A Reckoning of Swords 24

Saturday, 24 January 2026 01:22 am
kalloway: Cygames' Lucifer (Lucifer 2)
[personal profile] kalloway
Wrote 600 words of the 2003 NaNo re-write. This means I have started and that is possibly the most important part? It's a complete overhaul so far but I suspect as I go along, I'll be able to keep full chunks and quite a bit of dialogue. I also see other fine lines to walk as I go; hopefully I won't fuck them up too badly.

Posted to [community profile] inspiredby, posted the event info for the [community profile] small_fandoms Drabblethon coming in February, posted the [community profile] no_true_pair annual schedule...

Got the email inbox down to 240 messages, got the DW inbox down to 47 pages. (On a fuzzy goal of 240/54. I'll take it!)

While I was looking for the 2003 NaNo on the Wayback Machine, I kind of died a little at some of my old website front pages. So sparse, so simple! The one with like four! fandoms, original fic, and a links page was definitely my favorite, lol.

Back to archiving. I'm not going to 'catch up' this weekend, but if I can get down to ~a week behind, I'll be really happy.

As usual, if there's a section you'd like me to wake up, let me know and I'll do it.
mific: (Heated rivalry)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Game Changers series
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Rating: Explicit
Length: 4639
Content Notes: Discussion of unplanned pregnancy and of abortion as a treatment option.
Creator Links: SirMxALotts on AO3
Themes: Crack treated seriously, Canon LGBTQ+ characters, Mpreg, Established relationship

Summary: Most people in Shane’s position would call a doctor after two positive tests, but Shane isn't most people, so instead of doing that, he takes 17 tests over the course of two days.

Final result: 16 positive, one negative.

Reccer's Notes: A classic crack trope this time: Mpreg. In this story's worldbuilding, some men can "carry", and Shane initially thinks he's not one of them. That's proved wrong, and he then faces a choice, which is where the "taken seriously" part comes in, as it's the same difficult choice any woman faces with an unplanned pregnancy. Rather than an unrealistic tropey outcome, Shane (after ignoring the whole problem for a while) finally talks to Ilya about it and makes his decision. I enjoyed the realism and the way Ilya was supportive without trying to persuade Shane one way or the other. We don't see the final outcome, but the story covers enough so that we know Shane's decision.

Fanwork Links: nothing but some heartburn, baby

Pilgrimage, private life, mortality

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

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

Ice storm advice [meteo]

Friday, 23 January 2026 11:11 pm
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
For those of you in the parts of the US for whom an ice storm is predicted and who have no idea of what that is except that it means it will be cold:

1) If you have an ice scraper to clean the ice off your car, have it inside with you, not in the car. Because at a sufficient level of ice coating, leaving your ice scraper in the car is like leaving your car keys in the car.

1a) Honestly, at a certain level of ice coating, it's more like having one's car coated in concrete, and you shouldn't waste your energy and body warmth whaling futilely at it. One of the failure modes is you succeed in getting the ice off but take the windshield with it.

2) You probably associate winter storms and coldness with grey-overcast skies and darkness. But once it is done coming down, often the arctic winds that drove the storm will blow the clouds away, the skies clear and the sun will come up. I cannot begin to describe how bright it gets when the sun is shining and the whole world is made of glass. If you packed your sunglasses away for the winter, go get them out. If you store them in your glove compartment of your car, again, maybe go get them and have them inside with you so you can see what you're doing when you are trying to get the ice off the car.

3) All that said, maybe just don't be worrying about leaving home. A fundamental clue is that an ice storm is not done when the storm is done raging. For as long as there's a thick glaze of ice on everything, the crisis is not over. Your life experience has given you an intuition of physics that says ice forms where water pools and is therefore mostly something flat. But in an ice storm, you get ice coating absolutely everything including sloped and vertical surfaces. YouTube is willing to show you endless videos of people attempting and failing to walk up quite gentle slopes covered with ice and cars slowly and majestically sliding down hills. Driving and walking can be unbelievably dangerous after an ice storm. Try to ride it out by sheltering in place and don't try to go out in it if you can at all avoid it. Remember, it's not about how good a driver you are, it's about how good a driver everybody else on the road isn't.

