ashelterofpages: (pretty_pixels109)
[personal profile] ashelterofpages
Haven't worked on any icons yet, but I'm still intending to. I think the plan for that is going to be to do it when I'm not house-sitting so I have the better screen to do it with. Right now I'm on a 17in screen, which is fine, but it's a portable one that isn't the best for playing with something like graphics.

I will say that since I had that mindset shift about what I want to try to do every day, I'm seeing some interesting results.

1. I get a lot of stuff done on certain days, but then the next day I do less. This doesn't bother me, though, because I'm still getting a lot of life stuff done. I don't feel so guilty and awful on those second days, and that's the kind of thing I was hoping to accomplish.

2. I'm able to catch up on things like beta reading with less difficulty. Reading any fiction has been kind of hard lately, but I'm having an easier time getting to things I need to give feedback of some kind on, so that's nice.

3. My writing is...not really happening right now. Not drafting, and also not editing. I'm not sure what to make of that, but we'll see. This whole thing is still barely started, so maybe I just need to give it more time before I can start integrating words back into my life.

4. However, I did post on Bluesky asking for prompts to write microfiction off. I love doing these things every couple of months, so I'm looking forward to playing with those prompts soon.

So, I've been house-sitting for S again, which I can't recall if I've said or not on here yet, but I'm going back to my house tomorrow, then coming back here again on Monday. This is because I need to pick up some clothes, meds, and maybe a few other things while also swapping some stuff out too. Which is fine. Right now this is my life, switching between the two houses until S finally moves upstate.

Dear Fandom5k Creator

Apr. 11th, 2026 09:49 pm
trobadora: (Sherlock/Moriarty - in the darkness)
[personal profile] trobadora
Dear [community profile] fandom5k writer,

thank you so much for writing a story for me! I've requested and received all of these fandoms before - some for many, many years, and often with the same prompts, because when I really enjoy something, I immediately want fifty more takes on the same thing. *g* So if that's what we matched on, don't worry about repeating things! I'll be absolutely thrilled about anything you can create about the relationships I requested.

Everything important is in the requests themselves, but if you'd like even more info, general likes etc., here you go.

My AO3 account is [archiveofourown.org profile] Trobadora, and it's set to welcome treats.

General Preferences

Likes & Dislikes/DNWs )

Fandoms and relationships

In somewhat alphabetical order - note that some sections are expanded compared to the sign-up form:

Jump directly to:Grimm: Nick/Renard/Juliette )

镇魂 | Guardian (TV): Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Ya Qing/Zhu Hong, Shen Wei & Ya Qing )

Grimm/Guardian crossovers: Nick Burkhardt & Sean Renard & Shen Wei & Zhao Yunlan, Sean Renard & Shen Wei & Zhao Yunlan, Juliette Silverton & Shen Wei & Zhao Yunlan, Juliette Silverton & Shen Wei, Sean Renard & Shen Wei, Sean Renard & Ya Qing, Sean Renard/Ya Qing )

Nantucket Trilogy - S.M. Stirling: Kashtiliash & Raupasha )

Sherlock (BBC): Jim Moriarty/Sherlock Holmes )

山河令 | Word of Honor: Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu )

Pandemic Garden Club

Apr. 11th, 2026 12:03 pm
scrubjayspeaks: macro photograph of ladybug climbing a blade of grass (garden)
[personal profile] scrubjayspeaks
Welcome to the April edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!

Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.

As for myself...

Read more... )

(no subject)

Apr. 11th, 2026 11:38 am
greghousesgf: (Boingboing)
[personal profile] greghousesgf
It's still raining and I gotta go to the drugstore.

updating credit

Apr. 11th, 2026 11:23 am
calimac: (Default)
[personal profile] calimac
My new credit card came yesterday. This was slightly unexpected because the old one doesn't expire for two months. It was also noteworthy, because this is the card I use for all my online transactions, including recurring charges. That meant I had to go online and update them all, with the new expiration date and (where they stored it) the 3-digit thingie that supplements the card number for verification. (While the card number stays the same, the 3-digit thingie - I forget what it's called - changes with each reissue, but fortunately my new one is memorizable.)

And that proved a bit of a challenge. I don't keep a list of the recurring charges, but since they are recurring I can find them on my bill. First stop was my web and e-mail hosting service; that was pretty easy. The next one was unrelated to it, but I found it had somehow picked the change up from the web service.

