alias_sqbr

1. I had another work from home day. I'm about halfway caught up with my email and fully caught up with teams. Tomorrow I've got a couple meetings, so I've got to go in to the office, but I might work from home again on Thursday to finally catch up on everything.

2. When Carla was out today she stopped at Uncle Tetsu's, a Japanese cheesecake chain. They have a sakura cheesecake right now and we had some after dinner tonight and it was sooooooo good. I normally prefer New York style cheesecake to the Japanese fluffier style, but this was really good consistency and the sakura flavor was amazing.

3. I finished playing The Plucky Squire. Overall it's a pretty fun game, but it is not just a straight action adventure game. There are a bunch of (frankly not that fun) mini games for the boss fights and stuff where you have to play other styles of games and that is not what I signed up for. Like for one character's boss battles you play a Mike Tyson style boxing game, for another it's a rhythm game, and for the third it's a Puzzle Bobble type. Then there are some stealth sequences where you have to sneak past enemies who can kill you instantly if they sense you, and if they sense you there is no way to run to escape, even if you're close to a place you could get away. You're just instantly dead. And the final battle is a space shooter type. The good thing is that if you die in a boss battle you can sometimes restart partway through, not all the way at the beginning, and the stealth sequences have multiple checkpoints and you'll respawn there rather than back at the beginning. But I would still have preferred not to have that "variety" in my action adventure game. Still is a fun game, though. But if you suck at those types of games it might ruin it for you.

4. I finished editing all my Disney Japan pics, so hopefully I can get the last day's posts written up later this week.

5. Jasper is just so handsome.

torachan

When I last left off, we had just checked out the big gift shop at the Fantasy Springs hotel and were exploring the land while waiting for our return time for the Peter Pan ride.

( More DisneySea adventures! )

anghraine

Speaking of my coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb perspective on the various obligatory het romance plots in TOS, I’ve been really struck by how many seem dub-con at best. Maybe that’s partly because I’m finishing the third season and it’s especially pronounced there, and it’s also been particularly glaring with Spock in particular (the Kirk dubcon plots tend to be more viscerally horrifying, but he at least gets to consent sometimes).

Spock has a small fraction of the number of romantic (or "romantic") plots that Kirk does, and while I might be misremembering something in the many episodes I’ve seen—

1— “This Side of Paradise”

The premise of this "romance" is that Leila, the softly-lit blonde girl of the episode, was in love with Spock six years earlier, but his issues meant their love could never be, and he rejected any possibility of romance with her. It's not at all clear what past!Spock actually felt about the situation (Leila says "you couldn't give anything of yourself" and he wouldn't even put his arms around her), both because of his general manner when not under the effect of the sex/docility/spore cult pollen, and because her feelings are so much the main driver of both the backstory and the present events.

Early on, lead spore cultist Elias asks Leila if she’d like Spock to join their creepy community. She replies, “There is no choice, Elias. He will stay.” It doesn’t seem like she actually cares about what he’d choose in his right mind, just about using the sex pollen to railroad him into the life she wants with him. This doesn’t mean she was always like that (she herself has been exposed for a long time, though she doesn't change much when the spores lose their hold on her), but her disinterest in his consent to life with her makes this ostensibly sweet romance 100x creepier. Not helped by the sex pollen itself and her avoidance of explanations when Spock is still in his right mind and could decide for himself.

( Read more... )

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: West Coast (Lana del Rey)

ursula

Earth Day call log:

ursula used Governor Gretchen Whitmer's contact form to ask her to deny a permit to the proposed Line 5 oil pipeline, and will further celebrate Earth Day by attending a protest in support of EPA federal employee union members this afternoon.

