Summer is Icumen In

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:37 am
florianschild: (sunshine revival 2025)
[personal profile] florianschild posting in [community profile] sunshine_revival
I hope everyone is having a lovely June and looking forward to the official start to summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Behind the scenes we are getting ready to kick off the Sunshine Revival Challenge starting on July 1. There will be an introduction and friending post ahead of the start to the challenge so we can all gather and get to know one another. Here's a tentative schedule to mark on your planners, if you're into that:

2025 Sunshine Revival Schedule


June 28 - Introduction Post
June 30 - Friending Meme
July 1-25 - Challenge Posts every 4 days (7 in total)
July 31 - Wrap up post

In the meantime, please feel free to promo this challenge anywhere you can! Here are some graphics and icons to help you spread the word if you're so inclined. Feel free to use any and all that you like!

Icons and Banners under the cut! )
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
We’re at the mall getting eye exams (I already ordered new glasses from Zenni last month when I mislaid my regular pair, but I plan to get new prescription sunnies (also from Zenni) and Andrew should get new glasses too.

The optometry place is decorated with whimsical paintings of animals and celebrities wearing glasses, including portraits of Bea Arthur and Rue McLanahan. The manager must be a fan of The Golden Girls—there’s also a Pop!(?) figure of Estelle.

A large glass nazar hangs up in front of one of the cupboards, which seems appropriate.

Delay Announcement

Jun. 12th, 2025 01:42 pm
hurtcomfortexmod: (Default)
[personal profile] hurtcomfortexmod posting in [community profile] hurtcomfortex
As there are still unclaimed post-deadline pinch hits and I have had requests for extensions, I am announcing a delay. The new Reveals will be Friday, July 4th.

Pinch hit check-in day will be July 1st, if you currently have a pinch hit or pick one up they will need to be posted or you will need to e-mail me by July 1st.

Y'all

Jun. 12th, 2025 10:23 am
olivermoss: (Default)
[personal profile] olivermoss


Took a minute, but we are finally getting Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money

How to Secure Yarn End on a Ball

Jun. 12th, 2025 12:21 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Use a hair clip.  It holds securely, doesn't damage yarn, molds to the shape of the ball, and tells you exactly where the end is. 
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2025 06:02 pm
beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
[personal profile] beccaelizabeth
🖖
This week I have been mostly playing one of the DLC for Wrath of the Righteous
badly
on Core difficulty, where playing badly is not among the survivable options.

I am far enough along I do not want to start again but also far enough along I can see how I have borked my build entirely from the get go. Never played a Magus before, have got the wrong weapon and am making a mess of it. Currently surviving on cantrips and that's not sustainable.

I could start again, I could drop the difficulty, but at the moment I am playing the same fights over and over and over and wondering how I could be doing any better and getting stuck and having another go etc etc etc

And, eventually, noticing I am no longer having fun, and going away again.

Not a great way to play.

Also, doesn't give me much to talk about.

I did get two achievements for checking in all the corners for things, but it don't feel like progress when I know how many times I had to try the same fights to do it.



Then I stop playing and look at the actual real world news
and I really don't have anything to say at all at all.


So.


That's my week.
regshoe: Redwing, a brown bird with a red wing patch, perched in a tree (Default)
[personal profile] regshoe
I have a new obsession! And it's a bit of a surprise, because new American (/half-American) comedy in a modern setting is really not my usual kind of thing, but here we are. Étoile first caught my attention via a link to this gifset [er, big spoiler], then after clicking around a bit, finding some stuff about Cheyenne and deciding I had to know more about who she was, I decided to give the show a try. There is definitely some stuff about it that doesn't work for me, but the bits that do work really work, and on the whole it's loads of fun. Tobias and Cheyenne are, as I thought, among the highlights of the bits that work for me, but less expectedly, Geneviève has become my fave, and after watching the excellent finale I was inspired to write a little thing about her. I don't exactly know what I'm doing—live-action fandoms are not easy for me, especially one as fast-paced as this—and I'm not sure how far the ideas in this fic are really sound, but for now:

Not through words, but the first ray of dawn (1022 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Étoile (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Geneviève Lavigne (Étoile)
Additional Tags: Episode: s01e08 The Offer (Étoile), Post-Canon, Vignette
Summary:

Geneviève, the morning after.



I am beginning a slow re-watch of the show and would like to write some more stuff for it in future, so we'll see how that goes, I suppose. In the meantime reading all the Tobias/Gabin fic (there's huge amounts of it, by my standards) is being fun too!

Minneapolis

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:24 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
It's very poignant to be here again. I'm in Minneapolis so rarely that I can still distinguish each visit, but the overall sense is one of extended memory, that is not just of my own, but of anecdotes from my mother and grandmother about their lives here, my grandmother as a (very) young adult, and my mother as a kid.

Not all the memories of mine are good--the week we spent in Bloomington ranged from weird to horrific, the axis we kid spun around was the sound of my mother crying in the bathroom when my bio grandfather started his daily drinking and turned into a monster. We kids at least escaped with his bio kids (our age, his second marriage) but mom couldn't escape--we had the car.

The city that was best to them all (though mom only got to visit, never got to live there) was Red Wing. I adore that place! There's something so peaceful about Red Wing. And extended memory is very complete, as we heard ALL the stories about life on the farm, etc. But it wasn't idyllic--my grandmother and her older sister had to go--that was the conditions my great-grandmother accepted when she remarried in order to save the farm, around 1930, with the Depression really digging in. The man said he could abide the two younger girls but the sixteen year old (my grandmother) and her older sister had to get out and find their way on their own. Which they did, in Minneapolis, waiting tables.

Anyway I'm here for a con. I came a day early, knowing that getting in at one in the morning would leave me a zombie for a day. The weather is perfect--cool and cloudy. I think I'll go out for another walk.

365 Questions 2025

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:47 am
maju: Clean my kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] maju
10. If today was the last day of your life, would you want to do what you are about to do today? I don't see why not, but I'd be extremely disappointed if I had to spend the day away from any of my family.

11. If today was the last day of your life, who would you call and what would you tell them? I would call my daughters and tell them I love them and I'm proud of them.

(I can't say I'm a fan of questions that start with "If today was the last day of your life…" It's too much of a reminder of how little time I've got left compared to how much I've already had.)

12. Who do you dream about? I don't normally dream about people, even people I know. although I have had a couple of dreams about S. Generally if people appear in my dreams they are strangers.

Book Review: The Serviceberry

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:33 am
osprey_archer: (nature)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:34 am
maju: Clean my kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] maju
My morning started off well enough; I woke up a couple of minutes before my alarm and was able to go for a good walk just after 6 am, while it was still pleasantly cool outside. Things went slightly off the rails while I was getting my breakfast ready though. I'm not sure exactly how it happened (I think I turned around too quickly) but I knocked over my cup of tea just as I was about to spread marmalade on my toast, and the hot tea spilled right onto the front of my right thigh. Luckily the tea wasn't quite still at boiling temperature, but I hadn't yet added milk so it was quite hot. I stepped out of my wet shorts as quickly as I could and then got into the bath and ran cold water over the leg for a while before going back to the kitchen to deal with the mess.

I was eventually able to make myself another cup of tea and warm up my toast, but breakfast wasn't as enjoyable as it might have been. My leg was quite painful for a couple of hours but it's feeling much better now. The burns are still very red but there doesn't appear to be any blistering. I was afraid it would be much worse than this.

Accidents like this are one reason why I'm nervous about living alone. I'll be relieved to be closer to my daughter in due time.

Wednesday Word: Frankalmoigne

Jun. 11th, 2025 08:21 am
calzephyr: pwnies from ThinkGeek tee (MLP pwnies)
[personal profile] calzephyr posting in [community profile] 1word1day
Frankalmoigne

I screenshotted this word, but didn't realize it was such a doozy!

This medieval English legal concept is also spelled frank almoin or frankalmoign and describes a tenure by which a religious body holds land given to them, on the condition that prayers for the soul of the donor and heirs are offered.

Apparently I'm permanently cranky

Jun. 12th, 2025 10:16 am
mousme: A picture of Darth Vader, captioned My Fandom Destroys Planets. (My Fandom Destroys Planets)
[personal profile] mousme
 I lined up all my dominoes yesterday to guarantee an early bedtime. I wrote my posts early, fed the dogs and brushed their teeth early, put the quail to bed early, and had myself in bed winding down before 8pm. My plan was foolproof, or so I thought. I was about to turn out the lights and go to bed when my phone rang. I almost didn't answer because the call was from a Montreal number I didn't recognize. I only ever get calls from either my parents or my friend Lu, and all other calls originating from Montreal are usually wrong numbers trying to reach someone with my number but a different area code.

Then I figured, since it was likely a wrong number, I'd answer and just let them know, and then I could go to bed. NOPE. It was a volunteer from American Brittany Rescue calling to schedule my home visit. Oops. So she and I had a very nice chat and scheduled said home visit for ridiculously early this Saturday, and the very nice lady just. kept. talking. for over an hour. I still got to bed earlier than usual, but it was still 9:30pm, an hour and a half after I was ready to turn in. I am deeply frustrated and not a little cranky about the whole business. I'm going to try for an early night again tonight and hope it works better than last night.

*kicks rocks petulantly*

I am unreasonably annoyed by this specific loss of sleep, probably because A) I am bad at adapting to last-minute changes in my plans, and B) I had lined up everything perfectly in order to get to bed at the time I wanted, and if I just hadn't answered my phone, I could have done just that. Of course, if I'd done that I wouldn't have been able to set up the home visit or talk to the volunteer, so there's that, but I am still unreasonably annoyed.

I am tired of constantly being either in a bad mood, or a hair's breadth away from being in a bad mood after even the tiniest setback. Hopefully my attempts at getting more sleep will pay off in that regard. I don't have the luxury of taking time off work (not more than a day here or there, anyway), and psychiatric medication doesn't seem to be terribly effective for me (although I am being nice and compliant about taking my pills). So I'm going to have to trust that focusing on getting more and hopefully better sleep will have a salutary effect. Maybe not living surrounded by precariously teetering boxes and whatever trash KK has left around for me to pick up will help with my (perceived) stress levels as well. We shall see in a few weeks, I guess.

Raven, what are you doing?

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:57 am
annavere: (Joe Dawson facepalm)
[personal profile] annavere
They really brought in Philip Akin as a new character? And they really killed him off AGAIN? What even.

Profile

quillpunk: digital portrait sketch of an imaginary guy who might or might not (not) be me (Default)
Ren the Ghost

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1234567
8910 11121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 13th, 2025 08:03 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios