Creature feature

Oct. 27th, 2025 11:27 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I got to see the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein tonight, and it was great. Not only did I enjoy it, I was also relieved because I was expecting more body horror and, after his Pinocchio left me emotionally devastated, more of that too. Luckily I found both much more manageable than I had feared! Not to demean it with faint praise, just to note that I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

Sadly V wasn't able to come along with us tonight, but I'm already looking forward to the excuse this gives us to watch it on streaming in a couple weeks.

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
An excellent used bookshop in Tucson, The Book Stop, may be closing down unless the current owner, who is retiring, can find someone to take it over. Her contact info is on the "contact" page.

Anyone want to run a used bookshop in Tucson? It's really great and has an excellent location. I can vouch that being a bookshop owner is the best job ever unless you want to make lots of money.

Feel free to link or copy this.
silveradept: A head shot of a  librarian in a floral print shirt wearing goggles with text squiggles on them, holding a pencil. (Librarian Goggles)
[personal profile] silveradept
[The folks at [community profile] holly_poly wanted a little exchange primer for people who haven't done things before, and since I'm helping out a little bit on their socials side, I thought I'd put one together, based on my extensive experience over the years in participating. If you've never taken part in one, I highly recommend it, they're fun. And if you have additional information to contribute, please do!]


So, you're thinking about participating in a fandom exchange, and you're not entirely sure how this process all goes? Don't worry. Here's a walkthrough of what exchange participation looks like, from the first parts of nominations to the joys of reveals. Since a fair number of exchanges are run on the Archive of Our Own, this guide assumes you already have an account there to sign up with. If not, they're free to get, but they might take a little while to get to you in the queue, so getting one now, before the meat of an exchange starts, will ensure that you're ready to participate.

Let's get into it with the first phase of an exchange - nominations.

Nominations



Nominations is the part of the exchange where you get to suggest what kinds of things should be included in the exchange's tag set. Nominating does not obligate you to sign up afterward, but a lot of people will if their nominations get through because then they know they'll have something they'll be excited to write about. Most nominations are also finite, so even if you're brimming with things you want to see, you'll only get to put in so many into the tag set.

Nominations have to fit the exchange's focus and format. For something that's just a general exchange, anything might be possible, but most exchanges focus on specific fandoms, characters, situations, or relationships. Holly Poly, for example, is a polyamory-focused exchange. Holly Poly nominations must include more than two entities in them, otherwise it wouldn't be a polyamorous relationship. And since it's about polyamory, they want "/"-type relationships that are romantic or sexual, rather than "&"-type relationships that are platonic and don't have romantic or sexual components to them. If I Fics, I Sits, however, says that anything can be done, so long as there's a cat in the relationship, since it's focused on cats.

Where possible, try to use the canonical tag on AO3 for nominating. Two things to remember when you're doing nominations for Holly Poly or any other exchange hosted on AO3:
  1. AO3 does not do ship names, so if what you want is Zutaraang, you have to put in "Zuko/Katara/Aang." Yes, they make you spell it out.
  2. All canonical AO3 ships are in alphabetical order, by last name, if the character has one, and by their only name if not, so that Zutaraang relationship is in the AO3 database as "Aang/Katara/Zuko". The autocomplete can try to help you some if you put in at least one of the participants, but you'll have to wade through the dropdown to get to the thing you want if AO3 thinks you're looking for something else first.


Make sure you also check anything the exchange mod has posted about any deviations they might be making from AO3 canonical tags for their exchange. Sometimes a tag tries to slide into another place and the mod has to change the tag to make it stay in place, or separate shows / games set in the same continuity are being combined into a single universe tag. Or exchange moderators will ask you to nominate the most specific version of the character or relationship as possible, because characters and their relationships do change between media adaptations, and sometimes fans have strong opinions about which version they want to see.

Once you've nominated, keep your eyes out for any "clarifications" posts, because those happen when the exchange moderators detail the problems they're having with nominations. It can be something as simple as having nominated characters and relationships under the incorrect fandom, and sometimes it's as complex as trying to disambiguate which of the six canonical versions of a spandex-clad superhero was intended in a nomination, or whether it will be up to the people signing up to work it out for themselves which one they want. If you're the nominator, then you get to provide additional information to help the moderators place your nomination correctly. Moderators will also usually provide a threat to make sure that information comes in a timely manner, with the idea that either a nomination will be selected to be something, or the nomination will be rejected from the tagset, if clarifying information doesn't arrive by the deadline.

Signups



Set some time aside when it's time to do sign-ups.

More than that.

Still more.

Why? Because unless you're here only for the things you nominated and nothing else, you're going to want to spend some time looking at the tag set. Even if you are here just for the things you nominated and nothing else, you want to look at the tag set. There are a lot of gems in there, from properties you haven't thought of in years, or other popular things, or pairings that you might not have thought of initially, but there's a germ of an idea in your head about what you could write if you were assigned that, and now you're interested.

I'd also look in on the Crossovers and the Original Works tags, if you want to see some of the really fun ways that people imagine relationships and what kinds of worlds they envision or want to collide together. Original Works is also where a lot of the Omegaverse prompts live, but even if you're not an Omegaverse fan, some of the prompts in there can be creative sparks without having to try and figure out how to make existing characters work with it.

