geekturnedvamp | Reading

The YouTube Channel Parkrose Permaculture is doing a video series on Nonviolent Resistance.

With military invading our cities, I think this is very helpful knowledge to have. It comes from the information this person obtained from attending a Nonviolent Resistance Bootcamp. They live in Portland, Oregon, one of the places troops have been sent in a show of force against non-violent citizens exercising their Constitutional Rights, so they are a good source of factual information for what's really going on there, as well. They are calm, rational, hopeful and insightful and I've found their videos very helpful in putting things in perspective when I'm starting to freak out. They aren't pandering to sensationalism the way many channels do. I highly recommend all their videos.

Tags:

Before tonight's screening of Collateral - still astonishingly good and an excellent crowd, plenty of laughs and gasps - I spoke to someone else who'd also gotten there early, but instead of being early for the 7PM Collateral showing, they were early for the 9:15 screening of something completely different. They're both on the same night, both in the same screening room, and it's an easy, understandable thing to get confused. This person also had time to head out and grab some food, and their friend who was meeting them was understanding about the situation.

Weirdly, though, this person didn't say things like "how foolish of me" or "I've got time to grab something" or "this is an easy mistake and I'll remember this to attempt to avoid such things again." What they said were things like "I can't read" and "I'm such an idiot" and generally insulting themselves. It's got me baffled as to why someone would take that route and go for those reactions, and I can only hope they grow out of it.

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: nothing now

( i.e., the farmboys niche interest corner )

( Anyway, here's a small assortment of screencaps from their 2025 concerts )

Tags:

I’ve been rereading Stephen King for comfort reasons, and I have a couple of observations. First, The Dead Zone—which posits political assassination as an actual solution to a potential presidential madman—hits a bit different these days. Second (and not unrelatedly), while I am happy enough to get the expanded version of The Stand, it was a huge mistake for King to try to change the setting from 1980 to 1990; random updated pop culture references can’t disguise the fact that America changed substantially in that decade, such that characters and settings that made sense in 1980 were no longer plausible in 1990. The teenaged, white Nick Andros would almost certainly not have used the word “Negro” to describe an old woman in 1990. The singer Larry Underwood would have different beliefs about music from the 70s, when he was a young child rather than a teen/early adult. From attitudes towards single mothers to how racism was expressed to the dumping practices of fabric mills, the revised version still reads like 1980, but with a mention of rap on the radio, and it’s not good.

Tags:

au: king

August 26 to October 8 for five seasons of TV isn't as fast as I've done some shows, and it's still nice to log how long these things can take. It's been an excellent run of TV and I'm still happy I watched it when I did.

Now, to find a time to tackle the DVD special features.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tucked Away - The Goo Goo Dolls

A while ago,

minim_calibre asked me if I'd read any Kate Atkinson and I said I had, but it was very long ago--I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the first Jackson Brodie book after I fell in love with the Case Histories TV series with Jason Isaacs. She ended up buying me two books she'd read, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and I finally had the chance to start on the first one, which is like four inches thick so felt pretty daunting. I'd been so busy with work (some truly awful, awful books [mygodihateYAsomuch] and one really good one that I wasn't sure I could do it, but I really wanted to keep my reading streak going. It's been so wonderful to reclaim the reading part of my life, I can't even tell you. It's also hugely inspirational to my own writing when I'm reading really good fiction--or heck even nonfiction.

If you've never read Life After Life, I can highly, highly recommend it. It'd be easy to say it's essentially a time loop story/multiple timeline tale, where little decisions or events have history-altering effects both personal and global, but that barely touches on the story. I just loved it and I'm looking forward to the related book about one of the characters, I hope it's as un-put-downable as Life After Life.

I discovered there was a BBC four-part limited series of it a couple years ago, on Prime in the US, and it was...okay. It should have been at least six episodes, though, because a book that sprawling requires a lot more time--there were significant cuts to the story that I think any fan of the book would be a bit twitchy about, and a major change to the ending. Still, a lot of good actors and it was nice to see some of the characters come to life.

It's just so nice to feel like I can read again after all these years. Like when I have my nose in a screen, it's because it's something that adds a little value in my life, rather than the horrible garbage of everyday life.

