sobelle | Network

Title: Fun in the Sun
Author: gaiarheahera
Pairing: Giles/Cordy with Xander/Anya
Setting: Between season 4 Buffy/ 1 Angel and season 5 Buffy/ 2 Angel
Word count: 796 words
Rating: g/frc
Summary: Cordelia convinces Giles to spend the day at the beach. What could go wrong?

AO3 link here.

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25957796-bujold-impersonator-is-still-scamming

It is reported...

A person with the email loismcmasterb@gmail.com is out there pretending to be me. This not my email, and This Is Not Me.

This appears to be the same scammer who was impersonating me on X/Twitter and Mastodon a while back. Apparently their protocol is to engage the person in some conversation, and then try to sell them some kind of writing/editing scam.

Pass the warning along...

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on July, 30

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25957796-bujold-impersonator-is-still-scamming

starwatcher posting in

fandom_checkin

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday, July 30, to midnight on Thursday, July 31. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33447 Daily Check-in

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 15

How are you doing?

I am OK.
8 (53.3%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
7 (46.7%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
4 (26.7%)

One other person.
6 (40.0%)

More than one other person.
5 (33.3%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

scrubjayspeaks

“The farther I get away from him,” they said, voice wistful as it floated away on a mountaintop breeze, “the easier it becomes to forgive all the ways he hurt me.” Their companions, having never met the father in question, could only offer quiet support and the welcome distractions that came with wrangling flying islands as they drifted past the camp. “Now that I’ve left his dimension entirely,” they said as they lassoed one and started hauling it into the archipelago being formed, “I can almost imagine going back to see him some day.”

---

LL#1284

musesfool

I had to go into the office yesterday (for the first time since March! March!!!) and it has wiped me out. I mean, "had to" in the sense that my boss wanted to take us out for lunch since in addition to my birthday in July, 2 other team members had birthdays in late June. We made a reservation at a restaurant about a block and a half from the office, which was great since it was so hot! But not great because the restaurant...didn't exist? There was a sign, but nothing inside the building and the phone had been disconnected. Even though we had made a reservation!

So we stood there for a while in the heat, trying to figure out where else we could go, and I was like, "Pepolino is 2 blocks away, we could go there!" And thankfully, they still existed and were open and had a table for 5 available right underneath the air conditioner, so lunch was lovely after a rough start.

I didn't get a whole lot of work done, but I did have one or two quick conversations of the sort that is easiest in the office since you don't have to set up time - you just run into someone in the hall and chat. Still, not worth having to get up an hour earlier and spend 2 hours a day commuting.

(Also, I ran into oldboss3 and she was like, "wow I haven't seen you in so long! It's so good to see you! Can you send an email for me???" And I was just like, "...I think it's best if Assistant L sends the email, since she will be able to answer any questions received in response and I won't." *shudders* Dodged that one.)

Since I knew I was going to be in the city, I arranged to have dinner with

innie_darling and

tenaciousmetoo, which was also lovely!

And then I came home and even though I'd set the air conditioner to go on about an hour before I knew I'd arrive home, my apartment was still unpleasantly warm. Bleh. Took my bedroom some time to drop in temperature too, which is the real key to sleeping well, I think, at least for me. So I didn't have a great night of sleep. But I probably don't have to go back into the office until late September, so I guess it's okay. *g*

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: A Little Respect - Erasure

case posting in

fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6781 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #970.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 (second time?) - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

polyamships_mod posting in

fandomcalendar

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

shipperslist

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

tinny posting in

iconthat

HPI

https://tinpix.de/2025/hip_french102_15.22_02.png

Next color: yellow

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3122/

During the most recent glacial maximum, it's believed that land bridges extended from the surfaces and connected several of the spheres together.

https://xkcd.com/3122/

wychwood

Just for

isis!

I spent most of my week off playing Mass Effect: Andromeda obsessively, and am now about two-thirds through, according to the save game screen. ( Detailed thoughts - with spoilers )

Anyway, I think from here I am heading fairly rapidly towards the end game.

Other things I have played since my last gaming post:

A Normal Lost Phone and Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story - really nice tiny games, no more than an hour each, where you "find a lost phone" and have to look through it to find out whose phone it is and how it was lost. I got the first one in a Pride sale, and they're both fairly Issue-y, but felt well done. No real replayability, but well worth the couple of quid each they cost - I would buy more in this series.

Got a bit addicted to Terraforming Mars for a while and played quite a few games. I'd played this as a board game with S and her husband a few years back, but we ended up getting confused about some of the rules and failing to score things correctly - that sort of game is just so much easier as a computer game where it keeps track of all your special abilities and so on for you! Also, the music is gorgeous but sadly I can't find anywhere I can buy it.

I played the start of Paper Trail, looking for something a bit like Carto; it's not, really, but there's a somewhat similar mechanic where you origami fold the screen in order to reach the other side of a broken bridge, etc; I quite enjoyed it, and should go back to it.

Venba is a game in which you cook a series of South Indian recipes as an excuse to explore the immigrant experience (specifically as an Indian in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s). It's really charming, and I liked the whole family; the "puzzles" are really mostly an excuse, but it was quite fun anyway (...well, maybe except for the idli steamer when I had to do it a third time while trying to get the achievement for making everything correctly...).

I'd heard lots of good things about Chants of Sennaar, and picked up the demo, which was delightful; you're a mysterious hooded figure exploring a city? palace? and interacting with other mysterious figures, who talk to you in symbols which you can slowly work out the meanings of; once you do, you can hover over the speech bubbles and get partial and full translations.

I loved the demo, and bought the full game a couple of weeks later in a sale, but have ( run into a wall of frustration )
I liked this enough that I do want to keep playing it, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough...

While I was on the watery games kick from last time, I also played a few hours of In Other Waters, where you are a scientist exploring an alien planet where another person had previously disappeared, navigating the underwater world and learning about the flora and fauna while trying to find her. Again, this was satisfying to play, but I got a bit stuck about an hour and a half in, and can't work out what to do next - and it's frustrating to backtrack, because you can't jump around or zoom out and see the whole map, you're stuck moving from visible point to visible point in your current map section.

Briefly went back to Submachine and did another couple of levels. Also played some Hidden Folks, which is a Where's Wally type of thing only monochrome and with some of the little figures animated, again using hint guides to find the last few items in most of the scenes! There are levels of varying difficulty, but mostly it's either "tiny level, dead easy" or "massive level, super hard", without much middle ground.

And I just started Monument Valley III, which was released about a week ago! I loved the first two games, which are very gentle meditative puzzles where you manipulate buildings in a sort of Escher-esque fashion so that your little person can get from one point to another, rotating a walkway so that your path is suddenly linked to the arch overhead etc. I'm playing it very slowly, no more than one level at a time, and having a good time so far.

I also just picked up Dorfromantik, which I'd heard a lot of good things about; again it's quite mellow. So far it seems a bit like a sort of single-player Carcassonne, you put hexagonal territory tiles together to build villages and forests and rivers and railways and fields, and the tiles come with point-bearing challenges to do things like connect village tiles together until you have 25 houses in a clump, or 465 trees, or whatever, plus there's points for having a hex where all six sides match their neighbours, and so on. I expect there's fiendish depths of strategy that I will never actually explore, but at the moment it's about 20 minutes for a game and I'm quite enjoying it; I can see myself picking this up every so often to play for a bit.

twistedchick

This is a prayer for Lughnasadh. This is a prayer for the Resistance. Lughnasadh is a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of our look towards the dark. Lughnasadh is the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what we have. Lughnasadh is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for hopeful people who plant saved seeds in the chilly ground, in the February dark, charging the seeds and calling Ceres — people who want a clean harvest. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for mothers bearing children, poets birthing poems, engineers who see how to strengthen a bridge. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

Lughnasadh is a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of our look towards the dark. Lughnasadh is the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what we have. Lughnasadh is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for the scholar in her garret, making the cleanest translation, for the teacher setting off sparks, for the whistleblower who takes the risk. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for the farmer who grows an extra row for the food bank, for the activist in plastic handcuffs, for the nurse who ignores the insurance company’s orders. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

Lughnasadh is a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of our look towards the dark. Lughnasadh is the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what we have. Lughnasadh is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for the coder who fends off the hack, for the politician who doesn’t take the bribe, for the paper ballot. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

This is a prayer for phone bankers, demonstrators, people with signs in their yard. This is a prayer for early voters, people who call Senators, door-to-door canvasers. This is a prayer for the Resistance.

Lughnasadh is a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of our look towards the dark. Lughnasadh is the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what we have. Lughnasadh is a prayer for the Resistance.

And, of course, this is a prayer for yarrow and Black-Eyed Susan, for summer squash and basil, for peaches and corn, for fat blackberries and seedy dill. This is a prayer for Resistance, because Lughnasadh is a festival of Resistance.

Lughnasadh is a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of our look towards the dark. Lughnasadh is the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what we have. Lughnasadh is a prayer for the Resistance.

Lughnasadh is how our ancestors said that they would resist winter. They would have less now, but they would store up what they did have against the long, dark nights when tummies rumbled, illness went untreated for lack of herbs, old people died from the cold. And our ancestors said, “No.” Lughnasadh was a fire festival, the first harvest, the beginning of their look towards the dark. Lughnasadh was the time of plenty, the time to gather in, the time to store what they had.

Lughnasadh has always been a prayer for the Resistance.

I am praying it now. Will you pray it with me?

--HecateDemeter

(she has not posted this year, so I am assuming she is gone. I am also assuming she would not mind me reposting, as she never has.)

yourlibrarian

1) When person after person said they watched Penguin even when it was uncomfortable to keep going with it, it sounded rather familiar. I saw it with The Wire and especially with S2 of Andor. These were stories exploring the failures of systems, their purposes sabotaged by failing to account for personal agendas and human nature.

To me, Penguin and Andor share other similarities of the "it's so well written I had to see more" variety. Both are shows set within a franchise that do not feature the main features of that franchise, and which deal with the ruthlessness of societies in recognizable and everyday ways. ( Read more... )

2) Finished watching Girls on the Bus. It was apparently meant to go on for another season though I think it ended in a good enough place. Shame though as it really came together as a story of four different women in the same professional arena and the political angles are very familiar. Girls on the Bus is about female political reporters following a presidential campaign and has a nice diversity of characters. It's also interesting to pick up details from actual candidate reporting. ( Read more... )

3) In movies, I watched Fahrenheit 451 because I never read the book. Had Michael B. Jordan not starred I don't know as I could have gotten through half of it. Depressingly topical yet also doesn't make a lot of sense, since they apparently tried to update it to account for current events. ( Read more... )

Poll #33445 Kudos Footer-532

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 0

Want to leave a Kudos?

View Answers

Kudos!
0 (0.0%)

umadoshi

Yesterday we ran All The Errands! We made ten or so stops, all told, which is a pretty good outcome; there were two places on my list that we ultimately opted against, because it was really quite a lot (and one of the two is a stop

scruloose can make pretty easily when coming home from work).

The critical thing, of course, is that I did indeed get the lemon ice cream. I'd initially decided to go all in and get the lemon sundae, which IIRC also involved lemon curd sauce (I'm pretty sure that was the phrasing, and I don't really know why "curd sauce") and some sort of crunchy lemony thing, but one or both of those toppings was out of stock, so the sundae wasn't on offer.

The ice cream itself was tasty and I'm glad to have gotten it, but I didn't fall in love. (Just as well, really, since it was a temporary thing. I'm not good at ephemeral joys.) The flavor wasn't terribly intense, I think? But it was a delicious thing on a hot day.

The absolutely ridiculous thing I bought was this Hallowe'en figure from Michael's, which I saw go by on Bluesky a few days ago and for which I felt an immediate mighty need. It's very small and very inexpensive and is genuinely cute in person. It's presumably meant to be a Sphynx cat, but still looks enough like Sinha that I feel gleeful just looking at it. It may have to be a bit of year-round decor. ( other things that came home )

( and lo, we have a tomato plant! And...a rodent in the garden? o_o )

Current Mood: tired

jesse_the_k

Eliza Rain disabled_eliza posted an excellent 1:30 skit on how to interact with busybodies who can’t cope with the reality of ambulatory wheelchair users. (I'm also able to stand and reach for some things, so I appreciate helpful scripts.)

I loved her response to a stranger portrayed as complaining about the unbelievability of wheelchair users who can briefly stand. Eliza says, in a level tone, "Okay well, it makes no difference to me if you do or don’t believe me, this is my reality and I need a chair to get around."

You can watch it on on her Instagram or stream with open captions as well as narration from loud text-to-speech plus human dialogue ( right here )

Do you have go-to scripts to shut down invasive strangers (or family members, for that matter)?

rachelmanija

Poll #33444

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 81

View Respondents

Which of these books that I've recently read would you most like me to review?

View Answers

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. SF dystopia much beloved by many dudes.
12 (14.8%)

The Daughter's War & Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman. Dark fantasy featuring WAR CORVIDS.
25 (30.9%)

The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister. Very hard to categorize novel about a family whose oldest son can call a wife from the bog. Maybe.
27 (33.3%)

Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang. A descent into Hell by a pair of magic students.
39 (48.1%)

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Three timelines, all involving witches.
18 (22.2%)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it sounds like.
19 (23.5%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. It's so much harder to write reviews of books I love.
31 (38.3%)

Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn. Small-scale fantasy with really original magic system; loved this.
38 (46.9%)

Hominids, by Robert Sawyer. Alternate world where Neanderthals reign meets ours.
20 (24.7%)

Under One Banner, by Graydon Saunders. Yes I will get to this, but it'll be a re-read in chunks.
9 (11.1%)

A round-up of multiple books (not the ones in this poll) with just a couple sentences each
11 (13.6%)

Have you read any of these? What did you think?

rachelmanija

This book has a hilarious premise: a single woman's attic suddenly starts producing husbands! A husband comes down from the attic of Lauren's London flat, and she's instantly in an alternate reality in which she married that guy. The decor of her flat shifts, sometimes her own body or job shifts depending on whether she now works out regularly or some such, and sometimes there's wider ripple effects. Lauren is always aware of the changes, but no one else is. If the husband goes back into the attic, he vanishes and a new husband comes down.

I adore this premise, and the book absolutely commits to it. It is 100% about husbands coming down from the attic. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the way it explored the premise. It's largely a metaphor for dating in a time when you can swipe on an internet profile and instantly get rid of a possible match, so Lauren cycles through hundreds of husbands, often rejecting them at a glance, and we only ever get to know a very small number of them. Of the ones we do get to know, they're mostly fairly one-note - handsome and nice and American, handsome and nice but chews with his mouth open, handsome and nice but boring, or mean and hard to get rid of. The falling Ken dolls cover is apt in more ways than one. Lauren is also pretty one-note - shallow and frantic.

I also had an issue with the pacing. There's so much repetition of the same actions. A husband comes down, Lauren examines her text messages and photos for evidence of their history together, Lauren calls her friends to see what they know about him. A husband comes down, Lauren takes one look at him and sends him back. Some of this is funny but it gets old. The book felt at least 50 pages longer than it needed to be.

I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been way fewer husbands, and more time spent with each one. I never really got a sense of what Lauren wanted in a man, apart from some surface-level characteristics, or what she wanted in life. Her lives were also generally not that different, which didn't help.

There was one part that I really liked and was actually surprising.

( Read more... )

Rec by Naomi Kritzer, who liked it more than I did. But thanks for the rec! It was an interesting read, and not one I'd have found by myself.

My absolute favorite alternate lives story remains the novella And Then There were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker, available free online at that link.

rydra_wong

troyswann would like people to talk to about Prophet, please:

https://troyswann.dreamwidth.org/1130697.html

Also, if anybody wants to talk Prophet with me, please do.