Reading

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disney

2025 Disneyland Trip #77 (12/13/25)

I thought today would be less crowded than Monday because all three lower level passholders are blocked out, but it was super crowded. D: Still not as bad as Monday (especially because Monday was unfortunately timed with the parade, which makes things cloggier), but not great.

( Read more... )

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history

Please recommend books about the French Revolution

I started playing Assassin's Creed: Unity and realised that I know almost nothing about the French Revolution. We did study it in grade 10, but I missed a lot of time due to a never-identified virus -- I was out for most of the American Revolution and all of the French, and mostly passed the class because I knew more about the Chinese Communist Revolution than my teacher. (It's not her fault, she was an art teacher who was roped in to teach history for ... reasons which I'm sure made sense at the time.)

Anyway, I've decided to fill the gap in my knowledge. I started out by trying to listen to The Rest Is History, a podcast my mum recommended, but the hosts are two English men, and they spend a weird amount of time comparing Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle, but in a derogatory "maybe we should decapitate the Duchess of Sussex" way that I did not care for.

Then I read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, which I think is from 1980. It was a solemn, dispassionate accounting of events and personalities, but didn't get into the question of, for example, why the Parisian mob went from zero to heads on pikes in the storming of the Bastille.

I've requested an inter-library loan for Citizens by Simon Schama, which I've seen recommended a lot, but I would also be eager to read a history that's not ... British? Because the British, for understandable reasons (I guess) weren't really down with the beheading of the monarch and the end of the monarchy (even though they did it first), and I feel like a pro-aristocratic bias has pervaded a lot of what I've encountered. And obviously the Terror was bad, but, like, maybe Robespierre was an asexual smol bean who was a convenient scapegoat! I'm open to the possibility!

I am open to suggestions, is what I'm saying.

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Twelve Days of (until) Christmas, Day 1

The thing about being in fandom for a long time, or at least one of the things, is that I have written a lot of holiday fics over the years. And I thought it might be fun to do a sort of Advent Calendar and revisit them!

It's a good excuse to give some old fics some air time, and also to spread the love and post some recs for other holiday fics I have loved.

Day 1:

We kick things off with some light-hearted fun! This was written for the Kirk/Spock Advent Calendar in 2011. I’d written a couple more serious fics for the same event in previous years, so wanted to change it up a bit and go full-on ENTERPRISE SAVES CHRISTMAS SPECIAL for this one.

Operation Sugarplum (Star Trek Reboot, Kirk/Spock)
Rated Gen
‘The transporter room was full of them, most in dress uniforms from their cadet days, some in Operations red, and most with a fluffy red Santa hat perched jauntily on their heads. Spock was uncertain where all those had come from. One belonging to a young officer from Medical looked suspiciously as if it had spent a previous incarnation as a sock, but Spock did not consider himself an experienced judge of Santa Claus paraphernalia, so neglected to mention it.’

A song to go with it: Santa Claus is Comin to Town, of course!

And a rec: merry christmas ya filthy animal by belovedmuerto
(The Untamed, wangxian but it's Jin Zixuan POV, modern AU)
Rated Teen

Picked this one because I'm headed to L.A. tomorrow and because I wanted to get an MDZS fic in - none of mine are going to be, as I haven't written any AUs and there is an understandable lack of Christmas in Ancient Fantasy China. It's the final one of a series, but I read them out of order and it was fine - they're pretty standalone, as long as you grasp the uncomplicated premise that WWX ran off to California where LWJ lived. I love the whole series because I love L.A. and it's so full of place, and this is just one of those warm fuzzy things where people basically get along and have a cosy time together and it's all very sweet.

On to Day 2

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Boost! marina's well-informed meta on Heated Rivalry

I've observed hockey RPF fandom from an immeasurable distance, and I still got a kick out of this post:

https://marina.dreamwidth.org/1576715.html

marina was in hockey fandom, spent her childhood in Ukraine, knows much about filing serial numbers, and has definite opinions about vodka.

I'm reading reading reading.

Hi!

