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rebeccmeister

My Aunt L's birthday is the day after Christmas, and she loves nothing more than a trip to the bowling alley for a good game. So, it's the one time of year I ever go bowling. There was a smaller group of us this year, so we just occupied two lanes.

One of our lanes, however, was clearly possessed. It kept stealing our bowling balls and refusing to give them back, even when we capitulated and used multiple different balls of the wrong weight. My Uncle D had to go back over to the counter 7-8 times to get them to send someone over to manually fix that.

Other entertaining moments included giving my Aunt D a copy of a zine I just made. I'll blog more about the zine soon. It's about ants.

My Uncle D had not just one but TWO occasions where he had a gutter ball bounce right back out of the gutter at the last moment and knock over some pins!!

Because our lane was possessed, at one point my Aunt D accidentally bowled while the gate was down, realizing her mistake only a few seconds after she'd released the ball. It was one of those slow-motion accidents, watching the ball travel all the way down to the pins at far end of the lane, where it smacked into the gate...and then slowly, slowly rolled all the way back to her, right down the middle of the lane. By the point it reached her we just laughed and laughed.

The people in the lane next to us had a couple young children bowling, so they had those gutter bumpers that will go up for just the young child, then retract so everyone else has to just cope with the emotions of a gutter ball. One time when it was the young child's turn, she bowled, and somehow managed to get the ball to bump up and OVER the gutter bumper, into the gutter! That was a first.

My Aunt L was very happy to have gone bowling, as usual. She's 75 at this point, so it's great she can still happily heft her bowling ball. She even got some beautiful new purple bowling shoes for Christmas this year.

dolorosa_12

Today's prompt from

chestnut_pod brings this year's December talking meme to a close, and it's been a great run of questions. Many thanks to all of you who left a prompt! This final prompt is to talk about how I learnt to garden, plus any longstanding plant friends in my garden.

( Response here )

fandomtrees is due to open for reveals on 10 January, but it will only do so when every participant has a minimum of two gifts each. This post on the comm links to a spreadsheet of needy trees — there are still a substantial number of participants with only one gift, or with no gift at all. My own tree is here.

And the new year means that

snowflake_challenge will be rolling around again. I'm always so happy to see the consequent burst of enthusiastic activity on Dreamwidth!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

troisoiseaux

Finished I Leap Over the Wall: Contrasts and Impressions After Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent by Monica Baldwin, a 1949 memoir that is what it says on the tin and a fascinating read. It's a mix of explaining convent life to a secular audience (which was pretty much the same as in Catherine Coldstream's Cloistered, although I feel like Baldwin made more of an effort to explain why this or that aspect of life as a nun made sense in the context of Catholic doctrine), Baldwin's sense of culture shock from having entered the cloister in 1914 and left it in 1941, and her misadventures in adjusting to the modern world circa WWII— she worked various jobs in an effort to Do Her Bit for Britain, including as an unofficial Land Girl, dormitory matron at a munitions factory, hostess at an army canteen, assistant librarian at the Royal Academy of Science, and something for the War Office that she isn't allowed to talk about. (She was also the niece of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, which probably helped.) It's also a thoughtful, insightful memoir about a woman figuring out who she is as a person after nearly three decades of suppressing every instinct towards individualism; in a way, it reads a lot like someone recovering from a long-term abusive relationship— there was one particularly aching line about the first time she "had actually dared to open a window, in a place containing several other people, and the universe had NOT rocked to its foundations and then come toppling down about my ears"— although, as it's all written in such a bright tone and Baldwin's view was clearly that she personally was unsuited for religious life, rather than religious life in itself being The Problem, I imagine that she would have been surprised by the comparison.

Also finished my fourth(?) re-read of Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, just under the wire for 2025. I don't have any new thoughts this time— no, actually, I have one: ( ... )— but I continue to enjoy this series so so much and will cheerfully re-read it on loop until Alecto gets published and/or the rest of my life, whichever comes first, even at my current snail's pace of three years to finish three books (having last read Gideon in 2023 and Harrow in 2024).

malurette

Titre : Sans le A
Auteurs : Michaël Escoffier & Kris Di Giacomo
Langue : français
Type : album jeunesse
Genre : abécédaire

1ère parution :
Édition :
Format :

(trouvé à la braderie cette année, offert à mon petit neveu qui commence à lire)

Au lieu d'un abécédaire classique où chaque lettre est illustrée comme initiale d'un mot, on prend un mot quelconque et en lui retirant telle lettre on le change en un autre.
Sans le A... la carotte est une crotte.
Sans le J... y'a de la joie chez l'oie.

Bon j'espère que ça l'amusera ? Pas fan des dessins mais ma belle-sœur les trouve beaux.

conuly

ask a detailed question about phonology, such as "Do you really pronounce 'tr' as 'chr'?" (Yes, yes we do. We all do. It's almost impossible not to due to the physiology of those phonemes.)

And this will generate a burst of absolutely, frustratingly useless nonsense, because people just do not know how they talk. They don't know how they talk, they can't analyze their phonetics on the fly, and they are staggeringly unaware of these facts.

I keep telling these people to go to /r/linguistics instead, but thus far, nobody has taken my advice. Which is a pity, because I do give excellent advice, especially in this case.

But seriously - nobody knows how they talk. It's like trying to explain the biomechanics of walking. Sure, you've been doing it since you were a toddler (probably?), but that doesn't mean you have any understanding at all of what the hell you're doing as you propel yourself from place to place. I bet you can't even explain how you adjust for your varying center of balance!

copperbadge_feed

https://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/804216297876553728

snazzy-hats-and-adhd:

thememedaddy:
@copperbadge this feels relevant to your skillset.

I’m not going to lie, Hodag and I have a joint spreadsheet to track my visits to Milwaukee so they know when I’m arriving and where we’re staying. And when I visit Texas, my mother always makes a menu spreadsheet for meal planning.

You do have to have compatible attitudes towards how the data is input, though. Like my mother puts data into columns that I would instinctively put into rows and vice versa – I’d put days of the week across the top of a sheet and breakfast/lunch/dinner down the left, but she puts the days down the side and meals across the top. There’s no rationale to either method, like I don’t think one is particularly better than the other, but she struggles to understand data the way I present it, and I always have to rewire my brain a little to follow hers. Fortunately, Hodag and I are wired the same over data.

https://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/804216297876553728

silveradept

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

( 28: No )

Mood: contemplative
Music: GAYLE - ABCDEFU (angrier version)

dine

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

mific

Agh, I just found the hollanov discord server.

And wrote my first 1800 words of HR fanfic.

Um... anyone up to alpha read it to give me feedback about whether it's worth continuing?

jbwoodford posting in

girlgenius_lair

I want my cake!

