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Director of the nation formerly known as Canada Quinn Atherton is determined to deliver much mass murder as it takes to achieve peace, order, good government. Why do so many ingrates object?

Blight(Sleep of Reason, volume 2) by Rachel A. Rosen

three things make a post?

Jul. 3rd, 2025 02:34 pm
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[personal profile] summerstorm
Betrayed by fandom osmosis: I thought all the episodes of the last series of Taskmaster were out. Imagine my disappointment when I went looking for episode 10 and realized episode 9 had a timestamp of 5 days ago.

I started watching season 3 of the Australian version, but I kind of don't like anyone in the line-up. Maybe if I give it some time.

*

I haven't seen the last two episodes yet, but I am greatly enjoying Cloudward, Ho on Dropout.

*

Seven months after I stopped playing with my Sunday group (and roughly three after they moved to 7 PM EST and I was fully freed from thinking about rejoining them), I've come to realize how much I dreaded that game, felt judged for my choices, and did not trust the DM with a character I was deeply invested in. I still struggle with my ADHD and general social faux pas (plural) and have moments where I beat myself up or wanna crawl into a hole because I feel I was super annoying/took over too much, but I trust my DMs, I have fun, I look forward to every session. It's much freer.

My alt-Mummy film

Jul. 2nd, 2025 11:51 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
The inspiration being the 1999 Mummy movie is not without problematic elements.

Imagine an Egyptian film company wanting to make a movie about idiots waking a horror in Canada that only the Egyptian lead can resolve.
Read more... )

Wednesday reading

Jul. 2nd, 2025 04:46 pm
redbird: full bookshelves and table in a library (books)
[personal profile] redbird
Boston's Orange Line, by Andrew Elder and Jeremy C. Fox. This is a collection of black-and-white photos, going back to the start of the old elevated orange line, with captions. This was for the "explore Boston history" square on the BPL summer reading bingo. If I'd noticed the "images of rail" series title, I wouldn't have borrowed this book. The captions are just about enough to confirm that there's more than enough to be said on the subject to make a book, but this isn't. This has a disjointed discussion of the lengthy "realigmnent" of the orange line to its current route, and a couple of paragraphs on the decision not to run an 8-lane interstate through the middle of Boston and Cambridge, and no suggestion that anything similar had happened elsewhere. Ah, well.

There are suggestions on the library website for some of the squares (including "with a green cover"), but not this one. Searching the catalog for "Boston histpry" got me this, along with, among other things, a book about the Big Dig, a book about the Great Molasses Flood (which is at least mentioned in this, with a picture of damage to the orange line), and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The June 2023 Dark Eye Megabundle featuring the English-language edition from Ulisses Spiele of the leading German tabletop roleplaying game of heroic fantasy, The Dark Eye.

Bundle of Holding: The Dark Eye MEGA (from 2023)

June Album Choice

Jul. 2nd, 2025 07:39 pm
glinda: a cup of coffee, with a snowflake drawn in the foam (coffee/latte)
[personal profile] glinda
June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.

It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too.

No rest for the wicked

Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:31 pm
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[personal profile] catness
Wrote another AI-powered motivation script that processes my Obsidian Daily Notes (they are in Markdown, it understands the checkboxes) and provides the feedback and inspiration and tasks to focus on.

I really like Obsidian for private journaling and tasks list, but the lack of feedback (you don't even get points ;) always bugged me. Now I know that someone is reading and appreciating my entries :) (A robot, and probably OpenAI techs and the whole Internet, depending on how secure is the user-submitted data... but heck, I'm not posting any secret secrets, so I should be fine.)

And now as I store the data in the database (to make it easier for the script to process it), I can eventually make pretty graphs and stats...

2025 CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees

Jul. 1st, 2025 06:02 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
The quotation below is a quotation


CSFFA (The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association) is proud to announce the 2025 CSFFA Hall of Fame inductees.

Clint Budd, fan, convention organizer, modernized CSFFA and created the CSFFA Hall of Fame
Charles R. Saunders, author, journalist, and founder of the “sword and soul” literary genre
Diane L. Walton, editor, mentor, and a founding member of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic

More information here.


Congratulations to the Inductees!

