tentaclemod: (Default)
[personal profile] tentaclemod posting in [community profile] pinchhits
Event: Rare Male Slash Exchange, a gift exchange for fanfic, fanart and podfic.
Event link: AO3 | DW
Pinch hit link: https://raremaleslashex.dreamwidth.org/2025/08/31/
Due date: due asap, negotiable

EPH 1 - 赤ちゃんと僕 | Aka-chan to Boku | Baby and Me, 銀と金 - 福本伸行 | Gin to Kin - Fukumoto Nobuyuki, 忍たま乱太郎 | Nintama Rantarou

EPH 2 - The Mandalorian (TV), Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV), Andor (TV), Crossover Fandom

Fandom Empire presents: Bingo

Sep. 4th, 2025 07:30 pm
prisca: (empire mod)
[personal profile] prisca posting in [site community profile] dw_community_promo
Fandom Empire's last challenge of this year is:



August 27 - September 10: Sign-up
September 7 - December 7: Challenge open
December 8 - December 14: Final scores

At the end of the challenge, there will be banner/badges for everyone and 50 DW points for three randomly chosen regular (2 missed weeks maximum) participants.

Check out the information post here.

I would be glad to have you around. If you are interested, don't hesitate to sign up here.

Decisions.

Sep. 4th, 2025 11:34 am
aj: (transit)
[personal profile] aj
Ugh, this year has been expensive and I'm sensing next year is going to suck too. BUT. I've made the active choice that I won't be going up to Milwaukee for the Romance Book convention happening this weekend. I hope it's awesome for those who want to attend, but I am going to spend the entrance money on new running shoes and acupuncture.

My goal is to start going back to the gym in a more regular way. The last time kind of blew up in my face and I want to get back to going at least twice a week. Baby steps, right? BUT. I cleaned out my locker and am washing all the work out clothes this weekend. I also renewed my locker and am going to pick up a few small toiletries (deodorant, toothpaste) and bring my tied masks to cover my kn95's. Those hold them on better than the elastic ear-loop ones. Now I just need some new shoes for the elliptical and my barriers for entry will be lowered. I even have a new mp3 player to dump stuff on that I can sweat all over. Though, the busted iPod (TM) might be reaching repeated gym status. Ugh, I get so sweaty.

I am also grumpy I can't really check out audiobooks onto my budget mp3 player. It's deeply annoying. Do NOT get me started on Overdrive vs Libby. The shift has been a MASSIVE loss for accessibility. If you don't have/can't afford a device that runs an app? Too bad, so sad, no audiobooks from the library 4 u. (Unless you check out the cd's. Which is what I do now.)

ANYWAY. Enjoy my awesome icon!

I'm...good?

Sep. 4th, 2025 10:57 am
seren_ccd: (Star Trek)
[personal profile] seren_ccd
In my continued attempt to be more present here, here is a post! :D Honestly, things are...better. I'm still feeling all the things, but the main feeling I'm sitting with is disappointment.

I'm just so dang disappointed things ended the way they did when I'm fairly sure they didn't have to. I'm disappointed that we couldn't be what the other person wanted/needed. I'm disappointed that I'm grappling with the cultural/societal nonsense of feeling like I "failed," or I'm "not where I should be at this point in my life." It's all nonsense and I'm exactly where I should be because I'm alive and I'm thriving, so eff off society. I'm sorry for him that he's going to go through all this alone. I'm also disappointed because all the things that gave me pause initially are really coming to light. I'm not disappointed in myself, exactly, but some things have just been confirmed to me that I think I should have taken more seriously. They're things that were NEVER going to "get better." And I should have trusted my instincts. Now I know.

In good news, I'm feeling lighter and lighter and each day I'm that much further from the pain of it all and closer to feeling like my self again. I've made some really cool travel plans for next summer, something that I've always wanted to do, and I'm even considering home ownership.

And I have my hedgehog again! Her name is Mabel and she's a hilarious little grumpus and I love her.

In closing, it's Thursday, and while I could never get the hang of Thursdays, there are British murder mysteries to watch later this evening and a hedgie to cuddle (carefully) and I'm getting there.

