From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.
Fandom: Star Trek AOS (Reboot) Pairings/Characters: Kirk/inappropriateness, hints of Kirk/Spock Rating: Teen + Length: 3,235 for the fic, 23 minutes for the podfic Creator Links:insaneidiotreena_jenkins Theme: Working Together
Summary: The crew of the Enterprise is subjected to a compulsory seminar on Inappropriate Workplace Behavior, and Jim Kirk finds this to be particularly challenging.
Content notes: In addition to Kirk being inappropriate in the ways one might expect from canon, the seminar leader is stereotyped in a way that might be considered offensive.
Reccer's Notes: I'm reccing both the story and the podfic here because the story is only on LJ, and the writer does not seem to be active anymore. The podficcer, however, is still around, and the pod is hosted on AO3, which may be more accessible for some. It is also the way I first encountered this story.
Now that we have all that out of the way, I can gush about how hilarious this story is because Jim Kirk + Starfleet bullshit is fertile territory, and I always laugh really loudly when listening to the podfic. Jim is so deeply wounded by any attempt to rein in his obnoxiousness, inappropriateness, and mouthiness. The best thing about this fic, though, is Jim's relationship with his crew. Throughout the seminar, we see the dynamics play out, and it becomes clear that the seminar was put together for a very different kind of workplace and a very different kind of crew. As Jim puts it: "All the team unity and 'synergy' exercises in the universe aren’t going to build real trust or strong relationships amongst a crew."
As you might expect, Jim gets kicked down a couple notches by the seminar leader, but the tables turn in an unexpected way by the end of the seminar.
Reena, as usual, does a wonderful job with the podfic.
Taken on 9 June 2024 at 07:21 US Eastern Daylight Time:
Taken on 27 June 2025 at 19:46 US Eastern Daylight Time:
Taken on 27 June 2025 at 19:47 US Eastern Daylight Time:
Taken on 2 July 2025 at 19:43 US Eastern Daylight Time:
This gradually took shape across the parking lot from a local Asian fusion restaurant over 2024; between recovering from Hurricane Ian and the COVID quarantine, changing hands, and changing formats (from the mid-century Cantonese-American the original owners had served for forty years to a pan-Asian combination of sushi, ramen, and Chinese), they’d spent the previous couple years uneasily gaining their bearings.
The garden’s proximity to the street, along with the lack of any obvious receptacle for offerings, makes it clear that this is an ornamental rather than devotional site. (A Web search indicates the presence of a local Buddhist temple, but the address is a private residence, and home worship services are for who they’re for, not for curiosity-gawking spiritual tourists.)
My guess is that the white-flowering shrubs are Star Jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), aka Confederate Jasmine, Chinese Star Jessamine, and Trader’s Compass, native to warm regions in South and East Asia, and widely planted in the Southeastern U.S. The flowers’ heady indolic fragrance is prized in perfumery, but I’m afraid I haven’t the right sensory range to enjoy them.
today was a hard one. everything felt heavy and off-kilter, and finding glimmers wasn’t easy — but it felt important. small anchors, even if they’re a little wobbly.
🛏️ I had a proper lie-in this morning. Didn’t rush, didn’t feel guilty. Just let myself rest, and it felt right.
🍃 My Isabelle plushie was soft and solid and there when I needed grounding during a panic attack. Small comfort, big anchor.
📝 Coming back to blogging has felt really good — like reclaiming a piece of myself. Even better, I’ve been getting some lovely comments that have made me feel seen and appreciated.
That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛 Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.
Here are items with dates between Sunday, July 6th and Saturday, July 12th, as well as items added recently that started this past week. Remember, you can comment here on new items that need to be added to the list.
Items starting since the last update & this coming week
Remember: For anything Harry Potter fandom related, please refer to the Potterfests community on Dreamwidth or on LiveJournal. Additionally, there is a new community called vocab_drabbles (located here) that does weekly drabbles based on a vocabulary word.
