merrily | Reading

I had to go into the office yesterday (for the first time since March! March!!!) and it has wiped me out. I mean, "had to" in the sense that my boss wanted to take us out for lunch since in addition to my birthday in July, 2 other team members had birthdays in late June. We made a reservation at a restaurant about a block and a half from the office, which was great since it was so hot! But not great because the restaurant...didn't exist? There was a sign, but nothing inside the building and the phone had been disconnected. Even though we had made a reservation!

So we stood there for a while in the heat, trying to figure out where else we could go, and I was like, "Pepolino is 2 blocks away, we could go there!" And thankfully, they still existed and were open and had a table for 5 available right underneath the air conditioner, so lunch was lovely after a rough start.

I didn't get a whole lot of work done, but I did have one or two quick conversations of the sort that is easiest in the office since you don't have to set up time - you just run into someone in the hall and chat. Still, not worth having to get up an hour earlier and spend 2 hours a day commuting.

(Also, I ran into oldboss3 and she was like, "wow I haven't seen you in so long! It's so good to see you! Can you send an email for me???" And I was just like, "...I think it's best if Assistant L sends the email, since she will be able to answer any questions received in response and I won't." *shudders* Dodged that one.)

Since I knew I was going to be in the city, I arranged to have dinner with

innie_darling and

tenaciousmetoo, which was also lovely!

And then I came home and even though I'd set the air conditioner to go on about an hour before I knew I'd arrive home, my apartment was still unpleasantly warm. Bleh. Took my bedroom some time to drop in temperature too, which is the real key to sleeping well, I think, at least for me. So I didn't have a great night of sleep. But I probably don't have to go back into the office until late September, so I guess it's okay. *g*

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: A Little Respect - Erasure

china_shop

Pandemic life
I would like to go for a swim today, but the outdoor pool doesn't open till October, boo.

Previous poll review
I really enjoyed everyone's answers to the Youtube poll, thank you! I'd been thinking that I mostly use it for a) tv and movie trailers, b) specific music I'm looking for or that people have linked to, and c) how-tos (especially technical things, now that the search engines are useless, but also random stuff like how to fold dumplings). But the discussion reminded me I also watch essays, usually about story, writing, or film, in particular:

HelloFutureMe,

heyjameshurst,

everyframeapainting,

EllenBrock, and so on. And occasionally talk shows, exercise things (yoga, zumba), and other random things. I have my history disabled so I won't spend my whole life algorithm surfing.

In the poll, 48% of respondents said music, 44% said other, and 24% said "instructional videos - practical" and "dramas and tv". Ten percent of respondents don't use Youtube. In ticky-boxes, squishable fur-creatures (46%) came second to hugs (70%). Thank you for your votes and comments!

Reading
Audio: System Collapse (Murderbot) by Martha Wells, read by Kevin R. Free. I enjoyed this, not quite as much as Network Effect but well enough (and it might hit better on a re-read, like Network Effect did for me). I really appreciate that the series is grappling with wider existential issues, rather than opting for "Murderbot is super special" exceptionalism. And the middle section of Saving The World Through [Spoiler] was very fun.

Audio: Waiting for the Flood by Alexis Hall, read by Will Watt. This is a gorgeously written (and brilliantly narrated) m/m & m/m romance -- very close POVs, lovely similes. The perfect-partner wish fulfillment is almost at magic realism levels, and I found the transition from POV1 to POV2 a bit jarring, but I had been wondering how there could still be six hours left at that point, so something had to happen. My fannish brain wanted it to all come together more at the end -- poly, or friend group -- but how it actually played out was more realistic. The gestalt felt kind of genre-breaking: some very romance-novel elements, elevated by the observational detail and dreamy pacing, and complicated by the unorthodox structure. In minor characters, I loved Marius' mother so much.

Continuing on with Meditations for Mortals (thought-provoking and compassionate; the one-short-chapter-a-day really does feel meditative, and I suspect I'll go right back to the beginning once I've finished) and Guardian (just a few weeks to go in the readalong).

I found Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh in a neighbourhood tiny library yesterday, so probably that sometime soon. I haven't read it since I was a kid, and somehow I own the sequel but not the original. Talking cats ftw!