After that, however, came a bunch where I was dashed if I could find the page to make a credit card change on. If I did eventually stumble on the page of links that included it, it was easily identifiable, but stumbling upon that page was a doozy. At one site I typed in a help search box "how do I update my credit card" and it instructed me to find the link on a particular page, but it didn't say how to find that page. Typing a query on how to find that page produced no useful results.

Then there was my gym membership, which I don't use any more. I was just going to let it run out with the credit card, but I decided to try to contact them online or by phone. Ha-ha, you can't do that, though the online instructions say you can. The phone number, which the online system assures you can reach membership services, asks for your member number, confirms this, and then says goodbye and hangs up. It says elsewhere you can visit your local club. Well, ha-ha, my local club has been closed - news to me, but I told you I didn't use it any more. My membership was only good there, so I doubt I can get anything done at some other outlet. Maybe I'll just let it run out with the credit card - assuming it hasn't picked up the update, but I don't have an online account there, so I can't check.

multifandom icons.

Apr. 11th, 2026 09:12 pm
wickedgame: (Ilya & Shane | Heated Rivalry | Green)
[personal profile] wickedgame posting in [community profile] icons
Fandoms: Addicted, Bridgerton, Cobra Kai, Elite, Guardian, I'll Turn Back This Time, Mako Mermaids, One Piece, Shadowhunters, Superman & Lois, Zorro

elite-08x07arabiannights (1).png onepiece-2x05summerstorm.png illturnback-1x03.png
the rest are HERE[community profile] mundodefieras 

Agent from Above

Apr. 11th, 2026 07:51 pm
mekare: Yunlan smiling broadly (Guardian Yunlan smile)
[personal profile] mekare posting in [community profile] c_ent
man talking to a statue of 3rd prince


I've justed posted an extremely short review for this new Netflix show and thought I'd crosspost here.

TV

Since I’ve been travelling, I didn’t watch a lot. I did check out a new Taiwanese Netflix series though: Agent from Above. It’s about a Heavenly Agent (he's acting on behalf of the Third Heavenly Prince and gets missions via paper slips delivered by a bird) battling the forces of hell. Very entertaining, nicely shot and loveable characters. Strong found family tropes (humans and ghosts live together in an old “market” building.) The length was what actually made me check it out, it’s only 8 episodes long. I simply do not have the energy or time to invest in something long right now.
Someone on Tumblr compared its vibe to 2010s Canadian series and I can sort of understand what they mean.

Has anyone here watched it as well?
umadoshi: (kittens - Jinksy - soft)
[personal profile] umadoshi
Seasonal crunch is over! Feels like freedom, if you ignore the part where I still have, y'know, a job + freelance stuff. Increased freedom. We'll go with that.

My day off yesterday entailed such thrilling things as sleeping in and then taking ages to get up because Jinksy came to snuggle*; finishing my breakfast and tea by around noon; getting some banking done; washing my hair; vacuuming the two main levels of the house; spending several full hours being a cat-lap for Sinha; and starting in on a new novel for the first time since March Break or so.

*When I texted [personal profile] scruloose to say good morning, they said, "When my first alarm went, it was competing with Jinksy over on your other side rumble-purring so hard I swear the mattress was reverberating with it."

Reading: A couple more chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass, and I've finished Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, which has a fair number of recipes but is, as the title indicates, more of a family history than a cookbook.

And last night I didn't want to spend much mental energy on choosing what fiction to read, so I decided to just go with Tough Guy, the third Game Changers novel. I imagine in the not-too-distant future I'll pick up the ebook "box set" of books 4-6 just to have them on hand.

Watching: We're caught up on The Pitt and have seen five episodes of One Piece season 2, and I imagine we'll finish the latter before backtracking for the last couple-few episodes of Frieren. (I've also made note of this elsewhere, but to reinforce it in my brain: after The Pitt finishes, I need to remember to cancel our Crave subscription again.)

Eating: After the crunch ended on Thursday, [personal profile] scruloose and I ordered from a new (?) Korean BBQ place (bb.q Chicken) that a stranger in the local Bluesky feed had mentioned was good. We tried the bone-in Classic Fried Chicken (very minimal spicing, but very solid) and the boneless Golden Fried Chicken, the description of which didn't indicate any particular spiciness, but it turned out to be right on the edge of my comfort level...but also a really delicious seasoning to go with the heat, so I'm counting that as a definite win. The place offers a whole array of flavor options, so I imagine we'll be trying it again.

