bironic

nightdog_barks was one of the first online friends I made, back in 2006 when a bunch of us got into House fandom. She wrote great fic. She gave great feedback. She formed the core of a writers and watchers group that has lasted more than a decade. (I was not really a part of it, but several friends have remained the whole time.) She read book after book and posted insightful reviews. Several of the books I read and the movies I watched on her recommendation, or the conversations we had after she read or watched something on my rec, have stayed and will stay with me for a long time. She shared regular observations of the birds and other wildlife in her backyard, as well as the antics of her dogs. On Twitter at NDBarks, she RT'd tidbits of literature and art and antiques/antiquities. She gave wise and caring advice.

I wrote her a story once for her birthday, a loving, spoofy, meta take on a particular portion of her body of House fic. I believe it remains the only time I've posted a work in progress. It's definitely the longest fic I've put online. If you're curious: originally on Livejournal, now on AO3.

( Content warning: cancer )

zulu and bell hold the current record for length of time between when I made a friend or acquaintance online and when we met in person: 2006ish—the House fandom days—to 2019, or 13 years.

thedeadparrot and I got together with them and their little one when they came down from Canada this past weekend. Although their schedule and my outdoor activity-restricting allergies meant we only shared a couple of hours, and although the presence of a lively four-year-old simplifies the conversation, heh, it was nevertheless a treat to finally meet them "in the flesh." It felt like I already knew them. I mean, of course I did, but sometimes there's a disconnect between your impression of someone from their internet presence and what you experience in person, and that wasn't the case here.

Speaking of first encounters with people you know on Dreamwidth: We ran into sovay (Sonya Taaffe) and spouse spatch while foraging for dinner in a new-ish food market full of hipsters queuing for oysters and beer. Given that we live in adjoining neighborhoods and have overlapping tastes in cultural activities, it was only a matter of time before we crossed paths outside of Readercon. Hopefully I didn't make too much a fool of myself attempting the introduction and small talk! Another time soon, it will be nice to have a more substantive convo.

"Hooray," I need to move sometime in the next several months!

My landlady has begun taking steps to assess and likely sell the condo I have rented from her since coming to Boston for this job 5 1/2 years ago. She said she would offer me right of first refusal to buy it, but since I probably can't afford its market rate, nor do I think I'd want to spend that kind of money on a ground-floor one-bedroom with a list of issues anyway, it's time to hunt.

Which means finding realtors/brokers, answering the "rent vs. buy" question—nothing like trying to gauge how long you plan on staying in one place when you are at the same time wondering how much you like your job anymore—recalculating budgets, navigating the fact that more than 70% of Boston-area apartments turn over on June 1 or September 1, paring down belongings in advance of packing...

Sigh. I like stability. I was not planning on shopping for a new home this summer—or sooner. Then again, this is an opportunity to improve some bothersome things, like not being able to arrange furniture in a satisfying way for company or park in a driveway.

The stop-motion cartoon Rilakkuma and Kaoru did not deliver the comfort I sought but did instead offer the counsel I needed when I watched an episode after the landlady's phone call. Rilakkuma befriended some snowmen only to wake up the next day to discover that they had melted. "It's impossible for them to stay the same forever," Kaoru soothed him as he cried. Then the closing aphorism said: THINGS CHANGE.

.

Speaking of cycles and change: friends seem to be going through a full range of experiences lately.

[talk of pregnancy, babies, grief]

I have a friend who just had a baby, a friend who just lost a baby, a friend who's recently pregnant, a friend who's wrestling with trying to get pregnant.

I have a friend who was fired unexpectedly, a friend who started a new job one year to the day after being fired, a friend who's afraid of being fired every day even though she keeps being given raises.

Etc.

Take care of yourselves out there, everyone.

Travel

I just returned from a week in rural Tennessee, where my mom's boyfriend bought a house for them to retire to in a few years. It's perched on the side of a mountain abutting Cherokee National Forest. It felt like vacation as soon as I heard running water and smelled wood smoke. Beautiful land,* spacious home, largely off the grid, although the steep slope made me nervous. We saw turkeys and Carolina chickadees along with many neighbors' pets and livestock. Went for easy hikes, ate venison steaks, played games, sang along with my mom's guitar on Christmas Eve—she has adopted the bf's Italian-American Catholic traditions—and discussed the ups and downs of their relationship. I fired a gun for the first time; took out some bottles with buckshot. When in Rome...