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251228.html

Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251228.html

sonia

2025 but pictured in gingerbread. Amazing art.

jazzfish

Ordered replacement zipper sliders for my suitcase. Suitcases, rather; I never got rid of the one that lost its zipper last year. So I've got one to practice on, and maybe I'll have two good checked-bag-size suitcases.

Yesterday I went down to the States to ship my parents' xmas box (the last part of the gift arrived a few hours after I left for Minneapolis), and also drop off used books and thrift-store donations and poke around in both stores. In the event it was like treating myself to Xmas. The used bookstore supplied me with: a paperback of Walter Jon Williams's post-scarcity nanotech/cyberpunk thriller Aristoi, which for typographical reasons really needs to be read in hard copy; Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home, which I have vague recollections of someone recommending and even vaguer recollections of having read at some point; Tom Stoppard's last play, Leopoldstadt; and the collected poems of Hope Mirrlees, who you know (if at all) as the author of the very English fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist but who was apparently also a minor Modernist poet.

And from the thrift store there was a DVD of the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina, which is something of a comfort watch for me, and also two madeleine pans. Yesterday evening and this morning I made two separate batches of madeleines; the first tasted fine but had a texture that wasn't really right, but the second seems to have turned out pretty well. Turns out they're serious about "room-temperature eggs," and also I may have used too much flour the first time. The pans did fine, which is a pleasant surprise for cookery from the thrift store. I suspect they may have been used maybe twice.

On the advice of the catsitter, a month or two ago I got Mr Tuppert a treat-puzzle, with sliders and pivot lids and little pockets for treats. He's been enjoying it, and has gotten quite good at getting the treats out of even the more complex bits. He's been much less impressed with the cardboard thing I got him to scratch on. Not even catnip can induce him to try it out. Ah well.

I'm staying warm, I'm staying fed. Next month is for sorting out What Happens Next.

shadaras

1.
The darkest part of the year is always the hardest to remember to, like, be a person and not just curl up being grumbly about the long cold dark.

But, well, I do feel more like a person the more I act like a person and interact with people, as much as I might wish to be a lump and zone out while watching streams/tv that ask nothing of me.

2.
Yuletide revealed works!

There was perhaps 30min of AHHHH about 20min after reveals due to an Ao3 bug that revealed creators alongside works. Considering that this happened to Battleship this summer and the mods heard crickets from Support at the time, perhaps now that Yuletide hit the same bug (and solved the immediate problem with advice from the Battleship mods) Ao3 support will have more data and motivation to figure out wtf happened there and make sure it can't happen again.

Anyway, I received two Yuletide gifts:

The Promise (1222 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Oathsworn (Actual Play Podcast)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Dorado the Adamant & Nabain Palisade
Characters: Dorado the Adamant, Nabain Palisade
Additional Tags: and the absence of Serikali, Post canon, Missing Scene, Dialogue Heavy, Major Spoilers
Summary:
“Did you ever speak to Serikali?” Dorado asked.
“Not as often as I would have liked.” The broken promise settled over his shoulders like a yoke. But even under that weight, he still could carry curiosity. Dorado was direct: if she changed topic, there had to be a reason.

This is for a fandom that, as the author's note says, I wrote a promo post last year (and then mentioned again during Battleship season when people were asking about good actual play podcasts), and am thus inevitably the reason this person got into the show. <3 Delightful to get a gift for it! I was not expecting one, but also when I saw a gift show up for me and no fandoms I'd requested in the collection list I was like "omg... perhaps..." and it was!

This is a lovely little coda adding into the Oathsworn epilogue, about what people are willing to do for the sake of their community and what secrets they're willing to keep and why. Absolutely delightful.

The other gift is WORLDBUILDING VIA TEXTBOOK EXCERPTS

The Dresediel Lex Project And Its Consequences (2385 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Maestre Gerhardt
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Epistolary
Summary:
Excerpts from documents found in Tara Abernathy's bag before her graduation from the Hidden Schools, sketching out the historical project to understand undeath and some pertinent later findings.

aka, someone taking me up on my Worldbuilding and Atypical Narrative Stuff things. <3 Absolutely delightful. A+ look into how weird it is to do SCIENCE to the magic of Becoming A Lich and Living Forever As An Undead Being. The change in thought about said magic from the first excerpt to the last is very fun, and it's a good look at a bit of magic that the series itself takes rather for granted.

I have also received absolutely lovely comments on both of the fics I wrote for Yuletide! Further commentary about those after author reveals; I had a great time writing both of them for very different reasons. xD <3

3.
Been thinking about projects for the new year and things I want to do and how, as much as I'm like "ughhhhh I am TIRED all the time" it is annoyingly true that often if I do things anyway I will end up having more energy overall.

So.

Fundamentally I believe in my ability to Write Stuff so long as I, y'know, actually focus and put time into it. xD The part where I need to get myself to actually write instead of zoning out on the internet is the hard part, usually! But I would like to actually write about the blorbos I've been rotating in my head since this summer.

There's this part of me like "that would be easier if you had a TITLE for it" and I'm like "OKAY SO GIVE ME ONE" about it. (

tavina most of the time I do not feel your pain about this BUT IN THIS CASE it feels weirdly true, considering that my brain can give me the primary arc of the story and the vibes I want but the idea of WRITING it is somehow ???. if a title helps I will sigh loudly but also be like "yeah okay sure".)

but I would like to be able to actually explain about my blorbos and their not-romance (it is an ADVENTURE STORY and they are absolutely Together but also get mad if one's like "so your BOYFRIEND" about it) (they are a half-triton/half-elf and a half-orc/half-dragon because why be Normal about your multiracial fantasy characters) (the half-dragon gets kidnapped to build an airship and that's what kicks the whole thing off) which means I need to WRITE IT

so really if I have any goal for next year it is probably simply "please actually write full draft of that <3", which, to be clear, is Very Doable based on how many words I am capable of writing xD just gotta make them words about this.

4.
It snowed the day after Christmas (or, well, the evening of Boxing Day into the early morning of the 27th), fluffy dry snow that's perfectly aesthetic and wasn't too much of a pain to clean off. Tonight it's supposed to be FREEZING RAIN, however, which is so much more UGH and is going to make going to work tomorrow Special. (I wish I got more time off for the holidays, but, whatever, it's not like I would do anything in particular except rest and read and write.)

5.
The dojo did get a new heater in. It's the same as the old heater, I'm pretty sure, except newer and thus works properly. xD

6.
A friend made me watch the first four episodes of I Am Nobody, a cdrama that they were like "I think you'll like it!" about because of the traits: Has Women (aka: is not actually a BL) and Is Modern Cultivation (because I'd made a comment about the Legend of Xiao Hei that they should've told me it was modern cultivation and not just "it has a cute cat! look at the cute cat!"). The thing is, it has women by virtue of being Probably Het (I think fandom is mostly like BUT BOYS about it) and the modern cultivation is "secret sects keep magic secret" and not the far more interesting "magical cultivation sects are integrated into everyday modern life" that Xiao Hei included.