If you don't have enough from your nominations and the tag set by itself, some people start looking at the sign-up summaries, once they're posted, to see what other people have posted in their optional details field. It's still true that Optional Details Are Optional, but hearing someone describe what they do and don't want to happen in a work can help someone decide whether they want to offer that combination, or possibly stay away from it if the person who is offering it has Do Not Wants that would conflict if they were assigned that recipient.

Between nominations, tag set looking, and sign-up summary reading, it should be possible to build enough things to request and offer that meet the minimum requirements the exchange has set forth. So let's look at the sign-up form. It's split into two major sections: requests (what you would like to get) and offers (what you're willing to make for a potential recipient). There's a minimum number of each that you'll have to provide to successfully sign up for the exchange. The AO3 matching code works better with more options than fewer, so signing up with as much as you can is preferable to signing up with the minimums, but you should always only sign up with things you'll want to create or receive. The AO3 matching algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor, and if you put in something that you're only half-hearted about, it will ensure that you match with your recipient or your gifter on that thing and nothing else.

On the requests side, the form will ask you for what fandom your request is in, then what relationship(s) from that fandom you're requesting. Both fandom and relationships should match exactly what's in the tag set, or your sign-up will be rejected with errors. The autocomplete dropdown will try to help you get the exact tag from the tag set, but on those rare occasions where the dropdown isn't helpful, copying and pasting the tag exactly as it is from the tagset should still allow it to go through.

After that, choose from the tickyboxes about what kind of thing you would like to receive. Common items there are fic (written), art (still drawings and/or comics,), vids (video content, usually re-cut footage set to music or some other audio track), and podfic (an audio track recorded by the gifter or the gifter and others). Most exchanges, if they're not specifically about vids or podfic, will usually just have fic and art in this space.

After saying which fandom you want, which relationship(s) you want, and what form you'd like to receive a gift in, there's the Optional Details section. The first rule about Optional Details is that they are optional. The person who is creating for you is not obligated to follow any of your optional details, but many people who are looking to make gifts will find those details useful to give them a direction to go in. A good reason to provide optional details in some form is that if you don't, the person gifting you the work is likely to write what they will enjoy, and there's no guarantee that your tastes will line up completely, even if you match in the algorithm. If you don't leave anything as a guide, you are tempting fate, and if I haven't mentioned it enough already, the AO3 algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor and will give you someone who can complete an assignment that fulfills all the requirements and may not be anything like what you wanted.

The one exception usually granted to the Optional Details Are Optional (ODAO) rule is the Do Not Wants (DNW). Do Not Wants are the stuff that if it appears in a gift work will sour it immediately and permanently, no matter how well it's done, how tastefully it might be done, or how small the quantity of it is. You know people who have allergies so severe that they go into anaphylaxis even at the slightest inclusion of an ingredient in their meal or the presence of it in their environment? That thing that causes them such problems is a Do Not Want. It's poor form to use your Do Not Wants to box your gifter in to giving you something that is extra-tailored to you, if those things really aren't Do Not Wants, and some exchanges will say explicitly that they won't enforce Do Not Wants they consider unreasonable. Better to say what you do want and hope your gifter will follow that and leave the Do Not Wants for those specific things that will just turn you off the gift completely.

In your Optional Details, you can also indicate whether you'd like to receive treats, works created by someone other than your assigned gifter that otherwise meet the requirements of the exchange. Treats are generally pretty neat to receive, but sometimes a person doesn't want them, for their own reasons. If you do want treats, you'll also want to make sure that your AO3 account preferences have "Allow anyone to gift me works" checked, or any possible treats will fizzle.

The last field on the requests side is a place to link to your "Dear Creator" letter. Some people find it easier to put all of their optional details into a single entry, whether on Dreamwidth or Tumblr or somewhere else, and then point their gifter to that letter for things like what they like, what they dislike, possible prompts for their gifter to work off of, and the like. The "Dear Creator" letter is considered to be part of the Optional Details, and many times, exchange moderators say they won't enforce any Do Not Wants in a creator letter, because the letter itself is not required to be read, so make sure that you put your DNWs in the Optional Details box, just to be safe.

Okay, time for the offers side. The offers side works mostly the same way as the requests side, with choosing a fandom, relationship(s), and media, but for what you want to offer to someone else. Same rules apply about only offering what you want to create, because the AO3 matching algorithm is even more perverse on this side of the sheet than it is for request matches. It will almost unerringly choose the one that you were least enthusiastic about. The optional details field may still be Optional Details, but in some places it's re-titled as "Notes to Mods." This may be a place where you can mention if there are particular users that you don't want to match with, for whatever reasons you may have for this. There's no guarantees that such preferences can be accommodated, but those who are forewarned will do their best.

Once you've made your sign-up list and put in your details, click submit and wait. If you've forgotten something, or AO3 balks at something, the sign-up form will return, with highlighted spots where the errors are. If you succeed, you'll go to the sign-up summary page, and you'll see your own sign-up now in the list for other people to peruse and see if they can gather anything from your sign-up to assist their own.

