arduinna

Amina al-Sirafi, who, at a low moment, describes herself as a criminal, a sinner, a foul-mouthed middle-aged woman with a bad knee, is a Muslim pirate in the 12th century, retired. She lives off the grid and takes care of her daughter and their crumbling home, but—isn't it always the way—that one last job pops up that she can't refuse, on account of the extortion.

Her adventures include cons, jailbreaks, battles at sea, an ex(kinda)-husband, superpowered wizards, exotic explosives, even more pirates, giant tentacle monsters, an island filled with bird people, and a ship's cat that's no good at catching mice. But first she has to get the band back together.

I really enjoyed this. It's energetic and funny and tense and full of naturalistic historical detail. It's also quite violent and gory, which I enjoyed less. But the crew is a squabbly family that would do anything for each other, the settings are described with care, and Amina's foul voice and bad knee make her entirely relatable. I felt like her flexible relationship with the principles of her religion was handled well, especially when balanced with her unwavering faith in god, and I appreciated seeing the world through her eyes.

Contains: graphic violence, gore, descriptions of dead bodies; doing things your religion tells you not to; threats of rape; fear of heights; a character questioning their gender (if applicable) that may lead to some feelings of misgendering.

trobadora

Has Youtube been driving everyone else batty too with the auto-dubbed videos? At least you can manually switch the audio track to the original - but now it's auto-translating the video descriptions too, and I haven't yet found out how to get back to the original there.

It makes me want to scream. Who thinks that's a good idea?! Not anyone who speaks smore than one language, that's for sure - and even then! AAARGH.

I searched in hopes of finding some way to disable this nonsense, and found no way on Youtube itself, but there's a browser extension that gets you back to original audio and description!

Firefox version | Chrome version

It says it doesn't work on mobile, but I don't watch videos on mobile, so that doesn't matter to me much. And either way, better than nothing. *grumbles some more*

Current Mood: aggravated

sholio

As mentioned earlier, I have some Whumptobers to catch up on (half finished, or ones I was a little uncertain about posting) so those will continue into November.

No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture

1000 wds, Murderbot POV (TV-verse)
Also posted on Tumblr.

( 1000 wds under the cut )

james

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beatrice_otter

Now that

rarepairexchange authors have been revealed, I can tell you what I wrote! A Riker/Ro fic!

And this was not my first fic for this exchange. I got about halfway into a fic that I really liked, set during the Dominion War, just after the destruction of Enterprise. Riker and Ro were both on separate missions for Starfleet and the Maquis, and chanced to meet in a bar on some station somewhere. The problem was, that this is not an exchange that allows for genfics, and while I could have a really interesting conversation between the two, I couldn't figure out how to get them together in a way that I found satisfactory and realistic. I thought I could! but it didn't work out. So I stopped and did this instead. Throughout the process,

sixbeforelunch was extremely helpful.

Title: Extra Time
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Characters: Ro Laren/Will Riker
Written for: Eratoschild in Rare Pair Exchange 2025
AN: Thank you to

sixbeforelunch for brainstorming help and betaing.

On AO3. On Ad Astra. On Squidgeworld. At Pillowfort. On Tumblr.

"I wish I could give you better news, Will," Captain Picard said over the shuttle's comm system.

Will rubbed his forehead. "It's about what I expected, sir." The business of Enterprise's schedule and the shortage of other Starfleet vessels in the area to handle routine matters was why he and Ro had been dispatched in the shuttle Cousteau to handle this mission in the first place.

The anthropologists studying Lichiri V had wrapped up their mission and been extracted months ago. They'd returned to their university only to find that they had not double-checked their packing lists and had left a few small bits of equipment behind. Nothing big or hard to replace, but Lichiri V was currently in the middle of a (very slow) industrial and technological revolution, and nobody wanted to take the risk that some bright Lichirian would find the damn things and figure out enough about them to do damage. Enterprise was the only ship in the area, and she was busy with some tense diplomatic negotiations, and would be for a while.

Fortunately or not, Lichiri V was just at the edge of reasonable shuttle travel from the two systems Enterprise was currently stuck hovering between. Ro needed supervised piloting hours to get her small craft certification back. And, despite Will trying to find a better answer, he was the officer Enterprise could currently spare with the least disruption. And his own dislike of the ensign was not sufficient reason to disrupt other ship operations more than necessary.

So, Will and Ro had been dispatched to go pick up the equipment in the Cousteau. Four days in a cramped shuttle, a day or two in the Lichiri system to pick up the equipment and restock the shuttle with basics like water, oxygen, and hydrogen, and four days back.

If a freak ion storm hadn't blown up when they were already mid-takeoff, they'd already be on their way out of the system. Instead, the Cousteau had been damaged, they'd had to land again, and they'd be stuck here until Enterprise could swing by and pick them up. Which at the rate negotiations were going could take weeks, if not longer.

( Read more... )

twistedchick

As a result of umpty years spinning yarn, I have a lot of it sitting in bags waiting for a project.

So, I'm looking for an extremely simple bulky-ish sweater that I can knit with whatever is at hand and reduce the stash a lot.

Suggestions, anyone? It's been so long since I knitted anything but socks that I'm not sure if I even have any patterns.

china_shop

I haven't done a media update in weeks! Here's what I've been watching and reading.

Reading
( It didn't feel like a lot when I started, but cutting for length anyway. )

Kdramas
( This always felt like a lot. )

Other TV
( There's quite a lot here, too. )

Guardian/Fandom
Wishliiiiiiist! It went so well. Belated hooray for everyone and all the treats! :D

Perusing the Yuletide tagset was an object lesson in "other people's character preferences are not my character preferences, and that's okay." Still, I have a bunch of things to potentially treat if I can get into gear.

Films
Grace: a prayer for peace, a film about Aotearoa / New Zealand artist Robin White. Beautiful and arty, and I had trouble staying awake. (I'm not great at maintaining attention when there's no dialogue.)

Audio stuff
A handful of eps of Tech Won't Save Us, mostly AI-related. Some Guilty Feminist (UK), which is a bit hit-and-miss for me, but at least is tuned in to *gestures at the dumpster fire that is politics in a lot of places*

/o\ /o\ /o\

(They have a new series of live shows called "The Road to Gilead", and are particularly loud about Farage's links to US right-wing anti-abortion group ADF.)

Writing Excuses. Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson.

Writing/making things
I currently have a thing at beta, and I'm gearing myself up to work on my Yuletide assignment fic.

I broke my

fan_flashworks streak during Guardian Wishlist. That's okay; I actually find streaks a bit burdensome when they get too long. I'm not in a pushing-myself headspace. Instead of writing anything for the Amnesty round, I posted some of the art I've been trying out via Youtube instructional videos for kids. (I'm so happy with how the eyes came out on the kitten-dragon.) (Youtube art videos for kids are excellent, btw! I've drawn a fox, a llama, an owl, a lemur, another dragon, a unicorn mer-red-panda, and a few other things, and they always turn out pleasingly, despite my zero skill level. I'm thinking of investing in a set of coloured pencils for grown-ups, but for now I'm enjoying the tin of miniature ones

cyphomandra sent me before my hysterectomy and a few others left over from when I was five. :-)

Life/health/mental state things
Over the last few months, I've noticed more and more long silver hairs in my house. Hmph.

Good things
The Guardian Slo-Mo Rewatch on

sid_guardian. Guardian fandom generally. Yuletide. Podfic and audiobooks and Kdramas and libraries. The forecast for tomorrow is good. Kdramas. We went to an art exhibition opening yesterday evening, and it was great and made me want to make more things. Writers' Hour.

Poll #33799 Time is

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

View Respondents

Time is

View Answers

an arrow
4 (12.9%)

a fruit fly
7 (22.6%)

a banana
3 (9.7%)

melting
9 (29.0%)

relentless
13 (41.9%)

elusive
8 (25.8%)

other
5 (16.1%)

ticky-box full of hippity-hoppity frogs
11 (35.5%)

ticky-box full of blue-haired punk red pandas being, on average, purple
17 (54.8%)

ticky-box full of weird clock karma
11 (35.5%)

ticky-box full of colouring in
17 (54.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
23 (74.2%)

runpunkrun

Moody photograph of the ocean from an outlook. In the foreground, two dirty hands claw their way up over the edge toward the viewer. Text: Mystery & Suspense, at Fancake.

fancake's theme for November is mystery & suspense. If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: sad

sholio

A couple of quick things I wrote for Fandom Giftbasket:

Firefly (Biggles/EvS, G, 1500 wds)
An evanescent moment on the journey home from Sakhalin.

Vaguely inspired by a photo of fireflies in India.

Birds (Alliance-Union, Meg/Dek, 500 wds)
Posted as a commentfic snippet, just a soft little moment for them after a rider ship mission.

james

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brightknightie

I've posted that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom piece: "Gerudo Spirit, or Three Last Untold Tales (Before Age of Imprisonment Arrives)" (PG, gen, ~2K words). The jossing commences Thursday. ;-)

It's a progression of three ficlets. First, Kotake and Koume (villains) reluctantly participate in a show of fealty to those who had defeated their unprovoked attack. Later, an elderly woman (original character) arms the remaining soldiers of her home village, which has rebelled against the Demon King. Finally, Ardi (hero; the recently revealed canon name of the Sage of Lightning) reacts to the news that her people's last free settlement has fallen.

Alone, the scenes lean into grievance, guilt, and grief. But with the context of the rest of Tears of the Kingdom, I believe that they are necessarily hopeful, too. We know what Rauru, Zelda, Ardi, and the others do; we know that the darkness, though it must be endlessly defeated, does not prevail.

♥

heresluck

Thinking of absent friends as the moon turns full and the year turns to winter.

Death and the Moon

(for Catherine Marcangeli)

The moon is nearer than where death took you
at the end of the old year. Cold as cash
in the sky's dark pocket, its hard old face
is gold as a mask tonight. I break the ice
over the fish in my frozen pond, look up
as the ghosts of my wordless breath reach
for the stars. If I stood on the tip of my toes
and stretched, I could touch the edge of the moon.

I stooped at the lip of your open grave
to gather a fistful of earth, hard rain,
tough confetti, and tossed it down. It stuttered
like morse on the wood over your eyes, your tongue,
your soundless ears. Then as I slept my living sleep
the ground gulped you, swallowed you whole,
and though I was there when you died,
in the red cave of your widow's unbearable cry,

and measured the space between last words
and silence, I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars. I turn
to the house, its windows tender with light, the moon,
surely, only as far again as the roof. The goldfish
are tongues in the water's mouth. The black night
is huge, mute, and you are further forever than that.

— Carol Ann Duffy
from Feminine Gospels

twistedchick

I'm not sure how I'm feeling this morning.

We are waiting for an arborist and his crew to take down four trees, trim a fifth tree, and manage somehow to cut back some big vines that are hanging from other trees and look ugly. (I've cut the vines at the base; they're not alive, but just hanging there.)

One of the trees, a mimosa that hangs over the fussy neighbor's driveway, definitely has to go. The fussy neighbor is too lazy to get out a ladder and trim back whatever she wants on her side -- I'm saying lazy because she is three decades younger than I am and has a tall and able son and a tall and able husband. Together they should be able to trim back whatever they want... but no. She'd rather bitch at us about it than do it herself. I don't have a problem with that tree, which is split at the base and going in several directions, coming down.

But we're losing two beautiful wild cherry trees and half of the big magnolia tree because the branches lean over the house. The insurance company wants the roof clear of branches that might fall and damage something. The cherries lean over it from the back, the magnolia extends across it from the front. And there's an ash tree in back that is leaning, and has contracted emerald ash borer. It has to come out before it falls and hits our house or the friendly neighbors' house.

I love our trees, and we've lost so many in the last 33 years, especially the two big oaks. Now more are going down.

At least the weather is kind. The sun is out and the air is warmish.

And for the time being I'll stay here and read my Yuletide source and look for a story.

brightknightie

I have not seen this lore theory anywhere, but it occurred to me within the past week or so, and, and surely -- surely! -- I'm not the first to think of it. Before Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment drops on Thursday, let me ask:

Could Rauru be a Link? That is, in the era of the founding/re-founding, could Rauru be the embodiment of the spirit of Hylia's Chosen Hero?

He's certainly done the work of Hylia's Chosen. He is courageous. He's defeated the monsters, brought peace to the surface peoples, supported (and loved and married) his era's blood descendant of Hylia who carries some fraction of her sacred power... and gave his life to bring down the Demon King in his era, passing on his wisdom and power to a future Link to finish the job in another era.

He sure looks like a Link ... in every way but being a Zonai named Rauru rather than a Hylian named Link, and not bearing Hylia's sword (or any sword; he's a magic-user). But not every Link gets that sword. And, until 2017, every Link could be renamed by the player.

(Or maybe Rauru is a male Zelda and the source of Hylia's blood in the royal line, but that's a very different and less likely lore/timeline theory.)

trobadora

rarepairexchange author reveals happened this night! I wrote Word of Honor femslash. :D

It was great to revisit Word of Honor - I need to find time for a full rewatch at some point! It's still so good. And I'm still so delighted with the women of Ghost Valley and all the thematic depth the drama added just by including them. Also, Ghost Valley worldbuilding is a lot of fun to play with!

(I'm a bit bummed out that almost no one seems to have read the fic, in what definitely wasn't a ship of two the last time I checked. But my recipient liked it, so there's that!)

Anyway, here's some backstory about Liu Qianqiao's early days in Ghost Valley:

**

forgetting any other tie but this (5410 words)
Fandom: 山河令 | Word of Honor (TV 2021)
Rating: Mature
Relationship: Liu Qianqiao/Luo Fumeng
Content Tags: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Getting Together, Ghost Valley, Ghost Valley Politics, Department of the Unfaithful, Worldbuilding, cameos by Wen Kexing and Gu Xiang, and several original Ghost characters

Summary: Something was wrong with Xi Sang Gui, and Liu Qianqiao couldn't simply sit and wait.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: crazy

sholio

Rewatching Babylon 5's "Ship of Tears" and (parts of) "War Without End" was definitely not conducive to ending up in the most cheerful frame of mind this evening. It's so good, though.

( Something I noticed in Ship of Tears )

twistedchick

I've been watching 'The Graduate', the early-1970s movie.

It feels like a reconstruction of a lost culture at an archeological dig.

china_shop

As always, it was a pleasure to host. Thanks for being such delightful guests!

Here's the final tally for Write Every Day, 16-31 October 2025.

( Tally )

Please let me know if I’ve missed you, and feel free to check in belatedly. :-)

china_shop

I read this last week, and it's been haunting me ever since.

A new kind of bias: AI choosing itself over humans
Adding another wrinkle, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently discovered a startling trend they call “AI–AI bias.” Large language models like GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.1 consistently favored content created by other AIs over human-written material across product ads, academic abstracts, and even movie reviews.

Study coauthor Jan Kulveit warned that such bias could reshape economic opportunities, with humans at risk of being systematically sidelined. “Being human in an economy populated by AI agents would suck,” he said on X, advising people to run their work through AI tools before submitting it if they suspect another AI will be evaluating it.

This creates a troubling picture: not only are AI systems struggling to deliver promised productivity gains, but they may also be reinforcing their own dominance at the expense of human contributions.

From this article in The Economic Times (India), which also covers an MIT study into AI business application ("95 percent of business attempts to integrate generative AI are failing"), the AI bubble, and AI psychosis.

yhlee

I slightly less half-assedly fixed the warp on the Clover Sakiori loom (Japanese).

weaving WIP close-up

I didn't bring a comb for the weft and was using a tapestry needle, but catten remains unlikely to mind imperfect weaving.

Also, further adventures in dyeing wool yarn. I'd like to test on dyeing combed top for cotton, ramie, and silk (mulberry/bombyx, eri, tussah, and maybe a small sample of my treasured stash of muga); and then try some on alpaca or mohair after I've processed some more.

dyed yarn

Later in the season, in natural dyes, I might experiment with the traditional hoary old standby of onion skins; rose hips (several of my roses shrubs produce them); and find out if windfall figs from the no-longer-quite-so-baby fig tree do anything interested as dyes. Osage orange, common madder, true and false indigo, hibiscus, and elderberry grow in Louisiana so making a dye plant plot might be entertaining. That or I sacrifice e.g. a bunch of beets lol. For personal use, I don't care about consistency (I prefer chaos ball colors) and I'm not that fussed about reliable fastness. "Throw it in a pot and also an ~appropriate mordant" for personal experiment promises to be very entertaining.

james

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sholio

trickortreatex and

fandomgiftbasket both revealed this weekend. I have gifts to coo over!

Trick or Treat:

Beware of Gurathin Bearing Gifts (Murderbot, gen, 580 wds)
Fun and playful with some nice little cultural details, and a tantalizing hint of a future mission to come.

Fandom Giftbasket:

Jala, Tujula, and Fraught Understanding by

pushkin666 (Babylon 5, Londo & G'Kar, 700 wds)
This is lovely, a possibly-late-in-series vignette with a little bit of cultural exchange (via food/drink) and a little hard-won wisdom/acceptance.

Keepsake by

opalmatrix (Murderbot, gen, 3200 wds)
A really enjoyable, very slightly AU slice-of-life on Port FreeCommerce in which Ratthi takes MB shopping for the first time. Great in-character interactions and a lovely ending!

Zayd & Marwan by

celli (Murderbot, gen, 750 wds)
Murderbot, Mensah's kids, and cats. Cute and fun!

james

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Arduinna

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Reading

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty (aka S.A. Chakraborty)

Youtube

Whumptober Day 15: Live-streamed Torture (Murderbot)

Halloween Clearance

Fic: Extra Time

(no subject)

Me-and-media update

Fancake's Theme for November: Mystery & Suspense

Cassandra, part two

Fic in brief

Dry dry dry

Posted: "Gerudo Spirit, or Three Last Untold Tales" (TLOZ:TOOK)

monday poem #334: Carol Ann Duffy, "Death and the Moon"

(no subject)

Could Rauru be Link?

FIC: forgetting any other tie but this (Word of Honor: Liu Qianqiao/Luo Fumeng) [M]

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends

This show still has its hooks in my brain

(no subject)

Write Every Day: final talley

Postcards from the AI-pocalypse

emotional support fiber

December cards post!

Gifts everywhere!

Writer PSAs

Profile

February 2023

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