Lemonade with condensed milk

for Small Web Potluck 2026

it's been hot and humid where i am and nothing beats a lemonade on hot and humid days 🍋 i've made this creamy lemonade countless times and thought it would be an easy, summery drink to bring to the small web potluck. if you like lemon meringue, key lime pie, or creamsicles you'll certainly enjoy this.

the following recipe is originally from 12 tomatoes, with minor changes.

Ingredients

Makes around a half gallon (2L) of lemonade

• ~2 cups (~450g) ice

• 1¼ cup (300ml) lemon juice from 5–8 lemons

• 1 can (14 oz, 397g) sweetened condensed milk

• 5 cups (1.2L) cold water

• Optional: 1 extra lemon

Instructions

1. Add ice to a pitcher large enough to hold 8 cups (2L).

2. In a separate container, mix lemon juice and condensed milk. Pour over ice.

3. Add water and stir well. Enjoy :)

Optional: I like to add sliced lemon for additional texture. Discard the peel and seeds to remove bitterness.

Notes

• rolling lemons on a hard surface makes them easier to juice

• remove seeds when juicing lemons

• if i don't feel like squeezing juice out of 5+ lemons, i just grab a 100% lemon juice bottle from the store. still tasty!

• if you enjoyed this you'll also want to try brazilian limonada, which i assume was the inspiration for the recipe above.

• be sure to have a bite of all the other dishes at the potluck :)

also, there's still time to participate in the potluck—bring a dish by sunday, september 6!

The Checkout Counter #45

happy september! if you're reading this on my website, you may have noticed a visual update—it's one that i've been fiddling around with for a while. the theme switcher on the header still has the classic styling, along with some new and reworked themes. i've also added a kitchen section, which i hope to fill with many more food-related links.

thanks for reading 😊

Film

Taxi, 2015 (تاکسی)¹
Drama. Filmmaker Jafar Panahi drives a yellow cab through the streets of Tehran, picking up and dropping off passengers throughout the day.

Dog Day Afternoon, 1975²
Thriller, crime, drama. A bank robbery on a hot August afternoon soon escalates into a televised hostage situation.

Kamome Diner (かもめ食堂), 2006³
Drama, comedy. Sachie opens a diner in Helsinki, serving Japanese comfort food to a small but dedicated customer base of three.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, 2025⁴
Comedy, adventure, scifi. After failing to book a show for seventeen years, musicians Matt and Jay travel back in time to 2008.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L'Ami de mon amie), 1987⁵
Romance, comedy, drama. Blanche and Léa become quick friends after a chance meeting at lunch. Léa is dating Fabien but is considering leaving him, while Blanche is interested in a mutual acquaintance, Alexandre.

Music

Soft Current, Fjeldheim
Electronic

Kaikki tiet vievät Peltolaan, Maustetytöt
Pop

Limón y Sal, Julieta Venegas
Pop

Memories Of Tokyo-To, 2 Mello
Electronic, hip-hop

Games

puzzlebox ruin
Point-and-click puzzle

Ten Cat
Daily sorting game

Articles & essays

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek, Josh Jones

Stonehenge, Zarina Muhammad⁶

Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge, Anne Lawrence-Mathers

Blogs

Creating a halftone effect with CSS, Lean Rada

Sketching, Lifedrawing and Studies from Early Summer, Shel Kahn

Animated ASCII art with HTML video and canvas elements, Dominika

julieta venegas en vivo, tiramisu⁷

The Threat of Organic Videogames, Mokkograd

I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip, Colin

Life in TikTokland, Robert Yang

Around the web

OfHouses
Collection of old, forgotten houses

Young Artists' Summer Show 2026
Online exhibition of works by artists aged 4 to 18

The Wikipedia article for gossip benches

A Concrete Garden
Website hosted in a garden

Condiment Packet Archive

Virtual Criterion Closet

energy2energy⁸
Social network for HTML Day 2026

Small Web Potluck⁹

Falling Fruit
Foraging map

Japanese Manhole Cards

Eclipse Viewers
Historical solar eclipse ephemera

Notes

1. Taxi
movie piracy is beautiful 💛 i'm very familiar with panahi's work now so there were no real surprises here, but this is the most plausibly deniable it's-not-a-movie-trust-me film of his that i've seen so far. it's very intimate, like we (panahi, the cast, the audience) are all in on a joke together.