Your Assignment



In normal circumstances, the AO3 algorithms will generate matches in such a way that every valid sign-up set will have one match of a fandom/pairing/medium trio in their requests with a fandom/pairing/medium trio in someone else's offers. In rare situations, a sign-up's request set may have no matches in anyone's offer set, or might only be able to match with someone who has already been matched with someone. In such rare cases, the moderators will reach out to the unmatched user and ask if they want to add requests to their sign-up. Adding additional requests and re-running matching often reshuffles everything so that everyone is matched. On the occasion that someone isn't matchable and doesn't change their sign-up, they'll usually head to the pinch hit list.

In any case, after matching, you should receive an e-mail from AO3 with your assignment for the exchange. Your recipient has matched you on at least one fandom/pairing/medium trio. Sometimes it's only one, sometimes there's more than one compatible match in the set. Your responsibility, once you have an assignment, is to produce a new work that meets one of the requests on the list, avoids the stated DNWs, and is sufficiently long/detailed to meet the requirements of the exchange. You don't necessarily have to create the thing that you matched on if something else catches your fancy, but you do have to create something off the request list put in front of you. The match is there to make sure there's at least one thing on the list that you said you wanted to create and they said they wanted to receive.

Your assignment is a secret.

Your assignment is a secret.

Because there's a good chance that you're in the same social spaces as your recipient, and you don't want to spoil the surprise! Even oblique hints about what you're creating might be enough for your recipient to deduce that you're their gifter. Run silent, run secret. The secret period extends from your assignment through the reveals of the works to the point where the authors of the works are revealed. Therefore, in your assignment, you cannot use the Notes or any other means to identify yourself as the creator of the work. Not even obliquely. Don't talk about the work anywhere during the anonymous period. Don't reveal who your recipient is.

If you have questions about your assignment, or need clarification on anything, contact your exchange moderators. If needed, they'll relay your question to your recipient, usually with some obfuscation in the form of other relevant questions to their sign-up and requests so as not to tip off the recipient about which of the things being asked about is the important one. Then they'll relay the response back to you.

Your assignment also comes with a deadline. Your completed work that conforms to the requirements of the exchange must be submitted to AO3 before the time posted as the deadline. The deadline is often something like midnight or 11:59pm on a specific day, but check the time zone. If it's UTC, that may mean you have more (or less) time than you think. I generally try to have my assignment done and submitted the day before the stated day of the deadline, just so that I don't potentially trip over any time zone issues.

To fulfill your assignment, you'll need to log in to AO3, and then choose "My Assignments" or "Assignments". You'll be presented with a list of all the exchanges you've received an assignment for. Scroll to the right assignment and click "Fulfill". At this point, you'll be taken to the AO3 New Work page, with a couple of key details already filled in about what exchange you are submitting this to, and who the gift recipient will be for the work. Everything else you fill in just as you would for any other AO3 work, with one exception. AO3's anonymity mask does not extend to series. If you put your work as part of a series, your recipient can click on the series title and be brought to the series page, with the author of the series unmasked, spoiling the anonymity. Series must be edited in after the anonymous author period expires.

If you know you're not going to get something done in time, or that you can't make the requirements, on your assignment page, there's a "Default" button next to the "fulfill" button. Most exchanges have a "no-fault default" deadline around a week before the deadline. Defaulting on your assignment means that you're saying you're not going to be able to complete something on time that meets the requirements. It happens, whether it's the well of creativity running completely dry, or life events conspiring to ensure that you have no time to complete your assignment, or any other reason. If you're not going to make it, and you know you're not going to make it, hit the default button as soon as you're sure. Doing it before the default deadline usually means you won't incur any penalty or be required to do make-up work before you can sign up for the next incarnation of the exchange. Default after the default deadline, or miss the assignment deadline, or turn something in that doesn't meet the requirements or hits someone's Do Not Wants will also likely incur a default, and there's a strong likelihood that you'll have to sit out an exchange round, or complete your assignment properly and give it as a gift, or otherwise pay a penalty of some sort before you're allowed to sign up again. Eject at the earliest point you are certain you can't complete the assignment to avoid being penalized for it.

Pinch-Hits



("Pinch hits" here refers to the baseball practice of substituting a different batter for the scheduled batter in the lineup, usually because the pinch hitter will have a higher chance of successfully getting on base and generating scoring potential.)

Every unmatchable assignment and recipient who has their gifter default and who has not defaulted themselves gets put on a list of people who need to have someone give them a gift. (Most exchanges run on the rule of "If you complete your assignment and gift someone else a work, then you must also receive at least one gift work based on your own requests.") This is the pinch hit list. ("Initial" pinch hits are unmatchable assignments, and "post-deadline" pinch hits are those that happen after the assignment deadline.)

Pinch hits are usually posted to a specific place, and will contain the entire requests portion of the sign-up for all interested parties to look at and make decisions about. Pinch-hitters are not limited to those who have signed up, but those who have signed up can collect pinch hits. (There may be a rule that you have to have completed and submitted your assignment before you can have a pinch hit assigned to you.) Initial pinch hits and early defaults will usually have the same deadline imposed on the pinch-hitter as regular assignments. As the assignment deadline approaches, pinch-hit deadlines will start to move past the initial deadline, but they will try to stay close to it. Pinch-hitters are often very good at turning around works quickly, sometimes because they see the request and go "oh, I know exactly what to do with that."

This may seem obvious, but no, you cannot pick up your own pinch hit. Even if it seems like that would be the easiest and most effective way of making sure it gets filled.

Betas



No, not the Omegaverse ones. Beta-readers.

It's not required, but it is recommended that if you have the time to do so, you run your assignment's draft form(s) past another pair of eyes to catch things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG) errors, to have someone with lived experience in a specific community read the work to make sure that it doesn't perpetuate awful stereotypes about that community (sensitivity reading), or to see if the plot coheres and the timelines work, and the characterization makes sense for the fandom, and other such things that will improve the quality of the end product. There may be channels and places where you can make these requests, but remember, your assignment is secret. You cannot directly advertise for a beta because you might be tipping off your recipient with your request.

The Yuletide exchange has created the "hippo" system to deal with the necessities of keeping assignments secret while also getting beta requests publicized, and most other exchanges use a similar system. The "hippo" is usually someone with a specific role, whose purpose is to obfuscate who is making the beta request. Use private messaging to tell the hippo the important details of who your recipient is, what you need for your work, how long the work is, and what the turnaround time you need for the betaing is. Longer turnaround times have higher success rates, because most hippos are also working on assignments. The hippo will then make a post to the channel / community, passing along those details and asking for interested parties to message them directly and privately with their interest. On the high likelihood that the recipient offers to beta, so long as there are others willing to offer and one of them is selected, the hippo can politely decline the recipient with the excuse of "another's offer has been accepted," preserving the anonymity of the exchange, with the recipient none the wiser that they've offered to beta their own gift.

If you can, getting a beta reader / viewer is helpful and often can make the final product stronger. But it does require you to be more on top of your assignments such that you can take advantage of the extra time for polish. For some people, this will be impossible, which is why betas are usually recommended rather than required for your gift works.

Reveals!



Once everyone who has completed an assignment has a gift, the deadline has passed, and the exchange maintainers and moderators have checked and made sure that all of the gifts themselves meet the requirements of the exchange, the works are released!

However! The authors of the works are not. This is to preserve a period of time where the recipient, the participants, and any and all interested parties can enjoy the works without having their enjoyment influenced by whether or not the creator is well-known, a Big Name, a Professional Name using a pseudonym, or any other factors where the prestige of the person doing the work might overshadow the work and the work's enjoyment itself. During the anonymous period, any comments on the work by the work author will be noted as "Anonymous Creator."

In the rare case where a work is incomplete and was not caught by the exchange maintainers, or steps on a Do Not Want and wasn't caught by the exchange maintainers, let the exchange maintainers know as soon as possible! That will likely produce an emergency pinch hit need, but everyone is supposed to have a gift that meets the requirements and avoids the Do Not Wants.

By accident, I did a work that trod upon a Do Not Want. The recipient let the exchange creators know, and in this case, thought the work was excellent and accepted it and enjoyed it, but still let the maintainers know, so that I was duly chastised about it. I did offer to write something that would not be that, but it was not required of me. When I wrote something that hadn't been requested by a recipient, and they pointed this out, I wrote something that did match, with a certain amount of cussing out my inability to read. These things do happen, and they are often accidents, so giving the opportunity to make things right as soon as possible is the best thing for everyone.

If you have received a gift that conforms to the requirements of the exchange, it is customary to leave an indication that you have viewed/listened to the work that someone has gifted you. For some exchanges, more may be required of you, such as leaving a comment on the gift work, but the customary indication of something having been enjoyed, even if without any further comment, is the kudos button. Comments are lovely and very much appreciated by creators, but we also know that sometimes the recipient doesn't have anything to say, or doesn't feel like they can put it down in a coherent comment. All the same, please do indicate that you have at least viewed/listened to the work in question.

Once you've gone through your gift work (or works), then it's time to explore the rest of the collection! There might be more things in there with your favorite fandoms and ships, or you might discover a new ship or fandom to check out by reading the works in the collection. While the anonymous author period is still going on, you won't know who made it, but sometimes it's a good challenge to try and get through as much as you can before the author reveals happen.

Some writers also take this opportunity to manually set the date of publication for their work. In a fast-moving fandom or a popular ship, things can fall off the first page of "Arranged By Date" very quickly. With the period of time between when something is submitted and when reveals of works are, a work might finally appear on page two or three once reveals happen. Generally, if a work is being re-dated from the original submnission date, it can be brought forward to the reveal date of the works, so it will have the opportunity to at least exist for a little while on the front page. (For less popular ships, even with the delay, the work might still be the top of the first page. You never know.)

Author Reveals!



Usually seven days after the works are revealed, the author anonymity period ends, and you can see who all the writers were. That might mean that you have some new people to follow and subscribe to. At the point the author anonymity ends, all the people who have subscriptions to you will also be notified that you've written something new, and the rest of AO3 will have the opportunity to see it regularly, instead of in the anonymous period.

With the reveal of the authors, the exchange is usually finished, with the exception of any post-event question and answer sessions or feedback requests. There's all the stories to be enjoyed, the comments and kudos to be had, and the brainstorming for what you might want to write about next time around. Or to go off with a fistful of new fandoms and possible pairings and canons to look at.

Congratulations for participating in the exchange!