Alien: Earth 1.05

Sep. 4th, 2025 05:10 pm
selenak: (Spacewalk - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
No sooner did I finish with episodes 1-4 that episode 5 got dropped. I’m currently travelling (for work, not fun) and only intermittently online, but I did have the chance to watch it.

In Space, No One…. )

Blergh.

Sep. 3rd, 2025 10:51 am
aj: (void)
[personal profile] aj
I am having a lot of feelings right now, and most of them are grumpy. My record got stolen/mis-delivered and now I'm having to beat my head against the joy that is USPS bureaucratic jankiness to try and get my $44 back. And I'm going to have to try and order this goddamn vinyl again. I would like someone to come and just do this for me.

UPDATE: It was delivered this morning? Huzzah, thank you, universe.

I love being independent and capable, but fuck me it'd be nice for someone else to handle this for me.

I had a mostly good weekend although bits were hard. We got out to the cemetery on Sunday (Saturday was a loss for me) and I got to spend the day with mom. We plotted out scheduling for the rest of the year and caught up on some chatting. I also got some free produce from her (along with a bunch of mosquito bites) which I spent Sunday putting together as salads. NGL, my quinoa tabbouleh was fucking spectacular.

I am having some health stuff going on, but I don't really want to go into it. I am mostly noting this for my own records. I'm fine, but it is what it is.

Monday went ok. I worked hard to basically clear the day so I could be a lump. I did get 3/4 of the books I'd printed glued and sewn. The last one needs sewing and gluing, but it's pressed and awled. I'm honestly impressed at how my hands remembered what to do with the sewing. Now I just need to cut the boards, pick out a color scheme, and glue everything together.

I'm also working on line-editing another project. (It's fine! But there are minor typos that I go back and correct. Ex: their instead of there or awe instead of aww.) I never do substantive changes in anything I bind, but if there's a spelling or grammar error that throws me out of the narrative in the singular thing I am printing and binding so I and I alone can read it? Yeah, there's line-editing.
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Photograph of steel spoons and spices in a dramatic setting with added text that gives it the look of a gourmet magazine cover: September 2025. Food & Cooking, at Fancake. Steel teaspoons are arranged in an elogated oval to suggest a fish, with the bowls acting as scales and some of the handles left visible to create the fins and tail, giving the creature a spiky appearance. The concave bowls are dusted with a powdery orange spice for color and one spoon at the front of the fish is filled with a coarse black spice to create an eye. The fish is on a black surface with a rough texture and around it are three skinny green peppers, a mound of salt, a mound of orange spice, and a dipping bowl filled with a clear amber liquid.
[community profile] fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!

More books, more tv

Sep. 3rd, 2025 09:48 am
selenak: (Six by Nyuszi)
[personal profile] selenak
More books:

Stella Duffy: The Purple Shroud. The sequel to her novel Theodora, this one covering the time from when Theodora becomes Empress to her death. It's as readable as the first one, though I have a few nitpicks. Not about what I feared - the novel Theodora keeps morally ambiguous, and it confronts head on that once you are in power, you cannot simultanously be "one of the people", no matter how low you were originally born or how disadvantaged a life you've lived until this point. Doesn't mean your decisions can't benefit the disadvantaged, but you yourself are no longer one of them. So far, so good, and in case I hadn't mentioned it before, Duffy's characterisation of Narses is my favourite after Gillian Bradshaw's, and Thedora's relationship with him, ditto; they're firm allies from before she married Justinian, but they also sometimes have different opinions, and his ultimate loyalty is to Justinian, not to her. Also, Antonina (Belisarius' wife) in several lhistorical novels of the period tends to be presented as a none too bright promiscuous tool of Theodora's, and not so here, where they are friends, but up to a point, and Antonina has her priorities which are neither about her sex life nor about Theodora.

Spoilery Nitpick is Spoilery Because Not Historical )

Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver. I've heard many good things about this one but didn't get around do reading it before now. Turns out it is absolutely worth the hype. I had been charmed by Novik's Temeraire saga, though less so the more books were published and stopped reading before Laurence and Temeraire got to Australia. This novel, by contrast, didn't just charm me but made me fall in love and start it all over again as soon as I was done. Rather unusually for what I've read of Novik's novels so far, almost the entire main cast is female, and she even pulls off multiple first person narrations without this reader getting confused as to who is narrating which passage (note: in my copy, this isn't marked with "Name of Character" to signal a pov switch), because the individual voices are that individual.

