roadrunnertwice

fred_mouse posting in

Welcome to writtenwordsaloud, whose post caused me to look at this comm and work out that we've been quiet for over six months.

This is thus a general checkin post - how is everyone going? If you want to share what your current cleaning wins and/or struggles are, that would be interesting, but not essential.

I'm completely swamped by things the next two weeks, but I'm hoping to have the spoons to start semi-regularly posting some time in early June. But you don't have to wait for me, anyone who wants to post is welcome. Do you want cheering on in a task you are struggling with? Want to report in on a win, whatever the bite size?

soc_puppet

This evening, I was finally walked through (most of) the process of registering a new sit-supported mood theme in Dreamwidth proper.

Which is to say: Cloudy Daze mood theme, coming in the next code push!

Current Mood: excited

sovay

Tonight being Kittening Day Observed, Hestia was miffed that I would not let her at my olive-and-pepper-tinned sardines, but for the actual twelfth anniversary of Kittening Day, she was fed on lox. A dozen years she has been in our lives, the cat of legend. Her brother grows into irises. I still remember the soft musk under his ears. She lay warm and purring on my feet all afternoon.

Current Music: The Smittens, "Burning Streets of Rome"

conuly

The washing machine at work is broken for real again :(

I got the towels done last night, but this involved hand-wringing them because the spin cycle wasn't really spinning. And then three times around in the dryer, yay!

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

( Read more... )

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: amused

sanguinity

For

unsent_letters_exchange I was assigned to

luzula again, presumably on the strength of our sharing so many very rare fandoms. However, I thought Luzula might be entertained by receiving not-the-usual from me, so I decided to branch out into a new-to-me fandom, albeit one I was very familiar with via osmosis: Pride and Prejudice.

Luzula's request was for Elizabeth/Darcy/Colonel Fitzwilliam, inspired in part by

AMarguerite's Soulmark AU An Ever-Fixed Mark, an excellent series that I've read and enjoyed. However, I wasn't about to review a half-million words of fic for this assignment, and the request was officially for the novel anyway, so I figured I was in the clear to start fresh.

So I picked up the novel, read through the bit at Rosings Park (which contains all the Colonel Fitzwilliam material that exists in the novel), had a nifty little idea for a fic, and sat down to write it...

...and remembered halfway through that

unsent_letters_exchange is an epistolary exchange. (*looks askance at my story of Darcy and Fitzwilliam sitting around in their shirtsleeves without a pen in sight*) Whoops. Never mind, Luzula would enjoy it as a bonus story after reveals.

As it turned out, that false start ended up being a prequel of the (epistolary!) story I did gift her, which was a little bit awkward, because that required finagling my official fill so it could be enjoyed as a stand-alone, but I'm reasonably pleased with how it all came out.

Together, the series is called A Message Will Bring Me and features Fitzwilliam and Darcy in an established relationship, trying to navigate whether/how/on-what-terms Darcy proposes marriage to Miss Bennet. I may or may not add to the series someday; as it is, I have another partial story in draft and books on the shelf to research it.*

An Evening at Rosings

Pride and Prejudice
Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzy

Missing Scene, Polyamory, The Poignancy of Not Calling the Shots

He was not so attached to Miss Bennet as to feel a pang at yielding preference to his cousin, but to see Darcy so much in love… Well, it had always been a day that was coming: they would each find a wife, Darcy for an heir and Richard for a fortune, and that would be all.

Fitzwilliam and Darcy discuss Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

Another Opinion to Set Beside One's Own

Pride and Prejudice
Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzy

Missing Scenes, Polyamory, Metamours, Epistolary

If there is one comfort in all this, it is that you never had the opportunity to propose your arrangement to her. What a disaster it would have been if you could have had her but for your attachment to me…

Colonel Fitzwilliam's correspondence with Miss Bennet and his cousin Darcy.

Major props to

phoenixfalls, who insisted I go back and make both stories better (she was right, they are better), and to

grrlpup, for her willing ear and speedy copyedits.

----

* I asked the library for books on the Peninsular War. It tried to sell me on a bunch of Sharpe novels. Thank you but no. I need another long-eighteenth-century military fandom like I need another hole in my head.

conuly

Owl small be enough

The child for all his feathers was a cold.

Oh wow the owl.

The poem the vowels

The owl, look its vowels

That branch for you

Owl, are you an armature vector

And a large step for mankind?

Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift

You give to me give to you

Terrible other things happen.

We stay on our branch.

A hundred eyes

Two will do

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

Link

conuly

Modern (by which I mean within my lifetime, + about ten years?), popular or popular-adjacent, good beat to allow dancing, no profanity or slurs, or at least, clean versions available.

Please and thankies!