Social Media Note: Hey.Cafe

Jul. 1st, 2025 04:46 pm
dewline: (canadian media)
[personal profile] dewline
Just a reminder that Hey.Cafe exists. It's Canadian-based and Canadian-owned. It's an alternative to Twitter and the rest - however well-behaved they are - just in case.

My account is here:

https://hey.cafe/@dewline

Yes, I plan to try Gander as well once it opens up.
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[personal profile] brithistorian

A book has to really impress me to get a reaction before I've finished it, but Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance has definitely done that. I had read some of Palmer's science fiction and been very impressed by it, and I knew before reading this that she is a historian, so when I first heard of this book, I immediately requested it from my local library.[^1] Not really knowing anything about it when I requested it, I thought it was a history of how the Renaissance came to be. Then I started reading it, and from the way she talked about historians creating the idea of the Renaissance, I thought it was a Renaissance equivalent of Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages.[^2]. Then I read on and saw that it's both of those things and more. It's also Palmer's academic biography, and an explanation of how academia works, and an exploration of the processes that created the Renaissance (and that created similar shifts in society at other times and places. It's the best history book I've read recently.[^3]

Besides the major historical themes of the book, Palmer has also included a number of interesting trivia and also Easter eggs for science fiction fans: - The genetic changes in Europeans that makes the Black Death no longer the huge plague that it was in the Middles Ages took several hundred years to come about, and also caused Europeans to be more susceptible to "autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in [Palmer's] case) Crohn's disease."[^4] - She refers to Florence in the Renaissance as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy."[^5] - She uses the board game Siena as an illustration of how government worked in Renaissance Florence.[^6]

I particularly love this paragraph about the chronology of the Renaissance, and how it's exceedingly different depending on who you ask:

All agree that the Renaissance was the period of change that got us from medieval to modern, but people give it a different start date, because they start at the point that they see something definitively un-medieval. If we leave the History Lab a moment and visit my friends across the yard in the English Department, they consider Shakespeare (1564-1616) the core of Renaissance, while Petrarch's contemporary Chaucer (1340s-1400) is, for them, the pinnacle of medieval. When I cross the walk to visit the Italian lit scholars, they say Dante (1265-1321), despite being dead before Chaucer's birth, is definitely Renaissance, and often that Machiavelli is the start of modern, even though he died before Shakespeare's parents were born.

Reading this book makes me both sad and glad, in varying degrees at different times, that I never got my PhD and entered academia, depending on whether I feel at that particular moment that by having done so I would have been placing myself in cooperation or competition with Palmer. But leaving that aside, I'm exceedingly glad to be living in a time that I get to read this book, and I'm eagerly looking forward to getting to read more of Palmer's books.


[^1] Apparently a lot of other people had also heard of it, because I only got it about a week ago.

[^2] Although much more fun to read than Cantor.

[^3] I almost said "easily the best history book I've read recently," but I'm also currently reading Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, which gives Palmer some serious competition. But since I feel compelled to write a pre-completion reaction to Palmer's book and not to Parker's. . .

[^4] p. 116. All the MAGAts who keep yammering on about herd immunity with regard to COVID need to know that, but they probably wouldn't listen anyway.

[^5] p. 136.

[^6] pp. 65-8.

Canada Day 158

Jul. 1st, 2025 09:38 am
dewline: (canadian media)
[personal profile] dewline
As ever...

Canada Day, From Now Onward
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Only the brave, the arrogant, the naïve, or the desperate Men trespass in Arafel's Ealdwood. Into which category does the latest visitor fall?

The Dreamstone (Ealdwood, volume 1) by C J Cherryh

July 2025 Patreon Boost

Jul. 1st, 2025 08:58 am
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Jealous of all the people who support Aurora-finalist James Nicoll Reviews? Want to join them? Here are your options:

July 2025 Patreon Boost

Battleship Overflow Letter

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:06 pm
sheliak: A ship with decorated sails and elaborate prow, on a turbulent river. (ship: bilibin)
[personal profile] sheliak
I wasn't going to have one of these, but... I needed more room. This is going to be messy and will not have my usual formatting.