This and that

Oct. 27th, 2025 05:52 pm
selenak: (Breaking Bad by Wicked Signs)
[personal profile] selenak
Got my Yuletide assignment, which is going to be fun - I just have to refresh my canon memories, and it's not a long canon. Also, I just finished the (short) first season of Dark Winds. Now I dimly remember reaidng one of Hillerman's novels decades ago, but only a very few details remained with me - the asking about the clans, for example - which meant that basically I went into this unspoiled. And was v. amused that apparantly Noah Emmerich now gets typecast as an F.B.I agent, though Stan from The Americans and High Pockets here are very different types.

Spoilers thought it was a solid first season and will continue the show )

Meanwhile, thinking back to ye olde days when shows had 22 episodes per season, I just found this well crafted retroscpective on Six Feet Under, which reminded me of how much I loved and appreciated it:


The Family Tomb: A Six Feet Under Retrospective

Clocks

Oct. 27th, 2025 03:12 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

A short list of clocks which do not update themselves:

  • Matthew's bedside alarm clock. Several experimental button pushes to remember how.
  • Matthew's travel alarm clock. Fairly self explanatory
  • Small clock in the dining room. Turn the time knob, not the alarm one!
  • Oven. Doddle.
  • Microwave. A bit of poking, but not too bad.
  • Bike computer. Putting this one off as it requires a cocktail stick and remembering the right runes so you don't accidentally completely reset it. Write down the odo distance first before attempting!
  • The electronics (and the big living room wall clock, and the heating controller) all look after themselves, which is just as well, as there are quite a lot of them.

Pulling teeth from railway operators

Oct. 27th, 2025 01:08 pm
mtbc: maze I (white-red)
[personal profile] mtbc
Late one evening back in July, I boarded a CrossCountry train at Edinburgh Waverley that then failed to proceed further. In the end, my journey was delayed by an hour so, under the Delay Repay scheme, I was supposed to be eligible for a refund.

CrossCountry's claim process wanted a QR code and and a ticket number. Unfortunately, I was using one of their flexi season tickets in their mobile app, which prevents screenshots, and the day's ticket wholly disappears once the day is done. So, I asked their customer service people how I can claim. I asked several times and got no useful response at all.

Eventually, I fell back to an effective last resort: post them a paper letter. This triggered a slow sequence of back and forth by e-mail but, last week, they finally paid me my refund. It's absurd that it took three months, and probably cost them as much to deal with me as the £7.55 they paid me, but I still don't have my answer as to how people with those tickets are supposed to claim.

My body clock is never on time

Oct. 26th, 2025 09:11 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I woke up and looked at my alarm clock: 8.30. That's early!

Then I looked at my phone which said 7.30 - that's REALLY early!

"Gained an hour," but on the one Sunday in months when I have no plans at all so it doesn't do me any good.

I'm not normally bothered by the clocks changing -- I'm not normally bothered by eight-hour timezone changed -- but today once I got out of an excruciating conversation with my parents (they have their first laptop and they don't know what "browser" means and "the printer is in a file and I can't get it to come out!") all I could think was ah thank god it's bedtime and it was seven forty two pm.

8:42 I could accept as a typical time for me to go upstairs and get ready for bed. But this is silly.

And I was also very hungry and very overwhelmed by the time I ate dinner, because "the same time as usual" was in fact an hour late.

vital functions

Oct. 26th, 2025 09:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Two things finished, various things picked up and put down again.

Ouch!, Kerr & McRobbie: the subtitle is Why pain hurts, and why it doesn't have to; it's indicative of my current preoccupations that I was actively surprised that it is not, in fact, about chronic pain, except in passing, in that it's mentioned in the introduction in the context of pains the authors have experienced, and then it just sort of... vanishes again. What it actually is is more-or-less a tour of the sociology of acute pain, from a variety of perspectives and contexts, and an invitation to reshape your relationship with pain, optionally via the medium of sports.

It's very much aimed at a general audience (by which I mean both "not people with any particular pre-existing knowledge about pain" and also "not chronic pain patients"), with the infuriating-to-me feature of having not an actual bibliography but instead a "selected references" section, i.e. any claims I wanted to actually check required digging and then guessing (and in one case working out that they were actively wrong about which year the thing was published in, at least for referencing purposes). I did nonetheless get some useful information and vocabulary out of it (I'm especially here for the pointer to the 3P approach to pain management), and it prompted another couple of articulations.

Overall: not a disrecommendation; plausibly a light read if you have, you know, a recreational interest in pain; verify any specifics you want to rely on.

The Old Guard: Opening Fire, Rucka et al. A's conclusion was Well It Was Better Than The Second Film; mine was mild spoilers? )

and would be very happy to see that show up in an extended cut of the first film. The library doesn't have the second volume and I think we're unlikely to seek it out.

DW catch-up: halfway through September!

Playing. Inkulinati, mostly watching A play and occasionally making Suggestions. Does not work as well as a Shared Activity as I'd hoped (annoyingly I think I'd need to play basically all of it hands-on myself in order to internalise mechanics and strategy, rather than being able to e.g. swap who's driving for every level) but I am enjoying it happening in my vicinity. Today we also read the PDF of the art book together, which I am not counting as Reading because it was mostly looking at the pictures in another context.

