skygiants: Jane Eyre from Paula Rego's illustrations, facing out into darkness (more than courage)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-06-04 08:47 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

Over Memorial Day weekend [personal profile] genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by [personal profile] genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that [personal profile] coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
philomytha ([personal profile] philomytha) wrote2025-06-03 05:38 pm

travel-related books and war fiction

The Royal Navy: a history from 1900, Duncan Redford and Philip Grove
I read this in preparation for our Portsmouth trip, because I know nothing about naval history other than what can be gleaned from watching Hornblower and reading Alistair Maclean. This was a general overview of the 20th century, one book from a twelve-volume history of the Navy, very dense, but surprisingly readable for all that. I never lost interest even when deep in discussion of relations with the navy's one true enemy: Whitehall. Or the other great enemies, Churchill, and the RAF. It was quite clear that the French, Germans and so forth are all incidental to these long-lasting and deep emnities. To be fair, I'll give them Churchill, especially after Gallipoli.

As well as the details of battles and events and so forth, the book somewhat inadvertently told me a lot about the navy's biases and beliefs about itself: the Senior Service, it's known as, and they very much identify with that name. So much outrage at the RAF wanting to be in charge of airplanes, and getting funding that should really all go to the navy because the navy is the true defender of the realm. Which is not entirely false: anyone who wants to get here has to cross the sea, and anyone who wants to get here in large numbers has to cross the sea in boats, and stopping them is very much the navy's reason for existence. And they did it once, spectacularly, defeating the French invasion fleet at Trafalgar, with their great heroic admiral organising the battle brilliantly and dying at the moment of victory, and wow have they spent the next two centuries obsessed by this, clinging to it as a reason for their existence, and trying to find an opportunity to do it again to gain equal glory a second time around. And it was very clear that especially in WW1, this warped their thinking and their planning, which is why their attempt for a repeat at Jutland was, at best, a stalemate, and very far from the glorious triumph they thought was their due - but didn't have the training, strategy or skills to make happen, owing to being heavily mired in the past.

They did learn this lesson by WW2, where they did not attempt to replay Trafalgar, and instead they do their best to claim the triumph of the dog that didn't bark: the argument runs that the real reason the Nazis didn't invade is nothing to do with the RAF's Battle of Britain, but because the Germans didn't want to face the Royal Navy - and it's a fairly strong argument. But their main work in WW2 was grinding, difficult and focused on the economics of war rather than the drama, protecting shipping from U-boats across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean so that food and the materiel of war could reach the UK at all. And they got pretty good at this after a while, due to throwing lots of effort at the technical and strategic ideas involved. Which was mostly convoy work. There's a whole rather dismaying thing about convoys in both wars: the navy hates convoy work because you sit around and wait to be attacked and it's not dashing and heroic and dramatic at all and you just go very slowly - for a warship - back and forth like a bus driver shepherding a lot of fractious cargo ships until someone attacks you. In WW1 the RN really didn't want to do it even though it was very clear that convoys work amazingly well at protecting merchant shipping compared to letting them go on their own and the navy just wandering around looking for trouble, and it took them a long time to agree to do it. In WW2 they did go straight to convoys, though they had an equally hard time persuading the Americans that they also needed to use convoys once they joined the war; there seems to have been a frustrating period after the US joined in when the RN would escort ships up to American waters and then leave them, and since the Americans didn't convoy them the rest of the way, the U-boats immediately sunk hundreds of merchant ships that had been safely convoyed across the rest of the Atlantic; eventually the US navy agreed to convoy the ships, though it wasn't clear whether they ever agreed to black out coastal settlements (this is important because otherwise the silhouettes of ships are clearly visible against the coastal lights). Anyway, there was that and then the business of getting everyone back into Europe for D-Day and onwards, but again, the navy are obviously a little frustrated that this was clearly the army's moment of glory rather than theirs.