Title: “I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you” (still uncertain if I'm going to run out of plot bunnies or Taylor Swift lyrics for tennis rps fic - all but about 5 fics so far have her lyrics for titles)
This one started because I fell asleep watching a booktuber absolutely eviscerate the worldbuilding in romantasy — like, full destruction with timestamps and citations - and dreamed up two booktubers who get into a feud over it. Duelling videos, increasingly petty reading challenges, and unsubtle one-star reviews. It was meant to be a joke, and then, of course, it turned into a slow burn.
Carlos is the chaotic romantasy lover with warm lighting and overexcited hand gestures. Jannik is the dry fantasy purist who edits his videos like he’s building a cathedral. Their video styles hate each other. They are, obviously, soulmates.
It’s still early days - I've written and posted Jannik's opening video, I'm editing Carlos’ first response - but I’m having so much fun with the format. It’s another one where I’m playing with a different style: mixing prose with video transcripts, comment threads, DMs, and maybe even playlists later on. It feels like a multimedia fic without quite going full AO3 PowerPoint mode.
These are made in NZ so only of interest to the tiny no. of Kiwis using the comm, I'm sure.
I tried Quality Bakers Muffin Splits - pre-sliced English muffins, advertised as GF and sourdough. The flours are Tapioca Starch, Flour (Rice, Soy), Maize Starch. They contain egg white powder so aren't vegan.
Pros: nicely crisp crust - they toast well and taste okay. Cons: a little on the thin side, and although said to contain sourdough, I couldn't taste any.
Overall: acceptable but a bit unexciting. I still prefer bagels. :)
Fandom: DC Universe; Sandman Pairings/Characters: Gen; Morpheus, Alan Scott, Tomar-Re, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, OCs by the billions (including Reader?) Rating: General Audiences Length: 297 Content Notes: Nothing icky happens, but the story references Neil Gaiman’s Endless mythos;(1) dream transcript. Creator Links: (Website): https://leighwoosey.co.uk/; (Instagram) leighwoosey; (LiveJournal) woogledesigns; (Twitter) Leighwoosey
Theme: Working Together, Action/Adventure, Gen, Just Plain Fun, Non-AO3 Fics
Summary:One for Sandman fans: I had a dream of Morpheus, who saw an invasion of earth that would go through the dreaming to reach target. Morpheus, who foresaw the plan even as it was being dreamt up by the aliens, was obligated to mount a defense. He recruited two sleeping Green Lanterns, one of Alan Scott of Earth and one Tomar-Re.
Author’s Notes:People are always telling me to keep a dream diary, this is a concession.
Reccer's Notes: Raw dream content notoriously tends to be some-assembly-required narrative material, but in a 29 August 2010 LiveJournal post(2), Woosey described this downright jackpot he received from Dreamland: a cool premise complete with plot, grand spectacle, a firm grounding in the canon lore (note the smooth incorporation of the various Elseworlds Batman scenarios), implicit invitation to the audience (what would you have been doing during the Big Event?) and a clear if haunting resolution. The title is my own metaquotes header.
I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.
I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.
He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.
three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today
💇♀️ Got my ( hair dyed magenta! ) Bright, bold, and very me — it’s always a bit of a transformation, and it felt good to see that vivid colour in the mirror again.
🎾 Jannik Sinner, Ben Shelton, Grigor Dimitrov, and Mirra Andreeva all won their Wimbledon matches today — every one of them brought something joyful to watch.
🍔 Takeout burgers for dinner. We were completely wiped — two hours at the hairdresser left us sore, dysregulated, and done. The burgers weren’t fancy, but they were warm and easy and enough.
That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛 Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.
Challenge #2 Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.
☀️ The Romance of Summer: A Love Letter to Tennis When I saw the prompt What do you love? My first instinct was to be clever. Say something seasonal and tidy. Ice lollies. Sea air. The feeling of sunlight on your knees through the window. But the real answer is louder and messier and always true:
I love tennis.
Not just in summer. All year round. In slow January slogs and awkward 4 a.m. matches because they're in Australia. In rain delays and early exits. But in summer, on the clay at Roland Garros, on the grass at Wimbledon, it blooms. Everything gets bigger. Brighter. Louder. The highs hit higher. The heartbreaks sting sharper.
