Aaaand, another piece of art for my current obsession!



On AO3 and tumblr

It's Friday tomorrow, yay!

Dine and Killerweasel, I received your cards today, thank you both very much.Oddly the one from KW had been opened. There was no notation to indicte when or where or why. As I recall when I used to buy off ebay any parcel coming from the states was stamped to indicate it was opened at the border. Maybe the pretty ribbon that had a thin strip of wire triggered a beep from something. Who knows? In any event, alls well, but I just found it a bit strange.

I played very little Silksong in the past 1-2 weeks and did pretty much everything I wanted to in my first playthrough (before the DLCs come out) so now is a good time to post the "epilogue" notes.

( Things I did after the true ending )

( Some more thoughts )

( LPs I watched )

I already know what I want to play next: Hades 2, of course. (But probably not this year, I have a huge backlog of books etc.)

I've been feeling more strongly about trying to get reading done than I have been getting writing done lately, while also staring in dismay at how long that TBR list is growing. (The more books I read, the more I end up hearing about, and the more I end up wanting to read. Somehow.)

One of the things I've been considering as I look back at my reading for this year is... I think I need to be a bit meaner on my rating scale, haha.

And I think "mean" is the wrong word: but it feels "mean" when I give anything under a 4 out of 5. As such, I've given way more 4s than any other rating, even when a handful of those were books that I really did end up feeling fairly neutrally toward, which really should be more of a 3. At least a few of the things that I have given 3s to really should be 2s, because in some cases I have remained salty about how much I didn't like it, haha. Even a few of the 5s should probably more properly be 4s, but because they were better than some of the should-have-been-3s, their ratings got nudged up. Basically, the whole scale is out of whack.

Tumblr user "aromanticduck" shared the following chart to explain how they give ratings:



"Spicy" on the chart indicates that the work inspires some strong feelings, where "bland" indicates that it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression. (I quoted this chart a couple months ago, recalling the spicy vs. bland 3s, but have now actually found the original.)

I really like this chart!

As they explain in their reasoning, this makes 5s and 1s both fairly difficult to achieve, because there's only one way to get there. 3s are easiest to get on the chart, and would theoretically be the most common rating.

Now, I don't think that a 3 necessarily has to be the average rating that I'm giving. I am curating my reading list, and minus a handful of wildcards, I am trying to read things that I expect to enjoy. It would make sense for 4s to be pretty common, if the things I think will appeal to me actually do so! Even so, I know that in some cases I've been giving 4s because I really liked something, and sometimes the 4s mean that it was just... fine.

(Of course, blah blah, I always reserve the right to add in my subjective feelings. Like... Maeve Fly was a 2.5 for me, because I don't like the subgenre. For someone who likes that subgenre better, it could be an easy 5! I thought the writing and character work was great; I just didn't like it. It was subjectively wrong for me, which is not objectively saying "there were too many things wrong with this". Vice versa, there are things that could be an objective 3, but I had such a great time, I'm going to give it higher.)

I think I'm going to go back through my reviews from this year and try to reassess some of them, really trying to keep the chart in mind, because I want to be able to look back at things and see a fairly accurate view of what I liked or didn't.

I really do have to get over feeling like giving a 3 is mean, though. Even when I like the author, even when there were good points to the book, even when it's part of a series I enjoy...

(I think I've been poisoned by the way star ratings work for businesses, where basically anything under a perfect 5 gets some employee yelled at, and a 3 can get you shut down...)

These episodes dropped during a busy time, so I'm only now caught up. ( Spoilers behind the cut )

My tree is up at fandomtrees! I always have a blast with these kinds of events, so looking forward to perusing all the trees soon. :D

* * * * *

A trio of epistolary recs for rec_cember!

#toobadsosad by DontStopHerNow
Selfie, Eliza/Henry, 1100 words, no archive warnings apply
This is a hysterical texting fic with sharp, funny character voices! And it makes excellent use of timestamps and emoji to add to the story.

Eliza 9:18pm : Freddy and I broke up again. #toobadsosad
Eliza 9:18pm : It's really for good this time.
(Read by Henry at 9:36pm)

A gentle man and a scholar by isevsianne
Our Flag Means Death, Ed/Stede, 7500 words, no archive warnings apply
Modern AU consisting of a series of emails about letters. Contains outrageous flirting and even more outrageous obliviousness. Very cute and fun!