From 1945 onwards, the navy's big enemy has been Whitehall, trying to persuade the government to disgorge enough money to build ships and crew them even though there is nobody particular they're intending to fight, and Redford and Grove make a lot of arguments that you can tell have been made in government offices about how if you want to do anything military anywhere what you need are ships, not airplanes or armies, and so please give the navy more money. Watching the story slowly approach to discussions I hear on the news now, about the point of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, was interesting: naturally the navy is always on the side of more ships and more money. An interesting read all around. The funniest bits were where the author interrupts his usual fairly dry style to explain that in this particular operation, everything the navy did was perfect but unfortunately the army/the RAF/Churchill/Whitehall/the Americans/someone else who was definitely not the navy fucked up their part of it so the operation wasn't a success. One of those I'll grant them, but apparently every time an operation involving the navy went wrong it was someone else's fault!


And I also reread The Cruel Sea, which remains THE book for the Battle of the Atlantic and also for adorable levels of shippiness between the captain and first officer of the ship. Every bit as good on a reread, and it was great fun to see models of the Flower class corvettes in the Navy museum after that.


Berlin: Imagine a City, Rory Maclean
I picked this up thinking it was an ordinary history book. It really wasn't, but once I got used to what it was, I enjoyed it a lot. It's a biography of Berlin as told through the fictionalised life stories of a couple of dozen Berliners over time. Unsurprisingly, it's very 20th-century heavy: the book is 400 pages and we get into the 1900s a little past page 100. The individuals who make up the book are mostly real people, though a couple are fictional or semi-fictional (ie people for whom history has left a name and not much else, or people invented as a stand-in to fill a particular category Maclean wants to explore).

The author's presence is quite strong in this book, there are parts that are fictionalised versions of his own Berlin experiences over the years, and the authorial voice and choices and decisions are all very prominent in the book - though oddly there were times when it felt like he was doing himself down. He includes Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie because in various capacities he worked with both of them and was evidently utterly starstruck by both, especially Bowie, and I was not so interested in his hero-worship, if that makes sense; if I'd wanted to find out about David Bowie I'd be somewhere else, I was here wanting this author's voice. His account of Kathe Kollewitz's life was particularly poignant and I am now looking forward very much to seeing her statues in Berlin - though I was moved to tears dozens of times in reading the book, the history of Berlin is the history of horror upon horror and people making their lives in the midst of that. The early chapters in particular did bring home to me just how war-ravaged central Europe was in relatively recent history, compared to the UK; I hadn't actually registered that Napoleon had occupied Berlin, and I also learned a lot about the Prussian kings and Frederick the Great. Absolutely a book to make me even more excited about our upcoming trip.


Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, by Stephanie Graves
The cover of this depicts a young woman, pigeons, a Lancaster and a Spitfire: there was no chance I wouldn't pick it up. It was a frustrating book, alternating between very good bits and rather weak bits and with a heroine whose essential personality was much less defined than any of the other characters'. But I enjoyed reading it anyway, because it had a WW2 setting, spies, a murder mystery and pigeons, so it was not hard to persuade me to like it. Our heroine runs a prize-winning pigeon loft and is hopeful that the National Pigeon Service is going to show up any day now to recruit their pigeons for war work. But instead her pigeons are recruited by the SOE who are training at a nearby stately home. spoilers for the plot )


In Love and War, Liz Trenow
A sweet read about three women heading to Ypres in 1919 to find the graves of their loved ones. This was also a bit on the sentimental and predictable side, but fairly well-researched and did a decent job evoking the return to the battlefields and the start of battlefield tourism. The author clearly did her homework about Toc H - complete with an extended cameo from Rev Tubby Clayton - and also about some of the process of identifying graves. And I liked all the main characters and the way their experiences of travel to the battlefields changes them. Workmanlike and well done.
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podklb ([personal profile] klb) wrote in [community profile] pod_together2025-06-02 07:50 pm

2025 Sign-Ups

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There are 2 kinds of sign-ups.

For those looking to be matched up into a partnership or group, go to our Match Maker Signups Airtable form.

