jack

For the second time in the past two weeks, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a prominent national report, has classified 100% of California as being drought-free. That's a rating that hasn't occurred in 25 years.

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-california-drought-free-years.html

dhampyresa

Prompt 8 for this year is "Talk about your creative process." which made me realise it's been a while since I've had a Story Song. Usually when I have a story I'm working on I have a song that goes with it, that echoes some aspect of the plot, setting or character (dynamics) and yet lately... Nothing. Maybe that's why everything has been feeling so empty and been so hard to write?

ANYWAY all this is a long-winded way to ask for music recs.

mrissa

P.F. Chisholm, A Suspicion of Silver. Ninth in its mystery series, set late in the reign of Elizabeth I/in the middle of when James I and VI was still just James VI. I don't recommend starting it here, because there was a moment when I wailed, "no, not [name]!" when you won't have a very strong sense of that character from just this book. Pretty satisfying for where it is in its series, though, still enjoying. Especially as they have returned to the north, which I like much better.

Joan Coggin, Who Killed the Curate?. A light British mid-century mystery, first in its series and I'm looking forward to reading more. If you were asked to predict what a book published in 1944 with this title would be like, you would have this book absolutely bang on the nose, so if you read that title and went "ooh fun," go get it, and if you read that title and thought "oh gawd not another of those," you're not wrong either. I am very much in the "ooh fun" camp.

Matt Collins with Roo Lewis, Forest: A Journey Through Wild and Magnificent Landscapes. Photos and essays about forests, not entirely aided by its printer printing it a little toward the sepia throughout. Still a relaxing book if you are a Nice Books About Nice Trees fan, which I am.

John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days (365 Songs Annotated). When I first saw John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats live, I recognized him. I don't mean that I knew him before, I mean that I taught a lot of people like him physics labs once upon a time: people who had seen a lot of shit and now would like to learn some nice things about quantum mechanics please. Anyway this book was fun and interesting and confirmed that Darnielle is exactly who you'd think he was from listening to the Mountain Goats all this time.

Nadia Davids, Cape Fever. A short mildly speculative novel about a servant girl in Cape Town navigating life with a controlling and unpleasant employer. Beautifully written and gentle in places you might not have thought possible. Looking forward to whatever else Davids does.

Djuna, Counterweight. Weird space elevator novella (novel? very short one if so) in a highly corporate Ruritanian world with strong Korean cultural influences (no surprise as this is in translation from Korean). I think this slipped by a lot of SFF people and maybe shouldn't have.

Margaret Frazer, This World's Eternity. Kindle. I continue to dislike the short stories that result from Frazer trying to write Shakespeare's version of historical figures rather than what she thinks they would actually have been like. Does that mean I'll stop reading these? Hmm, I think there's only one left.

Drew Harvell, The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. If you like the subgenre There's Weird Stuff In The Ocean, which I do, this is a really good one of those. Gosh is there weird stuff in the ocean. Very satisfying.

Rupert Latimer, Murder After Christmas. Another light British murder mystery from 1944, another that is basically exactly what you think it is. What a shame he didn't have the chance to write a lot more.

Wen-Yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly. Gritty and compelling, small gods and teenage girl gangs in 1970s Singapore. Singular and great. Highly recommended.

Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, eds., We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. There's some really lovely stuff in here, and a wide variety of voices. Basically this is what you would want this kind of anthology to be.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I don't pick your subtitles, authors. You and your editors are doing that. So when you claim to be a history of sex and Christianity...that is an expectation you have set. And when you don't include the Copts or the Nestorians or nearly anything about the Greek or Russian Orthodox folks and then you get to the 18th and 19th centuries and sail past the Shakers and the free love Christian communes...it is not my fault that I grumble that your book is in no way a history of sex and Christianity, you're the one that claimed it was that and then really wanted to do a history of semi-normative Western Christian sex among dominant populations. What a disappointment.

Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words (reread). I accidentally got both of these instead of just one, but they're both brief and poetic about nature vocabulary, a good time without being a big commitment.

Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. This is one of those broad-concept pieces of nonfiction, with burial mounds but also mycorrhizal networks. MacFarlane's prose is always readable, and this is a good time.

David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and At Peace, 1670-1840. And again: I did not choose your subtitle, neighbor. So when you claim that your history goes through 1840...and then everything after 1796 is packed into a really brief epilogue...and I mean, what could have happened to the Cherokees after 1796 but before 1840, surely it couldn't be [checks notes] oh, one of the major events in their history as a people, sure, no, what difference could that make. Seriously, I absolutely get not wanting to write about the Trail of Tears. But then don't tell people you're writing about the Trail of Tears. Honestly, 1670-1800, who could quibble with that. But in this compressed epilogue there are paragraphs admonishing us not to forget about...people we have not learned about in this book and will have some trouble learning about elsewhere because Cherokee histories are not thick on the ground. Not as disappointing as the MacCulloch, but still disappointing.

Tim Palmer, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. I found this to be a comfort read, which I think a lot of people won't if they haven't already gone through things like disproving hidden variables as a source of quantum uncertainty. But it'll still be interesting--maybe more so--and the stuff he worked on about climate physics is great.

Henry Reece, The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic. If you want a general history, that's the Alice Hunt book I read last fortnight. This is a more specifically focused work about the last approximately two years, the bit between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Also really well done, also interesting, but doing a different thing. You'll probably get more out of this if you have a solid grasp on the general shape of the period first.

Randy Ribay, The Reckoning of Roku. As regular readers can attest, I mostly don't read media tie-ins--mostly just not interested. But F.C. Yee's Avatar: the Last Airbender work was really good, so I thought, all right, why not give their next author a chance. I'm glad I did. This is a fun YA fantasy novel that would probably work even if you didn't know the Avatar universe but will be even better if you do.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxie's Penalty. Fourth in a series of mysteries, but it's written so that you could easily start here. Well-written, well-plotted, generally enjoyable. I was thinking of rereading the earlier volumes of the series, and I'm now more, not less, motivated to do so.

Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below. I feel like the cover of this was attempting to sell it as a cozy. It is not a cozy. It is a fantasy novel that is centered on books and bookshops, but it is about as cozy as, oh, say, Ink Blood Sister Scribe in that direction. And this is good, not everything with books in it is drama-free, look at our current lives for example. Sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy adventure that acknowledges the importance of story in our lives, and this is one of those times.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lives of Bitter Rain. This is not a novella. It is a set of vignettes of backstory from a particular character in this series. It does not hang together except that, sure, I'm willing to buy that these things happened in this order. I like this series--it was not unpleasant reading--but do not go in expecting more than what it is.

Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea. A slim novel in translation from Finnish, spanning several eras of attitudes toward natural history in general and the Steller's sea cow in specific. Vivid and moving.

Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. The nation in question is the US, in case you were wondering. This was a generally quite good book about the middle of the 19th century in the US, except of course that that's a pretty big and eventful topic, so all sorts of things are going to have to get left out. But she did her very best to hit the high spots culturally as well as politically, so overall it was the most satisfying bug crusher I've read so far this year.

glinda

This week I've been working on making a good start to one of my resolutions, to start a new recipe notebook. (When I first started learning to cook in an organised fashion, while I was going my post-grad, I took a nice notebook I had and wrote down all my succesful recipes in it. It's a multi-coloured decade's worth of recipes that I refer to regularly even now that I'm a vegetarian and many of the recipes aren't one's I'd ever cook now.) I've been meaning to start a new one for a few years now, but never got round to it, because, well I had my tablet and most recipes I was cooking that weren't in actual cookbooks were on the internet and it was just easier to look them up, but it's really come home to me in the last year when I've gone to look something up and it's just gone. (Not even random people's food blogs, but places I'd expect things to be like the guardian or the good food magazine page.) So I've started in on recipes from my 'cook new recipes' challenges from the past few years, and a significant percentage of them are lost to link rot and paywalls.

