Week in review: Week to 16 May

May. 17th, 2026 09:52 am
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
. When we did the family walk on Sunday morning, I suggested we walk in a direction where I'd seen a mass of bright orange flowers blooming when I drove past the previous afternoon, but when we got there the orange blooms were nowhere to be seen. One of my siblings identified the plants as something in the daisy family that closes up for the night and apparently hadn't opened up for the day yet. We saw some other nice flowers, though, and a few interesting birds.


. At the weekend gaming session, we were missing one of the players for Ticket to Ride: Legacy again (a different one from last time), so we played Sequoia and Dark Tomb. I remember thinking, the first time I played Dark Tomb, that playing it again would quickly start to feel repetitive, and this proved to be the case even though were were playing a different scenario from last time.


. At the weekly gaming meet, we played Finspan. It's only the second time I've played it, and I'm still not very good at it, though I did at least avoid coming last.


. I saw a thing online mentioning that if you buy an ebook for Kindle that has a notice saying something along the lines of "At the request of the publisher, this ebook is available DRM-free", there's a way to download a separate copy of the ebook, if you can find where that option has been hidden away, and it occurred to me that the same was probably true of the Kobo store. So now I've downloaded separate copies of all the ebooks I've bought through the Kobo store where that's an option; I don't really have any plans to read them not-on-my-Kobo, but it feels reassuring to know that they're there. I kind of wish I'd figured this out earlier, before Humble Bundle did a bundle last year that included all the Murderbot books, and I bought it at least partly in order to have copies of the Murderbot books that weren't tied to my Kobo; to be fair, though, there were enough other interesting books in the bundle that I'd probably have bought it anyway.


. I've started another run on XCOM 2. I've had one disastrous mission, where I got complacent and wound up bringing the combined might of every enemy unit in the area down on my head at once, but apart from that it's been going well.


. Saturday gave us the first foggy morning of the autumn, at least as far as I've noticed; I haven't been consistently sticking my head out of doors early on these cold mornings, and only did so on Saturday because I had to go to Parkrun. If I hadn't had to get to Parkrun, I'd have been tempted to stop and take a photo of the fog lurking atmospherically over the cemetery. (Except that, see above, I wouldn't have been outside to notice the fog over the cemetery in the first place.)

Book Chain, etc, Week 20

May. 17th, 2026 09:06 am
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
#20: A book whose title has more letters than the title of the previous book
May: Make/Making

Third attempt: How Comics Were Made by Glenn Fleishman. An illustrated history of the various complicated methods by which newspaper comics have been transferred from the artist's drawing board to the newpaper page. I'm reading my backer copy of the Kickstarter-funded first edition; a second edition has subsequently been released by a major publisher with the title changed to How Comics Are Made, presumably because the publisher in question also owns one of the largest surviving comic syndicates and doesn't want people getting the idea that newspaper comics are a thing of the past.

(The Genghis Khan book just hasn't been holding my attention, and will probably end up going back to the library with not much more of it read.)


Miscellaneous

Reading all the Penric stories one after another may not have been a wise decision; they were written to be able to stand alone and be read as and when a person came across them, which means among other things that each one has to set up the premise and characters for what might be a first-time reader, and that gets a bit repetitive when read all together. There are also some other recurring narrative effects that are fine within the context of individual stories but can get to be a bit much in the aggregate, and a few things one notices when reading them in chronological order when that wasn't always the way they were written.

Despite all that, the stories themselves are very good.


I also finished reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, which I've been reading on and off since March. The amount of time I've taken to finish it isn't a knock against the quality of the book; it's just that it's the kind of book where you read an essay and let it digest for a while before starting the next one, and also a good book to read a bit of on days when I wasn't feeling like tackling a whole book. And every now and then it had to go back to the library and I had to wait a couple of weeks for it to come around again on the hold queue.

At it again

May. 16th, 2026 06:27 pm
john_amend_all: (ulkesh)
[personal profile] john_amend_all
Valen's Angels: Avenger (658 words) by JohnAmendAll
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Babylon 5 (TV 1993), Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jeffrey Sinclair, Kosh (Babylon 5), Ulkesh Naranek
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Anime, Vignette
Summary:

Lydia is lost to her family. Darcy knows someone who could help.

(no subject)

May. 16th, 2026 07:53 am
skygiants: Mae West (model lady)
[personal profile] skygiants
I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!
moon_custafer: Russian Futurism explodes (explodity)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
We watched this last night and it was just as delightfully bonkers as the trailers had promised. Bride of Frankenstein, 1930s crime film, feminist fable, ghost story, musical, the parts don’t always fit together perfectly but it doesn’t matter because it’s an exquisite-corpse about an exquisite corpse (Jesse Buckley), an escort formerly known as Ida till possession by Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Jesse Buckley) moved up the Chicago mob’s time-table on bumping her off for knowing too much.

As it happens, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Slater Bale) is in town and wants Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to make him a mate—one trip to the potter’s field and a jolt of electricity and revitalizing fluid and our heroine is back, still intermittently channelling Mary, and ready to revolt and to dance. I love that Gyllenhaal makes one of the key scenes in the film a tribute to the Puttin’ on the Ritz number in Young Frankenstein. This is a movie that loves all its sources. It rolls around in them.

I haven’t even brought up Penélope Cruz and Peter Saarsgard as police detectives who seem to have wandered in from a completely different movie, Jeannie Berlin as Dr. Euphronius’ walking Otto Dix painting of a maid, or the monster’s fanboy crush on polio-survivor-turned-movie-star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). Zlatko Burić, who seems to be making a career of playing sleazebags, is appropriately vile as the mob boss Lupino, but he’s only in a couple of scenes because it’s not really about him.

Apparently this has been a box-office bomb. I hope Gyllenhaal’s directing career doesn’t suffer for it, and I hope the movie gets a cult following in the coming years with midnight screenings and the audience showing up in costume. I know I plan to watch it again.

ETA— Good soundtrack, too.
mific: (Heated rivalry)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Wyatt Hayes
Rating: Explicit
Length: 7060
Content Notes: Underage, as both Shane and Ilya are seventeen.
Creator Links: toomuchplor on AO3
Themes: Journey and travel, Forced proximity, First time, AU: Fork in the road

Summary: Regina to Edmonton was nine hours by bus if the weather was decent; it took a bit longer if — for example — your bus lost power on Highway 11 just past Dundurn, Saskatchewan.

Team buses, night drives, and one way things might have started differently.

Reccer's Notes:
This is a lovely story about Shane and Ilya as teens, just after the first World Juniors Cup, being forced into proximity on a long nighttime bus ride. The inevitable happens, and it kick-starts their relationship and their friendship at a much earlier stage, allowing them to rewrite the MLH's narrative. Told from Shane's pov, with wonderful characterisation and details.

Fanwork Links: Torture Me (With All I’ve Wanted)
Podfic read by mific

casemod: Inspector Clawseau. (Default)
[personal profile] casemod posting in [community profile] pinchhits
Event: Casefic Exchange is a fanwork exchange focusing on investigations. These can be solving murders, retrieving stolen items, finding missing people, missions, and mysteries. As long as it has an investigation as its core theme, it fits with the exchange. We are an AO3 exchange; you must have an account and be 18+ to participate.

Minimum requirements: We allow 3 mediums: a minimum of 3,000 words for fanfiction, a minimum of 10 panels for a comic, or a recording of a completed fic of 3,000 words minimum with "casefic" as one of its tags. Works must include a fandom, character/ship and be of a medium that the recipient has requested.

Event link: [community profile] caseficexchange.
Pinch hit link: Current pinch hits.
Due date: Friday 5 June at 11:59pm EDT.

Available post-deadline pinch hits:



Thank you for considering!
melime: (Default)
[personal profile] melime posting in [community profile] seventhdoctor
I didn't see a model for posting, so hopefully this is ok!

Seventh Doctor & Ace, Survival coda, T-ratedHe looks at Ace, and he’s afraid of what he sees. The animal instinct in her, threatening to come out, the effect of the planet that is seemingly tailored to highlight her own worst instincts. He’s not afraid of her, but afraid for her, afraid that she won’t be able to fight off the planet’s influence, and this is a battle that he can’t fight for her. He can give her advice, but as she is she’ll struggle to listen to him. In this battle for Ace’s mind, all he can do is hope that she’s strong enough to win.


Seventh Doctor & Ace, The Curse of Fenric coda, T-ratedIt does hurt him, to do what must be done. It breaks his hearts to hurt her, but it’s the only way, he needs to shatter her faith in him, even if doing so is agony. It’s a sacrifice for him as much as it is for her, one she doesn’t know she’s making, but it’s for the greater good, and he’s learned by now that this face is willing to do what must be done. If he’ll ever be able to regain Ace’s trust, he doesn’t know, but he’ll save her now, and this will have to be enough.


Seventh Doctor & "Mel"!The Rani, Time and the Rani coda, T-ratedThere’s something very odd about Mel, and he can’t quite put his finger on what it is. She looks like herself, he’s almost sure of it, but with new eyes and new synapses it’s always a bit harder to tell, and some differences are to be expected. But there’s still something odd about her. There’s something odd about this entire situation, and he can’t really remember what he was doing just before, what made him regenerate. If only he could remember, then maybe things would make sense. But he’ll find out what’s happening, he’ll get to the bottom of this.

Local elections

May. 15th, 2026 07:08 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
Election results from the local paper: leader of the Conservative group loses his seat, Reform get no councillors at all, Labour have a slightly increased overall majority. Pre-election leafletting from the Liberal Democrats with the usual faked/misleading graphs: "A Labour vote is a wasted vote! Don't let the right wing in! Only the Liberal Democrats can win here!" This is why I don't vote Liberal Democrat... if I still had a vote, which thanks to the Conservatives I don't.

The two Independent councillors were returned with a sizeable majority (60% of all votes), as was the single Independent member of the neighbouring council, who received the highest number of votes of any candidate. In my view, *all* councillors should be independent councillors representing their own local wards, and not the victims/beneficiaries of whatever national politics happens to be going on.

Coats

May. 15th, 2026 04:14 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
It just just dawned on me that the Russian indeclinable (and hence of foreign origin) noun пальто is of course the French paletot, taken straight out of the nineteenth century -- just as the French redingote is, reputedly, the English 'riding-coat'...!


Another of my tomato plants -- from the first batch this time -- has damped off while actually flowering; they are supposed to be way beyond it at this stage of maturity :-(Read more... )

The first flower opened on the sweetbriar this morning, and there was a bumble-bee on it. (Sadly these wild roses aren't scented -- it's the leaves that carry the scent, but only when they are fresh and moist, and the leaves on mine are usually pretty leathery.)

At least one of the seedlings potted up as Gypsophila elegans has come into flower and turned out to be alyssum :-p

(no subject)

May. 14th, 2026 07:33 pm
thedarlingone: rainbow handprint on white background with white heart in the palm (rainbow handprint heart)
[personal profile] thedarlingone
not dead. arm infection still very painful and concerning. do not think i am physically capable of traveling anywhere till monday though when the course of antibiotics is set to finish anyway so i am planning to wait till then unless it explodes or does something really alarming (more alarming than its current slowish spread over my forearm, like turning non-pink colors or reaching above my elbow). at that point if it is not cleared up i am leaning towards "take it to urgent care" with a secondary option of "take it back to the ER" depending on whether it has improved at all under the antibiotics.

blood sugar continues to run high despite me reducing my carbs (on the advice of the hospital's diabetic educator who is following up with me) and meticulously following the insulin dosage instructions, except for last night when i panicked myself with an accidental dose of 7 units instead of 3 and somehow still did not dip below 200. (i did arrange with a local friend to call a welfare check if i became nonresponsive, because i know how often leia has nearly died from brittle lows, and she stays conscious if not coherent much lower than a normal human would. my favorite freak of nature. i do not fuck around with low blood sugar.)

am wearing a cardiac monitor patch to check on my tachycardia. it does not like how much i sweat and keeps trying to come off. hopefully it can get some useful results.

just did the math and realized my cpap mask is probably approaching 18 months of nightly use. including the parts that are designed to be replaced every three months. it is a fucking miracle every day i wake up and it hasn't exploded yet. i asked my insurance for a list of pulmonologists before but it doesn't look useful so i need to call them tomorrow and ask for sleep clinics instead. i have a list of other medical followup shit that's approaching two dozen line items. why are bodies.

Mortality

May. 14th, 2026 07:49 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
I potted up the *two* surviving towel-tomatoes sharing a pot from the second batch, namely the 'towel tomatoes (good)'. Every single one of the others appears to have collapsed and died, one after the other. [Edit: no, there is one more that I had put at the back.] The seedling chives have also died after their transplantation -- the hailstorms of the last two days probably didn't help -- and so have five of the six basil seedlings in one tray. The six in the other tray seem fine.
The second of the possible white California poppy seedlings has also now died, so that particular genetic experiment has failed for another year...

Le comte de Monte-Cristo (ii)

May. 14th, 2026 12:01 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
I watched the second half of the new 'Monte Cristo' (or, to be more precise, Parts 3 and 4 being run as a double-bill), and ended up with the same verdict: sort of mildly interested, but not enough to actually recommend it with any great enthusiasm...Read more... )


I really need to go and harvest some elderflowers; it is two weeks since I noticed that they were almost ripe enough, and I got the most terrific waft of scent (from some blossoms that were quite out of reach) while walking home tonight.

Renegade Squadron: Chapter 19

May. 13th, 2026 01:02 pm
sharpiefan: A wide blue circle bordered by two narrow yellow cricles. The centre is black with a twelve-pointed red star, the Rebel Alliance symbol in grey and on top of it an X-wing silhouette in black (Renegade Squadron)
[personal profile] sharpiefan posting in [community profile] roguesandwraiths
I really ought to try to remember to link to my most recent chapter updates/fic posts here just in case there are people here who don't follow my fic journal or AO3. Also! First use of my new Ren Squad icon! :D

Title: Renegade Squadron
Fandom/Canon: Star Wars
Author: [personal profile] sharpiefan
Word count: ~ 1800 (for the chapter, 32900 for the overall fic so far)
Rating: U
Spoilers:
Pairing/Characters: Wedge Antilles, Hobbie Klivian, original characters
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars or any of the canon characters who may show up in the course of this book.
Author's Note:
Summary: Commander Wedge Antilles won his Wraith Squadron bet. Now he has to take a shattered unit and forge them into something new and stronger than they were before, in preparation for taking on the command of his own snubfighter wing.

On my DW fic journal / on AO3

Life lived in dot points

May. 13th, 2026 05:09 pm
fred_mouse: line drawing of sheep coloured in bigender flag colours with dream bubble reading 'dreamwidth' (dreamsheep-bigender)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

It's been about three weeks since I've had the oomph to update.

  • study: I now have a literal basket of books to read, ahead of giving a presentation in the academic stream at Swancon (coming up at the end of the month, for those planning to attend who haven't got that on their radar)
  • study: response to reviewers for ethics got submitted. It has been discovered that the project agreement went missing somewhere in the system, and my primary supervisor followed up from an email from February. (I do not pretend to understand what is going on, but the uni with the primary ethics approval is not the one I'm enrolled at/not the node I'm allocated to, and thus there is Paperwork)
  • body: i thought all the healing was done, but there is still some swelling in the right armpit, which is very slightly tender. Also, I keep bruising, so I'm going to throw vitamin C at things, and if that doesn't help I'll go see a doctor.
  • health: I still have not got the 'get a cardiology appointment' sorted, because I put the paperworks somewhere sensible the last time I tried (and got lost in the phone transfer).
  • body/health: I took today off to get my covid and flu vaccines.
  • health: I nearly managed a 30h week last week! I actually feel like I'm making progress!
  • body: yet again - injured a 'shoulder' muscle (down the back, near the shoulder blade). Same place as December. Diagnosis is 'probably sprained'. Took ages to be able to sit for half a day, so I did a lot of study from bed.
  • oops: Youngest lost a fight with gravity / the barrier / the ice very early Sunday morning and we were called to take them to emergency. There was a very fretful coach asking if we didn't just want an ambulance called; I'm glad we didn't need it. 6am is a dreadful time to be woken by the phone, but all good. Half a dozen staples, mild concussion (lowest diagnosable level, is always concussion if the head hits hard enough to bleed is my new understanding), a week off exercise
  • appliances: the washing machine has been broken for ?2 weeks. Solenoid that controls the spinning failed. Part is back ordered. We are relying on the kindness of [personal profile] chaosmanor and of Middlest for getting our washing done.
  • swancon: the convention is getting close, we are now at weekly meetings, and it has reached the point where it feels like the wheels are coming off (this does not mean the wheels are coming off, just my ability to perceive the tasks to time ratio has failed).
  • scheduling: i apparently had a radiation oncologist appointment this week, but I hadn't been notified well enough to have it in my diary, and the reminder message came through just before 9am the following day, so I called and explained and now I have an appointment in June.
  • music: I made it to rehearsal Monday, but I'm not going tonight - I had hoped to, but I'm too tired to drive. This is an improvement on last week, when I was too tired to be safe to drive both Monday and Wednesday.
  • medication: the new hormone suppressing medication isn't doing anything I'm noticing, which I'm counting as a win. The first couple of weeks of screaming insomnia (not actually the worst insomnia I've had, but it has been a little while and I'd let the memories fade some) seem to have settled into 'no point trying to sleep before 11pm', except on nights when I literally can't keep my eyes open.
  • garden: we have harvested some of the prickly pear (tasty) but it doesn't seem to get loose the way I was informed, so I didn't get as many off and they are getting quite ripe. Next pass I'm going to take a very sharp knife to cut rather than tear (along with a different get of tongs, because the last time the tongs cut the fruit).
  • weather: it has turned cold. By which I mean we have had days where the temp doesn't get above 20°C. I have pulled out my slippers. The heavy quilt is out, and i've put my extras back on the bed. *craft: I had a week and a bit where I made progress on Eldest's quilt. I have 10 incomplete blocks. I pulled out [personal profile] chaosmanor's pillow (although that might have been long enough ago that I've already blogged it) and if i could work out why I'm blocked on doing something, I'd have made progress (sorry hon, it will happen).
fred_mouse: text 'elder queers didn't riot in the streets for you to argue about kink at pride' on top of  the non-binary pride flag colours (elder-queers-non-binary)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

(this is dated 2025-10-05; I suspect I had plans to write more or edit it down, but I no longer care)

Today I got to completely baffle another non-binary individual (I'll call them Q). Because I have a simplified explanation for gender that I trot out as a 101 explanation when I'm not in a situation to actually do the proper couple of hours Ally Training spiel.

In this explanation, I get my new ally to think of a graph (in person there is a lot of hand waving around), where across the bottom is how much someone considers them self to be a woman - at the left, 0%, at the right, 100%. And likewise, up the side is male, where at the bottom is 0% and the top 100%. And I said that lots of women might put themselves right at the bottom right. But that say, someone who is a tomboy might still think of themself as 100% woman, but maybe 10% man. And yes, I get that I'm doing some dodgy things about defining femininity here; the person I was talking to is in their late 70s or early 80s, and while they absolutely are an ally, they haven't ever had to think about this.

But my explanation kept being interrupted as Q kept going 'what'? They truly were expecting me to explain using a line, with man on one end and woman on the other. They had a moment of 'are you treating these as independent variables'? And I was yes. yes I am. Because how much 'man' I feel on any given day appears to be completely independent of how much 'woman' I feel on any given day. And yes, actually, I agree that it is more accurately an n-dimensional whatsit (Q is doing a PhD in mathematics, they understand so much more math than I). But this is what works when I only have a little bit of time to explain.

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