umadoshi: (pumpkin pie (icons_by_mea))
[personal profile] umadoshi
I somehow mentally misplaced a week when we were booking our covid/flu shots and I was looking at the last market date of the season for the little one on the corner. Unsure how my brain concluded that they were on the same day. (Market's last day is tomorrow, shots are a week from tomorrow, so it's FINE, just...odd.)

The rest of this is entirely about what we did for our little Thanksgiving dinner (with a bit of blood glucose talk), so it's going under a cut. cut! )

Organisational October - Day 17

Oct. 17th, 2025 02:59 pm
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)
[personal profile] peaceful_sands posting in [community profile] bitesizedcleaning
So my Organisational October is going about as well as the September Stampede! How are things going for you? I hope everyone else is having a more successful month than I am and managing to keep on chipping away at that list of things that need doing. Tell us what's been going well, and feel free as well to talk about the less successful part of your month. What are the stumbling blocks in your life right now that are making things more difficult?

Always keep in your mind that if you have a bad day or week or month (or year in my case), the beauty of our bite-sizing community is that every day is a new day and you can start again today or tomorrow or when life permits. I have to keep reminding myself that just because I've had a run of bad days, I mustn't give up and call it quits, I just need to start with a little bit of getting things done today or tomorrow. These aren't new year's resolutions, it's a daily resolution and so every day we can have a fresh start and while we can be proud and celebrate if yesterday went well, we don't have to give up if it went badly.

So here's the daily plan - don't forget it's fine to tweak the suggestions to better work for you if something doesn't quite hit what your situation needs, you can skip a day, pick a different day, stick with a task from an earlier day that you need a bit longer to finish - it's all cool here!

This post will remain the place to comment until I next get chance to put up a post. I encourage you to tell us how you are getting on and to cheer on fellow posters.

Daily Challenge Table shown below the cut )

Hopefully there's enough information in the table to give you a general guide without being too restrictive - feel free to adapt the suggestions and change out days that don't feel relevant or aren't what you most need. Really importantly, PLEASE do not forget we are all about bite-sizing so we're not aiming to get the whole of a room done, we're looking to target a key area within a space or within a task to make progress on it - this is about starting the process and knowing that we can move towards our goal step by step - not in massive jumps when life, health & energy conspire!

Wishing you all a great weekend.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
that would be greatly appreciated.

Currently trying to support a friend in a Very Bad Situation and it's desperately anxiety-inducing and my brain is trying to eat itself, which also makes me less useful as support, which is bad.

So if anyone would like to ask or discuss anything about Prophet or Dark Souls or IWTV or climbing or, you know, any of the somewhat cheering topics I sometimes ramble about, PLEASE DO. "More of a comment than a question" questions also very welcome.

I cannot guarantee replies in a timely or consistent manner (because of the Situation and also the bad state of my brain) but it would be deeply appreciated nonetheless.

Just One Thing (17 October 2025)

Oct. 17th, 2025 08:00 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] 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!

(no subject)

Oct. 16th, 2025 11:43 pm
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
Queen Demon by Martha Wells:

Read more... )

Also, volume 1 of AJ Demas' new serial (set in the same world as Sword Dance, but ~300 years earlier) is now available as an ebook from her website! I thought it sounded neat, but Ream as a platform didn't interest me.

Daily Happiness

Oct. 16th, 2025 04:51 pm
torachan: arale from dr slump dressed in a penguin suit and smiling (arale penguin)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Got the car stuff taken care of. Apparently there have been two recalls (neither of them urgent) and the most recent one requires a part replaced and they don't yet have the replacement parts, so they'll contact us when they get those in, but they did take care of the first, and did a full tune up and all that, and also washed the car (it wasn't in terrible shape, but always nice to get it washed). They did not have a Kia dealership in town when we bought this car, but they do now, which is very nice. It's technically within walking distance, but it would be a long walk, so I picked Carla up this morning and dropped her off this afternoon.

2. It was nice to have the day off. Didn't do anything special, just relax. I had considered putting together the Billy bookcase we bought a couple weeks ago, but decided against it. I know it won't actually take that long (though it has doors, so it will be longer than just the bookcase on its own), but it feels like such a large project. It was so nice with the furniture for the garage, I could just leave it half done and do a bit each day and it wasn't in the way, but this is for Carla's bedroom, so it needs to be done all at once (though I suppose the doors can be done on another day). Maybe this weekend. We really need more shelf space, so that is a good reason to get it done lol.

3. Molly is such a sweetie.

My life in music

Oct. 17th, 2025 08:55 am
lizbee: A sketch of myself (Default)
[personal profile] lizbee
When I have disposable income, I spend it on concert tickets.

So back in January I went to see Irish country-pop singer CMAT live. My friends and I were the oldest people in the room and we all got covid, and it was absolutely worth it. In terms of "best gigs I've been to", I'd put it on par with Florence + the Machine as The Actual Best, only at a fraction of the scale and price.

Her new album came out at the end of August, and I have an embarrassing number of feelings about the title track. Embarrassing because I was a fully grown adult and also Australian when the Celtic Tiger collapsed, but growing up in suburbia and feeling like your whole generation has been fucked over by neoliberalism is A Mood.



She's touring early next year, and I have tickets secured and a note in my planner to get a covid booster three weeks before the date.


King of Ashes, by S. A. Cosby: DNF

Oct. 16th, 2025 11:59 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Roman left the family business, a crematory, and its town to become an accountant to the rich and famous. His sister now runs the crematory with their father, while their younger brother Dante stays on the rolls but his actual profession is being a drug addict and ne'er do well. When the kids were teenagers, their mother vanished. Their father is widely suspected of having murdered his wife and cremated his body, but no proof was ever found. When the book opens, Roman hears that his father is in the hospital, victim of a suspicious accident. He heads home to visit his father and help out his sister. Naturally, he immediately gets embroiled in trouble.

I've loved or liked all of Cosby's previous books and was very excited for this one - especially given the crematory setting. (Cosby himself ran a funeral home with his wife.) Unfortunately, I did not like or feel connected to any of the characters in this one, and so I didn't care what happened to them. Cosby's characters are typically criminals who do bad things, but in his other books, I understand the reasons they are who they are and like them even if I wouldn't want to meet them in real life. But in this one, fairly early on, Roman - who I already didn't feel connected to - commits an act of horrifying cruelty that seems completely unmotivated.

Read more... )

It's possible that this is explained later, and my guess is that the explanation is "Roman is actually a sadistic sociopath," but I lost all interest in him at that point, and DNF'd the book as I no longer wanted to read about him, none of the other characters interested me either, and the sadistic sociopath explanation doesn't help. I heard an interview with Cosby where he talks about wanting to write a classic tragedy with a very bad protagonist a la Macbeth, which makes his intention make more sense to me, but it doesn't make me want to return to the book.

Cosby is a great author but this book was a miss for me. I HIGHLY recommend Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears for very well-written books where bad people do bad things that are very motivated, and you can't help rooting for them to succeed. I recommend All Sinners Bleed for a well-written book about a good guy fighting both crime and legal bad things. I recommend My Darkest Prayer for a fun, OTT thriller with a very Marty Stu protagonist. I don't recommend this.

Just One Thing (16 October 2025)

Oct. 16th, 2025 08:04 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] 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!

Daily Happiness

Oct. 15th, 2025 10:15 pm
torachan: (chloe yawn)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We had a nice dinner at Disneyland tonight. The parks were crowded, but it's finally feeling like fall weather, so that made it more pleasant than hot and crowded for sure.

2. Speaking of weather, it rained for a few more hours last night after I went to bed. It doesn't look like we're supposed to get any more in the near future, but I'm glad we got as much as we did.

3. Yesterday at work I saw this sweet potato spread and meant to buy it before going home, but forgot. But today I remembered, and I had a piece of toast tonight with butter and the spread and it was so good! It's not like a sweet potato jam, it's a creamy spread more like peanut butter. The package says you can also spread it on before toasting to give it a real roasted sweet potato feel, so I'm going to try that next.

4. I'm taking the day off tomorrow. On Monday a check engine light went on in the car, no accompanying beeps or message, so it didn't seem urgent, but it did stay on, so Carla called and made an appointment to take it in to the dealership. She's been wanting to get a tune up anyway, and there's some sort of recall that should be looked into as well. The appointment is for tomorrow, and I just decided that even though we have another car I could use, and it's not me taking the car in, work doesn't have to know that, so I put in a PTO request and told my boss I have to take the car to the shop, so I can't come in. (Now today the check engine light was off, but it does still need to get checked out, so we're keeping the appointment.)

5. Look at that leg!

2025 Disneyland Trip #67 (10/15/25)

Oct. 15th, 2025 09:53 pm
torachan: john from homestuck looking shocked (john shocked)
[personal profile] torachan
We went down to Disneyland this evening after work. It was windy when we got there, and getting a little chilly, so we both wore sweatshirts, which was nice. I'm sure there will be some hot days here and there still, but I hate how warm it is into October these days, so it's nice to have it actually feeling like fall.