The Sierra Club is trying to break a record for the most origami fish, if you want a fun craft for celebration.

letzan

High-level stats for week of 2025-04-08 - 2025-04-14

Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 10029 (+176 from last week)

Works I classified F/F: 5766 (+236 from last week) (2599 new, 3167 continued)

0.66% of all 875663 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! reaches a best-ever rank of 14 in its third week on the chart.
New RPG Zenless Zone Zero enters the chart for the first time this week. Hey Duggee also returns after a week away. These two replace Once Upon a Time (whose most recent run was 8 consecutive weeks), and The 100.
The Wicked Years Series celebrates 20 consecutive chart appearances (out of 40 total appearances).

( Full top-20 table and description of methodology after the jump )

anghraine

In response to this post, yavieriel said:

I don't have particularly strong K/S feelings - TOS Shatner has Dad Vibes too strong for me to overcome - but this has been a delightful journey to watch you take.

I replied:

Interesting, I see that more easily from Nimoy than Shatner, but we all feel the Dad Vibes differently, lol. And thanks, haha—I went from "this is just part of the fabric of the universe of me, I'm not passionate but it just kind of IS to me" to "beating my head against the wall to avoid going insane" so fast it feels like whiplash!

yavieriel said:

Oh that is fascinating, Spock is entirely "hot but unapproachable college prof" to me. I can't even slightly imagine him drinking beer while grilling, or mowing the lawn in cheesy tshirts, or coaching t-ball. Whereas I feel like Kirk would be entirely comfortable with those things, and probably somewhat enthusiastic. My own dad's very stereotypical middle class cishet guy-ness is definitely somewhat performative, but it's not insincere, if that makes sense? Which also matches with Kirk's vibes for me.

I replied:

Ah, I see! My own dad is an extremely reserved and intense programmer from LA with zero interest in the various sportsballs and a great value for reason and debate (and board games that require some amount of tactical thinking), and we've always been conspicuously similar and close. Also Spock continually being on the receiving end of microaggressions is pretty true to the ways my dad has been targeted (as a multiracial Mexican-American man), so Nimoy's Spock feels all the more familiar. That said, I think partly the show sexualizes Kirk so much that I personally find it hard to see him as exactly paternal despite the strong Father To His Crew vibes. But I can see that as a way to read, for instance, Uhura saying she finds it soothing to listen to his voice through the intercom when she's nervous—it could be seen as a shippy thing, but obviously isn't intended that way.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Pat Benatar)

fred_mouse

From [Book Jockey Alex’s] blog:

Notable Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror of 2024 - while the original post was at the blog, the actual list is at ReacTor Mag.
YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 1
YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 2

general thought: Look, I get that the USA has a stranglehold on some aspects of publishing, and that someone writing from North America about books published in English is going to get a lot more options set in the USA. But for me to pick something set there to spend my precious reading time, the summary has to be spectacular. Ditto ‘class warfare (near) future dystopia’. I’m here for the escapism, dammit. In the Reactor article there were books more relevant to my interests later on, but I nearly noped out when the first five or so were so dire.

Overall - I didn’t quite make it through these lists. I found it near impossible to focus on the descriptions to see if there was something I was going to like; then I just skimmed to see if there was anything jumped out at me. Also, two of these are from 2020, so there were several I’ve either got on the wishlist, or have read. Of the ~80, I added four to the wishlist, but only one is a ‘really want to read’, and that’s because it is one of my must read authors.

The Spinoff’s best NZ books of 2024 - I found the summaries much more readable than the previous, and yet I added zero books to the reading wishlist.

The Best Books We Read in 2024—And What We’re Looking Forward to in 2025 by Words without Borders - books in translation. Another one where the summaries/reviews were interesting reading, but none sparked an interest in actually reading the books.

Read Palestinian Speculative Fiction Reading List by Sonia Sulaiman - to be fair here, I’ve read five booklists already, and I’m starting to flag. But this is the last one, and then I can close the window, and I’m very invested in that. So, I’m expecting to be unmotivated by any of the books, and that is not actually a commentary on what is written. … and then I started reading and discovered it is a stack of links. For now, I’ve shoved it into the ‘reading plans’ tab group, which is where anything online short fiction gets put until I have the oomph to read it.

torachan

1. I worked from home today, getting a fair amount of catching up done. Unfortunately I forgot that I also had to double check all my stores' budgets for next month today so that did take some time away from the email and teams catch-up, but I should be able to focus more on that tomorrow. (Probably will mostly work from home tomorrow, too.)