Weathering/Growing: Yesterday was sunny and relatively warm, and now we're back to a slightly-chilly rainy/damp stretch, but a few days in the forecast will theoretically get back up into the double digits.

At my instigation, we're going to take another stab at Doing Garden Stuff this year. VERY preliminary notes )

Moonscrolling.

Apr. 11th, 2026 06:31 pm
goodbyebird: Last of Us: Joel is smiling. He's not traumatized. He's not emotionally shut down. Shhh. (Last of Us and nothing bad happened ever)
[personal profile] goodbyebird
+ They landed safely huzzah! Science!!

+ Graveyard Keeper is free on Steam for a short while.

+ Mexico’s monarch butterfly population jumps 64%, offering hope for at-risk species.

+ Scientists watch sperm whales work as a team to assist a birth.

+ Forest growth in the EU outpaces harvesting.

+ Elusive nightjar birds making remarkable comeback, conservationists say.

+ Discovered the on board kiosk stocked my favorite potato chips this trip \o/

[ SECRET POST #7036 ]

Apr. 11th, 2026 10:28 am
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #7036 ⌋

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


01.



More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 37 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1005.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Rounding up various things

Apr. 11th, 2026 04:03 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

***

And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

Surprised? not really.

***

More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

***

Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

***

This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

***

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #1006 ]

Apr. 11th, 2026 10:23 am
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets
[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #1006 ]




The first secret from this batch will be posted on April 18th.



RULES:
1. One secret link per comment.
2. 750x750 px or smaller.
3. Link directly to the image.

More details on how to send a secret in!

Optional: If you would like your secret's fandom to be noted in the main post along with the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. If your secret makes the fandom obvious, there's no need to do this. If your fandom is obscure, you should probably tell me what it is.

Optional #2: If you would like WARNINGS (such as spoilers or common triggers -- list of some common ones here) to be noted in the main post before the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret.

Optional #3: If you would like a transcript to be posted along with your secret, put it along with the link in the comment!

nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila
After breakfast, we got on the bus to the museum at San Sabba, the rice factory that served as a concentration camp in WWII. As expected, it was quite harrowing, especially walking into the middle square where the Nazis had torched the crematorium before fleeing. The hole where the chimney had been ripped out has a small plaque and flower vase in front of it. I am not at all superstitious. However, the feeling you get walking in from the entrance is one of tremendously bad juju. The dank cells with the wooden doors and too-small bunks may be the only physical remains of the instruments of torment, but the walls are permeated with it. We did not take any photos. We read through all the exhibition materials in the museum. Keiki insisted we leave a donation to ensure all is preserved so no one forgets.

Our bus ride back to town was quiet, and at the end of the journey we walked to a gelateria. Everyone practiced ordering in Italian. We must have done reasonably well as the server smiled at us a great deal and our single scoop cones wobbled under the weight of gelato piled in.

Much of the rest of the day was spent walking, punctuated by stops for refreshments and a bit of shopping. We visited the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire (photos in a separate post), and we watched the sunset from the harbour’s edge.

20260409_150038

Random garden with large wisteria vines in full flower.

20260409_150328

The drive leading up to the castle.

20260409_150514

WWI monument.

20260409_183432

Aperol, crisps and beer. Very acceptable.

20260409_193900

Triestian sunset.
[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow


Today's links



A sci-fi pulp robot holding a grotesque inverted severed head of a beared man aloft, zapping it with rays from its eye-visor. Behind the robot is a scene of collapsing Roman pillars.

Don't Be Evil (permalink)

How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).

Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.

There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.

Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.

Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.

(Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)

https://opencola.io/

But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.

It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno).

We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google."

That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!

Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.

I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.

I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.

The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Trotsky’s assassination – according to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010413212536/http://foia.fbi.gov/trotsky.htm

#25yrsago Online headline-writing guidelines from Jakob Nielsen https://memex.craphound.com/2001/04/09/headline-writing-guidelines-from-legendary-usability/

#25yrsago Floppy-disk stained-glass windows https://web.archive.org/web/20010607052511/http://www.acme.com/jef/crafts/bathroom_windows.html

#15yrsago English school principal announces zero tolerance for mismatched socks https://nationalpost.com/news/u-k-school-cracks-down-on-bad-manners

#1yrago EFF's lawsuit against DOGE will go forward https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Blueberry Strawberry Salsa

Apr. 11th, 2026 08:08 am
nverland: (Cooking)
[personal profile] nverland posting in [community profile] recipecommunity
image host

Blueberry Strawberry Salsa
Prep Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 15 minutes Servings:12

Ingredients

1 pint fresh blueberries about 2 cups
2 large jalapeno seeds removed, halved, or roughly chopped
½ small red onion roughly chopped
1 tablespoon lime juice about 1 small lime's worth
3 cups diced strawberries about 1½ pounds, washed and hulled
½ cup chopped cilantro
⅛ – ¼ teaspoon kosher salt adjust to taste
⅛ – ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper adjust to taste

Instructions

Combine the blueberries, jalapeno, onion, and lime juice in a food processor. Process for a minute or two until pureed.
Pour the blueberry puree into a bowl and add the strawberries and cilantro. Stir to combine and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Notes
This salsa is best served immediately after it is made. If you need to prepare it in advance, the blueberry puree can be stored for a day or two in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Combine the puree with the rest of the ingredients just before serving.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


10 works new to me: five fantasy, and five science fiction, of which at least three are series (if magazines count as series). I have not see that high a fraction of SF in quite a while.

Books Received April 4 — April 10

Poll #34466 Books Received April 4 — April 10
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Demonology for Overachievers by Lily Anderson (September 2026)
7 (24.1%)

All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan (May 2026)
11 (37.9%)

The Faith of Beasts by James S. A. Corey (April 2026)
3 (10.3%)

FIYAH Literary Magazine Issue 38 published by FIYAH Literary Magazine (April 2026)
8 (27.6%)

House Haunters by KC Jones (October 2026)
5 (17.2%)

The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee (May 2026)
13 (44.8%)

A Wall Is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz (October 2026)
16 (55.2%)

There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs by Jason Pargin (November 2026)
12 (41.4%)

A Kiss of Crimson Ash by Anuja Varghese (May 2026)
6 (20.7%)

Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho Yeeun (May 2026)
7 (24.1%)

Some other option (see comments)
1 (3.4%)

Cats!
20 (69.0%)

firecat: red panda, winking (Default)
[personal profile] firecat
This is an ~30-minute episode of a Vox podcast called “Today Explained.” There is a transcript.

”How fan fiction went mainstream: The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained” by Danielle Hewitt and Noel King

It’s a pretty good intro to fanfic and how it’s become something publishers and creators of TV/movies pay attention to. They interview Francesca Kappa, a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created AO3.

Things I learned and some bits I liked:
  • AO3 was created in part to prevent commodification of fanfiction and the social connections it facilitates.
  • “one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW organization for transformative works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.”
  • It was claimed that AO3 is “much bigger than Wikipedia.” I’m not sure what metrics they’re using to come up with that.
  • [AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”
  • (Discussing copyright) “it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to, like, negotiate with Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it. Like, that's the world we live in, right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet, it has a five-year option, Shakespeare really has a great idea for it, but like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ. Abrams is going to do Hamlet.”
    (I need to know which circle of Hell shows JJ Abrams’s Hamlet on repeat, because I really want to avoid it.)

TGCF, Qi Rong

Apr. 11th, 2026 03:22 pm
falkner: GSGW cover art detail: the good friend plushie inhabited by Braun in Kim Soleum's front pocket ([GSGW] Good Friend)
[personal profile] falkner posting in [community profile] smallbatchicons


(These were made for the april iconathon.)

Daily Happiness

Apr. 11th, 2026 09:45 pm
torachan: karkat from homestuck headdesking (karkat headdesk)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I got the final confirmation from the tax guy so I was able to sign in the app and have those sent off. I get really antsy leaving it so close to the deadline so that’s a weight off my mind to have it all done finally.

2. After yesterday’s rain, today was warm and very sunny. And muggy. Ugh! And since it was Saturday, the crowds were out in force, but we still have a really nice day today at DisneySea. Tomorrow we are doing non-Disney stuff and then going back to the park on Monday which should be both less crowded and not as hot and sunny, so fingers crossed.
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