But the other thing I've noticed - and part of what makes me want to keep the project up - is that my handwriting is really rusty. I've had to make fairly heavy usage of my tippex mouse because I keep missing letters out of words, not even in the analogue version of typos just I'm so out of practice of writing by hand that I'm half-forgetting how to form the letters properly. I used to have a problem with missing out letters when I wrote essays because I was writing so fast to keep up with my brain - the main reason I switched to typing, as it's much easier to keep up with the speed of thought/ideas that way - but I'm just copying out recipes here. Though on the plus-side, forcing myself to slow down, to form the letters properly is making it a more meditive experience than I expected it to be.

I've always prided myself on having nice handwriting. Ever since we did a unit on the Victorians and spent that whole term perfecting copperplate script I've written a minorly adapted version of that. (I adjusted some letters to be more easily read by modern eyes, so I wouldn't get marked down for mis-spelling words because my teachers that didn't recognise my old-fashioned letters.) All through secondary and university my preferred method of studying was to make notes and the rewrite my notes and I still have piles of notebooks about the place in neat multi-coloured copperplate. So it's both weird and minorly upsetting when my handwriting isn't neat despite my best efforts. No doubt with regular practice it'll improve but at the moment I'm falling a low way short of my own high standards for my handwriting.

It's a ridiculous thing to be having feelings about, I am aware, but nonetheless, I am having them. My handwriting isn't as nice as it used to be - less smooth, more effort for less pleasing results - and it annoys me. I'm feeling a little rusty here, it's a thing.

Current Music: Radio 3 - Unclassified

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34051

We spent the end of October and whole of November rolling out improvements across the site—from multiple fixes to the Download and Chapter Index menus on small screens to refreshing our footer and error pages to link to the status page. We also made an important security change: password resets can now only be requested using an email address when logged out. For some exciting news, we also finished our work making AO3 emails translatable! We're now going to target other areas of AO3 for internationalization.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors Danaël / Rever, Daniel Haven, Edgar San Martin, Jr, Jennifer He, Kiyazz, Lisa Huang, mgettytehan, ProtonDev, quen, ryeleap, Snehal Mane, and TangkoNoAi!

Credits

Coders: alien, anna, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Cubostar, Danaël / Rever, Daniel Haven, EchoEkhi, Edgar San Martin, Jr, Jennifer He, Kiyazz, Lisa Huang, marcus8448, mgettytehan, ProtonDev, quen, ryeleap, sarken, Scott, slavalamp, Snehal Mane, TangkoNoAi, weeklies, Yanpei Wang
Code reviewers: anna, Bilka, bingeling, Brian Austin, ceithir, Hamham6, lydia-theda, marcus8448, ömer faruk, sarken, weeklies
Testers: Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Deniz, hvalrann, Irina, Lute, lydia-theda, marcus8448, ömer faruk, pk2317, Sam Johnsson, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard

Details

0.9.440

On October 28, we made some small changes to a variety of areas of the site, including updating our footer and error pages to link to the status page.

[AO3-7129] - Bluesky blocks AO3's attempts to check whether a URL on the site is active, so we're now skipping the check when you try to create an external bookmark of a Bluesky URL or try to mark a work as inspired by something hosted on Bluesky.
[AO3-7149] - We removed some unused code for formatting text.
[AO3-7175] - We updated cache-apt-pkgs-action from 1.5.3 to 1.6.0.
[AO3-7178] - We updated the gems for Sentry, our error tracking and performance monitoring service.
[AO3-6167] - When logged in as admin, restricted series are now included on a user's series page and counted in their dashboard sidebar.
[AO3-7027] - We've been posting status updates on our status page and Bluesky account for a while now, so we've updated a number of pages to reflect that.
[AO3-7040] - We restricted the ability to search through invitations to admins with certain roles, instead of allowing all admins access to the search.
[AO3-7104] - We updated the page used for claiming your works if they were imported by Open Doors.
[AO3-7167] - When someone reports a comment to our Policy & Abuse committee (PAC), the report now automatically includes the user ID of the person who left the comment.
[AO3-6484] - We made a small change to the code that generates the HTML class names we use for hiding work blurbs by muted users. We were hoping this tweak would improve performance, but unfortunately it made it worse. So we reverted it later.

0.9.441

On November 5, we made some improvements to the admin side of AO3 and deployed the first of what would be several changes to fix issues with the Chapter Index and Download menus on small screens.

[AO3-6484] - We reverted the change to the blurb code that worsened performance (it's later).
[AO3-4519] - If two of your pseuds are set as owners of a collection, the collection will no longer be counted twice in your dashboard sidebar.
[AO3-7142] - Under certain circumstances, the number of collections in a user's sidebar was different than the number of collections on the user's collections page. The number on the collections page was right, so we updated the one in the sidebar to match.
[AO3-7166] - We upgraded the will_paginate gem to version 4.0.1 to fix a deprecation warning.
[AO3-7183] - We upgraded the version of actions/upload-artifact from 4 to 5.
[AO3-4629] - On small screens, the Download and Chapter Index menus could overlap the buttons, making them impossible to close. We made them narrower and adjusted their position to make sure you can always close them.
[AO3-6542] - We gave specific admins the ability to access user Preference pages.
[AO3-6833] - When you submit a ticket to PAC or Support, the submission to their ticket trackers will now automatically include information about which form you submitted.
[AO3-6931] - We split the "Assignments sent" and the "Challenge default by USER" into two separate emails and updated the text while we were at it.
[AO3-7071] - We made the emails you get when you reply to a comment translatable.
[AO3-7171] - We will now include the user ID of a profile page when it is reported to PAC.

0.9.442

On November 8, we deployed a single-issue release to fix menus having problems on multi-chapter works.

[AO3-7195] - Following our last release to update Download and Chapter Index menus, we fixed a bug from that update which was causing Chapter and Download menus to be cut off on small screens.

0.9.443

On November 17, we deployed a grab bag release targeting bugs and improvements in a variety of areas. We also made a change to improve account security by only allowing password resets using an email address (as compared to a username) if you're logged out. We announced this change on social media as well to get the word out.

[AO3-3976] - Series links in subscription emails will now show up in red and be stylized like all other email links.
[AO3-6054] - Works marked as inspired by or a translation of an existing work would show on your Related Works page even if you hadn't approved the relationship—now they won't do that!
[AO3-7134] - The tips for new users linked in the new user help banner will once again open in a pop-up instead of as an ugly, unstyled page.
[AO3-7159] - You'll no longer get an empty message if you press Accept or Reject on the Co-Creator Requests page with nothing selected.
[AO3-7180] - The pseud name field is now marked as required on the page for creating a new pseud.
[AO3-7202] - We fixed a issue that was causing the Chapter Index menu to be cut off in the Low Vision Default skin.
[AO3-7061] - To reduce unsolicited password reset emails, logged out users who want to reset their password must now enter the email address associated with their account, not their username.
[AO3-7204] - We upgraded appleboy/ssh-action from one version to another.
[AO3-7037] - If you request a password reset and it fails, it will now redirect you to the Reset Password page instead of the homepage.
[AO3-7039] - We've restricted which admin accounts have the ability to grant invitations to people waiting in the queue.
[AO3-7070] - We prepared the emails you get when you leave a comment on a work, admin post, or tag (if you're a tag wrangler) for translation.
[AO3-7115] - We updated the error messages you may get when you request a password reset while logged-in and something goes wrong.