I love the weird rhythm of a tennis summer. The shift from clay to grass. The way I measure time by who’s still standing on a Friday afternoon. I love the ritual of it: cold drinks, strawberries & cream & prosecco, the particular way sunlight falls across the floor during a 5-setter I wasn’t planning to get invested in. I love the commentary, the chaos, and the wild narratives we build between matches. I love players who break my heart and players I can’t stop watching.
I love how tennis reminds me I still feel things at full volume. That I can cry over a match I knew they were going to lose. That I can believe, right until match point, that maybe this time it’ll be different.
Tennis is stupid and beautiful and exhausting and sometimes the only thing that cuts through the fog in my brain.
It doesn't always love me back. It overwhelms me. It distracts me. It makes me anxious and angry and euphoric and sleepless. But every season, every surface, I come back. I love it wildly. I love it anyway.
Every summer, I fall in love with it again. Even when I swear I won’t.
Four works new to me. One is SF, two fantasy, and the magazine (which I have not yet looked inside) likely both. Two of the novels are series novels, one does not seem to me.
It's Book Swap Day* at the library. Last time I was lucky and found both volumes of a book by one of my favourite authors. This time I came out with almost the whole Masters of Rome series plus a bonus one about Troy, all by Colleen McCullough. Only the last one is missing from the Masters of Rome series. I'm sure I can source that some other how when I get that far. There's a lot of text to get through first. I have never actually read anything by this author before, but hey, there's literally nothing to lose by not trying and if I don't like them, they can just go back again.
*This is awesome. They do it I think once a month. You can donate books you don't want anymore (there are a few exceptions that they don't want) and you can take any books that seem interesting to you. It doesn't cost anything and you don't have to bring a book to take a book. I've found some gold nuggets there! (And a few regrets. Last time I stupidly didn't take the full set of 1001 Nights. 16 volumes. I think they were even illustrated. I don't know what I was thinking)
On the normality front, our street is full of cracks and bangs and whooshes from fireworks set off around the neighborhood, none so far combustibly. Otherwise I spent this Fourth of July with my husbands and my parents and eleven leaves of milkweed on which the monarch seen fluttering around the yard this afternoon had left her progeny. My hair still smells like grill smoke. Due to the size of one of the hamburgers, I folded it over into a double-decker with cheese and avocado and chipotle mayo and regret nothing about the hipster Dagwood sandwich. A quantity of peach pie and strawberries and cream were highlights of the dessert after a walk into the Great Meadows where the black water had risen under the boardwalk and the water lilies were growing in profusion from the last, droughtier time we had passed that way. I do not know the species of bird that has built a nest in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen, but the three eggs in it are dye-blue.
On the non-normality front, I meant it about the spite: watching my country stripped for parts for the cruelty of it, half remixed atrocities, half sprint into dystopia, however complicated the American definition has always been, right now it still means my family of queers and rootless cosmopolitans and as most of the holidays we observe assert, we are still here. It's peculiar. I was not raised to think of my nationality as an important part of myself so much as an accident of history, much like the chain of immigrations and migrations that led to my birth in Boston. I was raised to carry home with me, not locate it in geography. I've been asked my whole life where I really come from. This administration in both its nameless rounds has managed to make me territorial about my country beyond the mechanisms of its democracy whose guardrails turned out to be such movable goalposts. It enrages me to be expected not to care that I have seen the pendulum swing like a wrecking ball in my lifetime, as if the trajectory were so inevitable that it absolves the avarice to do harm or the cowardice to prevent it. It is nothing to do with statues. The door to the stranger is supposed to be open.
The wet meadows of the Great Meadows are peatlands. They were cut for fuel in the nineteenth century, the surrealism of fossil fuels: twelve thousand years after the glaciers, ashes in a night. The color of their smoke filled the air sixteen years ago when some of the dryer acres burned. If you ask me, there's room for bog bodies.
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!
Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.
(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)
The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett) (2024): murder mystery in a secondary world empire where biological husbandry seems to have beat out chemical synthesis, also there are kaiju leviathans. It's likely the leviathans are linked to the bio-engineering in ways that are glossed over in this novel, from the shape of the this novel and what I know of the sequel. (Only one sequel so far.) The detective-apprentice duo namechecks Holmes and Watson, which is a crime-solving template whose use I'm neutral to dubious about seeing, but Ana and Din mostly stand on their own.
Cup has a pretty speech about "when the Empire is weak, it is often because a powerful few have denied us the abundance of our people," which is a nice summing-up of one of the major themes. (I am all for compelled offering of that abundance, but later.)
Worldbuilding, plot, and characterization very much in a Hugo tradition from the '90s or '00s. I'd put money on Cup getting high marks in some circles.
Someone You Can Build A Nest In (John Wiswell) (2024): "cozy horror", which is a new to me subgenre, where human-eating monster Shesheshen falls in love with a human. And also eats people.
I forgot about the bonkers body count until I tried to fill cahn in on the ending. So let's start there.
Since this won a Nebula, clearly I am missing something. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the baroque Wulfyre murder-hookup chart and how the precocial biology works when I'm supposed to be getting "they're all monsters, we're all monsters, monstrous is as monstrous does" as the message and moving on. Am I just supposed to assume "Bloodchild" is in the DNA and move on? I am so baffled.
Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky) (2024): DNF. I started the audiobook, I stopped one sentence in. I tried the ebook, I stopped two sentences in. I did not have a good time slogging through Alien Clay and a survey of reviews tells me I'm not doing that to myself again.
The recurring theme of the 2025 Hugos (so far) seems to be people using other human beings as depersonalized tools. Literal robots (Service Model); totalitarians ship people off to labor camps (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay); mother uses daughter as abused pawn in her avaricious plots (T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes To Call); ditto Someone To Build A Nest In; The Ministry of Time going full spy-thriller tropes; to a lesser extent Din's apprenticeship with Ana in The Tainted Cup, but since there's a big empire, a murder investigation, elective (or "elective"?) biological modification of imperial subjects, and city-destroying toxic monsters periodically attacking, I am willing to read on in the suspicion someone is using someone horribly as their tool.
Quick ETA: Cup audiobook narrated by Andrew Fallaize, Nest audiobook narrated by Carmen Rose. When googling "someone you can build a nest in audiobook", the second hit is libro.fm, visible content An adorable romance of people falling in love for the first time set in a wonderful fantasy world, this book is perfect for you! ...wow.
Kaval Park, a full-length documentary about Alexander Eppler, an extraordinary American musician who specialized in Balkan instruments, including the shepherd's flute known as a kaval. He lived in Seattle, and the documentary includes other Balkan dancers and instrumentalists from the community there, as well as interviews with Bulgarians who knew him. I don't often watch movies, and this was fascinating. He went to Bulgaria by himself when he was 14 years old to learn kaval, while it was still a closed communist country!
Queer Dating Apps: Beware Who You Trust With Your Intimate Data by Em, staff writer for Privacy Guides. A thorough analysis, with the depressing conclusion that none of the dating apps are trustworthy with your private data, and suggestions for how to protect yourself if you use them anyway.
called my mayor, state rep, or other local official 1 (7.1%)
diddid get-out-the-vote work, such as postcarding or phone banking 1 (7.1%)
voted 0 (0.0%)
sent sent a postcard/email/letter/fax to a government official or agency 5 (35.7%)
went to a protest 5 (35.7%)
attended an in-person activist group 2 (14.3%)
went to a town hall 0 (0.0%)
participated in phone or online training 1 (7.1%)
donated money to a cause 8 (57.1%)
worked for a campaign 0 (0.0%)
did textbanking/phonebanking 1 (7.1%)
took care of myself 7 (50.0%)
not a US citizen, but worked in solidarity in my community 1 (7.1%)
did something else (tell us about it in comments) 2 (14.3%)
committed to action in the coming month 5 (35.7%)
As always, everyone is free to make posts about any issues and actions they think the comm should know about. You can also drop some information into a comment to our sticky post if you'd like the mods to do it.