4) Snow and ice falling off buildings can kill you. Yes, I know snow looks fluffy, but it is made of water and can compact to be quite solid and if it attains free fall it can build up quite a bit of momentum. Icicles are basically spears. If you endeavor to try to knock snow or ice off from a roof or other high structure, be real careful how you position yourself relative to it.

5) Now and until this is over is absolutely not the time to do anything that entails any unnecessary risk. Any activity that is at all discretionary that has even a remote likelihood of occasioning an ER trip is to be avoided. Boredom, I know, makes people find their own fun. Resist the urge.

posts I am not making

Friday, 23 January 2026 07:17 pm
snickfic: digital painting of Gen and Jared curled up on bed in PJs (Jared/Gen)
[personal profile] snickfic
Every time I think about making a post, it just makes me tired. This is how fic writing is going also. Anyway, some things I would post about if I had the energy:

- Heated Rivalry
- movies I've seen (Impromptu, Testament of Ann Lee)
- my recent hip hop binge and especially why I like Glorilla so much
- the Oscars
- like five different [community profile] snowflake_challenge posts
bluapapilio: Idia from Twisted Wonderland lying down listening to headphones (twst headphones2)
[personal profile] bluapapilio
A


Zen raving about Iori to the old man's grave. 😂

We get to see Iori and Reo's first encounter. Iori answered his calls for help and then took him in.

Whenever his mother was around, he was selfish and spoiled to a fault, wanting to reaffirm that she cared about him despite her absence. Eventually, she stopped coming home altogether; then, his father vanished, too, and when he did, he left behind a mountain of debt with which Reo got saddled. Reo was the only one left, and he soon spent his days being hounded by debt collectors.

Damn...

Back then, Iori hadn't started using the phony kansai-ben in imitation of the boss

That's why he uses it?? Makes sense.

I understand why Reo and Satsuki get along the least now. They started off on the wrong foot and have different ways of communicating. But it seems Satsuki managed to draw Reo out of his shell.

LOL Zen getting jealous over Iori looking at a picture of himself and Yohei.

One of the reasons Zen got into training so much is because of a scar? Whooa what? Zen was a straight-laced police officer who went undercover in the Suiseki?! He couldn't lie to save his life so they knew, but they took a shining to him and he learned their principles, and he ended up taking a bullet for Iori..."Aniki, you think of me as a partner," Zen said. "Even after Yohei-san is gone, you've accepted me as your new--"

"Why do I feel like I'm dealing with a chick who's jealous of my ex-girlfriend..." Iori muttered.

He said it!

Aw, the part with Hokusai, everyone loved him in the Suiseki group.

Reo was at a loss for words. He was good at people-pleasing; he had learned how to flirt and sweet talk from his father, and while that was certainly a method of winning over young people and pretty girls, it wasn't exactly how you attracted people to a festival.

Hokusai saving the day as always...

Aw, the Suiseki old man listened to Yohei's music after he left to start rapping. 😭

Hokusai's great at drawing, somehow not surprised. Reo opens up a little. They'll think we're just freeloaders. And if I can't do anything on my own, if I'm a freeloader, then there's no way I'll be able to stay here...

So the Suiseki were giving money to Alter Trigger because it was supposedly going into researching ways to use phantometal to help the heard-of-hearing communicate?? Iori had doubts though.

"Zen... you can't tell him everything or else he'll go run off and blab, but if you just tell him one thing at a time, he'll go all-out to do whatever you tell him. And he's got a whole lot of faith in me, too... he's a real interesting guy,"

Such an apt description.

So Hokusai's rap name comes from what Iori calls him, Satsuki just heard 'Gaia' from somewhere and liked it, I'm surprised Reo was able to hold back from laughing his ass off.

Satsuki rushing ahead to save Reo, my heart. 😭❤️️ And I'm even more sad about Old Man Suiseki and the others deaths now.

Reo imagining seeing all of those who died around Suiseki's grave made me tear up like daamn.

Thanks to this story I learned that yakuza are involved in summer festivals.

Akan Yatsura comes from Old Man Suiseki commenting on how the boys are. I need a bandaid for my heart now. Really good story.