2. We bought a sweater for Alexander for his birthday and even though his birthday is not until next week, gave it to him yesterday so he could try it on and see if it fit, and it was a little big so we said we'd be happy to go exchange it. I was just thinking to exchange it whenever we next go, but there was availability today and Carla felt like going to Disneyland, so while I had to stay home and focus on my email backlog, she went and exchanged the sweater and had a nice morning at DCA. She managed to find all the rest of the hidden easter eggs there (eventually with some help from an online guide) and took pictures, but I'm just going to include those with our next trip post rather than make a separate one. They had Lightning McQueen and Mater ones which are super cute, though.

3. We bought a stereo for the garage and it arrived today. As all modern stereos do these days, it also has bluetooth capability to connect to your phone, but she mainly wanted it for playing actual CDs. Her current CD rack is overflowing, so we need to get another and then move the CDs out to the garage so she can have them out there with the stereo. Nice thing is, unless you're standing right by the door or window, even with it turned up pretty loud you really can't hear much from outside. Amazing what insulation can do!

4. I love the look on Ollie's face here, but he was even cuter before I turned on the light and came in. It wasn't dark but was dim enough that he was really well camouflaged in the box!

anghraine

So the great chronological-by-airdate TOS watch with my housemates is nearing its end and I’m genuinely kind of sad about it, in much the same way that I was happy but kind of sad about my D&D campaign resolving.

I will say, though, that I’ve been trying not to be One of Those People but I truly hadn’t realized before this TOS household re-watch that Kirk/Spock on the original show was at this level. I didn’t clearly remember the little bits I saw as a kid (I was far more into TNG and Captain Picard as a tiny Anghraine) and so I thought it would be more like the standard action-adventure male friendships that inspire big slash ships, and not god-tier “these guys are truly unhinged about each other.”

I’d seen the various Spock/whomever shippers duking it out among themselves, but from a distance, and just vaguely felt that none of the ship warriors were covering themselves in glory. I hadn’t realized that—I’m sorry, I know I’m becoming the villain here, but I had no idea I’d end up feeling like every Spock ship in TOS vs Kirk/Spock is 100% coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb.

Tagged: #fine. the k/s girlies of yesteryear were entirely justified and spock especially has powerfully relatable closeted gay energy #(kirk does not. kirk's energy is powerfully bisexual)

ETA 4/21/2025: Somewhat relatedly, I was actually looking at how the characters' share of overall dialogue breaks down statistically between TOS and TNG. It turns out that, proportionally speaking, you'd have to combine the line shares of Picard, Data, Riker, and Geordi to reach the share of overall dialogue that Kirk and Spock have in TOS (~73% of all TOS dialogue). And this isn't only because Kirk gets so much of the dialogue (he does get a ton of it, though his share drops sharply over the course of the show; IMO he also gets the bulk of the bad dialogue in the later show, despite some great S3 scenes—he's not carrying so much of the show's bad writing earlier on). But the only TNG character who has a higher proportion of overall dialogue than Spock does in TOS is Picard, and only a few percent more at ~31%. Meanwhile, in TOS, there's a steep drop from Spock's share of lines/screen time to McCoy, who has only 13% of the show's dialogue; the line shares only get slighter from there. Meanwhile, Data and Riker both have slightly higher shares of overall dialogue than McCoy, and Geordi comes pretty close to his share as well. TOS gives a lot of centrality to Kirk and Spock compared to even other ST shows.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Danger Zone (Kenny Loggins)

anghraine

Femslash Spirk scrap for today (at a point around the end of “The Conscience of the King”):

“I will admit,” said S’paak, “that I do not find the governor’s presumed fate a particularly grievous one, captain. I see no reason that skill at performance should exempt anyone from justice, much less someone guilty of Kodos’s crimes.”

