yes, well, that would explain it

Oct. 28th, 2025 11:42 am
the_shoshanna: sign saying "Clown Motel", with pic of a clown (clown motel)
[personal profile] 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: two men in light linen three-piece suits and straw hats peering over a wrought iron railing (poirot)
[personal profile] 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!

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] 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!

Dear Yuletide Author (2025)

Oct. 24th, 2025 08:48 pm
proteinscollide: (Default)
[personal profile] 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 )

Yuletide Letter placeholder

Oct. 23rd, 2025 02:05 pm
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
[personal profile] dira
Yuletide letter coming soon!

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Oct. 22nd, 2025 12:50 pm
sage: image of the word "create" in orange on a white background. (create)
[personal profile] 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

Trying one new recipe a week

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:54 pm
cimorene: Illustration of a woman shushing and a masked harlequin leaning close to hear (gossip)
[personal profile] 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.)

Dear Yuletide Writer Letter 2025

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:11 am
marks: WHERE ARE YOU (nuts to you (yoi))
[personal profile] 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: abstract deconstructed tapestry in bright colors (blocks)
[personal profile] 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...

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] 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.

Dear Yulewriter

Oct. 19th, 2025 04:23 pm
kass: Yuletide dreidls (dreidl)
[personal profile] 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. )

Yuletide letter 2025

Oct. 19th, 2025 08:51 pm
soupytwist: typing fingers (writers are liars)
[personal profile] 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 )

Yuletide 2025 Dear Author letter

Oct. 19th, 2025 03:19 pm
ellen_fremedon: overlapping pages from Beowulf manuscript, one with a large rubric, on a maroon ground (Default)
[personal profile] 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) )

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Oct. 15th, 2025 02:32 pm
sage: The text no kings with a crossed out crown on a yellow background. (No Kings)
[personal profile] sage
books (Osman, Kingfisher x 3, Mohamed, De Nicola) )

The Vampire Lestat NYCC extended trailer! <333


yuletide
There's so much good stuff in the tag set, it took me forever to pare down my signup. I still might change it.

yarning
so much yarning! )

rl
Speaking of spending money, I got a new laptop, as my old one is 7 3/4 years old and Win10. The old one still works mostly fine, thank Lenovo, but the Prime Day sale was too good to pass up. I've been working on getting all my old software transferred over. Slowly.

healthcrap )

#resist
This coming Saturday: No Kings Day 2. If you're protesting, please stay loud and stay safe. I'm there with you in spirit, wearing an inflatable frog suit and passing out water. (The color for the protest is YELLOW, btw, but I like the inflatables. And I look like a zombie in yellow.)

I hope all of y'all are enjoying the Fall/Spring weather, such as it is so far, and that all is well in your worlds. <333

p.s. This No Kings icon is shareable. It and tons of other protest graphics are found here. Feel free to link & share!

Dear Yuletide Writer

Oct. 14th, 2025 05:12 pm
sage: a white stag on a black background, captioned "Yuletide" (yuletide)
[personal profile] sage
Thank you so much for writing for me! Please don't stress over the optional details. Write to please yourself and I'll be delighted!

Requests )
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