*stolen, sigh

Festivids

Hauling my desktop (vidding) computer 800 miles proved worthwhile, as I squeezed in two productive editing sessions. The draft is nearly complete. I'd like to send that out for beta soon and try for a treat. It would be sad to break the streak of making at least two Festivids per round.

Vidding anniversary

May will mark the tenth anniversary of posting my first vid. I'm planning some short write-ups for the occasion that can be spaced throughout 2019, like "favorite opening credits" and "vids that never made it." Is there anything you'd like to know?

In memoriam

I was saddened to hear about the recent passing of stardreamer. I had only just begun to get to know her here on Dreamwidth, where she was an engaged, insightful, compassionate commenter. It took longer than it should have for me to subscribe to her journal, which is when I learned that she had been struggling with pancreatic cancer for a while. It finally got the better of her in November. A real loss. Among other things, I'm sad I didn't finish the Midnight, Texas fic in time for her to read it; it's a tiny fandom and she'd said she was looking forward to it.

May her memory be a blessing.

Feeling

I need a vacation. I just want to sit in a room that is not mine for a few days and work on stories and let my mind wander without having to yank it back to take care of responsibilities. That’s what last month’s trip to my mom’s hotel in Worcester was supposed to provide, except I ended up needing to work. Now I keep going to the office and not really doing anything.

The silly part is that the only thing stopping me from taking time off is planning it.

Doing

My favorite college friend, R., is in town for a few days. We spent a good chunk of the weekend together. Due to a couple of near misses, we hadn’t met since 2015, and not in Boston since the year before that. I was all nerves leading up to dinner on Saturday, in part because he has "succeeded" more than me on multiple fronts and I do not have great self-esteem these days, in part because I’ve always had half a crush on him and want to make sure he still likes me too, and in part because it was a certain time of the month when anxiety peaks no matter what’s going on—but, to my great relief, I was reminded within the first few minutes that there’s a reason we became friends 17 years ago (!) and remain so now. He makes conversation easy, albeit with a hint of the know-it-all one-upmanship that tinges a lot of the relationships I had at school and still have with some coworkers. I was reminded once again that his life isn’t perfect either, and it matters a lot to me that he is comfortable talking about the challenges and disappointments we are dealing with as well as sharing joy in the things that are going well.

In any case, we ate interesting Italian/Peruvian fusion, enjoyed a breezy boat ride out to the Boston Harbor Islands, had a picnic, walked around some of the new developments on the waterfront despite being two very pale people in the summer sun, and talked a lot. <3

Later this week there will be dinner with a former coworker and a Star Trek-themed burlesque show with friends.

Writing

Zahn McClarnon characters continue to rev my creative engines.

750 words and counting of Hanzee/Constance (Fargo TV show, season two)
+ 2,240 Mathias/OFC (Longmire)
+ 1,940 Mike/Rachel and Kopus/Rachel (The Red Road)
+ 670 Zachariah/Pia/Lemuel (Midnight, Texas)
= 5,600 words since the beginning of July. \o/

Nothing is finished yet, and based on past experience, I’m worried about losing momentum and leaving everything incomplete. Even so, as maralenenok said last week, words is words, and as I said in reply, I’m pleased with how all four stories depict very different characters and have different structures and narrative voices.

Vidding

Planning three vids; waiting to see which gets started first.

Festivids approaches. I’m pondering requests old and new. The other day, I spur-of-the-moment gathered links to all the Longmire vids I could find on YouTube & the AO3 to confirm there aren’t too many for it to qualify.

Watching

Re: the above, I’ve been going through more of Zahn’s film & TV catalog and taking notes. In the last… week, OMG, I have seen or skimmed:

Fargo: Year Two - surprisingly engaging
Searchers 2.0 - golfing outfit!
Bone Tomahawk - dapper suit and walking stick, but only one scene
The Son - tiresome and cliché-ridden but at least he had a sizeable role

Started Into the West last night, also a skim. Spielberg tries to capitalize on the success of Dances with Wolves with a miniseries in the mid-’90s ETA: 2005, wow, the music and casting definitely feel a decade earlier. (Skeet Ulrich?!) So Zahn McClarnon was my current age when he filmed it.

Movie theater-wise, got together with various friend clusters to see Crazy Rich Asians, which was excellent, and Mission Impossible: Fallout, made by people who’ve mastered the art of the mainstream action film and more enjoyable than any James Bond movie I’ve seen. So many other movies to see; I keep running out of time.

Reading

Has been slow this past little while. Partly because I’ve wanted to do other things and partly because of the books themselves, I think. Right now I’m halfway through Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, which is fascinating in its combination of carnality and lyricism.

Thinking

About how, despite what roundup posts like this imply, I can write OR vid OR watch a lot of movies OR plow through a lot of books OR do in-depth media reviews OR go full-tilt at work OR be very social OR do everything I’m supposed to do food- and activity-wise to manage my health condition… but not more than one, maybe two, at a time. Thirty-six years old and I’m finally learning to accept the need for priorities and compromises and moderation instead of fighting against it, and to admit that I am not a machine running at 100 percent efficiency, and to see the rise and fall of different categories over the months as something that keeps life interesting rather than a flaw.

I do recognize the privileges that allow me to have even this much spare time and, more or less, the energy to do something with it. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not sad about not being able to do all the things, always.

synn and I went to Montreal for a week!

Neither of us had ever visited. We ate all of the things.* We also walked around all day almost every day to explore neighborhoods, sites, and museums, despite the nippy winter-into-spring weather: at or just below freezing most days, blustery, flurries. It wasn't too bad for me because Boston has been having a late, cold spring, but poor synn flew up from balmy North Carolina. The first front blew in on the evening we arrived, knocking over the bajillion road construction signs and sandwich boards as we leaned into the snowy gusts and cried, "Pourquoi????"

We spent Friday at a Supernatural con: synn is a fan of the show and I have liked one of the con guests, Sebastian Roché—who played a recurring character named Balthazar for, IIRC what synn said, one season out of 13, but SPN fans never forget—for, yikes, 20 years now, and never had the chance to meet him. We went to his Q&A, we took a silly Official Photo where synn suffered me to ask him to pretend to be evil vampire Mikael from The Vampire Diaries/The Originals and we pretended to be scared, and thanks to synn's sneaky generosity, I was also treated to a seat at his meet and greet, where seven attendees and Sebastian chatted around a table for 45 minutes. It was super nice. I also enjoyed the Q&A with Lisa Berry (Billy) and Kim Rhodes (Jody). Much more sedate and heartfelt than Sebastian's, who spent most of his time jumping on chairs and singing a dumb (but I guess charming) song with and about the house band. He did speak a lot of French, though, while making fun of Quebecois vs. France-French accents and lingo, which made my teenage heart go pitter-patter. And he made no secret of his attraction to Misha Collins, including, while answering an audience question about which cast member he would choose to be his slave for the day, the title of my new favorite Dr. Seuss book: "Mish on a Leash."

On the weekend we met up with xenophonique and were introduced to lunarflares, both delightful. We snacked our way through a maple syrup festival*—it's the tail end of maple-tapping season there—before retiring to xen's beautiful apartment for afternoon tea and conversation. A wonderful oasis during our city visit.

We checked out the cemetery and chalet-slash-lookout point atop Mont Royal, accidentally/on purpose got lost in the Underground City, and remarked on how the architecture varied so widely from street to street. We managed three museums:

• The modern art museum, where we inadvertently hit peak Montreal by wandering through their current exhibit on Leonard Cohen. The curators had built literal temples to this guy, from a small wooden cathedral, dark, hushed, in which microphones hung from the ceiling while a recorded chorus hummed "Hallelujah" in surround sound, to a Stonehenge-like ring of video screens of aging men trying to synchronize a recitation of his lyrics, to a "depression room"—"intended as a solo experience"—where, presumably, the people waiting in line would be able to commune with Cohen's spirit one on one.


• The fine arts museum: enormous, impressive, comprehensive. My favorites were the Inuit art floor (and the integration of native and non-native painting and sculpture in other galleries), the contemporary furniture and industrial design collection, and a particular painting at the entrance to a gallery about Canada finding its identity during the initial era of Western "settlement," because this painting, both disturbing and hilarious, portrays the horrors of colonization and fur trapping from the point of view of the beavers. (Perhaps obviously: warning for animal harm.) It is by Kent Monkman, who is part Cree and part Irish and who, I have since learned, paints and sculpts all sorts of striking, subversive subjects, often focusing on mistreatment of native populations and playing with artistic traditions. A+, all beavers go to heaven.


