went to the curveball, bounced it

May. 30th, 2025 07:45 pm
musesfool: Spiderverse Gwen Stacy (backwards and in heels)
[personal profile] musesfool
I slept very poorly last night and woke up with a blinding headache and some serious nausea, so I called out of work and went back to bed for a couple of hours.

I keep meaning to post then forgetting what I want to say, since it's mostly just about work. I did get several amazing photos of Baby Miss L in a Spider-Gwen outfit with a hood (with a glittery pink mask on it), a cute blue spider on the torso (when I first saw it, I admit my initial response was "Khaji Da?" so it's more scarab than spider but also she's 2 and a half, so) and a skirt decorated with webbing. It's so cute and she apparently approved of it by saying "Spider-Man! Spider-Man!" in her specific toddler lingo. And the Superman dress finally arrived so I hope to see pictures of that soon, too! Also, she has taken to carrying her Easter basket over her shoulder like a purse and calling it her bag, so she is definitely getting a headstart on her fashionista personality.

In other news, I was reading some fic I was otherwise enjoying but I will never ever ever understand why in EVERY SINGLE FANDOM I have ever read fic in, there are some gobsmackingly awful non-canon nicknames that proliferate. Sometimes for characters who already have a canonical nickname, so why? I mean, I get that the use of a nickname can be intimacy marker (much like the switch from last name to first name, or full first name to canon nickname), but the fact is, none of the characters this is applied to would ever allow themselves to be called these names by ANYONE, not even an intimate partner. The worst is when Jason calls Talia "Tals." NO. WHO thinks TALIA AL GHUL, DAUGHTER OF THE DEMON, is going to let ANYONE call her "Tals." No, really, meet me in the parking lot, I just have some questions.

I also don't understand when people apologize for...well, anything really, in their author's notes, but especially when they say shit like, "Sorry this chapter is mostly dialogue! We'll get back to the introspection soon!" I mean, I guess some people don't like dialogue??? Obviously mileage varies. But it is frequently the best part of a story for me. If your story holds off on dialogue for too long in favor of maundering introspection, I will likely wander away and never come back (like, obviously if it's a 900-word plotless character ramble that's fine, but then you are not posting it in chapters, at least I'd hope not).

I guess if you're not confident in your character voices, dialogue can be difficult, but you're still going to need to get the character voice right in the narration/introspection, and some characters are not really going to be doing a lot of introspection at all, even in their own heads, so it's even harder to get them right. Which is probably when it's time to revisit canon. But I admit, dialogue is pretty much the easiest thing I find to write, so possibly it's just me.

*

May the 4th art dump

May. 30th, 2025 04:38 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
Sorry for no other real update but I have just been "bleh" at the thought of sitting down and typing when I have other things to do. Oops.

ANYWAY. I did seven pictures for the May the 4th Star Wars fanworks exchange! And I received 3 stories!

WHAT I GOT: )

The seven pictures I did, in no particular order:

Stolen Moment (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order Series (Video Games), Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cal Kestis/Merrin the Nightsister
Characters: Cal Kestis, Merrin the Nightsister (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

It will have to be enough



Irresistable Force Meets a Movable Object (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Leia Organa
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

I know that feel, Obi-Wan.



Target Practice (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: CT-9904 | Crosshair & Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Characters: CT-9904 | Crosshair, Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Additional Tags: Fanart, Treat
Summary:

A little practice never hurt anyone. Well maybe not *anyone*...



Guardian (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jocasta Nu
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

She would guard it with her life...and did.



Formal Portrait (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

What would young Leia choose for her first senatorial portrait?



A Fistful of Credits (0 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character
Characters: Original Sith, Original Jedi
Additional Tags: love them western vibes, Space Cowboys - Freeform, Fanart, Treat
Summary:

It's the first holodrama of its kind! It won't be the last!



Dark Seduction (39 words) by Irusu
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Corran Horn/Exar Kun
Characters: Corran Horn, Exar Kun
Additional Tags: Fanart
Summary:

Prompt: "That scene where he appears to Corran at night but sexy"

Murderbot 1x04

May. 29th, 2025 11:24 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
New episode is out already! At half an hour they are very bite-sized.

