ds_flashfiction | Member Posts

Ever since Marjorie Taylor Greene "informed" us that California wildfires were being caused by "Jewish Space Lasers" I have been obsessed with making a mockery of her. (Hey, I'm Jewish, and if I had control of some space lasers I would NOT be using them to set California on fire.)

Now I see that she is resigning from Congress after The Orange One called her "wacky"...which is the first time I've ever agreed with something he said.

At this juncture I would like to show what I have created with my Refrigerator Magnet "What Will Marjorie Taylor Green Say Next" Conspiracy Kit.

Marjorie Taylor Greene refrigerator magnet

Bonus Image:

Current Mood: mocking
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

ride_4ever

Note: if you don't get sound with this video, check for doing "unmute" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

This link goes to Facebook: What Would the Founding Fathers Say about Trump

Current Mood: facepalm
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

mific

For those of you who like my garden photos, I did a post to

common_nature featuring self-seeded plants in my garden that I enjoy. It's here.

sage

Totally forgot to post yesterday, oops?

books
Cinder House by Freya Marske. This book was all over the place, like it didn't know what it wanted to be, and that undermined a really interesting take on Cinderella.

The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club #4) by Richard Osman. Really satisfying.

yarning
It's Secret Santa season, so I've been extremely busy shipping orders, doing commissions (carrots!), and making more kickbunnies and such for my shop. I also figured out how to offer Made to Order items, so I started with the calico cat stitch scarf. No takers yet, but it's good to be clear on the process. I went to yarn group Sunday and we had record-breaking turnout, yay! I've also made progress on Rockstar Lestat, though I've also had several setbacks, drat it all, including the yarn I picked for the gold pants not being at all gold enough. I did find a no-id skein that will work instead, but I wish I had a clue what brand it is, much less the colorway. And I decided on an axolotl for niece's xmas, which I've just now finished. Also, after an embarrassingly long search, I found my ziploc of embroidery floss specific to doll making. And the scarf on the left in the icon sold yesterday, yay!

( healthcrap )

I hope you're all having a lovely week! I may take a small nap. <333

seleneheart

1. What have you recently finished reading?
The City & The City by China Miéville, recommended by

cruisedirector. An interesting and twisty read, that I felt ultimately fell short because it was trying to do much.

2. What are you currently reading?

Empire of Grass by Tad Williams. Still reading

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. A hardback from the library that is in high demand so I'm not allowed to renew it. I'm struggling with this, and I've been tempted to DNF it several times, but I'm soldiering on.

3. What will you be reading next?
I'm going to finish the Lily Adler mysteries.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Death Cab for Cutie - Doors Unlocked and Open

ride_4ever

Voted first place by the FWF participants for best use of prompt.

My FWF First Place Winner - Category: "Best Use of Prompt" - Shocktober Edition

Title: Things Counter, Original, Spare, Strange
Fandoms: due South, Wristcutters
Rating: Mature
Category: Gen, M/M
Pairing: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Robert "Bob" Fraser, Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski, mention of Uncle Tiberius Fraser, mention of Diefenbaker (the half-wolf, not the former Canadian Prime Minister), mention of Nanuk (from Wristcutters), mention of Raife Kneller (from Wristcutters)
Word count: 400 (quadruple drabble)

Summary: Sergeant Robert Fraser -- dead Robert Fraser -- knows first-hand that All Hallow’s Eve is when The Veil between the living and the dead is at its most thin...but he doesn't know anything about Halloween-themed sex toys until Ray Kowalski has something to say about it.

Author's Notes: Written for the recurring Firewhiskey Fic Challenge, a 48-hour period during which fanworks creators drink "adult beverages" or "do the 420" and create their fanworks "under the influence" with no editing allowed. Participants then view all the fanworks and vote on them in the categories of Most Coherent Entry, Least Coherent Entry, Funniest Entry, Favorite Entry, Best Use of Prompt, and Best Smut.

Fic on AO3.

Current Mood: awarded
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

mific

Since I last posted, my new phone sat there accusingly while I tried to ignore it. Then a friend said they'd have no idea and would need to take it to a shop to get it done, and I remembered I could get tech support!

