Crafting night
Mar. 30th, 2026 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeMarch recs: 11 MCYT Battleship works
Mar. 30th, 2026 09:10 pmschneefinkSome early recs in late March: 3 art pieces and 8 fics, mostly Hermitcraft/Life Series but also Emduo, Vampires SMP, and MCSR RPF.
Worldhopper, Hermitcraft/Life Series/Empires/VBRPF
Art, Gem-centric
Summary: oops all geminitay! a digital spread of the many lives of gem :)
Why I love it: This is incredible. Nine different Gems, all in different lives with different outfits and worlds, and they all look fantastic.
( 2 more art pieces + 8 fics )
That was unexpected
Mar. 30th, 2026 07:33 pmoursinWell, I suppose getting a text from the GPs apropos slots opening up for Covid booster was not entirely unanticipated - I was looking the other day to see whether these were on the horizon - so anyway, my dearios, I am scheduled for mine in just over a fortnight.
But the other thing was getting an email from radio people as to whether I could talk to them about History of Criminalisation/Decriminalisation of Abortion THIS VERY AFTERNOON -
- which it so happened I could, and these days, it is not just talking to them, it is being on Zoom as well with instructions re camera -
So I am always up for saying that the way the police have been carrying on of very recent years, and the health professionals who have been grassing women up to them, is worse than the Victorians as historians have pretty much failed to find anything much in the way of prosecutions of women rather than abortionists -
- possibly because in most cases that even came to light it was because the woman had died, though there are a few cited In The Literature where she lived and testified in the court case, and presumably was granted immunity.
I suppose it is not totally improbable that a very detailed search of the British Newspaper Archives using the various likely search terms under which one would anyway search for cases of abortion (not the word mostly used) would turn up a case or two of women prosecuted for procuring their own, but I really think it's more likely to turn up a lot of fascinating detail about who was doing illicit abortions, and whether local juries thought they were performing a public service and had just had bad luck in this one case (came across at least one in a fairly random swoop myself).
Unfortunately time constraints and what they actually wanted me to talk about (like why the 1861 Act still pertains, cue me ranting about having to defend the 1967 Act, which just introduced Exceptions to the existing Act, for decades because of the RtL mobs rather than press forward with further reform) prevented me from doing the full oursin Boring For Europe on the subject.
Mr 'warm leads for archivists' is still badgering me.
FIC: Enthronements of the Chara (Tempestuous Tours)
Mar. 30th, 2026 02:44 pmduskpetersonEmorian enthronements generally occur every twenty or thirty years, alas. If an enthronement takes place while you are visiting the palace, it is unlikely that you will have been staying at the palace at the time of the previous Chara's death; enthronements take many months to plan and execute. But if you do happen to be in the palace when the Chara dies, be sure to submit a letter of sympathy to the Chara To Be – that is, to the Chara's heir. It is not necessary to personally meet with the Chara To Be; he will be busy with many matters at this time. If your mission requires you to meet with him, be aware that the heir is not actually the Chara until his enthronement. Until that time, the empire is jointly run by the Chara To Be and the Great Council. You may submit your business to either party during that period.
The enthronement of a new Chara is the highest rite in the Empire of Emor. If you are an ambassador or other distinguished guest, you may receive an invitation to the enthronement. Only serious illness or a similar calamity is an acceptable excuse for rejecting the invitation.
As I have mentioned already, it is always wise to dress formally in the Chara's palace, but this is the point at which you should fling forth all your flourishes. If you are a northern mainlander, imagine how you would want to be dressed for your burial. If you are an eastern mainlander, wear all the clothes and adornments you have been hiding because you feared the peninsulareans would find them too formal. Nothing is too formal for an Emorian enthronement.
You may wear a weapon to the enthronement, though that is not required. I recommend tying feathers, ribbons, or green branches around your weapon to make your peaceful intentions clear. All of the Emorian men at the enthronement will be armed, but not because they intend to fight each other; they are armed because they give their oaths to the new Chara upon their swords.
Part of their oath-bound duty is to defend the Chara against his enemies. Do not wave around your weapon.
Enthronements demonstrate Emorian rituals at their most elaborate. If you are an eastern mainlander, you will likely be enthralled by this evidence that Emorians understand the power of rite. If you are a northern mainlander, try not to fall asleep.
After the enthronement, you may be invited to a reception. This will vary in formality, depending on where it is held. If you greet the new Chara, be sure to address him as "Chara," not by his old title. Jokes about the new Chara are traditional, but should not be spoken directly to him. If you've seen the Chara's face transform during the ceremony, you probably won't have the courage to offend him.