And after six months I GOT UNSTUCK ON I Love Hue! The Ascension/Air/1, extremely gratified that searching for it revealed someone who'd managed to complete everything but that, and bolstered by this knowledge I turned brightness all the way up and the phone upside down and FINALLY managed to sort out the yellows, on my nth attempt... in way fewer than the average number of moves. VICTORY.

Cooking. Read more... )

andrewducker: (Join Darth)
[personal profile] andrewducker
There's research that if you leave people in a room with an electro-shock shock device long enough to get bored they will deliberately shock themselves.

In other news I took Sophia's phone away from the kids while they were in the bath and now they're repeatedly pouring cold water over themselves while shrieking like baboons.
[syndicated profile] reader_of_else_feed

Posted by Roseanna

First up, congrats on your amazing taste in books! High five.

But alas, assuming you have already burned through Fellman’s back catalogue (if you haven’t, why not, fix that, and then come flail at me about The Breath of the Sun1), you may have come to the end of the obvious comps for this excellent piece of fiction, and so you’re wondering… what on earth do I do with myself now?

In which case, I have five recommended reads for you that I think draw on (a few of) the different aspects of what makes Notes from a Regicide wonderful, and maybe among them you can find something else to start a pyramid scheme2 of recommendations3 for.


First up, were you there for the complex relationship dynamics (starting right from inside the protagonist’s head) and characters being heavily foregrounded? Is so, you might like:

No Such Thing As Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly

I reviewed it in full here, but in brief, Donnelly has the reader sit with the protagonist (a fictionalised version of Somerset Maugham) and experience their feelings about both themself and their relationships with others, as well as riding along as they stumble through those relationships, and uses that as a brush to reveal a love for humanity that is enriched by a clear perception of its flaws, person by person. There is a plot and a world and the fantastical, but the strength of the book is in using those to serve this character and relationship study, rather than vying for attention with it.

The story follows Maugham on a mission he feels deeply conflicted about, and which may not have much hope of any kind of success, but which brings him into contact with a compelling stranger and some time to think about himself and his relationship with duty. Through their interactions and his awareness of his own very-likely-imminent death, Maugham reflects on his loves and reacts to those around him, and is a delight (if delights can be poignant and sad) to sit with.

Other books considered that touch on this point: A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers, What a Fish Looks Like by Syr Hayati Beker, When The Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb and a very sideways pick of a non-fiction book, Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, which does a lot of work on the complexities of love that I think harmonise beautifully with some of Fellman’s work in this book.


Next, were you really sold on the way that Fellman grounds the story in human physicality? The twinned beauty and grossness (and how those two responses interplay) of being an embodied thing? Then might I recommend you:

Metal from Heaven by august clarke

This story begins with a factory strike, as the metal they handle is harming some of the workers, including the children (who are called the luster-touched). After the strike is violently eradicated, one of those children escapes and swears vengeance against the factory owner who made it all happen. Along the way, she has to reckon with her luster-touched nature, and use it even though it hurts her.

Even aside from that, her life as she grows up in a lesbian bandit camp of anticapitalist idealists, there is a great deal of lingering on touch, on the look and feel of the body both to oneself and to others, and the experience of proximity and grasp. It’s a thing I find rare in fiction to dwell on it in all its many emotive contexts, rather than one, and Metal from Heaven does it very well.

It also, as a nice bonus, gets you the rage at the world and its problems that runs squarely through a goodly part of Notes from a Regicide, which is handy. Both books also join up their bodies and their rages, and never let you forget their being in the world. Gender? GENDER.

In other books that cover this, you could try She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, and find some of that rage and gender in there as well.


Were you here for the sexy, gorgeous, delicious prose? God, same. And for a fix of something similarly substantial, I would recommend you try:

OKPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro

I reviewed this in full for NoaF here. A loose reinterpretation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche4, this somewhat surreal book takes you through a series of events in the life of a middle-aged trans woman as she grapples with dating, friendship and her relationship with her son. Her emotions are very real, even when we can’t be sure how grounded in reality her experiences are, and things take some very strange turns along the way. Throughout, DeNiro makes even the smallest moments of the story sing with her way with a turn of phrase. There’s a hallucinogenic quality to it that sits very well with her occasional turns of vicious accuracy in highlighting key moments, and so the experience of the novel is one always in flux.

I know “lyrical” is a word grossly overused in literary descriptions, but it is the one I most want to reach for for both of these authors. It gives the sense of fluidity that they both have in how they handle their language, but also the awareness of the underlying craft. Neither DeNiro or Fellman ever give the sense that anything they do is less than 100% calculated. Like poem or song, every word is made to count, and that wash of gorgeous whole is the product of a mass of tiny, perfect choices, rather than something magical or organic. And so, I’m sticking with “lyrical”. Because the alternative is me calling the prose “sexy” again, and I’m reasonably sure that isn’t as effective as it is in my head.

For other expertly crafted acts of prose, try Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru (translated gorgeously by Nichola Smalley), Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou or A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson


Did you come for the messy, complex, ambiguous worldbuilding? If so, I give you:

The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (tr. Polly Barton)

As in Notes, the speculativity of The Place of Shells is subordinate to the themes, ideas and emotional arc of the book, and is somehow both pushed into the corners and yet the cornerstone of why the book works so well. There are no answers, but you’ll have fun (and a good deal of thinky time) grappling with the questions nonetheless.