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All sign-ups close Saturday, June 14th.
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podklb ([personal profile] klb) wrote in [community profile] pod_together2025-06-02 04:12 pm
Entry tags:

Pod-Together 2025 Rules

Welcome to [community profile] pod_together, a challenge where writers and podficcers create together—the writer creating text specifically intended for audio, and the podficcer creating the audio.

While we encourage participants to read the FAQ, here are the basic rules you need to know going in:

Basic Rules )

Timeline

Monday June 2nd Sign-ups open.
Saturday June 14th Sign-ups close.
Sunday June 15th Assignments go out to everybody from Match Maker Sign-ups.
Monday June 16th through Friday June 20th Icebreaker week.
Sunday July 6th Check-in #1.
Sunday July 20th Check-in #2.
Wednesday July 23rd Early writing submission date.
Sunday July 27th All writing due.
Sunday August 10th Check-in #3; text must be posted to AO3 collection.
Wednesday August 20th Early podfic submission date.
Sunday August 24th All podfic due.
Thursday August 28th Reveals start.
Saturday September 6th Reveals end, Party Favors due.
Sunday September 7th Party Favors revealed.
Saturday September 13th through Sunday September 14th Weekend Jamfest listening and commenting event.

Notable changes from previous years of this challenge )
petra: CGI Obi-Wan Kenobi with his face smudged with dirt, wearing beige, visible from the chest up. A Clone Trooper is visible over one shoulder. (Obi-Wan - Clones ftw)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-06-01 09:35 pm

Dance in the oldest boots I own - Star Wars story, Winter Soldier AU

Dance in the oldest boots I own (5106 words) by Petra
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Hondo Ohnaka
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Hondo Ohnaka, Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Winter Soldier AU, Inspired by Fanart, Not a Superhero AU
Summary:

Hondo finds Obi-Wan frozen in carbonite and decides that he is worth more than the bounty on his head.

Obi-Wan is discomfited to learn what has been happening in the galaxy since he's been out of commission, but not nearly as discomfited as he is by finding out what his erstwhile padawan has been doing.

Two chapters of a Winter Soldier AU.

lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-05-31 09:14 pm
Entry tags:

Tian Guan Ci Fu [Heaven Official's Blessing], V. 1 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, translators Suika & Pengie



Funnily enough, the thing that gets me to actually read a MXTX novel is to assess getting it as a birthday present for someone who would give me no info on their current reading tastes and said they were willing to get anything, so based on some of their previous tastes, I considered a MXTX book and figured TGCF would be the most likely book of interest. So out from the library I got the first volume out to read it and assess it.

And it's funny and it's good, so I keep reading to see if the volume ends on a cliffhanger or not, and then I get to the Banyue arc. And I had been told the Banyue arc was racist but I was so not prepared for how racist it is. Right off the bat, it's "hello, nice to meet you, I'm a racist caricature" and then it *keeps getting worse*. So I plan to get the other volumes out from the library and read them myself, because this is enjoyable, but I'm unsure of the birthday present situation. I may go with something else.

yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
yhlee ([personal profile] yhlee) wrote2025-05-31 03:11 pm
Entry tags:

NSF and US science research advocacy (US politics)

I've been given permission to share this but this was written for an audience of people working for/affiliated with LIGO, so some of these actions won't apply to e.g. general "normal" US citizens.

I will try to make phone calls Monday, but that depends on my being able to speak audibly over the phone (due to medical issues ongoing for ~nine months affecting my voice). I may be limited to emails and handwritten mailed letters. (Good thing I'm not a singer-songwriter?!)

Dear all,
Answering some questions, here are a few more details about US advocacy for science funding:

Please only send emails or visit Congree people if you are a US citizen or permanent resident (so you are talking to people you can vote for), and if you feel comfortable doing so.

