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Jul. 1st, 2025 @ 08:36 pm
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Did I need to make potatoes tonight? Not particularly, and it's a little hot to be running the oven. But I got more of my favorite spice mix and yes, I did actually need roasted potatoes, thank you very much.Current Mood:  pleased
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Our new challenge is:
SCIENCE
As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.
Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Thursday, 10 July. No sign-up required.
Mods will tag your work with fandom and challenge. When you've posted entries to three consecutive challenges, you will earn a name tag, and we'll go back and tag all your previous entries with your name.
All kinds of fanworks in all fandoms are welcome. Please have a look at our guidelines before you play. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact a mod. And if you have any suggestions for future challenges, you can leave them in the comments of this post.
Also, keep an eye out for the next ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)
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Title: Shiny Red Fandom: Iron Man / Marvel comics Rating: PG Content notes: None apply Summary: icons of Tony Stark / Iron Man - armor, bath towels, even shirts for racquetball - all red
( Shiny Red )
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Some musings from me, prompted by last week's graduation ceremonies at Dundee University, plus this week's graduation ceremonies at St Andrews University.
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This year sunshine_revival is picking up where sunshine_challenge left off. Yay! Anyone is welcome to participate with no sign-ups or obligations. There's also a friending meme!
Challenge #1 Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025. Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community. In terms of journaling, the goals question is an easy one. This year I've been aiming for posting one book review and one game review per week. I already know what July's books will be and three of those reviews are already written. I like to have a backlog so weeks don't sneak up on me and become a scramble. By my standards I'm a little behind on games (only this week's post is ready to go! gasp!) and I'm not sure yet what the other games will be. I want to do some more retro titles since I've been leaning towards modern games lately. So one July goal is to play some old games and/or finish the ones I'm in the middle of. And to figure out what I'm reading/playing for August.
That said, hitting the second half of the year always sets off my fears that I'm not doing or accomplishing "enough," whatever that means, and this year I'm trying to counter that by actively choosing to do a little less this summer and give myself a break. Just because my job is less busy in the summer doesn't mean I need to fill up all the time with more activities! I've temporarily stepped back from a few things, which is really hard for me to do because it messes with the part of my anxiety that takes the form of Must Always Show Up And Never Miss Anything. But of course it is not actually possible to always show up for everything, and never resting leads to burnout. I know that, and I'm trying to be better about acting on it.
And on that note, I'm skipping the creative prompt. Not that the mods have in any way suggested that people should or must do both prompts! I'm just patting myself on the back for not trying to overachieve. :D
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Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.
The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what's become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who's going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the "Seven Wonders," and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say "basically" because it's deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it's one of them.)
I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who's responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there's a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation -- for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.
( Read more... )
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From this U.S. fangirl for Canada on today's Canada Day and every day: declaring my love and respect for the Great Sovereign Land of Canada.
Ten Inspiring Quotations About Canada.
(And furthermore: Fox Delta Tango!)Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan Current Mood: standing on guard for Canada Current Music: Oh Canada
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Title: Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians. Author: lannamichaels Fandom: Captain America Rating: G Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld
Summary: Aliens wrote Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford built the pyramids, and Steve Rogers was never Captain America.
( I started this in 2019 and then ignored it every time I saw it instead of getting it to fit wordcount )
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Syr Hayati Beker, What a Fish Looks Like. Discussed elsewhere. A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden. Weirdly I had read books 2-4 of this series and not this one. It worked perfectly well that way, and I think for some people I'd even recommend it, because this one is substantially about teachers attempting (and often succeeding) in sleeping with their teenage girl students and a mental health crisis not being responsibly addressed. All of it is very period-appropriate for the early 1950s, all of it is beautifully observed and written about. It still had the "I want to keep reading this" nature that her prose always does for me. And Lord knows Antonia Byatt was there and knew how it all went down in that era. It's just that if you want to do without this bit, it'll be fine, it really is about those things and it's really okay to not want to do that on a particular day. William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. This is largely How Buddhism Transformed the World and a little bit of How Hinduism Transformed the World. There is a tiny bit about math and a few references to astronomy without a lot of detail. If you're looking for how Ancient Indian religions transformed the world, that's an interesting topic and this is so far as I, a non-expert, can tell, well done on it. But I wanted more math, astronomy, and other cultural influences. Robert Darnton, The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Comparing the economic situations and lifestyles of several writers of the era--how they lived, how they were able to live, how they wrote. Also revisiting some of his own early-career analysis in an interesting way I'd like to see more of from other authors. Should this be your first Darnton: no probably not. Should you read some