pinboard | Member Posts

merryghoul

1) write for

iddyiddybangbang before the fest started
2) post my

tardis_bingo comment bingo chart 😑

merryghoul

Locked in/trapped	Huddling for warmth	Tea	Accessory	Master
Sound/Vision	Injury/illness	Reunion	Bodyswap/Genderswap	Aliens made us do it
Spies/secret agents	Angels	WILD CARD	Sonic	Companion
Wings	Multi-era	Age difference	Mystery	Date
Daleks	Fashion	Science	Soul mates/soul bonding	Monsters

morgandawn

In late 2019, TV, movie, anime, gaming, celebrity, music, and book fans assembled to save Yahoo Groups after Verizon decided to shut down the mailing list service. Approximately 300,000 fandom groups have been saved. The Yahoo Gedden project is working on identifying the fandoms of Italian language mailing lists and can use your help. We need people who can read Italian natively right now to help us identify the Unknown groups. You can work at your own pace and it is a low time commitment. Work is done on Discord, just reading the Italian group description and a few messages and summarizing the messages in English, maybe answering a question of clarification ("is it talking about X or Y?"). No software or other tools needed besides your phone/computer and access to Discord.

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/UyJdffhw2b

runpunkrun

In paperback, this makes a thick graphic novel worthy of the name. The greyscale art is simple but expressive, and you quickly get a feel for Mags and her Abuela and their small desert town near Joshua Tree. Mag's childhood friend is back in town with her cowboy boots and pinhole camera and stirring up feelings that Mags can't let herself have because she's tied to her home and the secret in the basement that's bleeding her dry.

A tender story about learning to love yourself so you can accept the love others have for you. The art's limited use of color highlights childhood memories and photographs, but comes out in full force for the happy ending.

Contains: butch/transfem romance; death of a grandparent; and, separate from the romance: infidelity, stalking, emotional manipulation, threats of suicide, gun violence.

azurelunatic

Susan visited!

Thorn didn't get carjacked by a Bigfoot.

runpunkrun

a dragonfly
unable to settle
on the grass
-1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

delphi

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

delphi

✓

kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Non-Human POV

(I checked this square off my bingo card last time, but this new release arrived with perfect timing, so I'm doubling up.)

Ew, It's Beautiful is the newest collection of cartoonist Joshua Barkman's webcomic False Knees. It contains around 120 short comics, the majority of which were new to me, separated into sections for winter, spring, summer, and fall based on their setting.

The stars of False Knees are usually birds, but there are some cats, insects, and at least a couple of beavers in the mix here. Barkman's art is legitimately beautiful, with a naturalist's specificity and a knack for combining human expressions with realistic animal features, and his writing captures the universal experience of being a small creature in an unfathomably big world. It's full of absurd humour, occasional moments of awe, and recurring bits about the creative process, self-image, and the way friends or family can be on entirely different wavelengths. The comic is where I got my current default icon from, and it almost never fails to bring me a little joy or give me something to appreciate.

( 3 Comics )

runpunkrun

Photograph with added text: Working Together, at Fancake. Workers in India use wide wooden paddles with long handles to shove a huge yard of drying grains into big piles. The grain, most likely rice, is a beautiful golden color, and there's a mix of western and traditional clothing among the seven men and women.

fancake's theme for July is Working Together!

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

beatrice_otter

The hardest thing about writing Peter Wimsey fanfic is the quotes. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of their era (and the literature that was considered classic/important in that era), and quote it often.

Today I posted on the Gaud Squad Discord that it would be awesome if we had a searchable database of the literature and poetry that they knew or could reasonably be expected to know, searchable by keyword and theme, so that one could look things up easily. And that I would be willing to do the data entry, but had not the technical skills to set it up.
supertailz responded by setting up a Notion instance and is noodling around with the technical aspects of it, so it looks like this is happening!

The easy part is getting the literature that Peter and Harriet quote added--all I have to do is read through the books (no hardship there!) and source the quotations. Although I know there are some annotated versions floating around, and if anyone has a copy of the annotations, that would be lovely.

The hard part is getting the right mix of things that Peter and Harriet would have known. Because what is considered "classic literature" changes over time. Some things rise in acclaim, some things fall out of favor. What would be really handy is a curriculum for Eton ca. 1900 and for Oxford ca. 1910, but so far I haven't found anything. Does anybody know how to search "what literary works were considered classics in 1920"? Or have a good list of where to start?

runpunkrun

One of those thrillers that splits the narrative between two women—both twenty years old, working at the same grubby motel and living in the same apartment, one in 1982 and the other in 2017 trying to solve the mystery of the first one's disappearance—and their stories run so parallel they're basically interchangeable and you start wondering if maybe the author should have only told the story once. It certainly would have cut down on the amount of clunky exposition and awkward dialogue.

The thrills were not thrilling, but the mystery might have been interesting if we weren't getting it from both ends. As it is, not worth the time.

Contains: References to rape, domestic abuse, and child death; descriptions of dead bodies; ghosts.

ursamajor

When

belladonna shares a tweet that got screencapped and put up on Insta:

@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now

and I was like "Yeah! There was this whole thing about NYC's tap water possibly being not kosher because of copepods in the water supply a few years back. Which might've meant that NYC bagels, whose lauded taste and texture were credited to the tap water used to boil them, were potentially treyf. But then other rabbis weighed in and said as long as the proportion of these microscopic crustaceans was less than 1/60th of the total volume, it was okay by the principle of בטל בשישים (bitul b'shishim/beteil beshishim), thank you Shabot6000."

... and then I realized "a few years back" was 21 years ago.

Current Mood: silly

lannamichaels

Title: Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: Captain America
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Aliens wrote Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford built the pyramids, and Steve Rogers was never Captain America.

( I started this in 2019 and then ignored it every time I saw it instead of getting it to fit wordcount )

delphi

Fandom 50 #22

Day by Day by

surprisepink
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Ship: Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands
Medium: Fic
Length: 1361 words
Rating: Teen
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, romance, humour, happy ending, established relationship, izzy lives, future, flirtation, compatibility, service
Summary: A typical raid for Captain Bonnet and his new first mate.

Excerpt:

“I’m getting the hang of this, if I do say so myself,” says Stede, cheerily.

“And you do.”

“What’s that, Izzy?’

“Say so yourself.” The man looks entirely unimpressed, but it does take a lot to impress Izzy. Stede has accepted it by this point, and knows not to take it personally. Knows, too, that if Izzy actually wasn’t at least a little happy with him, he could leave the ship just about anywhere and find another pirate crew to join. And yet, port after port, he doesn’t.

And all Stede had ever wanted was for people to stay.

This is everything I love about the idea of Stede and Izzy together on the Revenge, with Stede captaining and Izzy serving as his first mate. The way they rile each other up is perfect, tempered to just the right heat by a better understanding of each other. Izzy's ways of trying to serve Stede while keeping his ego in check are moving, and so is Stede's growing sense of what he's doing and what it means.

The story's funny, with a comedic moment early on that made me laugh out loud, and the sexual chemistry between Stede and Izzy absolutely crackles. This one really made my day.

delphi

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

beatrice_otter

I read a lot of MASH fic recently, and while most of it was very good, there were also a ton of inaccuracies about what mid-century America was like. I'm not an expert, but at the same time, I did listen to my parents and grandparents when they talked about what life was like when they were younger. And also, I know what's changed within my lifetime (born in 1982), and quite a lot of things people today take for granted are actually new within my lifetime, and thus not around prior to the 1980s. Now, this is fanfic, and if you don't care about historical accuracy in your fic, that is a fine and valid choice and I salute you. If, however, you do want to at least try to avoid major gaffes, here are things I've noticed that people get wrong a lot:

( Women's rights: Ms. )

( Travel )

( Money and Credit )( Alcohol )

( Childcare )

( Phone Calls )

( Progressive Ideas )

( The Ad Council )

( Entertainment )

( Police )

These are just a few of the things that have changed in the last fifty years. And, of course, I'm only one person and might have got things wrong. Let me know if you see things I missed

Rebloggable on tumblr

ursamajor

hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: ride e canta nel sole l'infinita nostra felicita // gloria a te!

merryghoul

So I read this post from the OTC. I totally understand why OTC needs a non-commercialization policy. On a petty level I've been annoyed at, for instance, someone writing fics in a kink meme and then linking to a site like Ko-fi at the end. And for copyright reasons I get not monetizing works. But part of me feels like their rules are a wee bit draconian.