So like... it's a show that I'd have fun watching with them, because it's honestly really well done for what it is, but unlike either friend I was watching with (either the one showing this to us or the other one new to it) I am not compelled to watch the rest on my own? It leans too much into comedy and not enough into the sort of worldbuilding or character dynamics that actually get their claws into me. Not a bad thing about it, really! I see why people like it! Just. Not as much my jam as that friend had hoped for.

7.
I watched del Toro's Frankenstein on Christmas Day, and spent the entire time talking with my friend about the use of color in that movie. It definitely understood what Frankenstein (the novel) was about! It portrayed The Themes (consequences of one's actions; accepting responsibility; the relationship between creator and creation) very well. It also did not shy away from gore and blood and the surgical nature of it all! (Also there were wolves that Did Not Act Like Wolves At All but also they're A Metaphor in the end so... whatever..) Very enjoyable, glad to have seen it!

grrlpup

a thick tangle of holly, with shiny green leaves and red berries

It’s the liminal days. I’m catching up on holiday correspondence and visits, restarting non-holiday things that got dropped (e.g. going to the gym), and eating a lot of delicious leftovers and improvised meals.

Sang and I watched Carol, and keep meaning to rewatch The Lion in Winter but also keep diverting or downgrading, twice to sample the gay Hallmark Christmas movies (The Holiday Sitter and Friends and Family Christmas so far), which are better than anticipated.

I’m working on a fic and a risograph print (they are not related to each other). There are many other things– piano, getting more flexible, drawing– that I’d like to practice steadily, but haven’t yet found where to work them in. I also browse rescue dogs on the internet.

I’m reading Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and deeply happy that it’s 650 pages long so I get to read it for a long time. Conversely, all my favorite books of 2025 are picture books.

2025 has been a lot. My father died in February and was buried in a military cemetery; we also held a public memorial service for him in June. I retired from the university in September. Sang and I traveled to Japan for several weeks after that. My youngest aunt, energetic and vivacious as always in June, was taken down by pancreatic cancer and died on Thanksgiving. A less eventful 2026 would be just fine. I could find a lot of joys in homebody life with outdoor walks.

This post originates at everyday though not every day. Comments welcome here or there.

johnridley

I'm not going to finish any more books in the next 2 days so I'm getting this done now.

2025 totals: 103 books, 34,250 pages. Significantly down from some recent years, but this year I set my goal at only 50 and didn't put any thought into reaching any goals, I just read when I felt like it.

Linked here is my 2025 recap.

Looking through the list below, what gets me rollin' is humor, relationships, and, I suppose, romance. Huh. Who'da thought?

And of course a good story.

Stand out reads for the year that I gave 5 stars:
* Chimes at Midnight (Seanan McGuire, October Daye #7)
* Even Though I Knew The End (C.L. Polk)
* When The Moon Hits Your Eye (John Scalzi)
* The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (T.L. Huchu, Edinburgh Nights #3)
* The Legacy of Arniston House (T.L. Huchu, Edinburgh Nights #4)
* The Brightest Fell (Seanan McGuire, October Daye #11
* This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar)
* Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire, Wayward Children #8)
* Paladin's Grace (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #1)
* The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune, Cerulean Chronicles #1)
* The Shattering Peace (John Scalzi, Old Man's War #7)
* Paladin's Strength (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #2)
* Paladin's Hope (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #3)
* Paladin's Faith (T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel #4)
* A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher)
* What Moves the Dead (T. Kingfisher, Sworn Soldier #1)
* Somewhere Beyond the Sea (T.J. Klune, Cerulean Chronicles #2)
* Slayers of Old (Jim C. Hines)
* Brigands and Breadknives (Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes #2)
* A Jesuit's Guide to the Stars (Guy Consolmagno)
* The Unkindest Tide (Seanan Mcguire, October Daye #13)

muccamukk

Fandom:

snowflake_challenge: Running a multi-fandom prompt every other day for all of January. (Yours truly isn't modding this year around, but will hopefully still participate.)

cultivativity: This community is organized as a series of modules designed to help build a practice to nurture our creative selves.

beagoldfish: This is an event for small and non-traditional fanworks. We want to remind you to appreciate the little things, be kind, be curious, enjoy generously, and above all, 'be a goldfish.' Runs over January and Feburary 2026.

Archive of Our Own: Update on Our 2020 Commitment from the OTW Board, Chairs & Leads.
I haven't been active in fandom for a couple years now, but I appreciate that they still seem to be working on this.

Writer Beware: Army of Bots: Deeper Into the Vortex of Nigerian Marketing Scams.
LLMs are so fun. I'm glad everyone has access to them. It's def making the Internet better. /s

Science
The Tyee: Charting a Course Through Bears’ Eyes.
Stewards from the Heiltsuk First Nation are using computational models and Indigenous knowledge to protect bears’ access to salmon.

Popular Science: First-of-a-kind study shows encouraging data for trans kids who socially transition.

Politics
CBC: Pro-Palestinian protester suspended from Vancouver Island University loses court challenge.
My level of cynicism about higher education continues apace. It would cost VIU nothing to let the woman have her transcripts. They've made their point.

Sojourners: Politically Polarized Family Attempts White Elephant Gift Exchange.
Satire, gave me a laugh.

sixbeforelunch

I made icons!

( 14 icons under the cut, mostly TNG. )

Mood: creative

kingstoken

I realized I never got around to promoting my own

fandomtrees, so here it is. I'm asking for anything other than icons (fic, art, podfic, etc), and the fandoms I'm asking for are: The Great Mouse Detective, Sherlock Holmes (both Granada and the Rathbone films), Our Flag Means Death, Dead Boy Detectives, Doctor Who, and podfic for any fandom I've written for.

mecurtin posting in

fandom_checkin

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Sunday, December 28, to midnight on Monday, December 29 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34015 Daily check-in poll

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 21

How are you doing?

