shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
[personal profile] shadaras
(I have recalled that one can title posts and that once upon a time I did that more frequently xD should get into the habit again, it's fun)

1.
The storm will be rolling in today (probably snowfall starting late morning/noontime), with projected snowfall of over a foot, heaviest in the late evening/early night.

It is unlikely that I will be working tomorrow, based on this. It was one of the big things folk were talking about on Friday! "Do you think you'll make it in on Monday?" on everyone's lips, and the answer was usually "idk, depends on the plows/roads" with a side of "it'd be cool if the work site shut down though, then we could just relax and not think about it".

New England is pretty good about dealing with snow, so I'm not particularly worried about the storm. Got grocery shopping done ahead of time, I live in an apartment that's fairly well insulated, etc. Shouldn't need to go anywhere until the snow has stopped and the streets are clear.

(A police car just drove slowly down the street, siren on, for the purpose of annoying the people who left their cars on the wrong side of the street into moving said cars to places that abide by the parking ban. I expect that in another hour I might see tow trucks if they haven't. This doesn't happen for normal snow bans—the plows just go around them and leave them a bit buried in snow—but, well, this storm is RATHER BIG and I see why the city would rather that not happen.)

2.
At work on Friday, end of the day, I was about to wrap up when the back door for one of the elevators opened (this is the one that we Do Not Use) and the woman who operates it stuck her head out and was like "I haven't seen you at all today! How're you doing?" at me.

I proceeded to have a Very Normal Conversation with her and then, after she left, my coworker/cohortmate was like "were you FLIRTING with her?" and I was like "No??? Just because you (probably) do doesn't mean I am?"

however upon further review I'm like "yeah no the way I interact with her absolutely could be read as flirting" and also a bit "huh she did not need to start that conversation at ALL", so, you know. (I am not opposed to flirting with her, she's cute, I'm just. too aro for this. xD in a "flirting is fun but it's not going to be serious" way.)

(also there's a bit of me going "god if I'm gonna have cute women flirt with me I want them to be queer, and I present as a dude at work in a way that means I do not expect people to realise I'm not cis/that a woman flirting with me should be a queer act" with this. like. I pass. I do not really care to and in some ways do not wish to, but it sure is useful/safe to know that to most people I'm just another dude working at a construction site.)

3.
At class on Wednesday night (I do not like evening classes! never have!) I was bored for like... all of class... because I already understood what we were going to be doing (I knew this from the week before). Which meant I was drawing, because Why Not. Pencil and paper, that day, because it was a practical class and having a sketchbook out was simpler than having a tablet out.

The teacher, when he came over to be like "so you're bored", was like "nice art", and then one of my classmates was like "wait, is this what you do during class all the time? I thought you were taking notes. you're good!" and another was like "dang, why didn't you go to art school?"

It's... odd. I do not think about my art as particularly good, due to having friends who do art at a (semi)pro level and following a lot of pro artists' work. But yes, objectively I am a Skilled Hobbyist? I can generally draw things that look like what I want to draw? If I focused on practice (especially doing life drawing studies) I'd get better faster but... I'm still pretty good at this, yeah.

Anyway during class yesterday I took the design I was working out on Wednesday ("that looks like Nami from League of Legends", one classmate said, which I do not think is true except for the "looks like a water-person" aspects, but that's sweet anyway.) and drew him out in color to see the design better.

At some point I will name him (his baby name is Sunshine, I think, but that's not his name) and he only exists as a baby/child during the timeline as currently established, though I drew him as an adult, and I still need to write the story about his parents (and when they accidentally conceive him) but hey, here's my pretty boy who's even quarters of dragon/orc/triton/elf. xD (mild nsfw? no clothes but also no detailed genitals and no intended sexiness.)

two images under cut )

4.
My friend and I have started watching The Story of Yanxi Palace, one of [personal profile] tavina's recs, and we are delighted by it. Mostly we're pointing at Our Protagonist (Wei Yingluo) going "THE AUTISM OF IT ALL" (occasionally going "haha she and Maomao [The Apothecary Diaries] would be so fun to watch interact"). We're also going "look at this bitch! (positive)" about Noble Consort Gao, wanting good things for Empress Fuca, and contemplating how bored Emperor Qianlong seems while bemoaning Qing Dynasty Men's Hair. (He has a very nice smile! He looks good bald! Except then we see his hair and sigh loudly.)

We're only three episodes in and Yingluo has already caused so much chaos and trouble. It's great. This is such a wildly different vibe from the last show we watched (The Story of Minglan), but both shows are gorgeous and care so much about MATERIAL GOODS and this one in particular is set in a SPECIFIC TIME in such a way that one could in fact look up more about the styles of dress and meaning of earrings/hairstyles/etc.

