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[personal profile] sunnymodffa posting in [community profile] fail_fandomanon
 
What you feared would come like an explosion, is like a whisper. What you thought was the end, the beginning."

RIP Robert Redford.

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What I'm Doing Wednesday

Sep. 17th, 2025 05:10 pm
sage: a white stag on a black background, captioned "Yuletide" (yuletide)
[personal profile] sage
books
still reading Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett. I haven't had the time to really focus on it, so I've been reading Kirk/Spock longfic.

yarning
I finished the crocheted globe for Niece and it looks pretty good. Definitely good enough for a child turning 5, though it's a little unevenly stuffed in a couple of places & I can't get it to shift. Am sad I had to miss yarn group this week, but yesterday I made a 3in diameter moon to go with the Earth. Hopefully it'll all fit in the box.

Yuletide
I nommed:
- The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. (Amina, Dalila, Raksh, and Jamal)
- Shadow of the Leviathan by Robert Jackson Bennett (Ana, Din, Kepheus)
- A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Cordelia, Hester, Richard, Penelope)
- Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher (Anja, Snow, Grayling)
- Dark Olympus series by Katee Robert (Icarus, Poseidon, Hades, Penelope)

sadly, Batman: Wayne Family Adventures and Rivers of London both look too large to nom this year, if I'm gauging them right. Drat!

#resist
October 18: No Kings Day #2

I hope you're all doing well! <333

[ SECRET POST #6830 ]

Sep. 17th, 2025 05:55 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6830 ⌋

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


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #975.
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.

Good news/bad news

Sep. 17th, 2025 09:41 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Welp. Remember when you told me I shouldn't need to chair a work meeting while I'm on vacation?

The good news is, I'm not going to.

The bad news is, our ferry to the island we're actually planning to visit, where V's son lives, was canceled. So last-minute that when we got to the port we saw vehicles driving off of it that had already boarded.

We couldn't stay anywhere in the small town where the ferry port is. It has hotels and B&Bs but not enough for an extra ferryload of people at short notice. Poor D had to drive forty minutes back the way we came just for us to get a room at all.

And our ferry crossing has been re-booked, for Saturday. No ferries until then. Allegedly; apparently this can change at short notice. But even if it does, it's hard to plan accommodation or anything else.

And in the meantime we're grateful just to have a roof over our heads (we're staying in the attic, so the slanted roof is only just over my head on this side of the room!). And we'll figure out what happens tomorrow.

But in the meantime, checkout is at 11, and so is this precious meeting. I already told my boss, when we didn't know where if anywhere we'd be tonight to explain, and he wrote back that he was sorry to hear this and to message him in the morning if he's needed to sit in. If! I'm not impressed that even I don't know where I'll sleep tonight and I won't have WiFi tomorrow lunchtime isn't enough to get him to understand that he has to chair this meeting.

Except for this massive snag and the possibility of V not being able to see their kid at all this year, which is a real "other than that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play," we've actually had a lovely day. We all were up and at 'em in good time to leave the nice place in Stirling where we broke the journey last night. We had time to visit the Highland Folk Museum on the way, which D picked up a brochure about when he was in a long queue to buy sandwiches for lunch at the café with the highland coo (Scottish for "cow") statue everyone gets their photo taken next to, including me now, and we were delighted at the serendipity. It was lovely to see an example of the blackhouses that I'd heard V talk about, and a loom shed for weaving the famous Harris tweed.

I am with my two humans and we are going to wait for more decision-making information and capacity after a night's sleep and maybe some updates from the much-cursed ferry operator.

Music Wednesday

Sep. 17th, 2025 08:56 am
muccamukk: Elyanna singing, surrounded by emanata and hearts. (Music: Elyanna Hearts)
[personal profile] muccamukk

Anyone else remember this band? I was very fond of them.
larryhammer: Yotsuba Koiwai running, label: "enjoy everything" (enjoy everything)
[personal profile] larryhammer
A few links hoarded up, sometimes for a while:

This guy saved a PNG to a bird.”

A very small selection of very good P.G. Wodehouse quotes. (via)

From Neal.fun: I’m Not a Robot, where you solve increasingly ridiculous CAPTCHAs. Level 11: “Select all the squares with Waldo” (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Castle on the Hill, Ed Sheeran.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Something Whiskered (A Cat in the Stacks Mystery) by Miranda James. (Just the one book because I was reading a lot of fanfic.)


What I am Currently Reading: Garden of Lamentations (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) by Deborah Crombie.


What I Plan to Read Next: One of my other library books, possibly Key Lime Sky by Al Hess.