Current Mood: stressed

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Saturday mishmash--household stuff, dyed hair [and work stuff], and a few links

Luck was not with us in the first attempt at clementines this year. (The batch we got are far from inedible, at least, but...not very good.) They're such a gamble these years. :/

Our new freezer arrived a week ago, and the plan is to finally get it in place today once

scruloose gets back from a market run. That hasn't happened yet due to a combination of factors and timing, the biggest of which is the fact that it'll require shifting some things out of the garage onto the driveway to make room for us to work with two upright freezers in play. (

scruloose is going to take a stab at moving the old one out of its place without emptying it, via a hand cart, but we have no idea how likely that is to actually work. It'd sure be convenient, though.)

My hair is dyed! It is. Um. Very dark. By which I mean it's not so much dark purple as "functionally black with some purple highlights that are probably some of my silver hair, but there's less of that than there is silver, so it's a little confusing". Oh, well. It looks fine, other than maybe making me look a bit washed out, and I don't much care about that.

(I might care more when I finally get

scruloose to take a headshot of me to send HR at Dayjob so they can update my long-expired work pass. [Part of why I decided to finally just go ahead and dye my hair was in the name of having it done for this photo.] These days, the process involves just filling out a form and emailing that and a photo that meets their technical requirements to the department handling passes and also to my boss, presumably so the boss can look at the photo and confirm "yes, that is the employee in question". But this means we can make potentially-endless attempts at getting a photo I don't hate, and honestly, if I can live with the horror of my provincial ID photo, I can probably live with just about anything.)

A few links:

--

mrissa's annual lussekatter posts are always good for my heart.

--Jenny Hamilton's "Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition" (covering ep. 1-2).

--"‘Pushing Daisies’ Season 3 In The Works, Says Creator Bryan Fuller".

Entry tags:

weekly reading

Weekly Reading

Recently Finished
The Girls Who Disappeared
On the 20th anniversary of a car accident where three girls mysteriously disappeared, the MC is assigned to do a podcast on it and goes to the town to conduct interviews, but strange things start happening. I didn't love the reveal of what actually happened, but overall this was interesting.

Mirage City
Fourth in the Evander Mills mystery series. I had no idea a new book was out until I saw it pop up on my goodreads feed. Looking back it seems like every book has come out in October, so I guess I should try and remember to keep an eye out around that time next year. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Murder on Harley Street
Most recent Cleopatra Fox mystery. Still enjoying this series.

The Final Curtain
Final book in the English translated series of Detective Kaga mysteries (and I believe final book in the original, too). I can see why the four books that were translated into English were chosen, if they knew they weren't going to be able to do the whole series, those ones all tie into each other somewhat. I liked these a lot, so I'm definitely going to try and see if I can find some of the ones that didn't get translated when we take our next trip to Japan (sadly they are not available as ebooks).

Murder at Merry Beggars Hall
New-to-me mystery series. And fairly new in general as the second book is just coming out next month. I enjoyed this a lot and am looking forward to the next one.

The Ghostkeeper
Graphic novel about a man who almost died as a child and can see ghosts ever since. He uses his powers to help ghosts deal with their issues and move on to the next life, but one day a ghost girl steals the key to the door to the next life and all the ghosts start flooding the town because no one is able to move on. I liked it.

My Home Hero vol. 17

Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. It's the weekend! I had a pretty productive day today and finished up what I was working on earlier than anticipated, so I just ended up going home early (around 2:30), which was nice.

2. It was warm and sunny when I took a walk after work, but it's very overcast and chilly this evening, and we're supposed to have cooler weather for a bit. Tomorrow says it will be overcast all day, which would be nice as we are planning to be at Disneyland and I don't want it to be too sunny.

3. We got burritos and tacos for dinner. Very tasty! Not agreeing with my stomach too well tonight, but worth it.

4. Look at this sleepy boy!

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The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

After a wet-bulb heat wave kills thousands in India, the UN forms an organization, the Ministry for the Future, intended to deal with climate change on behalf of future generations. They're not the only organization trying mitigate or fight or adapt to climate change; many other people and groups are working on the same thing, using everything from science to financial incentives to persuasion to terrorism.