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a pumpkin patch and U-pick farm, because she's very into the gourds and cucurbits for art, and I wanted to have a nice outing. We lucked out and got the most spectacularly perfect, sunny day in the 70s, and I found a couple of beautiful pastel pumpkins (one kind of a mottled salmon and blue-green and the other a pale blue) as well as a starfish-shaped gourd to buy, even though I've never been into Halloween at all. I'm not sure if I'll put them out on the back porch or the front, the front's pretty crowded and small, but I think that's the "obvious" place for a Hallloweeny decoration. I also bought some apples from the farm's produce side, and the best sweet corn on the cob I have ever tasted in my life. It was so good we were texting each other about it. If I didn't live over an hour away, I would have driven right back there for more corn.

Everyone always says fall is their favorite season, but I think if you live somewhere where it is relatively dry in October, and the leaves change early, sure, it'd be fine, but in the PNW it's just suddenly cold, super wet, and miserably gray. The leaves are just soggy masses, so you don't get to wander outside in piles of dry leaves, wearing your woolen sweaters and scarves, feeling the sun on your face while you drink your punkin spice bullshit drinks. Nope, instead you have to wear your Gore-Tex jackets and waterproof shoes and hope your street won't flood when the heavy rains have nowhere to go because everything's clogged with slimy leaves. Bleh. Give me spring any day.

My numbers have been holding steady at a place where it looks like remission, though no one wants to say it is. I could have a bone marrow biopsy, and may still do that, to determine whether I really am there, but honestly, then I'm just going to be doing pretty much the same thing I'm doing now, because I'm essentially doing what Dr. Li does for maintenance on people who've gone through stem cell transplants or the new hotness, CAR-T cell therapy. I am sure there'll be some fiddling with drugs, but considering the nightmare of the insurance situations right now, I don't know what will happen.

I had a mammogram today and a DEXA scan (which just seems so nuts to me, as it's for osteoporosis and I feel like having bone marrow cancer means that osteoporosis is kind of a silly thing to worry about), and next week I go to the dermatologist, and hopefully I will get some of these things done before the nazi pricks can take everything away.

As always happens, at the mammogram, the technician, who was nice and did a pretty good job of not hurting me, mentioned knowing someone with multiple myeloma who's had it for 18 years now. I cannot tell you how often someone tells me about their family member/friend/co-worker who has it and who's lived with it for X years, and I just...I have to smile and say oh wow. I HATE IT.

It used to be a death sentence, but until just recently, there were new drugs being approved constantly so the survival rates and times have been increasing constantly, but it's by no means an easy survival for most, and there is no such thing as a "cure" where it disappears completely. It always comes back, and I've been confronted a lot lately with that because some people in our support group have died, both of whom had lived with it for a long time, going back into treatment each time it returned. It always does. Ugh, I wish people would shut the fuck up about it. I know they think they're being positive for me, but it's just not as simple as they think.

Otherwise, I just keep plugging along. Blues is definitely getting pretty frail and fragile, but his appetite is great, so I'm hoping he hangs on for a while longer. He has a concerning thing on his lower jaw that might be a cyst or might be cancer or anything in between, but it's in a tricky spot, so all we can do is watch it for now.

I know there are other things I wanted to talk about--including my rewatches of everything from the X-Files to the Good Place--but I'll save that for another post, this one's long and boring enough!

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags:

There are now 8 days of limericks in the Kinktober 2025 series. The Blindfold poem is even more deliberately vague about the pairing than the others. I would love to know how people read it!

Current Mood: accomplished

Tags:

Love you and miss you forever, mom.

Per Trans News Network, there are currently 10 bills on Gavin Newsom's desk that support LBGQT+ rights:

Trans Rights Bills

AB 82 / SB 497 – These privacy-focused bills provide needed confidentiality for patients, providers, and volunteers involved with trans healthcare. AB 82 offers important protections for reproductive healthcare, and prevents prescription data about drugs like testosterone and mifepristone from being stored in databases that could be accessible by other states.
AB 1084 / SB 59 – This pair of legal name change bills includes one that streamlines the process of updating legal name and gender, and another to ensure that older court records of name changes can’t be used to out or dox trans people.
SB 418 – Bolsters nondiscrimination protections for health insurance plans and requires the plans to cover up to a 12-month supply of prescription hormones.