Kdramas/Cdramas
Continuing Nothing But Love and enjoying it tremendously. Both the leads have such a huge amount of heart, and the theme song's chorus ("you will be loved, you will be loved") really is the theme of the whole show. The found-family vibe is slowly coming together.

Other TV
The Secret Genius of Modern Life hosted by Hannah Fry s02e02 -- about the history of the vacuum cleaner; very close to being a puff piece (suck piece?) about Dyson.

The first episode of Tribe hosted by Bruce Parry (UK documentary series), where he goes to stay with remote tribes and lives with them for a few weeks, taking part in their daily life. It has what I'm assuming are the usual implicit tensions of this kind of anthropology (risks veering into voyeurism), especially when there's a camera crew involved. Parry can't actually sink into the experience fully because he has to keep breaking scene to narrate to camera. But was still really interesting.

Dead Ahead -- an Aotearoa NZ answer to the Ghosts franchise. A Māori family return from living in London to inherit the family home and find themselves haunted by dead relatives (kēhua). It's pretty great and also bilingual, with a fair amount of subtitled reo Māori. (Note to self: rewatch if/when you finally get around to starting to learn te reo.) One short season, which argh, does not resolve the central question. More of a drama than a sitcom.

North of North -- more indigenous TV, this time in the Canadian arctic. We've seen three episodes now, and it's delightful. The main character is lovely and charismatic, and it's made us laugh really hard a few times. Fresh and surprising.

More Bluey -- how is this show so adorable? How am I so intractibly earwormed with Bingo's "poor little bug on the wall, ding jing" song?

Tetris (2023 movie) -- this was unexpectedly excellent! It's a biographical thriller about trying to secure the distribution rights to Tetris. Set during the cold war, with a Ted Lasso-like main character. (I may only think that because of the moustache, lol.) A flawed but likeable main character, anyway. It contains corporate intrigue, corrupt and backstabbing magnates (Robert Maxwell played by Roger Allam of Cabin Pressure fame), and naive Westerners heading to the USSR and landing themselves in hot water in multiple hapless ways. Playful, funny, energetic, tense, and based on a true story. (On Apple+.)

Fandom
Multiple modding things happening at once. I can do this!

And ooh,

fan_writers already has 150+ subscribers. \o/

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses (the last couple of episodes haven't really landed for me; I like the technical ones), Letters from an American (US politics), Gone By Lunchtime (local political pundits; their discussion of the RSB made me want a lawyer or two to butt in).

Writing/making things
Lots of false starts. Apparently I'm still restocking the well or whatever.

Life/health/mental state things
My arms are such a mess, gah. Other than that, things are okay!

Food
I made Crispy Sesame Tofu last night, and it was amazing. Like the lemon chicken recipe, it contains 4 tablespoons of sugar; totally worth it. The tofu crisped really well, too. Last week I made nuoc cham (the dipping sauce that often comes with Vietnamese summer rolls; fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water, garlic, chillis) for the first time, and it was delicious. Conclusion: sugar is the answer to everything.

Today I'm going to make chicken dumplings to re-stock my freezer.

Link dump
Korean practice post | Current earworm (from Bluey) | Cow Cuddling & Highland cow experience (UK) | The Four Types of Novel Writers by

EllenBrock (Youtube, revisiting) | 9 Mistakes You're Probably Making in the First 10 Pages by

alyssamatesic (Youtube) | Louis Baker - R A I N B O W (Youtube, music). (So much youtube, hi.)

Good things
Guardian. Local TV shows. Cat! Cooking new things. An inbox full of fannishness. Audiobooks.

Poll #33442 Your name

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Respondents

When you give your name over the phone, you often / habitually

View Answers

spell it out, unprompted
29 (70.7%)

exaggerate the pronunciation to reflect the spelling
6 (14.6%)

offer an explanation or additional information
11 (26.8%)

other
5 (12.2%)

ticky-box full of being gentle with yourself
28 (68.3%)

ticky-box of a taxonomy of dandelion-wishes
13 (31.7%)

ticky-box of sugar in everything
11 (26.8%)

ticky-box full of waiting patiently, fiddling your bag strap
11 (26.8%)

ticky-box of three enchanted owl feathers that can draw forth the dawn
23 (56.1%)

ticky-box full of hugs
32 (78.0%)

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: uncomfortable

waketosleep

Random login go!

