Smallweb Chatter Post
Aug. 23rd, 2025 01:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kalloway posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
smallwebHeya, smallweb!
This is an open post to talk about what you're working on, what you'd like to show off, cool resources, things that maybe aren't working so well, etc.
Also please check out previous posts to see what people are up to or if you might be able to help someone out.
smallweb! This is an open post to talk about what you're working on, what you'd like to show off, cool resources, things that maybe aren't working so well, etc.
Also please check out previous posts to see what people are up to or if you might be able to help someone out.
Just Create - Radio Edition
Aug. 22nd, 2025 08:49 pmsilvercat17 posting in justcreateWhat are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?
Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?
What do you just want to talk about?
What have you been watching or reading?
Chores and other not-fun things count!
Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky
Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?
What do you just want to talk about?
What have you been watching or reading?
Chores and other not-fun things count!
Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky
(no subject)
Aug. 22nd, 2025 04:04 pmkradeelavI've been yoinking a lot of really cool background/living quarters/gardens type of reference pictures from chinese-speaking spaces, and it's highlighting an interesting conundrum that i honestly don't really know how to feel about (there's no easy answer to it).
on one hand, these are gorgeous, lived in traditional spaces with immense, antiquated character that's a feast for the eyes as well as real history, right. cool tea-houses, shrines, gardens, etc.
but they are inaccessible as hell lmao.
like i see a dude walking over a bridge that's a bunch of vertical tiny stepping stones and go 'ayep that's not ADA compliant... this stairway ain't either.... how the fuck is an elderly person supposed to get to this multilevel platform too, much less me... wait was that a rope ladder.. lol...'
(it's a common problem with "old" European cities too so it's not an east/west thing by any means; i've long since resigned myself to basically sticking to US/modern cities. arguably it's *the* reason i don't travel much because it'd be too much of an ordeal. yes yes yes i know there's services that exist blah blah, do you know how much still doesn't fuckin work in practicality and is there purely for 'check the box for compliance' reasons. yeah. just trust me on this one.)
and i'm not complaining here for the sake of bitching, the interesting conundrum here is just the fact that yeah - there is going to always bee an either/or division with 'gorgeous historical architecture' and 'is it easy to get to'. visually speaking, multi-level platforms is a great way to break up a space, but there's the inevitable steps, you know? and you can only make so many ramps.
so it's very interesting to also rotate this thought while designing/drawing fictional spaces, especially older historical ones -- how to make it plausibly accessible while remaining dynamic. (my dad and i talk about this all the time with him being an architect and knowing full well that struggle of 'how to make a functional space pleasing'. ngl it actually is fun listening to him complain about regulations since there's so many to learn about lol, much less shit like 'don't put a doctor's walk-in entrance next to the patient entrance because doctors are arrogant bastards who don't want to mingle with the plebeians (true story)).
on one hand, these are gorgeous, lived in traditional spaces with immense, antiquated character that's a feast for the eyes as well as real history, right. cool tea-houses, shrines, gardens, etc.
but they are inaccessible as hell lmao.
like i see a dude walking over a bridge that's a bunch of vertical tiny stepping stones and go 'ayep that's not ADA compliant... this stairway ain't either.... how the fuck is an elderly person supposed to get to this multilevel platform too, much less me... wait was that a rope ladder.. lol...'
(it's a common problem with "old" European cities too so it's not an east/west thing by any means; i've long since resigned myself to basically sticking to US/modern cities. arguably it's *the* reason i don't travel much because it'd be too much of an ordeal. yes yes yes i know there's services that exist blah blah, do you know how much still doesn't fuckin work in practicality and is there purely for 'check the box for compliance' reasons. yeah. just trust me on this one.)
and i'm not complaining here for the sake of bitching, the interesting conundrum here is just the fact that yeah - there is going to always bee an either/or division with 'gorgeous historical architecture' and 'is it easy to get to'. visually speaking, multi-level platforms is a great way to break up a space, but there's the inevitable steps, you know? and you can only make so many ramps.
so it's very interesting to also rotate this thought while designing/drawing fictional spaces, especially older historical ones -- how to make it plausibly accessible while remaining dynamic. (my dad and i talk about this all the time with him being an architect and knowing full well that struggle of 'how to make a functional space pleasing'. ngl it actually is fun listening to him complain about regulations since there's so many to learn about lol, much less shit like 'don't put a doctor's walk-in entrance next to the patient entrance because doctors are arrogant bastards who don't want to mingle with the plebeians (true story)).
Wednesday Reading Meme - August 20 2025
Aug. 20th, 2025 05:58 pmkitewithfishWhat I've Read
Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley - Audiobook with Katie Leung and George Weightman - Interesting vignettes but as a whole story, functionally kind of incomplete. Bradley talked about this book's origin as a piece of fanfic based on AMC's The Terror, which covers a fictionalization of the end of the doomed Franklin Expedition. (Fun Fact: I tried to read the book that the AMC series was based on, but truly hated it! Do not bother!) Bradley wrote pieces for her herself and her friends about how Graham Gore, time traveler scooped from death on the unforgiving arctic ice, would feel about modern UK life - and those bits shine. They feel fun and interesting and cared for. The main character of the novel, an unnamed government official who is strikingly similar to Bradley herself , is also a compelling look at a kind of person who might, in extremis, work at an amoral government agency that scoops people out of time to bolster Britain's fading national security.
