Oct. 30th, 2025 04:08 pm
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[personal profile] moomintroll posting in [community profile] addme
Name: Sadie

Age: early 30s

I mostly post about: My life, thoughts, and things I get up to, things I draw or create, places I've been to, something cool I've bought recently, etc. I might occasionally post about media I've consumed, but I don't really post fandom content unless it's relevant to my life in some way (like I've gone to a gig). I save that stuff for Tumblr.

My hobbies are:
Drawing (I'm an illustrator and have a degree in it), journals and stationery (I love my Filofax and Hobonichi ♥), Japanese street fashion (I wear EGL a lot), musical theatre, travel (I've lived in Japan and South Korea teaching English), wandering through the woods, taking photos, digging through junk shops, playing The Sims 4 and Animal Crossing, learning languages, and building Lego.

My fandoms are:
My favourite movies right now are Conclave and the new Frankenstein. My favourite bands are My Chemical Romance, Ghost, and System of a Down. I'm also a Disney adult and unashamed of that, I've been to every park except Hong Kong and Shanghai. My favourite authors are Tove Jansson and Stephen King (I read and watch a lot of horror, but not slashers which are kinda boring tbh), and some of my favourite novels are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Watership Down, The Phantom of the Opera, and Animal Farm.

I'm looking to meet people who:
Nice people who I can actually befriend. I like to form friendships with people on my friends list, and not feel like it's a transactional "comment for comment" kind of vibe which feels disingenuous 💔 We're reading each others diaries after all.

My posting schedule tends to be:
Whenever I feel like I have something to say, but I try to aim for at least once a week. I'm trying to get back into the habit of updating regularly after I had a bad experience with someone who made me feel self-conscious about what I post, and I'm trying hard to stop overthinking it and get back to posting whatever I feel like, but sometimes it's difficult and I struggle with that 'no one cares' voice. But I also realise no one knows me if I only update once in a blue moon and never say anything about myself.

When I add people, my dealbreakers are:
Judgey people and the usual bigots. Also if all you post about are fandoms that we don't share, media reviews, or your kids/partner, I'm not going to have anything to say about that and will likely end up skipping over your entries. I want to get to know YOU.

Before adding me, you should know:
I don't post about it much, but I have a chronic illness and I'm disabled. It usually comes up as vague mentions of being tired/in pain/struggling etc, but that's what I'm referring to.

Oct. 30th, 2025 10:04 am
kissed: (misc [🎋] kitten)
[personal profile] kissed posting in [community profile] addme
Hello, I'm Selena |˶˙ᵕ˙ )ノ゙it's very nice to greet everyone again. 28, she/her, ISFP-T. My reading list has gotten a little quiet when I'm someone who likes to comment, so here I am!

My journal's 99% locked because it is my safe space, but I unprivated some of my more recent entries for now so anyone can see if they'd vibe with my posting style/subjects. I mainly post about my personal life (my husband is my closest friend and pops up a lot), whatever games I'm playing or other media I'm into, and other random thoughts or opinions.

🩷 A good sampling of my interests is on my profile, though not all my fannish interests are listed. 

🎮 I'm an avid video gamer, and my favorite game is (for a mainstream answer) Mass Effect 2, though it's very hard to choose!

📖 I also love to read anything, including literary classics and fanfiction of my favorite ships! One day I'll actually track my completed books... I enjoy learning new facts no matter how mundane or morbid, so Wikipedia and likeminded sites are a comfort. My favorite book is Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

🎵 I love all kinds of music, though I mainly listen to K-pop. Since I grew up listening to Korean music, I have a fondness for 2nd gen groups though now my taste is kind of all over. My favorite group is BTS and I hope to see them again with their upcoming world tour!

I'm looking to find friends with journals similar to me, though we don't have to necessarily be into the same things. I like to read about other peoples' lives since they're typically so different from my own! I also like reading other peoples' reviews or recommendations. Sometimes there can be a lull in my own posting with how busy I can get some days, but I always come back. Dreamwidth is one of the few social medias I still use, so it's important to me. I've been regularly(ish) journaling for 2 years now.

Anyway if I seem interesting enough, I'm all up for being friends! I consider myself pretty tolerant barring seriously hateful rhetoric and emphasize with mental health struggles since I've been there (and am still here, really). Feel free to comment here or in my actual journal o/ I don't add people back unless they reach out to me first.

⚠️ Unless I'm familiar with the majority of the fandoms I don't know if I'd be able to connect with purely focused fandom journals, sorry! It should also be self-explanatory, but no minors please. Preferably 25+ since I'm old and usually have nothing in common with younger people.

(no subject)

Oct. 30th, 2025 09:45 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] boxofdelights!

(no subject)

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:15 pm
skygiants: Utena huddled up in the elevator next to a white dress; text 'they made you a dress of fire' (pretty pretty prince(ss))
[personal profile] skygiants
The other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.

Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.

After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.

This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension spoilers I suppose ) But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.

Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.

It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!

Recent Reading

Oct. 29th, 2025 11:04 pm
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
[personal profile] davidgillon
 

Hidden Legacy Series, Ilona Andrews

(First trilogy reviewed here. As a quick primer, magic has existed since the mid-1800s, runs in families called Houses, led by the overpowered Primes, and mundane law enforcement mostly refuses to get involved with their feuds).

Diamond Fire

Book 3.5 as it's a novella, and Nevada Baylor, protagonist of the first trilogy, is about to marry billionaire Connor 'Mad' Rogan. But they're two wedding planners down and Nevada's middle sister Catalina has decided she's going to make this wedding work if it kills her, or if she has to kill someone else. The problem is, someone already has killing in mind, a major theft already happened, and prime suspect for that is probably one of Connor's mother's family. So it's shy, brilliant Catalina against a dozen spoiled Spanish aristos.

I like Catalina as protagonist, but I think my favourite character is the utterly irreverent Runa Etterson, a Prime specialising in poisons: "Yes, the frosting is definitely poisoned - everyone grab a spoon and dig in!"

Sapphire Flames

Catalina has now replaced Nevada as head of House Baylor and the Baylor PI agency, on the grounds it's the only way to stop Nevada working herself to death. Summoned on a mission of mercy, to lure a grieving teen off a ledge, Catalina is horrified to discover his sister is Runa Etterson, and that they are the only surviving members of their family after their mother and sister burned to death in a house fire. Runa is convinced it was murder, and as the new head of House Etterson, she wants the Baylor Agency to find out who did it. Meanwhile, her mother had her own safeguard in place, and has hired an assassin to avenge her, an assassin Catalina is horrified to discover is billionaire playboy Count Alessandro Sagredo, subject of her teenage crush. In person Alessandro is arrogant, entitled, and annoyingly, evenly shockingly competent. It's love at first hate. 

Emerald Blaze

"Holster your weapons, and step away from the monkey!"

Nine months on from Sapphire Flames and Catalina is mostly over Alessandro walking out on her in pursuit of his personal obsession. But when both she and her secret boss, the grandfatherly Linus Duncan, aka the scary Warden of Texas, are attacked by summoned creatures, Linus decides that the attacks mean Catalina needs to take point on the investigation of the murder they may relate to. Which is when Alessandro reappears, strangely stripped of his arrogance, humbled even, and swearing to protect her. Which considering the investigation means going face to face with not one, but four combat Primes, the prime suspects in the murder, and a bunch of assassins, might be just as well.

Ruby Fever

A year on from Emerald Blaze and the Speaker of the Texas State Assembly (ruling body of the Houses) has just been assassinated, while someone walked through Linus Duncan's overpowered security to leave him comatose, which means Catalina Baylor, Deputy Warden of the State of Texas at the age of 23, is on her own when it comes to who is running the investigations. But that doesn't mean she's on her own for actually getting stuff done, because she has the full assistance of her family aka House Baylor, and her fiance, Alessandro Sagredo. Plus an annoying Russian prince. And she's going to need all the help she can get, because this time it's war.


Okay, these are David-candy, and I had to ration myself by insisting I read each book twice before moving on to the next, otherwise I'd have blown through the whole double-trilogy in three days. There's a definite pattern to the two trilogies: Book 1, best of frenemies, Book 2, reconciled lovers, Book 3, partners. But Nevada and Catalina are different characters, possibly overly defined by their older sister/middle sister roles, and if their partners are both dangerous billionaire bad boys, they're at least different dangerous billionaire bad boys - Connor as a soldier and Alessandro as, well, Zorro.

They're very much about family - the Baylors start as the three sisters, their mother, their two male cousins, and Grandma Frida, all working together, but also found family, because by the time the second trilogy wraps they are up to somewhere around twenty characters considering themselves to have family ties - and all but a couple of the younger kids with fully developed characters. 

The world-building is equally good, as is the plotting, with underlying arcs binding the trilogies together. I think I caught a couple of things that were raised and not developed, but nothing major. They even covered a point in the Baylor heritage where I initially thought they'd missed the scientific implications.

Impressed.

Daily Check-in

Oct. 29th, 2025 05:57 pm
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] 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, October29, to midnight on Thursday, October 30. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33771 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 20

How are you doing?

I am OK.
10 (52.6%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
9 (47.4%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
8 (40.0%)

One other person.
9 (45.0%)

More than one other person.
3 (15.0%)




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.
 

[ SECRET POST #6872 ]

Oct. 29th, 2025 07:36 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6872 ⌋

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


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #981.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - 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.
jesse_the_k: Metal disk nailed in sidewalk reads "survey marker do not remove" (Survey marker)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k posting in [community profile] access_fandom

When I started working on WisCon access in 2007, some kind soul (name lost) gave me a black teeshirt printed in tactile gold--with both Latin letters and braille. It sang the praises of ELECTRICAL EGGS, who advocated for handicap accessibility in the 1970s and 1980s. I loved the shirt but didn't know their history.

So I was thrilled when the September 2025 Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, volume 14 number 2, starts off with Eric Vero's article:

Oral History of The Electrical Eggs: Science Fiction, Disability Activism, and Fan Conventions

https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/1262

The journal offers PDF, HTML, and "simplified HTML" versions of each article; all are open access, peer-reviewed, and Creative Commons licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

ABSTRACT

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990, American science fiction fans in southern states organized, collaborated, and practiced accessibility at conventions. This grassroots movement began with the work of Samanda B. Jeude and a coalition of other science fiction fans who fought for visibility and access to convention spaces. In this oral history of their organization, “The Electrical Eggs,” I interview two key members decades after their participation in making conventions accessible. I complement these oral sources with brief histories of the role of eugenics and ableism in science fiction and the rise of disability activism in America. Although, the science fiction fandom still faces historical forces like ableism that have been present since its beginnings, the work of the Eggs is a testament to the power of collective action to provide accessibility in fan communities.

[pain] working on an articulation

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:48 pm
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] kaberett

I have, in the latest book, got to The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes, but this one makes a point of describing it as a "reductionistic approach".

The Thing Is, of course, that much like the Bohr model (for all that's 250 years younger, give or take), for many and indeed quite plausibly most purposes, The Cartesian Model Of Pain is, for most people and for most purposes, good enough: if you've got to GCSE level then you'll have met the Bohr model; if you get to A-level, you'll start learning about atomic orbitals; and then by the time I was starting my PhD I had to throw out the approximation of atomic nuclei as volumeless points (the reason you get measurable and interpretable stable isotope fractionations of thallium is -- mostly! -- down to the nuclear field shift effect).

Similarly, most of the time you don't actually need to know anything beyond the lie-to-children first-approximation of "if you're experiencing pain, that means something is damaging you, so work out what it is and stop doing that". The Bohr model is good enough for a general understanding of atomic bonds and chemical reactions; specificity theory is good enough for day-to-day encounters with acute pain.

The problem with specificity theory isn't actually that it's wrong (although it is); it's that it gets misapplied in cases where Something More Complicated is going on in ways that obscure even the possibility of Something More Complicated. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't get presented with the footnote of "this isn't the whole story, and for understanding anything beyond very short-term acute pain you need to go into considerably more detail". But most people aren't in more complex pain than that! Estimates run at ~20% of the population living with chronic pain, but even if we accept the 43% that sometimes gets quoted about the UK, most people do not live with chronic pain.

There's probably an analogy here with the "Migraine Is Not Just A Bad Headache" line (and indeed I'm getting increasingly irritated with all of these books discussing migraine as though the problem is solely and entirely the pain, as opposed to, you know, the rest of the disabling neurological symptoms) but I'm upping my amitriptyline again and it's past my bedtime so I'm not going to work all the details of that out now, but, like, Pain Is Not Just A Tissue Damage, style of thing.

Anyway. The point is that I still haven't actually read Descartes (I've got the posthumously published and much more posthumously translated Treatise on Man in PDF, I just haven't got to it yet) and nonetheless I am bristling at people describing him as reductionist (derogatory). Just. We aren't going to do better if we also persist in wilful misunderstandings and misrepresentations for the sake of slagging off someone who has been dead for three hundred and seventy-five years instead of recognising the actual value inherent in "good enough for most people most of the time", and how that value complicates attempts at more nuance! How about we actually acknowledge the reasons the idea is so compelling, huh, and discuss the circumstances under which the approximation holds versus breaks down? How about that for an idea.

sunnymodffa: 2 beans drawn as ancient greek warriors on an amphora (smol achillean beans)
[personal profile] sunnymodffa posting in [community profile] fail_fandomanon
 
"Inform thy lover, if he sayeth he hath beef
That I eat not of animal flesh and have no fear of him."

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Seasonal things, mostly

Oct. 29th, 2025 03:27 pm
umadoshi: (autumn orange candles (icons_by_mea))
[personal profile] umadoshi
I keep forgetting to share this link snagged from Bluesky a week or so ago: "Starbucks didn’t invent them. But it’s possible that Tori Amos or a Midwest grandma did".

The leaves are well and truly coming down now. There are still plenty on some trees--browning and crumpling--but the ground is drifted with them. (One of the downsides of having the outdoor spaces around the condo handled by a company: the leaves will probably all get gathered/raked/blown, rather than being left for winter habitat for critters. >.<)

We've had a few spots of rain in the last week or so, although nothing really major...and now we have a special weather statement for rain and strong winds on Hallowe'en. The timing. Possibly it'll clear up (or at least ease up) enough that trick or treating won't be miserable. (There are local social media reports of seeing parents demanding that Hallowe'en be rescheduled, but most people I actually know are cheerfully reminiscing about snowsuits and raincoats always being part of their costumes as kids.)

Our approach for the last couple years, at least, has been to simply leave out a bowl of treats and check on/refill it periodically, which will be much more feasible if the wind isn't threatening to simply blow it away. :/ (This year I was annoyingly sensible and said we should make sure to get treat offerings that I actively don't want, because blood sugar, etc. So we've done that.)
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished Encampment, which was brilliant, and intense.

So intense that I had to decompress with a brief Dick Francis binge: Driving Force (1992) - a bit subpar I thought, slow start, massively convoluted plot; Wild Horses (1994) - the one involving a paraphilia I actually did a post here on back when, and making of a movie; Twice Shy (1981) which has a lot of v retro though presumably at the time cutting-edge computer nerdery involving programs on cassette tapes.

On the go

Have started - this was while I was out and about in the world last week - Peter Parker's Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960–1967 (Some Men in London #2) (2024), since I was recording a podcast last week with the author and he assured me it was somewhat less of a downer than the previous, 1950s, volume. I think it may be a dipper-in over some while.

Still dipping in to Readers' Liberation - liked the first chapter, which is about what readers bring to the book, the second seems a bit heavier going.

Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood (1974) - perhaps not quite as good as Slow Days, Fast Company, but it was her first published work.

Up next

No idea: have just sent off for The Scribbler Annual but no idea when it's likely to arrive.

Something of Myself

Oct. 29th, 2025 11:15 am
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli posting in [community profile] books
Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling

An autobiographical account.

Read more... )

Reading Wednesday

Oct. 29th, 2025 06:50 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Just finished: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I don't really have a lot to add: This was good and useful, especially if you're in the revision stage of a project, which I am not. It weirdly made me want to read a few of the books that it talks about as examples, though with my TBR list as it is and a general disinterest in YA literature, I likely won't.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. It's time, fuckos! I've had a hold on this one since I read a bad review of it. I have heard that Kuang often doesn't land her endings, which I hope is not the case, because this has one of the best openings I've come across in a good long time. It begins with Alice Law, a postgrad in linguistic magick, preparing a chalk circle to go to Hell to retrieve the soul of her recently dead advisor, Professor Grimes, because he's on her dissertation committee and is her only chance to get tenure. The cost for going to Hell and returning is half your remaining lifespan, but Alice is more than willing to pay that in exchange for having a stable job, making her possibly the most relatable character in genre fiction. Her plans are interrupted by Peter, her hated academic rival and the department's golden boy, who insists on coming with her even though his prospects for career advancement are much better than hers.

Anyway this is completely hilarious and painful and only an inconvenient need to work and sleep is keeping me from it at the moment.

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