karanguni | Reading

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Current Mood: oh for heaven's sake
Current Music: You can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug

isis

Perhaps you're having the worst day in a week of worst days. Here's your remedy:

Watch on YouTube

(she is ten years old! I adore her! The world adores her!)

yhlee

Pre-launch for Ex Tenebris, a "a gothic space investigation TTRPG" forthcoming from Black Armada.

Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.

In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

I will be writing a scenario [Update #2] for this game. :3

:goes back to orchestration homework:

pensnest

Today I learned a couple of interesting things about ( pelvic floor exercises )

beatrice_otter

I use the same name everywhere so I am

beatrice_otter on AO3. Treats are awesome.

I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am not inspired that way." This letter is long with lots of suggestions and preferences if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am usually very happy with my gifts.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

I have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

General Likes and Dislikes

other things to keeep in mind:

I like stuff that takes side characters and puts them center-stage, especially when the characters and/or actors are marginalized. I enjoy seeing them come to life.
I don't like it when marginalized characters get relegated to the sidekick/supporting/helper role so that it can be All About The White Dude.
I like it when female characters are more than just the Strong Female Character(tm) or The Nurturer.
I like fluff
I like angst with a happy ending
I like stories that make me think about things in a new way.
I like to know that culture matters to people, and to see how different cultures interact and where the clashes are.
I like unreliable narrators.
I like acknowledgment that different people can have different points of view without either of them being wrong.
I like stories that engage with problematic aspects of the source, and which deal with privilege in one way or another instead of sweeping it under the rug.
Worldbuilding is my jam, I am pretty much always up for explorations of why the world is the way it is. I love hearing about the economics, the politics, the religion, the clothing, the history, the folklore, all of that kind of stuff. And I want to know why it matters--how is all this cultural background stuff affecting the characters, the plot, everything. You don't have to do deep worldbuilding, but I'll enjoy it if you do.
I don't like it when plots hinge on characters being selectively stupid, or selectively unable to communicate. Like, if they are stupid or a himbo or whatever in general, or have problems communicating in general, that's fine! Or if they canonically have a blind spot in that area, again, it's fine. But if it's just "the only way I can think of for this plot to work is if the character spontaneously and temporarily loses half their intelligence and competence," then I'm going to spend the rest of the fic wondering why the character didn't just ____?
I like AUs, but not complete setting AUs (i.e. no highschool or college or coffee shop AUs, and especially not mundane AUs--nothing where you keep characters but drop most of the worldbuilding). I like fork-in-the-road type AUs, where one thing is different and the changes all result from that one thing, and you explore what might have been if such-and-such happened.
I like the concept of sedoretu marriages.
I like historical AUs, but only when the author actually knows the history period in question and does thoughtful worldbuilding to meld actual culture of the time with the canon.
Crackfic is really hit and miss for me, sometimes I love it and sometimes I can't stand it. Basically, if it's the characters we know and love in a ludicrous situation, that's great. If they're OOC or parodied in order to make something funny ... it's not funny to me.

I like plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general. I don't care for explicit sex, particularly when it's just thrown in for teh porn. I'm asexual; a lot of the time I don't even bother to read the sex scenes. Romance is awesome (as long as both are in character and the romantic plot doesn't hinge on one or both of them being an idiot). I love it when friendship is held up as important and not secondary to romantic relationships and blood ties.

Please no incest or darkfic. I define "darkfic" as stuff where there's a lot of suffering and no hope even at the end and all the characters are terrible. Angst with a happy ending is fine, I enjoy it, but there's gotta be a payoff. Even an ambiguous ending is fine! But there has to be some note of grace or redemption or hope somewhere, it can't just be "people are awful and the world sucks, the end." I define incest as siblings and/or parents, cousins don't count.

I love outsider perspectives and academic takes on things. In-universe meta (newspaper articles, academic monographs--especially with the sort of snarky feuding common in actual real-world academia, social media feeds in current day or future worlds) is awesome.