• The natural history museum at McGill, a nice collection of shells, fossils, rocks/minerals, cultural artifacts and taxidermied regional wildlife in an interior hall that reminded me of a couple of English museums of medical curiosities that I visited with deelaundry. xenakis probably knows what it's called, beyond the website's description of "an idiosyncratic expression of eclectic Victorian Classicism." I learned a lot about shrunken-head production.

Oh, plus the botanical gardens, or at least the greenhouse sections, since most of the outdoor beds contained bulb shoots juuust daring to poke through a dusting of snow. The niftiest room showcased fruit and spice plants, from banana and litchi trees to cinnamon and vanilla, star anise, annatto, peppercorns. We had not seen most of those edibles in their natural forms before. Super neat. We intended to visit the neighboring Insectarium but ran out of time, alas. There was a dead centipede waiting in my toothbrush holder when I got home so that probably counted as a consolation prize.

*Okay but seriously ( ALL THE FOOD: )

Now back to regular life: work and chores, reading, radical weather shifts, and hopefully soon, back to vidding.

(That is a Muppets reference)

JAN
We have a toft in town! marginaliana and I enjoyed a leisurely brunch with her and her +1, J., before Thursday's snowstorm turned the region into barely navigable marshmallowland. We had only met once before, briefly, at Vividcon in 2010; it was a joy to expand on that.

OCT
While I was in San Francisco for a business trip, rhoboat came over to hang out for the day. We hadn't properly met until Vividcon two months earlier, and I am glad we finally did, because rho is whip-smart and funny and engaging, employed in a field adjacent to mine, and generally an enjoyable person to spend time with in museums and foodie neighborhoods.

( We visited the de Young museum )

Afterwards, laurashapiro was able to join for a delicious sashimi dinner and "yup, we're in San Francisco"-style ice cream. (I went for carrot halwa flavor.) Too brief a catch-up, but precious for its scarcity.

DEC PT 1
iggyw came to stay for a night during her own business trip! We secured takeout and chatted while Star Trek reruns played in the background. I continue to adore iggy and am glad when work or play takes one of us to the other's city.

DEC PT 2
When I lived in D.C., I used to visit deelaundry & family almost every Saturday, so it was nice to fall into old, comfortable patterns when I visited for ~5 days over winter break. Poor Dee caught a cold and I am a bad friend when people are sick because my instinctual reaction is GET AWAY FROM THE GERMS AAAAH but it appears we are still on good terms, heh, whew. Anyway, we started to put their house back together after a renovation, ate a lot of tasty food as Mr. deelaundry rejoiced in having a kitchen again, saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi and some Netflix movies, and played around with holiday gifts such as Paint by Sticker books.

Dee was scheduled to work the last two days so I hitched a ride into the city to see cinco and her +1, R. Because they got married after I'd moved away, I mostly know R. through what cinco posts about her. As above, it was great to spend a few hours getting to know her a little more, from culinary expertise to diatribes about education policy. And I always love the chance to have substantive conversations with cinco. We browsed a new-to-us wing of Kramerbooks before embarking on a Thai and chai tour of 17th Street. My only regret is I have but one life to-- missing alpheratz and the rest of the D.C. crew. Next time.

AUG
Okay, whatever, sometimes I think people are scary, and hollywoodgrrl and ohvienna are so cool that I had put them in the "too cool to hang out with" category at Vividcons past, but this time, this time I promised myself I would unload all of that onto them in a hopefully amusing way and then see if they wanted to have lunch. Which they did! The three of us and corbae went for ramen between panels/vidshows and talked about I don't even remember what, but it was fun. While they are still effortlessly cool, I am pleased to report they are not scary.


In conclusion: fan friends in other cities \o/

Also: fan friends in this city \o/

A year and a half ago, I fell for the villain in a music video on YouTube. Last night, I had a drink with him.

("Way to bury the lede," said thisiskis when I told the story the long way around this morning. You get the highlights version.)

I took the bus to Manhattan for a 24-hour visit this weekend to see a fringe play imported from England because, as you may recall, this actor I liked, Jon Campling, was in it and it didn't sound like there would be another opportunity to see him in the U.S. in the foreseeable future.

