jmtorres | Network

This challenge is being run by

kingstoken, and the master post is here.

~~Two substitutions~~ One more substitution and two wild cards allowed.

Squares: 23 ~ Bingos: 8

Reading challenge bingo card with 23 slots filled in

Reading challenge bingo card with 23 slots filled in

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Current Mood: pleased

rachelmanija

This picks up when Danny's been Dreadnought for a while, and is getting a bit too into the violent aspects of the job. This aspect is quite well done - you understand what's going on with her, but it actually is a bit unsettling. Also, Valkyrja reappears, sort of; an evil techbro wreaks havoc; a TERF is threatening the world; and Danny works on her relationships.

I liked this more than the first book. Danny developed as a character and spent a lot less time being abused by transphobes. I'll grab the third book when it comes out.

The sequel isn't as good as the first book, unfortunately. I'd have been happy with more of Zax, Minna, and Vicky exploring the multiverse, but this book is much more plot-driven and Minna and Vicky only show up three-quarters of the way through. Half or more of the book is narrated by a new character whose identity I'll leave out as it's spoilery for the first book. She was fine as a character but her storyline was less interesting. Zax gets a new companion, and I did quite enjoy his adventures with her. I also enjoyed Minna and Vicky when they finally appeared.

But the plot-driven parts were less interesting, and the structure was really odd and not in a way that benefited the book. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, we get a retrospective summary of what happened some time after that point, then we get the entire backstory of the non-Zax narrator bringing her up to the point where she meets Zax in the first book, then it jumps forward and we get what's happening to her now, then we catch up with what Zax is doing now, and then, about three quarters of the way in, we finally get the story of what happened immediately after the first book left off. I think it would have worked better to tell the story more linearly. And also, to have much more Minna.

It's not a bad book and it does have some really good parts, but there are some baffling choices made.

relicradiohorror_feed

Posted by info@relicradio.com (RelicRadio.com)

https://www.relicradio.com/otr/2026/05/fever-by-the-hermits-cave-2/

https://www.relicradio.com/otr/?p=24886

Today on The Horror, The Hermit’s Cave brings us his story from October 20, 1946, titled, Fever.

Listen to more from The Hermit’s Cave

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https://www.relicradio.com/otr/2026/05/fever-by-the-hermits-cave-2/

https://www.relicradio.com/otr/?p=24886

badly_knitted posting in

drabble_zone

This week's challenge is:

Amnesty 50

This is our fiftieth Amnesty challenge - every tenth challenge will be an Amnesty. Every tenth Amnesty will last two weeks!

What does this mean? Simply put, all previous challenges are now re-opened; write for any of them you want, and as many as you want.

Here's the list: New, Under the Influence, Wind, An Unreasonable Expectation, Pebbles, Heroic Failures, Whisper, Trouble In Mind, Halloween, Tough Choices, Relax, Fight or Flight, Seal, In The Doghouse, Decorations, Christmas Eve, Hope, Thank-You Notes, Cat, Peace Of Mind, Candlelight, Love Is In The Air, Alone, Just Friends, Mascot, Some Assembly Required, Arch, A Change In The Weather, Spring, Easter Eggs, Allergies, The Sky's The Limit, Birds, It Could Be Worse, Dabble, What Are You Complaining About Now?, Fruit, Sweet Summer Lovin', Twinkle, When The Sun Goes Down, Carnival, When There's Nobody Around, Holiday/Vacation, Growing Older But Not Up, Laughter, Free As The Wind, Awkward, If I Were You, Schedule, After All This Time, Nightfall, Love Is Blind, Travel, Fun And Games, Things That Go Bump In The Night, Jump, The Best Laid Plans..., Unbelievable, Long Way Back, Faith, How Did We Get Here?, Blue, Only Human, David Bowie Song Titles, Starstruck, Laying The Blame, Clear, Herbs And Spices, Waiting, There's Always Tomorrow, Anticipation, Mind Over Matter, Wonder, Do The Right Thing, Sneeze, One Of These Days, Early, Better Luck Next Time, Glass, Every Once In A While, Nervous, Old Enough To Know Better, Underwater, All Or Nothing, Hungry, Look Out, Space, A Chance Encounter, Nostalgia, In A Week Or Two, Coast, In The Moonlight, Shameless, Caught In The Act, Vain, Over The Hill, Torn, Nothing To See, Autumn / Fall, Imaginary Friends, Cold, Scene Of The Crime, Loud, Make Up Your Mind, Silver, What Are You Doing?, More, A Better Idea, Fireworks, Seeking Shelter, Numbers, Deep Down, Familiar, Just The Way You Are, Romance, Slip Of The Tongue, Tired, Right Or Wrong, Slinky, I've Got You, Elephant, Are You Ready?, Murder, On The Other Hand, Sleepy, A Long Time Ago, Memory, Where There's A Will, Fast, One More Day, Bake, End Of The Road, Gesture, Love Or Lust, Poke, Speak Of The Devil, Welcome, Not A Hero, Guilty, Late In The Day, Storm, Lie To Me, Dance, Thought I'd Seen Everything, Invisible, Friends And Neighbours, Spooky, In The Aftermath, Vibrate, Because You Love Me, Grey, Back To Front, Ride, Christmas Songs, Magic, Work Like A Dog, Exuberant, Long Lost Friend, Real, The State I'm In, Chemistry, You're The One, Hamper, Silence Is Golden, River, Good Advice, Warm, Out Of My Mind, Garden, Winding Down, Sound, Count On Me, Touch, Under These Conditions, Need, Hole In The Ground, Paradise, A Good Reason, Grope, Climbing The Walls, Visitor, Weather Warning, Believe, Having A Blast, Rash, The Last To Know, Park, Watch Your Step, Velvet, Dramatic Pause, Eyes, You Owe Me, Jelly / Jello, Trick Or Treat, Flirt, Push The Button, Tears, Nobody Gets Hurt, Freeze, Bad Habits, Needles, Making A Fresh Start, Weekend, In The Jungle, Shake, Cabin Fever, Darkness, Another Lonely Night, Speed, Just Getting Started, Restless, The Wrong Key, Precarious, Do Something!, Knot, Walking On Eggshells, Quiet, Try To Remember, Haywire, No Strings Attached, Jukebox, Far From Home, Whistle, Living It Up, Headache, Used To Be Mine, Last, Hot Summer Night, Yawn, Once In A While, Book, Too Many, Hide, Where Were You?, Pocket, Down The Road, Slide, Two Of A Kind, Genius, Dark And Stormy Night, Haunt/Haunted, Take It Off, Light, Good News, Ocean, The Holiday Season, Winter, Christmas Day, Celebration, In Another Life, Snuggle, Up To Something, Fine, In The Post, Birthday, Under The Weather, Catch, Kiss And Tell, Useful, Practice Makes Perfect, Apology, Kindness Of Strangers, Roll / Rolling, Soap And Water, Idiot, The Hard Way, Cling, Staying Home, Umbrella, Breaking The Rules, Key, Demons And Angels, Heatwave, Fun In The Sun, Someday, You Know Me, Plant, Into The Unknown, Fire, Out Of Sight, Squirrel, Nothing To Do, Alibi, Shattered Glass, Twist, Fright Night, Pumpkin, Dream Of You, Wood, Get Behind Me, Undone, Long Time Gone, Cosy, Warning Labels, Listen, Things Change, Explore, It's About Time, Order, Same Old Story, Chocolate, Wrapped Up In..., Kneel, In Too Deep, Run, Close Your Eyes, Homegrown, Take This With You, Ferret, Quality Time, Historic, Days Like This, Tail, Pass It On, Sweet, Love Who You Love, Parade, In The Shelter, Explode, Leave That Alone, Thunder, Take A Chance, Hand, Don't You Know?, Thread, Burning Bridges, Island, Come Monday, Survive, I Can Explain, Rain, Almost Home, Moon, Tell The Truth, Grind, That's Not Mine, Inspire, Nothing To Lose, Shopping, Have We Got Everything?, Feast, Turn It Up, Sleepless, I'm Alright, Massage, Driving Home, Wall / Walls, Taken By Surprise, Bone, Hard Times, Radio, Is It Just Me?, Buns, Under The Table, Detour, Because Of You, Swing, Here We Go Again, Change, Out Of Control, Single, On The Loose, Down, I'm Trying, Rock, Hold On, Revenge, Out Of Order, Worthless, Give Me Time, Leather, Use Your Imagination, Fancy, The Other Side, Overtime, I Can't Dance, Burn, Money Isn't Everything, Candy, Shame About That, Drop, Not That Different, Wild, See If I Care, Pretend, I Was There, Party, Travelling Light, Water, Someone Like You, Bright, Everyone's A Critic, Mud, The Walk Back, Admit, Up All Night, Mine, It's My Job, Quarrel, Long Way Down, Fantastic, No Big Deal, Gone, In The Dark, Ready, Up To You, Ripple, Over You, Liberty, Stay With Me, Flower, Tangled Up, Waltz, Going To Pot, Shuffle, Where Was I, Control, Have Mercy, Away, Painting The Town, Time, One Step Closer, Rough, I Know That, Lonely, Rocky Road, Hurt, On My Mind, Sunset, Lock And Key, Smoke, To The End, Glow, On The Road Again, Shiver, Here Comes Trouble, Accident, Feeling Blue, Stars, Childhood Hero, Damage, I Feel Lucky, Talk, A Stitch In Time, Rest, Letting Go, Mist, Ghost Town, Remember, Wake Up,

Reminder of Rules

Entries should be 100 or 200 words exactly, excluding titles and headers. Triple drabbles are now also allowed.
Please place the body of your entry behind a cut.
Tag with the appropriate Challenge, Fandom, Type, and Ratings tags. If a tag for your fandom doesn't exist, leave a request on the Tag Request post and I'll create the tags you need. You can request as many fandom tags as you want.
You don't need to use the challenge word or phrase in your drabble, though you can if you like.
Each challenge ends when the new challenge is posted.