DNWs
    General DNWs:
  • Time loops (including both stable time loops and Groundhog Day style time loops)
  • Rape/noncon
  • Hopeless endings
  • Unrequested setting-change AUs (as opposed to canon divergence, which is pretty much always welcome)
  • Porn without plot
  • Mundane AUs
  • Omegaverse
  • Hanahaki
  • Soulmates
  • Characters begging to come/for sex acts

  • DNWs specific to 7 Seeds
  • Ango playing a major role (mention is fine).

  • DNWs specific to Akatsuki no Yona:
  • Yona/Hak, except as part of Yona/Hak/Soo-Won or Yona/Hak/Jae-ha.

  • DNWs specific to Chronicles of the Kencyrath:
  • Jame/Tori as a central part of a story, except as requested.
  • Harm to bonded creatures (e.g. Addy, Jorin, Drie's fish; also applies to original character creatures).

  • DNWs specific to the Dark Crystal universe:
  • Original Skeksis, urRu/Mystic, or UrSkek characters. (Original characters of any other species are fine, as are "nothing to work off of but the name, but the existence of an UrSkek/Mystic/Skeksis by this name is canon" characters.)

  • DNWs specific to Six Ages:
  • Any variant of the "Are Elmal and Yelmalio the same god or not?" mess.

  • DNWs specific to Star Trek: Rihannsu:
  • The Rihannsu becoming or evolving into the Romulans of TNG.

  • DNWs specific to Star Wars:
  • Jedi Order or Council bashing - I have a lot of affection for them, both as people as and a a culture/institution.
  • Tattooine Slave Culture (the specific fanon).
  • The Mando'a conlang, or Mandalore stuff in general.

  • DNWs specific to X-Men:
  • The Phoenix Force being portrayed as an intrinsically evil being.
  • Trevor Fitzroy.
  • Selene, the Shadow King, or Mojo playing a large role (exception: if I'm requesting Spiral, Mojo is okay then).
  • Any romantic pairings involving Empath.
  • Ororo/T'Challa--please don't even mention the marriage, even to say they're divorced.
  • Mutant!Moira.

    Battleship Tag DNWs
  • ABDL
  • Abusing Heat Suppressants
  • Accidental Knotting
  • Age Regression/De-Aging
  • Assgasm or Nogasm
  • Awkward Boners
  • Belly Kink
  • Biological BDSM AU
  • Boot Kink
  • Breast Expansion
  • Breeding Kink
  • Cheating/Infidelity
  • Cigarettes
  • Cock Warming
  • Come Inflation
  • Coming In Pants
  • Coregasm
  • Dry Humping
  • Eating disorders
  • Edging
  • Glory Hole
  • Hanahaki
  • Heat/rut
  • Hole Training
  • Inflation
  • Knotting
  • Makeover
  • Objectification
  • Omega/Omega
  • Omegaverse
  • Omorashi
  • Oral Knotting
  • Piss Enema
  • Plugged in Public
  • Red String of Fate
  • Rimming
  • Ruined Orgasm
  • Serial Killers
  • Sexting
  • Spanking
  • Somnophilia
  • Soulmate-Identifying Marks
  • Submission Pissing
  • Time Loop

Likes
    General Likes:
  • Time travel, including: time travel fixit; time travel with the glorious angst of knowing you're overwriting your future to give the past a chance; time travel that results in forming new kinds of relationships with people, like becoming friends with someone who was an enemy in the old timeline.
  • Seers (in the absence of predestination) who know what may happen and use that knowledge cleverly.
  • Strict honor codes.
  • Worldbuilding.
  • Alien POV.
  • A sense of wonder.
  • Loyalty.
  • Characters temporarily putting aside their weapons or sources of power as a show of trust.
  • Best enemies, who might kill each other someday but fundamentally respect and trust each other, perhaps more than they do their nominal allies. Rivals and enemies becoming friends, or allies, or lovers, or swearing loyalty to one another.
  • Kneeling. Physical gestures of loyalty or affection.
  • Unexpected mercy. Mercy in general, too.
  • Heroism in desperate straits, characters choosing to be heroic even in a dystopia or doomed world.
  • Magical abilities/superpowers in daily life.