2. Dog Day Afternoon
MOVIE! the first third or so of this is so funny, like when al pacino has to stand on chairs to spray paint security cameras and doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, or when the head teller played by penelope allen refuses to leave with the police. as the afternoon crawls on toward evening the tone shifts appropriately and it's so satisfying and nail-biting how everything changes for the worse as the sun sets.
michael corleone has always endeared me to 70s al pacino and he's perfect here—and all the supporting cast members are on his level. i'm going to remember some of the line deliveries in this forever. perfect august watch. let's fly to wyoming.

3. Kamome Diner
it tastes better when someone makes it for you :) wonderful movie. the diner interior is ridiculously cute and the overall production design is a marvel. somehow this never got too twee or saccharine for me—maybe it was the brief moments of magic realism, or the way sachie remains a bit of a mystery. or, i don't know, maybe i'm only allergic to hollywood's brand of sentimentality.
i pointed at the screen and felt like leaping up when the man without a past star markku peltola appeared, what a brief but arresting screen presence. kopi luwak!

4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
perfect example of the type of movies we could get if copyright didn't exist (how on earth did this get made). this didn't quite hit for me, maybe because i'm not familiar with the original show at all or i'm just not on these two's exact wavelength, but i had fun. the moment in the movie theater when matt realizes something's deeply wrong and that he actually time traveled is so fucking funny.

5. Boyfriends and Girlfriends
i kind of didn't care for this plot at all but the visuals are so stunning and the two leads are so gorgeous it was still a very pleasant watch lol. i suppose i'm easily placated by fashionable women and the mazelike architecture of the parisian suburbs.
expectedly very straight and they obviously should've had a crazy foursome and blanche and léa should've made out at that cafe but alas, it was the 80s and challengers hadn't been invented yet.

6. Stonehenge
Most of the symbols and images we think of as traditionally English are symbols and images of state power: the monarchy, policemen and their little hats. It’s either that or it’s a lie: England’s green and pleasant land, the countryside as a kind of toy town theme park, butchers’ aprons and st George’s flags — the imperial nostalgia industrial complex, trying to trick us into believing that the rose-tinted past can come back if we all will it forcefully enough. None of those images speak of people and practices.

7. julieta venegas en vivo
this post introduced me to a great musical artist and made me want to commit to learning more spanish…! i took one semester in high school and haven't studied at all since. i hear the language all the time in my neighbhorhood and i've had multiple instances of strangers striking up a conversation in spanish and i'm dismayed that i usually can't reply.

8. energy2energy
HTML day 2026 was on august 8th and here are a bunch of sites made for the event! really hope i can participate next year, though i did celebrate in my own way by tinkering around with my website.

9. Small Web Potluck
this virtual potluck is still open until sunday, september 6! bring a dish, if you so desire.

as always, you can leave a comment on any checkout counter post. thanks for reading!

The Checkout Counter #44

whew my july was packed! sports, wildfire smoke, good eats, torrential rainfall—truly a month of the epic highs and lows of summer.

thanks for reading! until next time.

Film

The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä), 2002¹
Drama, comedy, romance. After being severely beaten, a man loses his memory and starts life anew in a Helsinki harbor.

The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö), 1990
Drama. Iris dreams of finding love at dance halls as she works her assembly line job.

Dead Man’s Wire, 2025²
Crime, thriller, drama. Tony Kiritsis takes the son of a wealthy mortgage banker hostage and demands to be broadcast on national television.

Look Back (ルックバック), 2024³
Animation, drama. Jealousy gives way to friendship as two artists for a class newspaper meet and begin to collaborate on original comics.

Music

true salad, curtain bangs
Alternative

Games

Oblivious Melodies (Volume 1)
Interactive fiction, historical. Follows two siblings in a Regency-inspired world ruled by class, religious authority, and ambitions of empire.

Books

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden⁴
Historical fiction, literary. Isabel's life of solitude, routine, and meticulous care of her countryside home is interrupted by the arrival of her brother's new partner, Eva.