LGBTQ+ Rights Bills

AB 554 – Requires insurance coverage of all FDA-approved medications that prevent HIV such as PreP, without prior authorization.
AB 727 – Mandates that schools and universities must provide all youth suicide hotline information, including numbers for LGBTQ+ hotlines in the wake of Trump’s defunding of the Trevor Project hotline.
AB 678 – Requires state housing programs to coordinate with LGBTQ+ communities to ensure homelessness programs remain inclusive and nondiscriminatory for queer people experiencing homelessness, directly combatting federal efforts to force homeless shelters to ban trans people.
SB 590 – Expands paid family leave protections to include the diverse caregiving needs of queer families.
SB 450 – Clarifies California adoption law to allow for LGBTQ+ couples who live outside of California to adopt children born in the state through California proceedings, which are more inclusive than many other states.

Call him at (916) 445-2841 to ask him to sign these bills into law.

When the clouds clear enough, and the moon comes out, it's almost a surprise - only almost, because you've seen it for ages, you know exactly where it is, but it's only when the clouds clear enough and the circle of the moon shows itself that you see it for what it is and not the light it gives. Because until the clouds clear, all you see is the moon's light. You don't see the moon for itself, for what it is, not quite yet. Standing up on the roof, looking skyward, all you see are the clouds and the light, not the moon. You see the reflection, not the thing itself.

Standing up there, the second night of Sukkot, the second night of the yearly harvest festival, the celebration that comes with the night of the full moon, I could see where the moon was by the light that pushed through the dense, dark clouds. Not the celestial body itself, but its light, its reminders and indicators of where and what it was. I could see where the moon was, and I could see, farther south, the breaks in the clouds that I knew would let me see it. I'd come from a Sukkah party of sorts, a dinner at a local synagogue that wasn't so much choreographed as it was loosely hosted: a sukkah built on the rooftop, with people bringing food of their own to have dinner in a sukkah and fulfill the requirements of the holiday. I talked about Greek museums, and riding the metaphor to work in Athens, and Hadrian's wall, and Los Angeles' architecture, and probably a dozen other topics, all while eating food and drinking wine in the temporary structure on the rooftop. There was some wine left over. I took the bottle with me to another rooftop. My parents' building doesn't close its roof the way my own building's does. My father wanted to see if he could see the moon.

It wasn't so much that he could see it as it was that he could see where it was. The clouds were moving south to north, along the eastern part of the sky. To the north, it was largely clear; to the south, the nighttime clouds loomed dark and uncaring, taking up as much of the sky as they could. I could see where they were thin and weak, and stayed to watch. My father had to go, satisfying himself by seeing where the moon was. I waited to see it, if I could. I knew I could, if I waited. I waited to open up the bottle and drink its remains when I saw the moon. I didn't wait long. The spinning of the earth and the motion of the clouds had them thin out and open up so it was more than seeing the light behind the clouds telling me where the moon was: it was seeing the moon itself. Waiting and watching, the darkness stopped for the light to come. It wasn't cold on the roof, not with the thick dress I was wearing and not with the wine I was drinking. The clouds weren't enough to hide the moon from me anymore. The faint spectrum around it, the blues and reds reflected by the thinnest clouds making a rainbow halo, told me exactly what I was seeing. The faintest reflection of sunlight turned into the strongest moonlight.

I watched the moon, and drank the wine. I looked at the clouds, and drank the last of the wine. I left when I was ready, and I don't know when next I'll see it - just that I'll remember having seen it tonight.

Current Mood: drunk
Current Music: A Plague on Both Your Horses - Jack Harris

The penultimate update on

periru3 and my vid album Jagged Little Slayer, a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alanis Morissette. Here are our most recent two:

Title: Not the Doctor
Character/Pairing: Anya/Xander
Summary: I don't wanna be the glue that holds your pieces together

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Title: Wake Up
Character/Pairing: Jonathan, Andrew, Warren
Summary: What goes around never comes around to you

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Tags:

tv: buffy the vampire slayer

Somehow, I missed that William Finn passed on April 7, 2025, until I found out from an AO3 comment.

His work regarding death, loss, and grief is extensive; this is my favorite.

And if that made you cry, let this one, sung by the man himself, make you laugh.

May his memory be a blessing.

Current Mood: oh no
Current Music: Anytime the earth moves, I'll be around

Tags:

This is the third novel of R. F. Kuang I've read (after being impressed by the The Poppy Wars, first volume, but also emotionally so exhausted I didn't read the rest of the trilogy, amused and captivated in an emotionally distant way by Yellowface, and turned so much by Babel that I only read the first twenty pages or so and then gave up), and I think my favourite so far. There is academic satire but also genuine emotion throughout, there is great ambition epically realised (i.e. writing a trip to the underworld in the grand tradition of all the obvious suspects, but specifically one that reflects the present), and the horror parts hit home in a way that feels not derivative but specific for this particular version. (The novel is set in a universe where magic is real, but isn't concerned with how this altered history or not, just what it means you can study it at university.) Our main character, Alice Law, is the kind of messy, complicated and morally ambiguous (and not in a "nice" way) woman the author specializes in, though for me personally preferable because I had the sense of the narrative being on board with what it was saying about Alice's strengths and weaknesses through her initially very skewered perspective. Also she had a genuine learning process through that trip through the Underworld, and... but that would be spoilery.

( Spoilers realize the Underworld is modelled on a British University )

Also improving my week: This trailer for Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Frankenstein:

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Bamberg

Tags:

About the only "life hack" of any sort I can reasonably advise: save those liquid medicine measuring cups. They're amazing for cooking and baking. A total of 3 teaspoons of this and that? Easily tossed in. A tablespoon of a liquid? Measure it out and then set the little cup down onto a flat surface. They're astonishingly handy to the point I'm routinely pleased at them.

There may well be a nicely polished, stainless steel version of these little cups at a restaurant supply store somewhere, or well-crafted ceramic equivalents, but neither of those also give me the rewarding feeling of having found a new use for an old object.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: nothing now

Maybe It Might Be Love (1494 words) by anr
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Grease (1978)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kenickie/Betty Rizzo
Characters: Kenickie (Grease), Betty Rizzo
Additional Tags: Post-Movie, Kissing, Touching, engagement ring - Freeform, Marriage Proposal, Wedding Planning
Summary: She takes pity on him. "Don't worry about it, Kenick. I'm not gonna hold you to it." She tries to keep her tone light and not mean, not disappointed. "Your offer? You can take it back."

He blinks, surprised. "You're sayin' no?"

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Night Train - Black Sally Lane

Tags:

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Here is my series (in progress) for Kinktober 2025. Every day will be at least one limerick, with some verse cycles when I get too inspired to constrain myself to one at a go.

Thus far, I am leaning in the Obi-Wan/Anakin + Padmé on bass direction. There may be other guest stars. We'll see! Each day is posted separately for tagging purposes.

The prompt list I am using is here. Put in a plug for your favorite and we'll see what I can manage!

Current Mood: poetically inclined
Current Music: Be prepared! That's the Boy Scouts' marching song!

Tags:

kinktober: 2025

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Tags:

This is in the same vein of Politics in Space as the time I wrote Josh Lyman of The West Wing being Princess Leia Organa's political advisor because she'd inherited him from her father, ~~Matt Santos~~ ~~Jimmy Smits~~ Bail Organa, and then they observed Space Passover.

Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It (link is very sweary) deserves someone he can really look up to (metaphorically) and cuss out (effectively).

I propose Chrisjen Avasarala of the Expanse (link is very sweary and also spoilery), who can give as good as she gets in the cussin' department. Malcolm can't physically look up to her, as she is a tiny Indian (subcontinent) grandmother who dresses fabulously. That won't stop her from kicking his ass.

I'm not sure he'd approve of her tactics, but he's on Team Earth all the way, unless one takes Peter Capaldi's legginess and runs with it to the wonderful world of Malcolm Tucker, Belter, sasa?

