ermingarden | Reading

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Update 1: Finally made it to that drag show!

I got a mid-week text about it, not saying it was canceled again, but that it was moving to a different venue. Slightly less convenient than the original, there was an extra bus ride involved, but it did exist!

As suspected, it was tiny. Little hole-in-the-wall bar/lounge, a dozen customers in the whole place, plenty of empty chairs, no stage, the queens just sauntered between the tables. The online signup had all these conditions -- bring your e-ticket, bring ID, bring the specific credit card you made the purchase with -- yeah, nobody on-site checked any of those things. I think some people showed up without realizing there was a performance at all, they just hung out at the bar and enjoyed it for free.

All that said, the performers were beautiful and talented, they did not let the small crowd slow them down, and I'm glad I gave them my money.

Update 2: Found the thing!

This pattern I remembered as "some kind of screensaver, probably" isn't from a computer screen at all. It's...a novelty lamp, I think?

Turns out the color-squares-playing gadget was still findable in my parents' basement. Short video on Bluesky, here's a screencap:

Screencap of the box with the colors

Stickers on the back:
- Underwriters' Laboratories, Inc. (R) LISTED PORTABLE LAMP ISSUE NO. E-383
- MATRIX MOD. 6019

The official packaging is long gone, so there's no telling what name it was actually sold under, and I can't find anything online referring to these model numbers. I don't suppose any of you know an archive that keeps records of this kind of thing...?

sholio

I was talking to The Husband last night about a video game he's been playing, an indie game that is apparently a two-person production (it's made by a husband and wife team of developers) and that segued into talking about Babylon 5 and Marvel, and he said something that I wanted to write down because I think it's always going to stick with me.

"Every person's brain emits a particular color of paint. If you mix too many of them together, you just get mud."

You can massage the metaphor in various directions - sometimes mixing together different paint colors is lovely! Or, if all you have to look at is suburban beige, any color really stands out. One person's garish or too pastel is another person's perfect hue. And so forth. It's just such a lovely way to look at it, and I will be thinking about that for a while. I like having different unique paint colors to look at, and refining my own.

runpunkrun posting in

fandomcalendar

Photograph of things you might take with you, or pick up, on a trip, with added text: Journey & Travel, at Fancake. Items are neatly arranged on a rustic wooden table or door and photographed from above: hat, knapsack, barn coat, worn boots, folding knife, sunglasses, bottle, magnifying glass, as well as various maps, notebooks, pine cones, cameras, lenses, and rolls of 35mm film.

fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!

dolorosa_12

I've been extremely busy, and consequently extremely tired, and haven't been around on Dreamwidth all that much in the past couple of weeks. Rather than one of my standard weekend wrap-up posts, I'm going to attempt to go through the various things that have been happening, in brief, in list form.

Two weeks ago,

catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).

Almost immediately after that, my father-in-law came over from Germany to visit for a week. He drove, and took the ferry, which meant he was a free agent, and could go out and do things while Matthias and I were at work, and he did catch up with some local friends a couple of times, but for the most part he seemed to just want to chill out in our garden, under the cherry trees. His regular daily life involves a lot of energetic grandchildren (my sister-in-law has three kids), and I think he viewed our place as something of an oasis of calm. My mother-in-law was the real Anglophile in the family — she came over to England on exchange as a teenager, fell in love with the place, and the two of them basically visited the UK almost once a year for their entire adult lives, barring the Covid years and my mother-in-law's increasingly fragile health. So coming back here alone after her death was a bittersweet experience for my father-in-law, stirring up a lot of complicated emotions, but I think he was pleased to have made the trip.

He left on Wednesday, and on that evening Matthias and I went to an author event with Andrey Kurkov, hosted by the local independent bookshop. (Ely is a sleepy small rural town, but it definitely punches above its weight in terms of literary events due to this fantastic bookshop.) He read from and chatted about his latest historical mystery novel (set in 1919 Kyiv), and answered audience questions with patience. (My favourite, somewhat left-field answer: '[In the final decade of the Soviet Union,] I graduated with a qualification in Japanese translation, and they wanted me to do my military service as a spy listening in to the Japanese in the Russian far east, but I didn't want to do this, since it would have prevented me from being allowed to leave the country. I asked my mother, who was a doctor, if she had any well-connected patients who could get me out of this, and one of her patients, who was a senior military figure, was able to instead transfer me to doing military service as a prison guard in Odesa. When the other guards found out I was a writer, one of them asked me to write his speeches for his meetings with the leadership, so I spent my military service reading propaganda magazines and rewriting the articles for him to reuse in his speeches.' This struck me as the absolute peak absurd Soviet experience.)