Captain Kirk’s lips curved into an unconvincing approximation of her typical expression. “His skill at performance wasn’t the difficulty, unfortunately.”

S'paak could not help but wonder what Kirk would have done if events had not taken the matter out of her hands. Dr. McCoy could talk with Karidian’s own theatricality about blood and severed heads and vengeance, but Kirk had been cautious to the point of near folly. True, the Jessica Kirk of Tarsus IV had been a girl of thirteen, and the uncertainty of human memory made caution understandable. But the weight of evidence was so clear.

Even so, Kirk—a woman more prone to leveraging emotion than hiding its existence—had not fully succeeded in concealing her true thoughts. At least, not from S’paak. Kirk had gone from uncertain and reluctant to grim, fearless, admirably unfaltering. S’paak guessed that, in the end, Kirk would not have hesitated to personally consign Kodos to the fate he deserved had circumstances allowed for it. That was not an irrational vendetta, however bitter, but deserved and necessary.

“Those difficulties are past,” said S’paak, “thanks to you, with respect to both him and his daughter.”

“Not me alone. But thank you, I think,” said Kirk. She turned slightly away, though not before S’paak observed the uneven inhalation of her next breath, the quick, repeated flicker of her lashes. “Riley deserves more of your sympathy, though. He’s younger than me, lost more, and I ... I’ve always needed challenges to struggle against. Something to overcome.”

“I see no logical reason for starvation to be among those challenges,” said S’paak flatly, “nor the massacre of civilians, least of all when they are sent to death on no pretext except baseless pseudoscience.”

( Read more... )

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Goin' Back (Freddie Mercury)

rachelmanija

In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.

b_auspol

Legalise Cannabis Australia

Website: https://www.legalisecannabis.org.au/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LegaliseParty

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Legalise.Party

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lcpaustralia/

(My review for the 2021 WA Election. My review for the 2022 Federal Election)

Probably the biggest single issue party on Australian ballots, Legalise Cannabis want to…well you know. Decriminalise and legalise various drugs.

Party Analysis

Legalise Cannabis have an extensive policy on cannabis, but it basically boils down to: treat the drug the same way alcohol and tobacco are treated as legal substances; update road safety laws to deal with medicinal cannabis use and test for impairment not presence; and remove it from all the Crimes Acts as a substance to stop prosecutions. It’s basically an argument to make it a legal drug and to allow personal farming and a bigger legal market to unwind the black and grey markets.

In terms of cannabis use: now that medicinal cannabis is legal nationally, the major complaints are it’s still too expensive to access and the difficulty getting access to a doctor to prescribe it. Some of this may still be that it’s a fairly new legal drug, but I suspect a lot of it is also that most GPs don’t particularly think it’s the best route for pain regulation and a lot of prescriptions are just documenting existing use for access reasons. Medically, the party wants to see cannabis used more widely in the medical industry as they’re sure it will be beneficial.

I also never see cannabis campaigners addressing the fact that if they actually want cannabis regulated ‘like tobacco’ I suspect they don’t mean “only available in locked cabinets that cannot advertise, plastered with warnings about the dangers of use”.

In other policies, there is also the traditional championing of how hemp is a wonder material that you’ve probably heard from your cousin who lives in Nimbin. Hemp as a base material for bio-plastics! Hemp grows fast, make more clothes out of it! Hemp seed as a food source and to make methanol as a power source! Growing hemp and cannabis is an economic benefit for the country, as we can sell the drugs legally! I am generally sceptical of all of these claims: no doubt the plant does have those capacities, but also hemp clothing is basically scratchier linen clothing, and the actual finances of the industry, if it does not already exist, really need to be scruitinised for why not. It’s already legal to grow as long as the level of THC is low, so why aren’t farmers already flocking to this income stream if it’s so financially viable.