We very loosely follow two very lightly sketched-in characters, an Irish woman who leads the Ministry for the Future and an American man whose life is derailed when he's a city's sole survivor of the Indian wet-bulb event, but the book has a very broad canvas and they're not protagonists in the usual sense of the word. The book isn't about individuals, it's about a pair of phenomena: climate change and what people do about it. The mission to save the future is the protagonist insofar as there is one.

This is the first KSR book I've actually managed to finish! (It's also the only one that I got farther in than about two chapters.) It's a very interesting, enlightening, educational book. I enjoyed reading it.

He's a very particular kind of writer, much more interested in ideas and a very broad scope than in characters or plot. That approach works very well for this book. The first chapter, which details the wet-bulb event, is a stunning, horrifying piece of writing. It's also the closest the book ever comes to feeling like a normal kind of novel. The rest of it is more like a work of popular nonfiction from an alternate timeline, full of science and economics and politics and projects.

I'm pretty sure Robinson researched the absolute cutting edge of every possible action that could possibly mitigate climate change, and wrote the book based on the idea of "What if we tried all of it?"

Very plausibly, not everything works. (In a bit of dark humor, an attempt to explain to billionaires why they should care about other people fails miserably.) Lots of people are either apathetic or actively fighting against the efforts, and there's a whole lot of death, disaster, and irreparable damage along the way. But the project as a whole succeeds, not because of any one action taken by any one group, but because of all of the actions taken by multiple groups. It's a blueprint for what we could be doing, if we were willing to do it.

The Ministry for the Future came out in 2020. Reading it now, its optimism about the idea that people would be willing to pull together for the sake of future generations makes it feel like a relic from an impossibly long time ago.

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Lurking in my drafts

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

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ask me no question i'll tell you no lie

re: Broken Hearts

-42 degrees out, and while it's supposed to let up a bit over the weekend, they're saying the temperature's going to plummet right back down after that and stay deep in the trenches for the next couple of weeks, which is going to suuuuuuuuck. Also I've somehow got to convince my brother to go see the Santa slasher with me, since mom doesn't want to go to the movies at all this weekend and I am NOT physically capable of taking the bus just yet, particularly in this weather. I guess I can go see the new Avatar with him the week after in trade? God, those movies are lame.

A&W for lunch because I've lost control of my life. Fresh start on Monday! I wonder if my back will be amenable to some gentle yoga over the weekend? At least work is going well. I got a $500 bonus! I can't focus on anything for more than thirty seconds at a time because I didn't sleep at all last night, bye!

Movies Watched in December: Starman, In the Mouth of Madness, Ghosts of Mars, Prince of Darkness, The History of Sound, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from L.A., Zootopia 2, Escape from New York, Christine

19. What’s the Best Way to Heal a Broken Heart?

Break your back instead.

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Daily Happiness

1. Still no word on when we will actually get the car back, but at least Carla popped in and got the stuff we needed from it so even if we don't have it back for this weekend, we can use the sip and savor pass at DCA.

2. I have really been enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. And now that I have the Playstation Portal, I can easily pick it up for a short session at my desk whenever I want to. I've already put a lot of time into it and only barely got past the Proving and started on the main game, but that's because I just keep running around killing machines and collecting parts.

3. Jasper's gotta investigate that bag. You never know what might be inside.

Entry tags:

record scratch

[500] it was more than the human mind could bear

Still at work. Still cold. Still in pain, but it's steadily pivoting to just a deep soreness in the muscles of my back, which is a big step up from the seizing agony whenever I move, so hopefully that means whatever the fuck I did is healing up nicely. Getting my eating back under control to start easing gently back into my goals. I had such high hopes for the month and they were all derailed so abruptly!!!

Finished reading The Lord of the Rings. Started watching Sailor Moon from the beginning for some reason? 10-year-old Leshia is thriving right now while the current version falls the fuck apart.

I really like the idea of the Letterboxd Video Store and hope it does well, even if twenty bucks will always be way more than I can justify for a single rental. I think five dollars is probably my ceiling, especially for something without a dedicated streaming app. Blockbuster prices, you know?

( Album #500/1001: The Velvet Undergroud - White Light/White Heat )

Movies Watched in December: In the Mouth of Madness, Ghosts of Mars, Prince of Darkness, The History of Sound, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from L.A., Zootopia 2, Escape from New York, Christine

Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Today was the last day of the heat spell. Whenever it's hot this time of year, it's always a very dry heat, and I do prefer dry heat, but ugh, too dry today. My eyes were stinging really bad this afternoon (and still a bit now). It seems the weather will still be warmer than I prefer for December for the rest of the ten day forecast, but at least it won't be hot. :-/

2. The car is still in the shop. The issue is that while they know something in the AC system is leaking, they can't find the leak, despite having used various methods. Carla spoke to the guy today and he said they're getting in some sort of specialized equipment tomorrow, so it may be fixed by the end of the day? We'll see. She did ask if we can go by and get some stuff out of the car and he said any time, so I'm going to drop her off there tomorrow before going to work so she can get my Disney backpack which has the sip and savor pass in it, so we've got that for Saturday if the car isn't ready yet.

3. I had a work from home day today. Tomorrow and Friday I've got to go in for sure as I have stuff to do in our system that is difficult to do remotely (it can only be accessed from within our network and that requires me to remote into a pc at work and just adds extra hassle), but the main thing on my to-do list today (aside from meetings) was just checking stuff in excel, so no need to go in, which was nice.

4. Molly!

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books

(no subject)

Ballad of Sword and Wine, vol. 6 by Tang Jiu Qing (translated by XiA, Jia, and amixy):

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universal

2025 Universal Studios Trip #1 (11/27/25) Part 2

First post is here.

After lunch, I decided to try my luck on the Jurassic World ride. It's a water ride and I googled and the consensus seems to be that as long as you're not in the very front, you don't get too wet.

( Jurassic World, Simpsons Land, Minions, and more. )

Overall it was a very fun trip and I'm looking forward to going again on Christmas with Carla.

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The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

An Icelandic horror novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal! I had no idea she's fluent in Icelandic.

Iðunn experiences unexplained fatigue and injuries when she wakes up, but is gaslit by doctors and offered idiotic remedies by co-workers. (Very relatable!) Meanwhile, she's being semi-stalked by her ex-boyfriend/co-worker, her parents refuse to accept that she's a vegetarian and keep serving her chicken, and the only living beings she actually likes are the neighborhood cats that she's allergic to.

After what feels like an extremely long time, it finally occurs to her that she might be sleepwalking, and some time after that, it finally occurs to her to video herself as she sleeps. At that point some genuinely scary/creepy/unsettling things happen, and I was very gripped by the story and its central mystery.

Is Iðunn going out at night and committing all the acts she's normally too beaten down or scared to do while sleepwalking or dissociating? Is she having a psychotic break? Is she a vampire? Is she possessed? Does it have something to do with a traumatic past event that's revealed about a third of the way in?

Other than the last question, I have no idea! The ending was so confusing that I have no idea what it was meant to convey, and it did not provide any answers to basically anything. I'm also not sure what all the thematic/political elements about the oppression of women had to do with anything, because they didn't clearly relate to anything that actually happened.

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

This was a miss for me. But I was impressed by the very fluent and natural-sounding translation.

Content note: A very large number of cats are murdered. Can horror writers please knock it off with the dead cats? At this point it would count as a shocking twist if the cat doesn't die.

Entry tags:

record scratch

[499] riding through the city, trying to lose your mind

All is pain, and cold. So, so cold. I'm a little bit better at being upright with each day that passes since The Incident, but the horrible seizing death stabs when I move wrong have given way to a general ache in a whole bunch of muscles that I've never noticed before, probably from the strain of having to hold myself so stiffly for so long. And also still a fair bit of seizing when I move wrong. And winter has finally arrived in earnest so I'm just so damn cold at work and so damn hot in my bedroom at home and I've been stress eating like a motherfucker so I get to feel like garbage in a whole host of different ways all at once!! I'm even more tired than usual, too! I blame Christmas for all of it, personally. It's a shame that McDonald's commercial was AI garbage that got bullied off the internet, because I really appreciate the general sentiment (but also the bullying).

