alias_sqbr

I never got around to writing up Anne McCaffrey's The Mark of Merlin when I read it last year, but I've been thinking about McCaffrey a lot recently due to blitzing through the Dragons Made Me Did It Pern podcast (highly recommended btw) and

osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.

The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.

Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"

There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.

As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.

But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.

torachan

Recently Finished
Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin
I was thrilled to have a new Enola Holmes book to read. I'm not sure if this is the last one (the ending kind of felt like it could be), and if so, I will miss them. This has been such a fun series.

The Age of Miracles
I found out about this from

rachelmanija's review and was immediately interested. When the MC is eleven, the earth's rotation suddenly slows and the world changes. But even as these big events are going on, she is focused on the big things in her own life: friendships changing, her parents' marriage falling apart, crushes on boys, starting middle school. I really loved the balance between the two.

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
Margaret, having defined herself as a tween detective in middle school, now struggles in high school with how to grow up and ends up developing an eating disorder that lands her in a treatment center.

This sounded very relevant to my interests from the blurb but it just didn't work for me. As someone who grew up around the same time (maybe five years earlier or so) and loved mysteries and series like the BSC, and struggled with weight and being queer in a time before the internet and easy access to knowledge of the fact that people like me even existed, I should be the target audience. But I am not that big a fan of the paranormal and magical realism, and while those elements are not mentioned at all in the summary, they feature heavily throughout, and more and more as the story goes on. I wanted something realistic, and this is not that. It's well written and I love the idea of it, but it's just not for me.

Middle of the Night
The MC moves back into his childhood home when his parents move out to a retirement community. Immediately strange things start happening, and he is constantly having nightmares of the night he and his best friend were camping in the yard and his friend went missing and was never found. Now his body has been found nearby, and the MC has to figure out if he's really being haunted or if someone is messing with him, and if they are, are they the murderer? I liked this all right.

The Legend of Auntie Po
Graphic novel about a Chinese American girl in the 1880s who lives in a logging camp with her father, a cook. I liked this a lot.

A Map to the Sun
Graphic novel about a struggling girls' basketball team. I liked it.

A Star Brighter Than the Sun vol. 4

Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo vol. 3

sanguinity

candyheartsex has revealed, and I have received a delightful gift!

In Which Laurent Rises to the Occasion
The Wounded Name -- D. K. Broster
Laurent/Aymar, Amyar/Avoye
Canon divergence, Pre-Poly

Aymar despairs of clearing his name and leaves France, leaving only a letter behind.

Laurent is so delightfully himself, burning with passion for all the things! For Aymar! To clear Aymar's name! To tenderly care for him! And also to straighten out this mess where Aymar is determined to throw himself on his sword for Avoye's sake, without first consulting with Avoye about whether she even wants that! (If there is one thing that Laurent has learned from his association with Aymar, it is the frustration of having a lover throw himself on his sword for you without asking first! NOT THAT THIS FLEETINGLY CRITICAL THOUGHT MEANS HE LOVES AYMAR ANY THE LESS!!!!!!!)

I have strong suspicions as to who wrote the story (*casts a meaningfgul glance in

luzula's direction*), especially given the central theme that maybe you should ask your girlfriend what she wants before making a grand life-altering gesture in her name. (A genre of story that

luzula excels at!) But I shall refrain from offering official thanks until after reveals. (But please know I enjoyed it very much!)

lea_hazel

Windows 11 is so phenomenally shitty that they managed to ruin Notepad, arguably The single most useful basic all-purpose program. You could just open any text file in it. You could use it to edit properties files, configuration files, XML, HTML. You could write entire Java programs in it if you were enterprising. It was quick, lightweight, and had all the features it could possibly need, which was almost none.

W11 "Notepad" is a bloated monster that takes several seconds to load a file less than 1KB. I uninstalled it. For the first time in my life, I uninstalled Notepad.

This fucking timeline, man.

cahn

I am super not promising to always have this on Saturday, but yay long weekend!

Last week: I know some of you reading this study Talmud -- Josephus asserts at the very beginning that the "sufferings of the Jews" (presumably, in context of Josephus' writing, Titus destroying the temple, etc. though we won't get there for a while) are their own fault: "no foreign power is to blame." It was pointed out that the Talmud may (?) have its own opinion(s) as to whether the destruction of the Temple and the resulting diaspora was divine punishment? And regardless of the former, may also blame Titus? (I also don't know yet, because we haven't gotten there yet and won't for a while, whether Josephus himself thinks it's divine punishment or just plain old temporal consequences. My vague recollection of Feuchtwanger's Josephus is that he was thinking more of the latter, which is also very much borne out by this week's reading.)

This week: First half of Book 1 (Ch 22 / Par 444):

Okay, I must say the first part of this was a slog for me -- flitting between a lot of people I didn't know. Good thing we have this reading group or I might not have got through it. As it was, I had to take copious notes to even make a stab at writing up a summary (I won't promise I'll do this every week, but I had a little extra time and quite frankly I knew I wouldn't remember who any of these people were next week if I didn't), and I'm going to put them in comments so this post doesn't get super long. At least Josephus felt it was "inappropriate to go into the early history of the Jews," which would have made it really long. Anyway, it got substantially more interesting once Herod showed up!

Next week: Finish book 1.

pedanther

. It was a good week at work. I tried a new thing, and was complimented by the boss on how it turned out. Unrelatedly, but also good, the boss has taken action to resolve a significant source of client-related workplace stress.

. We had a weekend session of board gaming, where we played 3 Witches, Quacks of Quedlinburg, and a few rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy.

( Read more... )

. At the regular weekly board gaming session, we played Liar's Uno and Paperback.

( Read more... )

. My library hold came in for Lies My Teacher Told Me, which I started reading a couple of months ago but had to return when I was halfway through, so that's what I've been reading this week. It continues to be interesting but slow going.

. I've been doing another run through XCOM 2, this time with the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which adds a new story mission that unlocks a new soldier class. I really liked the story mission, and I'm having fun playing around with the tactical possibilities of the new soldier. Definitely worth the money I spent on it.

I also installed two of the other DLC that were included in the bundle, both of which are cosmetic expansions that don't change any of the gameplay but provide new outfits to dress your soldiers in. One of them is going to be uninstalled as soon as this run is finished, because it is badly-behaved and keeps changing my soldiers into midriff-baring tops without asking.

. I'm making progress with the jigsaw puzzle; I'm past the stage where the amount of empty space feels disheartening and into the stage where enough of it is filled in that I can do a piece or two whenever I have a spare moment.

torachan

1. It looks like the rain for next week may not be as rainy as originally forecast. At least for Santa Monica it's saying only Monday. And the days I'll be in NoCal are the days with the least rain up there. So fingers crossed.

2. We had a nice time at Knott's Berry Farm this morning. They're having a Peanuts event, so there were lots of limited time menu items. Not sure any of them had any relevance to the Peanuts theme (though there were a handful of peanut butter ones) but the stuff we had today was very good.

3. Tuxie has taken to lounging on our back porch a lot lately, and it's so cute but it means we can't get out the back door lol. This afternoon I actually went out the front door and up the driveway just so I didn't disturb him, but then when I got to the backyard I found he'd relocated anyway.

torachan

A couple weeks ago I got an email from Knott's saying they were having their Peanuts Celebration special event in February, and there were a lot of good looking things on the menu, so I've been wanting to check it out but just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Then last week we realized we hadn't put in a reservation for Disneyland this week and there were none available (combination of Valentines Day and Presidents Day weekend, I guess), so rather than keep refreshing the site to see if we could get a reservation, we just decided to go to Knott's this weekend.

( Read more... )

muccamukk

Nenya's summary of an early account of St Valentine's Day as a romantic festival: "So it was RPF written during lockdown, which contained endless jousting sprinkled with #relatable? Whomst among us?"

Wild tonal shift to follow:

It's also the day that Frederick Douglass chose as his birthday, which is very sweetly illustrated here: What, to a Country, Is a Child’s Birthday? | Talk & Draw with Liza Donnelly & Heather Cox Richardson (video: 3 minutes).

Yesterday, we went to a No More Stolen Sisters march, which was very touching, especially given how many women were their with pictures of missing and murdered relatives. A lot of red cloaks and traditional woven cedar hats.

It was organised by the student union, and I appreciated how much care they put into cultural safety and looking out for family members.

We listened to the DNTO podcast "The Story She Carries: Lorelei Williams and her fight for justice" for class, and my professor said she'd gone to residential school with Williams' mother. It's all very close here.

otw_news_feed

Posted by Elintiriel

https://www.transformativeworks.org/its-international-fanworks-day-2026/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=279491

For anyone who’s missed our earlier posts, you can find all of our activities for this year’s International Fanworks Day in our “What We’re Doing For #IFD2026” post.

The OTW’s chatrooms and games session is a 30-hour party that lasts from February 14th, 21:00 UTC until February 16th, 03:00 UTC. The game times listed below are all in UTC, but you can click the links to find out how that converts to your own timezone.

The games will be hosted on our dedicated Discord server and moderated by OTW volunteers throughout the day. Every two hours you will be able to participate in a different fandom-themed game! The timetable and game descriptions are posted below; join us on Discord for the games you’d like to play!