Today a guy from GeeksOnWheels came by and struggled to get my wifi sorted so Apple would stop putting up warnings about "weak security". It took him four hours, and across much of that time I had no wifi to one or more of my devices (I'd planned ahead and downloaded fanfic). Eventually he decided my router was faulty, so I bought a new one from him and then it was resolved quickly (not a rip-off, he was very genuine). The call-out & router cost me almost as much as the new phone but it's done now and the phone (and my other devices) are working. Painless transfer of my data and apps, too. I'll need to update my iPad as well at some later point, but that should be manageable now the tricky stuff is sorted. So much for "user friendly" technology!

Got myself a Thai curry and gadogado via DoorDash as consolation for an angsty day, and now for an audiobook and arting session. Onwards!

verushka70

Regina Keim created and posted a new due South word search over in the private Fraser/Kowalski Facebook group.

You can access it here, if you can't see the group's posts because you're not a member.

verushka70

FYI, over the past few days I have had someone else requesting to change my AO3 password 3 times.

I don't know if this is happening to anyone else, but... I just thought I'd warn people.

I think it is a person rather than a bot, because it seems a bot would be more likely to just keep sending and sending requests (meaning, more than 3 in 5 days).

But you never know. If it is a bot, it could just be going down a long list of hundreds or thousands of usernames and coming back around to mine after going through the list.

Be careful out there!

luzula

I read some books!

What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corinna (2021)
About perimenopause and menopause. Well, I guess I learned things? It did all feel like a huge and intimidating list of possible symptoms to get, and I don't know yet how it'll shake out for me. But I guess one advantage of knowing what's possible is that it will help me connect the dots when/if various things do happen.

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by K J Charles (2023)
Hmm, hm. Meh. I thought I'd try something that's supposed to be self-indulgent, and this was certainly page-turney enough, but did not really zing for me. I can't tell if it's just that my reading is still far from my previous baseline, or whether this would not have been my favorite Charles in any case. Somehow I could not keep from comparing this to others of her books and seeing commonalities in the types of characters and relationships she often writes, and thus not being entirely able to see the characters as people of their own.

Not a book, but I thought the blog series Life, Work, Death, and the Peasant by the historian Bret Deveraux was interesting. It models the life and labor of pre-modern peasants, using sources from ancient Rome and medieval Europe. And I do mean modeling, trying to estimate such things as the number of pregnancies a woman would have on average, and the number of hours worked on various tasks. It really hammers home that while yes, I do live on a farm now, and I do over time want to try to produce more of the food we eat, there is so much labor pre-modern peasants did that I don't have to do. The amount of time women spent on textile production (mostly spinning) is unbelievable. And I didn't know the medieval spinning wheel is about three times more productive than the spindle of antiquity! Carrying water (back-breaking work!), washing by hand, etc. Obviously I knew people did these things by hand, but it's so interesting seeing estimates of the time it took.

I do think modern civilization is hugely wasteful of energy and materials, but can we not find some appropriate level of energy use and technology? Pumping water for household use, and spinning thread with machines: yes, great use of energy and technology. \o/ Mining bitcoins: nope, terrible use of energy and technology. /o\

china_shop

read through story A and return to beta
write story B from the zero draft I made yesterday ✅
catch up on comments ✅
catch up on email ✅
political submission! *stabs things* ✅
read ✅ (briefly)
Yuletide canon review
play with coloured pencils ✅
change vacuum cleaner bag ✅
make/eat dinner ✅
early night ✅

I might manage four of those? The last two are non-negotiable.

ETA: Some of those check marks are from over the weekend. :-)

china_shop

Pandemic life
My mother-out-law's birthday dinner on Sunday was my first meal inside in a crowded restaurant in a long time.

Previous poll review
In the "Time is" poll, 48.9% of respondents answered "relentless", and 31.9% said "elusive". In ticky-boxes, "blue-haired punk red pandas" and "colouring in" tied for second place (51.1%) after hugs (72.3%).

Reading
Finally finished Five Red Herrings. It was fine -- I mean, it kept me reading till the end. I missed Bunter being more active, though. Now I'm a quarter of the way into Have His Carcase.

