I was tagged by anghraine, and as is traditional am tagging anyone who thinks it looks fun. I think I may have done this one before but feel like doing it again regardless.

Since I am as much an artist as a writer I'll ponder it from both angles. Won't bother linking everything but my account is sqbr.
( Read more... )

Heart of Faerie literally fell off the wall on me, so I guess I'll do a pull.

This has been the messiest, most difficult shuffle of my life. Many more shuffles than usual until feeling ready. The actual deck didn't want to move nicely. In the end I did a few flip the deck over and shuffle face up until the cards that wanted to be picked were on top. The third card was third card down from the usual top. Weirdest shuffle of the year. Calling it now.

The Queen of Passage. The Speaker of Truth. Nameless card with a bunch of little mushroom guys.

I'm going to replace this deck with a random pack of cards one of these days. (This is a fond threat.)

Queen of Passage- surrender/transition/trust. inevitability of change. ask for help during times of transition. keep going.

Speaker of Truth- trust/acceptance/open heart. A "face" card and the second one talking about trust. hearing truth sometimes hurts. (truth plus lies equals lies.)

-> clarifying card - cut the deck and grabbed one -> Queen of Shadows - introspection / acknowledgement / balance. stop and look. whole self not just parts. what's being neglected? it's another truth card.

nameless little mushroom guys - a bunch of little mushroom guys hanging out. most of them look friendly. one has it's hands spread in possible invitation.

So what I'm getting from this is seek truth, look into the shadows and bring things in the light, and hang out with some weird little guys. ... Sure.

Thank you so much deck for insisting on being read, fighting the actual physical parts of reading, and then saying the same thing three different ways.

Signal boosting a research survey on how childhood experiences impact military based PTSD. Anonymous survey. Results talking about group statistics not specific people. PTSD can be officially diagnosed, suspected, or self-diagnosed. Please share the link around if you know anyone who would be a good fit.

https://uhcno.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0pmAUTlHNFID0KW

Today I went to the cinema to watch Enhypen Walk The Line concert/documentary. The concert is from last summer in Japan in a big stadium. The audience was really amazing, unlike some concerts i've seen (Fate Tour and WTL finale day1 were a bit lame). I loved the atmosphere and you could see the boys had fun too. There were also short interviews where enha shared their thoughts about that concert as well as reflected their goals and development, and of course their love for engene.  

Favorite parts

1. HEESEUNG - it was so shocking seeing him performing on a big screen at the cinema. He's such a good performer and has insane sex appeal. I really felt embarassed because that was one of my top fangirl moments.
2. PASSION - as i said the interviews opened up about their passion for performing and you could really see it - they are very captivating and that desperate longing and passion is at the core of their performance. 
3. SWEAT - sexy sweaty men singing and dancing....yeah
4. Jay bias wrecking me - he's such a great singer and i also loved his guitar solo
5. Lucifer!!! one of my favorite enha songs and performances. Sunghoon, Jay, and Jake in priest outfits being serious. It starts them being still, then walking at at the end they're dancing - i really love how dramatic it is. 
6. XO - the lightsticks were a sea of pink during it, how lovely. It started with Heeseung playing the intro on piano<3 Also one of my favorite enha songs(first one i heard). It's romantic in a magical way. 
7. Bad Desire - such a powerful performance
8. Shine On Me - from their Japanese EP. It has that hopeful summer feel.
9. Sunsun waterfight - they literally couldn't stop teasing each other as usual :D
10. Ending fanchants: Orange Flower and Highway 1009 - this is when i got emotional

Title: From All The Spaces Between Times
Chapter: Chapter 74 — The Winds Blowing Now Are the Winds That Blew Then Too
Author: elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Star Wars, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars — Obi Wan Kenobi (TV), Star Wars — Jedi Apprentice Books
Characters Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, The Force as a Sentient Character, Watto, Quinlan Vos, Padmé Amidala, Sabé, Darth Maul, Yoda, Mace Windu, Adi Gallia, Quinlan Vos, Professor Huyang, The Force, Plo Koon, Vokara Che, Siri Tachi, Aayla Secura, Bant Eerin, Bruck Chun, Xanatos du Crion, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Hego Damask II | Darth Plagueis, Komari Vosa, Bail Prestor Organa, Breha Organa, Bail Antilles Prestor, Rael Averross, Nim Piana, Ahsoka Tano, Sifo-Dyas, Reva Sevander, Lene Kostana (mentioned), Savage Opress, Pong Krell, The Traitor, Original Characters, Other Characters To Be Added
Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Shmi Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Qui-Gon Jinn, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon Jinn (yes, we’re arrived). Bail Prestor Organa/Breha Organa
Word Count: ~ 4000 this chapter
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None

Summary: Obi-Wan Kenobi has never known it, but he has always been the Force’s Champion, destined to suffer infinite sadness in defense of the Light. On his last turn on the wheel, responsibility for The Chosen One, the false child of prophecy, had been thrust upon him with no warning, and Darkness held the upper hand.

But this time, the Force has marshaled its power and will protect its Champion until the time is right, no matter how long Obi-Wan has to wait and how much he has to suffer.

Or,

Obi-Wan is reborn as a twelve-year old.

He wakes up on a slavers’ ship, with all of his prior life’s memories intact, and he’s bound for Tatooine with a Force-inhibitor collar around his neck, a bomb implanted in his spine, and no way of knowing what state of the Galaxy is in.

Just another day in the life of the Force’s Champion.

Chapter Summary:

Quinlan Vos returns to the Temple with the Tython-One and the High Council can confirm that it was a Temple Guard who planted the transmitter, and that the Guard is Fallen and thinks of himself as a Sith.

And so the search for the Traitor begins.

---

From All The Spaces Between Times: Chapter 74 — The Winds Blowing Now Are the Winds That Blew Then Too (On AO3)

---

( Meta — The Winds Blowing Now Are the Winds That Blew Then Too )

Things that are making me happy at this current time. I want to talk about them.

Things are still very not OK, I'm still barely keeping it together most days. Everything is Very Bad. But. I want to talk about happy things.

*

( books and tv shows )

I've been experimenting with Google's latest AI image generator (Nano Banana 2) to generate Jamie's Angels "fanart". AI image generation has come on a lot since last year; NB2 is capable of some impressive feats, such as tracking the flow of events in an image and guessing what came before or might come next. It's also still capable of out-and-out stupidity. One minute it's generating an entire six-panel comic strip with all dialogue correct, the next it's drawing characters with three arms or swapping whole people, or bits of them, in and out between frames. I haven't been sharing the results online because there doesn't seem to be any point; anyone who does want AI-generated fanart can generate it themselves with equal ease.

What made me do a double-take this time was that in my prompt, I gave it, as usual, character forenames, descriptions and costumes; and from that, the generator was able to deduce that there was a Doctor Who connection and added an unprompted police box in the background.

It's also possible to feed Nano Banana 2 an image and have it simulate people commenting on it, just in case one's ego is fragile enough to be flattered by fake reviews of one's fake fanart. (I was impressed that it understood the dialogue enough to follow Zoë's "Barbara Celarent" jibe). What's amusing is that when you do it with an image that it's generated itself, the comments sometimes point out mistakes (such as Isobel's camera suddenly teleporting to Gia). Which is all very well, but if the generator's got enough smarts to spot that something's wrong, it would would have been better to use them when generating the image in the first place.

A Perfect Spy (BBC 1987)
An adaptation of the Le Carré book, and unusually for Le Carré I could follow what was going on the whole time. It helps that it wasn't particularly twisty as plots go, and it was really a psychological exploration of Magnus Pym, where he comes from and how his relationship with his father made him into a perfect spy and then into a double agent, rather than complicated spy shenanigans as such. And it did this very well, with a slow steady journey through Magnus's life from start to end. Also it was devastatingly slashy: Axel and Magnus were just absurdly in love with each other and the show absolutely leaned into this far more than I would have expected for something made in 1987. Poppy and Sir Magnus, my poor heart. I shall have to read the book.

The German Secret Service, Walter Nicolai
This was a fascinating piece of history. Walter Nicolai was the head of German military intelligence during World War I, and he published this book in 1924 about his work. And it's an intensely, hilariously biased narrative, also full of Nicolai's fairly predictable prejudices. The way Nicolai tells it, WW1 was just not playing fair and the virtuous, noble, honourable Germans had everyone else ganging up on them in a very mean way for no reason at all and when Germans wanted to do things honourably and properly they had to contend with everyone else cheating and making unfair kinds of war with trenches and blockades which cruelly prevented the Germans from doing what they were good at and winning outright. But along with all that is a really comprehensive overview of the entire German intelligence system and also the various Entente Powers' intelligence systems and how they interacted. Nicolai lays out the different theatres of the intelligence aspects of WW1 in Europe - he doesn't go into the wider world elements - and discusses the differences between the Russian, British, French, Belgian and American intelligence networks and what they focused on and where they operated, and the measures he took to counter them. He focuses more on this than on how the German system was operating, for all that it claims to be a book about the German secret service it's more a book about catching enemy spies than about what German spies were up to, though he does talk a lot about how difficult it was to get spies out of Germany anyway when there were hostile countries on all sides. But I spent a lot of time laughing at how he kept turning absolutely everything into a propaganda argument for how much better Germans are than everyone else, even things like the significant number of Germans who were induced to spy on their own country he makes into a virtue by carefully explaining that these German traitors were utterly faithful to their new masters, loyal and reliable and provided really valuable intel and didn't ask for large sums of payment, and so as well as being the best at everything else, they were also the best double agents!

A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
Harriet Morton runs away from her oppressive bigoted father and miserly aunt to join a ballet company going on tour up the Amazon river to the newly prosperous Brazilian city of Manaus. Like all the other Ibbotsons I've read, once I'd started this it whisked me along to the end without really drawing breath, it's a delightful experience to read. The characters are gorgeous, the romance is lovely, the descriptions of Harriet blossoming in her new life are a joy and the whole thing was a tremendous ride. I did find the various misunderstandings a trifle contrived, Ibbotson is quite fond of the sort of misunderstandings that cause total disaster for the characters but could have been averted with ten seconds of conversation - though she did lampshade it a bit with the Romeo and Juliet feather motif - but I loved the characters and narrative voice and the storytelling overall so much that I just rolled my eyes at those parts and carried on happily anyway.

Magic Flutes, Eva Ibbotson
In the aftermath of WW1, an Austrian princess is working backstage at the opera while her elderly aunts arrange the sale of their castle to a fantastically wealthy English industrialist, who wants to impress the woman he still loves despite the fact that she previously turned him down for being too poor and unknown. Lots of fun here, with the opera company being fantastically, hilariously and vividly described, the elderly aunts are an utter joy, and of course everyone nearly ends up married to the wrong person before a bit of subterfuge sorts it all out.

A Song for Summer, Eva Ibbotson
This one was particularly good. Ellen, raised by three determined suffragettes, unfortunately enjoys cooking more than attempting to train in a profession, so she swaps university for cooking college and then takes a job as matron of an experimental school in Austria in 1938. Here she takes on a deeply chaotic school full of troubled children whose wealthy parents don't want them around, with all of Ibbotson's usual fantastic characters, and also the mysterious groundsman Marek who is pruning trees and looking after animals in between disappearing on mysterious jobs into Nazi Germany, and refusing to participate in any music whatsoever. I won't spoil the plot, but Ibbotson doesn't follow the strict romance novel rules of the other books quite so much here and I really liked how it all worked out.

Death On Ice, R.O. Thorpe
A fun contemporary murder mystery with a Golden Age vibe. Our heroes are twins, both marine biologists, who are going on a joint luxury cruise/scientific expedition to the Arctic, when one of their shipmates turns up messily dead. The Arctic luxury cruise ship recreates all the best things about a traditional country house murder mystery, with the structured formality, enforced interaction and fancy settings, and this very much had the country house mystery feel to it. The plot was a bit involved in places, but the story overall was great fun, the characters were well drawn and I did not figure out whodunnit before the reveal - though unfortunately I also did not have the 'oh, OF COURSE' sense you get in a really well constructed murder mystery. Still, I'd definitely read another of this series, and I believe there is one, so that's all to the good.

These questions were suggested by dray.

1. Do you know of any other words for snow? What's your favourite and why?

2. What's your ideal temperature range for winter?

3. Favourite winter activity? What about it makes it your favourite?

4. What are three things you can't do without when winter arrives?

5. Do you have favourite winter holiday activities?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**

and yet this ice cream truck has the fucking cheek to drive by playing its little tune.

It's not time for ice cream!!! The ground is frozen!!! Stop mocking me!!!

The last several days my foot has been extra painful and I have been very grumpy about it. It’s really unpleasant and I would like to stop being grumpy already. But I have been reading things while trying to rest my foot and distract myself so have some thoughts:

Ghost Circus written by Adrienne Kress art by Jade Zhang— MG graphic novel about, what else: a ghost circus. The story here didn’t really grab me, but I loved the art, especially of the circus performances. (content note: ghost kids, child in peril)

Lumberjanes, Vol. 15-20 by Shannon Watters, et al.— I have now read all of the main series of these! There’s still some extra stories and graphic novels to check out, but the main thing feels complete. Vol 19 where the campers decide to do one last thing before the end of camp was especially charming. The ending was a bit rushed but narratively satisfying. This whole series was very good and fun and I’m glad I came back to it and read the second half.

Gotham Academy Second Semester— The second Gotham Academy series. This one is all one long arc where the first one was more episodic. I didn’t like this quite as much as the first series, which I adored. Its a little bit darker and less fun. But I still love Maps and Olive and their friendship. I’m sad there aren’t more of these, but at least there are a few more stories where these characters show up for me to read. (Maps reminds me of very early Tim and I think it would be fun if they hung out, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.)

Batman, Vol. 6: Abyss by Joshua Williamson et al— I read this because it contains a story featuring Maps from Gotham Academy. That story was great! (Well except for the fact that some of the art of Japanese characters was bordering on racist caricature– that was not good at all!) The rest of it wasn’t bad– a little confusing because so much of it referenced other story lines and I have no idea what’s going on in comics this decade.

Kindred Dragons by Sarah Mensinga— A very sweet MG graphic novel about a girl who really wants a dragon egg. She lives in a world where fairies bring some girls dragon eggs – but it mostly runs in families and she isn’t from a “kindred” family. It’s set in Canada which confused me at first, but works for the vibe. The book says “volume 1” very prominently so I was a little worried that it would end on a cliffhanger but it's a complete story.

Fandom: The Protomen
Pairings/Characters: Protoman & Megaman, Protoman & Dr. Thomas Light, Protoman & Dr. Albert Wily
Rating: Unrated, estimated to be Teen and Up
Length: 3,178
Creator Links: ricefu on Ao3
Theme:
Siblings, Science Fiction, Apocalypse/Dystopia, Robots, Androids and AI, Trauma & Recovery, (Not Really) Character Death, Old Fandoms
Summary:
You have heard me tell this story many times before you sleep... This time listen carefully.
Reccer's Notes:
A beautiful and sad character study of Protoman, the older sibling of two tragic brothers in the Protomen universe. It connects his backstory and dives into psyche throughout the canon storyline, including his relationship with his younger brother, his father, and the main antagonist. Although I'm tagging the Not Really Character Death theme for a reason, this is a tragedy, so tread carefully.

Fanwork Links:
The Inevitable Fall of the Firstborn on Ao3

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.

Prologue / Previous Chapter

 

 

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Off-Dreamwidth News
Blogtor Who's video of the day for yesterday was a clip from 2018's "The Time of Angels"
Nicholas Whyte reviews "The Doctor Who Yearbook, 1995"
Details of "Doctor Who: The Ministry of Death", out now from Big Finish
"You Are Not Alone: A Gay History of Doctor Who" to be released in May
Blogtor Who's video of the day for today is a clip from "The War Between the Land and the Sea"

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If you were not linked, and would like to be, contact us in the comments with further information and your link.

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanart/fics/fanvids/fancrafts/other kinds of fanworks/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

Forgot to mention here that I did in fact sign up for FTH! I'm offering a 5k minimum bookverse Tolkien fic, and bidding is open until 8 pm EST, March 7.

Various:

--My mother tripped on her way to a concert (again) and fractured the bridge of her nose (again) and got up and went to the show anyway and enjoyed it while holding a plastic bag full of ice from the bar to her face (AGAIN). On the one hand I want to rage about her choice to just fucking carry on to the show, except on the other hand that's absolutely what I would do because I'm just as stubborn as she is, but back on the first hand she is seventy two years old and I am in the prime of my youth not. So I will just allow myself to be a little bit of a hypocrite about it, thanks.

--Melodifestivalen final is on Saturday. The lineup is mostly not terrible! I have no idea what the ultimate Eurovision pick will be, however, because I have given up on predicting the ~~mystery~~ that is the collective mind of Sweden (affectionate).

--I have been writing a deeply lemon-chicken fic for my new fandom but I'm fairly sure all the members of this fandom are too young to understand what it would mean if I tagged it lemon chicken. But I can glory in the tag in my mind. (Also I might not even finish it because there's no fun in writing an actual plot when I can just write my blorbo being hard done by.)

Right! I posted an entry about things that weren't The Goes Wrong Show, and everyone's very proud of me. Time to reward myself with more Goes Wrong fanfiction.


Title: Chekhov's Knife
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Robert/Chris
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: Robert has the perfect plan for making things up to Chris after the Chekhov's Gun incident. Well, maybe 'perfect' isn't the right word.
Warnings: S... sort of self-harm? It's pretty atypical as self-harm goes, but this is a fic about Robert going 'well, I've injured Chris; obviously our relationship will be fixed if I can get Chris to injure me in return.'

( Chekhov's Knife )