Articles & essays

High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago, Stefan Al

Twilight of the Velocipede, Alex Wright

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose, Keyana Sapp

Eider Cake: impossible lives & possible worlds, Lucas Souza⁵

Around the web

Projects by Blake Fall-Conroy⁶
Artist website

The Wikipedia list of U.S. state crustaceans

MS Clipart Search Tool

public stickers
Photo collection

Luke's Generic Textures
Free textures

clipart.studio
Magazine cut-out collage maker

Wiki Spy
Wikipedia image explorer

Notes

1. The Man Without a Past
aki kaurismäki does it again! i like when directors have a clear throughline of favorite actors and themes.
i don't remember anyone ever smiling in this movie but i certainly had one on my face as i watched. the cruelty of strangers is, in turn, remedied by the kindness of strangers. so it goes.

2. Dead Man’s Wire
you know those posts about actors in period pieces who are styled so they "look like they know what an iphone is"—this is the complete opposite of that. the art direction here is fantastic and everyone looks like they stepped out from a portal to the 70s. what a wild thing to have actually happened.

3. Look Back
love this art style! the score is a bit overwhelming and intentionally tearjerk-y in a way i dislike but that didn't detract from the whole thing.
there is a certain sense of magic and power you get when you're a kid who can draw—which, as this movie conveys so succinctly, vanishes as you age. i haven't drawn in a while, i should get back to that soon.

4. The Safekeep
some mixed feelings but i'm overall positive. the writing is lush and some sentences will stick with me forever. the twist got me good.
isabel is so off-putting and prickly and while i enjoy reading about mean women, she often seemed cartoonish in a way that clashed with the tone. i don't quite buy her eventual turn by the end, or that eva would fall for her—but how their attraction to each other is described is sumptuous. some real lavishly written sex scenes. very much in tune with anti cottagecore...

5. Eider Cake: impossible lives & possible worlds
A tale as old as time: history is gentle with a few and, in each age, crushes so many others. As any form of remembrance is absent, any attempt to represent these lives becomes almost impossible and all that remains is to use the contours left by these people as footprints to imagine a possible world.
i was so pleasantly surprised to see this essay from indiepocalypse. people playing my games and making connections that would never occur to me in a million years is so enriching and gratifying. yay :) indiepocalypse rules.

6. Projects by Blake Fall-Conroy
the minimum wage machine is a classic, and there's a lot of other neat projects here. eternal christmas is fun.

as always, you can leave a comment on any checkout counter post. thanks for reading!

The Checkout Counter #43

to my RSS readers: a few people let me know that my RSS feed was broken, so hopefully it's fixed now! please reach out to ayu@sweetfish.site if there are still any issues. thank you!

we're halfway through the year already…! my june was filled with good meals, movies about people desperate for connection, and impassioned manifestos.

hope you're able to keep to comfortable temperatures, wherever you are. until next time!

Film

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (偶然と想像), 2021¹
Anthology, drama, romance. Three stories of three women and their unconventional romantic encounters.

Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), 2023²
Romance, comedy, drama. A supermarket employee and a sandblaster meet at a karaoke bar. Soon after, they both fall in love and lose their jobs.

Thief, 1981³
Thriller, crime, drama. An expert safecracker agrees to lead one last diamond heist to ensure his future of an ordinary family life.

A Poet (Un poeta), 2025⁴
Drama, comedy. An aging and increasingly irrelevant poet finds purpose by nurturing the writing skills of a teenage girl.

My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま), 2024⁵
Drama. A figure skating coach trains two of his young students to ice dance, and the three form a short-lived bond.

Music

Eivät enkelitkään ilman siipiä lennä, Maustetytöt⁶
Pop

Games

10,000 rooms you could call home
Simulation. Traverse temporary floor plans and soundscapes.

Anthropeum
Daily game. Guess where and when each artifact was made.

