amplificathon

i hope the americans in the audience who had the day off had a relaxing and/or fun one, and that for everyone who didn't have the day off (or who doesn't live in the us...) it wasn't too monday a monday. i have watched almost no olympics but i did take myself out for lunch (steak tips! side salad! a pile of very good rice pilaf!) and, uh, bring a bunch of clothes to goodwill. and i read! an actual book! for once! which was very relaxing.

(i also got a rice pudding to go because i wanted it but i was too full after lunch. i got it with whipped cream which might have been a mistake because said whipped cream has totally lost its structural integrity in the fridge. rice pudding still looks good at least and will probably be breakfast tomorrow.)

canada finally won a couple gold medals - both kazakhstan (men's figure skating) and brazil (men's alpine skiing) beat them to gold - brazil got a gold altho the guy used to ski for norway (his mom is brazilian) so, y'know, he grew up in a winter-sports country - also his gold was the first winter olympics medal for any south american country ever which is pretty cool - anyway. canada set off a curling scandal! boopgate. which is evidently only partly about the fact that some of the men were touching the stone after throwing it, which is technically illegal but unevenly enforced (i think the whole thing started when sweden wanted some clarification on the rules over booping), and more about their very unsportsmanlike conduct. like, there was swearing. and lying. (a hint: if you're going to insist you didn't boop the stone and fuck you, sweden, for suggesting it, maybe first make sure there isn't video evidence of you doing that very thing.) (because one of the canadians was caught on tape very obviously booping the stone.) it's apparently a thing that happens - the booping, not the swearing, i mean curling is generally a pretty polite sport - and there's always the possibility someone booped the stone unconsciously, but did i mention the highly unsportsmanlike swearing? it seems to have snowballed a bit and caught the canadian women as well and now that everyone's so focused on the booping a bunch of other teams have been seen doing it.

curling, man.

the baby has a broom. SOCUTE.

i've seen mostly bits and pieces of other sports - a few ends of the women's curling (us vs china), some pairs skating, some women's monobob (not monoboob, self), some women's biathlon (i wanted to see the greenlandic biathlete but no luck), some men's figure skating. poor quad god. he fell twice and came in eighth and i felt so bad for him altho he sounded very mature and thoughtful and philosophical after his program when he got off the ice and some reporter stuck a mic in his face and basically asked "so how does it feel to have fucked up your chance at a gold medal?" so many of the guys fell tho. and he and the kazakh skater hugged and it looked like ilia congratulated him and it was very sweet.

i have yet to see any skiing. just moguls, no downhill.

local curling last night went better than last week - by which i mean no one fell and hurt themselves - and i made a couple good shots altho we lost anyway. and saturday for valentine's day i went to the dentist and got my comics (well, comic) and met my sister for dinner and a 40th anniversary showing of pretty in pink. pretty in pink is forty, good lord. it was never my favorite john hughes movie but jon cryer and annie potts remain extremely adorable. but the love story is kind of half-assed - like, why are these two kids interested in each other in the first place? - and for all the judging of blane being rich it's andie's hangup, not his. he seems legitimately earnest and sincere in his attraction to her and she second-guesses him because he has money and she doesn't. also i didn't like her remade prom dress the first time i saw the movie and i don't like it now. it's ugly and boring. but the soundtrack is still *chef's kiss*. whatever else you want to say about john hughes movies, they always had absolutely banging soundtracks.

for the heated rivalry fen in the audience, if you haven't seen it, have an interview with rachel reid. i keep wondering how many people are watching olympics hockey because of the show and/or books.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: star wars

starandrea

Today I photographed a little New Year's reunion dinner among the Mo Dao Zu Shi friends in Lego, and also quickly inked spring couplets for our door. I was able to make them recognizable on the first try, and although I still have no ability to write in semi-cursive, I judge my handwriting to be at least equivalent to a seven-year-old's.

(Li Can of EazyMandarin on youtube says "advanced" adult Chinese learners are about equivalent to a fifth- or sixth-grader in China, which I believe. The longer I learn Chinese the less I know. There was a time I considered myself as high as "upper intermediate," but now I am confidently "beginner" level. Perhaps not compared to other foreign adult learners, but compared to Chinese children I think I could make it in second grade. I wouldn't be top of the class, but they probably wouldn't kick me out.)

