Greg Holden

Aug. 17th, 2025 06:08 pm
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Posted by jeffburdges

We Didn't Learn a Thing, Off With Their Heads, What Am I Supposed To Say, Fuck It, Humans

I linked only new-ish songs above, since he appeared here previously, but I do recommend his older songs too, so see his his youtube.
fadedwings: Leverage OT3 together, hiding behind something (Leverage: OT3 in action)
[personal profile] fadedwings posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: too much twinkle
Fandom: Leverage
Characters: Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker
Length: 200 words
Rating: Teen
Warnings: none
Summary: Parker’s tree might have a little too much twinkle.


too much twinkle )

Round 178 Theme Poll

Aug. 17th, 2025 08:25 am
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fancake
Poll #33498 round 178 theme poll
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 100

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Food & Cooking
42 (42.0%)

Manners & Etiquette
26 (26.0%)

Whump
32 (32.0%)

Slavery, 21st-Century Style

Aug. 17th, 2025 01:30 pm
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Posted by rory

In a decade of many horrors, this has to be among the worst. Hundreds of thousands of people from developing countries have been lured to Thailand with the promise of well-paid IT jobs and then enslaved in scam call centres in the no man's land across the Myanmar border.

The problem grows worse, despite the freeing of several thousand earlier in the year. The victims are tortured if they refuse to work or work too slowly, and are bought and sold by the Chinese criminal gangs running the centres, abetted by the corrupt Myanmar warlords who control the region.

Weekly proof of life: mostly media

Aug. 17th, 2025 10:56 am
umadoshi: (fancrone - china_shop)
[personal profile] umadoshi
Reading: [personal profile] scruloose and I finished listening to Artificial Condition and have started Rogue Protocol (but only barely--we've listened to however much of chapter 1 we could get in over supper on Friday before [personal profile] scruloose had to be doing something else).

We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida) was a very quick read and hard for me to pin down. It's a story in the vein of "~mysterious~ place provides X [often wishes granted or strange/deadly creatures, as in xxxHOLiC or Pet Shop of Horrors], but the actual cats being prescribed mostly appear to be just ("just") cats. I think this is the first in a series. Alas, I find the prose of the translation awfully flat, and can only hope I would've found the book more engaging in different hands.

I also read The City in Glass, which was my first time reading Nghi Vo. Gorgeous prose, a neat concept, and a great read overall.

Watching: We're six episodes into The Summer Hikaru Died (which is, I suppose unsurprisingly given the premise, touching on a significant existential question from Newsflesh [and from plenty of other places]). It continues to be very good. ^_^

I think we also saw an ep. of Silo sometime last week.

And on Friday I started watching Glass Heart on my own. As so often turns out to be the way, choosing it from my horrifying to-watch list was mostly random. Sometimes the choice is made simply because something is short (ten episodes, in this case) and I've seen several friends talking about it very recently. I'm six episodes in now.

I knew going in that Machida Keita is in it (who I knew only from Cherry Magic). I did not know in advance that Satoh Takeru is one of the leads, and then couldn't place him until I caved and looked up the cast. (He played Kenshin in the live-action Rurouni Kenshin movies [of which I've still only seen the first], and was impossibly good in the role. I keep meaning to rewatch the first and watch the others, despite my feelings about the franchise overall being irrevocably poisoned now by the horrible revelations about the creator. I still need to offload my set of the manga. >.<)

Weathering: The drought continues. Parts of the province are on fire, although the uncomfortably-close-to-me wildfire is under control, last I heard.

Planning: We don't have tickets yet, because there aren't yet showtimes for it, but the plan is to see Dongji Rescue late in the week. *fidgets*
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Posted by chavenet

Now knowledge is shifting again. Ballooning. As AI eats the world, knowledge feels faster, flatter, streamlined. It's valued differently. The way we obtain it is determined by corporate technocracy. It doesn't belong to us. How does literature respond to the fact that we have created and stored more data—knowledge compressed—since the year 2000 than over the rest of human history? Frankly, how does it compete? Enter igno-fiction: stories that lean into all that humans do not know. from Igno-fiction [Dirt]

This is Part II of Where will the next literary movement come from?
m_findlow: (Jack sad)
[personal profile] m_findlow posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: When the lights go out
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,161 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 488 - Twinkle
Summary: Jack sees the stars in a completely different light.

Read more... )
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Posted by phooky

As the guttering flame of human endeavor on the internet flickers to a close, Every 5x5 Nonogram [previously] confronted us with an opportunity: an opportunity to collaboratively, as a community, perform a task that could be completed in mere minutes by a moderately powerful chromebook. And as a community we rose to that challenge. As of this writing, puzzlers from around the world have come together to solve over 24.3 million of the 24,976,511 possible solvable 5x5 nonograms. Sometime over the next forty-eight hours, it is likely that the monumental task will finally be completed. And in a world in which computation is rapidly replacing thought, and generated content is displacing the human soul itself, is this, in itself, not an act of resistance?