I've been linking to the summaries of books I use as summaries for

unconventionalcourtship to prove that they're real books since the goal is to alter a romance novel summary for a fic. I'm not advocating people to actually buy the book. I don't even know these authors. I haven't read their books. 🤐 I guess in the future I may just leave the links to the comm announcement posts and on DW but I'm a bit annoyed I'm being lumped in with people who actually are "please go to my Patreon for more!" when I thought I was doing a good deed.

Also: The OTC mentions Twitch but I want to clarify that getting a Twitch account is free. I would assume under their TOS that asking people to get Twitch subscriptions (with or without Amazon Prime) is against their TOS. There is no such thing as "Twitch Prime." And technically I think X actually can't be allowed to since you can subscribe to individual creators on X.

IDK, I think this policy needs a little bit of hammering out because to be fair it's thorny to enforce their commercial promotion policy as is.

lannamichaels

I'm not sure if it's a sign of improving mental health (less hoarding/control tendencies!) or a sign of worsening mental health (lack of interest/care about things) in that after discovering that, no, even logging in with my RSS reader to ao3 won't make archive-locked fics show up in RSS feed, my reaction is: eh, that's the author's problem that I never see their fic, not mine.

I fully disagree with a lot of the reasons people lock their fic on ao3 (especially the way many people on tumblr frame it as them being "forced" to do so) but hey, it's their decision.

Once upon a time, if you wanted people to see your fic, you would do things about it. Maybe you'd send it to a mailing list. Maybe you'd post on a LJ community.

And now what people seem to do a lot of is just post it to ao3 and never crosspost about it anywhere. Their assumption is, you'll see it on Ao3.

But I don't. Because a small one fandom archive, sure, I could look at it every so often and see the what's new.

But I'm following a lot of ao3 tags and I am not checking ao3 for 1) any locked fics, which don't show up in RSS, 2) any fics posted to collections which, because of changes ao3 made years ago, do not show up in the feed if there are 20 fics posted since that was posted.

And once upon a time, I was like "I need to see all these fics, especially ones in tiny fandoms I'd never see otherwise!"

And now I'm just like. Meh. That's their problem that I'll never see their fic, not mine.

Possibly this is because my "to read" list is so very very long and so is my author subscription emails that haven't been read yet.

But also it's like. If you make it hard for me to find your fic. Then you're just like those people back on LJ who would post a fic to a community with a note that they were going to friends-lock the fic after 3 days, and if you want to see previous ones in the series, you have to get them to add you to their friends list.

Because honestly why bother. If you're going to make it hard for me to read your fic, then clearly you don't want me personally to read it, and that's okay. There's plenty of others, from people who aren't making it hard.

Because, no, I am not going to be checking every single ao3 tag even monthly for archive locked/collections fics. I'm sure some people are checking them frequently. Those people will read your fic. And that's fine, honestly.

But I'm not putting in the work. And if I miss the world's great fic because I don't see it, then yeah, okay. That's fine. Go with god, do your own thing. Not my problem.

vass

Books
Still reading A Power Unbound.

Comics
Caught up on Order of the Stick (I was at about #1319, and the most recent one was #1328.) Welp, that was a thing that happened.

Things are also Happening in Dumbing of Age. I am looking at the title text in June 24's strip and glowering distrustfully at Willis after what happened last big finale.

Games
Playing a lot of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Games on my phone.
Slay the Spire: have now unlocked Ascension 4 on all four characters. Surprisingly (to me?) the hardest run on Ascension 3 was with the Defect.

Links

The Bedbound Activity Masterlist: Part 1 (Also good for insomnia or for when it's too cold to be anywhere but under the covers, even if you're not bedbound.)

A New Ballet by Underrepresented Artists: "The Little Mermaid reimagined as a disabled, queer and brown coming-of-age story for 7 dancers." The link is to a fundraiser, but even if you're not up for donating there's a video there from rehearsals that might be of interest. (Disclaimer: I can't be objective about this show, one of my best friends is dancing in it.)

Crowdfunders for the UK's Trans+ Solidarity Alliance: Support Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and Maybe I'm Trans? (with badges). (hattip: rydra_wong)
Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed. As usual, HaveIBeenPwned, you know the drill.

Cats
Ash is down an incisor and a canine as of last Tuesday. He was good and brave at the vet and, after he got home, patient with Dorian's mistaking him for a stranger because he smelled Wrong.

Phenology
No new kangaroo visits. It's been very cold out.