giddygeek

So, as I mentioned in my Festivids letter, I am currently in Hawaii. Hilo to be specific. I have been here since October 10th and I genuinely have no idea when I'll get to go home.

My mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure five years ago, but this fall she got significantly worse and also developed pneumonia. She was in the hospital for two and a half weeks and is now in a short-term rehab working on getting back her ability to do exciting things like walking across a room without getting shaky-legged and out of breath and using the bathroom unaided.

I'm in an itty bitty postage stamp sized airbnb room in Hilo, since my mom's place is a nearly two-hour drive away. I can't go home until we figure out what happens next for my mom. I don't think she can go back to the place she's been sharing with my sister. My sister is also disabled and not really able to help my mom with stuff, their tiny house is cramped and crowded, has built-in steps and is a constant tripping hazard, and honestly my mom and sister are driving each other completely mad.

Hawaii is beautiful and all, there are certainly worse places I could be stuck indefinitely, but I really want my own bed and my own spouses and my own pets and my own time zone.

sage

books
The Dharma of Healing: The Path of Liberation from Stress, Pain, and Trauma by Justin Michelson. 2025. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED if you have a history of anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, etc. I did hate the introduction, but I loved the rest of it. I've done all but the last couple of the guided meditations, too. A++, will absolutely reread.

Italy in the Central Middle Ages: 1000-1300 by David Abulafia et al. 2004, so it's dated scholarship, but there are some interesting tidbits.

healthcrap
Sooo, last week's whining turned out to be the worst IBS flare I've had in over a decade. I didn't know it could cause insomnia! THEN! Friday I failed to add one of my psych meds to my pill box & only realized it YESTERDAY! :facepalms forever: That only added to the existing nausea and insomnia from last week. Grrrr! ( cut for mention of weight maintenance issues )

yarning
I missed yarn group Sunday due to the IBS/withdrawal nausea. Spent the time crocheting another cat stitch scarf and reviewing Yuletide canon. Monday I did a long photoshoot of the 15 items that I just listed in my shop. (So many cat toys! -- just in time for Kitten Academy Sekrit Santa to go live, woot!) Also, this soft acrylic scarf is for sale (as well as matching one in a burgundy, ivory, and grey wool-blend):

I'm holding back on making more cat stitch scarves until these two sell, unless someone commissions one in other colors, frex. Meanwhile, I have all this yarn that I'm impatient to use, and I just don't know what to make with it. Suggestions welcome! Maybe more winter hats for donation? IDK. I also am on the verge of making an S3 Lestat art doll, except I need some good reference images, esp for the scars. If I do a wire armature, he can even hold a tiny microphone. Hmmmm...

etsy
also, etsy's CEO is stepping down and a different board member, I forget her name atm, is stepping up. May she undo the stupid decisions the soon-to-be-former guy made.

#resist
THIS weekend! #50501: Disappeared in America Weekend of Action — a national mobilization to protect immigrants, expose corporate complicity, and honor the lives lost in detention. Includes protests at Home Depots, Freedom Vigils & invokes el Día de los Muertos in an actually appropriate way.

Hurricane Melissa
Stronger than Katrina! When it hit Jamaica, Melissa had surface level winds gusting up to 252mph, 185mph sustained. I don't yet know where to link to donate that isn't the Red Cross, but dear gods. Wind like that, to say nothing of the surge, isn't survivable. Please consider donating to relief operations once they unfold. (Marco Rubio says US forces are there helping dig out so relief can arrive.)

That said, I hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween! It's Fall here at last, temperature-wise, and finally time to put a blanket back on the bed. I hope you're all doing well! <333

jamethiel

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

the_shoshanna

Geoff and I have been watching Red Dwarf, which neither of us have seen since the 80s. It's very . . . 80s, but we're very much enjoying it! We've almost finished the second series.

Last night I dreamed that Rimmer managed to fix a radiator on board the space ship, and decided that this achievement was so staggeringly, impossibly transhuman that he was clearly a superhero; showed up in a full-on supersuit complete with self-waving cape (no wind required); and announced that henceforward he should be addressed as "Captain Radiancy."

Then I woke up and found that it was three a.m. and yesterday's flu and COVID shots had me running the usual moderately significant fever.