Spoilers had fun )

LOLOLLLLLLLLL

May. 29th, 2025 09:49 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
AppleTV posted the full credits for "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon," Murderbot's show-within-a-show. 10/10 no notes.

sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
The Mismatched Tropes Flash exchange had author reveals while I was traveling, and I wrote:

Last Minute Save (Vir & Londo, 1600 words)
In which Vir gets drugged and almost kidnapped/intergalactically trafficked, and Londo gets to be a Big Damn Hero.

p.s. Incredibly random Tumblr poll on whether Centauri or Narns have a higher body temperature FOR SCIENCE. (And fic.) If you do not have a Tumblr account, feel free to provide opinions in a comment.

oh, hi, aten't dead

May. 28th, 2025 08:38 pm
watersword: An open book (Stock: book)
[personal profile] watersword

I have been staggering through the past few weeks, holding myself together with string and duct tape, and it is finally the Cottagecore Week.

I have finished a sashiko patch on a pair of jeans and I am very proud of myself, as well as the first of the embroidered numbers for my front & back doors, and I have solved the problem of how to print patterns onto stabilizer (use the library makerspace printer from a USB). The mending circle at the local "sustainable fashion collective" (it's a secondhand store with some mending/tailoring services) was fun and I'll go back when the bus schedule allows. Dropout.tv and the 1995 Pride & Prejudice miniseries have been my companions as I sew this week, and they are both great for that purpose. I think I will move on to North & South and perhaps Horrible Histories next. Is Shakespeare & Hathaway fun?

The knotweed in the garden has been beaten back from the path to the shed, and the asparagus is coming up spindly and feathery (I really hope that they will thicken over time, I will eat a thin asparagus spear without complaining but I love asparagus with some heft); no trace of the rhubarb, which I'm kind of upset about, but seeds are always chancy, and I'm waiting to see what happened with the watermelon and sunflowers, now that I've staked the peas. Surely something will come up? The gladiolus in the front garden are looking more promising, although I don't know what happened to everything else. I have proof that someone in the Parks Department exists, and has just been ignoring my emails (a coworker knows the parks director, and emailed her, and the person I have been trying to get in touch with answered when their boss was on the chain, but no luck since, so this is progress but not by much).

I have been wallowing in books, and can enthusiastically join the chorus of those of you who have been shrieking delightedly about Robert Jackson Bennett's latest, A Drop of Corruption, it's so good, please discuss in the comments; and I finally got my hands on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons, ditto.

Only One Bed meme

May. 27th, 2025 05:09 pm
sholio: Peggy Carter smiling (Avengers-Peggy smile)
[personal profile] sholio
Stolen / respectfully borrowed from [personal profile] rionaleonhart, a Tumblr meme now removed from its native ecosystem and repotted on DW [ETA: now tweaked a bit]:

Give me any two (or more) characters from a canon I’m familiar with, and I’ll tell you how they would cope in an ‘oh no, there’s only one bed’ scenario!

What you get might be anything from brief headcanons/thoughts to a small fic, depending on how much I have to say about those particular characters.

(Currently traveling, staying overnight on the road, would enjoy some fun distraction.)

Update: Based on how the comments are going, I edited the instructions slightly to hopefully bend the requests a little more towards characters from the same canon. (If you want two characters from different canons, feel free to ask for it - there are no wrong answers, it's very open-ended - but I'm really only going to be able to do headcanons for those, as I can't easily write crossovers, and I'm hoping for some of the other kind of prompts too!)

what a find by O. G.

May. 27th, 2025 08:57 pm
musesfool: the ocean (your ocean refuses no river)
[personal profile] musesfool
I slept through for a full 7 hours last night! right up until my alarm went off, actually, without waking up once!

I also got some fantastic videos of Baby Miss L going nuts about TATOES and BROCCOLI and also some mouse game she plays on my sister's tablet. She is such a character! <333

I haven't started the new season of Poker Face or Andor yet - I am still in HGTV mode. No emotional investment, and it satisfies both my nosiness about other people's houses and my need to be judgy about other people's aesthetic taste without hurting anyone's feelings.

Every time someone says they want to go BOLD with color and their palette is black and white I want to punch them. (I'm not saying black and white can't be a bold choice, just that it's not a bold COLOR choice.) Everyone wants POPS of COLOR but then the color turns out to be greige. I just...find it wearisome sometimes. I get it if you are doing a quick refresh in order to sell, since allegedly neutrals sell better? But these are people supposedly doing their "forever homes" or their "dream homes" so why not pick something interesting? At least a little bit? In the downstairs powder room??? I'm begging you, please!

Ahem.

If you asked me what my preferred home decor aesthetic is, I would say beachy with lots of blues and greens in various shades, and okay, a lot of white, a little gray, and some occasional wood or wicker accents. Definitely would want hardwood floors (or LVP that looked like hardwood). I'd want a large zero-access shower with a built-in bench with some fancy tile, and I wouldn't want to waste space on a tub (or double sinks, since I live alone), but I would like more linen/towel storage.

I would obviously want a large chef's kitchen, with FULL SIZE appliances and a big range - I don't go for that countertop stovetop and wall oven set up, I'd want a bigass stove with six burners - and I certainly wouldn't put it (or the sink) on an island. I'd like a large butcher block work surface and a breakfast nook with an eastern exposure, but don't need a formal dining room or a ginormous island. I do like white upper cabinets, probably with reeded glass doors, and then a color on the lower cabinets - a cobalt blue, maybe, or a deep teal.

The place I might go a little modern/industrial/maybe even avant garde would be in the light fixtures. I have seen some WILD chandeliers and lighting options on these shows and some of them are gorgeous.

Obviously I worked a lot of this out in the time between going into contract on my apartment and finally closing, so I was able to pick stuff out that all kind of went together, because I absolutely understand being a renter for years and not really being able to put your stamp on a place. (all the people who already live in their own houses who have no sense of their own style, though - they kind of baffle me, because didn't they paint/decorate their house? I get maybe not knowing what your architectural style is but these are mainly people in their 30s and older - they should have some sense of what they like, shouldn't they, even if they can't pin it to a specific style?)

Anyway, I don't need people to do their own homes in my preferred style, and some of these homes turn out to be gorgeous, but it would be nice if everyone wasn't doing the same things across several different home renovation shows. I guess HGTV has a bit of a house style? But if you've watched any of it, you can see why Keith and Evan from Bargain Block are my favorites - they actually do a lot of fun different things (or they used to, anyway), where even if it isn't something I'd choose, it still has a strong sense of style.

*
littlerhymes: (Default)
[personal profile] littlerhymes
Originally this was to be a conversation between Asako Yuzuki (author of "Butter") and Sayaka Murata, which I think would have been a fascinating conversation as they both have such interesting perspectives on being a woman and an outsider in Japanese society, and they are also friends. Unfortunately Sayaka had to pull out of the festival, and so this became a solo event, with Junko Hirabayashi as the MC.

The event was almost entirely in Japanese, with an automated translation supplied via a screen at the venue and also on our phones. Although good in theory, the translations were riddled with errors ("the translation said you DID breastfeed while drinking," one person told her in the Q&A section, as she laughed and said "no, no!") and very slow. Yuzuki spoke at what seemed like a fairly normal pace but it rapidly became evident the translations were way behind. After the event wrapped up, I kept my phone screen open and read the remaining translations for the next 20 minutes - that's how far behind it was by the end. So far from a perfect solution.

Despite the guesswork and delays involved in reading the translations, I thought it was a really interesting session. Please take these notes with a grain of salt, due to the aforementioned translation issues:

notes )

at the knees with a cutter

May. 25th, 2025 08:42 pm
musesfool: key lime pie (pie = love)
[personal profile] musesfool
The bbq was fun, even if the weather was chilly and rainy. We saw a huge double rainbow after it rained, and one of them was the most vivid and long-lasting rainbow I ever saw. it was pretty amazing.

Baby Miss L had a grand old time her in personal ball pit, and dancing to both the 90s playlist (it was a 90s-themed party) and later to her own favorite Elmo songs. She was really vibing with Pantera and Alice in Chains - that child is going to be in the mosh pit at the club before you know it.

In other news, Alyssa tried the confetti cookies and really liked them. This morning, she texted me like, "this is exactly what they're supposed to taste like!" Anthony and my sister also liked them, so I guess it's just me, but thy were disgustingly sweet to me. *hands* Trish also liked the brownies, so that worked out too! I will definitely have to make the brownies again, so I can taste them. My sister made ice cream cone cupcakes for the party, which I guess she used to make for the kids to take to school for their birthday's back in the day, so there was a nostalgia factor involved. They were good, though I still like my chocolate cupcake recipe best. *g*

Now I'm watching the Mets, though really, I'm listening to the local radio broadcast because good lord the ESPN broadcast is the worst. Simply terrible in all aspects.