The setting is vaguely Russian, using various fairy tale elements (Rumpelstiskin, Cinderella, Baba Yaga) to weave something new. The main narrating ladies are: 1.) Miryem, daughter of a Jewish moneylender who isn't very good at moneylending due to being too kind and exploitable by his antisemitic village, who takes over the moneylending business, makes a success out of it and makes the fateful for fairy tales boast of being able to turn silver into gold, which gets overheard by a Staryk (= essentially fairy for the purposes of this novel) Lord who decides to take her up on it, 2.) Wanda, downtrodden but strong and determined daughter of a drunken and abusive farmer who is in debt to Miryem, which causes her to work for Miryem, 3.) Irina, daughter of the provincial Duke who through a plot device involving Miryem's business with the Staryk lord sees a chance to gain power by marrying Irina to the young Tsar despite said young Tsar's very sinister reputation. There are more first person narrators among the supporting cast, but these are the three main characters who drive the narrative, who have to use their wits to first survive increasingly dangerous situations and then get a step ahead and actually defeat the cause of said situations, and who along the way form relationships with other characters (and each other) that help them achieving this. It''s really, spinning metaphors being inevitable, a fantastic and brilliant yarn, and every time I thought "hang on, I can see where this is going, but how does that work with Character X' previously established behavior", the novel surprised me by making it work in the best way.

More tv:

Alien: Earth, episodes 1.01 - 1.04: Not a sequel but a prequel, setting wise, though made with an awareness that most of the audience will be familiar with at least the first few Alien movies. Mind you, with the heavy emphasis on AI beings already introduced in the pilot I thought, hang on, to which Ridley Scott cult movie is this supposed to be a prequel to? (Four episodes later: leaving aside the four years limit on the life span of Replicants in Blade Runner, this actually would work in a kind of shared early Ridley Scott films universe.) Not that Alien and its sequels don't have robots (robots here being used as a collective noun for various different AIs in human shape) as important parts of the plot, of course, but this show really puts them centre stage (perhaps recalling David was one of the key elements of Prometheus that worked even for people who disliked the movie?), and it absolutely works. It also so far provides a good remix of core elements. Ripley in I think not one but two of the Alien movies said that the company (not just Wayland-Yutani which she originally worked for, but also its successors in the movie plots) were the true monsters, given that the Xenomorphs "just" follow their instincts but Wayland-Yutani et al sacrifice fellow human beings for greed. If this was late 1970s and early 1980s scepticism of capitalism and where it's going, well, now we the audience live in the world of tech bros and politicians not even trying to hide their corruption anymore but boasting of it, and so this tv series so far doiubles and triples down on Ripley's observation. Not just the good old Xenomorph but newly introduced creatures like the T-Ocelius deliver the creeps, horrors and scares, sure, as they go after their organic victims, but the character you really loathe and with every episode more wish to fall to an extremely unpleasant fate is the resident main tech bro billionaire, Boy Kavalier (what he really calls himself), so covinced of his own brilliance, so utterly unconcerned with any empathy whatsoever, and seeing both human and synthetic workers as his property.

(Future eras may write their film and tv thesis about tech bro villains from Glass Onion onwards.)

But any genre that involves horror needs sympathetic characters as well, characters the audience cares for and wants to survive, not getting torn apart by the Xenomorph (and other murderous species). Which is where this show also excels, but saying why gets too spoilery to talk about it above cut. )

World building wise, the Earth as presented by this show no longer has nation states, it's run by five cooperations (this reminded me of what Mike Duncan did for the Mars part in his Podcast Revolutions, and he couldn't have known), with Weyland-Yutani as one of the older powerful ones and Boy Kavalier's company, inevitably named Prodigy, as the newbie which together with another new company changed the "Triumvirate" to "The Five". Democracy, of course, is also a thing of the past. For once, North America isn't a location (so far), instead, the Weyland-Yutani vessel in the series pilot crashes down on what used to be Thailand, and Boy Kavalier's lair seems to be located somewhere in South Asia (Vietnam, I'd say, given the scenery) as well. We all know how a Xenomorph looks in the various stages of its existence by now, but the design team came up with four other creepy species as well which are new and are excellent at bringing on body horror. Though like I said: the truest revulsion is created by human greed. Contrasted, which makes it compelling and not nihilistic, by the capacity of doing better than that, by artificial and human beings alike.
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
As we all start planning our nominations and requests, mods have been reviewing our rules around the number of fandoms that can be nominated and requested.