NOTE: The games will be played and moderated in English.

Games Schedule:

February 14th

21:00 – 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
23:00 – Storytime (What time is that for me?)

February 15th

01:00 – List Builder (What time is that for me?)
03:00 – Poetry Round Robin (What time is that for me?)
05:00 – 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
07:00 – 5 Things (What time is that for me?)
09:00 – 2 Truths and a Lie (What time is that for me?)
11:00 – Lyrics Round Robin (What time is that for me?)
13:00 – List Builder (What time is that for me?)
15:00 – Storytime (What time is that for me?)
17:00 – 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
19:00 – 2 Truths and a Lie (What time is that for me?)
21:00 – OTW Trivia (What time is that for me?)
23:00 – Poetry Round Robin (What time is that for me?)

February 16th

01:00 – 5 Things (What time is that for me?)

Game Guidelines

5 Things

How to Play: During this game, the host will name a topic and players in the room will call out examples from their favorite fandoms. This will repeat for at least 5 rounds. Be prepared to explain why your answer counts (maybe you’ll recruit someone new to your fandom!)

20 Questions

How to Play: During this game, the host will think of a person, place, or object. Players have exactly 20 yes-or-no questions they can ask the host to determine what the correct answer is.

Storytime

How to Play: The host will paste a starting sentence into the chat. Players take turns coming up with the next sentence–the host calling out whose turn it is–until everyone has gone once, and the story is complete!

List Builder

How to Play: List Builder is a collaborative game in which players work together to come up with a list of fandom characters or items belonging to a particular genre, starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet. Start at A and work your way through to Z (you can be as flexible as required on the difficult letters!)

Lyrics Round Robin

How to Play: During this game, we’ll collectively write FANDOM lyrics to replace those of a familiar song. The host will choose the song and type out an alternate first two lines. Then those in the room will write the next lines until the song is finished.

Poetry Round Robin

How to Play: During this game, we’ll collectively write FANDOM poetry! The host posts a poem as an example of a specific poetic form (like sonnet, haiku, etc.), as well as a title. The players then write one (or more) original poems of that form together, one line at a time.

OTW Trivia

How to Play: Like most trivia games, the host will ask a question and the first person to answer correctly wins that round. Because we’re online and you’re free to do searches we’re going to add another factor, which is time — you must answer within 2 minutes. But you can call out your answer as soon as you think you know. If you’re the first to have the correct answer, the host will type your name and award you a point. At the end of the game, whoever has gotten the most points will be named the winner!

Two Truths and a Lie

How to Play: The host will paste into the chat 3 statements. Because we’re online and you’re free to do searches we’re going to add another factor, which is time — you must answer within 30 seconds after the third statement!

We also want to hear from you about other celebrations taking place today. Leave us a comment here to tell us about what your fandom communities are doing!

https://www.transformativeworks.org/its-international-fanworks-day-2026/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=279491

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34481

International Fanworks Day

For anyone who’s missed our earlier posts, you can find all of our activities for this year’s International Fanworks Day in our "What We're Doing For #IFD2026" post.

NOTE: The games will be played and moderated in English.

Games Schedule:

February 14th

21:00 - 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
23:00 - Storytime (What time is that for me?)

February 15th

01:00 - List Builder (What time is that for me?)
03:00 - Poetry Round Robin (What time is that for me?)
05:00 - 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
07:00 - 5 Things (What time is that for me?)
09:00 - 2 Truths and a Lie (What time is that for me?)
11:00 - Lyrics Round Robin (What time is that for me?)
13:00 - List Builder (What time is that for me?)
15:00 - Storytime (What time is that for me?)
17:00 - 20 Questions (What time is that for me?)
19:00 - 2 Truths and a Lie (What time is that for me?)
21:00 - OTW Trivia (What time is that for me?)
23:00 - Poetry Round Robin (What time is that for me?)

February 16th

01:00 - 5 Things (What time is that for me?)

Game Guidelines

5 Things

20 Questions

How to Play: During this game, the host will think of a person, place, or object. Players have exactly 20 yes-or-no questions they can ask the host to determine what the correct answer is.

Storytime

List Builder

Lyrics Round Robin

Poetry Round Robin

OTW Trivia

Two Truths and a Lie

We also want to hear from you about other celebrations taking place today. Leave us a comment here to tell us about what your fandom communities are doing!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34481

pedanther

According to my music player, my digital collection consists of 2,542 tracks, with a total running time of 143 hours and 39 minutes.

The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.