The play itself, TRIPPIN, was better than expected. Quite funny and creative on a shoestring budget. I think the advertising doesn't do it justice. It's billed as "weekend warrior does a drug and meets some wacky characters," and it was that, with a side of privileged white male existential despair, but it was also a surprisingly cathartic journey into how a person can create or exacerbate their own deep unhappiness and try to self-medicate with substances or escapist media without getting at the root of the problem. Anxiety transforms into peace.

I'm so used to seeing embarrassing productions/TV/movies/performances for the sake of a particular actor or actress that this was a nice change of pace.

Afterwards iggyw and I were hanging out in the empty lobby, where I was hoping for a photo op and autograph, when Jon's wife found us. We chatted until Jon appeared, and then, instead of a quick meet and greet, they totally invited us downstairs to the playhouse bar! I had been daydreaming about just such an outcome but wasn't sure I would be brave enough to ask for it. So I was on cloud nine for the next hour and a half as we talked about a bunch of different things and I got to look at his face some more. Much merriment and storytelling; I am once more thankful to extroverts for their seeming ease in keeping conversations lively among strangers. Iggy, who is less comfortable than I am about meeting performers, started out skeptical but ended up having a lovely time and agreeing that they were both super sweet.

And before we left, I did get that autograph and photo op. I had confessed my love for his villain roles starting with that abduction-themed Amber Run video, and he delighted me by feigning a kidnapping move while Iggy took our picture. <3

( photographic evidence )

Totally worth the trip.

*

Thanks to no_detective I also got to see a matinee of MENGELE, which I was more ambivalent about. It was neither as bad as it could have been nor as good. Lots of breathy, rapid-fire dialogue between "Mengele" and an avenging angel as they delved into his life and actions, with a few pauses to play video footage from the Holocaust and/or the Schindler's List movie. The performances were pretty strong, and I liked the attention paid to the conflicted attraction-repulsion some perpetrators felt for their victims, but there was nothing new or particularly insightful in its depiction of a war criminal justifying his behavior, and the structure of the play undercut any sort of catharsis.

Other weekend highlights included (1) being stopped by a fellow DS9 fan in a shop who liked my Terok Nor t-shirt and (2) food! Decent SoHo pizza with Iggy, a tea house on Bleecker I wish we could have spent more time lounging in before the play, an amazing kosher everything bagel with cream cheese around the corner from the hotel (Ess-a-Bagel, yummm), and brunch this morning with thisiskis and coffeeandink. More wide-ranging fannish conversation, this time with scrambled eggs.

*

Back to work tomorrow. synn and I are, uh, supposed to fly to Orlando on Thursday to go to Harry Potter World. It still appears to be possible? We'll see.

Today is Patriots' Day in Boston, a.k.a. Marathon Monday, a.k.a. the day most people in the city seem to have off from work and school except us. My usual commute is bisected by the marathon line, so I came home the long way tonight, through the city: a packed train of tourists, Sox and Bruins fans, and an international collection of runners in foil cloaks, some limping and leaning on one another and some looking like they just went for a jog around the block.

This afternoon, per tradition, a few of us walked to the local portion of the marathon course to cheer on our now-former coworker as she ran by. The crowd was quiet enough this year that she heard us, smiled and waved as she continued along the final stretch. (It was hot today and she's injured in two places, yet she still ran the thing in less than 4 hours. Unbelievable.)

*

Friends are great. Some came over for a seder on the first night of Passover; some were in town for lunch this weekend; some will be moving here from far away; some are helping me sift through an enormous amount of source material for this multifandom vid. I've only sent out a handful of emails so far, so if you volunteered for something and haven't heard yet, stay tuned.

Since last we spoke, I've watched or scanned through a whole bunch of movies and short TV shows. Let's see: Crazyhead (fun), Cleverman (difficult but rewarding), Extant (derivative but enjoyable), Travelers (meh), now starting Timeless (fun); the "San Junipero" episode of Black Mirror (not traumatizing, hooray), the Green Fury episode of Powerless (I liked parts of it, but sitcoms are still not my thing) and the new Doctor Who premiere (winning me back over); Pacific Rim (meh), Fantastic Four (2015) (Action Movie formulaic emptiness), Z for Zachariah (great), The Fits (as wonderful as promised). I am not a huge TV fan compared to the general fan community -- some of my dearest and most passionate fandoms have been TV shows, but I'm not well-"read" in TV and don't love the medium as a medium as much as I love movies -- so this endeavor presents an interesting challenge.