I am OK
15 (71.4%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
6 (28.6%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
7 (33.3%)

One other person
10 (47.6%)

More than one other person
4 (19.0%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

catherineldf

Okay, so apart from the horrors at the national and international level, my 2025 was defined by the following events:

My wife and partner of 29 years, bookbinder and conservator Jana Pullman, died in February after a 5 year struggle with dementia (the same week as my mom's birthday, which will be super fun this year).
My boy kitty, Shu, got diagnosed with feline diabetes requiring multiple insulin injections per day at the ripe old age of 15 in early March.
I was awarded a 2025 Alice B. Readers Award in March. This is an anonymous juried award for an author's body of work in sapphic fiction, nonfiction, poetry and/or drama. Previous winners have included such "lightweights" as Joanna Russ, Dorothy Allison and this year, Emma Donoghue. I was floored and thrilled and floored again. It is a lovely thing and it made my year much better.
In June, my friend Anne Shaw died unexpectedly (I didn't find out about it until several weeks later, for reasons I won't go into now) and I miss her a lot. Other folks who passed in 2025 who were friends/colleagues to one degree or another: bi activist and organizer Lou Hoffman; poet and WisCon/organizer.volunteer Terry Garey; and Tiptree Award/WisCon/lots of other things artist Freddie Baer.
In July, my IT contract ended (this was expected). But in the ensuing months of unemployment, it has become clear that between my age, the fact that I have to work remotely due to kitty care needs and changes in the job market, I am probably involuntarily retired from IT after 25 years. I have some mixed feels, but acknowledge that I was completely and utterly burned out and that, money aside, it is time for a change.
I started writing fiction again! And nonfiction! I had a new story up at Heather Rose Jones's LHMPodcast, "An Encounter with a Lady" and an short nonfiction piece at New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, "Joanna Russ: Sword & Sorcery Pioneer?" I will have a second nonfiction piece out in New Edge in 2026, "Thula the Maid and Her Creator," date TBD. Thanks to embracing the writing sprint model, I currently have 2 short stories, a novella and the next werewolf novel in progress.
I am knuckling down on making Queen of Swords Press profitable enough to pay me on a considerably more regular basis, to which end, I have enrolled in the State of Minnesota's CLIMB Program for entrepreneurs and Hennepin County's Elevate program, which does small business mentoring. I am also attending a crap ton of classes and such and am trying to spin up an editing business (hire me!). You can also check out my Ko-fi store for sundry workshops, coaching, downloadable things to read, boxes by Jana, etc.
I set myself a goal of doing one new thing and one thing that I hadn't done since before lockdown in 2020 each month. This included some travel adventures: a weekend in Red Wing, MN, at a historic hotel by myself; going to Seattle Worldcon and coming back by sleeper car with friends on the train; and flying first class for the first time in my life to Readercon in Boston. I've also been visiting new to me places around the Twin Cities, like Raspberry Island for the Alebrijes show this summer, and places I keep meaning to check out again, like the new location of the Somali Museum of Minnesota and the Landmark Center in St. Paul. Lately, I've been working on making some new friends as well as connecting with my old ones.
I continued with my weekly online movement and isolation dance/exercise class with local Middle Eastern Dance maven, Cassandra Shore (apparently, I can now "Shimmy Like Your Sister Kate" at a very basic level). I found a massage therapist I really like. Apart from ongoing pain issues and the occasional migraine, I'm pretty healthy.
I'm ending this year with some hopeful financial news, which is lovely. So overall, a very mixed bag of year from devastating to stupendous and back again.

Next up, publishing news!

loganberrybunny

Public

331/365: Debris on Bewdley Bridge
Click for a larger, sharper image
I have to be honest: in a way I will be relieved once my 365 project ends in a month or so. It has been interesting, but I don't feel I want to keep on trying to find a photo to post every single day. I'm certainly not going to stop posting them altogether, though! Anyway, here is some debris washed up against Bewdley Bridge. Most of the older bridges along the Severn get this, at least until someone can be bothered to go and clear it! And then the cycle starts again... :P

Mood: drained

dewline

Ottawa City Hall has declared a Significant Weather Event tonight.

Mood: nervous
Location: Home-for-now
Music: CBC News' Front Burner on YouTube

yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

3 for the Memories' 2025 session will be open for posts on January 3, 2026 and will run for 3 weeks until January 24. Event participation is as follows:

1) Three photos only per person during each annual session. Members are encouraged to discuss the reason for their choices.

2) Photos can be hosted at Dreamwidth or elsewhere, and should not be larger than 800 px width or height.

3) All three photos should be in the same post. Cut tags should be placed after the first photo.

3 for the Memories is not a competition, and entries are not being judged. Rather, participants are encouraged to share photos they took in 2025 that they find meaningful in some way or which represent how they experienced the year.

Questions? Visit the announcement post at

threeforthememories

copperbadge_feed

https://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/804198682268450816

copperbadge:

This damn thing.
Up top: it’s designed to look that way, it’s not dirty – in fact it just came out of the dishwasher – but I realize it looks like it has mold (the black stuff behind it on the left is also not mold, it’s marks left over from a faucet being installed and it won’t scrub up no matter how much I try). It’s also an unattractive shade of pink. It looks precariously perched, but it’s anchored to the wall with eye hooks and string. It’s very stable (just like me).
I bought it last November thinking I needed a small drying rack for the kitchen, for the stuff I can’t put in the dishwasher (ceramic knives, etc). I figured, it was $3 at Target, and if I used it and liked it, I’d replace it with something not quite so LIKE THAT looking. And I would love to do so, because I use it for several purposes at this point, but I can’t find anything better. Target doesn’t even sell it anymore.
Almost no counter-top rack I can find combines the important elements of it: it has to have pretty much exactly those dimensions to fit into the space (on the left is the faucet, on the right is the toaster oven), it has to have “feet” because the sink edge is too uneven for flat legs, it has to have at least 3.25" clearance before the first shelf to fit over top of that silver thing (something to do with the dishwasher), and it has to have perforated shelves to let the dishes drain. There are many shelves across several retail outlets which fit some of these criteria, but none fit all of them. It’s maddening. The damn thing’s a huge eyesore but it’s so useful I can’t replace it.
Anyway, today I cleaned the sink area of the kitchen and gave the sink itself a buffing with the Flitz sealant, while listening to The Rest Is Classified discussing that time the CIA ran an encryption company, and I also spent ALL DAY logging myself into all my apps on my new phone and clearing them off the old one. At this point it’s mostly set up the way I like it, but for some reason I can’t get my bookmarks to sync. Which as issues go is at least pretty minor, and I think I’ll figure that one out tomorrow.
Phew.

I solved it! Wall mounted shelving!

It even folds up to sit flush against the wall if for some reason I need more space. That is such a small problem to have taken this long to solve, but it did get solved!

https://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/804198682268450816

bookmaniac_feed

Posted by Liz Henry

https://bookmaniac.org/2025/12/28/going-through-freddies-books/

https://bookmaniac.org/?p=5594

When Quilter and I left Mary’s house I ended up with several large plastic bins of Freddie’s collages as well as some boxes of slightly mildewy books. Quilter pulled the stuff that looked like older, more rare or interesting anarchist and other political books along with first editions and old copies of feminist science fiction. There’s another box of zines and letters, mostly zines and books that have Freddie’s art on the cover or inside as illustrations. Mary has her enormous collection of vintage Tura glasses, mostly cat-eye style with amazing rhinestones, filigree, or other baroque ornamentation.

