petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-12-19 09:36 pm
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Story Index 2025

Leitmotif of the year:
I can't focus on long things, but by all that's unholy, I can write limericks and drabbles! I wrote other things, too, but golly.

My best story of this year:
Stand back, I'm going to try science!, in which Obi-Wan accidentally gives Anakin a complex about his body, and Anakin 3D prints himself helpful things. This one is deeply silly, and yet affectionate.

My favorite and/or truest story of this year:
The leaves grow bright before they fall wins this one for me, with Anakin and Obi-Wan doing the Hades and Persephone dance, in their own particular, backward, inside-out and upside-down sort of way.

Read on )
cofax7: Smash Williams smiling (FNL - Smash Glee)
cofax7 ([personal profile] cofax7) wrote2025-12-19 06:40 pm
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Staycation!

I probably didn't need to, but I have taken all of next week and the following Monday off. My workload is fucking insane but fuckit, I can only do what I can do, as multiple people told me this week.

I have just borrowed Cahokia Jazz and a YA novel by EK Johnston from the library, so I'm set for that. And I'm meeting my oldest friend in the world in LA next month, so she can go to the desert for the first time, so we're sending each other links and stuff, and that's fun.

Tonight I will set up the batter for those insane Dark and Stormy cookies -- though I do them as bars, it's so much easier and the texture is more controllable -- and tomorrow I will make a crustless quiche for my BIL's birthday. Sunday is a cookie exchange, Monday is wrapping. It's gonna be a nice week, or it would be if not for all the rain.

Why did the rain wait until I was on vacation?

Happy holidays to y'all!
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote in [community profile] followfriday2025-12-19 03:52 am
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Follow Friday 12-19-25

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

kass: Yuletide dreidls (dreidl)
kass ([personal profile] kass) wrote2025-12-18 12:19 pm
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This made me laugh a lot

Found via [personal profile] laurashapiro, this is so worth one minute of your time. The last couplet in this clip is just -- ::chef's kiss!::

Hot Hanukkah
petra: (Expanse - Chrisjen and Bobbie)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-12-17 09:55 pm
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If there's one thing I learned from finishing The Expanse novels

I was right to say I do not understand one goddamn thing that happens in Amos Burton's head when I asked for him for Yuletide.

I don't know that I have the Chrisjen Avasarala/Bobbie Draper series of my heart in my fingers, but I will be over here shippin' it like whoa.

Overall, they were a lovely ride. The audiobook reader learned to pronounce gimbals very late in the canon, and got the stress pattern wrong in Avasarala, but was quite good at voice distinction, and definitely didn't do the All Women are Falsetto crap.
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-12-17 06:27 pm

So you want to listen to some poetry

[personal profile] hannah and James Marsters have got you.

1969 by Alex Dimitrov is Hannah's recommendation to start with, and it's a banger. Wander the archive of that tumblr and enjoy!
runpunkrun: john sheppard and teyla emmagan in uniform and standing in a rocky streambed (hold the stillness exactly before us)
Punk ([personal profile] runpunkrun) wrote2025-12-15 10:44 am

#685, Bashō

with lightning
one is not enlightened
how valuable
     -1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

俳句 )
kass: Night Vale logo (nightvale)
kass ([personal profile] kass) wrote2025-12-15 11:39 am
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Night Vale

I haven't listened to Night Vale in a few years, but I happened to see this mentioned by one of the creators on bluesky and I am listening now and it is so weird and delightful.

Welcome to Night Vale, ep 280: The Story of Hanukkah

I'm not sure I knew that Cecil and Carlos are both canonically Jewish? (Or at least -- Cecil has a bubbe and a zaide, from whom he inherited a chanukiyah?) Though I suppose the fact of a floating cat named Choshech should've tipped me off.