If you're looking for information on anything else, you can use our tags to check for any ongoing actions or resources relevant to the issues you care about. I try to keep the tag list up-to-date. If you need a tag added, you can DM me.
In preparation for @hextechtrioweek, the blog is hosting #FanRecFriday to spread the our love for MelJayVik and I decided to join with a post of my own.
I've been wanting to get better at noticing the small, good things in my days, especially the quiet ones that are easy to miss when I'm overwhelmed, in pain, or just having a rough brain day. I keep going back to 3_good_things_a_day but figured I'd share them here too.
So this is me, starting a little series called glimmers and good things: three things each day (or as close to daily as I can manage) that made me smile, feel seen, feel safe, or feel a tiny spark of joy. They won’t always be profound. Sometimes they’ll be “I had a nice sandwich” or “Carlos Alcaraz didn’t destroy my soul today.” But they’ll be real, and I want to keep track of them.
three tiny joys, glimmers, or moments of soft comfort from today 🧡 Someone sent me a gorgeous pic of ( Darren & Simone ) they found online because they knew I’d love it and wanted to make sure I’d seen it. It made me feel so known.
📚 Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant Tumblr reblogged my review of Rolling in the Deep (!!) and I am still quietly screaming about it.
🍕 Friday night comforts: pizza, mango Pepsi Max, Nutella ice cream, and Carlos Alcaraz winning his 3rd round match against Struff. We feast. 🎾💛
That’s me for today. If you feel like sharing your glimmers, I’d love to read them 💛 Be gentle with yourself, especially if the good things were hard to find.
Fandom: Star Trek Reboot (AOS) Pairings/Characters: Gen Rating: Teen Length: 1390 words Creator Links:lazulisong Theme: Working together
Summary: Winona is called to fix the cock-up of the Yorktown's engines. She uses one of the science-bitches to help her do it.
Reccer's Notes: This fandom has many versions of Winona Kirk. The one you get here is the engineer who does NOT fuck around and can fix anything you throw at her. She is irreverent and badass. And, in this particular story, she is wonderfully, delightfully contrasted with Spock, who is helping her fix the Yorktown engines. Yes, Spock is the science bitch.
I really can't say much more because I'm laughing too hard rereading the story in order to write this rec. Laz perfects the art of proving that swearing isn't what you do when you lack imagination. Every cuss word in this fic is a brilliant gem of hilarious, creative, and accurate speech.
Like every ridiculous fic that is very, very good, this one makes you believe that this Winona Kirk is not only possible, but is absolutely in character. It also makes you believe that this Spock is possible and will call Winona Overlord and let her call him Tiny Science-bitch.
Our last stop on the Historic 30 route was Horsetail Falls. If you look at the next photo you can see people sitting on the log stretching out into the pool for scale. .( Read more... )
-Doors and windows all closed -Blinds and curtains all drawn when sunlight falls on the glass -Mylar foil on the windows -External shade on the windows and walls where available (we moved a potted tree) -Margarine tub of water frozen to make a huge ice cube for the flask-with-tap of water, takes longer to melt than same volume of smaller ice cubes so keeps water cool all day -Cooling scarves -Drinking water from bottles means we drink more -Linen clothes -Watering plants with Baumbad bags and only at night -Portable aircon units *simpsons meme*
Oh look, once again it's been forever since I posted. Since my last update I got hit by another rather tough challenge, albeit this time largely self-inflicted, when my application for Belgian residency got turned down because I was a bit late with some of the paperwork. This led to a certain amount of panic, but fortunately I had just enough visa free days left in the EU after my provisional residency card expired that by returning to London and missing the last week of lectures (most of which were fortunately recorded and made available online), and shifting some of my exams around so they were all the same week, I was able to take them all.