I am in the position of having studied English, Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin to the point of being able to mostly follow Belter Creole in audiobook form, where there are no footnotes to be had nor glossaries. Hell if that means I can write it, let alone write Malcolm Tucker Swearing in it, but now I want to try.

Kindly remind me that only about one other person on Earth, Mars, or in the Belt or Jovian system would understand this goddamn story, so it's not worth the effort, because I am very tempted. Unless of course it sounds like fun to you, in which case, can I get a beta offer?

Current Mood: i still have an icon for this
Current Music: In which I just want an excuse to write "cunt" twenty times

Tags:

Posting this by request, as she wrote it:

The Boston Globe is soliciting opinions on whether or not foster parents's views on children being queer or trans should be taken into account.

MSN link

Basically, we have to explain not only that water is wet but that if foster parents are allowed to dunk a trans kid into the tank of their transphobia the kid can drown in there. The Globe's editorial board termed this a matter of "personal views" and of DCF demanding foster parents be "perfect", which is glaringly disingenuous but needs to be spelled out to hopefully influence public opinion.

The Globe's address is community@boston.com.

Tags:

And when the internet gives me things like this short about Mark Hamill vis-à-vis Batman: The Animated Series, what can I do but weep and ship and weep and ship?

(It was SO HARD to pick an icon for this post. Too many options!)

Current Mood: oh my heart
Current Music: You'd be so nice, you'd be paradise

Tags:

Guardian: Nearly 100 years after her death, Oxford’s first female Indigenous scholar honoured

Reading the lost diary of the first indigenous woman to study at Oxford (by her descendant June Northcroft Grant, who accepted Papakura's MPhil certificate at the ceremony)

What a cool person and fascinating life; really interesting and impressive to see someone succeeding in doing academic scholarship on an Indigenous group from within that group, in that time period.

Someone's finally cast Francesca Mills as Ophelia:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2025/oct/01/hamlet-national-theatre-hiran-abeysekera-shakespeare-in-pictures

Which I have been saying should happen for six years, since seeing her in Barrie Rutter's Two Noble Kinsmen as the Jailer's Daughter (a role which I described as "semi-comic shitty-first-draft Ophelia"). Also Juliet now please, casting directors.

Tags:

( 32 books, 5 comic books, 5 movies, 1 landmark tour, and 13 episodes of TV. )

( Notes on Alien Earth, Margo's Got Money Troubles, Peacemaker, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. )

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Peacemaker: The Official Podcast

Tags:

SO: "'We sell topsoil.' I never see anyone saying they sell bottomsoil."

Me: "I want my soil to be vers."

SO: "Hm?"

Me: "Soil that switches between top and bottom. I believe it's short for versatile, but I never inquired."

SO: "Maybe it's short for Versailles."

Tags:

real life

Sign up here.

If you need an AO3 invite, please contact the mods.

For those with a need to review AO3 processes:
HLH Shortcuts AO3 Signup Guide by @teratornis
HLH Shortcuts AO3 Submission Guide by @teratornis
How to Default

Your mods strongly encourage the use of betareaders, whether affiliated with the exchange or outside the exchange:
Betareaders Wanted/Betareaders Available

In case you need to review the 2025 dates:

Sign Ups: October 1 to October 11, 2025 11:59PM CDT on AO3
Assignments handed out: no later than October 14, 2025
Default deadline: November 20, 2025
Submission deadline: December 15, 2025
First story posted: December 20, 2025

Please share far and wide.

Tags:

Well, the government shutdown happened. What resources are out there for those dependent on the services that just disappeared?

Current Mood: angry

Tags:

Dear Festividder,

Thanks so much for making me a vid! I requested the maximum amount of fandoms this year, and I'm excited to see what you will do for any one of them! Please feel free to make any kind of vid you want - happy, sad, pensive, goofy... anything is great with me. Essentially, if you’re into the vid you’re making, I’ll be into the vid you’re making! I'll add some specific things I like about each fandom below, but if you already have an idea or want to do something else, feel free to go with it.