Winter is Coming tonight. Rooting for the Babes of Wrath as inaugural women's tag champs.

( Album #499/1001: Neu! - Neu! 75 )

Movies Watched in December: Ghosts of Mars, Prince of Darkness, The History of Sound, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from L.A., Zootopia 2, Escape from New York, Christine

Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Carla made pesto and we had cheese ravioli with pesto for dinner. Since it's homemade, we can make it without garlic, and IMO, it tastes perfectly fine without. The ravioli were just Trader Joe's fresh ones where you just boil them for a few minutes, so it was super easy to put together. And delicious!

2. Another puzzle done. This one was fun, but went pretty fast. I'm definitely starting to feel like the 500 piece ones are less of a challenge (but still enjoyable to do).

I have a few 500 piece Christmas/winter ones that I'm going to do next, but then I think I'll tackle one of the 1000 piece ones and see how that goes.

3. Chloe! She is very much making use of the warming bed lately.

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Update on my life

I realized today that a lot of my friends don't know about what I've gone through this year.

Last year in June I moved back to Minnesota to look after my dad. My mom was in the hospital for a month and then moved to a nursing home with sudden-onset dementia (B1 deficiency) secondary to cancer.

I intended to support them temporarily but decided to make it a more permanent move to support them and their many animals. I struggled and kept expecting other family members to step up, but they did not.

I was hospitalized in May 2025 after a seizure. (Two seizures in 3 years means a new diagnosis of epilepsy.) I am missing about a week or 2 of memories from directly after that experience, so I don't know for sure what happened. I was busy looking after my dad and the animals, and then coordinating a move for my parents into assisted living, which I mostly did myself, While recovering from a seizure, with a broken rib.

I don't know why-- again, I don't remember (likely from medication side effects), but no one from the family came to help me directly after the seizure. My dad (who has dementia) and I did it alone. I'm angry about it and need people to know.

I supported my family for a year and half and did not receive any funds, no salary, very little emotional or logistical help from my brother, his wife, or his 4 healthy teenage kids. There is a wider extended family and they didn't show up either. We got some occasional visits but it wasn't enough.

Since moving my parents into assisted living, I have continued to support them in many ways, including looking after their farm and animals, again with no funds.

This week I asked my brother to help me advocate with my dad, to get me some money. He said no. He believes we should sell the farm (where I am now living). He made no mention of any provisions for me.

I'm obviously very upset, but the anger is at least helping me communicate about what is happening. I am reaching out to friends and various family members and trying to raise the alarm to protect myself.

I am safe for the time being but it is not the best idea for me to be living alone. I had intended to find roommates to come live here with me, but there are some barriers, including me not being the property owner, and the house being a bit of a mess. My next step is to directly talk to my parents about this situation. They both have dementia but I think they are capable of understanding my position.

I am currently unsure what the best course of action is moving forward. But I at least want folks to know what is going on. It's been very helpful to talk on the phone with friends who are affirming to me that this is a fucked up way to be treated. It's been a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that my family is exploiting me.

Warm thoughts, mail, messages are all helpful.

Entry tags:

wrasslin wroundup

you think you know them

So I didn't update at all last week, and then on Sunday, I threw my back out for the first time in my life, so I'm probably not going to start now. I'm at work after being stuck at home yesterday, but I'm very cold and hungry and in a lot of pain whenever I move too much (it's okay otherwise) and have a ton of work to do because I wasn't here yesterday, so I shall keep it brief!

For the two-year anniversary of the inaugural bout (and the one and only time I have brought a sign to a wrestling show), AEW finally uploaded the Montreal Cage v. Cope match, meaning the entire Old Man Yaoi trilogy is now on YouTube! Huzzah! I am including all three matches in their entirety here, simply because it makes me happy in a very dark time.

Watch on YouTube

(my stupid sign appears at 16:19 in the first video lol BUT THEY'RE ALL GREAT)

I have ordered a private taxi for a burrito. Grant me the strength to get up and head all the way out to reception when it arrives.