I still think that Rimmer wanting to be called "Captain Radiancy" isn't out of character, though!

cimorene

Yesterday Wax and I went and bought a new curtain rod to replace the one in the bedroom that's been hanging crooked for... several years.

We haven't put it up yet, but we got it!

jamethiel

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

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

proteinscollide

Hi Yuletide writer,

Firstly, sorry for the placeholder - I've been travelling but I managed to squeak in my sign-up on the run!

I'm always excited and happy that at least one other person has one of the fandoms below in common with me, and I would seriously be overjoyed with fic in any of them, so please don't worry about picking one over another.

( General likes and dislikes )

I hope I'm not being too demanding with the details above and below – they're just ideas that might help you to understand what I might like and hopefully they're helpful. But mostly I really hope you enjoy Yuletide season!

Thanks again 🥰

Love,
SQ

Requesting:
Secret - WJSN (Music Video)
IVE (band)
나의 별에게 | To My Star (TV)
Two Husbands One Wife
스토브리그 | Hot Stove League (TV)

( optional details are optional )

dira

Yuletide letter coming soon!

sage

( books (De Nicola et al, Ben-Ghiat, Michelson, Thomson) )

healthcrap
The eye is gradually getting better but is still semi-borked. ( cut for mention of weight loss & nausea ) Also, I have some pain in the ass neighbors across the street who stay on their front porch day and night, talking nonstop en español, which is just on the edge of what I can't, at speed, distance, and through walls, understand. Though my brain keeps trying. Annnnd it all interfered badly with my sleep Sunday night. (I had to dig up my earplugs and I was literally *sweating* with aggravation.) OTOH, they have sort of respected quiet hours since late Monday. Trouble is, since the weekend, I'm not sleeping til after 4am now, even with it quiet. Even with going to bed at 9 and trying to read myself to sleep like usual. It's awful. I've already got a sleep disorder. I don't need this on top of it. /extended whine

yarning
Finished the calico cat stitch scarf, made a second one, sold it, and ~~started~~ finished a shorter one (~68-72 inches) in black (instead of taupe), cream, and orange. ( more yarning )

#resist
Nothing national scheduled yet. Mobilize has lots of small local things on their calendar, though.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

cimorene

I decided a little while ago to try one new recipe per week as far as I can manage.

Since then we have made:

Ina Garten's Black Bean Soup, which is basically a mirepoix+bell peppers plus a bunch of black beans, Southwestern seasoning, and vegetable broth. It's similar to a couple of our favorite soup recipes and also to just the way I make black beans for burrito filling, but it's good.

RecipeTinEats' Country Harvest Root Vegetable Soup, which is very simple: a huge quantity of root vegetable chunks (she gives weight of each and we followed this pretty closely, but this style of recipe is easy to substitute of course) and some alliums sauteed with thyme and curry powder for seasoning and then cooked in water till soft, with cream added at the end, pureed with an immersion blender. This was delicious and we will definitely be having it regularly.

RecipeTinEats' Ultra Lazy Creamy Chicken and Broccoli Pasta Bake. I love pasta casserole and want to try more recipes where you don't have to pre-cook the pasta. The pasta came out great and this was delicious, but it's a little rich for me. It's a bit like oven-baked mac and cheese with broccoli in it. The vibes are very creamy and fatty and it just feels extremely heavy as a main dish.

Trying a white bean soup recipe this week. (I like to make soup once a week at least in the fall and winter.)

marks

Yuletide time again! I'm Marks on AO3 and nonnegative on bsky and tumblr, if you want to find me anywhere else. I hope you have fun writing for me.

All ratings are good. Explicit content is great. Treats are welcome and I have gifts enabled on AO3.

DNW: long discussions of consent, the traffic light system, non-canonical nicknames, explicit works featuring characters younger than 16, hopeless endings, pregnancy, lactation

All ratings likes: canon-divergent AUs, dystopian AUs, reincarnation AUs, timeloop AUs, loyal knight and their liege AUs, mutual pining, confessions, praise, vulnerability, descriptions of kissing, loyalty to the point of it being a detriment, hurt/comfort, smoking, alcohol and drug use, road trips, sharing a bed, motorcycles, shaving, haircuts, memory issues ranging anywhere from amnesia to that thing where a person had dental surgery and realizes their long-term partner is hot as they're coming out of it.