[Translator's note: Emorian enthronements take place in Blood Vow, Law of Vengeance, and Breached Boundaries.]
(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2026 11:42 amolivermossI wore my Torrent shirt because I was going to go right from one event to Sports Bra. I knew that a shirt with a logo, any sort of brand, was not going to be the vibe. It never is for a queer art event. But, it still felt good to wear because the Torrent have CJ, who is non-binary. They are the only person in top level professional hockey who is openly nb or trans. So, it felt right to wear. Sometimes wearing a shirt that is a little not the vibe is fine, if you feel confident in it. Sometimes.
Turned out, the event was far more punk/street that I expected and some vendors didn't even interact with me and I am reasonably sure that it was because of how I was dressed. And, fair enough. I go to a LOT of queer art pop ups and mostly it's people who art have a street/punk edge as an aesthetic, this was different. No one was LARPing here. I did not expect that, especially considering the venue.
They also had a prosthetics vendor with samples you can handle, which I've never seen at any event before. This event was... very much what I would have expected from a trans marketplace before I started going to queer art pops ups. I really liked it and want to find out a bit more about this group.
So, that was a lot of words to say 'even though some people there side-eyed my logo shirt and decided to not interact with me, I actually felt more comfortable there than at most queer events I've been to'.
Also, there was someone selling dairy /soy free mochi-based brownies that had the most perfect fluffy texture and I would like to eat 5 of those every day for the rest of my life.
And then I went to Sports Bra to see the return of Hilary Knight, and sadly the Torrent lost. It's not too surprising because from what I've seen so far, first game back for a top player is often not a great game for them. They need a few games to get back in the swing.
(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2026 11:25 amgreghousesgf
Bundle of Holding: Magpie Apocalypse MEGA
Mar. 30th, 2026 02:05 pmjames_davis_nicoll
A new Magpie Games Apocalypse Megabundle presenting a diverse abundance of Powered by the Apocalypse tabletop roleplaying games from Magpie Games.
Bundle of Holding: Magpie Apocalypse MEGA
Dark Shadows: The Wide Winged Moon by Kark
Mar. 30th, 2026 10:29 ampronker posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fancakePairings/Characters: Magda Rakosi/Sandor Rakosi, Angelique Bouchard Collins/Barnabas Collins, Barnabas Collins/Julia Hoffman, Nicholas Blair, Aristede, Andreas Petofi, Quentin Collins
Rating: Gen
Length: 93,699 words
Creator Links: AO3 Profile
Theme: Siblings
Summary: What if Julia loses her memory? What would happen if Blair had to actually help the Collins family? The answer was obvious: He'd hate it. He'd hate it soooo hard.
Reccer's Notes: Siblings come in all flavors, and this fic explores the dynamics of a witches' coven brother and sister, Angelique and Nicholas. With Satan as "parent," how is the more familiar sibling relationship different? How is it the same? Author delves delightfully into the question, as well as the all-too-human found-sibling relationship of Quentin and Julia.
Fanwork Links: The Wide Winged Moon
(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2026 01:09 pmmoon_custaferI’d found out earlier in the week that the Yorkdale Mall has a sushi concession, so I stopped on the way home Friday and, after wandering past enormous stores well out of my price range (props to the shopper I saw wearing Gucci wellies, though), eventually found the food court.
Saturday I did my usual trip to the coffee-shop, then the thrift store. Found several nice things, the best one being a 1970s-style three-quarter-length green print dress that makes me look like a murderous guest-star on Columbo. In the evening I had a weed gummy and painted, while Andrew watched a couple of episodes of Columbo.
Sunday Andrew wanted to go to the Scribe bookshop on the Danforth, and we arranged with Don to meet at the pub afterwards. As it turned out, Line 2 was down and we had to reroute, stopping at another bookshop on College—which ended up being a good thing because Scribe turned out to be closed— they were down at the Old Paper Show & Sale instead. Andrew’d already found a Robert E. Howard hardback for thirty dollars, though, so the only downside was having to wait fifteen minutes for the pub to open (turns out The Auld Spot doesn’t open till 2pm, at least on Sundays). I let Andrew have at least one cider more than he should have had, and we taxied home with Don in tow for more conversation.
I checked oceanofpdf in the hope of finding Lou Rand’s The Gay Detective (1960). No dice, but they do have his non-fiction work The Gay Cookbook.
Thanks, AI! "Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due to Flash Shortage"
Mar. 30th, 2026 10:54 amthewayneThe only cards remaining in production are: "960GB CFexpress Type B card and the lowest-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production. However, those UHS-I SD cards are discontinued in the United States outside of a scant few retailers and resellers." So if you are truly devoted to Sony memory cards, buy them NOW!