Traditionally, Yuletide has allowed participants to nominate a maximum of 3 fandoms to the tagset, with up to 4 characters each. We increased that to 4 fandoms in 2023 and got positive feedback about that change.

During signups, participants have been required to request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 6 fandoms if they choose. They must offer a minimum of 4 fandoms.

We've needed to limit the tagset size due to a combination of AO3 technical limitations as well as the logistical effort to confirm each fandom is eligible while avoiding duplicate fandoms. The good news is that we’ve found AO3’s tagset interface loads the moderation tools a bit faster lately. We've also developed more scalable processes and a group of wonderful, experienced volunteers to help with that checking. We think we can handle more nominations this year, but we won’t know until we try!

Change to nominations:


For 2025 only, we are going to increase the number of tagset nominations from 4 fandoms to 5 fandoms per person. The maximum number of characters will remain at 4 per fandom.

We’ll see how this goes, and whether the additional workload seems manageable to us, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

Change to requests:


For 2025 only, we are also going to increase the maximum number of fandom requests from 6 to 8. The minimum of 3 will not change. This means you must request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 8 fandoms if you choose.

Everything else remains the same: for each fandom, you will still be able to request up to a maximum of 4 characters. You will still be required to offer at least 4 fandoms with a minimum of 2 characters each.

Again, we will evaluate how it goes, and how this affects our workload, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

We hope this opens up some exciting possibilities for you in the 2025 round! Please stay tuned for our usual eligibility and evidence posts.

Rest in Power Graham Greene

Sep. 2nd, 2025 04:40 pm
muccamukk: Cluster of purple and white lilac flowers. (Misc: Lilacs)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I think there will be more in depth obituaries to follow, but here's a couple I liked.

CBC: 'Like watching Gretzky play hockey:' Colleagues remember actor Graham Greene.

CBC (Video): Remembering Graham Greene (interview with Jesse Wente).

I just saw him in Sweet Summer Pow Wow last week. Hard to imagine he's gone.
rivkat: Dean reading (dean reading)
[personal profile] rivkat
Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang: Ecoterrorists )

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky: Abigail to the front )

Rachel Hartman, Among Ghosts:ghosts versus abusive family )

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bee Speaker: Mars to the rescue (?) )

KJ Charles, Death in the Spires: murder among the swells )

Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar: my favorite book so far this year )

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One (2018), ed. Neil Clarke: the pulse of the moment )

Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things: prose poems )

Scott Carson, Departure 37: eerie phone calls )

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster: magic and community )

Melissa Caruso, The Tethered Mage:palace intrigue and magic )
Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day: Not for me, sorry )

Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads:survival in a dangerous magic world )

KJ Charles, A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel: more m/m in rural England )

Ray Nayler, Three very interesting books )

Matt Dinniman, Every Grain of Sand: The Shivered Sky - Book 1: Nope, need more Donut )

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightningalso not for me )

Allie Therin, 2/3 of a paranormal m/m trilogy )

Mira Grant, Overgrowth: Rant incoming! )


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A Few Words From The Wise

Speak to him, for there is none born wise.
-The Maxims of Ptahotep

In mourning or rejoicing, be not far from me.
- an Ancient Egyptian Love Song

But your embraces
alone give life to my heart
may Amun give me what I have found
for all eternity.
-Love Songs of the New Kingdom, Song #2

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.
-Wendell Berry

Up in the morning's no for me,
Up in the morning early;
When a' the hills are covered wi' snaw,
I'm sure it's winter fairly.
-Robert Burns

Visit to the Hermit Ts'ui

Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.
-Ch'ien Ch'i

Mistress of high achievement, O lady Truth,
do not let my understanding stumble
across some jagged falsehood.
-Pindar

Every Gaudy colour
Is a bit of truth.
-Nathalia Crane

I counted two-and-twenty stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks.
-Samuel Coleridge