The problem is, well, everything else. In a book that started with a thought experiment about how a particular man out of time might react to the modern day world, Bradley has plopped a fairly opaque government apparatus into the story to cover the whys and hows, and added time travel mechanics to make it all fit. But that's a lot of worldbuilding to commit to to just fill in the gaps of the story, and it feels like Bradley kind of just doesn't care too much about it.
Fanfic is all abou asking "What if...?" about a completed work, and I find myself thinking this book would also be great for fanfic - someone one would have fun filling in these gaps!
And Never Been Kissed by thehoyden, Twentysomething - Hockey RPF - I said last time I posted about this, it's a magnificently horny fic. I re-read this as part of my TheHoyden Renaisance where I was just diving back into fics from ten+ years ago , and this merits a re-read. My god, we were all so young and dumb and horny. Wonderful slow burn fic with truly the most desparately horny hockey loving teens I can imagine.
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters - I want to buy Waters a beer. This book tells a humanizing story of so many athletes in the 1930s, about how they were all just living their lives and working their hardest at their sports and then, wham! Fucking Nazis. Every time I thought, wow, I have hated the Nazis so much for so long, I cannot hate them more! Then this book showed me new gleaming heights of hating Nazis - distant beautiful peaks of hating Nazis that I have yet to climb. Because hating Nazis is based in loving that which they threaten, and Waters truly shows you people and a world that is worth loving. It's a wonderful book for showing you that the world is complex and weird and the past I took for granted was never the black and white of photographs. It really drove home just how much Nazis and fascism *took* from the world. I loved this book and burned thru it in about two days.
What I'm Reading
Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett - The audiobook came and oooh , it's good, so I jumped in.
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky - static from last week
Deal with the Devil by Kit Roch - static - I need to read it for next Wed.
What I'll Read Next
Book Club books planned
Lent by Jo Walton
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Space Opera ?
Monsters and Mainframes?
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton - Jo Walton talked about this in her July reading round up and I'm down
Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley - Audiobook with Katie Leung and George Weightman - Interesting vignettes but as a whole story, functionally kind of incomplete. Bradley talked about this book's origin as a piece of fanfic based on AMC's The Terror, which covers a fictionalization of the end of the doomed Franklin Expedition. (Fun Fact: I tried to read the book that the AMC series was based on, but truly hated it! Do not bother!) Bradley wrote pieces for her herself and her friends about how Graham Gore, time traveler scooped from death on the unforgiving arctic ice, would feel about modern UK life - and those bits shine. They feel fun and interesting and cared for. The main character of the novel, an unnamed government official who is strikingly similar to Bradley herself , is also a compelling look at a kind of person who might, in extremis, work at an amoral government agency that scoops people out of time to bolster Britain's fading national security.
The problem is, well, everything else. In a book that started with a thought experiment about how a particular man out of time might react to the modern day world, Bradley has plopped a fairly opaque government apparatus into the story to cover the whys and hows, and added time travel mechanics to make it all fit. But that's a lot of worldbuilding to commit to to just fill in the gaps of the story, and it feels like Bradley kind of just doesn't care too much about it.
Fanfic is all abou asking "What if...?" about a completed work, and I find myself thinking this book would also be great for fanfic - someone one would have fun filling in these gaps!
And Never Been Kissed by thehoyden, Twentysomething - Hockey RPF - I said last time I posted about this, it's a magnificently horny fic. I re-read this as part of my TheHoyden Renaisance where I was just diving back into fics from ten+ years ago , and this merits a re-read. My god, we were all so young and dumb and horny. Wonderful slow burn fic with truly the most desparately horny hockey loving teens I can imagine.
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters - I want to buy Waters a beer. This book tells a humanizing story of so many athletes in the 1930s, about how they were all just living their lives and working their hardest at their sports and then, wham! Fucking Nazis. Every time I thought, wow, I have hated the Nazis so much for so long, I cannot hate them more! Then this book showed me new gleaming heights of hating Nazis - distant beautiful peaks of hating Nazis that I have yet to climb. Because hating Nazis is based in loving that which they threaten, and Waters truly shows you people and a world that is worth loving. It's a wonderful book for showing you that the world is complex and weird and the past I took for granted was never the black and white of photographs. It really drove home just how much Nazis and fascism *took* from the world. I loved this book and burned thru it in about two days.
What I'm Reading
Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett - The audiobook came and oooh , it's good, so I jumped in.
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky - static from last week
Deal with the Devil by Kit Roch - static - I need to read it for next Wed.
What I'll Read Next
Book Club books planned
Lent by Jo Walton
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Space Opera ?
Monsters and Mainframes?