In audio, I'm still listening to Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins, and I've also started Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, read by Morag Sims and Will Watt, which is fun so far, though I'm slightly perplexed by the choice to have Alice's dialogue be American but her inner narration to be British. Also, I was hoping Will Watt would get more to do; I've really enjoyed some of his other performances.

Still dipping back into Take Off Your Pants! by Libbie Hawker. And I forgot to mention last week that I tore through Alison Bechdel's Spent! a while ago, before returning it to the library at the last minute.

Kdramas
Typhoon Family is getting a bit "this script was written in crayon", but I'm engaged and I like the main characters. I miscounted the Mystic Pop-Up Bar episodes; we finished yesterday. It was good but didn't quite hit me in the feels. (I'm a bit neutral on Hwang Jung-eum.)

Other TV
Nobody Wants This -- season 2 is less of the cross-cultural stuff and more "addressing psychological quirks", which isn't as interesting to me. Oh well.

Half of the latest season of Slow Horses -- the episodes always feel so short! I guess this is what successful pacing is like. A bit grimmer than earlier seasons, but I'm enjoying Ho a lot. (It helps to have read the book, I think.) We're finishing that tonight.

All of You (Apple+) -- a movie starring Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots, which maxes out on the "pining while fucking" concept. Great chemistry and Big Feels.

Spoilers.

Contains infidelity and an unhappy ending.

Rewatched some Bluey, plus a couple of episodes of Krapopolis season 3. :-)

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Letters from an American, Tech Won't Save Us, and Ex Urbe Ad Astra.

Writing/making things
I came up with a great title for a fic I'm working on and am now 20% more motivated to finish it up and post it. Other than that, I feel like I'm still juggling a bunch of things, but my general intention is to finish this one, bash out a flashfic for the FISH challenge on

fan_flashworks, and then dig into my Yuletide assignment, for which I've been doing canon review.

Note to self: Don't forget about Guardian Bingo!

I bought a pack of coloured pencils yesterday and have been watching a few Youtube "technique" videos and practising blending. I still can't actually draw, but hey.

Life/health/mental state things
Down Under writers' hour is currently at 10am New Zealand time (8am Melbourne time). In winter, when it's at 8am here, writers' hour is the first thing I do in the day; that means I get started early, spend most of the morning at my keyboard, and sometimes spud in for the afternoon too. In the transitions periods (when only one half of the globe has switched into or out of daylight savings), it's at 9am here, and I generally try to get the dishes done beforehand. This sets the tone for the day -- I do more chores overall, more offline stuff. Now writers' hour is at 10am: I get up and exercise, then sit down mid-morning to write. By the time I'm done, it's 11am, and if I have lunch plans, I have to get my skates on pretty quickly. And because I've primed myself to exercise, I've been going for walks more in the afternoon and generally being more active. Which is great, but... *grabbyhands at keyboard* tl;dr, I am controlled by scheduling.

Good things
Coloured pencils, and colour generally. Guardian and the Slo-Mo Rewatch. Sleep. Podcasts. Kdramas. Biking, TV-watching dates, walking. Chocolate. You all, hi!!

Note: Poll results are private; please vote freely.

Poll #33831 Making friends with chatbots

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 56

In the last seven days, I've used AI

for work
5 (8.9%)

for fun / personal reasons
0 (0.0%)

for interacting with organisations
0 (0.0%)

against my will
14 (25.0%)

not at all, that I'm aware of
37 (66.1%)

other
1 (1.8%)

ticky-box full of fandom-adjacent profic
15 (26.8%)

ticky-box full of fish fish fish fish fish
19 (33.9%)

ticky-box full of vague groaning noises
19 (33.9%)

ticky-box full of alpine octopuses practising their yodelling
23 (41.1%)

ticky-box full of hugs!
38 (67.9%)

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Diane Duane, Dark Mirror: Reviewed here.

Avengers Disassembled: Reread this for 616 Book Club; giving myself credit because otherwise I will not make my Goodreads goal.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( 1776 #1, Fantastic Four #5, Iron and Frost #2, New Avengers #6, Ultimate Black Panther #22, Ultimate Wolverine #11 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure yet.