Relatedly, I only got through the first of my first grade textbooks last week, so I'll try to finish the second one this week. I did meet my recording goal, but writing and reading both fell off. Can't wait to see what happens this week.

Oh, winter sowing! Ha ha, I know nothing about this. Our local library is offering a workshop next week, but it's full, so I decided to learn on my own. I bought some bulbs, and then found out there's a reason you sow seeds, not bulbs. (Apparently winter sowing is a wet process, and bulbs rot. And also freeze.) So the bulbs are in the back of the refrigerator, and I have a collection of seeds that may or may not require cold stratification. I picked them from a list of "seeds that are good for winter sowing" at a seed website.

I also have some clear storage bins, because get this, we don't have milk jugs. Milk jugs are the greenhouses of choice due to their low cost and availability, but Marci and I drink milk from double-serving bottles (me) or not at all (her). When I tried to poke drainage and ventilation holes in the storage bins, I realized the difference between sturdy plastic and milk jugs. I went back to the internet for more advice.

A soldering iron or a drill, it said; neither of which I own.

Yet.

aethel

1. A fun link: neal.fun. I haven't tried all of them yet, but I did spend a while launching asteroids at the Earth. Infinite Craft is fun too.

2. I watched I Am Dragon, a silly Russian fantasy film. It was not as good as it could have been, but there aren't too many films where the love interest is a dragon, so I was entertained.

3. Books: I keep picking up books containing a climate apocalypse, fascism, or both. Least depressing: After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations by Eric Cline. Most depressing: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower was written in 1993 and set in the "near future" of 2024--the unfolding catastrophe is too close for comfort and doesn't feel very science fictional. (I assume it was at least partly inspired by the 1992 Rodney King riots.) I'm now rereading The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes until I recover enough to continue with They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.

tassosss

We got out of town this weekend for a visit to my in-laws. It was a good weekend overall. Husband got to spend time with his dad and we all made it through his mom's idiosyncrasies. We watched Olympics together, and I worked on editing, and when we got home a lot of snow had melted. I finished reading Red Rising, too, which was good. I wasn't super blown away by it, but I liked it. On audio I'm listening to The Impossible Fortune, the 5th Thursday Murder Club book, and enjoying that.

( death )

yourlibrarian

1) Apparently I never mentioned here that my partner and I went to see The Harlem Globetrotters last month. He said he'd always wanted to see them. It turned out to be different from what we expected. ( Read more... )

2) I also tend to work on a lot of jigsaw puzzles in December and January. It's nice to sit by the sunny window and watch TV in the background while working on them. I've now put away the jigsaw board and sold off the puzzles, but Ahsoka and Grogu were a favorite ( Read more... )

3) I was listening to the Mutant Enemy Writer's Room Reunion recorded on March 17, 2015. Over 10 years ago now, but at the time it was already a decade on from the ending of all the Mutant Enemy shows. It was a really interesting listen, in terms of how those shows were written vs. the writers' experiences on other shows (especially broadcast network shows). But it also amazed me how, while rewrites were apparently rare, it was also not at all unusual that scripts were unfinished even as episodes were being filmed. ( Read more... )

4) In recent months I've been listening to a radio show from the 50s and 60s that does a variety of non-rock/pop tunes, as opposed to stuff like mambos, sambas, novelty songs, and other stuff that doesn't tend to make oldies' playlists. Sometimes they have TV theme songs in there too. Not sure I'd heard the Route 66 theme before, but the version I was listening to sounded like The Simpsons theme in that the main repeated phrase was similar. Made me eyebrow raise a little since it's one of the most profitable show themes ever written.

5) The recent Fansplaining article The Success of Heated Rivalry Should Not Be a Surprise contains other surprises. For one, the author is bewildered by most articles on the show covering (for the 1 millionth time) the "women interested in gay sex" aspect, and then also why there are so many more connections to Asian BL fandoms rather than more close-to-home slash fandoms including RPF fandoms. ( Read more... )

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atamascolily

Every now and then someone asks me if I've ever considered turning one of my essays into a video essay. I always say "no, that's really my thing" and leave it at that, because there's usually no reason to go any further than not. But I have many feelings about video essays and why they aren't my thing.

( Read more... )

runpunkrun

I posted my first fanfic* TWENTY NINE YEARS AGO TODAY. My most recent fanfic† was posted less than a month ago. And today I am finishing up a fanfic‡ I started in 2011.

* The X-Files
† Star Trek
‡ Stargate Atlantis

missizzy

The old computer was unchanged this morning. I've gotten almost everything off it now. I forgot one file I wanted to grab, and two of them refused to go onto the flash drives, even zipped, claiming they're too big, and my initial attempts to transfer them by other means have failed; that's probably going to be a next weekend problem.
At least I have now completed one years-long endeavour: by far the longest podfic I have ever recorded. Editing it has been an education in itself. Though even now I'm now much better at getting rid of clicks and such, to remove all the sound glitches from this one remained impossible. I'll actually be testing out my new microphone by recording something a little shorter on it, and if it fixes that problem, it'll be worth it for that even if the whole streaming thing doesn't work out.

Title: In the Closet of Our Discretion
Author: firefright
Original Fic: here (Only viewable by registered AO3 users)
Fandom: Critical Role
Characters: Caleb/Essek, the Mighty Nein
Music: "Made You Look" by Peak & Pitch
Disclaimer: Characters from show. Original fic by firefright. Music isn't mine either.
Warning: Some reference to both these characters' issues. Also some very mild sexual content, enough to get the original fic an M rating.

galadhir

From dreamersdare

Challenge 3:

Make a Top Ten list for your favourite music picks and share what you love about them. This can be in any format - songs, artists, albums, music videos, soundtracks, scores, something else not mentioned here. If it's vaguely related to music, it ticks the box, so go with whatever you like!

This is hard! Like a lot of people I stopped being passionately interested in music some time in my youth (around my 30s, I think.) So a lot of these will be from before that drop-off, when I was heavily into prog rock.

Having said that, I'm starting with one of my favourites from right now. Amanati, who I found through sword dancing and immediately wanted to belly dance to as well. Cretan trance music - Fos by Amanati
Speaking of belly dance music, this lady is my current favourite MENA musician Maro Hereira with Bladi What can I say, it's my trance background coming out again.
I am not a big fan of Western trained opera or choral singers, but I make an exception for the counter-tenor voice, which I think sounds like angels. For example Andreas Scholl - Who may abide the day of His coming?
I quite enjoy bardcore as long as it uses actual instruments rather than synth, and it puts a bit of effort into its language. Hildegard von Blingen with Pumped Up Kicks
This is not really music so much as it is someone talking about ancient music in a way that helps me understand music theory and history. He makes music too but I have to confess to not having listened to that part except for some of his medieval tavern music. Which is infinitely superior to bardcore. Farya Faraji getting heated about the duduk
Okay, now back into the far distant past, during which my second favourite group in all the world was Hawkwind, a band whose musical style my mother described as "music that sounds like you're listening to it through two walls." Hawkwind - The Psychadelic Warlords Disappear in Smoke
My first favourite band in those days was Emerson Lake and Palmer, and despite the intense nostalgia rush I had when I first re-heard the beginning of this album, I have no idea why. God, it's horrible - ELP with Tarkus
Surely this one is still beautiful? I remember Yes as being almost too pretty for my tastes. Close to the Edge by Yes Oh no, I'm not sure I like that either. Thank goodness Hawkwind still holds up.
Basically the only things I'm listening to now are belly dance music and the tracks of fanvids. So here is a fanvid I have singled out because I really love the music: The Future will be Silent - a fanvid by Wyomingnot
And here is a belly dancing track that I particularly like. Ya Hassan by Yassir Jamal

luzula

Still not reading much, but I did read some books during the past two months!

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (2025)
Listened to the audiobook for my book club. This is the first book in a while that grabbed me in a page-turney way, and I enjoyed it a lot! I'm sure it can be picked at, and we did so during book club, but for me it was mostly notable in being a book I was immersed in while reading, which for me these days is rare.

The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray (2023)
When I first started reading this, my feeling was that "yeah, I read a lot of posts on the author's DW about this book, and I guess the book is exactly what I was expecting it to be". Like, in a way I felt as though I didn't even have to read the book. But this feeling passed when I got into the particulars of the characters and their relationships so that they felt real to me, so that it wasn't just about the Idea of the book any longer, and then I thoroughly enjoyed it. (The Idea of the book being, if you haven't heard of the book before, the contrast between what was allowable in male friendships in 1860 and 1960.)

I also listened to about half of The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2024), also for book club. I feel like the book had a lot of Gormenghast DNA, and I enjoyed the weird worldbuiling, but I didn't end up finishing it.

galadhir

Ooh, ooh! There are leaf buds beginning to uncurl on the medlar tree. I barely got my apricot tree replanted in time because there are buds there too. They're still tightly clenched but they're visible in a sort of lovely plum bronze colour.

Snowdrops and crocuses are carpeting the graveyard of the church in our village. We've nearly made it, folks. These last couple of weeks are the worst, but the end is in sight.

mific

I can't...

spikedluv has died very suddenly on the same day as her last post here, Feb 2nd.

ride_4ever linked to her obituary here. I've known her as a fandom friend for years and always enjoyed her chatty posts and pics about day to day life. And oh hell, her poor family, with all they're going through at the moment.

Goddamnit.

chestnut_pod

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

Current Mood: thankful
Current Music: Giselle: Pas de Deux - No.5(bis) La Chasse(II) - LSO & Anatole Fistoulari (Adam)

atamascolily

Lately, I have been experiencing a lot of "glitches" in my dreams, where I'll notice that my brain is not quite "loading" (for the lack of a better word) the right details - looking at a page and seeing the appearance of text but not intelligible text; not being able to read the titles on a row of books, etc, etc - but not quite getting all the way to lucid dreaming. I've also been having variations on the same recurring dream, where they all have the same characters and themes, but the details are just different enough that I don't catch on until I wake up. It's really annoying because I know exactly what this is about, and there's nothing I can do about it, so I wish my subconscious would leave me alone.

This week, I learned that if you delete the Notepad app in Windows 11, you can access the old Notepad without all the AI stuff because it's built into the system - apparently, they just slapped the new version on top without bothering to change the underlying architecture. (This naturally begs the question of what else in Windows 11 is just surface stuff, but I haven't looked into it.) It's nice to have the old Notepad back without all the "features" in the new version!

The Madoka Magica movie got delayed again - not really surprising, but I think they did intend to release this month because of the timing on all the marketing and collabs. There are lots of conspiracy theories going around, but the simplest explanation is that SHAFT didn't finish the animation (especially the backgrounds) because that's historically what takes the longest and is the most complicated step, especially in a company full of perfectionists with poor project management doing something innovative and ambitious. Given that the Rebellion interviews are full of SHAFT staff saying "I didn't think we'd ever finish it" and "I can't believe we released on time," it's probably more accurate to say that in retrospect, Rebellion is the outlier for only taking ~2.5 years.

There's been some new trailers with more details, but overall, my gut feeling about where this is all going has not changed much in the intervening years. For me, there's the story I want, the story that is possible, the story that is likely, and the story as it actually is, and I'm not sure how much these different circles will overlap.

Ultimately, I think the finished film will be gorgeous (hopefully they tone down the Inu Curry visuals so it's not quite as overwhelming as Rebellion), but I also think it will challenge the audience's assumptions and radically transform the franchise; there are going to be a lot of people who will hate it, especially on first watch. It's astonishing to me that fans of a series famous for plot twists based explicitly on giving the audience incomplete information before adding new details that change everything are going to be shocked and appalled when it happens again, but I feel more certain about that prediction than anything involving plot or character. There are a lot of things that we're wrong about, especially when it comes to Homura and Walpurgisnacht, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story!

That said, I hope this will be the end of the story, because I don't want to wait another decade for a sequel (and the stakes have gotten so high and the scale has gotten so big that I'm not sure how you escalate any further after this), but the truth is, nobody knows for certain, and a lot depends on Gen Urobuchi's vision and how exactly he decides to execute it. After what happened with Thunderbolt Fantasy, I'm not entirely sure I trust him to stick the landing when it comes to delivering a satisfying ending for me personally, but I remain hopeful nonetheless.

ride_4ever

spikedluv. Seemingly fine one day and gone soon thereafter. I can't even.

Link to obituary.

Current Mood: sad and shocked
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

scrubjayspeaks

Oof. Ow. My aching everything. I had Wednesday off, so mum could go out of town for appointments. Work made up for the lighter week by hammering me on Friday with furniture moving. Oh god, so much furniture. And me in a new pair of boots, too. *wince* *hobble*

The solitary scrub jay, who rarely appears here, once again visited. I should put up the feeder again.

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written

Day job: 34 hours

Gardening: succulent club meeting

Reading: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (okay, I genuinely didn’t know that this would be very much in the same vein as the last book and even more mind-blowing, but here we are, holy shit again)

Watching: Adolescence of Utena (huh...I would have sworn that I had watched that before, but if so, I had forgotten huge chunks of it, started digging through some meta posts because I wish to UNDERSTAND)

Listening: The Vice Quadrant by Steam Powered Giraffe (came for the original version of “Fire Fire,” stayed for the everything else)

Playing: Animal Crossing, where I have done a major rebuild on one of the main set pieces of the island--witch maze is go!

Clock Mouse: 136 minutes of planning work and 1143 words

atamascolily

Alternate title: "The author has a lot of feelings about WW1, Part Two". So many feelings. And I can't blame her, war sucks and it was a big deal for everyone who lived through it.

At the beginning, Rilla is 15 and goes to a party at the lighthouse and has a great time, only to learn that war has begun in Europe and all the boys start enlisting. As Canada is still an English colony, the war between England and Germany is an existential threat in spite of the geographic distance, and everybody is highly patriotic about it. The only character who isn't is continually framed as a loser and a hypocrite whom no one likes, so there's not a ton of nuance on that front.

Montgomery was highly invested in following the war via newspapers and so her character do this as well. She also wrestles with her own complicity in sending young men to their deaths by encouraging them to join up via "The Piper" poem and imagery. There is also a lot of "look, we have to make a better world to honor the sacrifices" and "everything happens for a reason" as coping strategies, because "war sucks and bad things happen and the deaths were pointless and in vain" is so existentially threatening.

Anne is there but not a main focus and neither is Gilbert; again, the housekeeper Susan has the most character and personality. I was so startled when Shirley announced he was 18 and going to join up, because he is barely present prior to this point. He's the only Blythe kid for whom I don't have a good sense of his personality because he's generally only mentioned in passing. I get the feeling that Montgomery forgets he exists from time to time, and it shows.

This is the book where we can really see technology in action - there are airplanes and party line telephones (those have been around for a couple of books) and cars and movies and all the tension between modernity and tradition that implies. I think a lot of people loved the original Anne of Green Gables for its "nostalgia" and "simpler times" and one reason this book is less popular - in addition to the heavy subject matter - is that it doesn't do that. People want childhood innocence and funny but low stakes hijinks, and while there is a bit of that here and there, it's all subsumed by the war effort and the stress of not knowing what is going to happen or having much control over it.

Ostensibly, there is a romance between Rilla and Ken Ford, but given that they have one dance and then a big gap followed by a conversation right before he leaves, there's just not much there there - I have to rely on the narrative to tell me it's important, because there's not much to go by otherwise! The book ends with his return and their reunion, but again, Montgomery really isn't focused on the relationship and the romantic lead is once again barely present in the book.

The book ends with the war over and the men returning home and Rilla's "normal" life resuming - but the 1918 flu pandemic was just beginning, so their troubles were not yet over, though they don't know it. IRL, Montgomery's best friend died and she herself was gravely ill, but I don't think she ever wrote about in her fiction.

This is another book that is structurally sound and it does the things that it does very well, but I don't think I would read it again. It's the last "Anne" book in series order, but both Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside were written much later to fill in the gaps. Technically, there is another book, The Blythes Are Quoted which is a collection of poetry with Anne and her family as the frame narrative, which was not published in Montgomery's lifetime due to the anti-WWII sentiment. After having lived through the Great War, I don't think you can really blame Montgomery for going, "fuck it, why are we doing this again" but it was not a popular sentiment at the time.

missizzy

This morning I started the day the way I have most days since the beginning of this month, by turning on the old computer and working a certain amount on the Conclave montage I've been working on the past half a year or so, with plans after breakfast to likewise work on the ambitiously long Shadowgast podfic I've been editing for literally years. They're the last two projects left on that computer, since neither is easy to move. My plan was to finish the latter this month and the former next month, before I retire the computer, which continues to occasionally not connect to the internet, though it actually has more often than not.
I came back from breakfast and discovered said computer had suddenly set its screen resolution to 640x480. When, after considerable struggle though apps not at all set up to deal with such an old resolution, I got to the display settings to change it, it offered no choices for anything bigger. I tried restarting, giving in and installing the updates I'd been refusing to do before then, to no change. My computer has decided to make itself nearly unusable at a time when making the effort to fix it is least worth it, but I still had these two projects.
I eventually made Audacity usable again by hiding most of the toolbars. I had less than five minutes left to edit on the podfic, so it is now completed and exported to mp3. I had a bit of a scare when I tried to look it up while setting the metadata and couldn't find it on AO3. I feared it had been deleted, with no indication on whether it was ethical for me to post the podfic or not. Then it turned out I just needed to be logged in. I've called it a day after that. Cover art, full metadata, and posting can wait until tomorrow.
I'm also letting the computer problem sit overnight. The way these things are, it's perfectly possible it'll be back to its old resolution tomorrow. If not, I think I'm just going to move the last of my files over and officially retire it. I was halfway done with the montage, but I think I'm just going to have to do it over.

starandrea

February goes so fast. Here are a bunch of pictures from an exciting week.

♥ kicksled

This is a dogsled-kicksled hybrid that I put together from a kit. It's a fun way to try out the sport on my own time, and it has the added benefit of being able to transport cargo and/or help a person stay stable on only partially-packed snow. (Or keep them upright when they go off the trail in the dark.)

( kicksled pictures )

♥ (frozen) river at night

This is the river the night of the kicksled adventure. The second picture shows the turn I missed a few years ago (I went straight instead of left), and I would note that at the time there were no tracks indicating the popularity of the left turn. The third picture shows the railroad bridge you encounter if you turn, with tracks typical of its use as an access point.

( river pictures )

♥ succulent make-n-take

I've always wanted to do a succulent make-n-take, so I was happy when this one came up at such an accessible time and place. I'd never been to this garden center, and I felt very lucky to enjoy their greenhouse with the snow piled up all around, and also to walk out with such a cute little planter. (The last picture shows the planter in its new home, surrounded by jade friends.)

( greenhouse and succulent pictures )

♥ seasonal lights

marcicat and I went to a light show on Valentines Day. We've been to this farm a couple of times, and it's always different. This visit was cold and beautiful, with a lovely spring theme, tasty hot cider and donuts, and also a giant slide that was itself lit but let out into a dark deceleration zone at the end. Very fun.

( lights pictures )

juniperphoenix

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So excited. This was definitely not on my proverbial 2026 bingo card.

i could use another day off

"yes, I do need all of these dogs" (tshirt)

(no subject)

life or something like it

Of Shows, Puzzles and Meta

Old Fan Yells At Clouds About Video Essays

happy fanniversary

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Stuff I love challenge #3 Music

Recent reading

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Spikedluv (sad news)

Artistic apotheosis, aka Royal Ballet Giselle, Nuñez/Bracewell, 02/14/2026

misc February rambles

In Memoriam: sad, shocking news about spikedluv

Done This Week

"Rilla of Ingleside" by LM Montgomery

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"to never have to answer no when I ask myself, did I laugh and dance enough" (kellie coffey)

The Doctor Who Fan Orchestra returns!

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