Just a few DNWs:
1. Close-ups of realistic-looking fish. This would mainly come up in the cooking-related fandoms - basically, wide shot of someone gutting a fish? OK. Close-up of fish staring deep into my soul? Not OK. Feel free to run this past

kuwdora if you're not sure!)

2. Please don’t use dialogue from the source over music, as I find it distracting. Other diegetic sound (like sound effects) are great, an intro or tag with dialogue are fine, and using unusual audio like poetry as your “music” is fine! I just don’t love dialogue from the source being used throughout the vid.

Music:
As I mentioned above, pretty open to whatever kind of audio you want to use, including poetry, spoken word, or whatever else you can think of. I am a strong believer in using whatever kind of music/audio that works best for the vid, even if it's not something I'd normally listen to, but if you want to know what I like, I am generally into pop, rock, alternative, anything from the 90s, and classic rock. I'd prefer no Taylor Swift if you can avoid her music, but if you have a genius idea and you truly need to make an I Am Bread vid to Love Story, I'm not going to be mad about it.

COOKING FANDOMS!

Top Chef (US)
Listen, I know this fandom has a ridiculous amount of source. I do not want this to be stressful for you. Feel free to pick your favorite season, some kind of thread throughout all of it that you want to focus on, just a vid of yummy food, quickfire disasters, etc.

kuwdora and I have watched 21 of the 22 seasons of Top Chef over the past year and a half (and are currently watching our final one) and it's just been a nice time. We just really love the way they are all so passionate about food. This show has also inspired me to start cooking!

Bryan & Michael Voltaggio RPF
I just really enjoy their dynamic, and think it would be fun to see a vid of the two of them. This type of sibling rivalry sounds like my worst nightmare, but it works for them, and I love that they support each other, but are still very competitive. The fact that they're both ridiculously talented in their own ways makes them so fun to watch. Feel free to either stick to Top Chef footage, or use anything else you can find.

Kristen Kish RPF
Kristen is one of my favorite Top Chef people! I would love a vid that shows her passion for cooking, her friendships with fellow chefs and judges, and especially how she is not afraid to cry and generally show her emotions. Again, feel free to stick to Top Chef (and/or Top Chef adjacent) footage if you want, but you're welcome to use whatever other source you can find.

VIDEO GAMES!

Date Everything! (Sassy Chap Games Video Game)
I absolutely love the creativity of this game. The incredibly detailed costumes! The sheer ridiculousness of dating your bathtub! I know someone could make something really fun out of the visuals of this source.

I Am Bread (Video Game)
Another game that I think would just make a really fun vid. You are a piece of bread, desperately trying to make it to the toaster to become toast. It's harder than you'd think.

Tiny Bookshop (Video Game)
This game was released a few months ago, and I'm absolutely obsessed with it. You drive a little mobile bookshop around a small seaside town, making friends with the locals, helping them with their quests, but best of all... RECOMMENDING THEM BOOKS! Real book titles, for the most part! The design of this game is so cozy and lovely. I also love that the characters are super diverse, as are the featured books. I'd love to see what someone can do with this.

EVERYTHING ELSE!

Haunted Mansion (2023) [SAFETY]
Copying and pasting this from past years because it's still true: I expected to enjoy this movie going in, but it surprised me with how emotional it was! It was a lot of fun and made me belly-laugh several times, but it also made me cry with how much it had to say about grief. I'd be really happy with a vid about Ben and/or Travis and how they help each other heal, or I'd be just as happy with a vid celebrating how fun the cast of characters is (including the ghosties!)

The Pitt (TV)
This show <3 I am finishing it up now, and it's just so good. There's a lot you can do with this source, and yet I feel like it'd be so difficult to vid. I'd love a general vid of the whole ensemble; or maybe something about the strength of showing kindness and empathy in difficult situations; maybe something about the difficulties of being understaffed and overwhelmed; or I'd be happy with a character study. My favorite characters are Doctors Mohan, McKay, King, Collins, & Robby, if that helps!

The Traitors (US TV 2023)
This show is so over the top, and

kuwdora and I have had so much fun watching it together. The outfits! The secrets and backstabbing! The twists and turns! So much meme-worthy (and vid-worthy) content. Have fun with this one! Feel free to stick to one season or use all three (possibly four by the time go-live happens?)

