Weekend Plans

Dec. 20th, 2025 12:22 am
settiai: (Sue -- jadelioness)
[personal profile] settiai
Okay, let's figure out my plans for the weekend, shall we?

All of my big bills (hotel, storage unit, phone, PO Box) have already been paid, so unless something very unexpected happens I don't have to worry about any major expenses the rest of the year other than a vet bill on the 29th. So that's definitely something to be happy about, as it means I can focus on other things this weekend.

I think my plan is to get up tomorrow morning and do my usual weekend cleaning. That way, I can get all of those things done first thing. I'll wash clothes, do some vacuuming/dusting/mopping/etc., and then hopefully by mid-afternoon I'll be free to work on other things.

By which I mainly mean writing as many fics for Yuletide as I possibly can, to be fair. That said, I still need to watch this week episode of both The Mighty Nein and Critical Role, so I'd like to get that done tomorrow as well.

That way I can spend pretty much all of Sunday writing. 🤞🏻

Dept. of Memes

Dec. 19th, 2025 08:44 pm
kaffy_r: Roslin and Adama from Battlestar Galactica (Smiling Adama and Roslin)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Music Meme, Day 16

A song from a television soundtrack: 

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica was one of the best SFF shows of the 1990s - in fact, it may be the best SFF show of all time (with The Expanse only a hair behind it), at least in my opinion. Its soundtrack by composer Bear McCreary is a major engine driving the story, underlying the incredible writing and acting that made BSG the classic that it became. McCreary, who also composed for shows such as Outlander, for which he won an Emmy, became known during his tenure on all four seasons of BSG for what fans lovingly termed "the poundy drums." They're here in this song, and I wouldn't have it any other way. 

In his reimagining (there's that word again) of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, McCreary did what I initially thought was impossible. Who could be arrogant enough to rescore that song? He was, and despite my initial wariness, I came to love his version even more than Dylan's. It plays during a key point in the show's third season, and the show's producers were absolutely right to go with it. I'm including two versions here: the one on the Season 3 soundtrack, and a live version that McCreary directed during a night of BSG music played live several years ago. 





Before I add the live version, here are my previous meme answers, starting with Day 13 (which has a link to the 12 previous answers, and adding Day 14 and Day 15

Finally, here's the live version of the song. 








Story Index 2025

Dec. 19th, 2025 09:36 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
Leitmotif of the year:
I can't focus on long things, but by all that's unholy, I can write limericks and drabbles! I wrote other things, too, but golly.

My best story of this year:
Stand back, I'm going to try science!, in which Obi-Wan accidentally gives Anakin a complex about his body, and Anakin 3D prints himself helpful things. This one is deeply silly, and yet affectionate.

My favorite and/or truest story of this year:
The leaves grow bright before they fall wins this one for me, with Anakin and Obi-Wan doing the Hades and Persephone dance, in their own particular, backward, inside-out and upside-down sort of way.

Read on )
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Yuletide works are scheduled to go live a little under five days from now, at 9pm UTC 24 December (if all goes well and there are no further pinch hits needed).

COUNTDOWN TO REVEALS

Treats

Treats in both the Madness and Main Yuletide collections are enthusiastically welcomed. You can post a treat for someone in the main collection up until 9pm UTC 24 December, and in the Madness collection up until 9pm UTC 25 December. There's more information about posting treats here. If you're hunting for inspiration, see also the mini-challenges tag at [community profile] yuletide, and of course, please consider treats for pinch hitters.

Pinch hits

We’re still looking for intrepid writers to take on post-deadline pinch hits. As of this post, we need writers for:

PH #184: Aveyond (Video Games), Quasimorph (Video Game), Geneforge

PH #198: even if TEMPEST 宵闇にかく語りき魔女 (Visual Novel), Flowers Series (Visual Novels), Lkyt. (Visual Novel)

As well as offers from writers, we're keen to hear (yuletideadmin@gmail.com) from anyone with tips on how to consume or review details of these canons!

Please look at our outstanding pinch hit details, and help if you can!

Beta requests

Can you help out a fellow writer by beta-reading their work? Please check the hippo-want-ads at the Discord server, or email mods if you can help with one of the following requests and we’ll get you in touch.
As of this post, beta readers are needed for the following requests (click/expand to view):
1.2K T-rated Mayor of Kingstown
15k+ E-rated Damien/Gerald Coldfire Trilogy
7k Batman Wayne Family Adventures
Racepicker and sensitivity reader for a 10k fic featuring a young Black English girl
4.7k slang and other dialogue choices right for a Gen Z Black Londoner, Rivers of London
13k Lunar Chronicles
2.8k fic for The Odd Couple (TV 1970)
4k Nicked by M.T. Anderson

We also have some less time-sensitive beta requests in the server's betas-wanted channel:
WH40k
The Witcher III/Chronicles of Narnia
The Stakeout from Inside No. 9
Daria (Cartoon)



Meanwhile, please check your work

  • Please check that you uploaded the right draft. Mistakes can happen to anyone, but checking that everything looks right is a crucial part of posting. Make sure your work has a title and that the summary doesn't say "tbd". Please check that all the text is there and you didn't post the version with [name?] and [thing goes here] notes. Any uploaded version must be a complete story that is readable as it is, even if you're still making edits between now and reveals. Please don't risk disappointing your recipient or requiring mods to seek a back-up pinch hit.

  • Please check that all required characters feature in the work. This is likely to mean all the characters your recipient tagged, not just the ones they wrote prompts for. Or, if they selected Any, a character from the tag set. They may have selected additional tags that give further guidance about which characters to include - please check that too. If your recipient selected Worldbuilding and you're not sure there's enough of it, get a second opinion - a friend, a beta. If there is any doubt about whether your story contains all the characters it needs to contain, please check with mods. Prompts alone are not automatically permission to leave characters out. The use of additional tags may still leave some grey areas.

  • Please review your author's notes. Yuletide stories are anonymous for one week - do not give your name or link to your personal sites or socials in your author's note. Do not promise expanded, future, or replacement gifts - your work needs to stand alone. And do not apologise for your work in your author's note, or talk about what a struggle it was to write. People often feel doubt as well as excitement when giving someone a story, but don't give your recipient your doubts as part of their gift. In your author's note, please follow the principle that if you cannot say something positive, don't say anything at all.

  • Please check your recipient's Do-Not-Wants. Yes, again.

  • Please check your story in general! You don't have to get it beta read, but please check spelling and grammar. Please make sure that it’s not a wall of text with no spacing between paragraphs - and, conversely, that there aren’t too many blank lines between paragraphs.


(And, having fully prepared for reveals - we hope that you are excited for them! We are!)

Miscellaneous
  • If you're unlikely to be able to comment until the end of the anon period or later, consider letting your author know at the AFK post.
  • You can find beta volunteers at this post or at the Discord server.

LINKS
Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Tag Set App | Community DW | Community LJ | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth | Beta post
double_dutchess: (Sunnydale Herald)
[personal profile] double_dutchess posting in [community profile] su_herald
Xander: I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away.

~~Witch~~



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Write every day: Day 19

Dec. 19th, 2025 10:55 pm
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
[personal profile] luzula
We had an early Christmassy meal together before my housemates leave to spend Christmas with their respective families. The meal ran late, and I suppose I could have written after that, but instead I browsed Smitten Kitchen before writing an alibi sentence. Ah well, so it goes. Found some recipes to try, at least.

Tally:
Read more... )
Day 18: [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] chestnut_pod, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] carenejeans

Bonus farm news: Today we ate, among other things, British mince pies and Swedish ris à la Malta (which they probably do not make in Malta). The latter is a Christmas dessert made from rice porridge and whipped cream, mixed with pieces of chopped orange. To go with it, I make a sauce with red wine, lingonberry jam, ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon.

Since I just had to dig this up:

Dec. 19th, 2025 08:40 am
muccamukk: Han Solo, Leia Organa, C-3PO, Chewbacca watch from the bushes. (SW: We're Watching You!)
[personal profile] muccamukk
Archive of Our Own: Protect Your Contact Information From Scammers.

In the last year, AO3 has seen a rise in "art commission" spambot comments. The bots leaving these comments pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for a fan's fic. After convincing their targets to contact them off AO3, they scam their targets into paying for that art. Fans have reported that after sending payment, they either received AI-generated art or nothing at all.
If you receive a scam comment from a guest, you can press the "Spam" button on the comment. This helps train our automated spam-checker to better detect this type of behavior.

If you encounter a scammer that has a registered account, or if you encounter a guest posting scam comments on someone else's work, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:

  1. Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.

  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.

  3. In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".

  4. In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."

Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.

If you encounter a scam commenter on someone else's work, you can let the work creator know the commenter is likely a bot and link them to this news post.

(Thanks to JT for reminding me where the post was.)

(no subject)

Dec. 19th, 2025 10:19 am
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
I'm partway through the 10Dance movie. I'm enjoying Sugiki and Suzuki's chemistry (and like that they kiss each other onscreen - I really enjoyed the subway car sequence). I also ship their female dance partners together. I haven't read the manga, but I gather it's ongoing.

Read more... )

I'm looking forward to (and am a bit anxious about) ClaireBell's finale tomorrow. I'm hoping it sticks the landing (and is a happy ending for Bell and Claire).

(no subject)

Dec. 19th, 2025 09:57 am
pshaw_raven: (Hiroshi Nagai - palm trees)
[personal profile] pshaw_raven
'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
the AC was running, 'cause we live in the South.

The Friday Five - Selfing

Dec. 19th, 2025 08:32 am
pshaw_raven: (Derpy Hawk)
[personal profile] pshaw_raven
1. What is one thing about you that you hate?
I feel like I'm out of sync with other people. Like everyone's been issued an instruction book that I didn't get, and I'm just wandering around clueless.

2. What is one thing about you that you love?
I'm working on that one.

3. If you had to change one thing about you what would it be and why?
I wish I weren't so prone to anxiety. Anxious and fearful feelings have been the background noise of my life since I was a small child.

4. What is one word that you would use to define yourself?
Eremitic

5. Imagine what you would look like in a perfect world...what do you look like?
I would look like the athlete I am. Unfortunately, like many people I often confuse the appearance of fitness models with the appearance of athletes. That is to say, a woman who can deadlift her own body weight is unlikely to look like the chick in the ad for protein powder.

Recent reading

Dec. 19th, 2025 08:32 am
troisoiseaux: (reading 10)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Read A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, a slim, unconventional memoir. Framed as her repeated failure to respond to the prompt why do you write? to the satisfaction of a literary conference in Mexico City (she was eventually uninvited), it reads like a commonplace book: a mix of anecdotes, and copies of letters Toews exchanged with her sister over the years (the answer to why do you write? being, originally, because she asked me to), and musings on the concept of a "wind museum", and random quotes and poetry and bite-sized bios of historical figures who died by suicide. It helped to know a bit about Toews' background - mostly that she was raised Mennonite and that both her father and sister died by suicide - because eventually both of those things are made clear, but I did get a sense of presuming that someone picking up Toews' personal non-fiction on why she writes has already read at least some of her novels, many of which have elements drawn from her life.

In other writing about writing, I received This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days by John Darnielle as an early birthday/Christmas gift - an illustrated, annotated collection of the Mountain Goats' lyrics - and, of course, immediately just skimmed it for my favorite songs, which quickly turned into reading random chunks because each "annotation" is a short paragraph, max - sometimes about the context for writing the song, or commentary on the characters/story, or what inspired it, or how people respond to it, or some observation/quote/etc. that is not obviously related to the song in any way - so once you've opened it to a specific page it's easy to just keep going for a while, and anyway, now I have to figure out to actually read this book. Just read it cover to cover? Listen to each song in the order they appear, and read the accompanying passage? (Which is a cool idea, but would take forever. Theoretically, I could do one song per day, devotional-style, but I know my attention span well enough to know that's not happening.)

The Daily Spell

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:49 pm
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
I stumbled across this well-spell-crafted game whilst wondering around itch.io: The Daily Spell, a story about a sudden surge in magical beast manifestations in a fantasy city, told through daily word puzzles that resolve into the headlines of brief newspaper articles that advance the story. Quite delightful and very well done.

$rf$

The Ornaments, part I

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:32 pm
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
[personal profile] psocoptera
The first thing about ornaments is that there is no disadvent in ornaments. Ornaments may be created but not destroyed. Man hands on ornaments to man; they deepen like a continental shelf. (Put up as little as you can, and don't buy any ornaments yourself.)

The second first thing is that you can't imagine how many my mom had, as of last year. However many boxes you're picturing it was more than that. Years upon decades of gifts from relatives (sometimes in threes, one to my mom and one to each of my sister and me), Girl Scout craft projects, other craft projects just because my mom likes craft projects. My mom's share of all of *her* mom's ornaments, who collected Santa Claus-themed stuff and sometimes had a whole separate little tree just of Santa Claus ornaments in addition to her main tree.

In theory, I thought it was great that she was ready to downsize. In practice what she meant was that she wanted to see my sister and I divide them up, except for her favorites, perhaps the right amount for a small coffee-table tree.

I had been dodging taking more of my ornaments for years, doing things like dutifully sorting out a box of them and then leaving it behind in the garage. But it was a category of my parents' Stuff that my mom was actually ready to do something about. So... Ornaments.

(no subject)

Dec. 19th, 2025 04:56 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Da Qing looking conspiratorial (Guardian - Da Qing conspiratorial)
[personal profile] china_shop


Image: colour pencil sketch of a black cat wrapped neatly in a blue blanket, and a young man (Zhao Yunlan) sprawled/face-planeted under a red blanket, with his feet sticking out the bottom and one sock fallen off. He is holding a lollipop.

notes
* Perspective is really hard. ;-p
* Still avoiding drawing faces.
* I think my attempt at Da Qing is on a par with Guo Changcheng's notebook sketch, but in my defence, that is one weird-looking cat. ;-)

The Ornaments, part 0

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:13 pm
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
[personal profile] psocoptera
I have so much to say about ornaments that I made two false starts back in January and then gave up. (They were the third long story of the three long stories, which nobody but me remembers but is still an open to-do list item.) I still want to try to say things, but maybe broken into enough small pieces to not be a tl;dr-sized wall of text.

Gosh, don't you just hate it

Dec. 19th, 2025 01:35 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

*****************


Read more... )
glassesofjustice: Star Trek hunter green ugly sweater where the badge is stanging like a tree with a bell on top and it says "Trek The Halls" on the bottom. (Ex:TrekHolidays)
[personal profile] glassesofjustice posting in [community profile] startrekholidays

Reveals delayed until Wednesday, December 24, 2025.



There are two post deadline pinch hits remaining. PH 1 has added a request for Strange New Worlds. Please see the details and claim at the PDPH post here.

The new deadline for these PHs is Monday, December 22, 2025 11:59PM EST (08:59PM PST).

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