There is still a ton to go, but it feels good to have made a dent.

*

Meanwhile, my de-stressor and pre-bedtime media over the last month or so has been a BBC show made for five-year-olds: Sarah & Duck. Have any of you seen it? It's so lovely and chill, wholesome, and often funny. Sarah is curious, imaginative and accepting, and every day seems to be a vacation day, which sounds nice right about now. From time to time the art is really beautiful, too. You never know when the plot will go full-on surreal or stay within the realm of the plausible -- well, given a reality where ducks sort of understand English and ladybugs play small trumpets. I am a particular fan of Duck wagging his tail, Sarah when she gets really excited about things like baby manatees, and Scarf Lady's long-suffering handbag.

I'm almost out of episodes on Netflix, though, and then whatever can take its place?

Hwooof, that was a tough week, but this weekend was the best that's happened in a while, so all's well that ends well, I guess.

(It was just a trough of stress. Political stuff, work stuff, probably body chemistry stuff. I am finally getting started with seeing a therapist and then I missed an appointment because I was so discombobulated I thought it was the next day. I had never missed a doctor's appointment before. I felt so stupid until deelaundry said a kind thing that hadn't occurred to me: When I said, "I look like a flake," she countered with, "You look like someone who needs help." Self-compassion is a thing it would be nice to learn.)

The good stuff:

Socializing: In support of this year's goal to get together more often with friends I like to talk to and/or want to get to know better, a few of us went to a play yesterday and had a satisfying coffee shop chat afterwards, and then I accepted an unexpected invitation to another blossoming friend's low-key Superbowl dinner. All good.

The play was called Trans Scripts, a synthesis/melding of interviews with trans women from the US/UK/Aus. It was elegant, illuminating and well acted -- two cast members were particularly strong -- although I thought it faltered in a few spots when it shifted from "showing" through anecdotes to plain proselytizing. marginaliana wrote up some of her thoughts.

A phone conversation the previous night:

95-year-old grandpa: Oh! I didn't expect you to be home on a Saturday night. I thought you'd be out with your friends.
Me: No, I'm boring. Well, I'm going to see a play tomorrow, but it's a matinee.
Grandpa: Oh, yeah? What is it about?
Me, bracing myself: It's based on interviews with transgender women about their lives.
Grandpa: Oh. You know, there's this woman I know from the temple, who lives with another woman, and it turns out they're--what do you call it--lesbians? Lesbians?
Me: Mm-hm!
Grandpa: So that's very interesting! I just knew them as women from the temple, you know.

#NotAllGrandpas

Doing: Had a computer-free day Saturday involving a mall run, errands and two movies. In addition to some necessaries for work and winter weather, I treated myself to a grommet-studded cut-out shirt that I probably won't wear anywhere but at home and Club Vivid (because I am me) but love anyway.

Reading: Was delighted by Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols 1-2: plucky, witty, metatextual, intertextual, often involved the defusing of supervillainy through psychology/sympathy rather than fisticuffs. The '80s horror of Paper Girls turns out to be not as much my aesthetic, although the introduction of overlapping timestreams in vol. 2 is getting interesting.

Watching: Saw Moonlight and Lion. Loved the first and really liked the second; cried through them both; my heart aches for Chiron. Hope to see I Am Not Your Negro and Hidden Figures this week. Catching up on what I missed in Dec-Jan when too much else was going on.

Vidding: I remain in the planning stages of the two auction vids, and am figuring out if I can make the multifandom Club Vivid vid I've been preparing since the fall or if it'll need to wait another year. I watched all the festivids -- slim masterlist this year, half the usual total -- but haven't commented on any or recced any here because I'm afraid the gaps would give away what I made, and the thought of doing fake comments/recs to throw off the scent makes me tired. I'll probably just post the rec list after reveals.

Cooking: A pleasurable week is in store of chicken breast and goat cheese sandwiches for lunch and stuffed cabbage for dinner. Also, the supermarket was selling chocolate-covered banana chips, which I didn't know was a thing but I am all over it, mm. Banana chips were such a treat when I was a kid.