Also, I'm picky about European historical clothing details. You don't have to talk about it at all! In fact, if you don't know much about historical clothing, I would prefer if you didn't mention it at all. My pet peeve is corsets: no, they weren't a restrictive tool of the patriarchy, no, they didn't interfere with most women's daily lives, no, most women weren't wearing them so tight they couldn't breathe.

I like religion but I'm picky about it. Basically, Christianity is deeply weird compared to most other religions, and a lot of people whose only experience with religion is living in a culturally-Christian nation assume that what they know about Christianity is some sort of universal principle of What Religion Is Like, and that's just not the case. For example, in Christianity what you believe is more important than what you do. This is not to say we Christians don't teach and practice Christian ethics or have rituals we are very attached to, but rather that if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter what rituals you participate in or what ethical things you do, you are not a Christian (although you may be a "cultural Christian"). Every Christian group has at least a minimal core theology that members must affirm, but participation in ritual is far less rigidly a requirement. Most other religions rank what you do (both ethically and ritually) as more important than what you believe, and it is often quite possible to be a member in good standing if you participate in the practices and rituals even if you believe none of the teachings. Anyway, point is, if you are doing worldbuilding for a fantasy or SF or otherwise non-Christian religion ... unless it is explicitly a Christian-analogue, it should be different from Christianity. Question your assumptions and see where that leads you, and I will be fascinated and thrilled.

( Fandom For Robots )

( Rivers of London )

( Goblin Emperor )

( DS9 )

( Star Wars Legends )

( Enola Holmes )

( Babylon 5 )

( Enterprise )

( TNG )

( Sense8 )

swan_tower

Apparently I did not hallucinate a couple of weeks ago . . .

Marie Brennan (a white woman with glasses and long brown hair in a single braid) looking pensively at the trophy for the Hugo Award for Best Poem

Marie Brennan (a white woman with glasses and long brown hair in a single braid) looking pensively at the trophy for the Hugo Award for Best Poem

(I opted for the shot where I'm looking pensive rather than trying to smile, because I am atrociously bad at smiling for the camera. There's a reason my author photo features me looking like I'm about to stab somebody; it was preferable to any of the alternatives.)

So, yes: my award came!!! I could have opted to take it with me, but the logistics of getting it packed up -- especially the fragile glass part -- and handed over to me before I left on Sunday were complicated enough that it was simpler to just have them ship it to me. The downside, of course, was that I had to wait a whole WEEK AND A HALF to put my shiny new rocket on display!

. . . hilariously, a rejection for a packet of poems hit my inbox while I was reassembling this.

It's going to live in my office for at least a while, so that I see it every time I come in. Eventually I think I'll move it downstairs to our front room, where visitors to the house will see it, but for now -- nope, it's mine, my preciousssssss.

snickfic

- "I am definitely not signing up for

ficinabox," I said, and then promptly wrote most of a letter. I now have a request I can match to and spent the morning making a list of other requests that I could swap for. I've submitted a swap request, maximum two swaps of 2k each, but there's time to change my mind before swaps close.

- The Kinktober prompts are out. I have managed to write like one kinktober fic ever, plus October is the WORST month for this when I'm also working on FIAB and Yuletide treats and watching all the horror movies, and yet. You know what ship I want all the kinks for, all the time? It's Gallaghercest. I've made a list of all the kinks from this year that I think would be the most fun for them, and I think maybe I will try to post... one a week? That seems like something I could do.