As I catalogued and tagged the political books I got a very interesting picture of Freddie’s intellectual history and context – her milieu – that has given me a deeper appreciation of her art. I wish I had known her better as a friend rather than a long time acquaintance. She is a bit older than I am and I developed a sense of her in the 70s as a young person, agitating for the rights of herself and her fellow high school students, being around the “Red and Black” crowd(s) in the midwest, then dropping into the Situationist ferment of Santa Cruz and Berkeley and the general Bay Area. I came across letters from people like John Zerzan, sending her zines, reprints of Freddy Perlman or Camatte booklets, all kinds of stuff that it will take me a while to untangle (and likely scan). Debord, Goldman, Marx, De Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Audre Lorde. Mass production, technology, sociological arguments about industrialization, ecology, sexuality & gender; revolutions, schisms within revolutionary organizations, all made their way into her work. Anarchist women, surrealists, bomb throwers, angry women of all kinds. Her typesetting and graphic design alongside her art underpinned several different intertwined scenes & zines.

I was reminded a little of the feeling I have whenever I visit Timmi Duchamp’s house and when I first saw her amazing library (heavy philosophy! Holy shit!) Like getting to see the cathedral of books as a ghostly structure around her work. These few boxes of Freddie’s books hand picked by Quilter felt like a dark and beautiful sea, with my tiny boat (my own understanding) tossed around by the waves.

Like poetry the point of art (like freddie’s) is sometimes to say what can’t be said a different way , or say it in a way that can’t be “read” in words by people who will never trace your particular pathway through the world of books and ideas. Freddie’s delicate flywheels and iron, tendrils of vines, weave around women who are tigers, who are fairies, framed by the way they are classical statues, like Galatea bursting with things she wants to say, laid carefully across pages of anthropological texts, the chalice and the blade. Dozens of complex textures mixed with doll heads, with flowers, in a kaleidosope or a mandala, like stained glass window frames or reflections in a fly’s eye.

I am pecking away at these scans with my nice CZUR high speed camera scanner and putting them in two places, one on my Flickr in an album which also contains stuff that isn’t scans of her original art, and then more permanently and I hope usefully on Wikimedia Commons, under the category Collages by Freddie Baer. They are CC-4.0-BY licensed as Freddie wished. So far, there are 54 high quality/ high resolution scans up on Wikimedia Commons — take a look! Or, you can page through this little Flickr embed to have a glimpse of all the Freddie related stuff in my Flickr set.

For many of these works we have not correlated the titles with the work, so my file names for them are intended to be temporary placeholders.

I was at a party at Lisa‘s house this week & got to hang out with so many lovely bookish people, most of them knew Freddie, often through SFF communities like Potlatch which went all up and down the West Coast for many years. A bunch of us who used to do the “Tom Purdue” Proust dinner parties are going to reconvene and read Middlemarch (with me and Patrick advocating a bit for Dream of Red Mansions… maybe next.) Karen & Mike, Debbie, and others (I was briefly in their apazine but couldn’t keep up). I love those folks and especially am always keen to hear anything that comes out of Janet Lafler’s mouth, love her keen critical eye & wit & perspective. From some of those connections we will gather up more of Freddie’s work to scan (even if from prints not originals) and probably can figure out more of the titles. The T-shirt of the month club work is going to be tough to identify & catalogue!

Quilter and I are going back together to make one more pass through Freddie’s books and papers, next week.

I wish I had known Freddie better before this, and I wish we’d known to help do all this kind of organizing, scanning, curation, etc. for her (if she would have even allowed it). She was not looking to make a profit off her art. Obviously! Deliberately! As a political and artistic choice and I respect that a lot and understand it. Freddie gave her art away, she let it be used for fundraisers or swag for things like alt.polycon, the Tiptree, Potlatch and other really vibrant amazing communities. She made her money not just by her day job as a print materials designer, but by thrifting and re-selling (another interesting and deliberate political choice!)

I feel very determined that those choices to be non-commercial in her approach should not mean her work is disrespected or forgotten. Like, yes I am doing this because I will basically do any kind of collaboration with Quilter (we are also going to unfuck the feministsf.org site, wiki, blog, etc. on this visit and go through her books among other things.) But i am doing it because I love Freddie’s work and the bits of her politics and thought that I do know.

Thinking suddenly of Lorine Neidecker pulled out of semi isolation by Corman, and of course who even reads Cid Corman these days (other than me).

It is sobering work. Like, it’s one feeling to be sad I didn’t know her better, but how much more everyone feels who had been close to her! It is painful.

All of this made me think about the mess my own work is in. Every holiday season I look at my poetry and my writing and try to pull some more of it together, make a new zine, or re-publish something from my back catalog for Kindle. But it is in wild disarray. I don’t k now where entire years or books of poems are, or I might have one or two copies of a book/booklet or some printouts in a binder from 30 years ago, but no longer can find the files of entire manuscripts. It always is upsetting to face the mess. This isn’t even considering the things in journals & notebooks that never made it to a more final typed form. As I worked on this over the last week, on and off, I kept finding ENTIRE MANUSCRIPTS that I’d forgotten about, scattered poems, translations, or essays that were published that I also forgot about.

I resolved to set aside a little more time for that work and am putting all the poems and translations that are a bit more “finished” (lol) into a database locally on my laptop, and also to send out poems (old or new) more regularly for publication. A little archival work on myself, I guess.

Some local poets (or some correspondents even) would be so nice. I should call up Artsen and figure out a time to hang and write or go meet up with him at Hotel Utah. The DCC open mic was also super promising and I should be going to the Queer Open Mic at Strut more often to meet people! Feels like I lost my “scene” so many times and it is time to rebuild & make connections.

https://bookmaniac.org/2025/12/28/going-through-freddies-books/

https://bookmaniac.org/?p=5594

luzula

Day 28: Alibi sentence. Still lots of family time, now at my parents' place, so no farm news. How about you?

Tally:
( Read more... )
Day 27:

the_siobhan,

badly_knitted,

goddess47,

trobadora,

sylvanwitch,

sanguinity,

china_shop,

chestnut_pod

Day 28:

luzula,

china_shop

tielan

It went well.

I have finally worked out how to pav in this oven. Turn the heat waaaaaaaaay down to the lowest setting, then leave it for a couple of hours. Literally, a couple of hours.

I ended up doing it on Christmas morning and it worked beautifully!

( Christmas and Boxing Day )

Saturday I took entirely off, and Sunday I did some stuff around the house. The temps have calmed down a lot - to the point where I wasn't sleeping through the night unless I put an extra quilt on the bed - and so I could do some work I've been putting off for a while.