0.9.445

Our November 25 release was a big milestone: all existing AO3 emails have been internationalized and are ready to be translated!

(Our deploy script accidentally bumped us ahead, so this ended up being released as 0.9.445 instead of 0.9.444.)

[AO3-5542] - If a gift exchange didn't use tags, its Sign-up Summary page used to have a permanent and misleading message saying the summary was being generated. We've updated it to display the correct message: "Tags were not used in this Challenge, so there is no summary to display here."
[AO3-5668] - When determining whether to display the "Fandom" sort button, the challenge request summary sometimes ended up loading all prompts in the collection—now it won't!
[AO3-7187] - If you try to create a skin with a title that's more than 255 characters long, we'll now tell you the title is too long instead of giving you a 500 error.
[AO3-7190] - Trying to create skins that included a ^ used to result in error messages missing part of the text. We've fixed that, which should make the error message far more helpful.
[AO3-7201] - We made one more change to the Chapter Index menu, which was still too narrow in some browsers on Android devices.
[AO3-7205] - You can add private bookmarks to collections even though they won't be listed on the collections' Bookmarked Items page. We've now added a warning to the success banner to let you know to expect this.
[AO3-6941] - We've added more information to the browser titles of many of our comment-related pages.
[AO3-7056] - The emails you get when someone replies to or edits a reply to a comment you've left are now ready to be translated.
[AO3-7116] - We updated the wording of the reset password link on the login form.
[AO3-7168] - When a series is reported to PAC, the report now automatically includes the IDs of the series creators.

0.9.446

Our November 30 release focused on changes submitted by first-time contributors to our project!

[AO3-7121] - We fixed a bug that was causing bookmarks of unrevealed works to link to the work's Bookmark page even if you weren't the work creator.
[AO3-7133] - The "Flat View" button on your Statistics page wasn't styled correctly when selected—but now it is!
[AO3-7181] - For tracking purposes, admins have to enter a valid ticket ID in order to edit a user's pseud or profile. We've made sure the field for the ticket ID is clearly marked as required.
[AO3-7185] - We've removed the comment form on draft works and replaced it with a message saying you can't comment on draft works.
[AO3-7138] - We standardized the way the code displays participants in Collections so that site skins with CSS distinguishing them will correctly see participants displayed on both People and Membership pages.
[AO3-7212] - We updated the version of actions/checkout from version 5 to version 6.
[AO3-7198] - When logged in with some admin roles, admins can now more easily search for all invitations sent to specific email addresses.
[AO3-7199] - Some admins have access to a page that provides an overview of a user's works and comments, but the link was only available on User Administration pages. To make things more convenient, we've also added the link to user dashboard and profile pages.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34051

damninteresting_link_feed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxlvv0wdko?utm_source=DamnInteresting

Mysterious 'iron bar' discovery in space may reveal Earth's future (from bbc.com)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxlvv0wdko?utm_source=DamnInteresting

steorra

I have long been under the impression that Ents didn't eat, they just drank ent-draughts.

But when Treebeard tells of the separation between the Ents and the Entwives, he mentions Ents eating fallen fruit:

the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path; and they learned of the Elves and spoke with the Trees. (The Two Towers, Book III, chapter 4: "Treebeard")

Clearly Ents' main source of nutrition was ent-draughts, not fruit. But they did eat fruit sometimes!

Side note, some people online seem to think that photosynthesis was a major source of nutrition for Ents. I don't see any textual justification for this. It's conceivable that Ents with green leaflike hair (like Leaflock ("Covered with leafy hair he is") and maybe Quickbeam ("his hair was grey-green") could do some photosynthesis, but there's no actual mention of them getting sustenance from sunlight. Also it doesn't seem like all Ents had such hair, and even for those that did, it doesn't seem like enough that it could be a major source of nutrition.

hebethen posting in

fffriday

Happy Friday!