  • Time Travel Likes
  • Time travel fixit.
  • Time travel with the glorious angst of knowing you're overwriting your future to give the past a chance.
  • Time travel that results in forming new kinds of relationships with people, like becoming friends with someone who was an enemy in the old timeline.
  • Crack pairings that suddenly make perfect sense due to time travel!
  • Characters gaining a new perspective--on other people, history, themselves, etc.
  • Characters who were neglected in canon getting to shine, including but not limited to those characters using their knowledge of the future to achieve great things.
  • In action series, characters using their future knowledge to become totally badass (especially when it's a female character doing this).

  • Worldbuilding Likes:
  • Culture! I really love a piece that gets into the POV of the culture it's depicting.
  • Family structure. How do people see their relationships? Which ones do they prioritize?
  • Craft details!
  • Clothing, cloth, fibers, weaving, spinning... Also jewelry. Who wears it? What does it indicate (e.g., gender, status, ...?)
  • Architecture, how homes and public buildings reflect a culture.
  • Food! What do people eat? How do they store food for the times when they can't farm/hunt/forage for more? Do they trade for food?

  • Hurt/Comfort Likes:
  • Leaders slowly earning the trust of traumatized people who have every reason to fear the worst from the world in general and possibly them in particular.
  • A character is disparaged by their own allies, but an unlikely person (such as an honorable enemy or captor) recognizes their excellence and tells them so.
  • I already mentioned unexpected mercy, but it goes here too: I love a buildup of fear and then relief, mercy from someone who (as far as the character knows) has absolutely no reason to be merciful.
  • Characters who have no mercy for themselves, but can have it for others, or whose friends and lovers disagree with their self-judgement.
  • Characters pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, and others being there to catch them when they do.
  • Characters going to great lengths to help one another.
  • The less-hurt person also being in some distress, and struggling with it, and perhaps taking comfort in their own ability to help others.
  • Characters who are convinced that they don't matter and no one cares learning that actually someone does care and does think they matter.
  • Rescues! Rescues where the rescuee is convinced no one's coming, implacable rescuers overcoming terrible obstacles to save their friends/lovers.

  • Art Likes:
  • Pen and ink. Watercolor. Charcoal.
  • Use of light and shadow.
  • Limited color palettes can be very lovely!
  • Flowing lines.
  • Stained glass, decorated pottery, tapestry, art that evokes any of these.
  • Pixel art.
  • Body language.
  • "Royal ease" position, when appropriate (for gods and rulers).
  • Favorite artists: John R. Neill, Ivan Bilibin, Leo & Diane Dillon, Alphonse Mucha, Thomas Canty, James Gurney, Jan Pospíšil, Michelle Lockamy. On the comics side of things, Dave Cockrum for character designs & clothing, John Byrne for body language, Alan Davis, David Aja (his Scarlet Witch covers especially).


Any Fandom I've Requested Before
1: Any Character I've Requested Before (AFIRB)
Any & Relationship I’ve Requested Before (AFIRB)
Any / Relationship I’ve Requested Before (AFIRB)

Medium: Fic

Tags:
Teaching/Mentorship
Time Travel Fix-It
Unexpected Mercy
Grief/Mourning
Hurt/Comfort
Interactions with Gods
Katabasis
Loyalty
Memories
Mirrors
Exhaustion
Blood
celestial
Experimental
Apocalypse
Mental Link
Shapeshifting
Dimension Travel
Peggy Sue Time Travel
Fealty/Devotion

For this fandom, you can see my other exchange letters, the fandom's tag on this journal, or my Everything page on the app for old prompts.

List of Fandoms (... I'm probably leaving something out):
7 Seeds
A Matter of Profit - Hilari Bell
Age of Apocalypse
Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Bleach
Books of the Raksura
Casey Jones the Union Scab - Joe Hill (Song)
Cat-Eye Willie Claims His Lover
Chronicles of the Kencyrath
Crossover Fandom (Star Wars Sequel Trilogy x Star Wars Legends, Star Trek: DS9 x X-Men Comics, Chronicles of the Kencyrath x War Gods, X-Men Comics x Age of Apocalypse, Dark Crystal comics x Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), Transformers Generation One x Transformers Shattered Glass
마왕의 고백 | The Dark Lord's Confession (Webcomic)
Dreaming of Sunshine
Glorantha (sometimes as RuneQuest)
Heartstrikers Series - Rachel Aaron
Heer Halewijn (Traditional Ballad)
Homestuck (only the Eldritchfuck Roseworld AU from FFA)
John Barleycorn
King of Dragon Pass
Liavek
Long John Moore (Traditional Song)
Marvel Comics/Marvel 616 (X-Men, always)
Mesopotamian Mythology
Monstress
묘령의 황자 | Mystic Prince (Webcomic)
Naruto
New Mutants (Comics)
Original Work (mostly femdommy het, some gen with mostly similar power dynamics)
Otoyomegatari | The Bride's Stories
Planet of the Dragons - Richard Brightfield
Revolutionary Princess Eve (Webcomic)
SCP Foundation
Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind
SCP Foundation
Star Trek: Crossroad - Barbara Hambly
Star Trek: Rihannsu
Star Trek: The Entropy Effect - Vonda McIntyre
Star Trek: Various Authors
Star Wars Legends: Republic (Comics)
Star Wars: All Media Types
The Dark Crystal tie-in comics
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
The Sun Sword - Michelle West
Transformers (Skybound 2023)
Vespertine Series - Margaret Rogerson
The Vicars of Lower Squashby - Jared Pechacek
Vampire: The Masquerade
Warhammer (also as FFA Warhammer AUs )
X-Men (Comicsverse) (sometimes as Marvel 616/Marvel Comics)
Yona of the Dawn

Any Fandom I've Created For Before
Ships:
1: Worldbuilding (AFICFB)
1: Any Character I’ve Created For Before (AFICFB)
Any / Relationship I’ve Created For Before (AFICFB)
Any & Relationship I’ve Created For Before (AFICFB)

Medium: Fic

Tags:
Hurt/Comfort
Antiques and Relics
Arranged Marriage
Bets & Wagers
Blood
body of water
Bodysharing
celestial
Dimension Travel
Dragons
Enemies to Lovers
Exhaustion
Experimental
Fealty/Devotion
Forehead Touching
Found Family
Grief/Mourning
hair petting
Hand/Wrist Kisses
Historical Fashion
Huddling For Warmth
Hurt/Comfort
Interactions with Gods
Katabasis
Loyalty
Medical Exam
Memories
Mental Link
Mirrors
Peggy Sue Time Travel
Politics
Polyamory
POV Outsider
rococo
Role Reversal
Scar Kissing
Second marriage
Shapeshifting
Sharing Clothes
Teaching/Mentorship
Time Travel Fix-It
Unexpected Mercy
Wings

List of Fandoms (complete going by AO3 posting; see [archiveofourown.org profile] sheliak for characters/ships):
A Matter of Profit - Hilari Bell
Aladdin (Cartoon 1994)
Amalgam Comics
Astronomy (Anthropomorphic)
Avatar: The Last Airbender (Cartoon 2005)
Battleship Exchange
Bleach (Anime & Manga)
Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells
Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Elemental Logic - Laurie J. Marks
Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Homestuck
Mrs. Pollifax - Dorothy Gilman
Naruto (Anime & Manga)
New Mutants (Marvel Comics)
Original Work
Otoyomegatari | The Bride's Stories
Oz - L. Frank Baum
RuneQuest (Roleplaying Game)
SCP Foundation
Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem (Visual Novel)
Six Ages (Video Games)
Star Trek - Various Authors
Star Wars - All Media Types
Star Wars Legends: Republic (Comics)
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
The Heartstrikers Series - Rachel Aaron
Warhammer 40.000
Watersong - Mary Caraker
X-Men (Comicverse)
Yuri's Palace (Webcomic)
天使のたまご | Tenshi no Tamago | Angel's Egg (Anime)

Crossover Fandom (Transformers x Transformers Shattered Glass)
Any Shattered Glass Decepticon(s) (Transformers Shattered Glass) & Optimus Prime (Transformers G1)
Any Shattered Glass Decepticons (Transformers Shattered Glass) & Ratchet (Transformers G1)
Combaticons (Transformers G1) & Megatron (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Combaticons (Transformers Shattered Glass) & First Aid (Transformers G1)
Combaticons (Transformers Shattered Glass) & Protectobots (Transformers G1)
Elita One (Transformers G1) & Shockwave (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Jazz (Transformers G1) & Soundwave (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Jazz (Transformers G1)/Soundwave (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Optimus Prime (Transformers G1) & Starscream (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Optimus Prime (Transformers IDW) & Shockwave (Transformers IDW Shattered Glass)
Optimus Prime (Transformers IDW)/Shockwave (Transformers IDW Shattered Glass)
Ratchet (Transformers G1) & Soundwave (Transformers Shattered Glass)
Hook (Transformers Shattered Glass) & Ratchet (Transformers G1)