You can find actual numbers for funding from different agencies in different states by selecting a state in this link: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/support-federal-science-funding-budget (which provides a template letter too), or using data provided here: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/dashboards

We have been collecting companies and institutions where graduate students and postdocs trained in LIGO with NSF funding have gone in here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13yMrZ9HdmjtDTxS7hr7quwGEX-j4Ri0TVjMk0hJmxms/edit?usp=sharing (the diversity of companies is a very effective message for Congress people)

You can find flyers with data about specific issues APS [American Physical Society] advocates for in Congressional Day Visits held in January; these can be used year-long, of course: https://cvd.aps.org/

Nothing beats a face-to-face conversation; meeting with your Senators’ and Representative’s offices is one of the most impactful actions you can take.
[This part is probably addressed to e.g. university faculty and so on rather than regular people.]

(In joke mode, as a Cornell alum, I preferred the less clown show timeline when my jokey aggro rivalry feelings toward Harvard were "catchy well-respected Latin motto Ivy League p*nis envy" rather than rooting for Harvard. Sorry, Harvard folks!)

[adapted from cross-post to Tumblr]
I'm over a year late on CROWNWORLD. My agent and editor are aware. The book is not likely to get done soon despite my being under 10,000 words / 3 chapters from the finish line, because I'm too stressed and exhausted to soldier on.

The parts that I haven't discussed much if at all in public:

- My health cratered a few years ago. I wrote most of STARSTRIKE in all lowercase while seeking ways I could write flat on my back in bed without making the pain worse. I spent a year bedridden, getting 0-4 hours of sleep per night (not a typo); I only left the house for doctor's appointments or to vote.

- This included uncommon bad med reactions like the one that sent me to the ER with internal bleeding. I'm cautious about new-to-me meds for a reason.

- I was making good progress writing early in 2025 but then I had a concussion. I'm mostly recovered but my balance is still not 100%.

- A family member had multiple health crises that could have killed them.

- South Korea's president attempted an insurrection (a common interpretation) by declaring martial law in December 2024. Almost all my family is in South Korea. I couldn't even discuss it publicly because there was a nonzero chance that it would endanger my relatives. (I've been to a literature festival in Seoul under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Sport. They know I exist, and South Korea has a history of dictatorships, censorship, and brutal putdowns of protests.)

- I learned my father had a cerebral hemorrhage that same month. He's in South Korea. I'm in the USA. The unstable political situation in South Korea would have made any attempt to visit him unusually fraught.

- The Trump presidency. Unfortunately, chronic health problems curtail the kinds and amounts of activism I can physically do even before we get to being burned out.

- My husband works at LIGO, which won a Nobel Prize for the detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. President Trump's proposed budget would (among many other things) cut funding for one of two LIGO sites, at which point why not defund both. (NSF budget news [science.org] but the link may be paywalled.) You need two gravitational wave observatories to verify a detection (triangulation/noise reduction).

What about other observatories internationally, you ask? There are two: VIRGO (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan). LIGO can detect out to ~150 megaparsecs, VIRGO to ~80 megaparsecs (best case), KAGRA to ~10 megaparsecs (best case). But space is volumetric, so for a comparison you need to cube these numbers.

LIGO's at ~3 million (let's call that 100% as a measuring stick). VIRGO's at ~500,000 (~20%). KAGRA is at ~1,000 (under 1% - worse by a couple orders of magnitude, in fact). These are estimates, but I've estimated conservatively.

Pictorially:
LIGO    **********
VIRGO   **
KAGRA   .


- This is a proposed US budget, not an approved one as of this writing, but if LIGO doesn't get cut, it's because something even more essential than basic research in astronomy/physics is axed (further).

- I am selfishly stressed about the possibility that my husband will lose his job. I'm on his health insurance, and did we mention my health? This has career implications for me as well if I become the primary breadwinner. If we knew for certain one way or the other, we could plan; but the uncertainty is wreaking havoc for pretty much everyone.

- I've had my books challenged and pulled from libraries for "DEI" reasons (Tiger Honor seems to be the usual "problem" due to the nonbinary protagonist; I don't think Phoenix Extravagant sold well enough to attract similar attention).