Have fun!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

troisoiseaux

Read Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park, which starts with the murder of a North Korean spy in an alley in Oxford, England, and then spends the first half of the book as a slower, more understated read than one would expect from that opening: split between three characters living very different, but entangled, lives in Oxford— a North Korean spy (the protégé of the murdered spy) posing as a Japanese-French grad student, a Korean-American CIA agent posing as a bartender from Seoul to keep tabs on the North Korean spy cell, and a South Korean restaurant owner with a tragic backstory— it's mostly an exploration of identity (what does it mean to be Korean?) until it does in fact loop back around to being a spy thriller, and then several things I was kind of ???/ambivalent about from a narrative standpoint clicked into place. ( SPOILERS )

Current Music: Isimo - Bleachers

adore

I didn't post yesterday because I was recovering from the upset stomach. And I still have to catch up on replying to comments. But here's a mini post for today. I came across some absolutely synapse-firing art and found out it's Mo Dao Zu Shi fanart. I don't even go here, but here I am.

by @aimeeaprilpp on Twitter

It's beautiful and so sensual. I could fawn over his fingers for paragraphs, about how delicate they are and how evident their expertise, but this is a mini post. He looks like he's climaxing, and I don't mean the plot. The arch of his neck is perfect. The trees in the background look like nerve endings. It all gets one thinking. Not aloud, but definitely Thinking. 100/10 would poke my head into this fandom again.

Current Mood: horny

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: thoughtful

lyssie

Not much has been happening, work, work, sleep, work.

I bought myself a new bed frame. Now I need to use a stepladder to sleep (which is quite nice, though).

rambly stuff about changing my room about

I also bought new shelves, replacing the standard Wal-Mart pressboard things which, to be fair, lasted the twenty years they've been up. But were saaaaagggging something terrible and not very well-organized, and just generally looked terrible.

Now I have nice metal frame shelves that feel a lot more open? I also moved my dresser, so now I can put clothes away! That's a bit nice.

I also ruthlessly culled books and dvds into storage boxes that are now in the basement. Things I do want to keep, but don't need in my room. This included: the original Farscape sets I have (I bought the series on mega-sale one year, so I had two shelves' worth or barely a hand-sized box. Seriously, why didn't I do that earlier?).

Changing the artwork on my walls: I pulled down most of the posters in their terrible falling-apart poster thingies. Most of them are being pulled out and broken down/folded and stored in a couple of three-ring binders. I've been replacing them with my own artwork, or things I've bought over the years that I never had 'anywhere to put'.

There are still a couple of those to go, but I didn't have the energy when swapping the shelves out to also pull out the ladder and climb it to do so.

I have a plan for my desk! I need to pull it out, strip some of the paint and then cover it with wallpaper sticky pages. It should look odd and far too colorful when done, but I'll be pleased.

I'm also pulling everything off of it and organizing where it goes.

Which also includes all of my painting gear - that's spread too far and wide and everywhere, ugh.

I bought more under the bed boxes with good sliders, so now I have better storage for some things that were just shoved anywhere they could go.

I still need to tackle my closet, though. There's some things in there I wore once, fifteen years ago (related, though: I tossed my Furlough costume, the Klingon detritus I hadn't worn in twenty years, and the Delirium costume I wore once). Plus a lot of things that "I might wear this year!" but I'm wearing jeans at work anyway (fuck their clothing requirements, they can deal with jeans or I'll just stay home).

In other news, I finally finished reading Agatha Christie's The Hollow - John Christow always deserves everything he gets, and I will hear no other reading. Also, Gerda is my fave. And the adaptation they did was superb (speaking of, though, I could watch twenty seasons and a movie of Lucy rambling on and saving people with guns and helping hide murderers and burning tea kettles).

I tried watching the Inspector Morse episode The Dead of Jericho, which has a younger Gemma Jones. Unfortunately, it was so incredibly dull I stopped. Morse seems to be on Youtube, though, for anyone who wants to give a go.

Big Finish's Torchwood monthly series is at an end, with 100 episodes. I took advantage of the last sale they had, and now have all of it. I will miss this series, though there are episodes I will definitely re-listen to.

Big Finish in collaboration with a bunch of others are doing a massive Fugitive Doctor thing with Jo Martin (I want her on my tv, too, but I'll take what I can get!) https://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/the-countdown-to-doctor-who-circuit-breaker-starts-now

In RL news, my brother is part of the group leading the charge against the data center where he lives. He's now been quoted in several places. I'm so proud of him (and dad would have been so pleased). That bit where they VOTED OUT the council members who voted for it was brilliant.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Erasure - Swan Song

umadoshi

Reading: For non-fiction, I'm still steadily picking away at Braiding Sweetgrass; I think I've crossed the halfway point!

I finished Gareth Hanrahan's The Gutter Prayer, which has fascinating worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the characters. Neither library to which I have access has the sequel (I think it's a trilogy?) in ebook, so we'll see if/when I cave and buy it. For a second book, there's probably not much future in just leaving it on my wishlist indefinitely and hoping for it to go on sale, although one never knows.

Then I read T. Kingfisher's Wolf Worm via the library (I'm trying this novel approach of using the library more again if they have a book and the ebook cost is too upsetting), which was distressing in very T. Kingfisher ways (another case of interesting worldbuilding + EW EW EW), followed by Common Goal, the fourth Game Changers book. (I did give in and just buy the ebook set of books 4-6.)

In other book not-really-news, I decided to just go ahead and get the new Murderbot in hard copy, given the price of the ebook (esp. since I think it's a novella this time? And hopefully it being just novella-length will increase my odds of still getting it read fairly promptly despite being a hard copy).

Watching: Last night

scruloose and I made it to ep. 8 of Justice in the Dark, AKA the last ep. that was released in China and the last one I'd seen previously. Onward!

(I'm mostly coping with the name changes, but apparently I do better at keeping the different names straight in my head when it's different consonants than vowels. I mentally autocorrect the show's "Pei Su" to "Fei Du" and carry on, but when I don't actually have one version in front of me, I keep stumbling a bit over Luo Wenzhou [novel]/Luo Weizhao [drama].)

Listening: This week I listened to not one but two (new!) albums for the first time--Tori Amos' Time of Dragons, as mentioned yesterday, and Metric's Romanticize The Dive. I haven't done a proper lyrics-focused listen to the latter, but I imagine I will at some point. My initial feeling is basically "Yep, that's a Metric album, and I like Metric, so that works." (Fantasies is the only one I'm hugely attached to individually [and I'm not terribly familiar with their catalogue before that], but that's mainly because I used it pretty heavily when writing Newsflesh fic.)

Current Mood: okay

sabotabby

This has been the longest and coldest winter ever but today was Peak Cherry Weekend at High Park so

ioplokon and I did the thing.

( cut for people who don't want to see more cherry blossoms and a cool duck )

goodbyebird posting in

youtuberecs

Watch on YouTube

innitmarvelous_og posting in

fan_flashworks

Creator: innitmarvelous_og
Title: Queen Susan the Gentle
Fandom: The Chronicles of Narnia
Characters/Pairings: Susan Pevensie
Prompt: Challenge 514: Gentle
Word Count/Medium: 5 icons
Rating: None
Warning: None
Summary: Five icons featuring Susan

nanila

Do you like to spend time outdoors?

Yes! I like walking, hiking and swimming outside. I don’t get to do any of those things often enough, but when I do, they make me very happy.
What is your favorite flower?

Whichever ones are currently in bloom. Right now it’s the tulips, and an iris just opened so for a few days it will be them as they're ephemeral. The roses are getting ready to go as well, and all of our rose bushes are bursting with buds this year which is nice to see.
Any favourite warm weather activities?

Gardening for hours, and then sitting on the lawn afterward with a refreshing cold beverage, admiring my handiwork and planning what to do next.
Have you ever kept a garden? If so, what did you grow?

Yes! I’m not really the architect of our garden. The layout is all the bloke’s handiwork. I like weeding, trimming, and helping out the flowering plants and veg he chooses.
Do you know how to swim?

Yes, but not particularly well. I do wish I’d had proper swimming lessons as a child. Both my children swim very well because of their lessons, and Humuhumu has done lifesaving courses too.

rocky41_7 posting in

booknook

Title: Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp
Author: Tracy Slater
Genre: Non-fiction, history

It seems timely to read about America’s past experience with unjust detention of people based on perceived threats to national security, so last night I finished Together in Manzanar by Tracy Slater, a true story about one of the families in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. The situation of the Yonedas was somewhat unusual as they were a mixed-race family—Karl Yoneda was a Japanese-American citizen and his wife Elaine was white and Jewish.

The Yonedas make for a very interesting case study in what happened in the camps because a) their mixed-race family status (including their 3-year-old son, Tommy) made it clear how little the American military had really thought about this plan, given how thrown-off they were by the mere existence of mixed-raced families; and b) Karl and Elaine had been vocal social activists well before they were imprisoned in the Manzanar camp, speaking up for labor rights, racial justice, and participating in Communist advocacy. They had the language, tools, and knowledge to speak up and speak out, and they did.

Slater has done her research and provides a thorough list of sources at the end of the book, which include interviews with the Yonedas’ grandchildren as well as their own diaries and news clippings.

Together in Manzanar provides an in-depth look at the politics within the Japanese-American community at this time, both leading up to the camps and within. It ably tackles the question of “Why did they go? Why wasn’t there resistance?” (There was.) For the Yonedas in particular, the importance of an Axis defeat was difficult to overstate: as horror stories of German atrocities in Europe began to trickle out, they knew that a German or Japanese take-over of the United States would almost undoubtedly lead to Elaine and their son Tommy going into a death camp.

It provides a three-dimensional look at the discussions on the ground at the time, as well as following up with details from interviews Karl and Elaine gave many years later reflecting back on their statements and advocacy at the time.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style, but this is one of those books you read for content, not style. It jumps around from perspectives in a way that’s occasionally confusing, but I also appreciated getting some more background information on some of those in the camp who opposed the Yonedas’ view on cooperating with the US government. Slater does a good job showing how each person highlighted got to their perspective and why the tension both within the camps and in the world generally at the time put everyone so on edge.

The book is also helpful for reminding us of the names of the hateful racists (architect Karl Bendetsen) who propagated this plan and then later tried to lie about why it was implemented or how bad it was. It’s also a useful reminder that when these people were released, they didn’t get to just waltz back into the lives they had been living before being imprisoned. Many of them were forcibly resettled further into the US, away from the coastal cities where they had lived, and forced to restart their lives from scratch, away from their communities and businesses.

It just seemed like a particularly relevant time to remember this.

rocky41_7 posting in

books

It just seemed like a particularly relevant time to remember this.

bluapapilio

"Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru /
The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window"

Yamashita Tomoko, 2013

MangaUpdates

MyAnimeList

Chill Chill

Summary: Shy bookstore clerk Kosuke Mikado has the ability to see ghosts and spirits, an ability he wishes he didn’t have, since what he sees usually terrifies him. Rihito Hiyakawa, an exorcist whose supernatural powers are as strong as his social graces are weak, doesn’t seem to fear anything, mortal or otherwise. When this odd couple gets together to solve the bizarre cases that come their way, their work methods may not be entirely safe for work.

My comments: Hiyakawa can touch his soul to Mikado's to amplify his power and see ghosts, their souls are compatible and it feels good when Hiyakawa touches Mikado's soul, which is bigger than normal people's. Mikado is really reluctant at first but between the money and the pleasure gets roped in.

This isn't an explicit manga but the premise is pretty kinky. Mikado is as close to one can be to coming without actually doing so when Hiyakawa touches him and his soul. "You get turned on really easy."

Each chapter is a new case, they get solved pretty easily with the duo's powers but I enjoyed them all. There's an overarching case going on as well to keep you hooked and the volume ended on a cliffhanger.

Hiyakawa is definitely some form of neurodivergent, I'm definitely curious how he grew up.

I quite enjoyed this first volume and look forward to reading more!

Art: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Content warnings: One of the ghosts committed suicide. Dead bodies, ghosts, creepy vibes in general.

My rating: 9/10

Current Mood: full

sunshine304

I've been thinking about trying the Oops! All AUs exchange by

mdzsxchange in May. It's kinda beckoning me to try it out but I've never done this kind of exchange before, so I'm pretty insecure about it. What with all the nomination stuff etc., and writing requests, though I've at least checked some of the older exchanges to see how these things look.

Well, there's still some time to think about it, I guess. And it's not super demanding in word count, I can do 1k for a lot of prompts, I think.

Still. I'm tempted, but also - should I really do that?

*

In other news, I'm a bit annoyed. I thought I had a beta for my smut WIP, we'd chatted at the beginning of the year and they affirmed that they'd be happy to beta it when I was ready. Well, I've been ready this past month but I can't get a hold of them. I've tried several tumblr DMs, I've tried email, and last week I finally tried a tumblr ask since tumblr DMs can be unreliable and sometimes don't show up with the alert even though the DM went through. No reaction on any of these. tumblr tells me they're only pretty much every day, though their main blog hasn't seen updates and two weeks or so. One of the posts indicates that they're back into an older (?) fandom and so it might be that they are using only sideblogs, which I don't know.

And by now, I just feel weird and stupid trying again and again, since IDK if they're really not seeing my messages or if they did and are like, "shit need to get back to her at some point" and forget, ooor if they're just irritated by me and are ghosting me. Though I hadn't taken them for acting like that; they struck me as someone who'd be fine telling me they've changed their mind, you know. (They had told me they couldn't beta my FTH fic last year because the timing was bad.)

I wasn't rude in the messages, and also said that it'd be fine if they can't do it anymore for whatever reason, but that an answer would be helpful. And I'm also quite sad because I found their comments very helpful in the past and just liked chatting with them.

But yeah, that leaves me in limbo with that fic currently, which is annoying.

I do have a beta through FTH but they'd already said that May - July is an extremely busy time for them, so I don't necessarily want to ask and be like, "heyyy I know we agreed on a different fic for this and you said now is a bad time, buuut..." Because I did get them for the arranged marriage AU that I want to finish this year, dammit, and the timeline for that being autumn would be great. And I also don't want to overdo it, as I don't know how many fics they would consider working on for FTH. But yeah, mainly it would be a bad time for them now.

Hmph. Currently, I'm kinda stuck with the smut fic - I've got the beginning (needs a bit of restructuring, but overall it's there), got the whole smut middle (done as it is), and I have part of the ending, but that's were I'm a bit stuck of how to wrap it up, what people might expect from this without the plot devolving into misunderstandings and being drawn out etc., but also needing to wrap it up in a serious manner because the background of this fic is very much dubcon territory.

Perhaps I'll end up asking in the comm for a beta. Just wanted to vent; it's been a bit of a bummer...

flaskbringer posting in

fandomcalendar

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ysabetwordsmith

Today is sunny and chilly.

I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel.

.

Current Mood: busy

oursin

Apparently this is Still A Thing: Woman denied permanent birth control on NHS wins case with ombudsman. I.e. she was asking for sterilisation, and significant barriers are still being put in the way when women ask for this, compared to men asking for vasectomy.

Conceding that

Female sterilisation, or tubal ligation, is a surgical procedure that involves sealing, cutting or blocking the fallopian tubes to prevent eggs from reaching the uterus. It is usually performed under general anaesthetic via keyhole surgery and requires a few weeks of recovery. In contrast, a vasectomy is a minor outpatient procedure, typically carried out under local anaesthetic in under 30 minutes.
While both procedures serve the same purpose, permanent contraception, the ombudsman’s investigation found that the NHS was in effect treating them as different tiers of care, placing significant barriers in front of women while offering men a more straightforward pathway.
The investigation found that the ICB had denied women NHS funding based on the risk of “regret”, a criterion not applied to men seeking vasectomies.

Critics say women face unequal treatment but others say tighter controls reflect legitimate medical concerns.

While some of this is about its being a more serious operation, a lot of it comes down to 'maybe she will regret it'. Sigh. Not all women are happy with the various forms of long-term contraception which one 'emeritus professor' (it is not stated of what) says are equivalent and leave options open.

This is a different, and very strange, story about reproduction: ‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads.

I think there may have been some potentially similar phenomena collected by the sort of docs who collected Weird Medical Phenomena - come on down, Gould and Pyle and their Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day (1901), which includes 'twins of different colour' which before DNA testing was presumably the only means by which one might even suspect a case of this sort.

Have also looked up papers of doc who also did this kind of thing and see reference to blood grouping in twins, which might also have been a clue to this? or not - would fraternal twins necessarily have same blood group.

brightknightie

Yesterday, I got an email saying that the Gizmoplex is shutting down. Read it on their site.

Oversimplified, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (

MST3K) is: a space castaway and two robots hilariously mock bad movies (usually old and always genre). Back in the day, my family would watch it on cable on Saturday nights. As an adult, my sister and I went together to a handful of live touring performances. MST3K sits at the rare and invaluable intersection of her tastes and mine; it's also something best shared in real time.

I've supported every "Bring Back MST3K" effort, including the one that failed disastrously because people were still really mad about the expensive, slow shipping of the cheap plastic bonus knick-knacks from the previous one (because: pandemic). I own ("own") digital copies of everything on the Gizmoplex. Now, I have until June to stream it on my TV as I always have, and until September to download as many files as I want to keep.

My sister paid the extra to get DVDs instead of streaming, so in that sense she's definitely wiser than me. I didn't expect the Roku and other integrations to last forever, but I did expect the website to last... a little longer than this. On the other hand, I watched every new episode as it became available, especially during the pandemic, making a Saturday-night event out of it, reminiscent of those childhood family viewings, while I know my sister instead put her DVDs away on a shelf and still hasn't watched them all, though it's been years. So in that sense I'm the winner. They're downloaded to my brain, though not my shelf.

But of course I would rather have had more seasons, more years, more tours. And especially more sharing with my sister.

metallherz posting in

beautifulmechanical

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

colls posting in

vid_bingo

Fandom: Andor
Rating and/or Content Warnings: flash warning for quick jump cuts 2:30-2:34 *
Links: YouTube by

ethevillagecryptid2293
Summary: "Me and Mine" by The Brothers Bright

Watch on YouTube

Reccer's Notes:
I love Ferrix and the uprising in season 1. This vid brings all that out in such a visceral way - A+ song choice and great editing.

feurioo posting in

tv_talk

Assortment of black and white speech bubbles

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?

rmc28

I have slept so much this week. Both Wednesday and Thursday evening I had a miraculous lack of commitments, and both evenings I thought "I could get a bunch of things done now" and instead ... went to sleep. And re-read Ocean's Echo because I needed a comfort reread, apparently.

Anyway, I had Friday off work and Monday is a bank holiday, and I spent my day off going to Woking and back to buy new ice hockey skates from the place my friend works. She's only been telling me since last July I will benefit from new skates, and I have finally reached a point of "ok FINE I will SPEND MONEY then". (In April I bought a new chestpad and a new pair of shorts, both from Bauer's women's range, both on visits to Puckstop opposite iceSheffield when I was there for Nationals, both providing this weird feeling of stuff actually fitting as opposed to simply covering the relevant body areas.) I had a lovely time picking out new skates with friend L: they are very pretty and fit amazingly, but also I am having to relearn how to skate in them and it feels very odd.

Today and Sunday I have the last two Kodiaks 2 "home" games of the season in Peterborough (we have one last game next weekend, away at Coventry). I'm going to keep using my old skates for these games because I'm not solid enough in the new ones yet. On Monday evening I have CUIHC full club formal hall, and a pretty green velvet dress to wear to it, thanks to a charity shop run at the end of January.

dancing_serpent posting in

c_ent

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:
or

oursin

Happy birthday,

dakiwiboid and

rysmiel!

regshoe

I am slowly making my way through most of the classic boarding school books, and Stalky & Co. (it's complicated*), after happening to find it in a bookshop, was therefore next on the list.

I read the Oxford World's Classics edition with an introduction by Isabel Quigley, who I've just realised is the author of that book on school stories that

phantomtomato reviewed a while ago, and it seems odd to me that Quigley would choose to write a whole book about the school story genre because the impression one gets from this introduction is that she thinks the genre was a lot of trash written exclusively by unimaginative hacks until it was uniquely elevated by Kipling's peerless genius. Stalky & Co. is Not Like Other School Stories, says Quigley. Well, she's kind of right, I think. Certainly Kipling is irreverent and contemptuous about elements of school tradition which other stories tend to respect (I was genuinely shocked that the main characters sympathetically find cricket boring and get out of watching matches whenever they can); certainly he values cunning (right there in the title: the main character gets his nickname from a piece of school slang meaning 'clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action') and disrespect for official rules more highly than the usual school ethos tends to; and certainly the level of violence and cruelty portrayed and celebrated in this book rises above even the eyebrow-raising standard of late Victorian public schools. But are they that different, really? Kipling thinks he and Stalky are daring rebels against stuffy conservative authority, but most of his values are the same conventionally masculine Victorian ones—courage, honour, a sense of fair play, 'manliness', being really racist, &c.—that the stuffy conservative authority of the time approves of. Many of the stories revolve around Stalky and his friends getting dramatically violent revenge on teachers, but there is definitely also a sense that this is all part of how the system is supposed to work in the end and to some extent the teachers are kind of in on it. Quigley's view that the book is uniquely concerned with school as a preparation for life is also IMO wrong; The Hill is, in a more conventional way, doing exactly the same thing vis-a-vis education of the rulers of Empire.

What else, then? The school portrayed is based very closely on Kipling's own school, the United Services College, which was not a traditional public school but a recently-founded institution specialising in the education of boys destined for the army; this does make for some interesting differences in culture but I was also surprised by how overtly military the school isn't and how little the curriculum (lots of classics, a spot of maths and English literature, games, no actual military training apart from that one time and it was a big mistake) seems to differ from those portrayed in the more typical public school stories. A couple of the stories contain longer and more detailed accounts of what actually goes on in lessons than school stories tend to, which was interesting and enjoyable. Also interesting were the multiple more-or-less direct (as in, you need to understand period euphemisms but the euphemisms are undeniably being used meaningly) references to homosexuality, albeit mostly in the context of it apparently not existing at this school, and indeed the book isn't particularly slashy. Kipling writes with that kind of style which is extremely dense in references, allusions and specific subcultural slang (the OWC edition has 28 pages of explanatory notes in small type, only some of which are patronisingly unnecessary) and never says a thing directly if it can be said sideways, which is an absolute delight to read when you're in sympathy with the author and gets annoying fast if you're not, and thus I spent the book bouncing between the two extremes depending on how interesting/repulsive the particular story was.** As in Puck of Pook's Hill the stories are interspered with poems, relevant to and commenting upon the stories but not directly about them; once again the poems are very good, technically if not morally, and I really liked this structure. More authors should do that!

Also, I wondered what was going on with the convention of spellings like M‘Turk (one of the main characters here), and the conclusion seems to be that it's a way of approximating the more conventional abbreviation M^c when you haven't actually got a superscript C among your printing equipment—thus explaining what otherwise looks like a puzzlingly backwards apostrophe, so there you go.

*Originally a series of stories published in magazines from 1897-99, after which all but one of them were collected and published in book form; Kipling wrote four more stories between 1917 and 1929, after which a book including all the stories was published, and that's the version I read. Books published in 1929 have only recently come out of US copyright, so e.g. the version on Gutenberg is the incomplete 1899 edition.

**E. W. Hornung's prose does the same thing in a somewhat toned-down way and I can well believe that Kipling was an influence on him, albeit not particularly on Fathers of Men (and of course they disagree extremely about cricket). Of course Hornung titled a novel after a poem by Kipling, though I suspect Kipling wouldn't have allowed that the thousandth person could be a woman, and this is perhaps one of the important differences between them.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

philomytha

1913: The World before the Great War, Charles Emmerson
This was a good, fairly light, snapshot of the world just before the outbreak of WW1. Emmerson selects a range of cities around the world, starting and ending in London and crossing Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and some of Asia, with a brief glimpse of Melbourne, Algiers and Durban for Oceania and Africa, and gives a summary of their political and social situations in 1913, often with an overview of the history of each place. For getting a good overall image of the relations between various parts of the world, especially between England and her empire, it's an excellent book, and I learned something especially about the Argentina-UK connection that comes up so often in novels of this period and a bit later, and also I enjoyed the German tourist's guide to London in 1913. Of course there are thousands and thousands more things the author could have included, but it's a fun read.

Hawthorn: a Scottish ghost story, Elaine Thomson
Aka the bog trauma story. This was very readable, though rather languidly paced. Our hero Robert Sutherland is working with a team making the first Ordnance Survey map of Scotland, only he falls in a bog and then onwards his life becomes weird. And very full of swooning, at least three quarters of the book is him swooning, having hallucinations, fevers and other problems, while milling about waiting for the plot to happen. I would have liked more map-making, which is more flavouring than part of the story, and it would have been nice to have more female characters who weren't evil or dead, and I feel like it could have committed harder to the ending of discrediting Sutherland for extra horrific interest. But there really was an excellent amount of manly swooning.

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (available here at Project Gutenberg)
One of the oldest of the spy novel genre, written in 1903. I found this tremendously fun to read, unexpectedly hilarious and delightful, not so much for the plot as for the two main characters, Carruthers and Davies, and their fabulous odd-couple adventures sailing around the German coastline trying to figure out what the dastardly Germans are up to. Carruthers, fastidious, cynical, very posh and clever, and Davies, straightforward, enthusiastic, loyal, and brilliant at sailing but rubbish at intrigue - the book is written in the first person from Carruthers' perspective and I adore his narrative voice, he is clearly an absolute nightmare in many ways but with a saving dose of self-awareness and a genuine and growing affection for Davies and his very different virtues. There are tons of references to maps and charts and the interested reader can follow along with every nautical detail of the story, but I was not interested in the nautical details except in the superb competence kink in Davies' navigational skills. Luckily Carruthers also doesn't understand most of the nautical details and so the reader can keep up as much as they need to. I did get a bit lost in the details of the plot, but I didn't mind because I was having fun with the Davies/Carruthers show. I also watched the 1979 Michael York film, which was good fun: it elides a lot of the plot, but leans in nicely to the Davies/Carruthers dynamic, though I am not quite able to cope with film!Davies's giant moustache. But film!Carruthers is perfect; the shopping list sequence is hilarious in the film and even more hilarious in the book. This might be fun to request for Yuletide to see if anyone wants to write me some actual Davies/Carruthers, too.

Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris, Jane Thynne
WW2 spy novel series. These were inexplicably readable and I am trying to work out why. The plots were weak and the characters pretty two-dimensional, most of the characters were either real people or straight from Central Casting (would you like a mildly alcoholic private investigator with a failed romantic life and a problem with authority? of course you would. would you like to guess what kind of WW1 experience he had? you won't need two guesses. would you like to guess whether or not he is ruggedly handsome and inexplicably attractive to women who as we know love a low-life boozer?). The narrative was fluid and easy to ride along with, but a lot of the interest for me was in the fact that the author has lifted great chunks of her story from a variety of the history books I've read over the past few years, especially the complete works of Helen Fry, who probably should have a co-author credit for the second novel. And, as I said, most of the characters are real people: Thynne never bothers to invent a character when she can just use Noel Coward or Dorothy Sayers or Maxwell Knight or some other poor sod. The plot is weak: again, Thynne just uses real events and hitches her plot to them, but there's very little suspense or sense of danger or excitement, the characters have little interest in or awareness of the stakes and mostly spend their time wondering why they're even getting mixed up in this business. 'Um, I had a hunch' is a key plot motivator in both books, used so often the author unconvincingly lampshades it a few times. The heroine's assorted romantic options are a large chunk of the plot: her Viennese former fiance, her fellow student at Oxford turned refugee, her best friend's brother who happens to be Churchill's aide, and of course our inexplicably attractive to women piece of rough, the hero. No doubt she will shack up with the hero after extensively exploring all the other options over the course of multiple books. In fact, the two lead character and their dynamic are also not original, being 2D versions of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, transplanted to 1940 and with connections to the security services. The period setting is pretty well done, superficial but filled in at least a few degrees better than the popular press version of WW2. The second book's plot was particularly weak: for most of the book our heroes were running around on the basis that there was a German spy ring infiltrating Trent Park - which is a great concept - but then at the end it's oh no there is no German spy ring at all, we picked up the German spies the day they arrived for being Very Bad Spies and probably Canaris is sending Very Bad Spies on purpose because he wants Hitler to lose. Which is historically accurate, but when the plot of your spy thriller novel is 'catch the German spies before they reveal our very important secret' then saying 'oh no actually there aren't any spies' at the end is a pretty major cop-out. If you were writing a much darker and more serious novel about how spy work is pointless and people run around frantically and suffer for no reason and no gain at all, then this would have been a perfect ending: Le Carre could have pulled it off, but this was not even remotely that kind of book, this is your basic frothy romantic suspense wartime adventure, and in this kind of book you have to play the plot straight, or if there are twists they have to be the sort of twists that make it more exciting, not less exciting. So: the author's done her homework and the period setting is decent, the romance is nice and the narrative carries you along without requiring any actual thought, but the plot is not very well constructed.

No 2 Whitehall Court, Alan Judd
Another attempt to find some good WW1 spy adventures: this one features a female agent, Emily Grey, a linguist who is seconded to work for the fledgling MI6 under its famous head C, Mansfield Cummings. The author of this book knows his stuff, he's written a biography of C and there's evidence of plenty of research--but that is the problem with this book. Or one of the problems, anyway. Again, half the characters are real people, and I'm increasingly thinking that this is a mistake in this sort of fiction, because our heroine and POV character can't really have relationships with them. She's observing them without having an impact on them, and when your main character can't have any kind of relationship other than historical observer with many of your other key characters, the novel suffers. And that is the problem with this book: it's flat, plodding, the prose is leaden, the characters atomised, and considering that it's sold as a WW1 spy thriller, it's almost totally lacking in any kind of thrills. About the closest we get to suspense is when Emily starts to suspect that someone is following her - and someone is, it's MI5 to keep an eye on her in a completely harmless way and it all ends in farce. In general the farce was the best bit of this book: Emily is given a hapless failed Marine named Nigel to be her general fixer and bodyguard, and Nigel is absolutely shit at his job in almost every way and also is very believably chauvinistic and patronising towards Emily despite his obvious incompetence. This was where the story came to life - the sequence where Emily and Nigel are on a warship heading for Rotterdam and Nigel is a complete nuisance with far too much luggage was all hilarious - but there were never really any consequences from Nigel's incompetence, Emily is only very mildly annoyed by it and in the end Nigel gets to be a hero and save the day revealing an entire hitherto unmentioned bit of supreme competence. Otherwise, the real villain is telegraphed so hard you can see it from space, which meant that by the time the characters finally caught up with the reader, the overwhelming feeling was 'took you long enough' rather than 'oh wow, I didn't see that coming but it makes so much sense' - the latter being what any half-decent writer of a thriller is aiming for. The spy plot and depiction of how spying worked was all rock solid - as I said, the author's done his research, he knows how all this worked in reality, but what he doesn't know is how to take these historical realities and turn them into a tense, interesting, characterful plot. I was deeply surprised to learn that Judd's written many previous spy thrillers many of which have excellent reviews, I would have taken this to be a first attempt at fiction by a history geek. Anyway, the further this book got from repeating bits of history, the better it was as a novel, which is why the horrible Nigel was the best bit. But I'll definitely go take a look at his non-fiction now.

mbarker posting in

wetranscripts

Writing Excuses 21.17: The Up and Down Escalators

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-17-the-up-and-down-escalators

Key Points: tension and release, macro level, escalation and de-escalation. Where are you using tension, and when do you take your foot off the accelerator? Not just tension, stakes, romance, pacing. Flat stakes or escalating too quickly. Reality checks. Personal stakes. Distraction. Escalate something else. Competence de-escalates and models good behavior. Romcom miscommunication. False escalation, the almost kiss. De-escalation for transitions. If it works, we don't have a movie. PUDs. De-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. Use beta readers to identify changing stakes or escalation off track.

[Season 21, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The up and down escalators.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] This week, we're going to sort of continue our conversation about tension and release from last week, but shift it a little bit, and sort of zoom out from the sort of micro building and releasing tension, and instead talk about how you're using tension in your... Well, intentionality in the story. Right? And that is about creating a feeling of escalation and then, when you want to, move that into a de-escalation. So, instead of thinking about the individual moments of tension and resolution, this is more about what on a meta level, where are you using tension in your story and when do you want to, like, take your foot off the accelerator a little bit, and sort of ease off of it in those individual moments?

[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that I started thinking about this is that it's a thing that you can apply to not just tension but to other aspects of the story. For instance, if stakes feel flat, you can escalate stakes. If a romance is moving too fast, you can de-escalate a romance, make them less attracted to each other at that moment. And you do have to make a decision. This is why it's so closely linked to tension, because both of these are also tied in with how the pacing is working. So, a thing that I see happening sometimes is that at the beginning of a story, the... We have stakes and they're kind of flat. It's like if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't have won this beauty contest. It's like no one cares.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So sorry. But if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't be able to afford to buy my grandmother's medication. That's an escalation of stakes. And then the follow-up danger to that is the people who escalate too quickly.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's like, I won't be able to buy my grandmother's medication, and then she will become a terrorist.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, well, that happened...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like...

[DongWon] This is Erin's [garbled]

[Howard] That is the meme.

[DongWon] [garbled interrupted stakes]

[Howard] That is the meme, right there, the, well, that escalated quickly.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Or... And that's exactly it, that sometimes you're like, what just happened?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, thinking about how to use these, escalation and de-escalation, on purpose so that you aren't suddenly...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Terrorist grandma.

[Howard] We're laughing right now because, well, because it's funny to us. But it reminds me that one of my favorite... In humor, one of my favorite tools for de-escalation is the character who says, wait, wait, wait, is this really a big deal? Because I don't think it's a big deal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they issue a reality check, and everybody takes a step back and realizes, oh. Oh, the beauty contest doesn't matter. Oh, grandma isn't going to become a terrorist. Oh, I actually have that medication right here. Now you just go be pretty and relax, and off we go. I love de-escalation via humor.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Just because...

[DongWon] And I think sometimes there's such an instinct to keep ratcheting it up...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] To increase your stakes, to increase all these things. And so much of my critique of... Especially superhero fiction is the stakes get to a ridiculous level so quickly. And I think the superhero stories that we've seen succeed in things like the MCU are ones that are about personal stakes. Right? The Guardians of the Galaxy movies work because it's about Peter's close relationship to his father, not the fact that his father is a planet that's going to destroy the universe. That part, nobody really cares about. What we care about is how he feels about his dad, and how his dad feels about him. And so when you escalate your stakes too quickly and too dramatically, then you can really lose focus on what makes this story interesting.

[Erin] I think you can also, if you escalate too much, lose control of your reader's emotions...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And have them go in a direction you don't want them to. Howard, you talking about comedy reminded me of something I saw recently, where a comedian was doing crowd work, which is very popular these days, and I think she asked someone in the crowd, like, about their relationship, and they said, "They said I love you after like...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Two days." or something...

[DongWon] I've seen this [garbled]

[Erin] And the audience starts laughing at this person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But she then refocuses, and she's like, wait. But... We've all been there. Right? Right? Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And uses repetition to refocus the audience, and, like, de-escalate it from something that is shocking and bad to something that is hilarious and fun and is in the realm of comedy. And by shifting the focus back to herself from the audience member at a key moment, she is able to de-escalate it just a little bit.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you think about... If you're trying to de-escalate a fight, or, like, if you've ever had, like, a rowdy friend at a bar, like, one of the things you do is distraction. Like, they're mad and they want to, like, beat everyone up, and you're like, wait, look over here. Like, let me tell you this story. Or, do you want some water? And you, like, move the focus elsewhere...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And that helps to de-escalate it. Otherwise, the emotion of that friend, like the emotion of that audience, could get away from you.

[DongWon] Well, you can also de-escalate by escalating something else. Right? And the one time I've been in a street fight was a friend of mine that I was out drinking with decided to start something with some guy. And my one experience of being in a street fight was I slapped my friend in the face and told him to stop being an asshole.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I escalated things with one person and completely de-escalated with the other person. The fight stopped. Like. At no further point was the other guy going to be a problem. Because I redirected the energy back into our existing relationship. Right? So you can use an escalation of something else to deflate a thing that is becoming a problem.

[Mary Robinette] I think the other thing that happened with that is that you ceded territory.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, like, I'm actually not on his side...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even though he's my friend.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But, like, de-escalating is super hard in real life, and it's really hard in fiction, because so much emphasis is put on making things tighter, making things faster,...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Making things tenser. It's like actually sometimes you want to slow things down, you want to de-escalate the tension, because of some of the stuff we've been talking about, making sure that you give your audience a breather. But also, sometimes, it is about ceding territory for one... From one plot point to another in order to make space for that tension.

[Howard] One of my favorite things in fiction is people... Not just people who are really competent, but people who model good behavior. And watching a fight scene develop where I realize, man, this would not actually be that hard to de-escalate. You just have to not say the stupid thing that's on the tip of your tongue, and instead be the character that you were two pages ago. And a lot of books, a lot of media in general, will model bad behavior in order to generate those kinds of scenes. I love it when competence de-escalates things and gives me room for the realization that, oh, well, these are now competent people. Anything that actually causes them a problem...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is going to be a big deal.

[DongWon] People love to complain about the trope you see in romcoms about the miscommunication. Right? Somebody says something and it's misinterpreted like... I don't know, the line's crackling or something. Right? The reason those scenes are irritating is not because miscommunication is ineffective as a narrative tool. I think it can be very effective. People are irritated because there wasn't enough escalation of stakes between the characters ahead of time. Nothing felt truly at stake. And so it feels like, oh, you're just relying on fake conflict to create this escalation of tension which wasn't there in the first place. Right? So I think in that case, it's a misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem isn't the trope, the problem is the lack of build to get us to a place where we actually care that these people are fighting. The problem is it feels like the relationship's already resolved, so we don't care about the fighting. So that's the case where you might need to increase your escalation, and not worry about the de-escalation so much.

[Erin] I also think one tool you can use is the false escalation, Which is my... One of my favorite false...

[DongWon] This escalation goes nowhere?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yes. One of my favorite false escalations...

[whee]

[Erin] Which, again, comes from my soap operas, is the almost kiss.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Almost kisses are great, because, like, it does escalate it a little, but it seems like you're going there, and then you, like, take the off-ramp, which escalators don't have, but in my new world, they do...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so you jump off the escalator before you can get to the top, and you're like, oh. wow. Like, I didn't want that. But you learned something about yourself. So I think what's really nice in escalation and de-escalation is that while it is often about something external, thinking about how it reverberates internally. So you've set off a new escalator internally for that character, even though you... They jumped off what was happening externally. And I think a lot of times when escalation and de-escalation fall flat for me, it's because it... Everything comes to a stop. But even de-escalating a situation... If you slap your friend in the face...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] To stop the fight, at some point, your friend might be like, whoa, that was a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, in that moment, in that...

[DongWon] I'm a good friend.

[Erin] In a future moment, like... Because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then the audience is thinking, oh, well, that's interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Here's a new thread to follow...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas if something happens that doesn't go anywhere, or isn't rooted in relationship...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then it just feels like you stopped the tension to stop the tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to for some other reason.

[DongWon] If this were a novel, then what needed to happen after this scene was a conversation where we talked about why I was having a problem with him and the way he behaves in public spaces. Right? Oh, and like, just something about our friendship, something about our relationship that leads to us kissing or something. I don't know. But, like, in real life, that doesn't necessarily happen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] We never talked about that. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It never became a thing. But if you... So there's a way in which... Have you ever been on an escalator where someone gets to the end of it and then they stop and look at their phone...

[Mary Robinette] Ouch.

[DongWon] Instead of moving. And then you're like, I'm going to run into you unless you move. And I think that feeling can happen a lot in fiction, where sometimes somebody gets off the escalator, but then doesn't move out of the way and everything has to come to a full stop.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You've made me think of a thing that I want to talk about when we come back from the break, which is using de-escalation to... As a form of transitioning from one scene to another.

[DongWon] If your anxiety, depression, or ADHD are more than a rough patch, you don't just need another medication. And Talkiatry makes it easy to see a psychiatrist online using your insurance in days. Talkiatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy only apps, Talkiatry is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose simple health conditions and provide medication when it's appropriate. All of their 600 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly prescriptions or out of network fees. You'll meet with an experienced, licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. Your care stays consistent, and evidence-based. Getting started with Talkiatry takes just a few minutes. Complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your needs, and schedule your first visit in days, not months. More than 300,000 patients have already found high quality psychiatric care through Talkiatry. Head to talkiatry.com/wx and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes.

[Mary Robinette] Don't you wish everything was more rewarding? With Rakuten, almost everything is. You can earn cash back on those new shoes you've been wanting. You can save on the next trip you book. You can cash in on groceries. Just join. Shop your favorite brands and save. Sephora, [boots], Argus, TiMo, Adidas, trip.com, the list is long. Save online at over 550 stores. And when it's time to redeem those rewards, get your money exactly how you want it. Choose bank transfer or PayPal. So go ahead. Take a trip. Fill a cart. Get a new outfit. Rakuten is a world of rewards. Join today for free. Go to rakuten.co.uk or get the app. That's Rakuten.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, one of my favorite tricks... There's a thing that happens sometimes where you've got this really high tension scene, and then the next scene that needs to follow it is a pretty low, low tension, very quiet scene. And when you're writing it, or when you're reading it, you've had this experience where it's huge, and then you drop into this other scene, you're like, why do I care? This frequently happens when you have to switch POVs, because, like, one person is involved in battles and the other is making tea, and so what you can do is that you can do this false de-escalation. But you do a de-escalation at the end... As you're heading towards that transition, you do a de-escalation, and then you ratchet tension again. So that you bring it to the level that you're at for the next scene. So it's... People are like, oh, we're going down. Things are going to be okay. And then you just bring it up just a little bit, which you can do basically by like, ah, look, it looks like we've all defeated the villain, and we have another gem from Rohisla...

[laughter]

[Erin] The guy from terrorist Havana.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. And then someone else says, but that's not a real gem from Rohisla, and then you cut your scene. And now it's not battle tension, it's question tension, and then the next scene we go into is also a question tension scene, but it's not the same question. And so you're like, but now I have two questions.

[DongWon] Top of mine right now... I'm in the middle of launching the new series Alien Earth. Right? And I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise, and the thing about these movies is they always take place in one location. One spaceship, one planet, one space station, whatever it is. It's sort of a defining thing. And so in my primate brain, I expected this entire TV show that's many hours long to take place in this one ship that crash lands. And then, in the third episode, spoilers, they leave the ship, and my... I was shocked by this. And I was completely disoriented. But they made the transition incredibly smoothly, because of this exact technique. Right? There's a resolution to the primary conflict that carries you through the first three episodes, which then immediately leads into a question of what happens next? If they had had the final battle of that entire three episode arc at the end of the second episode, so many people would drop off of watching. Instead, they slip it into the first 10 minutes of the third episode, and then, now the doors open and you're already walking through it. The escalator seamlessly moves into the next one, and you're still on a people mover and you're still going.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It reminds me of watching... I think the movie was ParaNorman with my son, who was 10 at the time. And they have this plan, and I turned to my 10-year-old and I said, "Do you think it's going to work?" and he looks at me with that you gotta be kidding me dad. He's like, no. If it works, we don't have a movie.

[laughter]

[Howard] This is a 10-year-old.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] If it works, we don't have a movie. And that thing in Alien Earth, episode 3, you ask, well, oh, gosh, well, they defeated the xenomorph that was on the... That was loose on the ship. Is everything going to be okay now? No, there's eight episodes in this series and we're only on three.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Something else is going to go wrong. We've de-escalated, but the tension is still quite high.

[DongWon] Well, you realize the stakes of the escalation are different than you thought, and it's not about... Yeah.

[Howard] One part of that is the meta...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The understanding that there is a lot more story to come.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Howard] That's... I guess I'm a big fan of meta.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Not the company?

[Howard] No.

[Mary Robinette] You've actually reminded me of actual escalators. So, at the latest WorldCon, as we're recording this, was at the Seattle Convention Center. And they had these, like, endless escalators. It was unbelievable, because you would go in and at first it seemed normal. You would go up an escalator, and that's fine. And then you would go around the corner and then you would look up through four more flights of escalators that were directly in a row, and you're like, what. Is. Happening. Now?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think when you're thinking about your story, there is something to be said for letting people know that there's another escalator past this one, that like, oh, no, things are going to keep going up. That this can be a form of really nice tension, but it can also be a form of dread...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As well. And so it's thinking about, like, what are you doing and why? How much of this do you want them to know?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the thing with of course it's not going to work. Like, well, obviously we're going to go up yet another escalator. It was unreal.

[DongWon] Well, thinking about the meta, there's something that's really important to keep in mind. There is a term that we use in hiking, called a PUD. Which is pointless up and down.

[laughter]

[DongWon] It's when you get to a ridge, and you know you have to get to the next ridge, but you've got to go down first, and you're like, God damn it, this is going to be so frustrating, I have to go down just to go back up. Right? And I think you see that a lot in stories, and this is sort of where, again, going back to the romcom miscommunication trope, that often feels like a PUD. Right? Because you know where this story's going, so it just feels like you're spinning your wheels for a little bit, because this has to be a movie and we're only at minute 40 and you know this is a 90-minute movie. Right? And so knowing you have to go back down just to go back up means that there wasn't enough escalation of the actual stakes, of when you need to go from floor one to floor three. Instead, it feels like we're just staying on floor one, and why did we have to go down.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that I really like about the PUD is that the problem isn't the going down and back up, it's that you don't learn anything by...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Going down. And that's the thing that will happen with that trope. We aren't earning anything by their breakup. It's... There's usually nothing of interest on the other side of that argument. And so that's, I think, one of also the problems when people are just repeating something that they see in media without understanding the stuff that's behind it.

[Erin] And I was going to say that you don't learn anything by going up and down. So if you thought you were doing a PUD, but then it turns out there's like a magnificent view that you weren't expecting, then you'd be like, wow, I still had to go all this way, but I would have never seen this, I didn't realize it was around this corner. And so ideally if you're going to use a miscommunication, you should learn something about the character or they should learn something about themselves that therefore means that when they come back together, they both have a better sense of who they are.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If they're just arguing over, I don't know, whether the sky is, like, blue or teal, that is not going to tell you anything about who they are. But if they're arguing about something important, which that may be, depending on who you are...

[DongWon] If there's a Disney park at the bottom of the escalator going down that turns out to be a surprising delight, then it's fine to be down there. Right? You need to have true character development along the process to make it work.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] At risk of overextending the metaphor...

[DongWon] We've already done that.

[Howard] I overextended a knee going down on a hike. I mean, people who hike know this. Down is not necessarily easier than up.

[DongWon] Oh, it's worse. Yeah.

[Howard] If you do down wrong...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You do down for quite a distance...

[laughter]

[Howard] Before you stop doing down, and you injure yourself badly.

[DongWon] Down is where the real pain is. Yeah.

[Howard] And...

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't ski. I just skid.

[Howard] So, bringing it back to the metaphor, de-escalation does not necessarily need to be easy on the characters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] It does not need to be pointless. There can be lessons learned. It's... Because hiking down is not riding an escalator down.

[DongWon] I think, going back to our last episode when we were talking about tension and release, I think one thing we are sort of indicating here is that de-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. If all you're getting is de-escalation and no escalation, then it truly does feel deflating. Right? And to avoid the feeling of deflation, you need to make sure that when you're taking your foot off the accelerator on one level, you need to be presenting the reader with something else to be interested in. Right? And so, in the romcom example when you have that moment of break up, what questions are they actually grappling with to understand what their relationship to the situation is?

[Howard] You mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy, the second one with his dad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] There's a point in the first one where they're talking about the power stone, saving the Galaxy, and Rocket says, "Why do we care? What's the Galaxy ever done for us?" He's passing on this escalation of the stakes. And then we draw these characters back in by making it personal. They're not going after the infinity stone, they're rescuing Peter from the pirates. And that lesson... I learned that lesson years and years earlier. Yes, it's important to have big stakes sometimes, but if you really want to get the characters moving, the thing that escalates the stakes for them is their connection to those stakes.

[Erin] And to go back to something I was thinking about from the previous episode, the escalation can be in the minds of the characters. It cannot...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] The characters don't need to know the stakes are escalating, just the reader does. So, to go back to the gems of Rohisla, if you have discovered one, and it's the final one in the scene that I'm in, and then we flash over to Mary Robinette who's like, I'm glad we put that fake gem of Rohisla out there.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean?

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The stake's now like... Nothing has changed for me and my scene...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I'm still in celebration mode. But the reader knows that there is some new piece of information, when will I discover that? And so it raises the stakes on the level... On that meta level of consciousness the reader brings to the table, which makes the reader such a fundamental partner in discovering the story.

[DongWon] Well, the thing that everyone forgets about MacGuffins, or maybe not everyone, but, like, the failure state of a MacGuffin story is when the creators forget that the MacGuffin is a trick. Right? The point of the MacGuffin is to keep the reader's eye on something, not to be the actual stakes of the story. Nobody actually cares about the goddamned eagle, it is the experience of the characters going along the way and their relationship to each other. That's the thing that actually matters. It's his view of humanity as it develops over the course of the story, not the Maltese Falcon.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And things like that, the... With the Maltese Falcon, it represents a proximity to success.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is often one of the things that escalation and de-escalation can do, is that frequently when you're escalating something, when you're raising things, it feels like we are moving closer and closer towards the climax of the story. And sometimes when you start de-escalating things in sort of the wrong places, people are like, oh, is it over already? Which isn't to say that you shouldn't de-escalate in the first part of the story, it's just recognizing that it has this effect of causing us to think about how close we are to the success or [garbled] complete failure. [garbled]

[Howard] One of my favorite tools for identifying that is the beta readers. Asking them how they feel, how they are responding to each chapter as it unfolds. And a beta reader who is adept enough in the lingo to say, the stakes feel like they've changed. The stakes feel like they've escalated in a weird way. The stakes feel like you're now telling a different story. That's a super useful barometer for me, because often I know what I have planned, but I haven't communicated, via tone or whatever, that this escalation de-escalation is part of a structure that actually is going to hold together.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I was going to say, I think, like, even if they don't know the language, a lot of times people know it without being able to know it.

[Howard] If they can find a way to tell me, yeah.

[Erin] If somebody's writing, like, oh no, oh no, oh no. And then the next chapter is, like, this chapter feels long...

[laughter]

[Erin] What they're saying is, like, in the previous chapter, the stakes were escalating.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Now that they're not anymore, I have lost interest.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] So we have to, like, read through sometimes to figure it out.

[Mary Robinette] It's like the... This is the worst metaphor in the history of... It's like the O'Hare Airport. You go down this escalator, and they've got some stuff up to kind of distract you from the fact that you're descending, and then you've got this endless corridor with another people mover that is totally level, but there's neon lights over your head like luring me on, and it's playing music and the lights along the sides are lit up, and the first time you go through it, you're like, amazing, this is so cool. And you're not paying any attention to the fact that you've just descended into the bowels of hell.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And then on the other side, they don't need to do any of that when you go back up the escalator, because you can see the light and you know that you're going out of that. So, I think that when you do do a de-escalation and you've got one of these scenes, you do have to distract the reader with something bright and shiny to keep them from, oh, this scene is really long.

[DongWon] In New York City, at the 42nd Street subway station, there is a connecting tunnel that goes from the ACE line which is the 8th Avenue line to the Broadway line, the NR line. That tunnel is very long and is packed with commuters. And I used to take this tunnel every day to get to work. And as you're walking along this narrow underground jam-packed sweaty billion degrees tunnel, on the beams overhead are signs that are put up that are a poem that you see, line by line, as you walk down this tunnel, that I don't remember the exact text of, but it is a very bleak poem about the experience of being a commuter and having to wake up every day to do this thing. And you... Encountering that message as you walk...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Through this. It's such a different shift of escalation, because you were already feeling like it's eight in the morning, I'm on my way to work, this already sucks, and I'm being told that my life is meaningless and empty because I'm doing this every day.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a very big bowl of risotto.

[DongWon] It's an incredible shift of escalation that I genuinely love, because it was this weird moment of reflection every day, of reminding me what's important, which wasn't the fact that I was commuting to work, it was the greater context of what am I doing with my life, am I living with purpose, and all of these things, that I think is actually incredible art, even though the rage I would feel at seeing this thing in the morning...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Was boundless.

[Erin] I will say, before you give the homework...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I'm sure you're about to do, that the minute you said tunnel, I was like, oh, that poem.

[DongWon] You knew what I was going to say.

[laughter]

[Erin] That [garbled] poem about the meaninglessness of life.

[DongWon] That God damn poem. Anyways. On that escalation, I'm going to ratchet things up even further and give you a little bit of homework.

[DongWon] What I want you to do is to look at the outline for your work in progress, whether it's a short story or a novel. Take a look at the high level beats, not like super detailed, but sort of the major beats of your story. And make a mark as to whether or not you are escalating or de-escalating each of your individual plot lines. And then, once you have that map of the terrain, look for PUDs, look for things that are just meaningless drops, look for things that feel deflationary without a rising escalation happening on another level. And once you start to see that structural map of it, I think you'll have a much stronger sense of how to make sure your reader's experience is still pulling them through the story at maximum speed.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

m_findlow posting in

drabble_zone

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vilakins

Day 2: Favourite episode

This one's harder, but I'll go for Killer. It has excellent Avon and Vila, two of my favourite guest characters (Bellfriar and Gambrill), a good plot with no holes (looking at you, Mission to Destiny, to mention an otherwise excellent one) and the first time I saw it, I went cold all over at the ending.

Anyone else have one?

lhune posting in

3_good_things_a_day

1) I was glad the receptor area for coffee spills was big enough when I forgot to put my cup under tge machine this morning ^^’

2) Change of plans means I am now at the hairdresser (otherwise it would’ve been a week later)

3) Sunshine at moment, with a bit of luck the rain will only arrive this evening

mdlbear

Welcome to May, 2026! Hooray, hooray, the First of May.

Right now it's actually half an hour after midnight on the Second in Seattle. But anyway...

Current Mood: depressed
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: JoCo

doctorwhonews_feed

Posted by News in Time and Space Ltd

http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2026/05/black_archive_special_an_adventure_in_space_and_tim.html

Black Archive - Special (Credit: Obverse Books)

The latest instalment in the Black Archive series from Obverse Books looks at the 2013 docu-drama based on the creation of Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time

‘The following programme is based on actual events. It's important to remember, however, that you can't rewrite history. Not one line. Except, perhaps, when you embark on an Adventure In Space And Time...’

In 1966, William Hartnell is about to record his final scenes as Doctor Who. Having helped establish the series as a smash hit for the BBC, he is not keen to go, but ill health means he simply can't continue.

Tracing the story of the series creation from Sydney Newman's first suggestion of a new science fiction series to Hartnell leaving the role behind, An Adventure in Time and Space is more than just a biopic of William Hartnell; it's the story of the creation of a television legend.

David Rolinson is a lecturer at the University of Stirling. He teaches and writes on a wide range of topics but specialises in docudrama and terrorism. He wrote a guide to Alan Clarke and co-edited The Art of Invective, a collection of Dennis Potter’s non-fiction writing.

AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME is available now in paperback and electronic formats, direct from Obverse Books and from selected online retailers.

http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2026/05/black_archive_special_an_adventure_in_space_and_tim.html

reviews_and_ramblings

The Japanese BL drama Contrast (2026), based on the manga by itz, has quickly become a standout title in the 2026 spring lineup. Produced by FOD and available internationally on GagaOOLala, it is being praised for moving away from typical "fluffy" high school tropes in favor of a more grounded, cinematic, and emotionally resonant narrative. The main leads are Haruhi Iuchi as Kanata Aoyama (a popular soccer player who feels alienated by his own social circle) and Akune Haruse as Akira Senkawa (a quiet, high-achieving loner with a secret love for heavy metal). The story follows Kanata and Akira, two students who attend the same school but exist in entirely different social tiers. Despite their "contrasting" reputations, they find common ground on a secluded rooftop stair landing. What begins as a shared pair of earphones—listening to raw guitar riffs away from the school’s noise—evolves into a deep bond. The drama focuses on the friction between their public personas and their private vulnerabilities, dealing with themes like anxiety, familial pressure, and the isolation of being "popular" versus "alone." Directed by Miki Tomita (known for When It Rains, It Pours), the series is noted for its "moody" and atmospheric cinematography. The director uses side profiles and lighting to emphasize the distance between the characters, drawing comparisons to Depth of Field and Our Youth (this second is one of my favorite BL School Drama and BTW the School Uniform are the same!). The pairing of Haruhi Iuchi (transitioning from Tokusatsu roles) and Akune Haruse (from the idol group ICEx) has been a major talking point. Their "natural" acting style, avoiding the exaggerated "cutesy" behavior often found in campus BLs, is to be praised. Their chemistry is described as slow-burning and intense, rather than purely physical. There is actually very low phisical contact and just two closed mouth kisses, but the chemistry is undeniably there. Contrast is to be lauded for its realistic portrayal of adolescence. It doesn't shy away from heavier topics, including: Feeling like a prop for his popular friends (Kanata). The "hidden" side of life, including a mysterious past with a former tutor (Akira). The main conflict stems from their vastly different social standings and the bullying/homophobia inherent in a high school environment. The music, composed by Yuya Mori, plays a pivotal role. Given Akira’s love for heavy metal, the contrast between the quiet rooftop scenes and the aggressive guitar riffs provides a unique sonic identity for the show. Contrast is a cinematic exploration of identity disguised as a high school romance. If you enjoyed the atmospheric tension of My Beautiful Man or the adolescent drama Youth, Contrast is likely to be your favorite watch of the season. It rewards viewers who appreciate nuance, slow-burn development, and high production value. HEA. Watch on Gagaoolala. Heat Level: 2/6.

Manga: amzn.to/48DiO1g

ysabetwordsmith

This year during Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'm writing about reading as a way of becoming an expert in a given subject. Read Part 1: Introduction to Becoming an Expert, Part 2: Architecture, Part 3: Dance, Part 4: Music, Part 5: Painting, Part 6: Poetry, Part 7: Sculpture.

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth Part 8: Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution is a skillset for peacefully sorting out disagreements between people. Individual aspects include body language, communication skills, cooperative decision-making, coping skills, emotional awareness, mediation, negotiation, and problem-solving. The goal is to find a win-win solution, or if that is not possible, at least something that everyone can live with. Sometimes you may identify a need for additional resources, reorganzing things, or other stuff that could take a while to accomplish. Conflict resolution is effective when it diffuses the tension of the moment and identifies at least one practical step toward reducing or avoiding future conflicts over the same issue. It's okay if that takes multiple rounds to fix fully. All people experience conflicts sometimes, but different cultures handle this in different ways. Dreamwidth has no conflict resolution communities per se, but you might explore

common_nature,

goals_on_dw, or

thankfulthursday for a few of its subskills.

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth April 25-May 15

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

goodbyebird posting in

3weeks4dreamwidth

Weekly Challenge: Do you have a big current interest? Something you've just watched or read you'd like to chatter about? Go to Explore/Site And Journal Search and look to see if others are talking about it. Join in.
(for media this works best with recent stuff, but you can always try your luck!)

How'd that go, any luck?

• the pledge • tag requests •
• weekly challenge 1 . 2 • friending meme • event icons • journal memes • point gifting •
• community love •

Current Music: Modern Woman - Fork/Heart

dine

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guardian_blinddate_feed

Posted by Guardian Staff

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/may/02/blind-date-josh-hannah

Josh, 30, a video game designer, meets Hannah, 31, an architectural lighting designer

What were you hoping for?
A fun evening and easy chat with an interesting and unique human being.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/may/02/blind-date-josh-hannah

ysabetwordsmith

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

Should governments make laws to protect people from hurting themselves?

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

veronyxk84 posting in

drabble_zone

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delphi

Title: Here We Are
Fandom: Chance (2015)
Relationships: Amir Abbas/Trevor Bunting
Rating: General
Word Count: ~850
Content Info: n/a
Summary: An early morning during the first Ramadan of Trevor and Amir's marriage.
Notes: Written for the 2026 round of

bethefirst. This story is also available on AO3.

The short film this fic is based on was made available for free online by its director, and I really recommend it if you're in the mood for a very sweet later in life romance between a socially isolated widower and a refugee fleeing state violence with his own loss who meet in a London park one day and offer each other a new lease on life.

Watch on Vimeo

( Here We Are )

sholio

First of May, first of May, outdoor fuc--

a path through bare trees entirely buried in snow

Perhaps not.

This is the path off through the woods to one of our favorite walking spots. The driveway is SLIGHTLY less dire; at least you can walk on it.

a stripe of bare ground between two piles of snow

Rumor has it that it might snow this weekend. Apparently it's snowing like blazes in the mountains just south of Anchorage.

This, like all things, will pass, but I'm looking forward to a return to summer.

firebatvillain posting in

sufficiently_advanced_ex

Hi all, we hope you've been doing great so far! There are under two days left in the creation period!

The due date for assignments is on May 3 at 10 PM EDT (UTC-4). Due date countdown: (link)

Here's another Pinch Hit! Please reply to this post or email sufficiently.advanced.ex@gmail.com to claim. Please include your Ao3 username and the number of the pinch hit you are claiming. This will be due 6 days later than usual deadline, on Sat 09 May 2026 10:00PM EDT!

( PH 6 - Black Magician Trilogy - Trudi Canavan, Traitor Spy Trilogy - Trudi Canavan, The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club - Theodora Goss )

skygiants

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million, who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; every mini-arc includes a scene where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... ~~I love him~~ he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and

genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

ysabetwordsmith

A Day Away Spring/Summer 2026 is now up at the Effingham Magazines page. :D 3q3q3q!!! If you live in or plan to visit central Illinois, this is the best guide to events and attractions within daytrip distance of Effingham.

Current Mood: excited

ysabetwordsmith

Here is my card for the Greek Myth Fest Bingo over in

allbingo. The fest runs from May 1-31. (See all my 2026 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.

GREEK MYTH FEST BINGO CARD

loss	journey	destruction	music	fruit
metamorphosis	underworld	quest	nature	silver
recognition	centaur	WILD CARD	escape	building
rescue	hero	gods	identity	wait
monster	minotaur	chosen	magic	family

Current Mood: busy

soc_puppet posting in

summerofthe69

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the_other_sandy - 2026 Book Bingo: April Update
rachelmanija - A Set of Sequels: Sovereign, by April Daniels & Prison of Sleep, by Tim Pratt
relicradiohorror_feed - Fever by The Hermit’s Cave
badly_knitted in drabble_zone - Challenge #500: Amnesty 50
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
adore - 3w4dw: the untitled (like the untamed, get it get it)
princessofgeeks - emotions; i have them
lyssie - *surfaces* I keep meaning to make a post...
umadoshi - Weekly proof of life: we'll stick with media intake today
sabotabby - Cherry blossoms 2026
goodbyebird in youtuberecs - The Witch's Cat - animated short
innitmarvelous_og in fan_flashworks - Queen Susan the Gentle: The Chronicles of Narnia: Icons: Gentle
nanila - The Friday Five on a Saturday
rocky41_7 in booknook - Book review: Together in Manzanar
rocky41_7 in books - Recent Reading: Together in Manzanar
bluapapilio - 🌈BL Manga Check-in: "Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru" volume 1
sunshine304 - *pondering*
flaskbringer in fandomcalendar - Dishonored Fugue Feast 2026
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
oursin - Reproductive matters
brightknightie - Goodbye MST3K Gizmoplex & yep, stick with hard-copy media
metallherz in beautifulmechanical - Ironmouse/Starlight and Wonder - Music Box of Fate (Bajiru Cover)
colls in vid_bingo - Vid Rec: Andor
feurioo in tv_talk - Speak Up Saturday
rmc28 - Long weekend
dancing_serpent in c_ent - Weekly Chat
oursin - (no subject)
regshoe - Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling
nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (02 May 2026)
philomytha - it turns out I have more to say about books I dislike than books I like
mbarker in wetranscripts - Writing Excuses 21.17: The Up and Down Escalators
m_findlow in drabble_zone - Torchwood: By your side (Challenge 499 - Wake up)
vilakins - 30 Days of Blake's 7 - day 2
lhune in 3_good_things_a_day - Saturday 02/05/2026
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doctorwhonews_feed - Black Archive Special - An Adventure in Space and Time
reviews_and_ramblings - Contrast (2026)
ysabetwordsmith - Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Conflict Resolution
goodbyebird in 3weeks4dreamwidth - Weekly Challenge
dine - art may imitate life, but life imitates TV
guardian_blinddate_feed - Blind date: ‘What would I change? Nothing. It was perfect’
ysabetwordsmith - Philosophical Questions: Government
veronyxk84 in drabble_zone - [Challenge #499] Viola come il mare / Blurred Lines
delphi - FIC: Here We Are (Chance [2015], Amir Abbas/Trevor Bunting)
sholio - May is upon us, like a ton of ice cubes
firebatvillain in sufficiently_advanced_ex - 2 days left in creation period! + PH #6
skygiants - (no subject)
ysabetwordsmith - A Day Away
ysabetwordsmith - Greek Myth Fest Bingo Card 5-1-26
soc_puppet in summerofthe69 - Official 2026 Theme Poll

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