- Speaking of the Gallaghers, I have almost 7k of reunion... vignettes? At this point there are enough of them that maybe it's just a story, lol. I keep pecking away, and words keep happening.

pensnest

If there were a Big Cat fandom, surely this guy would be featured in 98% of the fic?
( Read more... )

yhlee

On a personal note, peace to Rai Weiss (https://news.mit.edu/2025/professor-emeritus-rainer-weiss-dies-0826) - physicist (co-won the Nobel Prize for detection of gravity waves at LIGO); learnt yesterday that he'd passed. I knew him only glancingly/socially (my husband worked with him as a grad student at MIT at LIGO Hanford) but I remember his extraordinary kindness and warmth.

gourdier

I've been playing so many video games recently. After finishing the Kingdom Hearts series (thank you library, for stocking a very comprehensive collection), I decided to branch out a bit in the Square Enix catalogue and try some well-reviewed games that were on sale: Star Ocean First Departure R, Star Ocean The Second Story R, and Neo: The World Ends With You. The first TWEWY wasn't on sale too, but I remembered liking it well enough back in the day, so I went and bought it for full price... I like it way more now, so no regrets, haha.

During the weekly anime nights with A, we've also watched all of Mushishi and FLCL, two very different flavours of shows, haha. Mushishi is lovely and very chill. FLCL is basically the completely opposite vibe, while still being a feast for the eyes. Now we're well into season 1 of Haikyu, and I'm surprised just how funny it is! It's also very bingeable; I feel like I'm always surprised once we get to the six-episode mark and call it a night. I like all the characters pretty well so far, though I did get very distracted when Tsukishima was introduced because OMG, I sure have been listening to a lot of Koki Uchiyama's voice, recently xD.

I always have aspirations of writing review posts about the stuff I consume but gotta accept that I'll probably never get around to it, so, impressions will be under a cut.

( Games reviews behind the link )

cahn

I have been sitting on this for months but I can finally tell you that the book I have been doing a ton of beta-reading for is out! Love Medley, by Lyssa Fairbanks, is a romance novel. One of the two protagonists is Lucy, a third-gen Chinese-American fourth-year medical student. She's quite bright and often goes full speed ahead at a moment's notice, which can be both a good and a bad thing; as the book opens, she is just finding her way out of an abusive relationship. The other protagonist is Jake, a Midwestern ER nurse who moonlights as a dueling pianist. Jake is a musical people-person; as the book opens, he is finding his way free of his emotionally controlling family. Lucy enlists Jake's help as a fake boyfriend to get her toxic ex to leave her alone, but will this lead to more? (...I mean, it's a romance novel, that was a rhetorical question.)

It's part of a projected 4-book series involving a close friend-group of four, of whom Lucy is one, who are making their way through medical school. (And the second book will be F/F, I've read the rough draft and am excited about that one too!) Jake, not to be outdone, has his own friends as well! As usual, I adore the ensemble scenes more than the actual romance. ;) (A me thing, of course! The romance is also very nice!)

The book includes a content notes page that cites explicit sex scenes, emotional abuse (on-page), physical abuse (off-page), explicit language, emotionally abusive parents. It is also very clearly a romance book, and I know this is not everyone's favorite cup of tea, but if you like romances then I think it's a great contender in the genre!

I would like to give the kindle e-book to the first five people who tell me they'd like one (I'll update this post if/when that number is reached) -- please DM me with your email address :) I'm sure the author would very much appreciate it if you left an honest review on amazon, but don't feel compelled to -- this isn't an "exchange" for a review, this is just me doing this for fun :)

If you would like to support the author, the book is available on amazon here or signed copies are available from Left Bank Books here. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited.

(BTW, Lyssa Fairbanks is a pen name. If you know the author (which a couple of you do, or may be able to to figure out that you do), please do not talk publicly about their real name or how I know them, thank you!)

yhlee

Do I know anyone who is going to DragonCon this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and who is

(a) willing to buy some BPAL for me there and ship it to me (Louisiana)
(b) in exchange for either filthy lucre (PayPal or Venmo) or
(c) 4 oz. handspun yarn just for you to be negotiated?

examples of my spinning:

wool, 2-ply

wool/sari silk, 2-ply

( and more )

re: (c), fibers I have on hand in sufficient quantity

These are wool. Front left (greens & blues) and front right (blues & greys) I have 4-ish oz.

In back, I have 1-2 oz. of others (pink & blue, sky blue, navy blue), which could be blended, or I could spin multiple yarns up to 4 oz.