- A studio optioned Dragon Pearl but was stymied first by the Hollywood strikes (solidarity to the unions!) and then opted not to negotiate for another renewal because when shopping it around, the feedback was that a Korean space opera was too "DEI" to be a good investment in this political environment. (Whatever one's feelings about this, this is absolutely true in a business/economic sense.) So this makes career planning additionally selfishly fraught. Too bad I didn't go all in on het shifter romance? I started writing one! - het shifter romance is my favorite kind - and I loved it but somebody had a book contract to attend to.

- I am sad for the US wrecking ball clown show and I am sad for everyone everywhere who is affected by the US wrecking ball clown show. ("Lying low" politically is a lost cause when one is a semi-public figure.) I am, perhaps controversially, of the opinion that the despot playbook of North Korea and past South Korean dictatorships ought to be assiduously avoided, not enshrined as some asshole US administration's hashtag life goals. But I'm just a science fiction writer, not a politician, so what do I know.

Any impact to me is unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. My job is producing entertainment fiction and it's by definition nonessential. My household will lurch along; I'm not in financial distress. But I am selfishly stressed out of my mind and likely to spend June 2025 writing bad music, badly playing 16-bit videogames, badly designing/coding a visual novel and/or graphic novel only half a dozen friends will ever see. Maybe I will scribble at the het shifter romance without any intention of writing well, but rather stress relief, and continue moseying toward music composition/orchestration. Under better circumstances, this would make a nice mini-vacation; but these are not better circumstances.

My failings as a writer and human being are well known at this point; but if the book isn't delivered in June, that's why. It's not much of an apologia. Y'all stay safe and take care of yourselves and each other out there.

Note: I had planned to just delete this journal as having served its function but here we are.
pingistam: (Default)
PingiStam ([personal profile] pingistam) wrote in [community profile] podfic_bingo2025-05-31 10:03 pm

May summary - Fullmetal Alchemist - 2 Podfics & BLACKOUT II

Title: Mix Up by [archiveofourown.org profile] kotosk
Reader: [personal profile] pingistam
Bingo Square(s): Read A Friend’s Fic, Crack, Lower Vocal Range (for you)
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Edward Elric & Roy Mustang
Summary: "Fullmetal. How on Earth do you accidentally buy cocaine out of all things?"
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply
Link to Podfic: Mix Up [Podfic]

Title: Right as Rain by [archiveofourown.org profile] Tierfal
Reader: [personal profile] pingistam
Bingo Square(s): Disability, Include an animal, Read Angrily, Read Loudly
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Summary: Surprises come in several varieties, and all of them are illuminating.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply
Link to Podfic: Right as Rain [Podfic]

My Card:
Wild Card
Fail (at) Sex
Fucking Grapefruits [Podfic]
New Author (for you)
Fucking Grapefruits [Podfic]
Repod Your Own Podfic
Christmas Confession [Podfic]
Rare Pairing
The Pairing Trilogy [Podfic]
Include an animal
Right as Rain [Podfic]
Read A Friend’s Fic
Mix Up [Podfic]
Higher Vocal Range (for you)
A Christmas Conundrum [Podfic]
Humor
No Comment [Podfic]
Use a Speed Effect
<10 Minutes Long
From calm to cuddles [Podfic]
Polyamory/Polycule
The Prevailing State of Things [Podfic]
Character Voices
No Comment [Podfic]
Breathplay
Crack
Mix Up [Podfic]
FREE SPACE
Garnish [Podfic]
Transform an Existing Podfic
(In)Convenience [Podfic]
Het
The Pairing Trilogy [Podfic]
Ace/Aro Character
it's not easy to be yourself [Podfic]
Fix-It
The Prevailing State of Things [Podfic]
Boy slash
No Comment [Podfic]
Disability
Right as Rain [Podfic]
Read with a Smile
A Christmas Conundrum [Podfic]
Read Angrily
Right as Rain [Podfic]
Read Loudly
Right as Rain [Podfic]
Trans Character
Fucking Grapefruits [Podfic]
More Articulation (for you)
it's not easy to be yourself [Podfic]
Lower Vocal Range (for you)
Mix Up [Podfic]


February challenge - Laughter: Garnish [Podfic]
March challenge - Cozy: From calm to cuddles [Podfic]
annapods: happy pea in a pod (Default)
annapods ([personal profile] annapods) wrote in [community profile] podfic_bingo2025-05-31 08:50 pm
Entry tags:
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-05-30 11:23 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-05-29 07:59 pm

(no subject)



The absolute greatest thing about having medical trauma and having to get medical tests done is when you tell the person doing the test that you have medical trauma and please X, Y, and Z, and they then proceed to ignore it and give you more medical trauma.