( of course it happens this week )

I should probably have some breakfast.

autobotscoutriella posting in

purimgifts

Five days left until Purimgifts 2026 signups open, which means today's countdown banner comes from 2021! Background only today, to avoid causing any date confusion, but it's still one of my favorites from our collection of past banners.

SIGNUPS & NOMINATIONS 2-9 Jan (anywhere in the world)
DEADLINE 23 Feb (anywhere in the world)
REVEALS 2-4 March
Find us on Dreamwidth, Livejournal, tumblr, and the Archive of Our Own.

shipperslist

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trobadora posting in

sid_guardian

Two years ago, I did a picspam/quiz about shoes and ever since then I've been meaning to do one for hands as well. There are so many striking close-ups, so many iconic moments - but also many not so easily recognised. And some great visual parallels/motifs. So let's have some fun with this!

The challenge: identify who's being depicted, and which scene it is!
Hard mode: without looking at the comments first. :p

Sometimes it's easy to tell who it is, but not necessarily when; sometimes if you know who, you know what scene it has to be. Please post your guesses in the comments!

Without further ado (as usual, click for full size): ( 44 pics to identify! )

I'll post the solution next weekend. Good luck, everyone! Looking forward to some guesses! Or if you're not playing, enjoy the picspam! :)

lydamorehouse

Mason bought me a solo RPG called The Bird Oracle for the holidays. I'm several days into it and just wanted to share a bit of my adventure. (Most of this will be under the cut, so those of you who would like to ignore it can.)

Here's a page from my journal:

The Bird Oracle journal sample

Image: sample page of my The Bird Oracle journal, where I've glued in a printed color photo of the nest I built, per instructions.

The basic premise is that I've inherited the cottage of the previous Bird Oracle and the job that comes with it, which is providing divinations for the people who write to me.

Initially, however, Jane (the mentor who left me this cottage) has given me various assignments to ease me into my new role I'm meant to take on. She's teaching me her mystical arts by asking questions I'm answering in my journal (pictured above). Previously, they've been things like what you can see if you expand the picture above where I'm supposed to think about what "egg" might mean to me and respond to a question like, "When do you feel protected?" This is all prep to lead me to coming up with my own definitions for bird-related divination prompts. Sometimes Jane comes with little crafting projects, like above, where I was asked to build a nest for Twigs, the carrier pigeon who also comes with the cottage. (I also later decided there are chickens, but I'll get into that in a second.)

I am not playing as Lyda, however, because, for me, that isn't role-playing. So, I've been feeling around for a character as I've been answering these questions. I finally hit on something as I was writing up my entry for "feather," which turned into an actual story. The only other thing I'll say about this above the cut is that I love playing villains, but RPGs are largely cooperative when played around a table (not all of them, obviously, but player v player isn't much fun when what you're playing is "let's all kill this dragon" or other such things where, you know, it's best if people have the same agenda.) In a solo RPG, I can choose evil.

I'm not choosing to be actively evil in this excerpt, but you can sort of see how it vibes like a villain's origin story (if you choose to read it.)

( Cut for potential boringness.... )

osprey_archer

A last-minute entry to movies I watched in 2025! When I popped into the library yesterday, there was Conclave sitting on the New DVDs shelf, so of course I snatched it up and took it right home and watched it.

Conclave is about a fictional modern-day conclave to elect a new pope, and I’ve been chomping at the bit to see it since it came out because… I guess I am just into movies about the Catholic church… I don’t fully understand this about myself. It may just be the aesthetic. Gold! Red! Shiny things! Lots of candles! One can criticize many things about the Catholic Church but by God they’ve got a look.

Anyway, cardinals converge on Rome, all wearing their cardinal gear, and if like me you enjoy things like aerial shots of cardinals carrying white parasols crossing the courtyard of a vast church complex, you will find great visual delight in this movie. And the movie doesn’t bog down in explaining things like the white parasols either. We don’t need to know why they’re part of the cardinal’s vestments.

The plot of the movie centers on the machinations to elect the new pope, featuring a bunch of guys who desperately want to be pope but also desperately need to pretend that they are being forced into pope candidacy against their will, because other people believe they are the best candidate. At one point in my life I would have scoffed at this hypocrisy, but having endured many years of Donald Trump on the public scene, I have come to believe that actually it’s quite politically useful for candidates to have to hang back until other people more or less drag them bodily into candidacy.

At the center of this is Ralph Fiennes, and I regret to inform you that I remember almost none of the character names from this movie, because I really struggle to tell people apart when they are all dressed the same and also all look pretty similar, in this case a bunch of old white guys with a smattering of old guys of other races.

Ralph Fiennes, as I was saying, is playing the guy who is in charge of making sure the election runs smoothly, and also perhaps awkwardly is one of the candidates - against his will, of course. (Perhaps slightly more sincerely against his will than some of the others.) I saw him about a year ago in the National Theater recording of Antony and Cleopatra, where he plays the sottish, running to seed, impulsive and still dangerous Antony, and his character here is just about the opposite in every way, which raised my respect for his acting ability even more.

He is calm, controlled, thoughtful, and deeply compassionate, a quality perhaps most clear in the scene where he points out to another cardinal that his hopes to be pope are toast. On the surface this action seems almost brutal, but that clarity allows the other cardinal to grieve his dreams in private, instead of hoping against hope and watching them get smashed in public.

An absorbing movie. I didn’t love it quite as much as I hoped to love it, but I greatly enjoyed watching it nonetheless.

jane_austens_world_feed

Posted by Vic

https://janeaustensworld.com/2025/12/28/dear-readers-merry-holiday-season-and-have-a-happy-new-years-eve/

http://janeaustensworld.com/?p=40889

Ah, ’tis the season for celebrations! And what a better way to recall our dear Jane’s 250th birthday celebration than during the month of December? This link leads you to a 2006 post of holiday celebrations Jane would have enjoyed. Then, this YouTube video features both Chawton Cottage and Chawton House, and will take you […]

https://janeaustensworld.com/2025/12/28/dear-readers-merry-holiday-season-and-have-a-happy-new-years-eve/

http://janeaustensworld.com/?p=40889

bluapapilio

[Official Site]

[Redeem Codes]

A Rainbow-Coloured Dream (Fina event):

It's always weird in these games when the MC starts talking for themselves with a personality you wouldn't necessarily choose when you're in control. Vita ribbing on Outsider so much is pretty funny though. X'D

Can't believe Vita took Fina outside without telling Outsider?? And she was 20 levels lower than the mobs, and Vita wasn't much help only using his sword.

I've always liked powers that can create from imagination, like Ronan's from The Raven Boys.

What were they doing with the kidnapped kids??

We didn't get all the details about what happened with the Glennvilles, I wonder if we'll get it with an Outsider quest?