Current Mood: hungry

green

I can't keep saying 'I miss the COMMUNITY of fandom' and then not do anything to contribute to/foster said community.

I'm writing, though. Lots of writing. I've been working on this one fic for about 6-7 months now. Just hit 50k on it. I'm hoping the first draft is almost done. And then I will have lots and lots of editing. But I have faith in this story. I think it's going to be good.

Two goats from across the street came to visit me today while I was taking out the garbage. I love goats! But I did not know these goats, so that made me wary. Another neighbor came along and tempted them back home with Cheez-Its.

Right now there is a physical therapist here in my home with my mother. Mom needs help. She's not using the walker she got, but then again there aren't many places she wants to go where she can use it. She wants to be outside, but the yard is bumpy and the wheels on the walker/rollator can't handle the terrain.

We've also got a companion from an agency who comes in twice a month who can take mom to places or pick up meds or vacuum and dust the house. It takes a lot of pressure off me, but it's only one day every other week. (So far)

Ummmm not much else going on. Meg is doing well. I'm hanging in there. We're alive.

Current Mood: tired

verushka70

According to this CBC article from October 30, this past summer, Canada tourism hit an all time high!

Well of course it did! Who would want to come to the US right now?? The US is a flaming dumpster fire right now and - as far as I can tell - will continue to be until the current clown and all his flying monkeys get kicked out in 2028. I wish I could live in Canada for the next 3 years, myself.

ETA: Oh, CBC also reports that US tourism is projected to be DOWN $5.7 billion by end of 2025. Are we great again yet? No. No we are not.

verushka70

There is a great interview with Hugh Dillon of Headstones at the V13 site. He talks a lot about how he got started in music by going to London UK to escape some trouble he was in, in Kingston, ONT - squatting in hotels, the early punk scene that inspired him, honing his singing and songwriting by busking.

I have the new album Burn All The Ships and it is great.

You can read or listen to the interview at the V13 article.

Headstones Burn All The Ships album cover

Headstones Burn All The Ships album cover

verushka70

November 9 was Ramona Milano's birthday!

She teaches at her own acting studio, and she's directed, too. See her IMDb.com page.

sineala

Today's cheap indie video game rec, found via a review at Ars Technica, is Skigill, which costs $5, currently $3.50 as a launch discount, and it is definitely at least as much fun as, say, a fancy caffeinated beverage of your choice, although admittedly it's less tasty.

It is yet another Vampire Survivors-esque "bullet heaven" roguelite auto-shooter -- you know, the kind where you dodge the enemies and the game does the aiming and firing for you. You know the kind of game I mean. The gimmick of Skigill here is that it is for people who really, really love RPG skill trees. You are actually running around on a giant skill tree, and as you kill enemies and collect XP, you can stand on any node of the skill tree (that is linked to one you have previously unlocked) and it will put your points in that skill, unlock new weapons, etc. So you are leveling up and building your character based on where you are running around.

There is of course also a second skill tree that you can access between runs and use to get yourself permanent stat increases. You know how this genre works.

It's in Early Access but there is enough content in here that it's pretty playable. The Mac port insists it is 32-bit and will not work, but this is lies; it works just fine on my M1 Air.

The game has extremely retro yellow-on-black pixel graphics and a chiptune soundtrack. The one downside is that the dev is committed to having no tutorial and in fact no in-game text whatsoever, which means I have absolutely no idea what most of these little symbols are or what they do or what my character is or how come when I stand on a skill node it doesn't unlock even though it looks like I have enough XP, which means I probably don't understand what the numbers in the game represent. But I will never know what I am doing wrong, because the game will never tell me.

Still, it's fun, if you like this genre of game. And skill trees.

Current Mood: dorky

sineala

Reposting book reviews from Goodreads because why not? This one is obviously a reread!

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I haven't felt like reading basically anything at all in a long time, and definitely not novel-length fiction. But lately I have started to feel like my brain can hack it, and then I spent a while thinking I just wanted to read something I already loved, and then I stared guiltily at my TBR pile, and then I thought, fuck it, I'm just gonna read Dark Mirror again. Probably haven't read this in, like, fifteen years. So here I am.

( Dark Mirror )