*

Recent Reading

May. 25th, 2025 08:27 am
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
[personal profile] sanguinity
Jashar Awan, Every Monday Mabel (2025)

Children's picture book about Mabel's weekly ritual of getting ready for the breathlessy-awaited, much-longed-for visit of the garbage truck. Mabel's family is indulgent of but largely indifferent to her fannish interest -- but all across the city, other small children are also devoted fans of the garbage truck...


Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

It's always odd to come late to a cornerstone of its genre. There are so many elements that were presumably fresh at the time of first publication, but which now ping as much-worn if well-beloved tropes. (In hindsight, it seems pretty clear to me that Stephen King was, directly or indirectly, influenced by Shirley Jackson.) And yet for all that the horror aspects of the story were defanged by my having first encountered them elsewhere, I enjoyed this story immensely. The characters are richly and deftly portrayed, and Nell is already one of my favorite faulty narrators, as her story unfolds into multiple layers of self-invention, misdirection, and supernatural influence. There's a whole bunch of chewy stuff here about why and how Nell in particular was targeted by the house, and especially the house's offer of home and belonging while simultaneously guaranteeing she would never know the same.

Note to [personal profile] garonne, who asked elsewhere if Theodora is canonically queer in the original English: yes, she is. It's discreet (e.g., the text refers to Dora's "friend" instead of her "girlfriend"), but for anyone who is familiar with the coded language that used to predominate for queer relationships, the implication that she's a lesbian is unambiguous.


Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr (1998)

Read-aloud with [personal profile] grrlpup; first-read for her and re-read for me.

I remember being underwhelmed with this one the first time through, and it's true, all the stuff with Tien is just... awful. (It's not bad writing! The character is just numblingly sloggingly awful, exactly as he's meant to be. I appreciate the depiction of the dynamics of getting caught in an awful marriage, but that doesn't make the experience of reading about him any more pleasant.) Sadly, even after he exits the book, he still haunts the narrative. But I do love Ekaterin, and the Vorthyses, and a bunch of minor characters -- the two accountants, while getting only a half-dozen pages each, were great favorites of Grrlpup. And the climax is glorious; Miles is correct to be smitten with Ekaterin.

politics of occupation )
umadoshi: (fancrone - china_shop)
[personal profile] umadoshi
I'm surprisingly annoyed that Mozilla is killing Pocket, given that my personal use case for it is "that's where I throw unread links that I realistically know I'll almost certainly never actually dig up again, thus satisfying the itch of 'but I need to know where it is in case I suddenly have a desperate need to read it'". I've backed up my Pocket data and will presumably never look at it again, but what will I use as bottomless pit now?

Reading: I finished The Incandescent, which was a great read and also a wildly different book from Some Desperate Glory, so hats off to Emily Tesh's range! Now I'm a couple of chapters into Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice.

I'm also still working my way through Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Watching: [personal profile] scruloose and I are caught up on Murderbot and (until tonight) The Last of Us, and have finished The Pitt, which was, as advertised, fantastic. (Medical shows are so very not my genre that I don't have anything to compare it to; I think the only other one I've seen is Scrubs, manymany years ago.)

I duly read through the trivia section and whatnot on IMDb and saw when season 2 is apparently going to be set, and I think that's more months into the future that the newbie!doctors' ER rotation will last? (Have I successfully absorbed the terms for the various levels of doctors in an ER? No. >.<) That's a bit of an upsetting prospect, since Mel is my favorite (and [personal profile] scruloose's, and probably unsurprising for either of us). But I haven't read much else about the show at this point.

EXCEPT! I did remember that Sarah Kurchak [standard disclaimer: friend] wrote an article about Mel for Time last month, so I've read and can recommend that: "The Pitt’s Dr. Mel King Is a Small but Meaningful Step Forward for Neurodivergence Onscreen".

So now we have one episode left of TLoU, and odds are good we'll shift back to Kingdom for season 2, but Kingdom's seasons are very short, so we'll be back on the "what to watch now?" train relatively soon.

(Wheel of Time fans, I'm so sorry about the show's cancellation. :( On a personal level, I guess it pretty much guarantees that we're not going to go back and resume season 3 from where we drifted off after the first couple of episodes.)

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fulselden

January 2011

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