I got my results on Wednesday. No perfect 20s this time, but two 19s, two 18s, and four 17s, which gives me almost exactly the same 89% average as the first semester's rather wider spread. The highest accolade available at KU Leuven (summa cum laude, with the congratulations of the examination committee) kicks in at 90%, so I need to slightly up my game next year, but now that I've got a much clearer idea of what's expected of me I think that it should be achievable, especially if I don't have quite so many curveballs to deal with as I did this semester.
One of favourite modules this semester was Syriac II, where instead of an exam we had to produce a portfolio, the largest part of which was a translation of a portion of a text chosen in consultation with the professor. I did a part of the "Syriac History of Joseph", which retells the story of Genesis 37-39 with various additions. I enjoyed doing this sufficiently that, having done the first three pages for my portfolio, I am going to try and do the remaining 16 over the summer. The same professor is teaching Coptic next year, which is not a language I realised I was interested in learning (nor, for that matter, was Syriac), but he's such a great teacher that I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm now back in London for the whole summer, which hadn't been the original plan, but I am enjoying seeing more of obandsoller and looking forward to doing so even more when he emerges from the pile of marking and admin that accompanies the end of term for the teachers, when we students have finished our exams and are enjoying sitting on our laurels...
Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography and worried me.
Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.
I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.
listening to:The Dropkick Murphys, "Who'll Stand with Us?"
I embrace new tools. In Fabula Ultima, for example, the order in which characters go in combat varies. I found it hard to keep track of who'd gone, so I went out and got poker chips and little round labels. Now, I can just toss the chips representing characters into a bowl once they've gone. Order!
OK, except it turns out I can't tell blue from green under the ceiling light in the room where I DM and the names on the labels need to be bigger.
Things which I don't get to say nearly enough: "Can you break a hundred?"
To make things as simple as possible, I got paid in cash earlier today, and to make things really simple, it was a mix of twenties and hundreds to use as few bills as possible. I'll freely and happily admit it cut down on the volume of currency being exchanged. It also struck me that while $100 is a standard unit of currency, it's an atypical one, which isn't a combination of traits I see much.
My plan was to break them into twenties if the bank was open for customers, or deposit them intact in an ATM kiosk if it wasn't. On the walk to the bank, I decided to buy a luxury imported British film magazine at Barnes & Noble, and in thinking about how to pay for it, I asked the clerk my question.
Then I said it was fine, and handed over $21 to more easily make change for the $15.50 price tag. A much more ordinary type of payment. I took the hundreds to the bank and deposited them at the ATM, as I'd planned.
And for a moment there, just a brief moment, I had a glorious glimpse into another life where I always asked that question.
When I was 21 years old, my parents came out to visit me in California. My father is an audiophile, and he went with me to buy my very own stereo system with separate receiver, double tape deck, CD player, a stereo cabinet to put all that in, and speakers to hear it all. I had a big tape collection back then, mostly copied from his folk music records. The speakers are Advent Prodigy Towers, approximately a foot square and 28" high, with pecan wood on top and black grilles on the front.
I got rid of the tapes in this move back to California since I never listened to them anymore, but the same stereo system, cabinet, and speakers came back with me. I did replace the CD player about 10 years in, because apparently they changed the CD encoding over time and it stopped working.
My favorite thing to do with the stereo system since 2008 is to run my computer audio through it and play mp3s for folk dancing. I love the feel of the music through big speakers, and the audio quality is way better than the smaller portable speakers that big dance groups used.
A few years ago I realized the music was getting fuzzy. I took the front grille off, and the foam around the woofers was completely perished. I carefully unhooked them, put them in my bike trailer, and took them to a small audio store where a crusty older guy took them in and promised to repair them. A week or two later I biked back, picked them up, hauled them home, and reassembled the speakers. They sounded great! (Apparently this was in 2014.)
After the move back to California, the audio started dropping out unpredictably from one of the speakers when I was dancing. I tried swapping out the cable from the computer to the receiver, and swapping the speaker cables. Finally it got bad enough that I decided after 30+ years it was time to replace the speakers.
I did some online research and picked out some speakers that I wanted to check out at Best Buy. (I wonder if that's where I bought my system in the first place!) Then I started thinking about having new electronics off-gassing in my living room, and how I would get rid of the old speakers. I took off the grilles and unscrewed the woofers to take a look at them. The foam still looks good. I disconnected the clip that held in the woofer on the one that's been dropping out, and reconnected it.
I put it all back together and the audio hasn't dropped out since. Maybe the clip got jarred during the move? It didn't look wrong, but at least it's behaving better now. Which is good, because the one local audio repair place I found didn't return my message, and the new speakers I was interested in don't look nearly as nice as the old ones. The thought of new & improved electronics is exciting, but I love how my speakers sound and I'm glad they're not dead yet.
Bringing Thursday Recs in a little bit early today 👀
Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!
Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
So the creative prompt for sunshine_revialchallenge 1 is: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Mpreg is kinda popular on tennisblr right now - both Carlos/Jannik and Jack Draper/Jannik - and the other night before I went to bed, deliriouslyshipping had posted responses to a couple of asks she'd had. One of which involved
I could see Simone or Darren putting her on their knee while they sit, guiding Jannik from wherever they are, trading off as needed. But they'll also set her down and let her explore more, try to teach her how to toss the tennis ball.
, I fell asleep with visions of Darren and Simone with a baby and... well.. y'all know I ship those coaches. So this happened (and apparently in mpreg it doesn't matter if you're 59 - you can still give birth)
Challenge #1 Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
June was a bit of a blur, honestly. I read a lot — but only finished four books. I posted 8 fics and wrote a lot more in my head. I got very distracted by Roland Garros (because how could you not?!), and now Wimbledon’s here to steal what’s left of my focus. That’s okay.
So I’m going into July with gentleness. Here’s what I’m hoping for, aiming toward — not in a pressure-y way, but in a “this would feel good if it happened” kind of way.
📚 Reading Goals I want to read 6 books this month, or at least finish 6. There are currently 12 books in progress. Oops. Also:
Prioritise a few summer TBR titles
Tackle my mountain of library loans (13 books out, most nearing their final renewals 😬)
Catch up on posting reviews
Keep going with “20 mins a day” as my baseline
Read for joy, not pressure
✍️ Writing Goals There’s a lot on this list, but I’m not expecting to do all of it — I just want to keep the creative momentum going, especially when the ideas are flowing.
Finish A Field Guide to the Sinner Pack
Update:
You Wouldn’t Take My Word for It If You Knew Who Was Talking
I Had the Time of My Life Fighting Dragons With You
The Courage of My Convictions
Wolf-Tethered
Maybe write or post a one-shot, just because·
Keep sharing, even if it’s scary — people want to read these stories
🌿 Life Goals Soft intentions. Low stakes. Good food. Hopefully fewer appointments. But also:
Make a doctor’s appointment to talk about the arthritis diagnosis
Day trip to the RAMM in Exeter + sushi 🍣
Visit Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm 🦙
Reclaim one chaotic space at home (possibly the laundry chair)
Come back to Dreamwidth, and stay
Cook something that feels like summer
One proper lie-in, no guilt
One evening offline with candles, music, or silence
If I do all of this, amazing. If I do half, still pretty great. If I just read something I love and write one scene that lights me up, that’s enough too.
Director of the nation formerly known as Canada Quinn Atherton is determined to deliver much mass murder as it takes to achieve peace, order, good government. Why do so many ingrates object?
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.
This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)
(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)
So what cool fanvids/fancrafts/podfics/fics/fanart/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.
BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.
In spring of 2022, I tried out a kick scooter my husband randomly brought home, and loved it, which got me thinking about riding a bike. I needed something to do in the spring and summer, when ice skating is much less available. Back in 2020, I’d bought myself a little three-speed steel retro bike, with fenders and a Dynamo hub and a front rack, but I was too busy and stressed to re-learn how to ride a bike at that point.