( Read more... )

torachan

1. We met our deadline for the big project, so it can move ahead on schedule! For the last couple weeks we've been pretty sure it was going to be okay (and this last week there was really no worry at all), but it was a major stressor since I joined the project last summer, and we did not make the original deadline at the end of the year so this extension was our final final deadline. It's a huge relief to have turned that in to the developers and be able to report to upper management that everything's going well.

2. This morning I was almost home from my walk when I saw a text from Carla saying she was going to get a breakfast burrito. The restaurant is not on my way, but only about a five minute walk from where I was, so I met up with her there and we split a burrito for breakfast.

3. I was looking around to see what all is near the new store when I go to help out next week and saw there's a Shake Shack in the same mall, which reminded me that we wanted to go to Shake Shack and try more of the Korean menu, so we went there tonight. It's a little longer walk than Carla was up for, so we drove, but then after dinner walked around, down to the beach and then through the Promenade.

Everything at Shake Shack was delicious. In addition to the chicken sandwich, which I'd had before, we got the spicy fries with cheese sauce. I'd had them without the cheese before and they were good, but even better with cheese. I also got the gochujang caramel shake, which was also very tasty.

We used to go down to the Promenade all the time years ago, but then just stopped, and now hardly ever go down there, and when we do it's usually just to the first block, where the Apple Store is. This time we did go to the Apple Store but also the other two blocks we don't usually check out, and I had totally forgotten there's a Barnes and Noble there again! There was a huge three story one there years ago, and then that closed (in 2018, apparently), but they opened a new smaller one about a year and a half ago. I had heard something about it, but it's not very relevant to me anymore, so I immediately forgot. We went in and checked it out, though, and it's really nice. Nowhere near as huge as the old one, but still big, and they have a second level in the basement where I bought a new puzzle.

We ended our walk with donuts from Sidecar, which is just about a block from Shake Shack. Brought the donuts home and will have them later. Overall it was a really nice night out and just the sort of thing that I want to do more of. Although there were several empty storefronts, overall the Promenade seemed pretty revitalized and there were a lot of people down there tonight. (It's one of those areas that has gone through multiple booms and busts. When I was really little, it was just called the mall, and then became the old mall when they built a new, indoor mall next to it, and it kind of died off. Then when I was a teenager it was revitalized as the Third Street Promenade, but started dying off again a while back, but seems to be having another revival now.)

4. It's the start of a three day weekend!

5. Molly!

rocky41_7 posting in

booknook

Title: Looking for Smoke
Author: K.A. Cobell
Narrators: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Katie Anvil Rich, Jordan Waunch, Julie Lumsden
Genre: Crime thriller, murder mystery, fiction

Earlier this week I finished another commute audiobook, Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell. This is a crime thriller/murder mystery that takes place on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When a teenage girl is found strangled at the Indian Days summer powwow, four of her classmates become the prime suspects in her murder.

I would say this is a solid entry in the murder mystery genre. The book alternates perspectives between the four classmates, which allows the author to do some fun things keeping the reader on the hook. One character will make a big discovery only for the POV to pop over to another who doesn't have that information, so Cobell can keep information from the reader without it feeling too forced. The audiobook has a separate narrator for each POV, which was also fun (although I didn't care for Eli's reader) and if you're prone to picking up and putting down your audiobook in the middle of a chapter, this helps you keep track of whose POV you're in.

Cobell uses the format of the crime thriller, like Marcie Rendon in Where They Last Saw Her, to draw attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), but the book still feels like a novel its own right; it never feels like just a tool for explaining the MMIW issue. And it's an important issue that deserves a lot more attention. The statistics on violence against Native American women are shocking--even if you think they're bad, they're probably worse than you're imagining--and specific stats get highlighted in the text and in the author's note at the end. In this way, I think the book has enormous social value. Cobell uses her characters to personalize the problem and show the comorbid impacts of poverty and drug use on the reservation.

Outside of its interest in the MMIW crisis, I don't think the book does much that's particularly groundbreaking. The teens band together to try to solve the mystery and absolve themselves, as you'd expect. At various times they suspect each other, family members, law enforcement. Cobell keeps you on the hook while offering reasonable suspicion for a number of characters. She avoids my least favorite move in the murder mystery genre, which is pinning it on some rando at the last minute.

The ending is pretty explosive and I enjoy some of the things she does with perspective here as well. We the readers know what the killer thinks of their crimes because the text tells us. But the other characters never hear that explanation except third hand, and many of them simply don't believe it. And that feels real--they end the story with their own version of the truth and there's simply no space for that to be corrected (and why would they believe the word of a killer anyway?) The killer feels a little one-dimensional, but the motives make sense, if they're unsurprising. The motivations behind most violent crimes are pretty repetitive.