Where Notes directs this into the future, and towards revolution, The Place of Shells has a quieter, more personal approach, but no less effective for the reduction in scope. Set shortly in the aftermath of covid, the story sits with an unnamed narrator who grapples with the death of a friend in the Tōhoku tsunami ten years before. He has now returned, and come to visit her in Germany.

How he’s done this isn’t explained, nor are some of the other strange events that occur through the book, but they don’t need to be to be effective within the story. The emotional journey – which culminates in a parade with heavy symbolism of pilgrimage – is clear where the world is not. Instead, the ambiguity and the strangeness that sit as motifs in those corners of the story builds slowly into resonances that reveal how little the “why” and “how” matter in the story’s circumstances – what matters is the process, the immersion, and that character journey, and the pay-off when you get there is beautiful.

Both this and Notes are books that insist full comprehension can be at odds with emotive heft, and prove their points emphatically with an experience that comes with an emotional hangover.

For books that likewise reject clear classification or clarification, try Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins or In Universes by Emet North.


And finally, is what captured you about this the sense of awe and wonder, or the way Fellman gives feeling to both art and the act of its creation? It’s maybe a little quieter here than in The Breath of the Sun, but I would consider the two books quite close siblings in how they play with my ability to be awestruck by something bigger than a single person. One may be a mountain and the other may be something a little more abstract, but it’s pushing a similar button inside me, and it turns out it’s quite difficult to find other books that give me a glimpse of something similar.

So, this is a slightly sideways suggestion, but I’m going to offer you:

Memorial by Alice Oswald

This is a sort of translation of The Iliad, but one that strips out action and reaction and plot of almost any kind, instead using the hollows and the words that are left from this centuries-old poem to craft a memorial to the war-dead, the lives destroyed and detailed, book by book in gory, vivid detail in the Homeric epic. Somehow, by cutting away swathes of content, Oswald manages to build a monument to the dead, the act of memory itself, and the poem within whose hollowed cathedral this all lies. Sometimes what remains on the page is sparse, but the act of finding the meaning within and around it crafts some of that sense of wonder that I found in Notes from a Regicide. Unlike Breath of the Sun, the awe here is in the deeply human, and I think Oswald captures something not wildly unlike it, and equally rooted in the lives of both the individual and the power of the collective swept together by fate.


And after all that, if you haven’t read Notes from a Regicide? Well, I think you know what to do.

  1. No really please do. I need people to talk to about that book. I’m not over it. I may never be over it. ↩
  2. You think I’m joking but at this point, I really am not. I am being such a fucking problem about this book. ↩
  3. A quick note on my choices (and something that I haven’t spoken about much in them). Notes is a trans story that focusses very much on being in the world as a trans person. It’s one of the things that I think is great about it. But I, as a cis woman, don’t feel wildly qualified to say “here is another good book about transness”, because who am I to judge, which is why I haven’t chosen that as one of my threads to draw on. That being said, several of the books in the categories chosen are by trans authors, and there are clear thematic overlaps in what I enjoyed about what they were doing. ↩
  4. Really quite loose. ↩

Weekend goals

Oct. 25th, 2025 02:29 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I got up early and went to the gym and then basically went right to the Springsteen movie, and now I feel physically and emotionally amazing but by 2pm on Saturday I'd done everything that I had planned for the weekend and it's a weird feeling!

Alphabetical Fic Meme

Oct. 26th, 2025 10:19 am
selenak: (Royal Reader)
[personal profile] selenak
From [personal profile] astrogirl. Clearly, I must write stories to cover the J and X gaps.


Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.



A - Age of Iron (I Medici, Lorenzo "Il Magnifico" de' Medici/Francesco de' Pazzi)

B - Bad Reputation (16th Century CE RPF, Barbara Blomberg & Fernando Álverez Toledo III. Duque de Alba)

C - Cover her face ( The King's Touch - Jude Morgan, 17th Century RPF; Henriette Anne Stuart (Henriette d'Angleterre)

D - Discordance (Merlin (TV), Morgana & Gwen)

E - Eve of Destruction (To Walk Invisible (2016), 19th Century RPF, Branwell Bronte/ Joseph Bentley Leyland)

F - Five ways in which Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia did not meet (18th Century CE RPF, Frederick the Great & Maria Theresia)

G - Graham O'Brien's Survival Kit for Companions (Doctor Who, Graham O'Brien & Thirteenth Doctor)

H - Here lie we (Merlin (TV), Gwen & Morgana)

I - Invicta (3rd Century CE RPF, Helena (Mother of Constantine)


J -

K -Kin (Merlin (TV), Arthur & Morgana)

L - Learning Frederick (18th Century CE RPF, Frederick the Great/Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf)

M - Murder in Florence (16th Century RPF, Margaret of Parma, Alessandro "Il Moro" de'Medici/ Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici)

N - Nusquam (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ziyal & Dukat)

O - Opposites (Beatles RPF, Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono & Paul McCartney)

P - Prussian Doll (18th Century RPF, Frederick the Great & Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great/Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf)