And finally: this is a single issue party. There is no discussion on their website of how the party would expect any MPs to vote in terms of any other policies outside their omni-issue. This means that candidate selection is highly important, because parliamentarians have to make decisions and vote on a wide suite of issues. It’s helpful to know their intentions on what they’re going to say when confronted on other issues.

Legalise Cannabis are a party where you always need to check who their candidates are. Previous lead candidates that some Legalise Cannabis voters may not have wanted to elect are Jeremy Buckingham, for the NSW upper house (sexual assault and bullying accusations while a member of the NSW Greens), and Sophie Moermond, for the WA upper house (antivaxxer, transphobe and anti-offshore wind turbines among other problems).

This time around in NSW the lead candidate is Miles Hunt. Hunt is a lawyer who has done work with cannabis possession charges, personal injury law, and also worked as an Industrial Officer for Actor’s Equity in the MEAA, giving him union cred. He’s also the co-founder of a drug harm minimisation organisation, Unharm, a NSW-based charity which focuses on campaigning for making drugs ‘safe and legal’, particularly around increasing pill testing, decreasing sniffer dogs, and working to legalise cannabis use. (I will note he is however not currently a director of the organisation).

Hunt has previously run for the Senate in 2013 as the lead candidate for the Drug Law Reform party where the party polled some 4,000 votes in NSW. From everything I can see, he’s serious about harm minimisation (Unharm is currently running a campaign warning of the dangers of Nitazines; Hunt himself has previously publicly argued for a cocaine boycott over a decade ago due to the harm from the supply chain and cartels), and has previously been willing to put his job on the line for the cause (in 2014 to raise awareness he had a front page article in the SMH in which he admitted to taking drugs, as a avenue to show plenty of professional people did).

Is this party trying to kill me?

No, they want everyone to have a good time getting high safely.

Is this party trying to harm me?

No, they want everyone to have a good time getting high safely.

Conclusion:

As a party, Legalise Cannabis essentially want one issue: legal cannabis, on demand. If that is your primary concern for policy, then this is the party for you. If you want a first preference vote that says that’s a major issue of yours, this is the party for you. However because of that narrow set of issues, how any Senator for the party might vote on other issues is an open question dependent on that person themself, given there’s no strong party platform.

torachan

1. Back to work tomorrow. I am not enthused about that, but I did really enjoy my time off and I felt like being off for three weeks allowed me to actually disconnect more from work than I usually do if I'm just off a couple days or even a week. I did glance at my email and messages every day, but only responded less than ten times and even when I looked at the phone screen to see the messages, I only did so once or twice a day, rather than multiple times throughout the day. Tomorrow will be the start of a huge catch-up (thousands of messages to get through) and I think I will just work from home tomorrow unless something else comes up, so at least it will be a slow easing back into things. And since it's the last week of the month, there are less meetings, which means for time for catching up.

2. We had a lovely time at DCA this morning. I've heard that easter can be a pretty busy day but while it was getting a little busier by the time we left, it was super light in the first few hours and the weather was great.

3. I love getting shots of the cats looking out the window.

got_quiet

I picked up these two CDs at the CD exchange a while back (when I got that Dream Theater album) but now I'm gonna review them. Tl;dr my music sniffing nose did it's job this time. I've picked up a few duds by just buying used CDs completely blind but I guess judging music by it's cover works well enough.

First CD is Prorok Ilja by Patriarch. It turns out this is kind of a group I have already heard. Many years ago for a fandom gift box someone recommended to me the band Batushka, which I enjoyed a lot, and this group is some sort of splinter group that happened after a rights fight. The tone is the same. Orthodox church vibes slathered in black metal and noise. This has been my play on repeat car CD since I got it.

The other CD I got I lost, and I don't remember the name of the band, so I guess I'll have to come back to that when it surfaces.