In other Sony news, they've had TWO price increases on the Play Station 5 this year already!
https://petapixel.com/2026/03/27/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage/
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/0345230/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage
This away day could've been an email
Mar. 30th, 2026 05:58 pmcosmolinguistTwo dozen people from my workplace, which is national so we normally work in all kinds of places, schlepped to London for two days together in the head office today.
Only for the office to have to be closed by lunchtime in the first day because there's a flood in the building. Ominous rumors about toilets and smells abound...
We spent the first half of the afternoon trying to find somewhere to decamp to.
I don't even know if we'll be allowed back in the building tomorrow, lolsob
Birdfeeding
Mar. 30th, 2026 11:57 amysabetwordsmithI fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches plus a fox squirrel.
I put out water for the birds.
.
DNFs
Mar. 30th, 2026 09:56 amsnickficThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A bunch of characters from classic literature get together to save the world. Not only does it not pass the Bechdel test, but I think there's only one female character that even had lines by the time I quit, and Quatermain had already been outrageously sexist to her on three separate occasions. Also it was boring. I'd osmosed that this was unfairly maligned but uhhhh I don't think it was.
Titane. A psychopathic woman does a bunch of apparently disconnected, increasingly violent stuff. I thought this was going to exactly my kind of freaky shit, but alas it was a different kind of freaky shit. Once she got done getting fucked/knocked up by the car, it was all downhill from there.
Heart Eyes. Slasher romcom starring Mason Gooding from the new Scream movies, among other things. The slasher half of the story is by the book, although there's one impressively gnarly kill. The real problem was I didn't buy the romcom half at all. These people have no chemistry, and I don't care about either of them.
The Void. The local lawman brings an injured, raving guy to a hospital where he knows literally everyone by their first name, which is then immediately hemmed in first by creepy Klan/cult types and then by two angry rednecks with guns. Also people start turning into flesh monsters. A bottle story like this lives or dies by the dynamic between its characters, and this one has got nothing going on at all in that department. Also they'd already been grudgingly teaming up with the rednecks for twenty minutes and still no one had asked the rednecks WHY they were trying to kill the injured raving guy, which was just too stupid for me to handle.
books
Like in Love With You by Emma R. Alban. Regency romance where two young woman trying to marry the same man fall in love with each other instead. I could pretty much roll with the modern-sounding dialogue, but then they professed their feelings and had sex and there was still a third of the book left, and I couldn't muster any interest in continuing.
Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Young woman raised on an isolated estate in the north of England discovers big family secrets. I picked this up because the premise sounded like it had great Gothic vibes, but I was not prepared for it to be 700 pages, and I found the prose to be labored in that "trying to be old-timey" way. I lasted like 20 pages.
2026 Media Catchall Post, First Quarter
Mar. 30th, 2026 11:12 amlady_ragnellMusic
Movies
TV Shows
ETA right before posting: Antiques Roadshow!!! How could I forget?
Other
I also saw two pieces of theater over the past couple of months! I saw the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa, which was fun and bright and colorful and fast-paced and a bit overacted for my taste in a lot of places (it was fun! They were doing it on purpose! It was a directorial choice and they played it to perfection! Just not the choices I would have made), but the Aunt Augusta was PERFECT. I will say that I always forget the brother reveal at the end and it sure does make queering this show awkward, at least they leaned more on the women for that. The other was a local production of a lesser-known play (not going to say what it is, sorry, no idea how many places put this show on in a given year and don't really want to doxx myself), which was a really fun night and a deeper show than I expected it to be from the summary! Some really cool staging and a fun set in a black-box-esque theater, and a show that tried to say some things and succeeded like 75-80% on it.
D&D
And then they went to the Underdark, and with my players' full consent, I violated one of the strictest and most beloved rules of D&D and I scripted a bunch of scenes! They were going to visit the party's boyfriend's family, and he has a large and complicated family and they really wanted to lean into the drama so I just ... wrote a play? And we all took a few characters and acted it out and had a marvelous time! And then back in improv-land they had to find a missing teenager who was being preyed upon by monsters that force you to listen to your deepest insecurities, so it was very fun to throw that emotions bomb onto the players, we're still dealing with some fallout from that.
Creative Projects
Writing: I started off my year with an edit of one of my original works. You know, if you follow these posts, that I spent a good chunk of last year, and a bit of the year before if I recall correctly, absolutely miserably struggling with an edit that didn't want to happen. And then I got to this one and it practically edited itself in six weeks into a much stronger book. I don't know what possessed me but I would fucking LOVE for it to happen again, holy shit. Then once that was done I had a D&D play to write, see above, and I've done a bit of fic since then (D&D summary, accidentally wrote a 9-1-1 episode tag, currently writing some D&D porn). Overall, feeling consistent and good about my writing so far this year!