Q - Queen's Gambit (Don Carlos - Friedrich Schiller, Elisabeth de Valois & Princess Eboli, Elisabeth de Valois & Philipp II of Spain)

R - Repercutio (Babylon 5, Londo Mollari & G'kar)

S - She blinded me with science (18th Century RPF', Émilie du Chatelet/Voltaire)

T - Till our shadows blend (Babylon 5, Delenn & Londo Mollari)

U - Unforgivable (Angel the Series, Holtz & Connor)

V - Vita Guineveris (Merlin (TV), Gwen (Guinevere)

W - We happy few (Beatles RPF, Brian Epstein & The Beatles)

X -

Y - You should see me in a crown (18th Century CE RPF, Catherine the Great & Prince Henry of Prussia)

Z - Zinc Man (The Americans (TV), Elizabeth Jennings/Philip Jennings)


That's 24 letters out of 275 stories. For easiness, I started with the most recent ones, but even so, clearly history is a dominating theme. Also, I would have bet Z to be the most difficult letter to find, but no, The Americans came through for me.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A YA novel about five friends who once played a spooky game that only four of them survived. Four years later, their friendship now broken, the ghost of their dead friend returns to drag them into a gameworld based on Japanese folklore. They must play again, for higher stakes, or else.

I like Japanese folklore, "years ago our group of friends did something bad that's now come back to haunt us," and deathworlds/gameworlds. This book sometimes hit the spot for me but more often didn't; it feels like the bones of a good book that needed a couple more drafts. The main issue, I think, is pacing. It's very fast-paced once it hits the gameworld, to the point where it feels like it's rushing from one scenario to the next, without having time to breathe. This also affects character. The characters are there, but they're a bit shallow because of the go-go-go pacing.

The best parts are a really excellent twist I did not at all see coming, and the scene where they all have to play truth or dare with younger versions of themselves at the ages they were when they first played the game. That part digs into character and relationships, not to mention the feeling of that game itself, in a really satisfying way. If the whole book worked on that level, it would have been much better.

There's a sequel that doesn't sound like it goes anywhere interesting.

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Photo cross-post

Oct. 25th, 2025 10:29 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


One of these children won at Ticket To Ride: First Journey, the other...did not.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

What is a person?

Oct. 25th, 2025 01:32 pm
emperor: (Default)
[personal profile] emperor
The second chapter of our book group book (Rowan Williams' Being Human) is "What is a person?"

He starts by paraphrasing a slightly obscure[0] essay by Vladimir Lossky, who, he says, declares that we lack good vocabulary to distinguish between something that is simply one unique instance of its kind, and the quality (whatever it is) that makes a conscious thing of this kind irreducible to its nature.

The point he's making, I think, is that there is something more to being a person than simply being an example of a kind of thing. He's saying that there is something about us as a whole that isn't captured simply by listing facts that happen to be true about us. He then quotes Lossky at more length:
Under these conditions, it will be impossible for us to form a concept of the human person, and we will have to content ourselves with saying: “person” signifies the irreducibility of man to his nature— “irreducibility” and not “something irreducible” or “something which makes man irreducible to his nature” precisely because it cannot be a question here of “something” distinct from “another nature” but of someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still containing it, who makes it exist as human nature by this overstepping [of it].
Williams then goes on to talk about how people are shaped by the web of relationships they are part of and influence "A person, in other words, is the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created." He asserts that this (at least to Christians) is a mystery that applies to each and every human individual, and that from this it follows that the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them (regardless of any of the features of people that result in their marginalisation).

This is all well and good, and I'm sympathetic to the desire to avoid the "meet this set of criteria to be a person" approach that can come out of debates as to what it means to be a person. And from a Christian point of view, the idea that all people are first of all in relation to God before they are in relation to anyone or anything else; and thus that we must bear that in mind in all our doings with other people is useful (and very traditional).

But it doesn't seem to me to be actually answering the question of "What is a person?" Rather like the idea (I think from Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance) that everyone knows what "quality" is, but most people would struggle to define it; fine for the day-to-day, but not a very satisfactory answer to the question posed. Williams at least half admits this, saying later in the chapter that it's only a theological perspective that makes sense of the idea of personhood "But what I'm really suggesting is that when it comes to personal reality the language of theology is possibly the only way to speak well of our sense of who we are and what our humanity is like — to speak well of ourselves as expecting relationship, as expecting difference, as expecting death [...]" But how to talk about personhood to people who reject any sort of theological worldview?

Williams notes that Science Fiction has from time to time looked at this question of personhood - when encountering an alien or a cyborg, how do you decide to accord the status of person to this other being? He concludes that the answer is that "At the end of the day, we can say this is something we could discover only by taking time and seeing if a relationship could be built." That still seems unsatisfactory to me, not least in the age of generative AI systems[1] that produce plausible-sounding answers to any question and with whom at least some people seem to convince themselves they've had a relationship.

Is there a useful way of answering the question "What is a person?" without relying on a theological worldview or having the sort of argument that concludes that some humans are less people than others?

[0] e.g. the WP article doesn't mention it at all. But then Williams did his thesis on Lossky. The article "The Theological Notion of the Human Person" is online
[1] which are stochastic models of "what would an answer to this question likely sound like", and I am axiomatically going to declare as neither conscious nor persons