I've had a run of lots of timetabled, lecture-style teaching, which happens this time every year, but is always a bit exhausting: it's in a huge, echo-y wooden lecture theatre (when the students come through the doors, they slam loudly and make a massive amount of noise), it's to groups of 75 students, repeated three times to different groups, and it's with undergrads rather than the postgraduates and researchers I normally teach (who are a lot more work to keep focused), and I always feel completely flattened by the time the Friday class is over. The one nice thing is that these classes are in central Cambridge instead of out on the hospital site where I normally work, and I can buy decent food and coffee afterwards. I guess it's a good thing I don't normally work in that part of town, because I'd be so tempted to eat lunch out every day, and end up bleeding money.

I read Innamorata (Ava Reid), and with Reid I think at this point it counts as hate-reading, since my expectations are always so low, and they're always confirmed. This is her take on a gruesome gothic novel, complete with purple prose, and the literary equivalent of a child hopping up and down going 'look! look! did you see what I just did?' Did I see her obvious and intentional allusions to Mervyn Peake? Yes, yes I did. Am I shocked at all the gore, bodily fluids and shock value edginess? Shocked that I keep picking up Ava Reid books, maybe.

Then I read Almost Life (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) and Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain), and was a lot happier in my choice of reading material. The former is a novel about two young women who meet, hook up and fall in love in 1970s Paris, then go their separate ways, but continue to haunt and fall in and out of each other's lives, in a mess of intense emotions, difficult choices, and lost chances. The latter is both a memoir of the author as an individual (fighting the parental expectation to marry and instead attend Oxford as a young woman in the 1910s, then serving as a nurse in WWI and watching all the young men in her life be swallowed up into the maw of that terrible war), and a portrait of the absolute wrenching collective trauma experienced by her entire generation, and how impossible it was to go back to civillian life and go on living afterwards.

Then I read The Red City (Marie Lu), which had a great premise (clandestine underworld alchemist syndicates fight a global battle for dominance, operating much like real-world organised crime), and an absolutely wrenching depiction of intergenerational immigration trauma, but was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. I only like present tense when it's used to evoke a sense of stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy, as if you're getting a glimpse inside a character's messy, unedited interior monologue (I prefer it much more in the first person), but when the whole story feels as if it could work perfectly fine in past tense, the use of present tense is distractingly grating.

Yesterday was Eel Day in Ely, which involves, among other things, a giant cloth eel on a frame being paraded through the town, trailed by an incongruous juxtaposition of local groups (think Morris dancers followed by a girls' rugby club, followed by musicians playing steel drums, followed by a Scout group, etc). We were in the market buying vegetables, so missed the actual parade, but did witness all these various participants marshalling in front of the cathedral beforehand. We did a quick swing around the stalls afterwards, but it was pretty hot, and we'd already eaten lunch, so we didn't stay long.

We watched the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation yesterday, and I regret to report that it was 90 per cent vibes and dramatic scenery, and I was not particularly impressed.

As it's a long weekend, there was a food and craft fair outside the cathedral today, and Matthias and I wandered around, eating lunch from one of the stalls, people- and dog-watching, before meandering on home, having picked up a box of macarons to eat over the course of the week with our tea and coffee.

We've made a start at booking tickets, etc for our summer holiday, which makes it start to feel a bit more real. I love the planning stage — investigating food, activities, transport, and so on, with the days of the holiday unfolding, and given greater shape.

rekishi

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

sholio

I signed up for Season of Drabbles on an impulse under a new account called AltSholio (note my A+++ socking skills). In the past I've been slightly inhibited about signing up for some kinds of exchanges that I would've been more likely to try back on LJ - drabbles, fanart, that kind of thing, stuff that's a bit out of place on my main account - so I created this new account so I can play around with things that I might otherwise hesitate to try.

Anyway, I had fun and I ended up writing 5 things across both that and my main account - two of which are for fandoms I've never written before! And I got two delightful gifts as AltSholio:

Bygones (Agent Carter, 200 wds, Jack & Peggy)
A sweet little season 2 coda, very much in character.

We'll Meet Again (Biggles, 600 wds)
Slightly AU next meeting for Biggles and EvS, set in the early 1920s. Great characterization and a delightful concept!

Author reveals will be on Tuesday.

gekidasa

Been rewatching For All Mankind, got to the episode where Sergei just... drops his own life and goes off to find Margo. Had to write a blog post about it

It's the sort of story that needs a time travel fix-it... someone write it, I want to read it!

Animated gif of Margo and Sergei meeting again in a parking lot

luthien

He Keeps No Secrets From Him (4338 words) by Luthien
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Characters: Yuna Hollander
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Original Character(s), Marriage, Secret Marriage, Wedding Planning, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Episode: s01e06 The Cottage (Heated Rivalry)
Series: Part 3 of The Secret Marriage
Summary:

"I had a high profile client - well, a pair of high profile clients - applying for a marriage licence."

"And what? They complained? They're just entitled assholes. Don't stress about it."

OR:

How the rest of Greg's day went after issuing a marriage licence to Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander.

(This is just a little side story for me and the three other people who wondered what the rest of Greg's day was like.)

maythe4th posting in

maythe4thbewithyou

We are on target! Thanks to our pinch hitters, all assignments are in and we are ready to reveal just under twenty-three hours from now!

While we wait, please take the time to do one last read-through of your works. Check your tags, check your summaries, and for those who got a last minute beta, please make sure you have uploaded the correct draft of your document. Remember your author notes should not be de-anoning, and try not to talk down your own work; you made something nice for someone else and it's time to celebrate that effort!

If you're done and ready, consider browsing the Grab Bag post (pinch hitters especially welcome to make requests here!), Automagic App List of Requests, or the Treat Tracker Spreadsheet. The May the 4th 2026 Archive is open for all your treating needs.

Countdown to Reveals

skygiants

When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:

a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also
b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also
c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy

Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:

- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group
- Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club
- Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them

This has left peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:

- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it?
- how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help?
- how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
- but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being?
- and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?

Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.

And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.

daughterofshadows posting in

silwritersguild

A painting of many people in medieval clothing going about their daily duties, from gardening to shepherding.

The Silmarillion is a story about heroes, often larger than life (sometimes literally, given how many characters claim to be the tallest) and the performers of deeds worth the historical record. Yet hovering around the edges of the lives of heroes are ordinary people. They are the companions, the spies, the messengers, the servants, and the soldiers, their actions given the barest glance and their names unknown. Yet as the compendium of their deeds—collected in this month's prompts—show, their impact on the tale is not insubstantial.

This month's challenge brings these unnamed, unknown characters to the foreground. Create a fanwork about an ordinary character in legendarium using one of our collected quotes about the unnamed and undistinguished people of Middle-earth. While you are welcome to write the scene from which the quote derives, this is not the only approach to the prompts, and we welcome all interpretations of the prompts (and some have been left intentionally vague!) You can use all or part of a quote. The only requirement of the challenge is that a background character plays a key role in your work.

You can find the prompts for the Everyman challenge here.

Thank you to Erdariel for this month's stamps!

In order to receive a stamp for your fanwork, your response must be posted to the archive on or before 15 May 2026. For complete challenge guidelines, see the Challenges page on our website.

daughterofshadows posting in

silwritersguild

Our May challenge will be an interactive Matryoshka challenge, meaning that challenge participants will provide prompts to each other. How it will work:

If you want to provide prompts to participants, you can sign up one or all of your fanworks posted to our archive. These will become the clues in the scavenger hunt!
When participants solve the clue, they will read/view and comment on one of your fanworks (or the specific fanwork you offer, if you choose to offer just one).
You will reply to their comment with a prompt. You can create your own prompt(s) or the moderators can provide prompts for you to use.