Nickelodeon GUTS (TV)
I loved this show so much as a kid and always wanted to be on it (I am not particularly athletic so probably wouldn't have done very well, but tbh most of the kids are pretty terrible at these games, so who knows). I'd love some Aggro Crag action, but a Spill Your Guts focused vid could also be fun. Baby Mike O'Malley had so much energy, and I absolutely had a crush on Mo.

While I was in Wales, when I wasn't hiking, collapsing after hiking, drinking local beer after hiking, or blogging, I read Emily Skidmore's True Sex, and I recommend it highly to those of you who are interested in queer history! She traces the lives of eighteen American trans men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is fascinating in itself, but part of her focus is that, while queer history has tended to focus on cities and the development of queer communities in them, these men pretty much all lived in small cities, towns, or rural areas, and clearly did so by choice in most or all cases. I mean, many of them moved around a lot; they could have moved to Chicago, but they stayed in Nowheresville. And they could sometimes be welcomed and treated as men there even when their communities knew they were AFAB.

Also, of course, a significant number were only publicly revealed as AFAB after years of living as men, sometimes only after their deaths. Skidmore doesn't spend a lot of time on this, but to me that means that there were a lot more stealth trans men who never got found out at all.

I did want her to dig deeper into racial issues, She often ties the ability to live as a man to white privilege, but I think that tie is weak without a discussion of the experiences of, and community acceptance of, black (or other nonwhite) trans men, which she doesn’t really offer.

Her research is impressive, and it's smoothly readable, not jargony. I recommend it highly!

Because it's the world we live in, I got a virtual consultation on my wallet today. There's an assortment of leather repair shops in New York City, and they now offer the option of having someone check out a piece through video conferencing rather than legging it out to Midtown. My wallet's been getting fairly ragged for a while, so I figured it was time to look into seeing if it could be fixed. It turns out, not so much. The guy took one look at it and said that it probably wasn't possible, given the overall wear and weathering and and rips at the seams, and even fixing up the seams would be difficult. He gave a timetable of several days, if not weeks, and a price point of a few hundred dollars.

The thing about this wallet that's got me considering that price and timetable is that this is my wallet. To be clear, this is my only wallet. To be even more precise, this is still my first wallet. It's the wallet my parents bought for me when I'd have been five or six, old enough to be trusted with one. To illustrate how long I've had it, it's got the address and phone number of the house I grew up in. My hometown changed its area codes in 1997, and the number in my wallet has the old area code. When I told the leather guy I'd had it for at least 30 years, I wasn't exaggerating.

Besides the sheer emotional attachment to this thing, it's also a good wallet. It's got a clear slot for emergency contact information, it's got an ID pocket, it's got six thin credit card sleeves and a larger pocket for a few more, it's got a lot of room for bills, and it's got a coin purse. A coin purse! With a clasp! A coin purse with two pockets, one I use for pennies and one I use for all the other coins to make exact change that much easier to manage. That's not a feature on most modern wallets. It's barely a feature on vintage wallets, at least going by what's being offered on eBay.

A few hundred dollars to fix this would still be getting my money's worth out of this wallet. I'm also thinking that given I've had this over thirty years, it might be time to buy a second wallet for a good deal less than a few hundred dollars. Provided, that is, I can find one that's also capable of doing what this one does. Hopefully with all the same features, ideally for at least another thirty years.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Calico Train - Steve Martin

Mirror Kukalaka (Star Trek) is a searchable tag on AO3.

As of this writing, Mirror Spot (Star Trek) is not.

I am so glad that people are examining the question, "But what if the teddy bear was evil?"

Spot, too, deserves a rampage, being the best kitty.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Fanfare for the Common Bajoran (the DS9 theme, which is not called that)

Tags:

Darth Real Life hounds my every step these days, but I did manage to watch the ( Alien: Earth )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Munich

Tags:

I used part of my stuck-in-bed-with-owies day to catch up on my story index of 2025, at the end of which I discovered I never finished updating the one from 2024. 2024 will have to wait, because at the moment I am just floored by how many fucking limericks I have written this year.