Book 99 of 2025: Something Whiskered (A Cat in the Stacks Mystery) (Miranda James)

I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy this book, but I really liked it. spoilers )

I enjoyed this book, and it had the benefit of not having any obvious continuity errors! I'm giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)

Sep. 17th, 2025 09:07 am
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
[personal profile] pauraque
In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughtsThe main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I hit Walmart while I was downtown and Stewart’s on the way home. I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, scooped kitty litter, and showered. I stopped by the library on the way home from mom’s to pick up some books. I grilled steak for Pip’s supper.

I started the next Duncan Kincaid book and watched an HGTV program.

Temps started out at 48.7(F) and reached 77.2. I wore shorts and a tank top out of the house in the morning despite the cool temps because I was determined to enjoy the later warm temps. (With a sweatshirt, naturally. *g*)


Mom Update:

Mom was on the porch when I arrived, but still complained about having too little energy. more back here )

September flowers: fairy crassula

Sep. 17th, 2025 10:33 pm
mific: (Art brushes pencils)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] drawesome
Title: September flowers: fairy crassula
Artist: [personal profile] mific
Rating: Gen
Fandom: original art
Content Notes: Made in Procreate. It's been a cold winter so there's not much flowering yet in September, in Auckland. This succulent in one of my hanging baskets has been lovely, though.



full size below )

More school stuff

Sep. 16th, 2025 11:35 pm
soc_puppet: A brown hooded rat seen from behind as it is surfing the web at a desktop computer; barely visible on the computer's screen is the Dreamwidth logo (Computer time)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Big project for Intro to Human Services: History project (5 to 7 minute presentation, needs visual aid(s)); can work in groups of up to three. I'm working solo, and my project is on the history of the ADA. It's due Monday the 22nd, aaaaand I haven't really done a lot yet 😑 On the plus side, no homework next week?

No big project for Social Problems! I just gotta read another textbook chapter, originally by Thursday but now possibly not until Tuesday. (I may try for Thursday anyway.) No Asynchronous Course Materials this week, because last week's was two-and-a-half hours long.

Big project for Ceramics: Two coil-and-pinch projects due for bisque (initial, pre-glaze) firing by end of day Friday. I've got one finished, and have only barely started the second. To be fair, I tried starting the second twice already, and had to scrap it both times, because I just kept pinching the bowl larger when I was trying to smooth the coils together. And then yesterday, though I finished cleaning up my fish (that I love and can't wait to share), we did some practice of taking stuff out of the kiln, and that ate up some class time I would have otherwise used to work on my bowl.

Our next class period, tomorrow, will be dedicated to Raku firing our test pieces, so I doubt I'll have a lot of time to work then, and will have to leave class ASAP to get to an appointment back home. So I anticipate staying late on Thursday and coming in on Friday, neither of which is an official Ceramics day, to finish my bowl.


I probably should not have slacked off quite as much as I did over the weekend, but slacking off felt so gooooood 😭 Ah, well; back to work!

[ SECRET POST #6829 ]

Sep. 16th, 2025 06:42 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6829 ⌋

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


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #975.
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.

Overlooked Again

Sep. 16th, 2025 05:06 pm
yourlibrarian: Stephen amuses Jon Stewart (OTH-StewartIsAmused-random_beauty88)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) Some interesting posts at Henry Jenkins blog about the Peabody Awards process and disruption in the entertainment industry. "So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18...who represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. ..which is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched...Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff"

Two other factors: "It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world" and "also...is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters." Read more... )

2) A few more notes about Silent Witness as I move into S26. S23 seemed a really unusual season, enough so that I wondered about its production dates. Read more... )

3) Watched a documentary on the BeeGees which, like a lot of documentaries, goes very light on the time after their popularity peaked. (That was one thing the Billy Joel and Bon Jovi ones avoided). Read more... )

4) A Spy Among Friends was well written and interesting to watch but I kept constantly thinking about the 2003 Cambridge Spies which I saw last year and suspect it's much closer to the truth. Read more... )

5) Just a few comments about the Emmys, mostly in how unsurprising it was that Stephen Colbert finally won an Emmy for Best Show more because voters were jolted into a show of support. Yet John Oliver won yet again, twice. (Particular irony given the broadcast was on CBS).

Otherwise can't say it was entertaining and I wish a lot of stuff not involved in handing out awards had been cut. The tribute to Gilmore Girls seemed to really exemplify "too little, too late" since it and so many shows from the WB had been overlooked through sheer snobbery decades ago, when the attention would have done more good.

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Raindrops keep falling on my head....

Sep. 16th, 2025 04:47 pm
selenak: (Ben by Idrilelendil)
[personal profile] selenak
RIP Robert Redford. A fantastic run of movies especially in the 70s as an actor, later as a director never made an uninteresting movie, founded a film festival of several decades running, and to the best of my knowledge never abused his fame and status and instead used both to help others.


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