(I can't get more of the colorways shown here because these were inherited from others' destashes.)

Also 2 oz each of the following:

- left: 25/25/25/25 flax/hemp/cotton/ramie blend
- right: 25/25/25/25 flax/hemp/bamboo/ramie blend

I have smaller quantities of various sari silk colorways that could be blended into most of these for effect. (The silk fiber is the stuff on the chair, not the wool yarn draped over the arm lol.)

Or I could order US-based fiber batts/combed top (etc) within an agreed price range and spin those for you.

But I imagine filthy lucre is the most interesting. :p Leave a comment or email me at yoon at yoonhalee dot com!

dolorosa_12

I've had this Rebecca Solnit essay bookmarked for a few days, because it's such a clear distillation of my own personal and political outlook that rather than write the ten millionth iteration of my own 'behave as if you have agency' rant, I can now just point to Solnit's post and call it a day.

I might quibble with some of her specific illustrative examples, but the overall shape of what she's saying aligns exactly with my thinking. And while I'm on this topic, I'll add (yet again) that constant awareness raising about iniquities and atrocities absent any specific instructions about concrete action to take in response to those iniquities and atrocities provokes exactly the kind of demoralising, despairing-in-advance apathy Solnit deplores in her essay. The only people who should be raising awareness are those whose job it is to do so: people who work in the media, or people who functionally fill a media-like role (paid or unpaid) by virtue of the content they've decided to disseminate via social media, and the large audience they have there. Even in those latter cases, awareness-raising without context does more harm than good.

Hope is an action. This doesn't mean a naive, apathetic confidence in the status quo. It means being clear-eyed about the gravity of the situation and the potential societal and personal risks it causes, and using what agency remains to you as an individual, a community and a society to push back against the tide, without being overwhelmed by the knowledge that it will be a marathon, not a sprint, comprised of lots of tiny little moments of concrete action. (And being able to handle the fact that the greater the atrocities and injustices, the less likely it will be to stop them with one grand action, and to be able to acknowledge the weight of this without being steamrollered into apathetic despair.)

None of these complaints are directed at anyone on my Dreamwidth reading list, which (to my good fortune) is comprised of sensible, thoughtful people who are better than most at understanding the motivating (and demotivating) power of words and information. But I felt, in the wake of Solnit's post, that it was time to set out my own thoughts on this particular nexus of issues once again, with as much clarity as possible. (And thank you to

muccamukk for giving me the push I needed to set words to screen.)

yhlee

This one's going to an astronomer friend. I think catten is trying to figure out where the SHEEP are. :p

Earlier:

nanslice

Requisite "omg how has it been so long since I updated, blah, blah" shenanigans, time is weird and I don't understand how it goes so quickly.

I've drawn several things recently but I'm gonna share thing th

I took a silly little personality quiz that ended up being extremely accurate! I love personality quizzes and I used to do them all the time. It helps that the design is super cute. <3

I've been on the hunt for a new MMO as my interest in FFXIV wanes (it never really recovered after the shenanigans with the grifter) and have fallen firmly into Elder Scrolls Online. I love the Khajiit so much! I started the game as a dude but since I don't really have a group to play with (Will is playing but they're on PS4 and I'm on PC and there's no crossplay - YET) and I prefer playing as a girl. So I created a second character - also a Khajiit. Whoops!

and also, Razum-Dar is adorable and I love him.

I also started replaying Pokemon Violet, since I didn't get very far along in it. I tried to make my character look like an office worker, lmao. I don't know how old these characters are meant to be but I don't think it's fourteen, right? Like. Maybe.

Also: garden producing a lot! This is just one bowl of five that has been harvested. <3 I'm really pleased with how it's been going! I also have at least four spaghetti squash and six mini-pumpkins! And another six pocket melons! And lemon cucumbers!

I'm definitely going to be expanded the gardens for next year; with the way grocery prices are going it's better, I think, to take advantage of the space we have for vegetables.