This was a weird ride, to be honest. It's a fairly meaty book -- in an alternate Singapore where gangs can channel divine powers through oath tattoos that bind them to their god, the daughter of a nouveau middle-class shopkeeper discovers her mother's secrets, her own sexuality, and how far she's willing to go for revenge -- and I found it immersive in the worldbuilding and compelling in the storylines, but the pacing is absolutely bizarre. It kind of goes about its business for 80% of the pagecount, suddenly accelerates in the next 15%, and then breaks the sound barrier to crash-land the final 5% with a resolution that feels to me almost like the author ran out of energy and just summarized the rest.

If you're craving dark f/f with plenty of violence and tragedy, it might be worth a gander -- I'm deeply curious as to whether anyone else feels (or will feel) similarly about the pacing.

tinny

This set took me much longer than it should have, considering this is my fave pairing right now. But once I sat down to finish it, I had fun again! It's for round 04 at ships20in20.

Enjoy!

Teasers:

( 20+3 icons of Ashile Sun and Li Changge from The Long Ballad )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

dotaturls_feed

Posted by Tony Finch

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1053142/8ec93e58d5d3cc06/

https://dotat.at/:/UC9C8.html

2026‑01‑16 - READ_ONCE(), WRITE_ONCE(), but not for Rust in the Linux kernel.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1053142/8ec93e58d5d3cc06/

redirect https://dotat.at/:/UC9C8

blurb https://dotat.at/:/UC9C8.html

atom entry https://dotat.at/:/UC9C8.atom

web.archive.org archive.today

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1053142/8ec93e58d5d3cc06/

https://dotat.at/:/UC9C8.html

damninteresting_link_feed

https://nautil.us/horses-can-smell-how-youre-feeling-1261710/?utm_source=DamnInteresting

Horses Can Smell How You’re Feeling• (see also) (from nautil.us)

https://nautil.us/horses-can-smell-how-youre-feeling-1261710/?utm_source=DamnInteresting

badly_knitted posting in

get_knitted

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: What are your crafting goals for 2026?

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

marina

I've officially completed all my birthday activities for this year, so I can like, breathe again.

There was recreational axe throwing, joint TV marathons, dinners, gifts and hugs. I chose not to have any kind of party or gathering this year, so just saw friends individually or in small groups, and it worked out OK. I also celebrated

roga's birthday (and will continue to tomorrow), so it all kind of worked out with multiple events.

How have you been doing, friends?

I'm feeling a bit better than I hoped to, at this time of the year.

ETA: I have cautiously started looking at social media again, in very very limited quantities, and as twitter seems like... not the place, I now have a bluesky. IDK IDK. But if you're on there I may also be on there sometimes too I guess.

mellowtigger

In warmer climates, people may know the phrase "ice out" as an idiom meaning to treat someone coldly. In cold climates like Minnesota's, it also has a specific meaning that refers to the calendar date each spring season when the ice covering a lake finally melts away and disappears. You can see the current dates (from 2025, until thaws begin this year) at this Minnesota DNR page.

It has taken on a new meaning of political resistance now that ICE agents have invaded Minnesota and are terrorizing its citizens. I will go out on a limb and vouch for the following website, where people can submit and view an entire USA map of locations where ICE is recorded each day. To visit the site, you have to agree to a long list of user agreements. It's intimidating, and I refused to accept them until I had time to read it properly this afternoon. They are trying to prohibit false entries and also prohibit scraping of data by other people/agencies. I saw nothing unreasonable when I looked over the full text. I accepted their terms.

https://iceout.org/en/

Because of this armed invasion by our federal government, there is a general strike planned in Minneapolis for 2026 January 23 Friday. I can't remember ever living during a place and time of a general strike. These are historic times.