The answer is no. No, it is not. These are really easy puzzles, folks. Anyway, if you want to solve a few, get your last licks in while you can.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Of the MANY bait-and-switch books I've been tricked into reading, this takes the prize for the biggest switch. The back cover says it's about a single mom carpenter who builds a tiny house for herself and her daughters to live in. The title is about tiny houses. There is a tiny house on the cover. I read the book because I thought it would be about building a tiny house.

The book is actually about the events leading up to her building the tiny house. She doesn't build the tiny house until the LAST CHAPTER. It takes up about four pages.

A side hustle suggestion

Aug. 16th, 2025 09:29 pm
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Posted by Brandon Blatcher

Do you enjoy returning your shopping cart, aka that taking of aim and pushing the cart from far away to see if you can get it in the pen? That's called shopping cart archery and it's a thing in Germany.

Movies: Superman, Kpop Demon Hunters

Aug. 16th, 2025 10:07 pm
schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)
[personal profile] schneefink
I mostly went to the cinema to watch Superman today because I wanted to feel like I did anything, but I did have a good time.
I'm so out of ~practice watching superhero movies, I kept getting distracted by logic. But other than that I did enjoy the superhero parts, and the Superman parts. (The romance I was neutral on.)
This is another movie where the villain had a good point somewhere in there originally but left "reasonable" behind several thousand miles ago. Yes having extremely powerful metahumans/aliens that can interfere in any conflict they like apparently without any oversight is very concerning (no matter how "human" they feel) but, uh. Excellent job making this Luthor both very evil and very scary.
(I didn't like Krypto. As a "character" he was fun but I really dislike badly trained exuberant dogs and one with superpowers is so much worse.)

A few weeks ago I organized a movie night with friends to watch Kpop Demon Hunters because I'd heard so much about it and that was a great decision. Here I didn't get distracted by logic once ^^ It was just a fun time. And the songs are very catchy, too. I've already sung one at karaoke (This is what it sounds like) and tried two of them in Beat Saber (Golden was very difficult, Soda Pop on easy was indeed easy.)
I only took a brief look at fandom/fanfic but I'm not feeling that fannish about it. (I was surprised that the common assumption seems to be
spoilersthat Rumi's mother had a secret love affair with a demon - I think it might even be word of god canon - while my first thought was that she was probably raped. Fandom is also very hard on Celine, which on the one hand I understand but she was also in a super shitty position.)

There is a lot more trouble to come

Aug. 16th, 2025 07:47 pm
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Posted by chavenet

From a systemic perspective, the GENIUS Act's main shortcoming is its failure to deal effectively with the inherent risk of stablecoin runs, because it prevents regulators from prescribing strong capital, liquidity, and other safeguards. And when any stablecoin issuer – domestic or foreign – gets into trouble, who will step in, and with what authority, to prevent the problems from spreading to the real economy, like in the 1930s? from The Crypto Crises Are Coming [Project Syndicate; ungated]

a first ball of yarn

Aug. 16th, 2025 01:00 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee


It's wildly inconsistent (wool/sari silk waste blend, about 30 g / 1.2 oz) and I struggled with the learning curve for plying (first on a Turkish spindle that was too small for plying, then on the wheel once I figured out how to adjust the takeup; mine uses scotch tension) but hey, it exists!

I remain desperately curious about the mordant because I soaked yarn in hot water for an hour and the water ran completely clear, and it's a red dye!

But as therapeutic activities (quite literally this doubles as physical therapy for my wrecked ankles, and I'm still sick), this is very satisfying.

Speak Up Saturday 🍃

Aug. 16th, 2025 03:29 pm
feurioo: (music: ms. furman grand mal)
[personal profile] feurioo posting in [community profile] tv_talk
Assortment of black and white speech bubbles

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?
garryowen: (sherlock grimpen)
[personal profile] garryowen posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairings/Characters: Sherlock/John
Rating: Teen
Length: 2007 words + companion stories
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] waketosleep
Theme: Marriage of convenience

Summary:

"We should really get married."

John stared at the red mark on his wrist. "I'm sorry, what?"

Reccer's Notes: I almost never revisit this fandom, but when I recced waketosleep's Trek story for this theme, it came to my attention that w2s was a little obsessed with marriages of convenience and had a fantastic and charming gem of a fic where Sherlock co-opts John's life (again), and John (again) doesn't mind at all.

I don't know if I've ever seen hospital access as a reason for a marriage of convenience, but I am here for it! It's practical and a little grim, typical of Sherlock. The interactions between Sherlock and John are spot on and hilarious. In 2000 words, we also get Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, and Mycroft, all contributing to the comedy gold in their understated way.

This story belongs to two different series. The Intellectual Intercourse series is the easiest way to navigate everything if you want to read beyond this fic.

Fanwork Links: Declarations of Mutual Devotion
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