Let's see...I'm sure there are more things, but that's all I can think of! I have art to post but some of it is NSFW and should have its own post. :3

Current Mood: sleepy

rachelmanija

Full letter to come!

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, canon divergence AUs anf alternate versions of characters. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

( Opt-in Tags )

( General DNWs )

( Caught in Crystal - Patricia Wrede )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey )

( Marvel 616 )

( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

james

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

snickfic

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). A group of hapless twenty-somethings wander into a farmhouse in rural Texas hoping to buy gas for their van and are picked off one by one by the home's very large nonverbal resident, who wears the skin of a human face for a mask.

I got to see this in the theater, which IMO is definitely the way to go for this one. It does a great job building tension from the very beginning. For all its raw filmmaking approach, I felt the movie had a surprising amount of ambition in terms of both background themes (city vs country, the way technological progress can disrupt people's lives) and this recurring idea of, like, a sense of cosmic apocalypse brought on by the alignment of the stars and planets. The sun as a malign figure wreaking havoc on humanity. The movie goes way harder than it needs to do to succeed as an exploitation horror film.

I was surprised by how little of the actual story I'd osmosed from hearing about the movie over the years. For example, I had no idea that of the little friend group of victims, the one with by far the most lines and personality is a guy in a wheelchair, which honestly felt pretty progressive. His mobility is a significant element of his character throughout the film without being a plot point, and I appreciated that. The movie also leans more into black comedy than I expected. Leatherface lumbering around chasing people with the chainsaw is some pretty good physical comedy, actually!

I also had not realized just how sympathetic a character Leatherface is. He's clearly upset about these people just walking through his front door and wandering around his house. After the second or third one, he sits in his living room, surrounded by taxidermy and bone furniture, and puts his head in his hands, like why is this happening to me!! He also doesn't seem to have any malice towards his victims. There's a whole backstory of how his family used to kill cows at the slaughterhouse, and he treats the tresspassers like cows. But once he and his family has captured the final girl alive and tied her up at the dinner table, he dresses up for dinner! I feel like these details sound like I'm being sarcastic or making fun, but genuinely I liked him a lot and felt sorry for him, especially in the context of how his family members treat him.

Overall a good time. Would watch again.

--

Honey Don't (2025). In the second in Ethan Coen's "lesbian B-movie trilogy," Margaret Qualley stars as Honey, a neo noir private eye investigating a death that may or may not be connected to a creepy local church pastored by head creep Chris Evans.

I had a great time with this movie until I didn't. It's 2/3 of a very fun movie in which Margaret Qualley is a really hot PI, and then 1/3 of a very annoying movie in which she is those things, so at least you get really hot Margaret Qualley the whole time. The plot barely counts as one; this movie is running entirely on vibes. For most of the movie it's unclear whether a crime has even occurred. Fortunately the vibes are excellent. Yes, I DO want to watch Qualley show off her long legs in dressy casual slacks and heels while kicking ass, taking names, and having lesbian one-night stands. She did the job she needed to do in The Substance, but she is absolutely magnetic in this. On the other hand, the ending is nonsense AND made me mad, the worst combo.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Chris Evans the cult leader was a disappointment. Between this and Bad Times at the El Royale, I'm 0/2 on Avengers-turned-cult-leaders. (Has Ruffalo been one? He seems the likeliest. Does his role in Mickey 17 count?) The pastor's plotline also turns out to be completely irrelevant, and the whole thing where his church is a front for a drug running business funded by "the French" is just signature Coen quirkiness, I guess.

OTOH, I think Charlie Day has finally aged into roles I can enjoy him in. So there's that.

Honestly this movie needed another writing pass or two and probably should have excised the church plot entirely and come up with a new, better mystery for Honey to investigate. But if vibes and Qualley are enough of a draw, this might be worth your time.

--

Biosphere (2022). Sterling K Brown and Mark Duplass are childhood friends who live in a tiny dome they can't leave after the rest of Earth and humanity has been destroyed.