Crafting: Less consistent on this so far, since I've been sinking all my attention into D&D and an edit. However, the big news is that I finally finished the Tortall map! I'm really pleased with how it came out, I'm not always the most precise of stitchers but I'm really glad I put the time and energy into this. Now I'm in the slow process of mocking up a new dress pattern, and I need to move into higher gear for that because the past few years I've had a new me-made dress for me to wear for my birthday in early May and I would LOVE to make that happen. Right now the bust is giving me conniption fits, got to figure out how to fit that better. Also, I'm missing having an embroidery project on the go! Got to think about what to do next.
Things I'm Looking Forward To
For creativity, I've got two Fandom Trumps Hate fics to write and I'm looking forward to getting to those (well, the first one, second person hasn't prompted me yet), and then I'll see where the wind takes me! More D&D porn, probably, but still interested in more Tortall and 9-1-1 fics, and the first edit this year went so well that I'm looking ahead in the series ...
And that's all for now! What should I watch to replace Elementary when I finish that? I like to have a show with a decent amount of episodes to default to when nothing else is new or interesting. I do have a couple seasons of Murder She Wrote sitting around, at least, but I'm feeling uninspired about it. Usually I'm doing those default-y shows with my mother, and our tastes don't overlap on much but murder mysteries and Leverage, but if you've got a genius idea, lay it on me!
Movie Review: Hail Mary
Mar. 30th, 2026 08:46 amhrjIt's very much old-school SF, where a lone (male) hero solves insurmountable difficulties through the power of his enormous brain. Despite Weir's evident recent claim that he doesn't do politics in his writing, the "cross-species cooperation to survive" element is solidly political (and should be promoted more often for intra-species cooperation). But it's a solidly traditional theme (see, e.g., Enemy Mine), as is the mechanics of developing an alien language translation program (see, e.g., Arrival).
I did find the late reveal of spoiler spoiler spoiler to be a satisfactory motivation for the protagonist's eventual choice of fate. (Not the self-sacrificing aspect but the later choice.) And in that context, the flashback method of showing his gradual memory recovery was also effective.
So: it was ok, I guess?
⛵️
Mar. 30th, 2026 12:33 pmsoemandThese were the "budget" metal option of their day, offering premium performance without the astronomical eBay price tags of other unsealed tapes. With a long, snowy weekend ahead, I'll be firing up the deck to see how these vintage gems hold up. It's not the weekend I planned for getting the hull ready, but it's the perfect time for some high-fidelity analog experimentation.
The Frogs Talk Back
Mar. 30th, 2026 01:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
cakewrecks_feedRecently here on CW I took aim at frog cakes, which I might have insinuated are all slimy hell beasts of Wreckage. A few of you took issue with this. So, here to defend their good name are some more frog cakes.
Take it away, guys!
"Well, Jen, as you can see we're extremely well-rounded."
"And we always put our best feet forward."
"In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a frog cake that was too dimensional.
(And if you did, I'd be crushed.)"
"Never mind all that, though: The eyes have it, dahlings."
Uh huh. I see.
Well, frankly, guys, I think you're just making my point for me. But wait - what's this? Dribbles has prepared a short statement summarizing why frog cakes are awesome? Ok, then. Preach it, Dribbles.
"Thowwy, I can't wewwy tok wight now. Ma tongue is bwoke."
Aw, what a shame. Well, slimy hell beasts you remain, frog cakes. Sorry.
Thanks to today's hip-hop artists Wesley T., Jen C., Erin R., Tim W., & Andrea L.
*****
P.S. I take it back; I *do* like chocolate frogs. Or rather, the resin DIY chocolate frogs John and I made a few years ago for our Harry Potter party:
This was such a fun craft, click over for my tutorial and links to all the supplies and free box template.
zygodactyl
Mar. 30th, 2026 07:17 amprettygoodwordFor the adjective sense, also zygodactylous, but that's less common. Most zygodactyls are climbing birds, such as parrots, woodpeckers, and cuckoos (including, interestingly, the decidedly non-climbing roadrunners). The most common arrangement for birds is anisodactyly, with three forward and one back, which is good for perching and some climbing. Contrast also with heterodactyl, which is also two forward/two back, but instead of digits 1 and 4 pointing back it's digits 1 and 2. Coined in 1831 from Ancient Greek roots zygo-, paired (from zugón, yoked/yoke) + -dactyl, digits (from dáktulos, finger).
---L.