If you subscribe to me on AO3 and you don't like my poetry, I am so, so sorry (insincere). This will continue unabated, as I just came to the (un)fortunate realization that I can do limericks for Kinktober.

For anyone whose ears perked up at the mention of Kinktober, here's a possible kink list for you.

Current Mood: poetic
Current Music: The apples fermented inside the lamented

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: hopeful

Look Up From the Pavement (1941 words) by anr
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fear the Walking Dead (TV), The Walking Dead - All Media Types
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alicia Clark/Nick Clark
Characters: Alicia Clark, Nick Clark
Additional Tags: Incest, Fantasizing, Sex, 5 Times, Pre-Series, Season 1, season 4, Missing Scenes, Drug Use, Masturbation, Pining
Summary: He's starting to sweat again, his gut tightening and his pulse kicking into high gear, his dick hardening like he's not in withdrawal and tangled around his sister, her body warm everywhere it's touching him.

(aka, Five times Nick fantasizes about Alicia while high.)

Current Mood: pleased

Tags:

For fans of body horror and/or excellent boss design, please enjoy the Gaping Dragon:

Watch on YouTube

Look, I just love its whole vagina dentata/Venus fly trap/ribcage/entire-body-as-maw/spine-snapping-backbends thing, okay? And it’s a fun fight, despite its absurd number of hitpoints and ability to kill you if it bumps you with a leg while it’s charging.

For anyone curious about how the process of figuring out a Dark Souls boss fight can go, some samples:

https://youtu.be/nnZP6WkKRpg?si=M3abOUFachMgs6cP&t=1143
https://youtu.be/u2U5mlfI6zM?si=Scx5xCM_Z7lB4bbX&t=5560 (after getting Capra on the second try, Mapocolops enters the Montage Of Despair zone)

Important context for some of what’s happening: Dark Souls has no animation cancelling, so if you press the “light attack” button twice, your character will swing twice, and if you press the “heal” button they will start the (slow) flask-drinking animation, even if you’ve subsequently realized this was a terrible idea and are now frantically pressing the buttons to dodge and screaming at your character to move. This is part of what requires you to be more deliberate and tactical; you can’t button-mash your way through even if you can mash buttons quickly.

(Also, both Reggie and Mapo started off summoning an NPC for assistance, but the trouble with it in this fight is that the NPC AI is not very bright and tends to stand in front of the dragon and get eaten early, leaving the player dealing with a boss that still has the extra HP to make up for the summons.)

Conversely, after having an un-fun time with Capra, Symbalily reads the fight near-perfectly on her first try: https://youtu.be/ByTGX1NRFs0?si=VBbn5DLh0hK-Gqp5&t=3183

(Team Halberd for the win; that two-handed R2 is so good.)

Tags:

dark souls,
games

Visiting my parents' building is always a gamble, and it's both rare and memorable when I lose. Specifically, when I have to deal with a dog. More specifically, when a dog needs to be held back from attacking me. Once about a week ago, down the hallway, and today. The encounter that happened about a week ago took place when I was climbing up the stairs and got to a floor where someone had their dog on a leash, waiting for the elevator to take them down, and without any provocation, just from seeing me climbing the stairs, their dog starts barking at me. Clearly at me, needing to be held back, its owner holding the leash to keep it from coming in my direction. Why it did that, I don't know. It wasn't a very large dog, but the bark was angry enough I was worried about its teeth.

This afternoon, I got on the elevator, and as it descended, it picked up a dog, who came at me but got pulled away when the owner saw my body language - stiff, pulling inward, steadfastly looking away. Then a couple floors below that, it picked up another dog, and I behaved the same way, shifting my legs when it came close to my bare skin, and it begins barking. Loud, angry. I keep looking away and it keeps barking, getting violent enough its owner picks it up to hold it and make sure it doesn't do anything.

Someone on the fourth floor called the elevator. I leave and head down the hall, and look back to see see that they were waiting for the next one, too.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: nothing now

Trans Rights Bills

LGBTQ+ Rights Bills

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags