Welcome to fire season

Nov. 8th, 2025 03:58 pm
fred_mouse: A hazard sign that says "WARNING! The Floor is Lava" in a pool of lava with the text "The Floor Is Lava!" (lava)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Four sodding big helicopters have just gone overhead. Checking the emergency website, Wireless Hill (the whole parkland) is on yellow alert.

This isn't that early for fire season -- reasonably sure that the fire bans start in October, but it sure feels early.

sholio: murderbot group from episode 10 (Murderbot-family1)
[personal profile] sholio
I was too busy to notice when it happened, but [community profile] trickortreatex revealed authors this morning, which means I can 'fess up to my (not at all predictable) ToT offering.

The Preservation Harvest Festival (4989 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Halloween, Holidays, Trick or Treating, Friendship, Bonding, get loved idiot
Summary: Murderbot vs. Halloween.
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
No. 22: “All the battles I want to win, nothing matters but giving in.”
Self-Sacrifice | Collar | Hunted for Sport

Babylon 5, Cartagia arc [800 wds] - also on Tumblr

800 wds under the cut )
sholio: Gurathin from Murderbot looking soft and wondering (Murderbot-Gura)
[personal profile] sholio
The post-October Whumptober catchup continues, with more of the ones I wrote last month, but wasn't sure about.

No. 27: “Would you even want me, looking like a zombie?”
Surgical Scars | X-Ray | Bedside Vigil

Murderbot TV, Gurathin & Bharadwaj gen, 800 wds
Also on Tumblr

800 wds under the cut )
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


This book is very hard to describe without spoilers, so I'll just cover the setup. Aspiring actress/current waitress Jess is having a bad night that gets much worse when she finds a scared little boy who's run away from his father. Things get extremely strange from there. This book is a wild ride.

I read it in a single sitting, so it's very propulsive. It's also very dark/bleak, despite some absurdist humor arising from the premise. I enjoyed it a lot while I read it, but it's now months later and it hasn't quite stuck with me the way some other books have. Nestlings is still my favorite of his.

Content notes: Child abuse/harm is central to the story. So is an accidental needle-stick with a possibly contaminated needle.

Spoilers! Also contains some light spoilers for Stephen King's Firestarter.

Read more... )
sholio: Gurathin from Murderbot looking soft and wondering (Murderbot-Gura)
[personal profile] sholio
As mentioned earlier, I have some Whumptobers to catch up on (half finished, or ones I was a little uncertain about posting) so those will continue into November.

No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture

1000 wds, Murderbot POV (TV-verse)
Also posted on Tumblr.

1000 wds under the cut )

Fic in brief

Nov. 3rd, 2025 09:15 pm
sholio: aged sepia paper with printed text saying "If undelivered, return to Air Ministry, London" (Biggles-london air ministry)
[personal profile] sholio
A couple of quick things I wrote for Fandom Giftbasket:

Firefly (Biggles/EvS, G, 1500 wds)
An evanescent moment on the journey home from Sakhalin.

Vaguely inspired by a photo of fireflies in India.

Birds (Alliance-Union, Meg/Dek, 500 wds)
Posted as a commentfic snippet, just a soft little moment for them after a rider ship mission.

Life lived in dot points

Nov. 4th, 2025 08:13 pm
fred_mouse: pop funko of Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who (thirteenth doctor)
[personal profile] fred_mouse
  • I submitted my preliminary candidacy proposal today. I still have to present it, get reviewer's feedback, and resubmit, but it is one hoop closer to done.
  • I received confirmation that my application to work with a larger project has been accepted. I have until Monday to tell them what my milestones, deliverables, and KPIs are, and while the first two are okay, the last one is supposed to have at least one from a list I can't find
  • I caved and bought an ebook bundle from StoryBundle: this trilogies bundle - I bought it for the Natania Barron (which I acquired book one while travelling, and then lost when I was 1/3 in) and the Jane Yolen (I believe I know where book 1 is, but I didn't know it was a trilogy). I have no expectations for the rest, but it was cheaper than trying to buy either of the trilogies (definitely in hard copy, but possibly still cheaper than them in softcopy, with the cost of ebooks)
  • I was running ahead on the quilting, I then did none in the weekend just gone, so I think I'm a block behind, but I've also done some of the assembling, so I've worked ahead as well. progress is progress
  • the little chamber orchestra has a performance on Sunday, and Youngest (who has not been able to attend a rehearsal all semester due to uni scheduling conflicts) came along and can play at least some of it, which helps bolster the currently light on cello section (we have a new cello player. This was their fourth session with us; I'm not sure they had met any of the other cello players before last night).
  • I have managed to lose the blanket that lives on the red couch. I have zero memory of it ever being anywhere else, so I'm a bit :( about it. But I used it as the reference object for a course I'm doing (I'm doing two tiny courses, on the future of data and the future of communication, each ~10 hours, while attempting to do a stack of other things. As is the way, I'm too slow moving for it to be only 10 hours, given that I spent nearly two this afternoon doing 1/6 of the work)
jesse_the_k: That text in red Futura Bold Condensed (be aware of invisibility)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k posting in [community profile] access_fandom

Marissa Lingen ([personal profile] mrissa here) is a disabled SF writer. She’s been publishing short stories since 2001—over 200 so far. Most of her work is quite short, and I’m delighted at how her subtle implications generate detailed worlds and relationships.

Her disability experience informs her work. One of my faves is “A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places”, free to read in print or in audio at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Like the author, the viewpoint character has vertigo.

Her monthly newsletter alerted me that she’s

leading a writing workshop where people can process their vertigo experiences through the written word.

FREE
23 November 2025 1700 GMT
must register in advance or more info
ar220@st-andrews.ac.uk

FULL DETAILS:
https://dateful.com/eventlink/1965359842

She’s eager to spread the word to people directly or indirectly affected by vertigo—please share the Dateful link far and wide.


Free Story, Essay & Interview

links and excerpts )

sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
Rewatching Babylon 5's "Ship of Tears" and (parts of) "War Without End" was definitely not conducive to ending up in the most cheerful frame of mind this evening. It's so good, though.

Something I noticed in Ship of Tears )

Gifts everywhere!

Nov. 2nd, 2025 12:11 pm
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
[community profile] trickortreatex and [community profile] fandomgiftbasket both revealed this weekend. I have gifts to coo over!

Trick or Treat:

Beware of Gurathin Bearing Gifts (Murderbot, gen, 580 wds)
Fun and playful with some nice little cultural details, and a tantalizing hint of a future mission to come.

Fandom Giftbasket:

Jala, Tujula, and Fraught Understanding by [archiveofourown.org profile] pushkin666 (Babylon 5, Londo & G'Kar, 700 wds)
This is lovely, a possibly-late-in-series vignette with a little bit of cultural exchange (via food/drink) and a little hard-won wisdom/acceptance.

Keepsake by [archiveofourown.org profile] opalmatrix (Murderbot, gen, 3200 wds)
A really enjoyable, very slightly AU slice-of-life on Port FreeCommerce in which Ratthi takes MB shopping for the first time. Great in-character interactions and a lovely ending!

Zayd & Marwan by [archiveofourown.org profile] celli (Murderbot, gen, 750 wds)
Murderbot, Mensah's kids, and cats. Cute and fun!

Spaceposting 2.11.

Nov. 2nd, 2025 08:39 pm
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
[personal profile] yvannairie

Crossposted from Tumblr

Having narrowly avoided reading Shrike the riot act about how the current situation – in which he and Beebs are now dealing with a mutual rejection of all of the bonding they’d been doing up to this point – is all Shrike’s own fucking fault, I do also want to talk about what agency Beebs has over the situation, and the ways in which he is also culpable for his own part of the bad communication.

Screencap from ep3 of Beebs looking distressed with a caption of him saying "Though I'm starting to have a LOT of questions..." Screencap from ep5 of Beebs standing in the background, visibly upset as Commander Tezzorree speaks to Shrike from offscreen. The caption reads "-AND your actions reflect poorly on ALL involved."