I've been reading a lot of Arcane fic, though the frantic pace at which I'm doing this has started to slow down a little, so I'm working on something of a "rec" list. It's more of a review list because some of the fic I've enjoyed I've enjoyed despite some rather significant issues, sometimes even with basic SPAG, but imo while it's certainly rude to give an unsolicited critique to an author, the personal journal is fair game.

And I have picked up another batch of snacks from the Eastern European shop. And, good news, the wall of snacks actually has a back side, so there are double the snacks that I originally thought! The bad news is I forgot entirely which ones I had gotten, or which ones I liked or didn't like. I stuck to the newly discovered back wall to prevent dupes.

Today I tried Gulliver from AVK. I didn't notice when I grabbed it, but it's a vegan chocolate bar, which on AVK's website says was developed well before veganism was popular. So it's a hipster vegan bar. It was also twice as big as all the other snacks, and is part of the "wafer covered in chocolate" family. Inside the wafer there is more chocolate, like a mouse, so this was a very rich candy and the 6" bar was more than enough for me. To likely no one's surprise, the quality of the chocolate is significantly better than our counter options here in the US.

I also tried a chocolate flavor frozen cheese curd snack. I think I liked it more than the orange even though the orange was good. It was chocolatey but not too rich or sweet. I'm becoming a real convert to these things, but I don't think they're easy to find without a specialty grocery like this nearby.

torachan

Last day of the Food and Wine Festival so last chance to ride Soarin' Over California before it goes back to Soarin' Over the World.

( Read more... )

torachan

Currently Reading
The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill
26%. The MC is a cleaner who goes in and deep-cleans the houses where people have lain dead and undiscovered for a long time. She stumbles upon a mystery when two of her recent jobs have had the same dried flower at the scene. Pretty interesting so far.

Architectural Follies in America
16%. This is a short, picture-filled book about various odd buildings in the US. Randomly found it in a neighborhood Little Library. It's interesting.

A Drop of Corruption
23%. This has definitely picked up now and I'm a lot more interested in what's going on. Just haven't been making much progress because I've been off work and the majority of my audiobook time is in the car. Also a note on the audiobook, and I had this problem with the otherwise excellent audiobook versions of The Locked Tomb series, but there are pronunciation changes from the first book! I'm guessing that after the first book's audiobook came out, the narrator got feedback from the author and then made changes for the following books, but it's really jarring and I wish that if the author really wanted names/words said a certain way (or in the case of The Locked Tomb, certain accents used) then they would make note of that first, rather than changing mid-series. (And if it's just the narrator making changes rather than author feedback, I wish they wouldn't make those changes, either. Pick a pronunciation and stick to it!)

Hidden Figures
44%.

Recently Finished
Winterborne Home for Mayhem and Mystery
Sequel to Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Virtue. This felt like maybe there was supposed to be more books in the series and it all got wrapped up quickly in the end? It was all right, but I wasn't super into either book.

The Boney Hand
Sequel to Charlie & Frog. Another mystery in the town. This was cute. Seems like the author maybe wanted it to be a series but there haven't been any more books after this.

The Amelia Six
Middle grade book about a group of girls who win an overnight stay at Amelia Earhart's childhood home, but while they're there, her goggles go missing and they have to solve the mystery. It was just all right.

Murderburg
Apparently originally a web comic, this graphic novel is about a small island town inhabited mostly by criminals. The actual name is Muderburg, but everyone calls it Murderburg. The main characters are not even thinly veiled Morticia and Gomez, though the children are not Wednesday and Pugsly. It was fine. Somewhat funny in places but mostly just there.

Break Out
Heavy-handed graphic novel about a world where mysterious and possibly alien cubes appear in the sky and start randomly kidnapping people. But it only happens to teens, so when the governments of the world have done all they can and can't find a way to stop it, they just say well, it's just a few people here and there, we'll just have to live with it. Then the kids save the day. Obviously paralelling school shootings, but it felt like the message was more important than the story itself, because the plot is just one of those types where so many coincidences happen just right that it feels unbelievable.

Do Da Dancin'!: Venice Competition vol. 1-2
I'm not enjoying this quite as much as the original series, but it's good enough that I'll finish it.

Umimachi Diary vol. 8-9
Overall this series was just okay. I originally read the first three volumes on a limited time free promotion and liked them a lot, but when I finally got around to reading the rest of the series now I just found it kind of dragged. Not bad, but just okay.

jesse_the_k

Declaration of Interdependence from queerspacepunk (aka emmett)

A tiny snippet from a lovely thread

i want to be asked to come over and help put my friend's kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it's on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone's at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people's houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it's still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people's mending by my couch

i want to be surrounded by reminders that 'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do

https://queerspacepunk.tumblr.com/search/interdependence

Today I learned there are graphic resources—icons and banners—on the Archive of Our Own!

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Banners%20*a*%20Icons/works

(Sadly AO3’s metatags don’t create RSS feeds, so I can’t add one here.)

New DW community for people who archive information from the web: datahoarders

timeasmymeasure provides resources for would-be archivists without tech skills: https://datahoarders.dreamwidth.org/3299.html

Of particular interest to me:

AO3 Downloader: a life-saver for any person who has thought, "God, I wish I could download all of my bookmarks, but that would take sooo long to do individually." Another Github download which is saved by its thorough instructions!

anghraine

Femslash Spirk update: I’ve been brainstorming how “Amok Time” would even work and am really entertained by one solution I came up with:

The child marriage of Spock and T'Pring becomes one between S'paak and Stonn, who is still infatuated with T'Pring in this universe.
T'Pring remains the architect of the homoerotic duel and it still happens; I think she has already dealt with her own husband in some fashion or another and S'paak is now the only obstacle between her and Stonn.
I’d feel weird about the incredible “Kirk gets slashed across the chest in just such a way as to reveal his nipples” scene happening exactly that way with Jessica; I think the result here is instead very AOTC Padmé.
I think S'paak is surprised and unwillingly impressed by Stonn being capable of such calculating reason as this scheme required, not expecting it of him, and is rather relieved to discover that the real mastermind was T'Pring and her judgment of him was not mistaken.
Spock’s icy line to Stonn about how he may not find T'Pring as enjoyable to live with as to pine after becomes a warning from S'paak to T'Pring about Stonn’s mediocrity.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: SOS (Rihanna)

pedanther

. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.

. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.

. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.

. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.

torachan

1. We went to the farmers market this morning. I wish it was on Sundays instead of Saturdays because we usually go to Disneyland on Saturday morning, but this week we're going tomorrow instead, so we could go to the farmers market today. Sadly the Filipino tamales guy was not there this week, but we did get some of the delicious chocolate dipped macaroons we've gotten the last few times we went.

2. For dinner we ordered pizza from a fancy local place we have been meaning to try for years and never get around to. Sadly the one pizza I was most interested in from their menu was not available (butternut squash), but we got a zucchini one and a meat lovers one and both were very tasty. Definitely would order from there in the future, though it's not an every day place, that's for sure.

3. Usually I make a chocolate sheet cake for Carla's birthday but because we were out of town, I totally forgot about it, until randomly a channel Carla follows on youtube had a video about it, so I decided to make it today. I don't bake very much anymore and this cake is a lot of work, but it's soooooo good. After I'd already started mixing ingredients, Carla mentioned making a half-batch, but it was too late by then, but for next time I definitely will. We hardly use our large oven anymore and it's become a cupboard instead, so it has to be made in two small sheet pans to fit in the Breville, and that made it a little more annoying, plus we just don't need that much cake. I can give a good chunk to Alexander to take home with him tomorrow, at least.

4. Chloe and Molly were twinning on the bed.

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