The weekly chat posts are intended for just that, chatting among each other. What are you currently watching? Reading? What actor/idol are you currently following? What are you looking forward to? Are you busy writing, creating art? Or did you have no time at all for anything, and are bemoaning that fact?

Whatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes:
<b>Highlight for spoilers!</b> *<span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Write your spoilery text here.</span>* or <details> <summary>Write a non-spoilery summary of what's hidden under the arrow here.</summary> Write your spoilery text here. </details>

16 Doctor Who icons from 12x08 The Haunting of Villa Diodati

  

Check out the rest here. <3 

16 Doctor Who icons from 12x08 The Haunting of Villa Diodati

  

Check out the rest here. <3 

Theme Prompt: #291 – Safe Harbor
Title: hypnopompia
Fandom: Sense8
Rating/Warnings: T
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 993

( Read more... )

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

Was the agricultural revolution and the explosion of civilizations that came from it an overall good thing for humans or a negative? In other words, would it have been better or worse for people to stay in small tribes?

( Read more... )

I took some pictures around the yard today. These are from the savanna. (See the house yard.)

( Walk with me ... )

The day started with a nightmare. I dreamed I was in my dad's workshop in his basement screaming at him that no one liked him and he was crying. Mom was yelling at me why did you do this and I said he was hitting my SiL and I lost it (to be clear he would never do that).

I go to work shocked everyone actually showed up except a few trapped by flooding (ah spring). It was going well...and then I got two emails (I wasn't even going to look at them but I needed to get any late submissions of work due today) about more cheating. And it IS more, in a different class. One has only heard about the girls bragging about it and doesn't want in trouble and the other came to speak to me since she was on campus and she said the same thing they're bragging about it. She doesn't know the student's name but from her description I know exactly who it is (another athlete)

Since I didn't catch them and there's no proof, I can't kick it up the chain. I DID tell the dean and I plan on talking to the heads of their departments to get some help. Not saying a word to them, just making them all put their phones in a box. They get them back at the end of the exam. No warning. Let's see what happens then. And other one hasn't been to lab...ever. Just has excuses and asks to make them up. Guess that's going away.

So now I'm an hour late getting home. Then the GI track says yeah you ain't leaving the bathroom. Once that fit was pitched I started getting ready and my sugar crashes out. Eye roll. Rocket tried to get in the bedroom and hide. FINALLY I'm out of the house. It's now after 230 and I haven't had lunch.

I have to go to Jackson to get a book from the library before it's sent back so I'll go to Sonic's. Get there. It's 240 and there are NINE cars in line. I nope out, stop for KFC and then go to Tim Horton's, the new one and this is the third time the guys on the window can't figure out a drink order (caramel machiatto, it's your standard fing menu) so I might be done with this place.

In the mean time the gas station's are changing their prices by 50 cents so I get my library book, race back across town to where they haven't got that message yet. Off I go. It's now 3 pm. I was supposed to BE here by now.

Luckily it was an easy drive and this Best Western has been recently redone. It's nice, clean...and the bathroom is an afterthought. You come in the door and immediately is a curtain pretending an alcove is the closet (at least there's a half dozen hangers not that I need them for 1 day) and the bathroom is SO small the toilet and tub nearly touch and the sink is in another part of the room outside the bathroom door.... BUT it has a fridge and microwave which the last two expensive hotels I've stayed at did not manage to have.

Everyone and their grandma is in the pool. Glad I didn't plan on that but this place is...well let's just say I love living in the country but I DO miss having options. I had researched, as I always do, best places to eat and planned to go to Dolsot Bistro as there is NO Korean food within 60 miles of me. I get to the strip mall and in it side by side is Korean, Chinese, Boba place, Indian place, juice joint and Phoenican/middle east food and a huge stand alone Mexican place. WOW. AND in the 2 miles from my hotel to hear it was nothing but food and strip malls including three other Korean places and a Greek place right across the street.

I got some goonmandu (fried dumplings that were amazing) and tofu doenjang dolsot (fine cut tofu, basically a sweetish red miso, veggies and a lightly fried egg on the rice. man crispy rice is a different, tastier experience (yes I'm not meant to have rice but...this is once in like 2 years for me as far as Korean food goes). Also they had a sliver of their pancakes on the kimchi tray and man I wish that app wasn't the price of dinner or I'd gotten that. It was amazing.

In theory I get breakfast free here and they have the daily specials written out. Every day is the same thing....ha. If it sucks we share a parking lot with the Waffle House.

And if something goes sideways with the festival I'll just drop down to Cincinnati and do fun stuff.


I did write something.

Title: She’s on the Ball
<
Summary: Angel has lost track of his belongings. At least Niffty knows what’s going on.

Rating: teen

Notes:Written for the allbingo prompt of scrapbooking and for spikesgirl58’s six words challenge. The words were Song, Finger, Unhealthy, Righteous, School, & Optimize and was inspired by Sarajayechan’s three sentence ficathon’s prompt of Hazbin Hotel, Niffty /& anyone, sometimes they forget that for all her chaotic murders she's the most organized housekeeper this side of the Pride Ring but I didn’t share it there because it was less Niffty than I think was wanted, gifting it here anyhow.

( Story above or under here )

Fannish 50 recs


Starsky's Flowers Starsky & Hutch

but turn it does The Murderbot Diaries

The Art of Selling Yourself Profitably Hazbin Hotel

Persistence Torchwood

Strikethrough Hazbin Hotel

Escape to the Beta Site Stargate Atlantis

Downward Spiral The Owl House

Letting Hope In Hazbin Hotel

Topless Hazbin Hotel

Episode 4: Right Here, Where I Don’t Belong UglyDolls

Born To Be Wild. 逆転裁判 | Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney

Endings And Beginnings Torchwood

Watching The Professionals

listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness Helluva Boss

Gently Growing Together Inspector George Gently

The Truth Exposed. Stargate Atlantis

you were beautiful back then, but so lonely Hazbin Hotel

God Sends Meat And The Devils Send Cooks Hazbin Hotel

There's No Aftercare in Hell Hazbin Hotel

in heaven an angel is nobody in particular Hazbin Hotel

Made blackberry and apple cake and mint tea tonight, for an end-of-week treat. I forgot how nice it is sometimes to feel like a little Redwall mouse after a long tiring day.

(I'd post pictures, but the lighting in my kitchen is terrible, so you'll just have to trust me when I say I burned the cake a little bit but it was still delicious.)

Today was unseasonably warm and sunny, so I took pictures around the yard. The first few are from indoors, then the rest are the house yard. (See the savanna.)

( Walk with me ... )

In helping one of my clients sort through several decades of personal photos, we found the Polaroids of the man sitting on a bed and masturbating with his head out of frame came with a note where he extorted his adoration for her and his desire to masturbate while she watched. Our best guess is he followed her to her building and gave the doorman some story about knowing her and needing her apartment number to get back in touch.

I didn't get a good look and they're long gone by now. I didn't ask why she'd kept them these last few decades or why she decided now was the time to throw them out, either. But the story lives on, and proof positive unsolicited dick pics have been around for as long as the technology for the pics themselves. It was something I'd suspected and in an odd way, it was nice to see the firsthand confirmation.

Only slightly more surprising was seeing someone else pick a cigarette pack out of the trash, fish through the pack, pull out the last one in there, toss the pack away, and start smoking it. I didn't stay to watch, knowing it'd be rude to stare, but boy, what an addiction that is.

Though written before it, this book chronologically follows Wild Seed. It picks up the story in 1970s Los Angeles, where the body-hopping immortal Doro has continued his human breeding program, now focused on creating a race of telepaths who can mind-control ordinary humans into total subjugation. He has high hopes for his daughter/lover Mary to become his most powerful telepath yet, but when her abilities fully mature, she accidentally links herself to several other telepaths, gaining psychic power over them. Now, for the first time in thousands of years, there's a real threat to Doro's control and the continuation of his eugenics project.

spoilery thoughts

As I think about this book, a thought keeps arising: This book has no good guys. Mary is not a good guy. She's is positioned as the protagonist because she opposes Doro, and in the world of the books Doro is, if not literally the worst person on Earth, at least the person with the most power to do the most harm over the longest period of time. He is a merciless sociopath who will not stop until he is the absolute ruler of humanity. Being a better person than him is a low, low bar.

To be fair, Mary never intended to bring others under her control and she doesn't know how to stop it, and she at least has some conception of using her power to help others, even if only other telepaths. And yes, most telepaths were dying or succumbing to mental breakdowns before she set up a plan to help them. But she has no qualms about enslaving the mutes (non-telepaths) and using them as an underclass to serve her and the Patternists. Some characters voice concerns, but by that time it's basically too late, she's already consolidated her power and there's no going back.

Doro's downfall has the shape of classical tragedy, as his obsession with controlling others spectacularly backfires and rebounds on him. Everything he's been working towards points inevitably to this outcome, as he creates people with stronger and stronger powers while believing he would somehow remain in control of them. But he can't have it both ways. He's made Mary everything she is, and while she lacks his immortality, she has something he doesn't: followers who see her as a savior, who love her because she's made their lives better, not just because they're scared of her.

No reader is ever going to be sad about Doro finally being defeated, but his defeat means the triumph of a society where an enslaved majority serve a privileged minority. The best you can say for it is that power is shared with a sizeable elite rather than concentrated in one absolute despot. It's the victory of the lesser of two evils—emphasis on the evil. (And again, I am reminded of Kindred's chilling examination of "less bad" enslavers in real world history.)

There actually is one good guy in the book, though. Anyanwu (here called Emma) is a tertiary character. Of course, this was written before her character had been fully revealed in Wild Seed; I wonder how much Butler already knew about her? I'm not sure what I would have thought of her if this book were all I knew. This reading order emphasizes that the best Anyanwu could ever do was to fight Doro to a stalemate, and suggests that she could never defeat him in part because she wasn't ruthless enough. Unlike Mary, she wasn't born into his twisted world, and she has a moral code that goes beyond mere self-preservation. No wonder Mary can't stand her.

With this book I felt more of a sense of it being backstory to an existing work, setting up for what's to come. Which is exactly what it is—it was written as a prequel to the first-published book in the series. And Wild Seed was in turn a prequel to Mind of My Mind, but I got more of a stand-alone vibe from that one. I still do not actually know what eventually becomes of Doro and Mary's descendants, but I am guessing it doesn't go super great for humanity!

[47x] Xenoblade Chronicles (Rex, Pyra, Mythra, Nia)
[65x] Hazbin Hotel (Angel Dust)
[35x] RWBY (Blake/Yang)

Teasers:


Full post here

部首
手 part 38
搜, to search; 搓, to rub/twist; 搞, to do ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

词汇
底, bottom; 彻底, thorough; 月底, end of a month ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
根据我们搜集的情报来看，一个地星人只有一种异能, based on the information we've gathered, one Dixingren has just one power.
看来赵处长是真的想要探我的底啊, it seems you really want to plumb my depths, Chief Zhao

Me:
搞定!
钥匙原来在我包底。

I guess the joint tour is going well. This is the most wholesome fucking shit I've ever seen.

The Annual Interdimensional Haixing-Dixing 520 Day Reverse Exchange is coming back for 2026!

520 sounds like "I love you" in Mandarin, so May 20th is a bit like Valentine's Day. To celebrate, we're back with the eighth annual 520 Day Reverse Exchange. As the name says, this is a reverse exchange: instead of making your request and that request being assigned to a writer/artist/fanwork creator, here:

1. You sign up with the kinds of things you enjoy creating.
2. You choose three writers/artists/fanwork creators based on anonymised ads.
3. You make a request of each of them based on what they enjoy creating.
4. You are assigned one request to create for, based on your offer.
5. You receive a gift from one of the creators you chose.

(An updated rules/info post will go up before sign-ups open, but here is last year's for reference.)

This year's schedule

Sign-ups part 1 - offers: Sunday 15 March - Friday 27 March
Sign-ups part 2 - requests: Saturday 28 March - Friday 3 April
Matching: Saturday 4 April - Tuesday 7 April
Assignments out: Wednesday 8 April at the latest
Deadline: Wednesday 13 May
Work reveals: Wednesday 20 May (there is no anon period)

ETA: This post is also on tumblr now, if you'd like to reblog over there!

Water bears on Mars: Tardiguardians of the Galaxy?

Tardigrades – also known as water bears – are tiny animals about 1 mm or less in size. They’re known for being able to survive in extreme environments.
Tardigrades can survive in simulated Martian regolith, researchers found … if you rinse it with water first.
Future astronauts could use tardigrades to help grow plants and survive in habitats on Mars.


Tardigrades are interesting little extremophiles. They can survive a wide array of harsh conditions, such as radiation and starvation. Some live in desolate conditions; others live in warm, green places hence their nickname "moss bears." This implies that they excel at colonizing harsh terrain, but they can also take advantage of better conditions. They're about as close to indestructible as life on Earth has gotten. So it makes sense to take them along for space exploration.

Today is mostly sunny, unseasonably warm, and windy. It drizzled on and off yesterday and last night. Today the wind is drying things out some.

I fed the birds. I haven't seen any yet.

I put out water for the birds.

Lots of flowers are blooming -- the crocuses are open and I spotted a winter aconite.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I took some pictures around the yard.

I saw a turkey vulture wheeling overhead. I've also seen a small flock of house finches and some sparrows at the hopper feeder.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I transplanted volunteer snowdrops from the parking lot to the apricot tree.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I tried using a pruning saw on one of the remaining saplings in the parking lot. I managed to make a small cut, but clearly this method is too inefficient to bring down a sapling. *sigh*

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I transplanted more snowdrops from the parking lot to the apricot tree.

The first Ginger Gold apple seedling has appeared in the milk jug, and indoors, one of the apple seeds has also sprouted. :D 3q3q3q!!! All my willow cuttings are leafed out. Last night the lower stems had tiny white dots; today they have distinct little root buds. Their speed is impressive.

The first peony shoots are appearing in the tulip bed and under the apricot tree.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I started trimming brush along the north edge of the house.

I am done for the night.

Title: Complicated
Fandom: FAKE
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: JJ, Dee, Ryo, Commissioner Rose.
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Throughout Vols. 1 and 2.
Summary: Jealousy is running rife at the 27th Precinct, even if some of the people involved refuse to accept that’s what they’re feeling.
Word Count: 1545
Written For: Theme Prompt: 207 – Jealousy at fandomweekly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.

Title: Wanting To Be Noticed
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Tosh, Owen, Gwen.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 578
Spoilers: Nothing too specific.
Summary: Tosh wishes she could be sexier and more outgoing.
Written For: The prompt ‘Any, any, If only…,’ at threesentenceficathon.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.

This post is to give information so people can decide whether they want to subscribe to me or not.

In no particular order:

( Read more... )