Darnton and also this: quite possibly. J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Reread. Still gut-wrenching and bright, superpowers and magic circus and found family, what we can change and what we can't. Reread for an event I'll tell you about soon. Reginald Hill, Arms and the Women, Death's Jest Book, Dialogues of the Dead, and Good Morning, Midnight. Rereads. Well into the meat of the series on this reread now. The middle two are basically one book in two volumes, which the rest of the series does not do, and also they feature a character I really hate, so I kept on for one more to clear the taste of that character out of my brain. Still all worth reading/rereading, of course; they also have the "I just want to keep reading this prose" quality, though in a very different way than Byatt. Really glad we've gotten to the part of the series with contrasting younger cop characters. Vidar Hreinsson, Wakeful Nights: Stefan G. Stefansson: Icelandic-Canadian Poet. Kindle. This is the kind of biography that is more concerned with comprehensive accounts of where its subject went and what he did and who he talked to than with overarching themes, so if you're not interested in Stefansson in particular or anti-war/immigrant Canadian poets in the early 20th more generally, will be very tedious. Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age. Recently retired assassins discover that their conglomerate is attempting to retire them. Good times, good older female friendships, not deep but fun. Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Very straightforwardly what it says on the tin. Recognizes clearly the lack of angels involved without valorizing the people destroying other people's lives on shady evidence. Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. When Vivian and Daniel's daughter Aria gets turned into a werewolf, they have to find another kindergarten to accommodate her needs. But with new schools come new problems. This is charming and fun, and I'm delighted to have it be the second recent book (I'm thinking of Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, which is very different tonally and plotwise) to remember that schools come with grown-ups, not just kids. James C. Scott, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings. You know I love James C. Scott, friends. You know that. But if you're thinking a lot about riverine flooding in the first place, this does not bring a lot that's new to the table, and there are twee sections where I'm like, buddy, pal, neighbor, what are you doing, having the dolphin introduce other species to say what's going on with them, this is not actually a book for 8yos, what even. So I don't know. If you're not thinking a lot about watersheds and riverine ecosystems and rhythms in the first place, probably a lovely place to start modulo a few weird bits. But very 101. Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records. You'd think she'd have had me at "Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza are two of the major characters," but instead it just didn't really come together for me. The speculative conceit was there to hang the historical references on, and in my opinion this book's reach exceeded its grasp. I mean, if you're going to have those two and Du Fu, you've set the bar for yourself pretty high, and also a cross-time sea is also a firecracker of a concept, and...it all just sort of sits together in a lump. Ah well. Katy Watson, A Lively Midwinter Murder. Latest in the Three Dahlias series, still good fun, the Dahlias are invited to a wedding and get snowed in and also murder ensues. Not revolutionizing the genre, just giving you what you came for, which is valid too. Christopher Wills, Why Ecosystems Matter: Preserving the Key to Our Survival. "Did the author have a better title for that and the publisher made him change it to something hooky?" asked one of my family members suspiciously, and the answer is probably yes, you have spotted exactly what kind of book this is, this is the kind of book where someone knows interesting things about a topic (population genetics and their evolution) and is nudged to try to make its presentation slightly more grabby for the normies in hopes of selling more than three copies. It's interesting in the details it has on various organisms and does not waste your time on why ecosystems matter because duh obviously. If you were the sort of person who wasn't sure that they did, you would never pick up this book anyway.
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I was making smalltalk with the bus driver along with the other guy at the bus stop and he asked if I was a student, lol. (Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses took twenty years off I guess.) I said, No, but I'm going to driving school!
And he said close enough and gave me the student ticket rate.
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Onto another one, and this time one that's set in Ancient Greece, that sees Benny and Jason meet Socrates.
This feels like such a novel setting for the range, after a long run of futuristic (for us) scifi adventures. Benny and Jason used to have time rings that the Doctor gave them as wedding presents, though in this case I think they're using one or more time rings from the Braxiatel Collection. It's a shame these are not used more often. It's not even clear listening to this story why they've decided to use them this time, except it's on orders from Bev. And there's a strange cliffhanger at the end, which is also muddled. Though that's something that can happen a lot with this range, with confusing/under-written arc elements. Not least with the awkward split between the books/short stories and the audio adventures.
But that aside it's a refreshing and light-hearted adventure. Albeit with the threat of a devastating plague hanging over Athens ... Socrates is a superb quasi-companion for Benny, and there are lots of clever insights into Athenian society and democracy. It's particularly amusing when Benny dresses up as a man to go into the Assembly. And then Socrates dresses up as a woman ...
Jason's side plot works well, and it's just all round fun. I think this was maybe the first Benny audio that Scott Handcock wrote for Big Finish? If so it's a great start.
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Title: Dusted Fandom: BtVS Author: badly_knitted Characters: Buffy. Rating: PG Word Count: 200 Spoilers/Setting: Early Season 2. Summary: Vampire dust goes everywhere. Content Notes: None needed. Written For: Challenge 483: Amnesty 80, using Challenge 439: Dust. Disclaimer: I don’t own BtVS, or the characters. A/N: Double drabble.
Current Mood:  hot Current Location: my desk
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2025/100: Monsters — Emerald FennellThe best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464] The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder ( Read more... ) Current Mood:  uncomfortable
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