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton - Jo Walton talked about this in her July reading round up and I'm down
cool exciting things happening, dreamwidth gang edition :D
Aug. 20th, 2025 01:45 pmkradeelavalso doubles as the 'what has krad been up to this summer' post ~
* Gaze an Eagle Blind - Environment Design Assistant - For the past few weeks, been working with chira for the backgrounds of Gaze aka a black comedy action webcomic by Little Foolery. I've been a fan of LF's work for gosh, 15+ years now? and Gaze really was the perfect intersection of an extremely compelling story-project with teeth and real soul plus the chance to help out in some pretty uniquely synergetic ways! We'll save the announcement post for other socials for later but this collaboration has been a literal dream of mine for, not kidding, a decade plus. :D
* Like Fine Wine - guest artist - LFW is a creative anthology featuring older men and their significantly younger partners :3c run by some dear friends with an absolutely all-star contributor selection, it's a delicious mix of classy with real honest to goodness bite. the strip i have in mind is something i've been aching to do for a few months now too, and just -- going to be real good for the soul.
* "Summoner Support", a short Karel/Summoner Mark/Volke R18 fire emblem selfship comic for
karel :3 working unashamedly on FE selfship work in the last few months has been really healing, and everything about this strip was total guilty pleasure territory from the characters involved to the Vibes, to the meta-ing that has spun out from this ~ should actually be finishing this up pretty soon!* Nazine II Spot Artist for
idal_waves 's story - I've wanted to work with Idal on a creative project for years now and so, so glad we got to collaborate here. :D Idal went above and beyond writing his characters Petr and Bruno with both real historical nuance and incredible id, and he really let me go ham on some cool mid-century smoky-masculine art style here with the 3 pieces. * in the background, ashes & ghost doujin shipping is going (most likely for the next month), actually packing the second large order right now in between writing this post; once these are out, 20/66 of the doujins are shipped. I'm going to save the retrospective/actual closure-celebration once when all of these are shipped and once when i figure out what itch.io is going to do with the payout since this is uh. An Ongoing Interesting Event, to put it mildly. :D;
... believe it or not there is Even More (non-art) Stuff happening behind the scenes lol, but that covers it for now; the back half of this year will most likely simply continuing to work on all of this ~
(no subject)
Aug. 19th, 2025 10:04 pmkradeelavthank you for saying that thing about the pendulum... i've been feeling so hopeless about the state of everything, and i still don't know if i can believe it will get better, especially in places other than the us of a, but 'try and outlive the bastards' is a good enough goal to stick around for just in case it does swing back haha. sorry if this is too depressing of an ask. thank you for making and sharing honest genuine sexy art despite everything
<3
you know, i've been thinking about the Tom of Finland biopic every day for the last few weeks.
For the unfamiliar, it's a film about one of the world's most well known kink/Leather/gay artists and his journey from a youth in Finland, surviving through WWII, struggling with the sheer amount of homophobia in Europe during and after it, finding refuge in his art and Muse especially when he came over here to the States that had somewhat more artistic freedom for the time, struggling through AIDS as it decimated his loved ones and equally struggling with the artistic censorship in the 80's against something he held so dearly.
There's a scene where East Germany border police detain and interrogate him over his kink pictures, if it wasn't clear about how deadly serious it was. and the thing is - drawing gay kink wasn't just.... lewd pictures to him.
it was his Muse.
he lived for it, breathed it with his sexuality. he faced very real repeated physical, social and existential threats for protecting that right to sit down and privately come alive for his Muse through paper and pen.
It's this last part that frames the context for (personally), one of the most powerful scenes I've seen in film.
in this scene, he and his fellow Leather creatives have gone through every last printer's shop in their state, from A-Z, searching for any printer that'll keep Tom's art circulating, given his work was the heartbeat of gay/Leather circles. They're desperate. (Sound familiar?)
Desperate enough to cold-call and step in Mr. Zagat's's printer shop, despite being quite transparently who they are:
Here --
you have a veteran, an elder Leatherdaddy, and somebody who's already been through hell for his art and Muse, quite literally bled and broken over it --
-- still say that it's worth it all.
We can and must do the same.
Hugo Award Thoughts for 2025
Aug. 18th, 2025 03:33 pmkitewithfishhttps://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/winners-and-stats
Hugo Awards thoughts
Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.
I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?
I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.
The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.
I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.
In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.
Hugo Awards thoughts
Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.
I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?
I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.
The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.
I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.
In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.
Tags:
(no subject)
Aug. 17th, 2025 09:54 pmkradeelavwatching sword of the stranger is delightful because it's reminding me i actually am capable of being amazed by some media. like. oh man. this is what it's like to love something solid again and be drawn in. the artistry. the story nuance. the choreography. this is the good shit.
(I'm not even halfway through the movie yet and it's already my favorite one this year.)
anyway had a genuinely good sunday relaxing for once. ;w;
(I'm not even halfway through the movie yet and it's already my favorite one this year.)
anyway had a genuinely good sunday relaxing for once. ;w;