(Did Alter Trigger take out Reo's dad or did he really just run off?)

Unlikely Birthday Buddies, v2.

Friday, 23 January 2026 07:17 pm
full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] c_ent
Wrangled my meme from 23 January 2024 into a slightly more Tumblr-friendly shape; reproduce and distribute freely, as long as you credit me and don’t feed it to generative AI.

Once again: happy birthday (23 January as of 19:26 US Eastern Standard Time) to Lan Wangji from Mo Dao Zu Shi and Hei Xiazi from Daomu Biji!

news (work)

Friday, 23 January 2026 06:26 pm
elainegrey: Inspired by Grypping/gripping beast styles from Nordic cultures (Default)
[personal profile] elainegrey

NOT traveling this weekend; work meeting moved to next week.

Major relief.

It's been a strangely long week

Friday, 23 January 2026 10:25 pm
rosa_heartlily: (Default)
[personal profile] rosa_heartlily
This time last year I was watching two episodes of Traitors with the boys, celebrating the closure of two projects, waiting for a business-led project to start, and trying to get my monasticism-based prayer group off the ground.

Today I wrote the summary paragraph for the fourth book in my 'trilogy' - it's getting more like H2G2 all the time :D I also listed some more secondary characters who will be very important to the whole story. Time to get my name-creation hat on again!

I'd had an email telling me the latest parcel from Peace with the Wild would arrive this morning, so I sat downstairs to wait for it. When it didn't arrive I checked my emails again - now it was saying between 2-3pm *sigh*

I came back upstairs for one of the external meetings - it really feels like I'm part of the group, now. One of the other people works for one of the NHS Trusts and always has a different background - their trust encourages staff to submit photos of their local area and they're used as their corporate background.

After dinner, the parcel arrived. Not much this time but it helps with my efforts to be eco-friendly :)

Then I came back upstairs to work through a chapter of the Impact Engine System book whilst watching Dave climb Mount Gagazet with Rob ranting at him :D He managed very well, though, and even did a bit of grinding. He saved at the top of the mountain. We know what comes next... Good luck, Dave! This week's Friday Feature was about how NPCs might react to the behaviour of PCs :D

This evening we watched the final of The Traitors. We agreed the creators of the programme are very clever in the twists and turns they create for the players. 

Now I'm watching the final episode of this series of A House Through Time. It's fascinating to see something of what was happening in Germany at the end of WW II. I've only really considered it from the pov of Britain - naturally enough, I suppose.
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
MSN report here, from last year. I just learned this today. If I can stop anyone else from being exposed, it's worth a reblog.

The dishes in question are basically ubiquitous in kitchens I have known and loved, so that's not great.

ETA:
Okay, now I'm just confused. The lead levels are both a) high and b) technically legal, and it may not be leaching in any case due to the processes used. I hate living in an era where I don't know which of the seven million articles titled essentially the same thing are bullshit, and which are trustworthy. I figured MSN might fact-check, but apparently Corelle has never issued a recall per se, just a "Okay, we guess you might as well buy new stuff, because it's true there's lead in the old stuff." This info from this article.

Catching up on Snowflake backlog

Friday, 23 January 2026 05:57 pm
dolorosa_12: (heart of glass)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
There is no Friday open thread this week, because the [community profile] snowflake_challenge backlog was stressing me out so much that I needed devote a whole post to catching up with it. That said, if you want to use any of the challenges as a prompt, and respond in some way to it in the comments (either by linking to your own [community profile] snowflake_challenge post, or by answering it fresh), do feel free to treat it as a Friday open thread.

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge 10 )

Challenge 11 )

Challenge 12 )

General Strike!

Friday, 23 January 2026 11:44 am
lydamorehouse: (Default)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
I tried to embed the list of businesses shutting down, but here is a link: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1556336315616701


There are so many more... yes, this is adided by the fact that we have -15 F /-26 C air temperatures out there(does not include windchill), but this city is shutting down in solidarity with the anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis/St. Paul.  Y'all, general strikes like this normally do NOT work in the United States, they just don't. 

Except here.

And the best part? If a business needs to stay open for reasons no one is shaming them, as the statement from the Minneapolis City Council noted it's understood that some businesses are supporting the movement in other ways (including continuing to employ vulnerable people.) 