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

( Read more... )

github posting in

changelog

Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: 41eb4c6eded51bbf052c2f1ec69032221baaa185 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/41eb4c6eded51bbf052c2f1ec69032221baaa185 Author: Carly Ho carlymho@fastmail.com Date: 2026-05-23 (Sat, 23 May 2026)

Changed paths: M cgi-bin/DW/External/Site.pm R cgi-bin/DW/External/Site/Twitter.pm A cgi-bin/DW/External/Site/X.pm

Log Message:

X/Twitter Userhead Update (#3545)

Update twitter.com userhead links to go to x.com and add x.com userhead support. sigh
Adjust regex to allow for domain names that are one letter long

To unsubscribe from these emails, change your notification settings at https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/settings/notifications

writtenwordsaloud posting in

bitesizedcleaning

I read the welcome letter, which spoke to me as I have a very limited amount of energy at any given point for cleaning. I keep wanting to do more, but my brain also wants to do everything at once when I finally can do things, which wipes me out again.

So I thought I would start by going through some of the tips on here slowly. Such as starting with my touchstone. I fear to say I don't have one, so I'm going to try forming one.

It will be my bed. Because of my health, I can spend entire days sitting up in bed, because that is all the energy I have. Today I will do laundry for the bed and then start cleaning up around the area until it is in a state where I can say "I can at least clean it up to this standard", even when everything else falls apart.

toastykitten

And apparently some residents are not happy. Heidenreich, who is 70, white and a Dublin resident of 16 years, said she misses Hobby Lobby and a fabric store, both of which have shuttered. She hopes for a different kind of retailer to fill the city’s empty storefronts.

“I would love to see restaurants go in there,” Heidenreich said. “Olive Garden, things like that. A little bit less expensive, but (it’s) a sit-down healthy meal.”

With 99 Ranch Market also in town, Heidenreich said she doesn’t understand why another Asian market was needed; 99 Ranch is Taiwanese as opposed to the Korean H Mart.

Meanwhile, today was the 3rd time in a week I visited HMart, this time to try out the food court. Earlier was to get some marinated meats for dinner and also try out their prepacked spam kimchi fried rice for lunch. All delicious! And still contemplating going back later to get some veggies and fruits for the week, which all looked fresher and cheaper than whatever is at Safeway.

rivkat

Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong?:( internal/external causes )

Jef I. Richards, A History of Advertising: The First 300,000 Years: ( factoids )

Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century: ( geography and politics )

Paisley Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation:( what is appropriation? )

Mel Stanfill, Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia: ( fans and anti-fans of academia )

Roger Kreuz, Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots:( plagiarism and some related stuff )

Farah Mendelsohn, Considering the Female Man: Or, as the bear swore: ( lit crit )

Joshua Clark Davis, Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back: ( how to destroy a movement with law )

shati

Meme stolen from multiple, because I was really not expecting this much unity of theme:

( the meme instructions/notes/etc. )

1. On New Year's Day 1804, a group of generals gathered in Saint-Domingue to create a new nation.
2. In the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, and Brazil, dolls and other types of appropriated and handmade figures along with Roman Catholic chromolithographs and religious statuary play numerous roles in such African Diaspora religions as Regla de Ocha, Shango, Vodou, and Candomblé.
3. Those, like Arthur Buies, who thought that the use of both languages would cause confusion and interference were more numerous: "We are so used to the two languages being mixed that we no longer make a difference, or see the character, the separate nature of each one."
4. "We are rejoiced to see your cities, and as we are here in your temple, what I now beg as a favour is that you will show us your gods and Teules."
5. They themselves shaped the creation of new practices that in turn became traditional.

aurumcalendula

I put up my hummingbird feeder today and they were visiting it within a few hours!

sovay

For MerMay,

leecetheartist did me the great honor of using me as a model for a glittering mermaid.

After the hectic bloom of mid-week summer, the weather has crashed back into overcast, rain, and intermittently raw chill. The Bradford pear directly in front of my office window has been hedged around with sawhorses declaring it a threat to public safety and scheduled for removal next week. I was photographing its delicately clustering blossoms just a few weeks ago. It's full of green leaves. It hasn't been antisocial to me.

asakiyume sent me Thao & The Get Down Stay Down's "Temple" (2020).

Current Music: Quinquis, "Morwreg"

soc_puppet

Thanks to everyone who expressed support on my previous post 💖 Apparently replying individually is a major mental roadblock for me right now, so I'm skipping that for the moment for the sake of actually updating for goodness' sake.

I'm still feeling emotionally better at work, and am trying to nail down what sort of accommodations I need. I worked on Sunday and Wednesday, and on Sunday I did my best to take mental note of when I started getting tired versus when I started to physically ache and so forth. On Wednesday I compared notes; I opened the day thinking to myself, "Surely my initial assessment was incorrect? I can't have been starting to flag at only four hours in and counting down the hours until I left while thinking longingly of more painkillers at six hours..." And then I hit five hours of work, and yep, that assessment held up.

That said, my mattress is also not holding up very well, which can't be helping my back recover during sleep. I don't want to rush out and get a new mattress, though, because what if that's not actually a significant part of the problem? I did work enough hours over the lead up to Mother's Day that I can afford one, but my current mattress is supposedly supposed to be viable for another four years, and it wasn't cheap. Ideally, I'd like to try out a different mattress for a night or two, but all of the spare bedrooms in my house are... kinda being used for storage 🤦‍♀️ One is covered in Legos and books, one in toys that my niblings play with when they visit, and one is covered in probably mostly books but honestly has been buried for over two decades at this point. IDK, I'll have to give it some more thought.

Current Mood: sore

mrissa

Review copy provided by the author, who's a convention/online buddy.

Sometime in your life, you've probably met a smartass who always has a joke for every occasion--and then gradually realized that this person was genuinely kind. That they were not punching down, and mostly they weren't punching at all, instead focusing their jokes on wry incongruity or situation rather than mocking individual people. That there was a core of tenderness behind the wisecracking. If you know the kind of person I mean (let's be real: several of you are the kind of person I mean), you will understand Sol, the narrator of Hornytown Chutzpah pretty much right away. He's not just called Solomon the Wise Guy for a wry historical reference. He's definitely a wiseacre--but not as dumb as he might joke that he is. He's coping using a very specific kind humor--in this case, the instantiation of it that shows up in a lot of American Jewish culture.

And boy, does Sol have a lot to cope with. I knew I was hooked all the way when the guy who is enough of a smartass to earn the nickname Solomon the Wise Guy can be brought to action with a reference to tikun olam. Look, friends, I'm not Jewish, but I know that one. A call to repair the world? those are lyrics everyone can enjoy. And having it be a touchstone, a point that rings our hero like a bell? I'm in, I'm all in.

The Hornytown of the title is an incursion of Hell into the Washington, DC, area, complete with hellfire around it and sin-eating demons within (and sometimes without). It's run by a figure that will look unfortunately familiar, but rest assured that our hero is all-in against him. I was frankly worried by the title, because my interest in "city of people who would like to have a lot of sex" is pretty minimal, but it's not that kind of Hornytown at all. Whew. Is there chutzpah, though? There is chutzpah to spare. Which is a good thing, because the literally hellish nature of the problems Sol faces will require it.

nineweaving

Sofia Samatar was in town for some archival research, and having done a little early, asked me out to dinner, to celebrate my Lanternfish contract. She said she wants my books in print so she can teach them! (Be still my beating heart.)

She and her husband, the author/illustrator Keith Miller, took me to the courtyard at Oleana, which is spectacular.

The conversation sang.

Nine

sanguinity

unsent_letters_exchange opened last week, and authors are due to reveal later today. But first, let me recommend two stories to you.

Worth Waiting For
The Flight of the Heron
Keith/Ewen/Alison
Epistolary, Long Distance Relationship, Established Relationship, Gardens and Gardening

(no summary provided)

My gift, which makes use of the epistolary format to tease out the peculiar joys and frustrations of a long-distance relationship. Even among the frustration and pining and doubt, there is the anticipation of coming together at last, an anticipation that is almost as sweet as its fruition. The gardening metaphor is beautifully apt, and I especially enjoy thinking of Keith as a prickly artichoke--except that it's not the prickliness or bitterness of an artichoke that his lovers associate with him, but the long cultivation and anticipation. (Have they ever tasted an artichoke, I wonder? Will the prickles be a surprise?) Just a lovely story all around.

Beta Feedback
Vorkosigan Saga
Cordelia/Aral
POV Outsider, Documentation, In-Universe Film Criticism

Three columns, over five years, from the Betan paper of record.

Clever, twisty, multi-layered work in which Cordelia's adventures have been multiply adapted into holovids, and critics tear into them. I love the layers of interpretation and re-interpretation here, and the unreliable-narratorness of both the explicit and implied accounts of Cordelia's life. (Which raises the question of whether we should be taking Shards of Honor as a wholly reliable account...?) Just a hair over a thousand words, and just like any good journalism, makes every one of those words count.

machinistm

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Music: When You're Young - 3 Doors Down

Profile

Nick Eff

nfagerlund.net

Static and Noise

🌻 Mastodon
🌻 Twitter

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Wet Paint

Style: Scratch the Surface 🐾 for Cutting Corners by roadrunnertwice

Radio On

Network

Checkin

Yippee!

I'm singing out this poem all the way back home

My fix on the dishwasher seems to be working, yay me!

Not enough facepalm in the world

Unsent Letters Reveal (plus a bonus!)

An Owl (in Memory of Gil) by David Shapiro

I need some music recs

[dreamwidth/dreamwidth] 41eb4c: X/Twitter Userhead Update (#3545)

Starting: Touchstone

new hmart

Nonfiction

memes > chores

Hummingbirds!

Pa vez o pellaat da vag, ha ma c'hoantaez c'hoazh?

Currently at the bakery...

Hornytown Chutzpah, by Andrew Hiller

Table talk

Unsent Letters Recs

Gay During That Goal, Too / Heated Rivalry fic rec

Profile

Static and Noise

Expand Cut Tags

Wet Paint