Our hope is that this challenge encourages interaction and collaboration and results in comments for those of you who are offering prompts! A few additional details to keep in mind before signing up:

The challenge will run May 15 through June 15. You do not need to be available every day to provide prompts, and the moderators will be available to provide backup prompts if you can't. However, if you're planning to spend three of those weeks off-grid in the wilderness, it's probably best to sit this one out.
If you sign up a single fanwork and it is Adult-rated or if all of your fanworks are Adult-rated, we will mark it as such so that participants who need SFW (safe for work) fanworks can find them.
You do not need to create a fanwork for the challenge in order to hand out prompts and enjoy the comments on your work!
If you make your own prompts, prompts should be SFW and open-ended. Prompts should not require creating about a specific character, relationship, group, time period, place, genre, etc.

If you want to provide prompts for the challenge, you can sign up here.

rachelmanija

This picks up when Danny's been Dreadnought for a while, and is getting a bit too into the violent aspects of the job. This aspect is quite well done - you understand what's going on with her, but it actually is a bit unsettling. Also, Valkyrja reappears, sort of; an evil techbro wreaks havoc; a TERF is threatening the world; and Danny works on her relationships.

I liked this more than the first book. Danny developed as a character and spent a lot less time being abused by transphobes. I'll grab the third book when it comes out.

The sequel isn't as good as the first book, unfortunately. I'd have been happy with more of Zax, Minna, and Vicky exploring the multiverse, but this book is much more plot-driven and Minna and Vicky only show up three-quarters of the way through. Half or more of the book is narrated by a new character whose identity I'll leave out as it's spoilery for the first book. She was fine as a character but her storyline was less interesting. Zax gets a new companion, and I did quite enjoy his adventures with her. I also enjoyed Minna and Vicky when they finally appeared.

But the plot-driven parts were less interesting, and the structure was really odd and not in a way that benefited the book. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, we get a retrospective summary of what happened some time after that point, then we get the entire backstory of the non-Zax narrator bringing her up to the point where she meets Zax in the first book, then it jumps forward and we get what's happening to her now, then we catch up with what Zax is doing now, and then, about three quarters of the way in, we finally get the story of what happened immediately after the first book left off. I think it would have worked better to tell the story more linearly. And also, to have much more Minna.

It's not a bad book and it does have some really good parts, but there are some baffling choices made.

troisoiseaux

Read Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park, which starts with the murder of a North Korean spy in an alley in Oxford, England, and then spends the first half of the book as a slower, more understated read than one would expect from that opening: split between three characters living very different, but entangled, lives in Oxford— a North Korean spy (the protégé of the murdered spy) posing as a Japanese-French grad student, a Korean-American CIA agent posing as a bartender from Seoul to keep tabs on the North Korean spy cell, and a South Korean restaurant owner with a tragic backstory— it's mostly an exploration of identity (what does it mean to be Korean?) until it does in fact loop back around to being a spy thriller, and then several things I was kind of ???/ambivalent about from a narrative standpoint clicked into place. ( SPOILERS )

Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.

Current Music: Isimo - Bleachers

littlefics posting in

seasonsofdrabbles

Works are now revealed! Please take a moment to leave a comment on your gifts, and enjoy the haul of drabbles this round! Thank you to all who participated, especially our pinch hitters!

Author reveals will take place 72 hours from now on Tuesday, May 5 @ 1:00pm Eastern Daylight time (Countdown).

Please get in touch if you have any questions. Should you receive a gift that is not for a fandom, character, and drabble type you requested, or that contains a DNW, reach out to us ASAP.

Is a fic you posted stuck as unrevealed? There's a couple potential reasons for why this could be. Please get in touch with us via Dreamwidth or email for help.

marthawells

A week ago I got back from Japan where I was a guest at HALCon, an annual SF/F convention held in the Kawasaki International Center, and it was awesome. (Though right now I am still dead from jet-lag.) The convention itself was great, I walked to so many cool people, and was treated to so much good food. The Japanese edition of System Collapse translated by Naoya Nakamura had won the Seiun Award, and they presented me with that, which was also awesome.

Afterward we went down to Kamakura, which was the seat of the first Shogunate, and saw the Great Buddha https://www.kotoku-in.jp/en/ and two other Buddhist temples, one in a bamboo grove, and a huge Shinto Shrine. It was an incredible trip and I'm so glad I went.

Tour dates for Platform Decay, the next Murderbot novel:

https://us.macmillan.com/tours/martha-wells-platform-decay/

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uc_xmen drabbleathon > 3weeks4dreamwidth

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A Set of Sequels: Sovereign, by April Daniels & Prison of Sleep, by Tim Pratt

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