And you never know! Until you get there and do it! If the person is going to have great bedside manner and everything will be wonderful, or it isn't, and you just have to roll the fucking dice.

skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-05-27 07:39 am

(no subject)

I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-05-26 08:26 pm
Entry tags:

Recommendation: One-Night Fandoms, the 2008 Yuletide Vid

Vid: One Night Fandoms: A Tribute to Yuletide (1596 words) by eruthros, thingswithwings
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Multi-Fandom, Yuletide - Fandom
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage Sex
Additional Tags: Yuletide, One Night Stands, Bondage, Weddings, Vampires, Musicians, Dancing, Impact Play, Gags, we watched so many things for this vid, basically no fandom gets more than twenty frames, Fanvid
Summary:

Just call me angel of the morning, angel.


*

I revisited this masterpiece today because I accidentally wrote cheek-touching in last night's story, and a friend asked, "Not what you were going for? Or...more like the equivalent of waking up, rolling over, seeing a story in the cold, revealing light of day, and scrambling to get dressed before it wakes up?"

And what better way to get Angel of the Morning stuck in my head than this gorgeous vid?
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-05-26 07:10 pm
petra: A photo of lilac flowers with the text "How do they rise" from Pratchett's Night Watch (Pratchett - How do they rise)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-05-25 01:23 pm

The Glorious 25th of May & Towel Day

Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!

My Tumblr dash runneth over with Terry Pratchett memes, as is only right and proper.

I know where my towel is, and I am thinking of the friends I have lost along the way, as is traditional on this day.
petra: Two men in beat-up Elizabethan garb. (Ros and Guil - Extras)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-05-24 11:57 pm
Entry tags:

Slow Horses s1-s3

I have finished Slow Horses s1-3, as a result of paying for Apple TV to encourage them to Murderbot.

I want to inflict the Slow Horses, AU-ized, on various fandoms. Some of their mistakes are universal; others can be readily translated between universes.

I mean, really, what do the Jedi do with their terminal fuckups, once they've been accepted as padawans -- other than promote them to Council seats?

Not me wanting Roderick Ho the Jedi slicer who thinks he's hot bantha poodoo, nosiree bob.

In other universe-smashing paradigms, I still want to introduce Lamb to Peter Grant. They would loathe each other uncordially. It would be splendid.

Sorry, this is as close as my icon collection gets without going all Gene Hunt -- who would also be deeply entertaining to inflict on Lamb and his merry band, while I'm proposing crossovers.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-05-23 06:23 pm

Murderbot TV episode 3



Unsure how I feel about having 22 minute episodes (sorry, "30 minute episodes"). On the one hand, short and quick enough to watch. On the other hand, this entire episode is essentially half an episode: In Which Our Heroes Travel To DeltFall And MurderBot Looks Around.

Enjoyable, but this kind of episode feels like it is meant for watching entire seasons all at once, where it would just blend in to the before and after. They spent too much time arguing in the shuttle for it to feel like it stands alone at all.

The security footage of what the Gurathin and Bharadwaj are doing back home was pointless, but I guess Character Building or something.

petra: Cartoon of Shakespeare saying, "Read my latest, it is god damn glorious." (Beaton - Shakespeare)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-05-23 05:02 pm
Entry tags:

Rudest tag possible

Rudest tag I have seen in a month of Sundays:
Life on Mars (UK) spoiler for the finale )

Compare with The Untamed spoiler for the first episode )

Which is kinda like Shakespeare spoiler )

When it could've been Bigger Shakespeare spoiler )

Greek myth spoiler )