5.
I thought I had another thing xD uhhhhh some rapid-fire stuff since apparently I don't want single-paragraph sections otherwise:

a.
Still slowly watching ST:DSC. xD s3e4 was a meditation on how Trill work now and how Adira is a very cute character but also very much A Teen and meant to be relatable to teens more than me, an adult. More interested by how Discovery has a personality and watching the bridge crew (plus Georgiou) have a dinner party that goes bad and then make up with each other. And Michael not following strict Starfleet protocol.

b.
Reminded myself, this week, of the difference between talking on the phone for "migraine means I can't look at screens but I am BORED and I wanna talk to you" reasons vs "I am awake and wanna hang out with you but there's stuff I gotta do that requires my body but hey I can talk on the phone while I do that" reasons. It's a lot nicer when one's a person and not a lump, oddly! One feels a lot more like they're participating equally in the conversation that way! Wow! Such surprise!

c.
The remix event ([community profile] seasonalremix) that [personal profile] hafnia and I are running got SEVEN WHOLE SIGNUPS (including the two of us), which is tbh pretty good for the first time we're doing the event and how it's a rather atypical sign-up/event structure (and that we weren't promoing it particularly hard). It's a good number for hand-matching, too, since there's variety but not an overwhelming amount of data to sift through. Excited to see how it'll shake out!

d.
I wanna work more on writing Rhei and Ames' story (since, y'know, I now know what their son is gonna look like :P), and as part of that have started writing down my mental outline/figuring out a timeline. Might post excerpts here as I write, once I get to actually writing? It's fun sharing things as I go! And also with dw I do not need to worry about character limits the way I sharing bits with friends on discord. xD
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for [community profile] threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

Check In: Day 24

Jan. 24th, 2026 05:34 pm
glitteringstars: (writing)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Happy Saturday!

How was writing today? How about this week?

Challenge # 486: Feeling Blue

Jan. 24th, 2026 06:00 pm
badly_knitted: (Drabble-Zone)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] drabble_zone

This week's challenge is:


Feeling Blue


Reminder of Rules

Entries should be 100, 200, or 300 words exactly, excluding titles and headers.
Please place the body of your entry behind a cut.
Tag with the appropriate Challenge, Fandom, Type, and Ratings tags. If a tag for your fandom doesn't exist, leave a request on the Tag Request post and I'll create the tags you need. You can request as many fandom tags as you want.
You don't need to use the challenge word or phrase in your drabble, though you can if you like.
Each challenge ends when the new challenge is posted, but if you're a few days late that's still fine.

NEW RULE: DOUBLE AND TRIPLE DRABBLES ARE ALSO ACCEPTED ;)

Have fun!




jjhunter: silhouetted woman by winding black road; blank ink tinted with green-blue background (silhouetted JJ by winding road)
[personal profile] jjhunter
Unbreaking Team @ the Unbreaking: This week at Unbreaking, January 16
Beginning in late November and escalating through early January, the Trump administration has sent 3,000 ICE and CBP agents into Minneapolis–St. Paul. For comparison, the “Operation Midway Blitz” surge in Chicago deployed about 300 federal immigration agents. The Chicago metro area’s population is roughly 2.5 times the size of the Twin Cities’, so the Minneapolis–St. Paul operation has sent about 10 times as many enforcers into a much smaller population center.

Kelly Hayes @ Organizing My Thoughts: Choosing Each Other in a Time of Terror
Trump is waging war on our communities, and we don’t need “better training” for our attackers.

Scott Meslow @ the Verge: How much can a city take?
The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back.

Fred Glass @ Jacboin: The Citywide General Strike Has a Rich History in America
In response to the killing of Renee Good and the ICE invasion, the Minneapolis labor movement has issued the nation’s first citywide general strike call in nearly 80 years

Andrea Pitzer @ Degenerate Art: Into the abyss
You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.


ETA: Naomi Kritzer @ Will Tell Stories For Food: How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota
If You’d Like to Donate Money
Contact Your Senators/House Rep
Write a Letter to the Editor
Hassle ICE-Supporting Businesses
To Learn More About What’s Going On in Minnesota, Read Minnesotan News Sources
Push Back on Disinformation
Send Words of Encouragement
Get Ready For This Bullshit to Come to You
Talk About Immigration, and Make it Clear You Think It’s GOOD

Pilgrimage, private life, mortality

Jan. 23rd, 2026 10:21 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
[personal profile] sovay
On a theory, I believe, of sustaining me on literature, my parents very unexpectedly presented me with my own copy of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), which seems to have shipped from the UK as if the international post just worked.

Well, here we are, the 29th of July, 1940. What have we done with all the years since 1918? Armistice night in Piccadilly Circus is so vivid in the memory, it seems like last Wednesday week. What did happen to all those years – and what have we done with them? It seems we are back where we began. Anyway, there it is on the calendar, July 1940, and this war has been on for eleven months. And I am in London speaking these words, and when I am finished talking to you I shall go out of this building, past sandbags and bayonets, into streets of medieval blackness. As I hunt for the two pin-points of light that represent a taxi it will be about two a.m. here, which is nine in the evening your time, and I shan't be able to resist a thought of the dazzling glare which at that moment is lighting the sky above New York's Great White Way. I daresay there isn't an Englishman alive who is more familiar than I with Broadway at nine o'clock on a summer's evening.

maythe4th: (Default)
[personal profile] maythe4th posting in [community profile] maythe4thbewithyou
Profile: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Maythe4thBeWithYou2026/profile

Schedule:
(all times are 23:59 UTC unless noted -- dates may be on a different calendar day for you due to time zones)
Feb 6 - Feb 20: Nominations
Feb 13 - Feb 21: Sign ups
Apr 18: Early default deadline
Apr 25: Assignments due
Apr 26 - May 3: Pinch hits, treats, last minute flailing and panic
May 4 00:01 UTC: Works go live
May 11 00:01 UTC: Creators revealed


May the 4th 2026 Archive | May the 4th 2026 Tag Set | Sign Up Form | Requests Summary | Grab Bag | Automagic App List of Requests | Treat Tracker Spreadsheet


Contact the mods by replying to posts or by email: maythe4thmod@gmail.com

(no subject)

Jan. 22nd, 2026 09:51 pm
marginaliana: Love (Love)
[personal profile] marginaliana
Why can't I be into the gay hockeys? Why must I be tortured by a tiny fandom that was in its prime 10 years ago? And yet the heart wants what the heart wants.

Iceberg (1075 words) by marginaliana
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sorted (Website) RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James Currie/Ben Ebbrell
Characters: James Currie, Ben Ebbrell
Additional Tags: The Last Bite special, bow ties
Summary:

The Last Bite live weekend special: Saturday night, the Community Case Files segment. Drinks before dinner - Kush has made Bloody Marys and given them a ridiculous name. Ben unfastens his bow tie. James has an emotional revelation.

sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but [personal profile] thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

These sisters waiting to wear their own clothes. )

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.

Check In: Day 22

Jan. 22nd, 2026 11:42 am
glitteringstars: (writing)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hi-hi~!

How did writing go today?

Discussion question: do you have any go-to writing tips you'd like to share?

No, I'll build a cute flower border

Jan. 21st, 2026 11:39 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
In the midst of everything, we still have birthdays, and for [personal profile] spatch's fifty-first I took him to Porter Square Books and on the roundabout way home we collected dinner from Il Casale. It started to snow on the way back, the light salting flakes of an all-day deep-freeze. I have my fingers crossed for an Arctic explosion this weekend.



I have written another fill (AO3) for [community profile] threesentenceficathon. WERS played Dave Herlihy's "Good Trouble" (2025) and I had to get home to trace his voice to Boston's own post-punk O Positive. I wish I could call the hundred-year tides against the people who have no right to the streets of my grandparents' city. Failing that, it still matters to be alive.

Check In: Day 21

Jan. 21st, 2026 08:09 pm
glitteringstars: (ttrpg)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello all!

How was writing today?

wednesday reads and things

Jan. 21st, 2026 05:42 pm
isis: (vikings: lagertha)
[personal profile] isis
What I've recently finished reading:

The Bear and the Serpent, the second book of the Echoes of the Fall series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. As with most books that have multiple storylines and POVs, there were parts I liked better than others; I was more interested in Loud Thunder's adventures as reluctant war leader (and Lone Mountain's journey to the coast) than I was in the goings-on of the River Lords. However, I really liked the bits of cultural worldbuilding there as well, particularly the Wolf priest and the Snake priest(ess) coming to an understanding, and the uneasy relationship of Asmander and Asman which sort of echoed that between Maniye and Akrit Stone River.

Toward the end, it became clear that this series ties into the Shadows of the Apt series, which I had read the first book of (Empire in Black and Gold) a while back, but didn't really feel inclined to continue. So when I finished, I grabbed book 2, Dragonfly Falling, but it only took me a few chapters before I had the "yeah, nah" feeling again, so I guess I won't read that series.

What I'm reading now:

I was about to buy book 3 but then my library hold on Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo came in unexpectedly quickly ([personal profile] wychwood had reviewed it and it sounded up my alley) so I'm reading that now - hey, it's got people who turn into animals too!

What I've recently finished watching:

S2 of The Empress, which was really enjoyable. The setting of a great power in decline desperately trying to hold onto its glory through ill-advised military ventures is great escapism from...oh, never mind. They do have more magnificent dresses, though!

Actually one thing that struck me about this series is that although the women are formally valued only in their ability to produce boy babies, the narrative highlights their strength, the way they are the iron rods stapling things together. They may be swaddled in yards of cloth that make it difficult to run through the forest, but Elisabeth goes out and looks the people in the eye and talks to them, Sophie has a place at the council table, Charlotte gives Maximilian advice (and he listens) - well, they all give men advice, and the men ignore them at their peril.

What I'm playing now:

Still Ghost of Tsushima. Getting close to the end of the first part, I think!

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