Articles & essays

Manifestos for the Future, Hans Ulrich Obrist⁷

On prioritizing play, Matthew Prebeg and Mercedes Torrendell⁸

Blogs

making interactive fiction for e-readers with tweeul8r, adam le doux

Nurturing games, Laura Michet

I styled my web feed (while I still can), Pearbosc

Why Not Manifest?, Em Reed

Caper in the Castro thoughts, Michael Klamerus

Painting with Light, John Coulthart

Around the web

India Street Lettering

Spore dispersal
Portal to interesting websites

Postcard Log⁹

Web design as architecture¹⁰

Manifesto Jam 2026¹¹

Liminal spaces shrine

Zine Imposer
Upload a PDF and get a print-ready booklet

Current Rothko
A painting for the day

Heikki's Garden of Flowers
Archive of historical and contemporary pictorial letterpress works

Storied Colors
One color and its story every day

Notes

1. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
i was feeling pretty neutral about this until once again, the last story in the anthology. what a lovely tale of coincidence and memory and play, with a speculative fiction twist. a computer virus so widespread it makes everyone go back to using mail and telegrams is a fun storytelling device.

2. Fallen Leaves
i've only seen one other movie from this director and i'm very keen to seek out more. the anachronistic production design and deliberately stilted acting are just my cup of tea, and they're done in a way that's completely unromantic and unsentimental. woman who steals from work and guy who drinks on the job, what a couple. a perfect movie dog, too.

3. Thief
wow! every frame is just dripping with style and mood. how enthralling to watch experts at work and artfully use huge pieces of equipment. thermal lances are very cool.
i wouldn't have been surprised if james caan started quoting marx towards the end there. i can easily imagine him saying "labor is entitled to all it creates" then whipping his gun out and blasting a bunch of guys. what a picture.

4. A Poet
the kind of movie that makes me want to grab the screen and say "noooo" out of secondhand embarrassment. agonizing and funny and so clearly reflective of arts industries around the world. it's kind of like if tár was good (sorry!). loved cecile's review.

5. My Sunshine
beautifully composed shots and production design! feels very quaint and nearly saccharine, until the reality of bigotry comes crashing down upon everyone. the stylish end credits were much appreciated.

6. Eivät enkelitkään ilman siipiä lennä
checked this album out after hearing a certain needle drop in fallen leaves. good tunes!

7. Manifestos for the Future
For one thing is certain: without some kind of a manifesto, we cannot write alternatives that are more than vague utopias; without a manifesto, we cannot conceive the future.
[...] What interests me about the manifesto is that it’s a defunct format. It belongs to the early twentieth century and its atmosphere of political and aesthetic upheaval. The bombast and aggression, the half-apocalyptic, half-utopian thrust, the earnestness—all the manifesto’s rhetorical devices seem anachronistic now. For that very reason it’s compelling, in the way a broken bicycle wheel was for Duchamp. Things that don’t work have great potential.
lots of great ideas to chew on here. very much an inspiration for my manifesto jam entries.

8. On prioritizing play
A lot of narratives about technology assume that we either control the machines or the machines control us. But the reality is that technology is so interwoven into our lives, our culture, our values, our power structures, that everything about technology reflects us right back. They are intimate extensions of us.

9. Postcard Log
so wonderful :) the total miles traveled is a nice touch. i should try out postcrossing too…

10. Web design as architecture
another point of inspiration for my manifesto jam entries.

11. Manifesto Jam 2026
a whopping 333 entries for the third manifesto jam…most auspicious. i submitted two entries and have ideas for many more after parsing everyone else's. what a refreshing and rejuvenating exercise! i hope to write an actual blog post about this since i have many thoughts, but in the meantime here are some of my favorite entries of the ones i've read: SHUT UP ABOUT HOW MUCH YOU HATE MAKING GAMES, EXPAND THE POSSIBILITY SPACE, TEXT FETISHIST: AN AUTOPSY, Against Gratitude, Untimely Art Manifesto, i’ll start making games again as soon as somebody gets this boot off my fucking neck, antisense manifesto, THE RETURN OF THE Notecard Mini-festos, secret horses manifesto, and Steal, and Be Stolen From!.
okay i listed 10 and that's probably enough…but of course i could keep going. check out the 333 entries for yourself and skim them, parse them, save them as PDFs. impassioned declarations by independent gamemakers and writers and artists aren't scary, i promise.

as always, you can leave a comment on any checkout counter post. thanks for reading!

thanks!