Read more... )
rachelmanija: (Autumn: small leaves)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Yuletide signups are open!

Here's the tagset showing what's eligible to request and offer.

What intrigues you in the tag set? And who plans to participate this year?

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Oct. 15th, 2025 12:58 pm
rachelmanija: (Autumn: small leaves)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them.

This year I have gone for a slate of obscure-even-for-Yuletide canons plus a few less obscure canons with obscure-even-for-Yuletide characters. Some of my prompts are longer than others, but I want everything equally.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, canon divergence AUs anf alternate versions of characters. I particularly love deadly/horrifying yet weirdly beautiful settings, especially if there's elements of space/time/reality warping as well. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

General DNWs )

Crossroad - Barbara Hambly )

Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )

Fire Dancer Series - Ann Maxwell )

Ki and Vandien Quartet - Megan Lindholm )

The Last Hot Time - John M. Ford  )

Lyra - Patricia Wrede )

re: Happiness

Oct. 15th, 2025 09:26 am
merridia: (Default)
[personal profile] merridia
Hello it is Wednesday and I am at work. Thanksgiving was fine, mostly notable because all weekends should be three-day weekends. I took the BUS to go to the MOVIES all by MYSELF, because the new bus routes absolutely live up to the hype for the time being, and it no longer takes an hour and a half (if I'm lucky) to get across town! Hot diggity! My options for entertaining myself without the ability to drive have just opened up massively!! Also I found an old long wool coat of my grandmother's that fits me perfectly, it just needs a belt. Wins upon wins!

It is WrestleDream go home day, so I will need to make time for three hours of graps today and tomorrow (probably tomorrow, sometimes my favourite torrent provider can be slow on the upload) while still trying to catch up on Dracula Daily (I came back from vacation just as the entries started getting super long, so it was easy to fall behind). Also need to do my nails and buy booze for the PPV and get my brother to close my mother's sticky bedroom window, because it's that time of year where she leaves it open even though it's below zero outside, so the heater constantly kicks in and I wake up in a sauna at the other end of the house in the middle of the night. Except for last night, because I stayed up way too late reading and listening to a pair of professional wrestling-themed electronica/pow-wow concept EPs (WHAT) and just kinda experienced the creep into hothouse territory firsthand.

It's snowed a few times now, but never enough for it to actually stay on the ground, so I refuse to count it. AUTUMN LINGERS.

15. Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Not directly, but it can certainly buy you the means to take it for yourself in a way that 'no money' cannot.

October Movies: TRON: Ares, Lurker, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Roofman, The Smashing Machine, The Fly, Sorcerer, Gladiator

Just One Thing (15 October 2025)

Oct. 15th, 2025 08:27 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] 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!

Daily Happiness

Oct. 14th, 2025 07:23 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Well, we did get that rain. It started sometime during the night (I did wake up once around four or so and it was already raining by then) and continued on through midday. It was steady and heavy enough that there were some areas that got flood warnings, though nowhere near us, thankfully. The last time we got rain it ended up being just a teensy bit, so it was nice to get some proper rain.

2. Unrelated to the rain, I had already planned to work from the store close to home today rather than going in to the office, so it was nice to just have to drive a couple miles rather than 30 minutes on the freeway in the rain.

3. This cutie.

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


This is an outstanding work of narrative nonfiction about the sinking of the merchant marine ship El Faro, with no survivors, on October 1, 2015. As far as anyone could tell initially, the captain inexplicably sailed the ship straight into the eye of Hurricane Joaquin, which he definitely knew was there.

Then the black box got retrieved. It had the complete audio recordings of everything that happened on the ship for 26 hours before it sank, right up to its final moments. Rachel Slade, a journalist, used the complete audio plus in-depth interviews with everyone who could possibly have any light to shed on the matter to write the book. She not only gives an analysis of what happened and why, she covers all the surrounding circumstances that led to it. It's an outstanding work of nonfiction disaster reporting that often reads like a suspense novel, it will teach you a lot about many things, and it will make you very angry.

The culprit, essentially, was capitalism. A company called TOTE took over the original company that owned the ship and put a business bro who knew nothing about shipping in charge. He fired a bunch of people at random on the theory that there were too many employees, and slashed maintenance because it was expensive. Everyone who was experienced, skilled, and not desperate who hadn't already been fired quit, leaving only people who were inexperienced, unskilled, undesirable for other reasons, desperate, or in low-level positions where they had no influence on general operations, on a ship in serious need of repairs and upgrades. TOTE put enormous pressure on the captain to get the ship to its destination on time, no matter what, to save money. Finally, there were multiple sources for weather reports, the one which was most current was more complicated to use, and not everyone understood that the other source could be nine hours behind.

