tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
something happened today that i wanted to share and now i don't remember what it was. it's spring? but you knew that. i don't have an apartment yet, but you knew that too. i do however have a lot of leftover passover food. i have an entire unopened box of egg matzo. i should buy chocolate chips and make matzo crack.

we got new desk chairs at work and they are COM. FY. my back feels so supported.

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars

--Federico García Lorca, from "Ballad of the Small Plaza"

Red Boar's Baby

Apr. 22nd, 2025 01:10 pm
sholio: bear raising paw and text that says "hi" (Bear)
[personal profile] sholio
As is my usual practice, my latest book as Lauren is available for download for my DW circle for the next week or so!

cover shows a man holding an infant

Download from Bookfunnel.

The download will be up until the book goes live on Amazon on May 2.

(Technically this is Shifter Agents #6, but it's a standalone that shouldn't require any context to read.)

Another thought about B5 5x18

Apr. 21st, 2025 11:11 pm
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I will be going back to answer recent comments, but first, one more stray B5 thought with spoilers through 5x18.

Tying up a loose end )

Me-and-media update

Apr. 22nd, 2025 06:20 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the vegetables poll, 90.4% of respondents clicked fresh vegetables (bought), 46.2% clicked frozen vegetables, and 44.2% clicked fresh vegetables (homegrown). I was surprised; I thought more people would go frozen for the convenience. (I wonder what that says, if anything, about Dreamwidth demographics.)

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 78.8%, followed by a tie between "hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out" and "sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side" with 63.5% each. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still going on The Horse and His Boy (I am slow and distractable) and the Guardian novel read-along (it's on a schedule). Nothing in audio.

Kdramas
We started Tale of the Nine Tailed, a sweeping epic about a powerful immortal, the reincarnated love of his life, and his bratty younger brother. (Nothing at all like Guardian the novel, why do you ask?) I'm hoping it has enough plot and worldbuilding to hold Andrew's interest; he gets bored during extended romance scenes.

More of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. And in solo-watching, I started Heesu in Class 2; it's pretty adorable, but also Heesu is the living embodiment of Idiots In Love, and sometimes I have to watch through my fingers.

Other TV
This week's Doctor Who
was very silly and meta, set against a background of ominous racism. Hm. But I did enjoy the jokes, and Belinda is great.


Episode 1 of Sherlock & Daughter. We were just going to try out the first ten minutes to get a sense of it, but we ended up watching the whole episode. I can forgive Holmes for being a grumpy old man when he has a reason for it.

Our Deadloch rewatch-with-a-friend continues, plus Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, about which I still have no opinion.

My sister and I watched Into the Night (1985 film; Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, and a vast number of film directors as extras, the only one of whom I knew on sight was Jim Henson). The caper was silly, and the romance plotline was very thin, but Goldblum and Pfeiffer are so watchable that it hung together despite the weird pacing when it lingered on random extras we were supposed to recognise. Lovely to see David Bowie in a small (albeit violently psychotic) role.

Guardian/Fandom
I archived my Murderbot flashficlet, and wow, Murderbot fans are generous with their kudosing. *hearts so much* (In my experience, some fandoms are just more kudosy than others.)

Audio entertainment
I listened my way through all of The Setup, a romance audiodrama about Juan, an anxious art museum curator in NYC, and Fernando, the con artist who's trying to steal a painting. It's great! I'm really into it. And then I got to the end of the available episodes and realised it's not finished yet, ahhhhh! I need to check these things before I start!

(Is it just me or are depictions of anxiety becoming more common in romances? I feel like there's some wish fulfilment going on: people longing to meet The One who is hot, super into them, and will also be incredibly kind and patient and give them effective tips for handling their panic attacks. Not that romances aren't all about wish fulfilment, so why not? Add dimensions to your dream partner!)

Writing/making things
My little 4k exchange fic is becoming somewhat tortured by all the writing advice I'm trying to enact on it. Hopefully I'm not engineering the spark out of the thing. Also, hopefully I emerge from this process wiser and more capable. (It could happen!) Note to self: this story still doesn't have an ending, oops.

Other than that, I'm spending a lot of my life rolling around in meta discussions, yay!

Life/health/mental state things
Oh, look, let's not even talk about it. /o\

Note to self: I had a flu jab on Saturday.

Online life
I'm switching ISPs on Friday. Wish me luck! If I disappear off the face of the internet, that will be why.

Food
Today marks my first attempt at baked potatoes in the slow cooker. *fingers crossed* I forgot to prickle them with a fork before I wrapped them in foil, so who knows.

Good things
Fandom. Writing. Lunchtime dumplings on the back deck. Cephalopod plushies. Queer audiodramas. Friends coming over to watch stuff. Guardian. Home-made salsa. Trivia quizzes. Music and kindness and laughter and love.

Poll #33020 face blindness extrapolation
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43


Do you have face-blindness?

View Answers

yes
2 (4.7%)

technically no, but it's not unusual for me to get people confused
23 (53.5%)

especially when they're dressed the same
14 (32.6%)

no
12 (27.9%)

I mix up similar usernames
14 (32.6%)

honestly, they don't have to be that similar
12 (27.9%)

other
1 (2.3%)

ticky-box full of black cats slinking mysteriously in the shadows
28 (65.1%)

ticky-box full of starting a howl
15 (34.9%)

ticky-box of overthinking
21 (48.8%)

ticky-box full of squirrel-dragons with floofy tails, guarding their golden acorns
21 (48.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
33 (76.7%)

tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
first, rip, pope francis. i always kinda liked him and thought he was reasonably progressive, for a pope. he legitimately always seemed like a genuinely decent guy.

second, pete hegseth was caught sharing classified military information in yet another signal chat, this time with his wife and his brother (among other people). because he is a dumbass who has no idea how to do his job. and! kristi noem, the head of homeland security, had her purse stolen at a restaurant - very secure there, ms noem - and said purse had inside it such things as her apartment keys (makes sense), her makeup bag (also makes sense), her passport (could conceivably make sense), and, er, $3000. in cash. which seems like the kind of money you carry around if you want to make a big purchase that you don't want anyone to be able to track. my question is: how did someone get close enough to her purse to steal it? she has secret service with her. we really are living in the stupidest timeline, seriously.

in happier news, i had today off on account of patriots day, which is marathon monday and also celebrates the battle of lexington which kicked off the revolutionary war. (reenactors gather on lexington green at ass o'clock in the morning to reenact the battle which i think is both really cool and kinda nuts.) the only states that celebrate are mass and maine. and it was mostly a nice day, even! i got a late start (partly because [livejournal.com profile] tamalinn called me before i could bestir myself out of the house, and then i had to tell her about sinners and try to figure out what besides black panther michael b jordan was in that she might have seen) and went to the diesel and had breakfast for lunch and wrote a bunch, most of it for a random thing that i don't know what to do with. i had to exorcise a scene out of my head, i guess. but it was productive! which is always good.

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

--Kerry Hardie, "Acceptance"

Started Astalon: Tears of the Earth

Apr. 22nd, 2025 12:00 am
schneefink: Dracula's castle (Castlevania castle)
[personal profile] schneefink
After a long day of classes (on a bank holiday, too) I treated myself to some grapefruit + nougat ice cream and then planned to spend some time reading, do some housekeeping in preparation for hosting a guest (very exciting), and then write some overdue review posts, maybe prepare some recs if I'm feeling ambitious.

Instead I spent most of the evening continuing to play Astalon: Tears of the Earth. I'd seen it recommended quite a few times on r/metroidvania and I was very curious, so when I saw it was on sale I bought it even though it's not entirely smart to start a new game 2.5 weeks before an exam. Ah well.

You play as a group of three adventurers in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that investigate (read: fight their way through) a tower from which comes a substance poisoning their village. One of them sold his soul to the titan of death, and in exchange every time you die you are transported back to the entrance of the tower.

I also saw it described as a "metroidvania with roguelite elements," which made me a bit skeptical because the other game that claims that is Dead Cells and that didn't convince me when I briefly tried it. But that description isn't really accurate because it doesn't have the procedural generation of a roguelike, it has the exploration of a metroidvania, and that's my favorite part of the genre. It just doesn't have checkpoints and very little healing. But there's plenty of shortcuts to unlock so landing back at the beginning is much less frustrating than I'd feared. And unlocking shortcuts is very satisfying; the exploration is satisfying in general, with plenty of secrets to discover. Plus, there are not that many but enough character interactions that I care about the characters as well.

After about eight hours I've beaten three bosses (one of them I'm pretty sure is optional) and discovered around 35% of the map. Spoilers )
resonant: Ray Kowalski (Due South) (Default)
[personal profile] resonant
For the New House by Ursula K. Le Guin

May this house be full of kitchen smells
and shadows and toys and nests of mice
and roars of rage and waterfalls of tears
and deep sexual silences and sounds
of mysterious origin never explained
and troves and keepsakes and a lot of junk
and a flowing like a warm wind only slower
blowing the leaves of trees and books and the fish-years
of a child’s life silvery flickering
quick, quick, in the slow incessant gust
that billows out the curtains for a moment
all those years from now, ago.
May the sills and doorframes
be in blessing blest at every passing.
May the roof but not the rooms know rain.
May the windows know clearly
the branch and flower of the apple tree.
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.

Face the Dragon, by Joyce Sweeney

Apr. 21st, 2025 11:59 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.
lilly_the_kid: (Default)
[personal profile] lilly_the_kid
Title: Something Good
Fandom: Deadpool & Wolverine, Deadpool movies
Music: Something Good by Herman's Hermits
Pairing: Deadpool/Wolverine
Summary: something tells me I'm into something good
Warnings: violence, blood

Here on AO3

This movie gave me so many feelings and I had to make this vid. Hope you'll enjoy!


Come speak to me of Second Person POV

Apr. 21st, 2025 05:44 pm
china_shop: You can't wait for inspiration to strike. You have to go after it with a club. (writing - inspiration)
[personal profile] china_shop
The Writing Excuses podcast is doing a series on voice (first, third limited, third omniscient), and mostly their discussions have been great. I've enjoyed them a lot. But I found today's episode on second person (2ndPOV) unsatisfying. They got distracted talking about video games, TTRPG, online recipe essays, and Youtube influencers, and when they did discuss fictional prose, they seemed to think the "you" character had to be a reader stand-in. (Or maybe I misunderstood? Quite possible!) Anyway, now I'm itching to procrastinate on my story talk with like-minded souls about the joys of second person.

Note: If you not into 2ndPOV, that's totally cool. Each to their own! But please don't chime in to tell me or explain why; I'm not interested in defending it today.

Rambling, so much rambling. )

ION, Andrew sent me a link to Secrets of Writing Snappy Dialogue (Banter) (Youtube video). At first I was resistant, but then I watched it and now I'm overhauling my 4k fic AGAIN. This is killing me, lol.
tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
happy easter to them what celebrate, and to them what don't a lovely and restful sunday. today was beautiful like yesterday but a tch colder so after zoom with the fam (during which my sister defended the sixteen comic book boxes under my bed when my mom wondered why i didn't go through them and get rid of some of them), grocery store (which was not crowded because easter), and lunch (i sat on the front porch for like twenty minutes and then went inside because my feet were cold), i put on shoes and a jacket and went Out. and sat in the sun (sort of) and read my book and drank my iced chai and tried vainly to ignore the fact that i should have worn more clothes. but it was SO NICE. i mean, it's spring.

and then i came home and read some more and made dinner (as passover is now over i can eat bread but instead i had, uh, matzo brei which is basically scrambed eggs with farfel) (ok and also a red bean bread i got at h-mart) (i was going to go out for dinner with my sister but did i mention it's easter? and almost everything is closed) and watched an episode of andor s1 with the confab discord in preparation for s2 which starts on TUESDAY. we haven't caught up yet. if you haven't seen andor i highly recommend it. it's kind of harsh but really well done and diego luna is exceptionally cute. also it has stellan skarsgard and he's always worth watching.

On the edge of another blue world
the lake looms like salvation. Over
coffee, my mom and tía speak excitedly

about the vibrant villages along the shore,
how you can only get there by boat
across the lake’s beautiful depths, how

the volcanos stand piously over the water,
how each village is named for one of the twelve
apostles. I ask, with complete sincerity,

if that means one is named for Judas.
The waitress brings our food. My mom
and tía eat slowly with side-eyes and silence.

--Ariel Francisco, "On the Shore of Lake Atitlán, Apparently I Ruined Breakfast"

Yet more thoughts on B5 5x17-18

Apr. 20th, 2025 12:30 pm
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
Now that I've processed a bit, a few more random comments.

Mostly about You Know and Who, obviously )
umadoshi: (pork belly (chicachellers))
[personal profile] umadoshi
Reading: Still working my way through The Spear Cuts Through Water--somewhere past the halfway point now.

Watching: I finished my Guardian rewatch!

[personal profile] scruloose and I finished season 1 of Kingdom and did indeed opt to hold off on season 2 until after we finish season 2 of The Last of Us. (Is Kingdom complete at two seasons? Anyone know offhand? Fear of spoilers makes me not want to search up the info.) We also saw the season premiere of TLoU and the first episode of The Pitt.

Playing: Because the evil 368chickens game keeps track and springs the number on you when you beat it, I know that when I finally rescued 368 chickens a few days ago it was after 454 tries. And for reasons that are not clear to me, the victory screen (at least in the browser version) also informs you that you can't play anymore and is all that shows if you reload. (There are ways around it, of course--incognito tabs, simply using a different browser, whatever--but it just seems weird to me. I have thus far avoided going back to it, but that just means returning to my default couple of games that I play endlessly when my brain is completely incapable of focus but needs to be doing something. >.<)

Adulting: Mid-week, [personal profile] scruloose and I took the day off for my birthday and both dropped off our tax documents with our tax guy (bless our tax guy) and voted in the federal election at the Elections Canada office. I'm glad we got the voting taken care of so early--sounds like lineups for advance polls have been unusually lengthy this weekend (and here's hoping that's a good sign for the outcome!).
under the cut: fruit and meat consumption (separately) )

2493 / AO3 Meme

Apr. 20th, 2025 10:09 am
siria: (iwtv - louis vibe)
[personal profile] siria
Another year has gone by! It's meme time.

First up, ordered by hits.

Annual AO3 Meme )

As is traditional to say: no huge movement and no new entries. I continue to be surprised at how many readers my H50 fics still get, and at how consistent the increments are annually. A fic that gets about 270 hits one year got about 250 the year before; a fic that gets 230 kudos this year got about 240 the year before. There does seem to be a comparative slackening in interest in MCU fics, though.

Babylon 5 5x17-18

Apr. 19th, 2025 09:49 pm
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
Watch Babylon 5, she said. It will be fun, she said.

Babylon 5 episodes 5x17-18 )

Movie rec

Apr. 19th, 2025 09:30 pm
gwyn: (teevee jim ward morris)
[personal profile] gwyn
Hey, if you are going to theatres to see movies these days, I can highly recommend Sinners, with Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld. It's about twin brothers (played by Jordan) who return to their town in Mississippi in 1932 to open a juke joint, and run up against vampires. I'm not much of a vampire person at all, but I think this would probably satisfy both the vampire loving crowd as well as the crowd like me, because the whole first hour is mostly a slow build of who the twins are and who the people in their lives are, and what's happened to them to make them what they are (not the least of which is of course generational trauma from racism), and also background for the character who becomes central to both their story and to the vampires' story.

The music is fucking off the charts amazing (Ludwig Göransson does the soundtrack and a lot of the music stuff) and worth it alone. There are two music sequences that left me kind of gobsmacked. I've never seen anything like it.

There's definitely gore and jump scares, but overall I didn't find it too horror-y, more like a modern monster movie in terms of the violence and such. It was definitely R-rated, with some very sexual scenes. Anyways, if you were considering it, I loved it. (It was directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame.)
tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
today was beautiful (warm, mostly sunny, nice breeze) and i celebrated by a. going to the dentist (all good), b. meeting friend l and [livejournal.com profile] tamalinn for a snack and a walk (we saw small turtles and large fish, and there was a goose watching us), and c. watching sinners with michael b jordan (playing twins!), hailee steinfeld, and delroy lindo. ok, and a bunch of other actors but those are the names i know. it was billed as horror. ) the story is that the twins come home to mississippi from chicago in 1932 and open a juke joint and discover evil afoot, and there's a scene during the joint's opening night that is fantastic, and overall i enjoyed it and i'm glad i went to see it. the only thing i think i'd change is that i went at four when it was still nice out and maybe i could've gone to the five o'clock show instead.

(previews were the next and i think last mission impossible, another final destination, and one battle after another with leonardo dicaprio which looks really interesting. and i sat a couple rows too close to the screen. >.< )

the james webb space telescope might have discovered signs of life on another planet. could be really cool, could be not as big a deal as we think. we'll see!

may the fourth (meal box) be with you! by which i mean, clover (my favorite local chain) is doing a star wars inspired meal box for may fourth. it includes green pancake mix (for making baby yoda pancakes, natch) and blue milk and bantha gyros, among other things.

"When Benny Agbayani Became a Met"

my ancestors rose and cheered.
From their ancient graves,

pairs of arms rose to make the wave.
Every burial site, a stadium and,

for every one of his at-bats
Mayon Volcano spat a puff of smoke

visible for miles. Children in T-shirts
with the number 50, hand-scrawled by Sharpies

would run into the streets and clang
on metal pans calling all to feast

and when Benny’s cleats dug into the box,
the little cloud of dust rising from his spikes

would drift across continents, into the living room
of every Filipino, issuing a sneeze

which would be followed by a blessing.
The diaspora, a flood of blessings,

watching the orange, blue, and white uniforms
pixelated into millions of screens.

Tens of thousands of nurses held their breaths
when they looked up between shifts

and saw him rest the bat on his shoulder
staring down the pitcher. When Benny Agbayani

was a Met, whole families, once torn apart
by distance held each other close, wrapped

together tightly in the embrace of phone cords,
the web of telephone lines crisscrossing the nation.

Each long distance call the shimmering pulse of a wrist
bracing for the recoil of the bat making contact.

When Benny fielded fly balls we’d all look
into the sun for the speck of something—

something to ease us into the heartbeat
of Americana where it was always

summer and the lawn markings
formed grids visible from space.

When Benny Agbayani was a Met we thought
the organ’s roar was for us and the syncopated applause

put us into a rhythm in tune to our hearts.
When Benny Agbayani put his mitt to the ground

to stop a daisy cutter, millions of us put our ears
to the earth to hear the rumblings

of what we hoped would be thousands of footsteps,
following his path. But instead they were galloping

towards home. We’d raise the brim of our caps
and nod our chins at a cool breeze

or the smell of fryer oil. And when Shea
sang in one voice “B-B-B-Benny and the Mets”

we stood and put are hands to our hearts.
We rocked back and forth on our heels

watching the strike zone get smaller
and smaller. Watched as the sun made

our shadows grow and we waited until the roster
made room for us in the show, now and in the ever after.

--Oliver de la Paz
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