Meeting Zhiliu:

*smh* That ticket seller in the theatre digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole. Hope he gets fired. "Thoughtless lips invite trouble." you mean loose lips ink ships? X'D

Lol why is Snow standing off to the side in the viewing box, there's plenty of room on the seat. How come it played Phantasio's singing when it was Violetta singing? They could've just played the melody without the voice.

Zhiliu's phoxichor sensor reacted to Vita? 🤔

I don't care one way or another for her design.

Mood: irate

cosmolinguist

I've had a week and a day off and I have slept so much!!

Despite last night itself not being great for sleep, I am starting to wonder if I have actually caught up on sleep.

Because a strange feeling has overcome me this evening and I think it's...boredom? I am used to keeping myself busy after dinner doing chores, reading, or just trying not to go to sleep until bedtime.

But now I've done enough stuff for the day -- went to the gym with angelofthenorth, had a shower, fetched the now-empty recycling bin and put it back where it belongs, walked Teddy, put groceries away when they arrived -- and I'm not that tired.

Is...is this when people do hobbies??

shipperslist

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

oursin

Last week's bread held out adequately.

On Wednesday I made Angel Biscuit dough (this year I had active dried yeast) which was enough to provide for Christmas, Boxing Day and Saturday morning breakfast. Turned out rather well.

For Christmas dinner we had: starter of steamed asparagus with halved hardboiled quails' eggs and salmon caviar; followed by pheasant pot-roasted with bacon, brandy, and madeira and served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat, garlic-roasted tenderstem broccoli (as noted with previous recent tenderstem broccoli, wish to invoke Trades Description Act re actual tenderness of stem), and red cabbage (bought-in, as not only is it an Almighty Faff, making it from scratch would involve ending up with A Hell of A Lot of Red Cabbage). Then bought-in Christmas puds with brandy butter and clotted cream.

Boxing Day lunch: blinis with smoked salmon, smoked Loch trout, and the remaining salmon caviar, and creme fraiche with horseradish cream, and a salad of lamb's lettuce and grilled piccarello pepper strips, in a walnut oil and damson vinegar dressing. Followed by mince pies.

Yesterday lunch was the leftover blinis and smoked fish. For yesterday evening meal I made the remains of the pheasant into a pilaff, served with a green salad.

Today's lunch: chestnut mushrooms quartered in olive oil, white-braised green beans and cut up piccarello peppers, the Phul-Gobi (braised cauliflower) from Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery, and blinis made up from the last of the batter, a bit past its best.

florianschild posting in

snowflake_challenge

Happy Snowflake Season to all! As we prepare to kick off the 2026 challenge, please feel free to promo this event within your own circles. You are welcome to use any of these new banners and icons that I've created to include with your post. You can copy the code from the text box below the banner to use it where you like!

Icons:

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Icon table generated by Chlor's Icon Table Generator

Banners!

( More Banners Below the Cut )

vvalkyri

I very much appreciate Marmota and Trowa Barton sending me pictures from Boston, and I've got some people I should send messages to.

It does look like it was a great party and I hope to reconnect with the post posts at some point and I had a pretty good day after all yesterday. It's not a bunch of time on the phone with a couple people and then
Tarek came here to pick me up and we first went swimming and then used the showers and then drove out there and got there part way through the lesson and if he hadn't kept disappearing I might have wanted to leave a lot earlier but I had some very good dances and met some cool people and got much more of an idea of bachata and even got a little Acro in. The instructor may try finding Acro.

Speaking of acro, it's 2:00 to 6:00 today and I was not planning on getting there anywhere near that early and I still have some goo in my hair that I need to wash out and I still need to actually eat anything...

Getting to sleep at 6:00 was not clever. And part of that was putting goo in my hair when I first got inside.

dianec42

We had a bunch of friends over for Boxing Day snacks and socializing. This gave Mr Diane an excuse to bake ONE BILLION SNACKS, with the added bonus of leftovers for the rest of the year. It was great to see people and hang out. What with holiday baking and the attendant cleanup, plus some lousy weather, I was going a bit stir crazy. Snacks and socializing were a hit; I think this will become a tradition.

The up side of all that cleaning and tidying is that the house is now somewhat more pleasant to do stuff in (especially the kitchen). The down side is that I managed to put a few things in "safe places" and I'm not sure I've found everything yet.

The first rule of Retirement Club is ~~there are no rules~~ ~~don't talk about Retirement Club~~ I need to have some structure or I will never leave the house.

Some rough ideas for structure:
1. (With Mr Diane) Go out hiking once a week (snowshoeing counts as hiking);
2. Try at least one new location, food, or activity every week;
3. Every day, do something I didn't do yesterday;
4. Every day, SKIP DOING at least one thing I did yesterday;
5. DO NOT VOLUNTEER FOR ANYTHING FOR AT LEAST A MONTH! Seriously. I've met me. I WILL overcommit and burn myself out if I don't watch it;
6. Have some long-term goals as well as short-term activities;
7. Do stuff with Mr Diane;
8. Do stuff WITHOUT Mr Diane.

Activities so far have included yoga class and Open Knit (yes, cross stitch is also allowed). I still need to check out the senior center, the sports center, the Y, activities at the library and the museum, and actually GO to the library and the museum. Yes, I have a spreadsheet.

Speaking of structure, for 2026 I'm going to try a premade planner and skip doing a bullet journal. I've mainly been using the bullet journal in its capacity of "it's a free-form planner for people who don't like any of the planners sold in the shops". I've been doing some habit trackers but that's tailed off in the last few months. I just can't be arsed doing all the setup any more. I got a cute Pusheen weekly/monthly planner off my wish list this Christmas, which includes space for notes and 2 pages for 2027 planning, so I'm going to give that a go.

I should write up a 2025 "year in review" thingy, but honestly 2025 kind of stunk in a lot of ways so I might not bother.

Mood: lazy

boxofdelights posting in

wiscon

This year has been an amazing year for WisCon, all thanks to our volunteers & supporters! Drop one goal you have for the new year. We’ll see you in 2026 for WisCon Online!

#WisCon #WomeninSFF #feministconvention

malurette

Titre : Croque, la nourrissante histoire de la vie
Auteures : Aleksandra Mizienli&nacuteska & Daniel Mizienli&nacuteski
Langue : traduction française du polonais
Type : album jeunesse
Genre : leçon de choses

1ère parution : 2010
Édition : Rue du monde
Format :

(offert par ma mère et mon petit frère au petit neveu pour Noël)

Le style graphique est wow!!

Une fleur pousse, elle est mangée par un herbivore, qui est mangé par un carnivore, qui meurt et dont le corps nourrit le système, et ainsi de suite...
(on épure légèrement les choses en disant que les prédateurs sont morts de vieillesse ; en réalité c'est plus souvent de maladie ou d'accidents mais)

Je ne sais pas ce qu'en pensera l'enfant à qui il est destiné mais tous les adultes qui l'ont lu l'ont trouvé très très bien !