So once I finally had the bandwidth, I took my bike out into the quiet parking lot of a closed doctor’s clinic on a Sunday, practiced mounting and dismounting (using a curb), and slowly got myself riding on quiet streets and getting my balance back. Riding a bike as a fat adult felt quite different than it had as an average-sized kid, and it took a while to get my muscle memory back. But with patience and letting myself go slow, it did come back. With a vengeance.
I started riding that granny bike everywhere, as fast as possible, on gravel trails and in the forest, and eventually for 50 km one summer’s day. Then I thought, “I’m gonna need a faster bike.”
All of this, from buying skates and taking lessons, to buying a bike and then needing a better bike, was all wildly intimidating as a somewhat shy person, but also as a fat person. Going into sports-focused stores does not feel comfortable as a fat person. I feel lucky that no one gave me a hard time, but they easily could have, and it would have been very discouraging.
I forced myself to go to a couple of bike shops and test ride some bikes…and then I fell in love, predictably, with the ugliest and most expensive bike possible: a Salsa Warbird with a carbon frame in millennial gray. I was immediately repulsed by the colour when they pulled it off the rack, but when I rode it, I found myself whispering sweet nothings to it, telling it how smooth it was, how fast it was, and how much I loved it, even though it was far too expensive for me. I went home and sulked for a week, and my husband told me to go back and buy the Warbird, so I did.
It was still ugly, and I still loved it more than I have ever loved an object before. It was and continues to be the most expensive thing I have ever owned. I rode it a bunch in the late summer and fall of 2023, culminating in an 85 km trip.
The following spring, I got hit by a car (thankfully it was a very slow, ridiculous crash and I was only a bit bruised), and had to replace a bunch of parts on my bike (which thankfully the driver’s insurance paid for), as well as the frame, which is now a beautiful, glossy black instead of gray. So now I’m even more in love with it, and that’s what I was riding this morning, yet another roller coaster in my life.
I did not think all this would happen when I decided to accept myself as a fat person and stop dieting in November 2000. I just wanted to experience peace in my body, stop caring so much about how I looked, stop experiencing the intense shame that I’d been taught to feel about my weight, and the guilt and confusion around food that came with it. I had no idea I was an athlete; I had no desire to become one. But somehow, learning to treat myself and my body with compassion allowed me to learn things about myself that had been hidden for years, decades.
As it turns out, I’m a small-time thrill-seeker, a diver, a skater, a cyclist. I’m still fat. Hills are hard, but I descend like a beast.
I may or may not have ridden my bike 50 km to eat a Fat Bastard burrito in front of an out-of-business Jenny Craig.
The inspiration being the 1999 Mummy movie is not without problematic elements.
Imagine an Egyptian film company wanting to make a movie about idiots waking a horror in Canada that only the Egyptian lead can resolve. ( Read more... )
Thinking it'd look more professional, I went with a messenger bag instead of a backpack today. As professional as it may have looked, I'm going to go back to the backpack. So much easier for so many things on so many levels, not the least of which is being able to ride a bike. Yes, I know bike messengers do it all the time. No, I'm not a professional bike messenger, and I'm unwilling to try. Especially if I'm already wearing a nice dress.
There wasn't much time to read at work, mostly because I'd been given an actual task to do: sorting through patient folders and setting aside old records to discard. Not as much fun as it'd have been if I'd had an MP3 player with me, and still satisfying to see the piles start to rise, and space in the drawers start to emerge. Where there's space in a drawer, there's objects to be discovered, and found my second office perk. A stain remover stick's not much, but it's still something I could take home with me. The first thing is a large can of cold brew coffee sitting in my fridge, waiting for a morning I need a jolt beyond all meaning.
Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).
What I'm reading now:
My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.
What I recently finished watching:
American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.
I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.
What I'm about to start watching:
Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.
What I'm playing now:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.
I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.
"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.
Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.
My friend J.R. Dawson is launching their second book, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, and I get to be part of the festivities! We'll be at Moon Palace Books at 6:00 p.m. on July 29, having a lovely conversation about this book and the previous book and other stories and life in general, and you can come join in the fun!
In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.
I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:
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spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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