glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv
A little under a week ago, Le Sserafim posted this cover of Selena's "Amor Prohibido" alongside a cute MV.

OK, firstly, kudos to them for tackling one of the most well-known songs for a Tejano LEGEND. Secondly, they did AMAZING--especially when it came to rolling their r's! Finally, it's pretty clear that they understood and respected the song AND Selena's legacy. <3 to my FIMMIES.

sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."

anomaly

Sep. 25th, 2025 01:00 am
[syndicated profile] merriamwebster_feed

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 25, 2025 is:

anomaly • \uh-NAH-muh-lee\  • noun

Anomaly is a somewhat formal word that refers to something that is remarkable in its deviation from what is usual or expected.

// Last summer’s storm was an anomaly for this area.

// We were unable to explain the anomalies in the test results.

See the entry >

Examples:

Magic realism usually makes no attempt to explain or justify the anomaly behind the magical event. Its justification lies in the conceptual possibilities it allows for in the narrative, pleasure it provides, and feeling of strangeness that comes from a familiar world being tweaked.” — Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, 2025

Did you know?

You might be familiar with the Greek word homos, which means “same.” It is from this word that we get words like homonym, homogeneous, and homophone, all of which have to do with sameness or similarity. What does this have to do with anomaly? Although it’s not obvious, homos is a part of the etymology of anomaly, too. Anomaly is a descendant—by way of Latin and Middle French—of the Greek word anṓmalos, which means “uneven” or “irregular.” Anṓmalos comes from the prefix a- (meaning “not”) and the word homalόs (meaning “even”)—and homalόs comes from homos.



Community Thursday

Sep. 25th, 2025 05:33 am
vriddy: Studious, smiling Eri (studious)
[personal profile] vriddy
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Posted & commented on [community profile] getyourwordsout.
landofnowhere: (Default)
[personal profile] landofnowhere
My Life and Functions, Walter Hayman. Walter Hayman was a mathematician who worked in complex analysis, but I heard about him first because of his daughter Sheila Hayman, descendant of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, who made documentaries about her family history (I watched the one about her family and the Nazis, which was powerful, and have still not watched the one about Fanny, because I don't think I'm its target audience.) Walter Hayman had a life that was in some ways not that unusual for a mathematician of his time and place, but still had some interesting features: he was born in Germany, grandson of the distinguished mathematician Kurt Hensel. Kurt Hensel retired and then died early enough to be protected from the worst effects of the Nazis, but Walter was Kindertransported to an English boarding school as a child, and lived the rest of his life in England (excepting some brief stays in the US and other travel). He married three times, outliving his first two wives; his first wife became a math educator who founded the British Math Olympiad team (with his help); his second wife was his former grad student who had come to the UK from Iraq, and he converted to Islam for her (but still continued to be a practicing Quaker), and his third wife was a successful writer and businesswoman.

This all sounded interesting enough for me to track down his memoirs, though I found it a bit disappointing, in particular because it didn't go into detail about the things I was most curious about. The sections about his early years were the best, but after that it became rushed. The title is appropriate; he does sometimes switch abruptly from reminiscences to a mathematical discussion (which I could follow but is not my field). However, I did learn details I'm not sure I actually wanted to know about his relationship with his former grad student who he eventually married, which was even more problematic than that description makes it sound like. It's interesting that he spent his life around smart, influential women; in addition to his wives, his Ph.D. advisor was the groundbreaking Mary Cartwright, and he had four daughters who all went on to have successful careers. But he doesn't come off as particularly feminist or thoughtful about gender.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. This is a fairy tale novella, using many of the classic tropes, and a well-constructed one, as one would expect from Novik. I enjoyed it.

Teresa, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Like the last Ayrton Zangwill I read, this is a un-proofread OCR'd copy: the book has just entered Distributed Proofreaders and will be on Project Gutenberg when fully proofread (at which point I expect I'll post about it again!). As I've come to expect from Edith Ayrton Zangwill, the writing is great, the social commentary is excellent, and I gulped the whole thing down in a day. The book feels like a response to Middlemarch, specifically the prologue that talks about all the latter-day analogues of St. Teresa of Avila who didn't reach their full potential, and this book's Teresa could be one of them (some characters compare her in-book to her saintly analogue).

Teresa starts the book as an idealistic girl fresh out of boarding school with a strong and inflexible sense of morality learned from her mother, who is a relic of the Victorian era but also a committed socialist -- and the theme of socialism throughout the book really helps Teresa's morality not come across as mere priggishness. (Vicki, who I am very grateful to for scanning the book from the British Library, commented that Teresa reads as possibly on the spectrum, and I think she has a good point there.)

Like The First Mrs. Mollivar, this is a story about two people who never should have gotten married to each other, and how they navigate being married anyway. Also like it, there is lots of good parts in there that is not just about the miserable marriage; I particularly liked Teresa's badass lady doctor cousin, though I'm sad that her roommate got shuffled out of the way to make room for a heterosexual love interest (the book does not use its femslash potential).

(no subject)

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:42 pm
skygiants: Audrey Hepburn peering around a corner disguised in giant sunglasses, from Charade (sneaky like hepburnninja)
[personal profile] skygiants
I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.

The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.

Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.

ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.

And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
sonofgodzilla: lachesis raises her blade (lachesis of the three sisters)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Title: In the Arms of Sleep
Universe: Kamen Rider Gotchard
Prompt: Power Rangers Zeo: S04E20 - Found and Lost
Series: 101+ Chemys (X Wizard | Catchula | Kamedoon | El Dragon)
Character(s): Harima Shiori/Kudo Rinne, Lachesis
Rating: 15
Warnings: N/A
Summary: The new transfer student was proving difficult. She had tried to speak to her colleagues about the girl’s behaviour, but as always, the most she got was a shrug from Minato and Umigane’s pointed reminder that, as her homeroom teacher, Kudo Rinne was her problem.
Length: 1731 words
Author's Notes: I wrote this in a coffee shop in Ikebukuro yester-day in one sitting, so apologies if it is a little rough around the edges. also: external link.

sleep!

In the Arms of Sleep )
killabeez: (Default)
[personal profile] killabeez
Get your requests and offers ready, spread the word, and let's do this!



2025 Guidelines and helpful links here.
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Thanks for all your nominations so far! 4,429 fandom choices have been submitted so far (note that if two people nominate the same fandom, that counts twice towards that total). You can nominate at the tag set here.

AO3 has announced maintenance downtime from Sep 26, 07:30 UTC to (approximately) Sep 27, 03:30 UTC, which cuts a large chunk off the end of our planned nominations period. Because of this, we’ll extend nominations for an extra 16 hours, and instead close nominations on Saturday September 27 at 1pm UTC (What time is that for me?). However, we urge you to get your nominations in before the downtime begins, just in case AO3 doesn’t come back up in time for you to submit before we close nominations.

If your fandom requires evidence, please also submit it here on the Evidence Post by that time. We can't give a decision on all fandoms by close of nominations, but the sooner you make your case, the better your chances of a swift answer.

Dan Quayle

Sep. 24th, 2025 06:53 pm
paperghost: (Default)
[personal profile] paperghost
So, I'm doing some last final research on an article I'm writing, and I just now discovered Dan Quayle's website? The layout is peak Web 1.0, but really charming. He may not have been a good Vice President from what I've read, but I guess I can hand him this...


carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
We need a host for October!


Quote of the Day:

“I wrote a book. I have the page numbers done, and now I just have to fill in the rest."

— Stephen Wright, from "67 of the Best Steven Wright Jokes on His 67th Birthday" at Cracked.com.


Today's Writing:

Free-writing to the tune of 326 words. Mostly junk, but a few sentences go with that thing I thought of that I didn't want to forget. 8-)


Tally

Days 1-22 )

Day 23: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 24 (over the international date line!): [personal profile] sanguinity


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

[ SECRET POST #6837 ]

Sep. 24th, 2025 06:26 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6837 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 20 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Timing and Distribution

Sep. 24th, 2025 05:16 pm
yourlibrarian: Hawkeye Shoots multiple Arrows-lady_kingsley (AVEN-HawkeyeArrows-lady_kingsley)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) Nothing like a Disney bundle price increase right on the heels of the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco. I wonder if they held off on the announcement until 24 hours after saying he'd return?

2) Having just watched the latest Death in Paradise spinoff, it struck me as curious that a successful show like Silent Witness has not done the same (though maybe it has? Anyone know?)

In a way though, it's like the show has had various spinoffs within the same show. Read more... )

I also thought about this issue given this article which argues that technology will continue to make the cost of content creation fall to where practically anyone can create marketable content, especially since consumer expectation of what counts as entertainment and information has changed due to cost and access issues as well as demographic changes. As a result, companies that invest heavily in it will expect to get paid in different ways. Read more... )

3) It's fun to see how many people over time at Board Game Arena have recognized my Merlin icon. It's a little fannish high five.

4) Sister Boniface's episode of Doctor Who struck me as a sign of changing times. Twenty years ago the fan would have been the geekiest cast member, probably the reporter, but here various cast members are fans and it's mainly the tall, matinee idol detective.

5) Interesting to see how U.S. films are getting less viewing overseas, mainly due to China's restrictions on how many can be shown there. I thought this bit was interesting as well: "The the top French films released were all English-language movies co-produced with the UK among other countries, and did more business in the UK than in the US or China." I didn't realize France even made films in English.

Poll #33655 Kudos Footer-541
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Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

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