Explicit likes: sex pollen, aliens/captors/other outside forces made them do it, sloppy makeout sessions with fully or partially clothed frotting, rimming, barebacking, praise kink, grumpy characters getting railed, touch-starved characters getting touched and losing their minds over it, oral fixations, arranged marriages that have to be consummated immediately because of law-related reasons.

( fandoms and prompts are under here )

cimorene

I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

celli

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

kass

Dear Yulewriter,

Thank you so much for writing me a story. Write something that makes you happy, and it will make me happy.

In general I am a big fan of chosen family, happy endings, people being good at things, people helping each other be better together than they were apart, theology of all kinds, wit and banter, and kindness. I'm happy with anything (any situation, any rating) that feels right to you given the characters at hand. I'm open to AUs or to going deeper into the worldbuilding of any of these canons.

Please, no betrayal or unquenchable grief or people being awful to each other or despair. There's enough of that in RL (especially these last few years.) On Yuletide morning I want something that makes me smile. Thank you kindly.

Most of this note is my standard Dear Yulewriter letter -- these are the things I've been saying year after year, and I've been doing Yuletide since... 2003 I think? but this year I am really struck by the extent to which I want to see these characters get to experience joy. Maybe because the world has been difficult, in a variety of ways, for the last several years in a row? Anyway: this is just to say, thank you for figuring out how to bring these characters some sweetness.

In closing: yay Yuletide! Yay you! Thank you so much!

There's nothing below the cut that wasn't also in my Yuletide sign-up, but I include my requests here for anyone who's curious or maybe wants to write an extra treat.

Kass

( The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn; the Toby Daye series by Seanan McGuire; Murderbot / tv show. )

soupytwist

Hi, person writing me a Yuletide gift! Thank you in advance! I am already delighted. I'm going to put a little bit of additional information here in case you find that helpful, but I promise I am overall very easily pleased and every time I open a story that's for me I clap my hands together like a happy toddler. I mostly write these because I always want to know about my recipient, to be honest. Maybe you do too. Either way, I hope you have a fantastic time.

( general things about me )

Requests:

( Remember You Will Die – Eden Robins )

( The Trials of Gabriel Ward = Sally Smith )

( Cyclist Friend Explains Necessity of $35 Socks – The Onion )

( All of Us Murderers = KJ Charles )

ellen_fremedon

Dear Yuletide Author:

Thank you for writing a story for me! I love it already!

If you have a story in mind in any of the fandoms I requested, go for it--I will love pretty much anything for these sources. I love worldbuilding, I love character-focused fic, I love smut of all stripes, and I love gen. I want to read what you want to write.

In all of these fandoms, I am especially interested in any or all of the following:

--Nontraditional relationship dynamics and the way people find or build a niche for themselves in a world with strict rules--about gender and relationships and everything else.

--Seeing the characters deal with actual historical figures and events and inventions--ones offstage or coming up post-canon, or more detail on events during canon.

--Material culture: how they decorate their rooms, what they have for dinner, how they dress. These fandoms are all made for lavish descriptions of fashion--the men's no less than the women's!

If you are here as a pinch hitter: I'm so sorry. I have all historical fandoms this year. Fortunately they are all fairly short: two stand-alone novels, one film, and one TV series of 6 30-minute episodes. The one that will probably need the least amount of historical research is Mademoiselle de Maupin, which is extremely vague about what year or even what century it's set in.

One general DNW: Animal cruelty. I can handle non-graphic descriptions of hunting, butchery, or veterinary work, but please, nothing with an element of punishment or betrayal--no deliberate harm to animals by people they trust.

( Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier )

( Horace - George Sand )

( Quacks (TV) )

( Impromptu (1991) )

celli

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

Profile

giddygeek

April 2009

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Oct. 30th, 2025 06:13 am

Reading

Stuck in Paradise for the Foreseeable

What I'm Doing Wednesday

I am trying to Improve Myself

yes, well, that would explain it

When two adhd girls get together... ANYTHING could stop us

My attention span these days is non-existent

Database maintenance

Dear Yuletide Author (2025)

Yuletide Letter placeholder

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Trying one new recipe a week

Dear Yuletide Writer Letter 2025

Pushing in everywhere so aggressively and so inappropriately and breaking spellcheck

AWS outage

pinch hits

Dear Yulewriter

Yuletide letter 2025

Yuletide 2025 Dear Author letter

T-minus three

Profile

April 2009

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags