trobadora: (Luo Fumeng - defiant)
[personal profile] trobadora
[community profile] 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.
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] 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 )

(no subject)

Nov. 3rd, 2025 12:50 am
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
[personal profile] twistedchick
I've been watching 'The Graduate', the early-1970s movie.

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

Write Every Day: final talley

Nov. 3rd, 2025 05:12 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] 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. :-)

Postcards from the AI-pocalypse

Nov. 3rd, 2025 05:08 pm
china_shop: Drawing of a fierce, pre-historic dire panda, with the word "Dire" printed across the bottom. (Dire Panda)
[personal profile] 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.

emotional support fiber

Nov. 2nd, 2025 06:56 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
weaving WIP

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.

Gifts everywhere!

Nov. 2nd, 2025 12:11 pm
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
[community profile] trickortreatex and [community profile] 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 [archiveofourown.org profile] 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 [archiveofourown.org profile] 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 [archiveofourown.org profile] celli (Murderbot, gen, 750 wds)
Murderbot, Mensah's kids, and cats. Cute and fun!
umadoshi: (autumn leaves 2 (dhamphir))
[personal profile] umadoshi
So here it is: the rest of autumn spread out before us, post-Hallowe'en and pre-Christmas with (in Canada) mainly the gray blur of November in between.

(It's really just as well we have our harvest celebration in October, but as always, I do envy the placement of it between Hallowe'en and Christmas in the US just in terms of not having the stretch between seasonal holidays. [I say, as if US Thanksgiving isn't horribly fraught in so many ways.] I don't know why I have such strong feelings about this. I had them before I stumbled into wanting seasonal decor at home for more than just Christmas and started feeling all adrift in that sense at this time of year.)

(This probably isn't why some people have non-holiday decor that can be swapped in and out, thus having more options, but it's a nice side effect, I imagine. *contemplates* Please feel free to tell me about your non-Hallowe'en decor! Full-on harvest stuff is not terribly seasonal here, but surely there are other options?)

Anyway. It's noticeably cooler here now, and still bright outside rather than all gray-skewed like my mental picture of the season, but the month is young.

If there are things you love about November, please share?

Last time we ordered groceries, I got a bag of Granny Smith apples with intentions of baking, and that...uh, that hasn't happened yet. Hopefully today after I get some work done, assuming nothing horrible has happened to them. (I worry about overestimating the durability of things like apples. And cabbage. We also have a cabbage. >.> It's been around longer.)

As for what to bake...well, I have my eyes on two Smitten Kitchen cakes and two RecipeTin Eats cakes (all new to us), and there's also an a cake we made last year, or just doing baked apples or crisp. We'll see.

In cat news, the other night Sinha was being a tremendous pest to Jinksy (as is typical), and unexpectedly, Jinksy remembered (???) how to scruff him! He scruffed Sinha a couple of times a couple years ago, and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever actually made Sinha back the fuck off, but then that was it. Maybe he won't go another year or more without remembering about it again. (It's such a complicated feeling for us, because Sinha makes the most pathetic keening noises and gets really upset about it [and the other night it took an hour or so of him racing around the house grumbling to himself before he settled down, which was awkward since we were trying to sleep], so it's a bit heartbreaking, but we are absolutely in favor of Jinksy standing up for himself and saying, "NO. You will STOP.")

Reading (back)log

Nov. 2nd, 2025 01:06 pm
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
I wound up reading fourteen novels/novellas in October! Here's what I've read since my last reading check-in.

KJ Charles' The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal (historical M/M) is a neat setup, where the narrator has been partnered for years with a paranormal investigator and has written famous accounts of the cases they faced, and is now much more privately writing about their personal history and the cases that instigated and shaped their romantic partnership (with, of course, many references to cases he's already written about for the public eye).

Dweller on the Threshold is my second read by Skyla Dawn Cameron, in which a woman inherits a probably-haunted house early in the covid pandemic. It's creepy and well-done and much weirder than it initially seemed likely to be (although to nowhere near the degree of weirdness that her The Taiga Ridge Murders, which I read late last year, turned out to be).

Dreadful Company (Vivian Shaw) was a quick, fun read. It's the second Dr. Greta Helsing novel, and it left me in the odd-feeling (but not uncommon for me, really) position of having enjoyed it without feeling any particular need to seek out the following books.

What Stalks the Deep is the third of T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier novellas, which due to the increasingly-horrifying prices of ebooks (in particular novellas, IMO) I borrowed from the library. OT1H, that's deeply annoying, because I generally really like Ursula Vernon's writing and would like to simply buy everything, if only to support her (and yes, I do know library borrows do contribute to that as well); OTOH, I avoided spending something like $20 on a NOVELLA and was (briefly) spared the need to decide what to read next, because when this became available at the library, it became my obvious next read once I'd finished Dreadful Company. Also, I enjoyed it; I wouldn't recommend reading it without at least reading the first book in this set, and if you've read and liked the previous ones, you'll presumably like this one too.

(Before my many-years-ago-now decision to spend a year [ha!] reading mainly/only from books I'd purchased but never read--which has pretty much been ongoing ever since, because I keep buying books--I almost never had to think about what to read next, because I had several hundred holds on hard copies at the library, and basically would just put something on hold and immediately suspend the hold for a year or two [whatever the maximum was], and then frequently scroll through the list and re-suspend books if I caught them in the window between them being automatically unsuspended and actually heading my way. Whatever books I didn't catch in that window arrived for borrowing at the library, so I'd pick them up and read them, whatever they were.)

Also [personal profile] scruloose and I finished Fugitive Telemetry, although it took us long enough that I had to check it out from the library a second time (which I'd rather avoid, given my understanding of how ridiculous the ebook/audiobook situation is for libraries >.<). When we circle back to listen to the first novel, we'll definitely have to be ready to actively focus on finding time for it.

Current reading/watching: I'm a few chapters into Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (V.E. Schwab), and on the non-fiction front, a little ways into Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.

Meanwhile, [personal profile] scruloose and I are two episodes into season 2 of Silo.

Spice Cake recipe

Nov. 1st, 2025 09:46 pm
rhi: A cappucino, my name written in the froth. (cappucino)
[personal profile] rhi
Welp, I printed it out without the URL, apparently, so, I must type it here to share it.  Oops.

"Intensely Flavorful, Super Moist Spice Cake" -- I used GF flour, so I'm not sure about the moist, but it's not dry, that's sure.  Seriously, this cake is autumn on your plate.

How is it November Already?

Nov. 1st, 2025 09:19 pm
glinda: I...have a cunning plan (cunning plan)
[personal profile] glinda
So my revised target for writing this year has been to start each new month with more words than I finished that month the previous year with. Largely due to the fic part of my writing brain having unlocked itself back in July I have been solidly making that target since then. This month however was always going to be a challenge because, well, last November I wrote nearly 13,000 words. However, while I did not come anywhere close to that I will be starting November with 6000 words more than I started last November with - which given that my monthly target is around 6300 words, feels true to target.

33609 / 75000 (44.81%)


Once again I'll be doing [community profile] mini_wrimo with a target of 250 words a day. (Signups are still open if you're doing a writing challenge this month and think it might be useful.) I'm also doing Nablopomo as usual, so between here, my film blog and my food blog I'm planning to blog every day. (We'll see!) I'm giving myself an overall target for this month of 10,000 words with a stretch goal of 15,000. Given that according to my spreadsheet my daily target for this month is 333 words a day (which has a pleasing ring to it) I should really have signed up for that, but that would require me remembering to put the figures in the spreadsheet before signing up and I did not do that. Also I know from experience that 250 words is sustainable over the month so why set myself up to fail?

385 / 10000 (3.85%)


Also, I am now on holiday from work for a fortnight. I very much need it. *basks*

emotional support fiber: weaving

Nov. 1st, 2025 05:04 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
This is beginner mode weaving on a Clover Sakiori tabletop ~portable loom. It has an unbelievably easy warping setup based on the reeds, with what I think of affectionately as typically beautifully overengineered Japanese design and terrific documentation; I don't read Japanese but the pictures + diagrams are extraordinarily clear. I'm US-based so tariffs are a vexed situation, but these tend to run ~$200 USD plus international shipping off eBay. I do also own a Lojan Flex rigid heddle loom, but I like the ease of warping so much better on the Clover Sakiori. I'm also that extremely boring person who just wants to plainweave forever; if I want to embellish fabric, I will embroider.

I half-assed the warp and it shows, but at the level of "can I set this up at all," the answer is yes. Also, catten is unlikely to be a HARSH critic of a tiny little catten blankie to shed all over, so.

warping a Clover Sakiori loom

weaving WIP on a Clover Sakior loom



Just look at those warping layouts! I'm too lazy to check the trigonometry, but I'm betting it's correct.

I'm struggling with weaving (English-language [1]) vocabulary so I can't describe the action further. This YouTube playlist by Renee Johnson Studio shows it in action, though.

[1] There is probably random Korean terminology buried in my head because of my mom, but it's not helpful in sussing out help in English...

I need to lie down now but it was a good day for exploratory weaving.

Random Guardian screencap

Nov. 2nd, 2025 08:47 am
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
(Okay, semi-random. I had it as part of the rewatch post, but I just swapped it out for a different one, and now I have to post this one somewhere, because asdkfhaskdfjhasd! /dork)

Alphabet Fic Game

Nov. 1st, 2025 10:13 am
rachelmanija: (Staring at laptop)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Autumn Gold. Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden. Fear is the end of the battle and you can't find your captain.

B. Burn. Original Work. The revolutionary hides her face to conceal her identity. The princess silences her voice to preserve her purity. They know each other. And they don't...

C. The Colors of Lorbanery. Earthsea. The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

D. Dorset: Portal to the House. Piranesi/Grand Designs. Maggie and Olabisi plan to transform a ruin containing a portal to the House into a cozy home with an artist's studio. But the ruin's status as a scheduled monument and the unique challenges of its proximity to the House endanger their project.

E. Eilonwy Wanderer. The Prydain Chronicles.. Eilonwy travels Prydain in search of her place in life.

F. Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him. A Song of Ice and Fire. A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

G. The Goddess of Suffering Scam. The Lies of Locke Lamora. In the early days of the Gentleman Bastards, Locke impersonates a self-flagellating acolyte of the Goddess of Suffering, and Jean stands by as the muscle in case the mark catches on. You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

H. A Hatching at Half-Circle Sea Hold. Dragonriders of Pern. “That’s a rather extraordinary proposal, Menolly,” said the Masterharper.

I. IP, YEVRAG NIVEK. The Leftovers. Kevin Garvey makes another visit to the hotel.

J. The Journey. Annihilation - movie. Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

K. Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November. Original Work. When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.

L. The Life of a Cell. Annihilation - movie. The being that leaves the Shimmer carries with it some of both Lena and Dr. Ventress.

M. Men Sell Not Such In Any Town. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. I have fruit that shatters like glass and fruit that must be spooned up like pudding, fruit that tastes like caramel and fruit that tastes like roasted meat, fruit that glitters and fruit so translucent you can see your fingers through it and fruit that glows golden at twilight, fruit like silver coins and monstrous hands and autumn fog, fruit that loses all its flavor unless you eat it straight off the tree as it tries to coil around your tongue.

N. No Reservations: Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia/No Reservations. I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

O. one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. The Stand - Stephen King. Flagg rewards Lloyd for doing a good job.

P. Professor Xavier's Haunted Mansion. X-Men comics. The ghosts of dead (or temporarily dead, or dead in another timeline) X-Men and villains haunt the halls of Professor X's mansion.

Q. The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. You are no doubt familiar with the major genres of tardigrade literature.

R. The Realm of Persephone. Greek mythology. Persephone takes Hades blackberry picking.

S. The Story of Marli-Hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle. Watership Down. What lies on the dark side of the moon? Ask the Black Rabbit. He knows.

T. To See a World in a Grain of Sand. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick. Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.

U. An Unexpected Catch. Dragonriders of Pern. Lessa and other Benden women visit Southern Weyr to help out with a fishing tradition; things don't go as planned.

V. Vintage Year. The Fall of the House of Usher - TV. Verna visits Arthur Pym in prison.

W. The Woman Who Watches the King. Piranesi. For some, the House is a prison. For some, it's a place of healing.

X.

Y. You're Wrong About Misericorde. The Dark Tower. You're Wrong About podcast. Sarah tells Mike about the lost horror movie that became an urban legend. Digressions include the chemical formula for mescaline, Sarah imitating Ethan Hawke imitating a Yorkshire prop witch, and where the fat goes after it gets vibrated out of your body by a $19.99 girdle sold on late-night TV.

Z.

We all seem to be getting stuck on X and Z. But I also almost got stuck on J, the only letter where I couldn't select from multiple possible stories.

Silksong: 100 hours

Nov. 1st, 2025 02:14 pm
schneefink: Quirrel from Hollow Knight sitting on a bench (HK Quirrel on bench)
[personal profile] schneefink
After playing Hollow Knight: Silksong for 100 hours, I'm at 99% game completion working toward the true ending and still having a great time.

Approaching endgame, spoilers )
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
[personal profile] sholio
Whumptobers will continue until morale improves probably a ways into November, since I'm still having a good time with it, and I have a few incomplete ones.

Alt Prompt: Organ Theft
Murderbot & Tarik, 800 wds (bookverse, post-System Collapse)
Also on AO3: Grand Theft Human

800 wds under the cut )

November writing goals

Nov. 1st, 2025 07:16 pm
china_shop: An orange cartoon dog waving, with a blue-green abstract background. (Bingo!)
[personal profile] china_shop
My writing goals for the second half of October were: don't stuff up my arms, finish my flashfic, finish a treat I started for [community profile] guardian_wishlist, sign up for Yuletide, and write something for the [community profile] fan_flashworks amnesty round. I managed 2/5, but I'm calling it a win. (My game, my rules. :-)

Goals for November!
  1. post at least one media update (in my head, I still call these "weekly updates", lol)
  2. write my Yuletide assignment fic
  3. maybe a treat or two? or flashfics for things in the Yuletide tagset that I like but no one requested ;-p
  4. finish the thing I'm currently working on
  5. write something else
  6. don't stuff up my arms again
  7. if LWS have another 24-hour sprint, go to some of that


Today I went for a walk and saw a huge eel and some cute dogs and lots of trees. I did a little alibi editing on my WIP, posted a Slo-Mo Rewatch post to [community profile] sid_guardian, and a 1000-word comment on that. Not sure if I'm going to write some more this evening or read or watch more A Hundred Memories (on which I have about 2 episodes to go).

(Will I keep posting tiny daily life updates? Who knows?!)

Hallowe'en

Oct. 31st, 2025 09:43 pm
umadoshi: (autumn - carved pumpkins (wilde_hearts))
[personal profile] umadoshi
After an embarrassingly long time of sporadically reminding myself that I specifically bought a tiny low-powered laptop explicitly for use down in the living room (and used her accordingly for a while, until the spring Dayjob crunch threw me out of the still-forming habit), I've finally got Haruna up and running again. Will this help me leave fewer tabs open, or just result in them being split among more places?

Happy Hallowe'en and blessed Samhain, as applicable! It's a quiet one here. The wind and rain were wild for much of the day, but did calm down in the late afternoon, as hoped. Reports from online locals indicate that a lot of people got way fewer trick-or-treaters than usual (if any), although some spots seemed to get normal levels.

We don't really know what our neighborhood "normal" is, either in the area in general or along our condo corp's road, since for the last few years we've just been setting out the candy and refilling as needed. Some or most of it has generally vanished, but that doesn't say much about numbers vs. the likelihood that at least a few kids take it by the fistful. But tonight [personal profile] scruloose decided to actually answer the door and hand it out (in a hazmat suit, because why not?) and not a single kid came by during the window of time when they were down there. (That said, they got down there somewhat later than would probably have been ideal, and the doorbell did ring once before that point [and go unanswered, but all of our lights were off until [personal profile] scruloose was ready]. So if we try it again next year, earlier might make a bit of difference.)

I've mostly been chilling on the main level with the cats, who've been barred from the ground floor for the evening. (We had the window open during that span of time when more kids might've been on the move out there, but I heard only the occasional young voice echoing over from the main road.) After finishing up at Dayjob for the day, I put on my Hallowe'en onesie, and [personal profile] scruloose made the first hot cocoa of the season, and we finally finished listening to Fugitive Telemetry before dinner was made and [personal profile] scruloose bagged up candy. (;_;)

I hope you're all having a fun/peaceful time of it.
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