(Needless to say, the story of Chanukah articulated in this episode does not initially seem to have anything to do with Chanukah. But stick with it. It's wonderful.)
lizbee: A sketch of myself (Default)
lizbee ([personal profile] lizbee) wrote2025-12-14 09:36 am
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Please recommend books about the French Revolution

I started playing Assassin's Creed: Unity and realised that I know almost nothing about the French Revolution. We did study it in grade 10, but I missed a lot of time due to a never-identified virus -- I was out for most of the American Revolution and all of the French, and mostly passed the class because I knew more about the Chinese Communist Revolution than my teacher. (It's not her fault, she was an art teacher who was roped in to teach history for ... reasons which I'm sure made sense at the time.) 

Anyway, I've decided to fill the gap in my knowledge. I started out by trying to listen to The Rest Is History, a podcast my mum recommended, but the hosts are two English men, and they spend a weird amount of time comparing Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle, but in a derogatory "maybe we should decapitate the Duchess of Sussex" way that I did not care for. 

Then I read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, which I think is from 1980. It was a solemn, dispassionate accounting of events and personalities, but didn't get into the question of, for example, why the Parisian mob went from zero to heads on pikes in the storming of the Bastille. 

I've requested an inter-library loan for Citizens by Simon Schama, which I've seen recommended a lot, but I would also be eager to read a history that's not ... British? Because the British, for understandable reasons (I guess) weren't really down with the beheading of the monarch and the end of the monarchy (even though they did it first), and I feel like a pro-aristocratic bias has pervaded a lot of what I've encountered. And obviously the Terror was bad, but, like, maybe Robespierre was an asexual smol bean who was a convenient scapegoat! I'm open to the possibility! 

I am open to suggestions, is what I'm saying. 
runpunkrun: silverware laid out on a cloth napkin (gather yon utensils)
Punk ([personal profile] runpunkrun) wrote2025-12-13 11:13 am

there are two kinds of products in the world

We have these envelopes I use to half-assedly organize coupons. After our local Kroger analogue recently remodeled, I had to rename some of the envelopes because they dissolved the "natural" section—where I did most of my dairy-free, gluten-free shopping—and moved those products around the store.

So now the "deli & meat" envelope has "dairy & non-dairy" added to it, which amuses me every time I get it out because "dairy & non-dairy" encompasses everything in the universe.
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote in [community profile] followfriday2025-12-12 01:06 am
Entry tags:

Follow Friday 12-12-25

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

petra: Paul Gross in drag looking blank (Ms Fraser - Secretly Canadian)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-12-10 09:53 pm

Make my wish come true - due South drabble, Food Bank Thank-You

[personal profile] ride_4ever just let me know about a donation, so I wrote:

Make my wish come true (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Additional Tags: Drabble, Christmas Fluff
Summary:

Ray observes a holiday tradition.


*

If you donate 25 USD in cash or in kind to a food bank or food pantry, tell me about it and I'll write for you!
petra: A woman grinning broadly (Shirley - Good day)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-12-10 09:23 pm
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Cards will not arrive in time for the holidays

Happy "It's December Tenth" to all who observe it.

I have not written my Dark Outside pieces yet, far less addressed and sent the mail, so I will send cards When I Get To It.

I am still going to write for people; it'll just be in your email inbox come Solstice, not your physical mailbox come whenever. People who just wanted cards will get cards at some date TBD.
runpunkrun: Dana Scully reading Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' in the style of a poster you'd find in your school library, text: Read. (reading)
Punk ([personal profile] runpunkrun) wrote2025-12-10 09:45 am
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Slippery Creatures, by K.J. Charles

Will Darling's inherited his uncle's used bookshop and also a secret that everyone in London is trying to beat out of him. After Lord Arthur "Kim" Secretan—handsome, charming, rich—rescues him from one of these numerous thugs, Will accepts his help in searching the bookshop for whatever it was his uncle was hiding. Sex, intrigue, and hats (it's the 1920s) ensue.

I don't know, gang, I just didn't vibe with these two, and the many sex scenes kind of demand that you do. I would have preferred a higher story to horny ratio; as it is, it's pretty much 1:1. But, personal tastes aside, it's not a bad book, and other readers have found it delightful, so don't let me scare you off.

Contains: explicit m/m sex, including some terms so deeply unsexy I can only assume they're historically accurate; violence; references to WWI, trench warfare, infectious disease, and biological weapons.