Stede Bonnet unearths potential evidence that his 18th century ancestor could be the Gentleman Pirate, and contacts a top pirate historian Edward Teach, an expert on the dreaded pirate Blackbeard, to get to the bottom of it. An email correspondence sparks something more than just academic research.

from the mortal realm by mixtapestar
Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers, Lady Chirp & Lord Squak, 500 words, no archive warnings apply
Delightfully charming and fun post-canon letter, featuring excellent puns and an excellently frothy Chirp voice.

Lady Chirp Featherfowl's letter to her dearest cousin, Lord Squak Airavis.

I realized today that a lot of my friends don't know about what I've gone through this year.

Last year in June I moved back to Minnesota to look after my dad. My mom was in the hospital for a month and then moved to a nursing home with sudden-onset dementia (B1 deficiency) secondary to cancer.

I intended to support them temporarily but decided to make it a more permanent move to support them and their many animals. I struggled and kept expecting other family members to step up, but they did not.

I was hospitalized in May 2025 after a seizure. (Two seizures in 3 years means a new diagnosis of epilepsy.) I am missing about a week or 2 of memories from directly after that experience, so I don't know for sure what happened. I was busy looking after my dad and the animals, and then coordinating a move for my parents into assisted living, which I mostly did myself, While recovering from a seizure, with a broken rib.

I don't know why-- again, I don't remember (likely from medication side effects), but no one from the family came to help me directly after the seizure. My dad (who has dementia) and I did it alone. I'm angry about it and need people to know.

I supported my family for a year and half and did not receive any funds, no salary, very little emotional or logistical help from my brother, his wife, or his 4 healthy teenage kids. There is a wider extended family and they didn't show up either. We got some occasional visits but it wasn't enough.

Since moving my parents into assisted living, I have continued to support them in many ways, including looking after their farm and animals, again with no funds.

This week I asked my brother to help me advocate with my dad, to get me some money. He said no. He believes we should sell the farm (where I am now living). He made no mention of any provisions for me.

I'm obviously very upset, but the anger is at least helping me communicate about what is happening. I am reaching out to friends and various family members and trying to raise the alarm to protect myself.

I am safe for the time being but it is not the best idea for me to be living alone. I had intended to find roommates to come live here with me, but there are some barriers, including me not being the property owner, and the house being a bit of a mess. My next step is to directly talk to my parents about this situation. They both have dementia but I think they are capable of understanding my position.

I am currently unsure what the best course of action is moving forward. But I at least want folks to know what is going on. It's been very helpful to talk on the phone with friends who are affirming to me that this is a fucked up way to be treated. It's been a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that my family is exploiting me.

Warm thoughts, mail, messages are all helpful.

My Xmas Playlist on YouTube. (ETA: I fixed the access.)

 Two weeks before I'm off for the holidays. I'm grinding through edits, and have gotten to the section of 4 chapters that need full rewrites. I'm starting to feel the pressure of getting this draft done.

What I'm reading: Babylon's Ashes and The Man Who Died Twice. The latter is a reread/listen and is my falling asleep audiobook.

What I'm playing: Still Stardew Valley. This is the first time I'm going for perfection since the last update. Just got the Big Clock and full friendship with Leo.

What I'm watching: We're onto Nova episodes on Youtube for our low stakes watching. The one problem is many of these were made in lower resolution and/or then futher compressed when they were uploaded so it's like watching without glasses on. But they're cool. I reccomend the one about the Kite structures in the middle east. 

A baba yaga house this week. I like the cool colors. I bought this sticker from an artist's booth at the Spirits and Spirits event, but I forget the artist name. :(

This was a good week! It felt very strange to be to December already, but mid-week we got our first truly "winter" weather. Glad to have gotten a few things done, like starting that project with my mom. Also very relieved that my dental appointment went better than expected. I felt relatively on top of things, despite struggling a bit with the weather. (Cold, grey days make me very tired.) I kept going on reading, but at a slower pace than hoped.

Goals for the week:

• I finished reading The Spite House
• I started reading A Conjuring of Light
• I went to my dentist appointment
• I went to my mom's house to start her declutter project
• I continued my WIP outline
• I worked on my reading page
• I did not work on my pin boards
• I did not make my phone call
• I posted my reviews of the books I read in November
• I posted my writing goals for December
• I did my tracking grids for December
• We did not start on any holiday decorating
• I did my getyourwordsout check-in: 8233 words written in November, bringing year to date to 100981

Tracked habits:

• Work - 4/7 - I took Wednesday off for my dentist appointment
• Household Maintenance - 3/7
• Physical Activity - 2/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 5/7 - one day of over 1000 words, four days of over 500, with one additional day of under 500
• Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
• Meta Work - 5/7
• Personal Writing - 6/7
• Other Creative Things - 3/7
• Reading - 7/7 - I did finish The Spite House and started A Conjuring of Light, plus read bits of my ebook side-read; Taylor and I finished reading Queen Demon; Alex and I finished Dead Silence and started reading The Sundog.
• Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday we watched a livestream and then some of the Broncos game, plus some reviews in the background; Monday had some storm chasing in the background, and book reviews later; Wednesday we watched some storm chasing (in Colorado, even), and a review later; Thursday we half-watched the mediocre Whisper of the Witch, and then I fell asleep during Fostered, and woke up partway through Rounding. The latter were okayish horror/thriller things; Friday I half-watched Troll 2 (the newer, Norwegian one), and Terminator 2; Saturday we watched a paranormal thing, and later reviews.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 6/7

Total words written: 7112 on outlining, book reviews, and my writing plan

The Emorian borderland, like the remainder of the borderland, is famed for the friendliness of its villagers. Despite that, do not be surprised if you are asked to pay for your room and board. Past foreign visitors have often taken advantage of the villagers in order to escape the high price of inns elsewhere in Southern Emor.

In the westernmost villages, you will find a blend of Emorian and Daxion life; though no bards live here, villagers can often be heard singing. As you travel further east, the singing will slowly cease, replaced by talk of blood-lineages and the seven gods and goddesses. You are now in the portion of the Emorian borderland that lies north of Koretia.

The borderland is the only part of Emor where vineyards can be found. Despite the relative coolness of the Emorian borderland, Emor's wines are among the best in the Three Lands. Especially popular is sweetened wild-berry wine (don't try the unsweetened variety unless you enjoy bitter drinks, which you probably do if you're Koretian) and wall-vine wine, made of a mild-tasting grape that grows only in the Emorian borderland.

Farming is also common here. Eastern mainlanders who farm will find much to interest them in these lands that have been plowed since ancient times.

Travelling east, you will eventually reach a crossroads. To travel on to Emor's capital, turn left.

[Translator's note: Hidden Blade shows life in an Emorian borderland village.]

Anybody have any recommendations for recent Romance novels focused on holidays, specifically winter-type holidays?

Another piece of art for my current obsession.



On AO3 and tumblr

Also I've realised what the TV series reminds me of. The Canadian govt-supported film company is called Crave, but it could easily be Gay Porn For Girls. Not because the series is actually porn, but because it's made by a team that understands how to film sex scenes.

I discovered that I have a *ton* of things that I planned to try and do this "weekend," and I'm kind of dreading it!

The biggest one is needing to get some maintenance on the truck. Our lead instructor's neighbor has volunteered to take a look (I hope he volunteered; I asked my coworker if he thought his neighbor would be willing and he told me yes, ha.) There's a pretty major coolant leak somewhere, and the washer fluid does not work at all. I'm *hoping* the coolant leak is something that's easy to figure out and not wildly expensive to fix. The washer fluid shouldn't be too big a deal - either a fuse is burned out, or the motor in the pump died - but having no washer fluid is pretty crap heading into winter. Buuuut, lead instructor also thinks we should take a bigger look for any other major maintenance things that the truck needs, since it's hit over 200k miles, and I know he's right, but I *just so deeply dread* anything car-related. I'd love for it to not be a big deal, but every time, I'm petrified that what I hope is a tiny thing is actually a MAJOR thing.

I hope that's really the only truly major thing on the list. Some of the rest is fun stuff, or at least not *not* fun stuff, like getting holiday cards sent out, hopefully getting stuff in the kitchen neatened up enough to put up our tiny trees... I want to try and get caught up on some reading, since I'm behind where I'd hoped to be... I have other chore type stuff to do. I am a bit worried that if the car stuff is worse than planned, it'll derail me from being able to do anything else, heh.

You may know Joyce Hindman as LionHeart Distribution or as Requiem Publications, publisher and seller of zines and as Bast Ravenshadow's publishing partner, or you may know her for her four tables at Media West, or as the artist with the little boxes and jewelry and other fun beaded stuff in the Media West art show, or as the fic writer Sekhmet.

She is now a senior citizen (over 70), and on social security after years on disability, along with her husband who is also a senior with health problems.

This has been a particularly tough year as far as health problems and medical expenses. Her husband was hospitalized with pneumonia. She needed rotator cuff repair on her dominant arm and additionally shortly thereafter broke the humerous bone near her shoulder on the same side.

She and her husband are now trying to cope with many medical bills for surgeries and physical therapy at a cost of thousands of dollars. With fixed incomes, and looking at increases in insurance premiums, food costs, et cetera, and with her husband's part-time job offering no work for two months now, they are very uncertain about how to pay these bills.

If you can donate anything to the Hindman GoFundMe, please do so at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-joyce-overcome-medical-expenses . If you would rather donate privately as I did and you have PayPal, you can PayPal Joyce at jersey dot lion at gmail dot com.

Despite it still being pretty cold, Alex took Bella to another FastCAT today! This will probably be the last one of the year; I don't think there are any others scheduled, though it's always possible that something will pop up.

This was a different organization hosting, and Alex didn't share any complaints about the organization today, so I'm guessing it all went more smoothly. He did say that they'd cleared all the snow off the course, though the grass was wet.


And she did so good! :D

Still hasn't quite broken the 10 seconds like I hope she someday will, but that's a great pair of times to close out the year on.


I thought Bella looked quite smug in this picture, but according to Alex, she was actually flailing and whining, because she wanted to go again, haha.

He also said their timing was good, because the wind picked up and it started spitting rain just as they were leaving.

I just read The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls by Valorie Lee Schaefer for content, focusing on a few things, but primarily ovulation and eating disorders. It doesn't mention ovulation, and while the eating disorder section itself is fine, I wasn't impressed with the overall section on food, and there were other parts of this book that really rubbed me wrong, especially the emphasis on smiling. It's weirdly anti-salt and doesn't seem to believe that insomnia exists.

This book kept making me think "this would be great to use in some kind of dissertation on a very specific culture that this came out of, telling the young girls in this culture how best to grow up to be women." The examples alone of what concerns they thought the girls had about their bodies and their social interactions (they all seem to have very mean friends and want larger breasts, except for the one girl with large breasts, whose friends all dropped her for being ugly and fat. No one is actually fat in this book. Also their bra size chart doesn't go above 36D; people thinking that breasts can't possibly be beyond that was the source of a great many problems in my life, and I kept thinking, while reading this book, that this book would have been negatively helpful to me in my actual experience of puberty.)

So.

Does anyone have recommendations for "what to expect when you're expecting to go through puberty" that are fat-positive? You know, something like "it's very genetic and it's not because you ate too much junk food"?

And is more honest about period pain, and mentions -- at the very least -- ovulation. And that you can get back pain from your breasts.

And also -- okay, there were a bunch of things in this book that made me go "this is the opposite of helpful, I understand why you think it's helpful, but trust me, while you're not contributing to the problem, you're also not helping."

But really, the fat-positive thing would be helpful, and also more realistic about numbers on scales, please and thank you.

(And maybe ones that don't assume everyone has a mom???? I'm just. I'm just. This book is so oddly heteronormative for a book that has nothing in it about dating.)

My notes on these. Still not much to say but it's been, quite frankly, better than Nashim.

( Read more... )

Ok, I'm in. Extremely hot pretty boys, what's not to like? I did art of them, here on AO3. It's also on tumblr.



So glad I don't use public transport these days, because as hillerska-official says



The show's on Neon in nz. Have been forced (forced!) to watch the initial two eps twice so far, and am working my way through the books by Rachel Reid.