I deleted Twitter because of course I did. I am on bluesky now (https://bsky.app/profile/waketosleep.bsky.social) and I actually post a fair amount there? Back on my microblogging bullshit, I guess.

You're more likely to keep up with my doings on AO3 than here at this point, but fannishly: I've posted 230k words of fanfic in the last 3 years! The amount I've WRITTEN far exceeds that. I'm a machine. A machine that's writing a lot of Yakuza old man yaoi. But that is only one of nine different fandoms I've written fic for in that time. I wrote like five fics for Trigun Stampede. Finally getting into Trigun fandom after loving it since I was a teenager was wholesome.

I basically don't watch TV or movies anymore, couldn't tell you why. Just stopped, that's all (although I did watch TriStamp and I've seen some other random stuff here and there). I've been meaning to watch s2 of Severance though and it's on the Plex server I'm subscribed to so I might get on that soon, at least.

I do play video games still. I remain subscribed to FF14 and do a lot of high end raiding now. Once you get a good regular group for that shit (and I have one), it's pretty fun. I played like half of FF16; might finish it sometime. I have played almost every Yakuza game at this point. I think there's like four I haven't played still. Five if we're counting Lost Judgment. I'd like to play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 since nobody shuts up about it but my PC can't handle it until I replace the processor and mobo, so lol. Maybe someday.

Work-wise, I've been in solo practice now for... a year and a half? Thereabouts. Never going back to being employed by someone else, I don't think. Money is tight but I stay busy and the ability to decide how much I work and how much money I make is helping my health some, which is really all I can ask. Got several matters in early litigation right now, we'll see which ones make it to trial. Probably more than one. I need to figure out how to serve a claim in Michigan soon.

I had to move last year (same city, different neighbourhood) but I like my new place quite a bit. It's very cool in here in July. I'm trying out growing flowers from the ground again in my little patio area outside, although I started them late and from seeds so we'll see how they do. Some are perennials, so fingers crossed they try again next year. If not, I'll try starting them sooner and see if that helps.

james

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musesfool

I keep intending to post and then forgetting to do so. Nothing much is going on. I pan-fried a steak for dinner tonight and it was delicious but it also reminded me why I do it so infrequently - the smoke condition was intense and ongoing despite 2 fans going and the smell is going to linger. But I ate it with a nice arugula salad and it was good.

Here's a couple of links I found interesting recently:

- Sydney’s Choice How The Bear cooked up season four’s best episode.

- After ‘iconic’ Rangers tenure, Chris Kreider opens up about New York departure: 1-on-1 (do not read the comments)

- Why Your Team Sucks: New York Giants - this is an annual event (for every NFL team) and remains hilarious because in the case of the Giants, it's all sad but true. On this one, the comments are great.

*

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Mets vs Giants on the radio

james

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resonant

Five Musicians Who Owe Their Careers To Stack Moore (And One Who Doesn’t) (394 words) by Resonant
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sinners (2025)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elias "Stack" Moore, Billie Holiday, Paul Simon, Lil Nas X (Musician), Rhiannon Gidden (Musician), Sarah Vaughan (Musician), Prince (Musician)
Additional Tags: music industry, RPF if you're a real stickler
Summary:

It's who you know.

Beta thanks to

mific and

terminally_underwhelmed.

runpunkrun

I played a hilarious trick on myself. I had a coupon for a free Follow Your Heart vegan cheese, and the Kroger had fake parmesan (with ingredients I avoid), fake feta (but they were out), and fake bleu cheese (which I didn't like even when I could eat cheese).

But the coupon was about to expire and it was free, so I got the bleu cheese style crumbles as an experiment. Hilariously it tastes (and smells!!) just like blue cheese, only not quite as strong. I sprinkled some on my salad and didn't hate it and so I kept sprinkling because I don't get many novel flavors these days, and now it's actually starting to grow on me. It's tangy and creamy and kind of melts into the salad dressing in a pleasing way. If only it didn't taste like blue cheese.

Anyway, if you're a dairy-free-ish person who likes blue cheese, I recommend this! It's vegan, soy-free, and gluten-free, and I had my dad, a cheese-eater and gorgonzola enthusiast, try it and he was surprised at how good it was, saying it could pass as the real thing. I'm really looking forward to trying their feta. I have high hopes that it's similarly realistic.

Current ingredients: Filtered Water, Organic Coconut Oil, Modified Potato Starch, Sea Salt, Potato Starch, Natural Flavors, Less than 2% of: Potato Protein, Organic Vegan Cane Sugar, Calcium Phosphate, Lactic Acid, Caramel Color, Spirulina, Beta Carotene for Color.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: thoughtful

james

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siria

Just Zhuzh It
The Pitt | Gen | ~1300 words

(Also on AO3)

( Trinity, Whitaker, and platonic roommate advice. )

james

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princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: melancholy

james

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resonant

Anybody want to beta 400 words of light-as-air Sinners genfic?

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Retribution poll, 78.6% of respondents said the best revenge is living well, followed by a tie between "is sweet" and "is served cold" with 21.4% each. In ticky-boxes, an ancient language of shadows and flight (52.4%) came second only to hugs (73.8%). Brain being empty, but not in a meditation way came third with 50%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, one short chapter a day. It's good! Yesterday's chapter was, basically, stop hesitating at the fork in the road, and take a step one way or another. So I should probably pick a WIP to work on. Heh.

Also listened to Network Effect (Murderbot) by Martha Wells, read by Kevin R. Free. (I've read it before in ebook, but I didn't remember much.) This time I was struck by how the first third or so is a locked-room mystery

spoilers.

set inside the corpse of the victim, ha! The middle is Murderbot-ART fighting/relationship drama, which is delightful. The final part starts out all action/adventure, and I kept zoning out of the logistics, but then we got other SecUnits, who are delightful, and ART cleaning for the in-laws.

Awesome! I've started System Collapse.

Ebook: just Guardian.

Kdramas/Cdramas
An episode and a half of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. We have two episodes to go. And I'm continuing my rewatch of Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You), a Chinese m/f romance set in a tennis club. I guess I'm renewing my VIKI subscription after all.

Other TV
About two thirds of The Residence (no spoilers, please!), which is enjoyably quirky in a Knives Out-esque way. Original flavour Lilo & Stitch, just as fun and anarchic as ever. We finished Turning Point: The Vietnam War, which was excellent but, despite having a wide range of voices throughout, ended very much in a US pov. And more Bluey, which is currently my happy place. "Bingo!"

Fringe with my sister (plus a couple of episodes of Bluey).

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 Did I mention that

guardian_wishlist is coming in a month or so?

Also, that

mific and I set up a comm for talking about writing:

fan_writers (original fiction writers also welcome). It's humming away so far. Bring us your writing-meta links and thoughts!

Audio entertainment
A little more Letters from an American (/o\), one episode of Writing Excuses (currently has a very chatty, not very technical vibe, which is not so much my thing).

Offline life
On Saturday I went to the Dowse Art Museum, which had a range of delightful exhibits, including: a) several rooms on the theme of gay cowboys (before I went in, one of the staff cautioned me in an undertone that some of the works were explicit; reader, they were), featuring frilly saddles, large metal dildos, a whole wall of pencil sketches of gay cowboy sex, like seriously, and a short film about a newly het-married man who either decided to live in his gay-cowboy dream or went through a portal to a meadow-by-a-river gay-cowboy paradise, taking the married couple's priest with him, I'm not sure which. It ended with a dance number. b) a collection of latex sphinx cats, with each tattooed by a different local tattoo artist. c) a more sober and traditional exhibition of art made out of stone. d) a collection of "Shoes with Personality". e) some very nice weaving from (iirc) the 1920s and 30s.

On Tuesday, a friend and I went to the National Portrait Gallery for the 2025 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award, which had a fantastic range of styles and media, and I was particularly struck by one that made me think about my WIP meta, how much conviction it must take and how grounded in the concept the artist must have to be to embark on something quiet and thoughtful and complex, and then keep at it.

Writing/making things
I wrote a last-minute drabble for the Face challenge on

fan_flashworks, but other than that, nothing but meta. And I spent yesterday's Writers' Hour on this post. I appear to be in a fic-writing hiatus, waiting for my creative brain to surface, but today I managed to find a sort-of ending for a WIP, just a few paragraphs, and send it to beta.

Life/health/mental state things
Arms still not great. Otherwise things are pretty good. The sunshine makes such a difference.

Food
I made this lemon chicken recipe twice in three days. So good! (So much sugar, lol.) Am about to make malfatti to stock the freezer with.

Good things
Art galleries and lunch with friends. TV with friends. Sunshine. Bluey. Guardian. New writing comm. Dreamwidth. Plenty of fun things to keep me busy. You all.

Poll #33408 Youtube

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

If you use Youtube, what do you mostly use it for?

View Answers

music
24 (48.0%)

game play
9 (18.0%)

vlogs
7 (14.0%)

instructional videos - practical
12 (24.0%)

instructional videos - creative
9 (18.0%)

dramas and tv
12 (24.0%)

movie and tv trailers
10 (20.0%)

other
22 (44.0%)

I don't use Youtube
5 (10.0%)

ticky-box full of squishable fur-creatures
23 (46.0%)

ticky-box full of the delicate scent of honeydew among beech trees
19 (38.0%)

ticky-box full of grabbing a large hammer and just smashing things
21 (42.0%)

ticky-box full of existential hummingbirds wondering what to do with their lives
22 (44.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
35 (70.0%)

runpunkrun

A good old fashioned young adult novel about being stranded on an inhospitable planet and struggling to live off a steadily declining cache of resources. In one case, it's an alien world far in the future, and in the other, the dying Earth those colonists left, where the last inhabitants are about to extinguish themselves through nuclear war. Ah, children's lit.

This is actually a sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, but if you're a chaos demon you might be able to read this without having read the first. Partly because it stands on its own while gently reminding the reader what happened in the first book, but also because it fully retreads some of the same ground.

Because half of this book was telling me stuff I already, basically, knew, I was much more interested in the sections on the alien planet with its frontier survival vibes and foreign mysteries. I wanted to spend all my time there rather than on Earth, since I already knew that was a lost cause, and any new information we got in those sections could have easily been worked into the future segments and much of it, in fact, was. But it wasn't a chore to spend time with the original versions of Ambrose and Kodiak as they come to terms with the lies they've been told and try to undo some of the damage they caused, and together the two parts of this book tell a full story that comes to a satisfying conclusion, whether or not there's ever a third book in the series. But if there is, I'll be there.

Contains: queer dads; child harm and references to child death; wild animal harm/death; mental illness with intrusive thoughts; gun violence; nuclear apocalypse; climate disaster.

musesfool

Today was my first day back at work after my vacation and I did not sleep at all well last night, despite, you know, working from home and didn't have to get up early or anything. I was tossing and turning until sometime after 4 am, at which point I finally fell asleep.

Work was fine - busy, and kind of a lot, but not difficult despite the lack of sleep - but then I sat down on the couch after dinner to watch the Mets and fell asleep for about 40 minutes. *hands*

I'm really glad I took yesterday off too. I 100% recommend adding an extra day onto your vacation if you can - especially if it's a Monday, and doubly so if you actually went away. It makes it easier to get back into the grind, at least for me. I had 333 emails to sort through this morning, and there is way too much going on, as usual, but I timed it so that all of my regular meetings happened while I was out, so this week should be fairly quiet.

On the home front, I've had my new dishwasher for a week now and it is working really well, though I am still learning how to load it. The tines are much closer together and shorter than in my old one, which makes it difficult to get stuff in between them. But it's so quiet! And it doesn't leak! *knock wood* It does take 2.5 hours to run the full normal cycle, but I can live with that.

On the TV front, I finished Murderbot and enjoyed it - Mensah is still my favorite and I wish Bharadwaj had had more to do because I liked her as well.

I also finished the last 2 available episodes of My Life Is Murder because I read they are doing a new season, though who knows when it will be available here. I enjoyed the s4 2-part finale, and I do kind of low-key ship Alexa and Madison, though I also like that they have not had any real romantic interests for Alexa, and those 2 episodes really focused on her lingering grief for her husband.

In other news, Baby Miss L went to Sesame Place this past weekend and the videos of her vibrating with joy over meeting Elmo and Grover and Cookie Monster are amazing!

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Angels on tv

siria

When Descends on the Atlantic
The Old Guard | Joe/Nicky | ~1500 words

(Also on AO3)

( They follow the rocky beach around past Liscannor, taking their sandals off to ford the Inagh where its waters are shallow and warmed by the late morning sun. Past this point, the beach is broad and sandy and so Joe and Nicky amble along it together, shoes still in hand. Joe never thought that one day he'd be glad of sunglasses in Ireland, but so it goes. )

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: sad

china_shop

I'm listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, which espouses imperfectionism, a philosophy of life where you acknowledge that you'll never manage to do everything, and you stop beating yourself up about that fact. (I'm only seven short chapters in, hence this massive oversimplification.) I was thinking about how this relates to my WIP folder.

I'm serially monofannish. When I move fandoms, my old WIPs generally acquire Permanently Discontinued status. Sometimes I post them to AO3 marked incomplete, and other times they lurk in a subfolder of my WIP folder, where I occasionally mourn their lost potential. But mostly they're easy to ignore.

Over the months and years in a new fandom, I naturally accumulate more WIPs. So how do I choose what to work on next? How do I blow the dust off and get the engine turning over?

( Below the cut: multiple lists! )

runpunkrun

a wild boar
is also blown about
by the typhoon
-1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: sad

china_shop

A grey-scale banner showing a handwritten page with edits on one side, and hands typing on a laptop on the other. The centre text reads '@fan_writers.dreamwidth.org - talking about writing'.

mific and I have started a new comm:

fan_writers - for meta about writing. As the name suggests, we're primarily coming from a fannish context, but original-fic writers are also welcome! Bring us your links to writing-related meta on Dreamwidth or post directly to the comm.

Here are an Introductions post and a Resources post.

james

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netgirl_y2k

Comics

Absolute Superman: Last Dust of Krypton - Hi, I have a new favourite comic series. So, this is an alternate origin where an incredibly class stratified Krypton was destroyed when Kal-El was a teenager, and the Els are at the bottom of the heap. The S is the symbol of the working class, and when Kal gets to earth he starts finding mines amd farms and sweatshops that use slave labour or have abusive labour practices and protecting the workers. I didn't know how much I needed working classs hero Superman! Best enjoyed while blasting Springsteen!

Poison Ivy: Human Botany - I am still very much enjoying my other favourite comic series, where lesbianism continues to be the cause of, and the solution to, all of Ivy's problems.

Books

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling - We are in a low fantasy medieval castle under siege and on the verge of being starved out when the literal Gods of this world turn up to intercede. The gods are fairies, and maybe also bees? There is unrelatedly a monster living in a crack in the walls. There is a noble lady knight who cannot pass a wisdom check to save her life trying to protect people. There is a dispossessed noblewoman living in the walls waiting for a chance to get revenge on the knight. There is a madwoman in a tower who may be their only hope. All three of these women kind of want to fuck in various combinations.

It has a lot more cannibalism and mutilation than I usually like in my books.

It is the blood soaked fever dream of a mind clearly going through some stuff. I also kind of think it is hella good?

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab - The tagline for this book was The toxic lesbian vampires are coming and, like, yes, that is an accurate description of the book, but I also think it writes a check that the book can't quite cash, because even though it is shelved as adult it is very YA coded, like, there's a lot of sex and violence happening just off the page and what there is is very PG-13.

Like, it's good. It's very readable, the villain is delightfully awful, it does a good job of eliding how awful the supposedly sympathetic antihero is until the end, one of the characters is Scottish and I will always bump you up a letter grade for that. So, I did enjoy it, it was just a little more YA feeling than I was maybe hoping for.

Telly

Ironheart - I was not expecting to like this, it was filmed years ago before Disney pivoted away from the tv shows, and was clearly pushed out to die. I hadn't loved the character of Riri in Wakanda Forever, a movie I'd thought was already stuffed to bursting before she arrived. But on her own show, with her own supporting cast, she shone, they all did. It had that same thing that I'd really enjoyed with Ms. Marvel too, where the comic book shenanigans were rooted in a sense of a real place and and a real community.

But.

It was six episodes and it really should have been nine. It felt like they made the first two acts of a three act structure and then just...stopped.

Murderbot - I read the Murderbot novellas when they first came out, and kind of didn't see what all the fuss was about. Like, I enjoyed them as bits of fluff, and I could see they were objectively very good, but they just kind of skated off my brain without really going in. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this show, which was a whole hell of a lot. I thought it married the aesthetics of streaming era science fiction with the format of a zany workplace comedy, except that the workplace in question is that you are a horrifying murderbot.

I also watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the first of which was a perfectly serviceable conclusion to a cliffhanger, even if the Gorn will always be a bit 'we have xenomorphs at home', and the second of which made me say OH FUCK OFF out loud on three separate occasions.

Movies

Superman - I took the day off work the Friday Superman came out, so there I am, at the cinema at half past nine in the morning, in a Superman t-shirt, and the chick at the concession stand, in a fine display of deadpan comedy, goes 'What are you here to see?'

I told my buddy Cameron that I was using up some annual leave to see the movie and he was like, 'I thought this whole you being hyped about Superman thing was you doing a bit?' and I was like, 'NO, IT IS VERY EARNEST.' And then he was like, 'Was it always for real, or did it start as a bit and you talked yourself into it?' and I was like, 'I DON'T KNOW.'

After all that I am delighted to report that I thought the movie was wonderful. Like, it's not perfect, Hawk Girl doesn't get enough to do, and Eve Teschmacher is too good for Jimmy Olsen. But it's got this core of kindness, of earnestness, of all is not lost silliness that was exactly what I needed right now.

The Old Guard 2 - Oh no.

Not since Joker: Folie à Deux has a movie so fundamentally misunderstood what people liked about the first one - actually that's not true, Joker 2 got what people liked, it just made the very deliberate decision to call them dickheads. Old Guard 2 was worse, a film made by committee for an audience of no one.

One of my favourite podcasts has a phrase 'The Game is On' to describe movies that end with sequel bait for a next instalment that is never, ever, in a billion years going to happen, and, yup.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim - I missed this when it was in the cinema, and I kind of understand why. Like, how in the hell were they going to advertise this: it's a Lord of the Rings prequel, but it's also an anime, and it's kind of a girl power story, except it can't be really because there canonically wasn't a ruling queen of Rohan, and also we can't say 'girl power' because have you seen the state of the discourse!?

I really liked it, both because I found it delightful by its own merits, but also because I like a big swing, and if the future of the franchise is weird experiments like this or that Golum movie that I still think is a trick the internet is playing on me and not a real movie, I will take this every time!

Predator: Killer of Killers - Is it kind of weird that of all the big franchises Disney owns Predator is the one that seems to be on track and doing cool and interesting things? Sure, a bit. But also, MORE OF THIS KIND OF THINGS.

runpunkrun

Banner with text: fan_writers.dreamwidth.org: talking about writing. Black and white image shows hands typing on a laptop and a pen making revisions on a piece of lined notebook paper.

New comm for meta about writing! Moderated by fandom staples

mific and

china_shop!

siria

how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
The Pitt | Jack/Robby | ~2100 words | Thanks to

sheafrotherdon for betaing. Contains canon-typical suicidal ideation.

(Also on AO3)

( 'How the fuck do you have wings?' Robby's back on the rooftop. )

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: sad

mific posting in

sga_noticeboard

fan_writers is now open for business. It's a multifandom comm for meta about writing. Please post or link your writing theory, tips, techniques, and other writing meta here. As the name suggests, our primary context is fanfiction, but original-fiction writers are also very welcome. We're just here to geek out about writing!

Join, subscribe, say hi on the Introduction post, and comment with Tumblrs, podcasts, Substacks, and any other writing resources you'd recommend on the Resources post. But most of all, post or link to your meta about writing, and join in the discussions. (Or lurk. Lurkers are absolutely welcome, too.)

Hope to see you over at

fan_writers!

james

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musesfool

I mentioned I've been reading a bunch of DCU/PJO crossovers, and mostly I like it when nobody is related to the Waynes and no Waynes are secretly demigods and it's just Percy et al in Gotham and rolling with their weirdness (or vice versa, I guess, but I haven't seen any like that yet), though I have enjoyed those other types. For me, the big key to making the crossover work, aside from the fact that I want it to so I'm primed for it (i.e., buy the premise, buy the joke), is how Wonder Woman is handled (and to a much lesser extent, Wonder Girl), even more so than Aquaman and Atlantis.

Like, for me as a reader, you can't pretend that the Batfamily is totally ignorant of the Greek pantheon or demigods if you've got Diana around. And I realize that some folks are basing their Batfamily stuff on other people's fic (I'm not making that call - some of them state it outright in their notes), which may not contain any info on Wonder Woman or the Amazons etc. but Wonder Woman is not an obscure superhero! Even if you ignore the retcon that she's a daughter of Zeus (and you should! Even the comics have walked that back, though I can see why it might be interesting to work into this kind of crossover), she was made of clay and had life breathed into her by Greek goddesses.

I mean, it complicates things to some degree, because where was she during all of Percy's adventures, but 1. she was in space/another universe etc., or 2. she'd been stripped of her powers for trying to help, or 3. she was back on Themyscira, and unaware, or, or, or... And those are just off the top of my head. Mostly I've seen Percy and friends angry that she didn't participate and that's a fine way to go, but like, I feel like something has to be said, even if just in passing, unless it's set very very early in Batman's career and he hasn't met her/she isn't public yet. And the ones I've found so far are not set in that timeframe, because the fun of the crossover is having all the kids interacting with each other and with Bruce.

Anyway, I'm always interested in how other people make crossovers work, because for me, skipping over most of the nitty-gritty of trying to make incompatible worlds/magical systems etc. work together is the way to go - choose one or two details to set the vibe and handwave the inconsistencies.

***

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Mets vs Reds on tv

james

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siria

Q&A
Superman (2025) | Lois/Clark | ~2200 words

(Also on AO3)

( 'I know you're never going to let me interview you as Superman again,' was how Lois began. Clark sighed and put the TV on mute. ''Never' is a very definitive way of putting it.' )

james

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china_shop

guardian_wishlist is returning next month, yay! It's my favourite event. It runs like

fandomtrees: people sign up with a wishlist of things they'd like to receive, and then anyone can make them gifts. One of the things I love about it is that every year I make things that would never have occurred to me otherwise: the SID Team writing RPS, Arthurian-inspired AU, tea shop AU, Zhu Hong learning martial arts, Li Qian joining the SID, etc.

I find most of my own prompts revolve, by default, around my main /-pairings, so I try to make a conscious effort to include gen and &-pairing prompts in my signups too. And (speaking not as a co-mod, but as a co-participant) I'd like to gently encourage everyone else to do the same, if they'd like to receive that kind of thing, because I love writing little gen and other-pairing things (as well as SW/ZYL), and prompts are love. :D

musesfool

I made this fancy lemonade with what I learned from

minoanmiss's tags is called oleo saccharum, which is sugar syrup made with the oils in the citrus peels. I had 8 lemons, and some leftover frozen strawberries and blueberries, so I let the berries defrost in the fridge overnight and then this morning I did all the juicing and the dicing and then let it sit for several hours (5, I think?) before straining the syrup and adding the juice etc. It's very good, though I need to try it with lemons only, I think, and maybe less sugar. Because I do like my lemonade on the tarter side.

Anyway! I dug out my potato masher and my citrus reamer with carafe for this, so it was nice to be able to use them. I do kind of wish I had a food mill but I've never been able to justify the expense to myself - I used a large fine mesh strainer and it worked fine.

In other news, I watched the most recent season of GBBO and I LOVED EVERYONE IN THE TENT, but especially Dylan! Nelly! Gill! and Georgie! ( spoilers, I guess ) And Allison is so great. I hope she sticks with the show for a long time.

*

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

china_shop

From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, chapter 4:

As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do.

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: awake

runpunkrun

I was like, can I make this work for

fancake's "Working Together" theme? And I decided I could not.

So I'm going to slap it in here for now because it's too good not to share immediately:

RADIOACTIVE by Murderbot [vid] (30 words) by pollyrepeat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murderbot (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (Murderbot Diaries), Fanvids, Video Format: Streaming, Embedded Video
Summary:

A vid or fanvid is a video edit, often set to music, produced by fans, known as "vidders."

No spoilers for Murderbot, and all the spoilers, I guess, for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

runpunkrun

Perihelion's people notice it's been acting strangely since it returned from its last solo mission. A short story set after Artificial Condition.

My favorite thing about this series is Murderbot and ART and their favorite humans. My least favorite thing is all the descriptions of walking around. This has both. I would have liked it a lot better if it had spent half as much time describing the path they took through the spaceport facility and twice as much time exploring Iris and Peri's relationship because that's the important stuff, right? I wanted to learn more about their relationship and the ways Peri changed after meeting Murderbot and what Iris thinks about those changes. Here I was thinking ART was always like this, but it seems Murderbot might have had more of an effect on ART then it could have known.

Instead: Transit schedules. :(

Read it for free at Reactor.

We All Came Here Together

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