Medium: Fic

Tags;
a brief respite
abduction/kidnapping
Alternate Universe
Angst
at gunpoint
Bathing/Washing
beaten up
Carrying
Catching Collapsing Character
Collars
Crying
Dimension Travel
Exhaustion
Facial Scars
Forced Marriage
Forced Bonding
Gentle touches
Getting to Know Each Other
Helping Character Walk
Hiding Illness/Injury
Hospitalization
Huddling For Warmth
Hurt/Comfort
Identity Reveal
Kindness
Loyalty
Manhandling
Marriage Hunt/Chase
Memories
memory sharing
Mind Control
Non-Consensual Body Modification
Non-Human Genitalia
non consensual drug use
On the Run
Poison
Portals
POV Outsider
Power Dynamics
Pre-Relationship
Promises
Protectiveness
Reluctantly Accepting Comfort
Rescue
respect
Responsibility
Restraints
Reunions
Robots
Role Reversal
Running Away
Scar Kissing
Scars
Secret Identity
Sentient Places
Shapeshifting
Shock/punishment collar
Soulbonds
Stabbing
Stocks (or pillories)
Teamwork
Temporary Character Death
Tenderness
Touch-Starved
trapped together
Trust
Unexpected Mercy
Vulnerability
worsening illness
Wound Tending

Fandom notes: I don’t have strong feelings about seeker trine fanon, empurata outside of IDW (in IDW I like the angst/whump of it) or Soundwave’s exact relationship to his casssettes. Follow your spark.

I am 100% okay with continuity soup for G1, and I like both canon Shattered Glass universes but also tend to like continuity soup Shattered-Glass-As-Generic-Multiverse.

However, for the ships where I specified IDW Optimus and SG IDW Shockwave, I do strongly want IDW—their histories there are a big part of why I want those characters to interact!

Prompts, general:
- The SG Autobots are terrifying, so I’d be very into the SG Decepticons being terrified of the nice Autobots when they meet them!
- I love the id factor of having to rescue the sweet mirrorverse good guy versions of your enemies from the horrifying mirrorverse versions of your friends.
- Also the idea of having to impersonate your evil self (with advice from your not-evil not-enemy kinda-prisoner, who has a much better idea of how your evil self acts)!
- I'm up for super tropey over the top scenarios—fell into the AU, got mistaken for your evil self and received their war prize? Find out that your friends are evil here because you see them torturing your enemy and now you have to save them? That kind of thing.
- It's really fun when Decepticons are scared of the medics to me, and that'd make extra sense if they're really scared of their evil counterparts.
- I'd be into as much whump as you like here as long as it's followed by rescue and/or h/c!

Prompts, Megs + Combaticons
- Okay, how would the whole “reprogrammed to be loyal to G1 Megatron” thing work with encountering an AU version of Megatron?
- I'm super into the slave coding mind control trope, both as whump with an evil "master" and as a justification for slavefic h/c tropes with a good guy in charge.
- I’m certain SG Megatron would be horrified by this situation… and wouldn’t that be surreal for the Combaticons?
- (And I am also amused by the idea of the professional soldier Combaticons meeting the Fun Pub SG Decepticons & realizing that this is a resistance movement run by academics. How are they not dead! … Wait, why do they object to the idea of them dying?)

Prompts, IDW1 Optimus + IDWSG Shockwave
- So both IDWSG and IDW Shockwave suffered empurata and shadowplay, but the shadowplay had opposite effects—SG Shockwave is still nice, just even more emotional. Knowing what he could’ve become if it had worked as intended would be traumatic! Horrifying! (… Boggling, given the claim to logic and then the black hole thing!)
- For Optimus: this is the friend and mentor he couldn’t save, who faced a horrible fate for trying to work within a broken system and who then turned into a terrifying enemy. And here he is, having suffered something similar but come through it far more like the person he used to like/admire/love…
- And meanwhile from Shockwave’s point of view: this is the ex-friend who betrayed him and did that to him! The enemy he’s been fighting against ever since! (And sure this Optimus has his flaws but he’d be horrified at his SG self.)
- And both of them could expect the worst from a version of their enemy/friend who has good reason to hate them.


Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names
Art references (only for the characters I nominated):
Daphne Clear
Black Tarn (homid/human) and Black Tarn (lupus/wolf)
Elton Dey (homid) and Elton (crinos/hybrid war-form)
Ashley Nin (homid) and Nin (hispo/mostly-wolf hybrid form)
Melodie Palys (homid) and Melodie (crinos)
Podge (Patrick Hodge) (homid) and Podge (glasbro/mostly-human hybrid form)


Icon — Runaway to the Stars

Jun. 30th, 2025 09:39 pm
sheliak: Handwoven tapestry of the planet Jupiter. (Default)
[personal profile] sheliak
Tail end of the month, didn't icon, busy with Battleship signup, so: have a single icon of Talita from RTTS being relatable. (Text could use some work, ah well.)

Goal Checking

Jun. 30th, 2025 08:34 pm
zhelana: (Trek - doctors)
[personal profile] zhelana
Finished This Month

Finish reading 3 books with a Jewish protagonist


Progress This Month

Exercise every day in 2025
Weight lift every day of 2025
Brush teeth 360 times in 2025
Shower weekly 2025
Go to fighter practice 12 times in 2025
Art Every Day 2025
Paint 12 times in 2025
Write in Spanish every day of 2025
Write in Russian every week of 2025
Finish my memoirs
Write 300k words in 2025
Write weekly 2025
Work through a book of writing exercises
Read 2 pages of Spanish every day 2025
Read 12 new fiction titles 2025
Clean 2 minutes per weekday 2025
Clean 10 minutes per week 2025
Cook 12 times 2025
Watch a video in Spanish every week 2025
Watch a video in Russian every week 2025
Read 3 science textbooks
Read 3 social science textbooks
Read 3 history textbooks
Work through 3 math textbooks
Read 12 new nonfiction titles 2025

Watch out, it's getting worse

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:13 pm
flwyd: melting clock detail from The Persistence of Memory (melting clock)
[personal profile] flwyd
Last year I noticed that almost all the velcro hooks on my Timex Expedition watch band had been torn out. This wasn't entirely surprising; I've been taking the watch off every night and putting it on every morning for more than a decade. At one point I thought the battery had died, so I unscrewed the back to find out what coin cell number it had; when I reassembled it I discovered that merely repositioning the battery gave it several years more life.

I checked the Timex website, which has product listings for dozens of straps, almost all of which were marked as unavailable. I entered my email to be notified when the strap was back in stock, but six months later the velcro had become dangerously un-clingy and still no luck, so I bought a new watch of the same model. I think it cost $50, and I'm pretty sure I paid about $20 for the original in the early 2010s, so there's an inflation datum for you.

The new watch works the same, except I noticed the Indiglo feature wasn't very helpful: it illuminated the LCD, but just as a big glowing rectangle: no digits were visible. Still, a functional watch in daytime or dusk.

Earlier this month I attended a pagan event in the California redwoods. Wanting to check the time while singing songs around the campfire, I hit the Indiglo button on my year-old watch, but this time it erased most of the LCD segments on the face, leaving behind something resembling an inverted L|. Fortunately, I kept the non-clingy watch in my ham radio bag, with time set to UTC. I was able to switch watches for the remainder of the trip, careful to ensure that disconnecting velcro didn't come off my arm entirely.

Back at home, I unscrewed the back of the new watch. I removed the battery, which has a significantly more complicated placement than the previous decade's model. It also requires shorting the battery to the rest of the watch, which I've yet to successfully do, so I've now got a non-functional watch. But fortunately, this meant I had a new watchband I could put on my perfectly-functional old-watch. Still waiting for an email on Timex about the ability to do this the easy way…

Profile

2017revival: Animated icon advising that DW is "not just for queer|fannish|geeky|slash-writing|LJ-hating|godless so-and-sos anymore!" (Default)
A 2017 Revival

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