Kiddie book explaining the cycle of life through a few loops, an incredible artwork.

sistawendy

Took a ride share* last night to chez D, whose house was as I expected stuffed with first-rate baked goods, plus too many well-dressed people. It's only too many becasue D's house is about the same size as mine, and her parties routinely have at least twice as many people as have ever been in my place at once.

D and her friends can bake, boy howdy, and every horizontal surface had either quality baked goods, largely made by D, or a punch bowl accurately labeled "high octane".

Got to talk to Diminutive. She has a writing project afoot, for which I'll keep my antennae up. I asked her how she wasn't melting in that gorgeous black velvet confection she was wearing. "I'm always cold," she said. She does have the sort of build that loses heat well.

Queen J congratulated me on my impending surgery, and thanked me for Dr. D's name. I warned her that only my mother's death put him within my reach. She's had a hard time the last year and a half, but has gotten through it.

Cuties. Queerness unknown. Well, also known queers, but they're mainly taken.

It wasn't tremendously late when the heat finally got to me. Yes, me, the Florida girl. I was in bed by 2330. Je ne regrette rien.

Jealous of the hostess with the mostest, looking fabulous in '50s retro? Me? Not as much as you might think. I'm not about to take up baking, because in the words of my father, I'd just eat it.

*D only lives about two miles from my place, but it's really awkward to get to & from on a bus, involving either a monster hill, a long wait, or both. It also cooled of last night.

Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Music: Sunshine Jones, "Home"

troisoiseaux

2025 has been a fabulous year for Batshit British Crime Thrillers: shows that can be best described as why must TV be good? Is it not enough to watch a haggardly hot, grumpy British guy have a really bad week?, with a tidy 6-8 episodes, really good actors, and wildly implausible plots.

Dept. Q stars Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck, an acerbic police detective in Scotland reassigned to investigate cold cases with a misfit team while recovering from physical and emotional trauma. The plot is completely bonkers and impossible to talk about without major spoilers, because the first episode ends with the reveal of what happened to ambitious prosecutor Merritt Lingard, whose disappearance Morck and co. are investigating: ( ... ) There's also definitely a vibe of maybe the real mystery was the friends we made along the way; the fact it closes with an instrumental cover of Radical Face's "Welcome Home, Son" really captures the emotional tone. So, yeah, 10/10, had a great time watching this.

Lazarus stars Sam Claflin as Dr. Joel "Laz" Lazarus, a forensic psychologist who is either having a mental breakdown in the wake of his father's apparent suicide and unresolved grief over his twin sister's unsolved murder twenty years earlier, or is being haunted by the ghosts of cold-case victims from his home town, leading him to investigate their deaths and whether they were related to his father's and sister's. ( Spoilers! ) This show is, objectively, not very good - it ends with multiple twists so stupid I did laugh out loud - but I actually really enjoyed the timey-wimey-ness of it, between the concept of flashback-based hauntings - the ghosts, when they appear to Laz, seem to think they are a. alive and b. having therapy sessions with Laz's father - and the way the show cuts between the characters as adults in the present day and the teenagers they'd been when Laz's sister was murdered. The big names in the cast are, of course, Claflin, and Bill Nighy as the late Dr. Lazarus Sr., but I was delighted to see Edward Hogg as the twitchy town loner who has lived under suspicion of Laz's sister's murder for decades, and David Fynn - who I've mostly seen as the goofier characters in Shakespearean comedies - in a more serious role as Laz's childhood friend, now a local police detective; I was unfamiliar with Alexandra Roach, who stole the show as Laz's wounded, woo-woo surviving sister.

Black Doves is technically stretching the definition a bit, as it's from 2024 and more of a spy thriller, co-starring Keira Knightley as a spy ten years' deep into her cover as the wife of a rising politician and Ben Whishaw as an assassin with a broken heart; I'd procrastinated on watching this for a full year, which actually meant I watched it at the best possible time (i.e., last week, over Christmas) because it is specifically set at Christmas. (Move over, Die Hard!) Absolutely spaghetti-at-the-wall plot - it's conspiracies all the way down, ( vague spoilers ) - and everyone in it is, like, so bad at the first rule of Being A Spy (don't freaking tell people you're a spy!!!) but both Knightley and Whishaw act the hell out of their roles and the writing is fun and there were a bunch of other great characters, including the incomparable Kathryn Hunter as a London crime boss and a delightful pair of snarky zillennial hitwomen.

sixbeforelunch

This one has a great premise, excellent characterization, and is a lot of fun.

Q Switcheroo (10660 words) by V_NUS
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: William Riker & Ro Laren
Characters: William Riker, Ro Laren, Geordi La Forge, Data (Star Trek), Q (Star Trek), Beverly Crusher, Deanna Troi, Miles O'Brien, Jean-Luc Picard, Worf (Star Trek:TNG/DS9), Guinan (Star Trek)
Additional Tags: Mission Fic, Canon Compliant, Takes place between Disaster (5x05) and Conundrum (5x14), POV Multiple, Bodyswap, Enemies to Friends, Bajoran Culture (Star Trek), Q Being Q (Star Trek), Minor William Riker/Deanna Troi
Summary:

Q is sick of listening to Commander Riker and Ensign Ro arguing. To fix this, he forces them to swap bodies-- and if anyone finds out what's happened, they'll be stuck as each other forever...

jadelennox

Some Yuletide recs. I am saving a bunch of longer stories and some that are puzzles for when I have more focus.

( Deadloch, Dragonriders of Pern, Lively St. Lemeston, Nettle & Bone, Some Desperate Glory, The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, The Good Place, The Lottery, The Residence )

creepy_shetan posting in

comment_fic

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Hi, c'mon in! We hope you're enjoying the holiday season. ^_^ It's time for the last Lonely Prompts adoption day of 2025. If this is your first time at

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How to link:
[a href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/449155.html?thread=70682755#t70682755">MCU, Tony Stark/Pepper Potts, She's wearing daisy dukes and one of his button-down shirts.[/a]
(change the brackets to "<" and ">" respectively)
or:
http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/139897.html?thread=30155641#t30155641
Burn Notice, Sam/Michael/Fi, "It's always been you. And it's always gonna be you."

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rebeccmeister

At some point after I met

scrottie, he showed me his potato ricer and the special rolling pin he has for making lefse, that Norwegian specialty food. I'd heard a bit about lefse from another friend of mine with Norwegian heritage, but really didn't know much more than all that. Fast forward, and just about every year there's a period of eager anticipation for the arrival of a special package from his mother and sister, containing lefse.

Describing lefse is tricky.

( blah blah blah lefse lefse lefse )

celli

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