, a curtain on the left and a window to her right, and flowers on a table further right. The dark St Clare stands behind the bed, looking down at Eva, while Topsy kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed, leaning towards Eva.

Caption:
Figure 13 Hammatt Billings, headpiece illustration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Engraved by Baker and Smith (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853). Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. Photograph: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Digital Photograph: Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, Institute for Advance Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.

keri@keristars· Jun 13

For illustrative purposes, a couple cartoons commenting on the "tommanie" in France are included. The first one cracked me up, especially after the comment about how it was impossible to go about Paris and NOT be aware of the book (or, later, play).

Cartoon: Two people sit up in bed as a shadowy
figure at the window interrupts their sleep. He's atop a ladder and holds a large placard, lit by a lantern in his hand, which reads "Lisez Oncle Tom".

Caption:
Figure 10 Cham, Inconvénient de ne pas bien fermer ses fenêtres la nuit par la tommanie qui règne (The downside of not properly closing your windows at night[: a visit] by the “Tom Mania” that reigns), Le charivari, November 28, 1852, 5. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Cartoon: A man in a top hat huddles under an umbrella as black men tumble out of the sky. Text below reads Mais voilà qu'il se met à pleuvoir des oncles Tom...

Caption:

Figure 11 Nadar, Mais voilà qu’il se met à pleuvoir des oncles Tom (But look, it’s beginning to rain Uncle Toms), Le journal de rire, December 25, 1852, 1. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

keri@keristars· Jun 13

Chapter 2 of Value in Art ends by explaining how unlikely it is that Manet *wasn't* familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin. tbh it's one thing to know the book was massively popular, but to see the number of books sold! incredible Makes sense though - the French were as complicit in slavery as anyone else

eleven different translations of the novel appeared between 1852 and 1853, a number not even approached by any other English language book (Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, probably the most popular English novel in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, was translated only a half-dozen times over the thirty years between 1820 and 1850). These various translations in turn accounted for some twenty editions of Stowe’s novel published in France by the end of 1853. In addition, many of the English editions were readily available at the foreign language bookstores such as Stassin and Xavier or Reinwald’s. As George Sand put it in 1852, “This book is in everyone’s hands, in all the newspapers. It will have, it already has editions in every size. One devours it, one drowns it in tears.”

By the time the last installment of the novel appeared in the National Era on April 1, Jewett had sold out the first edition of five thousand copies and had already issued a second printing of the same number.26 By the end of the year, three hundred thousand copies of the novel had been sold in America (by way of comparison, in the five years following its publication in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter sold eleven thousand copies).27 By the summer of 1852, several British publishers had issued editions of the novel, and during two weeks in October, ten editions appeared, in no small part because no international copyright laws protected the novel from pirated editions. Clark and Company bragged in the introduction to one of its three editions that it had already sold ninety-six thousand cheap railway copies and twenty-five thousand illustrated copies: “A Hundred and Fifty thousand Copies of this Work are already in the hands of the public while still the weekly returns of sale show no decline.”28 In Britain and its colonies, 1.5 million copies of the novel would be sold in its first year of publication.

keri@keristars· Jun 12

ngl I've always thought Olympia was an intriguing work and saw the obvious quote of Titian's Venus of Urbino, but this book is making it downright fascinating, really getting into exactly why it caused such a stir. knowing the cultural context is huge!

The painting. A naked white woman reclines on a bed with white linens and pillows. She looks frankly at the viewer as she displays herself to (presumably his) gaze - her forward arm is bent back a bit to give a clear view of her breasts, her legs are extended and crossed to emphasize their shape. But her other hand rests on her lap, keeping it hidden for now. Though she is naked, she is dressed in finery: a red flower in her hair, earrings, a ribbon necklace around her neck, a bracelet on her wrist. At her feet, one of which is wearing a mule slipper (the other slipper has fallen off), is a black cat.

Almost as an afterthought, though she is integral to the composition of the painting, is the a black woman to the side and behind the reclining figure, at whom she looks. This woman is dressed in white with a light-colored scarf over her hair, and she carries a large bouquet with a big, white central flower surrounded by smaller red and white flowers and greenery.

The two women balance lightness on either side of the composition, one with deep red in the background, the other against dark green. They are contrasting yet complimentary.

keri@keristars· Jun 9

I'm sliding into "ow, my body bone" territory, so may try to sleep? idk it's still mostly my arms and my hands, not too bad. oh hey my powerchair order status finally moved to the next step! "estimated completion date 8/4/2026" 🥲

Screenshot of the order update page. Two boxes at the top labeled Step 1 of 6 and step 2 of 6. The first, Preparing Your Order, was marked complete today, 9 June. The second, Collecting Insurance Documentation, has an estimated completion date of 4 August.

There's little arrows and the edge of a box to indicate the steps can be swiped to view the rest.

Below is detailed information for Step 2 of 6. It repeats the label and estimated date and has a bullet point for Additional Documents Required by Payer, which is greyed out with "upcoming" where an estimated or completed date would be.

keri@keristars· Jun 8

oooof my arms and legs are protesting yesterday's haircut bigly 😬 really wished i already had the powerchair when i got up to make breakfast just now (chicken and carrots and rice) but i think i did ok! the top bit i cut last week ofc so it was just the clippers last night.

Selfie! keri is in front of a bookcase with a Stitch plush and a camping bear figure. Ey is wearing a grey t-shirt and tortoiseshell glasses. There's a bit of puffy, sleepy eye thing going on. And, actually, the longer hair on top, about as long as two fingers are wide, has some sleepy ruffledness to it, too. The sides of keri's head are extremely short buzzcut, like not even 1 centimeter long.

keri@keristars· Jun 7

ew and also 😱 (from Lindsey Fitzharris's the Facemaker)

But the rich farming soil of France and Belgium harbored lethal microbes that caused tetanus, gas-gangrene, and septicemia. The battlefield was a breeding ground for pathogens, so much so that the Australian medical officer Arthur Graham Butler called it “a war of faecal infection—streptococcus and anaerobes.” A surgeon quite literally sealed a soldier’s fate when he sutured a wound packed with bacteria. Even if antiseptic dressings were applied afterward

keri@keristars· Jun 7

i hope you can be fancy and eat delicious vegetables, too! The broccoli and tortellini is one I really like for mid-energy days like today, when heating up from frozen and mixing with butter and seasoning isn't too much. of course on low- or no-energy days, broccoli stops being food to me 😅