I am about to head out to our local mosque with some neighbors who want to be introduced to the local protectors, but my day yesterday was much the same as the day before. I spent about an hour and a half loading groceries and diapers into cars that are then taking them to our immigrant, refugee, and other folks in need so that they can continue to stay inside and stay safe. 

Mason's partner arrived just as the protest was starting at the Minneapolis International Airport where we are demanding that airlines stop collaborating with murderers and kidnappers. I'd gotten the call to go out there, but I have chosen to leave that fight to others. Pictures of the event underscore my choice. There are hundreds of people marching in this weather!   


loon art by juliessa figueroa
loon art by juliessa figueroa  No laser-eyes today, but the cool thing about loons, actually, is that they carry their babies on their backs!

Assortment

Friday, 23 January 2026 03:37 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Dr rdrz may imagine the noises I made when reading this (we get the London Standard free from our newspaper deliver people): Make America Hard Again: is there an erectile dysfunction epidemic?, particularly when I came to '“There have been huge uncertainties about male virility since the rise of feminism,” says Grossman.' and started screaming 'THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY!!!!'

Okay, there are some very creepy blokes there.

***

Creepy but in a different way: I was being 'recommended' this on Kobo, Y O Y???? The Voyage Out: A Quick Read edition:

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 13 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 20 minutes

The horror, the horror. And really, is Woolf a writer for whom this is an appropriate approach?

***

I'm sorry, but I couldn't help flashing on to the famous phrase 'Normal for Norfolk' when reading this: Archive reveals hidden stories of Queer Norfolk:

Norfolk: That's a queer ol' place
In the depths of the Norwich Millennium Library, there’s an archive dedicated to Norfolk’s LGBTQIA+ history

Doesn't mention that Gurney was a Friend, also disabled as a result of childhood polio.

***

This is rather fascinating: Flap Anatomies and Victorian Veils: Penetrating the Female Reproductive Interior:

Lifting flaps that unveiled the female reproductive body for medical purposes could just as easily be interpreted as a pornographic act imbued with sexual titillation and voyeurism. The ‘obstetrical flap’ was thus understood and used as both a teaching prop and an obscene tool. It functioned as a ‘veil’ of Victorian modesty in the name of new and penetrating obstetrical knowledge and a ‘veil’ of man's apparently underlying and untamable penetrative sexual impulses.

***

One has rather worried about this, and it appears that there are grounds for concern: ‘That belongs in a museum’: The true ‘cost’ of detecting in England and Wales.:

My previous work has discussed various aspects of the hobby of detecting: how the context of archaeological finds is often lost, how private ownership of finds is reducing the archaeological dataset, how our obsession with monetary worth may be fueling an increase in artefact theft and, more recently, the hidden and unacknowledged costs of the hobby of detecting to the wider British public.

Minnesota linkspam

Friday, 23 January 2026 03:54 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Mostly to create some space in my head. But holy shit, Minnesotans, you are extraordinary and we see you. Across the fucking ocean, we see you.

Cut for US politics, violence )

How To Help If You Are Outside Minnesota by Naomi Kritzer

Snowflake Challenge: day 10

Friday, 23 January 2026 03:37 pm
shewhostaples: image of a crown with text 'heaven doesn't always make the right men kings' (zenda)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).


I've never done a digital moodboard (have done physical collages, back in the day) and this sounded fun, if a little challenging to manage with limited laptop time. As I've been burbling about The Prisoner of Zenda quite a bit recently, I thought I'd stick with that. All the images came from Wikimedia Commons.

I can never make DW images play nicely, so I'm just sticking this under a cut and hoping for the best. I hope it doesn't come out too huge!

Read more... )

Profile

spindizzy: Cartoon of me wearing a mask and looking tired (Default)
Susan

About

Hi! I'm Susan, I write for [community profile] ladybusiness and The Lesbrary, and I do transcripts for Fangirl Happy Hour.

If you want to throw money at me, I have a patreon!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

January 2026

M T W T F S S
   1234
56 7891011
121314151617 18
19202122232425
262728293031 

Style Credit

Powered by Dreamwidth Studios