The captain had been investigated for sexual harassment, had a history of poor judgment calls, and had the social skills of Captain Ahab; because of this, he knew he was on thin ice and if he got fired from the El Faro, he might not get another job as captain. The second mate was a young woman trying to make it in a men's world who had reported him for harassing her, and dealt by avoiding him as much as possible. The entire crew was operating under a system where the captain was basically God. The only way to contact the outside world, like if for instance a crew member wanted to report that the captain was set on sailing them into a hurricane, was a satellite phone that only the captain had access to.

Basically everyone but the captain was worried they'd sail into the hurricane, the captain was worried he'd get fired if he took the long way around to avoid the hurricane and didn't realize that his weather reports were not up to date, everyone was tiptoeing around or avoiding the captain because he was a giant asshole who was also the God-King, and no one had any way to overrule or go around him.

The culture of "never question the captain even if he's obviously wrong" has caused a number of plane crashes, and the aviation world responded by instituting a system of training to teach crew members to speak up forcefully if they think the captain is making a mistake, complete with exactly how to phrase it. If you're interested in this, it's called Cockpit/Crew Resource Management (CRM); the podcast "Black Box Down" has a number of episodes involving it.

CRM would have been helpful for the El Faro, as would giving the crew private access to the satellite phone or some other way of reporting on the captain. And, of course, so would not allowing companies to put workers in extremely unsafe conditions. Regulations are written in blood. Worse, the blood can spill and nothing gets written at all.

An excellent book. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in disasters, survival, or the failure mode of capitalism.

Dear yuletide author

Oct. 14th, 2025 08:41 pm
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)
[personal profile] raven
Dear yuletide author,

I'm [archiveofourown.org profile] singlecrow on the AO3. Thank you very much for writing for me, I will be happy and excited about whatever you write! I am also open to and excited about treats, should anyone wish to write me any.

My general do not wants are violence against women and omegaverse, with a caveat about "The Day After The Revolution", see below. But that aside, I read very broadly. I enjoy sad and dark stories, happy stories, love stories, stories with sex in, stories without. I don't do Christmas, so would prefer a story not be entirely about the characters celebrating it. Other festivals are marvellous.

One thing I really love, in sad and happy stories alike, is people being quietly kind to one another. I also really like people being competent, and found families of all sorts.

Fandom-specific stuff follows.

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones )

The Day Before The Revolution - Ursula K. Le Guin )

The Saint of Steel - T Kingfisher )

That's it - as above, I read many things, and I'm thrilled that you're writing for me! I hope you have a wonderful yuletide.

Cheers,
raven

Dear Yule Writer,

Oct. 14th, 2025 01:22 pm
reflectedeve: Janet proudly holds out a cactus which was definitely not the item requested (not a girl - not a robot - buggy)
[personal profile] reflectedeve
Hi there!! Thanks so much for writing for me! I hope you have as much fun with that as I know I will, reading it.

I keep telling myself I’ll write a shorter letter, but I get so much enjoyment out of imagining possibilities and squeeing over the books (and webcomic, this year!) that I love. That means I’m going to have some prompts and some possibly disjointed thoughts about why I love these fandoms. None of it is there to be prescriptive! Feel free to go your own way!

My general feeling going into this Yuletide is that life is pretty tough right now and things are rather dark in the real world, and well, I could use some joy. While every canon is different and the tone that fits each one varies, my tastes are running towards silly shenanigans, adventures, and comfort ... if sometimes flavored a bit by darkness, spookiness (how I love spooky things), or hurt. I’m not looking for schmaltz, but I’m looking for going relatively light on the hurt.

(Er, also. I want to acknowledge something: for all my reliable enthusiasm about this event and the process going in, over the last few years, I’ve struggled pretty hard with reading and commenting on my gifts in anything like a reasonable time frame. It seems to fit in with some other mental health struggles, but that’s not an excuse, and I feel genuinely terrible about it. So, mainly for my own accountability/breaking this cycle: feedback will be prompt this year.)

A note on DNWs (and Likes): I think these lists are helpful, and I very much appreciate you taking them into account! That said, I think they’re there as general guidelines, to be given and taken in good faith. There’s always going to be some possible interpretation of something (my Likes or DNWs, something in canon, something you’ve written) that one of us won’t have thought of that could maybe be borderline, and I don’t want you to stress it! (My AO3 sign-up includes some fandom-specific annotations to the DNWs, in case those are helpful.)

I hope that you have a marvelous Yuletide - whatever that means to you! Thank you again! <3

DNWs, requests and prompts! )

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