Faith leaders are calling this assault "spiritual warfare" (CBS News story), with some announcing their plans for fasting and prayer that day (KARE 11 news story). Some local unions are joining the effort too. The socialists noted that the AFL-CIO (representing 300,000 workers in Minnesota) has not made a statement yet... so I asked them to. A special shout-out to local business George & The Dragon pub for closing to join the general strike.

I haven't seen necessary details at a webpage yet, but I assume the main protest will be in downtown Minneapolis at the People's Plaza (the Hennepin County Government building, across from Minneapolis city hall). This Reddit post says the march begins at 2pm. I plan to be there.

immortalje posting in

dailyicons

closed

Today's prompt is: BAMF

• You have 2 days time to submit an icon for this prompt (in other words, until prompt 2732 gets posted)!
• Prompt 2728 has been closed.
• If you have any questions regarding the prompt, feel free to ask in a comment.
• To submit an icon you simply reply to this post with the following information:
Icon:
Claim: (only necessary if it's a specific claim)
Status: (e.g. #1/10 - number of icon completed/table size)

Pre-formatted

hamsterwoman

Some fannish catching up!

1)

fandomtrees still has 3 trees below the minimum number of 2 gifts, and is thus at risk of delaying reveals again (currently scheduled for Jan 17 reveals), with the decision on delaying to be made the morning of 1/17. Needy trees are mastershield's Tree (f:astro boy, f:balan wonderland, f:kingdom hearts); kalloway's Tree (f:brave nine, f:crossovers, f:fire emblem, f:granblue fantasy, f:gundam, f:kingdom of heroes, f:super robot heroes) whoremoantreatments' Tree (f:advance wars, f:bleach, f:hypnosis mic, f:kuroko no basket, f:pokemon, f:tales of berseria, f:the world ends with you). (List kept updated here.) All of these are open to fic, and the minimum fill for fic is only 100 words, if anyone knows these fandoms and can help out.

(My tree has above the minimum number of gifts but is here, and I’m eager to see what’s on it :)

2) I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

lunasariel is hosting a sync read of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in her DW here. Currently it’s her, me, and

cyanmnemosyne reading along, but contrary to the name, we don’t actually have to be all synched up to participate, so if (like me) you’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, or if you’ve read it already and want to follow our impressions as we make progress through it, come join! I am currently just past halfway,

lunasariel is 10-20 chapters ahead of me, and Cyan has just recently started. (And yes, my thoughts on this book are ~50% on the chemistry. Actual Periodic Table of Elements chemistry, I mean, not chemistry between characters, although I’m enjoying that too.)

3) Snowflake catch up!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

The problem with doing Snowflake every year for the last, uh… 10 years, I guess? – is that for repeated questions like this, which are about ME as opposed to about my fandoms or projects or objects, which can accumulate it is much harder to come up with something new to say! Both of these questions fall under that category, and so were more challenging than most for me to answer. But let’s see if I can come up with something without repeating myself.

Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I do want to stick to fandom-related things I like about myself for this one, so, hm. Last time I answered this question seems to be in 2017 (and my things were “good fannish role model for my children”, “thorough and detailed in talking about what I’m reading/watching”, and “conscientious beta”) and the first time in 2016 (my answers were “good fannish baba/matchmaker”, "committed to fannish crack”, and “conscientious about fandom participation”) – and I do still feel those things are all applicable to me and I still like them. But I’ve done a bunch of new things in the last 9 years, from attending conventions to paying attention to the Hugos to signing up for Yuletide, so let me focus on those new things and see if I can extract three new things I like about myself fannishly from them.

( things I like about myself viz conventions, fanfic, and Hugos )

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

This is another one I’ve done before, in 2019 and in 2015, but looking at even the 2019 one, I talked about fannish poetry and graphics, but not about fannish prose/fanfic. So clearly that’s what I should talk about, but what IS my process?

( Fanfic process )

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Posted by Andy Baio

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https://waxy.org/?p=50493

like The HTML Review, a new publication of experimental interactive code poetry #

https://www.gamepoems.com/issue01/

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