Because, like, it’s fairly obvious that Beebs is also practicing some crazy selective sharing with Shrike, right? He may have taken Shrike at his word about having left Enforcement, but he openly references Shrike still having some unfinished business with the suit and the presumably-everything-else associated with it. And while I acknowledge that this is Shrike, and he may have simply not cared to ask, I genuinely don’t get the sense that Shrike knows much about Beebs’ personal history. I maintain that it’s likely that Beebs is actively hiding things from Shrike too, otherwise he wouldn’t be acting guilty and cagey whenever the topic of Shrike associating with him comes up.

Read more... )

umadoshi: (autumn leaves 2 (dhamphir))
[personal profile] umadoshi
So here it is: the rest of autumn spread out before us, post-Hallowe'en and pre-Christmas with (in Canada) mainly the gray blur of November in between.

(It's really just as well we have our harvest celebration in October, but as always, I do envy the placement of it between Hallowe'en and Christmas in the US just in terms of not having the stretch between seasonal holidays. [I say, as if US Thanksgiving isn't horribly fraught in so many ways.] I don't know why I have such strong feelings about this. I had them before I stumbled into wanting seasonal decor at home for more than just Christmas and started feeling all adrift in that sense at this time of year.)

(This probably isn't why some people have non-holiday decor that can be swapped in and out, thus having more options, but it's a nice side effect, I imagine. *contemplates* Please feel free to tell me about your non-Hallowe'en decor! Full-on harvest stuff is not terribly seasonal here, but surely there are other options?)

Anyway. It's noticeably cooler here now, and still bright outside rather than all gray-skewed like my mental picture of the season, but the month is young.

If there are things you love about November, please share?

Last time we ordered groceries, I got a bag of Granny Smith apples with intentions of baking, and that...uh, that hasn't happened yet. Hopefully today after I get some work done, assuming nothing horrible has happened to them. (I worry about overestimating the durability of things like apples. And cabbage. We also have a cabbage. >.> It's been around longer.)

As for what to bake...well, I have my eyes on two Smitten Kitchen cakes and two RecipeTin Eats cakes (all new to us), and there's also an a cake we made last year, or just doing baked apples or crisp. We'll see.

In cat news, the other night Sinha was being a tremendous pest to Jinksy (as is typical), and unexpectedly, Jinksy remembered (???) how to scruff him! He scruffed Sinha a couple of times a couple years ago, and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever actually made Sinha back the fuck off, but then that was it. Maybe he won't go another year or more without remembering about it again. (It's such a complicated feeling for us, because Sinha makes the most pathetic keening noises and gets really upset about it [and the other night it took an hour or so of him racing around the house grumbling to himself before he settled down, which was awkward since we were trying to sleep], so it's a bit heartbreaking, but we are absolutely in favor of Jinksy standing up for himself and saying, "NO. You will STOP.")

Reading (back)log

Nov. 2nd, 2025 01:06 pm
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
I wound up reading fourteen novels/novellas in October! Here's what I've read since my last reading check-in.

KJ Charles' The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal (historical M/M) is a neat setup, where the narrator has been partnered for years with a paranormal investigator and has written famous accounts of the cases they faced, and is now much more privately writing about their personal history and the cases that instigated and shaped their romantic partnership (with, of course, many references to cases he's already written about for the public eye).

Dweller on the Threshold is my second read by Skyla Dawn Cameron, in which a woman inherits a probably-haunted house early in the covid pandemic. It's creepy and well-done and much weirder than it initially seemed likely to be (although to nowhere near the degree of weirdness that her The Taiga Ridge Murders, which I read late last year, turned out to be).

Dreadful Company (Vivian Shaw) was a quick, fun read. It's the second Dr. Greta Helsing novel, and it left me in the odd-feeling (but not uncommon for me, really) position of having enjoyed it without feeling any particular need to seek out the following books.

What Stalks the Deep is the third of T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier novellas, which due to the increasingly-horrifying prices of ebooks (in particular novellas, IMO) I borrowed from the library. OT1H, that's deeply annoying, because I generally really like Ursula Vernon's writing and would like to simply buy everything, if only to support her (and yes, I do know library borrows do contribute to that as well); OTOH, I avoided spending something like $20 on a NOVELLA and was (briefly) spared the need to decide what to read next, because when this became available at the library, it became my obvious next read once I'd finished Dreadful Company. Also, I enjoyed it; I wouldn't recommend reading it without at least reading the first book in this set, and if you've read and liked the previous ones, you'll presumably like this one too.

(Before my many-years-ago-now decision to spend a year [ha!] reading mainly/only from books I'd purchased but never read--which has pretty much been ongoing ever since, because I keep buying books--I almost never had to think about what to read next, because I had several hundred holds on hard copies at the library, and basically would just put something on hold and immediately suspend the hold for a year or two [whatever the maximum was], and then frequently scroll through the list and re-suspend books if I caught them in the window between them being automatically unsuspended and actually heading my way. Whatever books I didn't catch in that window arrived for borrowing at the library, so I'd pick them up and read them, whatever they were.)

Also [personal profile] scruloose and I finished Fugitive Telemetry, although it took us long enough that I had to check it out from the library a second time (which I'd rather avoid, given my understanding of how ridiculous the ebook/audiobook situation is for libraries >.<). When we circle back to listen to the first novel, we'll definitely have to be ready to actively focus on finding time for it.

Current reading/watching: I'm a few chapters into Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (V.E. Schwab), and on the non-fiction front, a little ways into Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.

Meanwhile, [personal profile] scruloose and I are two episodes into season 2 of Silo.
jesse_the_k: Pixar's Dory, the adventurous fish with a brain injury (dain bramage)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k posting in [community profile] access_fandom

My cognitive impairments mean I always mess up time zones. I’ve participated in many events in the past five years. Only one managed to sense my current time zone and adjust all the info on their site to match. (And of course I can't remember which one it was.)

Which is why I love https://dateful.com. It’s an excellent tool when you’re communicating across time zones. It’s free. It features:

  • Time Zone Converter: convert between major world cities and timezones instantly as you type
  • World Clock: up to 20 clocks to see how the rest of the world can participate in your event
  • Time Calculator: adds and subtracts times, dates, and durations

And best of all:

  • Eventlink: create a link that converts an event’s time to the user’s current time zone and day. You can add an event title, description, and URL (meeting link or a web page), and you can offer an “add to my calendar” which works with Apple, Google, and Outlook.

All that info in a single link. You don’t need an account, but if you create one, you can go back and edit your Eventlinks.

I’m able to do these things with the keyboard; I welcome insights from readers using adaptive technology.

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong


[Image description: my character seen from the back in a giant bird's nest perched on a ruined stone building. She is wearing a pointed crimson hat and a greyish-brown shawl over her shoulders, and holding a halberd in one hand. An option on the screen says "A: Curl up like a ball."]

(The reason you curl up like a ball is to pretend to be an egg so that a giant crow will transport you to another location. Obviously.)

Alphabet Fic Game

Nov. 1st, 2025 10:13 am
rachelmanija: (Staring at laptop)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Autumn Gold. Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden. Fear is the end of the battle and you can't find your captain.

B. Burn. Original Work. The revolutionary hides her face to conceal her identity. The princess silences her voice to preserve her purity. They know each other. And they don't...

C. The Colors of Lorbanery. Earthsea. The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

D. Dorset: Portal to the House. Piranesi/Grand Designs. Maggie and Olabisi plan to transform a ruin containing a portal to the House into a cozy home with an artist's studio. But the ruin's status as a scheduled monument and the unique challenges of its proximity to the House endanger their project.

E. Eilonwy Wanderer. The Prydain Chronicles.. Eilonwy travels Prydain in search of her place in life.

F. Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him. A Song of Ice and Fire. A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

G. The Goddess of Suffering Scam. The Lies of Locke Lamora. In the early days of the Gentleman Bastards, Locke impersonates a self-flagellating acolyte of the Goddess of Suffering, and Jean stands by as the muscle in case the mark catches on. You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

H. A Hatching at Half-Circle Sea Hold. Dragonriders of Pern. “That’s a rather extraordinary proposal, Menolly,” said the Masterharper.

I. IP, YEVRAG NIVEK. The Leftovers. Kevin Garvey makes another visit to the hotel.

J. The Journey. Annihilation - movie. Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

K. Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November. Original Work. When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.

L. The Life of a Cell. Annihilation - movie. The being that leaves the Shimmer carries with it some of both Lena and Dr. Ventress.