This is the purest two-man show I have seen in movie form in a very long time. It has exactly one set (broken up into various pieces, but still) and exactly two actors, who are clearly what all the tiny budget went toward. It is a science fiction comedy/drama thing about, idk, hope and resiliance and male friendship.

A movie like this lives or dies by the chemistry between its leads, and Brown and Duplass are great together. There are many funny bits, enough honest emotion to keep me hooked, and various plot developments that I enjoyed. (Gotta love when you quote a famous movie line and then five minutes later the character ALSO quotes that line.) I also just respect the hell out of this kind of barebones, microbudget moviemaking. You see it a fair bit in horror (such as Duplass's project Creep), but less in other genres.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

Fairy-tale Logic, A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

First published in the March 2010 issue of Poetry. Stallings remains the poet my age I most admire. I am struck by how the examples from the octave are all from European folklore, while those of the second are from Greek Mythology (with the last common to both domains).

---L.

Subject quote from Best Guess, Lucy Dacus.

dolorosa_12

Long weekends in the UK can go two ways: freezing, rainy and miserable, or sun-drenched to perfection. This time around, we got the latter, and everyone seemed to be in a great mood, spilling outside to make the best of the last gasp of summer. Matthias and I were no different: we went to Norfolk, we went to Suffolk, we sat under the trees in our favourite courtyard bar in Ely, and life was good.

Ever since we moved to Ely five years ago, I kept suggesting that we go on a day trip to Kings Lynn (at the far northern end of the train line on which we sit; the southern end is London), and every long weekend when we had a spare day, it would end up pouring with rain and we'd elect to stay home. This time, however, the weather did what we wanted, and we took the train half an hour north, for day of pottering around. We ate a lot of seafood, we discovered a fabulous gin distillery and bar, a fabulous rum bar, and a pretty decent gastropub, we wandered through the historic city centre, and realised far too late that there was also a pretty little walkway along the riverfront, with a foot ferry — something for a future trip, perhaps.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, we caught the train half an hour in the other direction to Bury St Edmund's, which was holding a beer festival in its massive cathedral grounds. (It felt somewhat medieval, especially with all the church officials wandering around in ecclesiastical dress, as if we'd stepped back in time before the Reformation, as guests of a beer-brewing monastery.) We stayed for about five hours, people watching and chatting, before returning to Ely in the early evening. Miraculously, everything worked flawlessly with the trains for both day trips, which is not always a given!

My preference on long weekends is to do the travel on the earlier days, staying progressively closer and closer to home each day, so today we did just that — I haven't gone further than the swimming pool, although we did have lunch at the market, before wandering home, eating gelato. This afternoon will involve the usual weekend wind-down activities: yoga, cooking, a bit of catching up on Dreamwidth.

( Two books )

It still feels like summer here, but if I look closely, there are changes: some of the cherry trees' leaves are yellow, the lavender plants in the front garden are all dried out, the feel of the air is slightly different. My nod to the slide towards autumn is to start bottling some of the summer abundance — fridge pickles, three litres of fermented tomatoes. I picked some of the dahlias and marigolds and put them in the living room. Our front windowsill has a line of pears and giant tomatoes in varying stages (and hues) of ripeness. If nothing else, the colours of summer are alive and vivid in my house, even as time marches on.

ara ara ara?

How to spam

Chicken Jockey from Minnesota

Forthcoming TTRPG Kickstarter: Ex Tenebris

mama's got a squeezebox

Dear Fic In A Box Author

It's heeeeeere!

Exchanges and things

the only cat who knows where it's at

Professor Emeritus Rai Weiss has passed

Games, Anime, Et cetera

Love Medley (Fairbanks)

DragonCon & BPAL?!

Hope as a state of mind, not a state of the world

moar spinning

Hello, friends!

Fic in a Box Letter

Buh?

Movies: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Honey Don't, Biosphere

“you are my best guess / if i were a gambling man, and i am / you’d be my best bet”

Late summer in the tomato farm

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