The prose is fine. We're reading from the perspective of teenagers, so expect a lot of melodramatic metaphors and jumping to conclusions based on minimal evidence.

Overall, this book tells an important story. It was entertaining as a narrative and sheds light on a community that deserves a lot more attention.

jesse_the_k

HGModernism, aka Hendry, offers a soothing yet informative 30 minutes on the theme

I found even rarer bird facts

( or stream it here )

Hendry shows illustrations and video of the birds under discussion, sitting in a well-appointed room with fascinating wallpaper, all while holding a tea cup that's as big as a plant pot. They appear to have four white devil horns thanks to the impressive antler mounted behind Hendry’s head.

Hendry is clearly a firm believer in factual content: corrections appear in the first comment; citations are in the description as well as all the links in a Github Gist. They have 28 other YT videos on divers topics plus more on Patreon.

Access

Accurate captions, except from 9:20 to 10:23, where Hendry sped up audio to get full value after splashing out $10 for the research paper defining the correct Latin gender nomenclature — Strigops habroptilus — NZ kākāpō.
The first link here and the listed video on YouTube go to the version where there’s an operatic music bed during the research paper recitation. My “stream here” is the no-music edition Hendry provides for “for my fellow auditory processing disorder strugglers”
No image descriptions
No flashing lights but lots of picture-in-picture video of birds.

via “We’re Here,” John & Hank Green’s good-news-and-links for Nerdfighteria every Friday

skygiants

Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.

In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?

In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?

I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.

Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.

ehyde

February is Renegade Bindery's "encourage everyone to make a lot of books and learn new things" month and while I'm not going as all-out as some people, and haven't managed to watch any of the presentations yet, I am doing a bit more bookbinding work than I have in the past few months!

The main project I'm working on is for Fandom Trumps Hate from last year, and I will admit I procrastinated on it because I was honestly intimidated with how much my recipient donated. But I'm now at a point where I think I can safely say I'll finish in the next day or two!

I also finished up my own copy of How Dare You?! being prompted by the drama's release (I bound it for last year's Cnovel bookbinding exchange, and my own copy has been sitting half finished since the summer). I've typeset two small books since the start of the month--first, the script for the War of the Worlds audiodrama, and second, a short Guardian fic that I read and immediately went "this needs to be a tiny book!" I have been neglecting working on my dad's late Christmas present, which honestly also doesn't need a lot more work, but what it does need is maps and I'm putting that off (it's a binding of my great great grandfather's civil war diary). Another project I'll probably finish up soon is Mo Du, which someone else typeset for last year's exchange, so I've printed and sewn their typeset but haven't made the covers yet. There are a lot of good typesets from past cnovel exchanges, some other I want to bind are Guardian, Lord Seventh, Kaleidoscope of Death, and Purely By Accident.

(...yes. Bookbinding is very much an "eyes bigger than stomach" hobby. I have a few fanfics typeset and ready to print/bind, too).

Recently read and would recommend: I, Your Emperor, Have Been Wronged! and I will put the same promo I wrote up on tumblr under the cut

( Read more... )

sockshuppet posting in

fandomcalendar

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

muccamukk

(I've basically peaced out on answering comments, apologies. I'll try to catch up on at least the fandom ones. I appreciate you all!)

denise posted the thread about LJ going Russia-locked (ETA: see comments for corrections) and/or selling off six weeks ago now, which feels like twenty years in Internet time, but is probably not that long in business time. Has anyone heard updates on what's happening with LJ since then? Is this like the x-number of times ff.net was definitely going offline?

Relatedly, is anyone in touch with the mods of

camp_toccoa,

skyearth85 and/or

skew_whiff? Sky used to be active on Discord, but I haven't seen her in ages. Has there been any talk of moving that comm to Dreamwidth?

I remember it was a bit of a voyage through broken links and broken dreams last time I looked at it, but there's still a bunch of fic that never moved to either AO3 or DW.

fred_mouse

I'm reading an Ellery Queen detective novel from, hmm, the late 1920s, I think? And I was highly amused to read the following line:

“It was Friday morning and the Inspector and Ellery, garbed romantically in colorful dressing-gowns, were in high spirits.”

Methinks that 'romantically' has shifted in meaning. I can kind of work it out, but also, only at a kind of intellectual understanding rather than really getting it.

(for those not familiar, this is a parent/adult child dyad)

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The Wounded Name fic

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The Jewish War: First half of Book 1

Week in review: Week to 14 February

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2026 Knott's Trip #1 (2/14/25)

for this was on seynt Valentynes day

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It's International Fanworks Day 2026!

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