M. Men Sell Not Such In Any Town. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. I have fruit that shatters like glass and fruit that must be spooned up like pudding, fruit that tastes like caramel and fruit that tastes like roasted meat, fruit that glitters and fruit so translucent you can see your fingers through it and fruit that glows golden at twilight, fruit like silver coins and monstrous hands and autumn fog, fruit that loses all its flavor unless you eat it straight off the tree as it tries to coil around your tongue.

N. No Reservations: Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia/No Reservations. I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

O. one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. The Stand - Stephen King. Flagg rewards Lloyd for doing a good job.

P. Professor Xavier's Haunted Mansion. X-Men comics. The ghosts of dead (or temporarily dead, or dead in another timeline) X-Men and villains haunt the halls of Professor X's mansion.

Q. The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. You are no doubt familiar with the major genres of tardigrade literature.

R. The Realm of Persephone. Greek mythology. Persephone takes Hades blackberry picking.

S. The Story of Marli-Hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle. Watership Down. What lies on the dark side of the moon? Ask the Black Rabbit. He knows.

T. To See a World in a Grain of Sand. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick. Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.

U. An Unexpected Catch. Dragonriders of Pern. Lessa and other Benden women visit Southern Weyr to help out with a fishing tradition; things don't go as planned.

V. Vintage Year. The Fall of the House of Usher - TV. Verna visits Arthur Pym in prison.

W. The Woman Who Watches the King. Piranesi. For some, the House is a prison. For some, it's a place of healing.

X.

Y. You're Wrong About Misericorde. The Dark Tower. You're Wrong About podcast. Sarah tells Mike about the lost horror movie that became an urban legend. Digressions include the chemical formula for mescaline, Sarah imitating Ethan Hawke imitating a Yorkshire prop witch, and where the fat goes after it gets vibrated out of your body by a $19.99 girdle sold on late-night TV.

Z.

We all seem to be getting stuck on X and Z. But I also almost got stuck on J, the only letter where I couldn't select from multiple possible stories.

LEP 1.11.

Nov. 1st, 2025 04:51 pm
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
[personal profile] yvannairie

The one thing I would really want in this world is for CJ the X and Ro Ramdin to get popular enough that they can afford to pay transcribers to get good subtitles on all of their videos.

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong


Available on Steam and Itch.io for the low low price of free:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240530/BABBDI/
https://lemaitre-bros.itch.io/babbdi

The description says it's a short game but I've spent over 10 hours happily wandering around in it and there's definitely more to do.

Immensely satisfying traversal and exploration of a brutalist concrete cityscape full of weird nooks and hidden places to discover, using a series of different movement tools (as well as your own ability to jump) -- including a baseball bat (hit a surface to propel yourself in the opposite direction, including hitting the ground to go UP), leaf blower, motorcycle, pickaxe (climb any vertical walls by jumping and stabbing the pickaxe in, then repeating) and propeller, all of which are enormous fun to use.

(You can only carry one tool at a time, but there are multiple iterations of them scattered around the map, and if you lose something, after a while -- possibly requiring quitting and reloading, not sure -- it'll tend to respawn where you originally found it.)

None of the platforming has required more co-ordination than I have; there are things I could undoubtedly do more easily if I was a better platformer, but finding the right tool can get me there anyway.

And if you can see somewhere, it's real and you can get there, and sometimes you'll discover things to see or collect. Maybe you'll crawl through a sewer and discover a secret underground dance party. Maybe you'll randomly run across a hidden room that looks at first glance like it's monitoring surveillance cameras but turns out on closer inspection to be running Windows on multiple microwaves. Even the invisible wall round what appears to be the edge of the map has a gap in it, and you can sneak through it to get to the ship you can see in the distance; it's not a skybox.

No fall damage, no ticking clock, no combat, no jumpscares. The vibe is ambient vaguely-dystopian melancholic creepiness, but within that people are going about their lives (the woman lying in the garden pond is not dead; she's breathing and appears to be just chilling). I'm reminded of the origins of parkour in the neglected brutalist concrete environments of social housing in France.

Weird, relaxing, delightful.

(For anyone wondering, yes I am still very much playing Dark Souls, but I can only do so in moderate amounts per day, when I have mental energy, so I mix it up with other things too.)

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