Challenge # 499: Wake Up

Apr. 25th, 2026 06:26 pm
badly_knitted: (Drabble-Zone)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] drabble_zone

This week's challenge is:


Wake Up


Reminder of Rules

Entries should be 100, 200, or 300 words exactly, excluding titles and headers.
Please place the body of your entry behind a cut.
Tag with the appropriate Challenge, Fandom, Type, and Ratings tags. If a tag for your fandom doesn't exist, leave a request on the Tag Request post and I'll create the tags you need. You can request as many fandom tags as you want.
You don't need to use the challenge word or phrase in your drabble, though you can if you like.
Each challenge ends when the new challenge is posted, but if you're a few days late that's still fine.

NEW RULE: DOUBLE AND TRIPLE DRABBLES ARE ALSO ACCEPTED ;)

Have fun!




[syndicated profile] lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed
As is my usual custom, this is to supply a discussion space in the comments for readers who have already read the new Pen & Des novella to talk about it with each other, without having to worry about spoilers for those not yet caught up. (Because it's hard to have a substantive discussion about a book without spoilers.)

In a nice piece of serendipity, this podcast discussion of specifically the Penric & Desdemona series surfaced this week on the podcast series The Incomparable Mothership:

https://www.theincomparable.com/thein...

Enjoy! L,

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on April, 25

A Slice Of Eternity

Apr. 25th, 2026 05:00 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read A Slice Of Eternity

Customer: "How much longer will my pizza take?"
Me: "Let me check." *Finds ticket.* "Looks like we ordered fifteen minutes ago, so it'll be ready in ten minutes tops."
Customer: "Is that, like… long? Until I eat pizza, time has no meaning…"

Read A Slice Of Eternity

umadoshi: text: "Aw Rachel, don't be scared of ghosts! They're only dead people." + "I know people. That's not helping." (AGAHF - ghosts)
[personal profile] umadoshi
This year's Hugo nominees were announced early this week. In an unexpected development, I've read four of the Best Novel candidates (having finished the fourth the night before the announcement) and three (!) of the Best Novella candidates, which is more unusual, given how few novellas I read. I'm delighted that [personal profile] renay got nominated for Intergalactic Mixtape for Best Fanzine (all the more impressive for how new it still is!), as well as for The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for Best Related Work. ^_^

But the thing that hit me hardest is that A Girl and Her Fed is up for Best Graphic Story or Comic, having wrapped up its third (and for now, final) act last year. (On Bluesky, K.B. Spangler notes "The work *as a whole* is eligible as it concluded in 2025, but since that is 2000+ strips, we are including the 50+ strips from 2025 in the packet, with a cover page with links to Parts 1 and 2 for reader convenience." She and Ale Presser (who took over the actual art from Spangler a while back) will be attaching this cover to their Hugos submissions packet.

I love AGAHF (and especially the connected Rachel Peng novels, as I've said many times) so much, so this is a real joy.

Reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud (the aforementioned Hugo nominee that I finished the night before the announcement), and while I enjoyed the back half of it more than the beginning, it still never really got emotional hooks into me, which is required for me to particularly bond with any story. Fascinating worldbuilding, though, and a grimly plausible look at a future society where humanity lives to serve capitalism.

I've also finished reading the Hikaru no Go manga! According to Goodreads, I'd read as far as vol. 19 before (a loooooong time ago). (It's now been long enough since [personal profile] scruloose and I watched the c-drama that I mostly only remember my feelings about it, so I have no real sense of how faithful its plot wound up being by the end.)

Currently reading The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan.

Watching: As I mentioned last weekend, I asked [personal profile] scruloose if they'd be up for giving Justice in the Dark a shot, if only to give me the excuse to rewatch the first eight episodes before finally moving on to the ones that eventually got released in Japan after not being cleared to air in China. They agreed, and we're now four or five episodes in!

I haven't read any of the new release of Mo Du/Silent Reading yet (partly because I don't read nearly as much as I'd like, but also because I'm getting this series in hard copy, which makes it take even longer for me to get around to reading something >.<), so my memory of the novel from reading the fan translation several years ago is fairly fuzzy, but (as expected) I really, really like the main actors.

The tacked-on sci-fi framing is both bizarre and aggressively pushed, and since Mo Du, unlike Guardian, is a modern setting with no fantasy elements that needed to be given a sci-fit polish to make it passable, I can only assume its main purpose is to put extra distance between the genuinely horrific crimes and reality. (At the very least, I don't remember reading about any other explanation/theory, but it's been ages since I saw much talk about the drama that wasn't largely focused on the relationships/character dynamics--which is not a complaint, since that's totally what I'm here for.)

Working: This weekend I'm starting my adaptation of the penultimate volume of Yona of the Dawn. I read the translation a couple days ago and am having a lot (A LOT) of feelings. Send strength.
soricel: (Default)
[personal profile] soricel posting in [community profile] fandomweekly
Theme Prompt: #298 – Disappearance
Title: She Bit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss
Fandom: Generation X, X-Men (Comicverse)
Rating/Warnings: T
Bonus: No
Word Count: 477
Notes: Kinda loose interpretation of the prompt--hope it's okay! Set after Generation X: Volume 2. 

 

Read more... )

Icon meme

Apr. 25th, 2026 05:17 pm
regshoe: Alan and Davie at the end of NTS Kidnapped, standing hand in hand with Alan's arm round Davie (Happily ever after)
[personal profile] regshoe
Three Weeks for Dreamwidth begins today! Over on the community [personal profile] goodbyebird has posted a set of memes to give people some ideas for what to post about. This one is about icons; the ability to collect icons and use different ones for different posts or comments is something I love about Dreamwidth, and I think we should celebrate them :D So let's do this:

Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favourite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favourite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES! userpics.

Activity #105 - Silhouettes

Apr. 25th, 2026 06:20 pm
tinny: Chuck: Chuck and Sarah kissing in backlight (chuck_sarah kiss)
[personal profile] tinny posting in [community profile] icontalking




I feel like looking at shapes and what makes a shape recognizable after our last round, so I thought we'd make this round about silhouettes.

This is a free inspirational challenge, you can interpret the theme however you like.

Some inspirational material under here )

* You can make as many icons as you like (if you need a goal, five is a good number :))
* There is no minimum, 1 icon is enough to enter this activity
* Please submit your icons (and URLs!) to this post, all in one comment (if possible)
* Everyone can participate, you don't have to be a member of this community

* I will collect all the icons from the comments and make a result post
* Everyone can leave comments on the inspiration and activity result posts
* There is no voting

Deadline: Saturday, May 16th, your end-of-day
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Via https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mkboea2zgs2k

Clinician Guide: Constellation of Chronic Medical Conditions Commonly Seen in Autistic & ADHD Adults

https://allbrainsbelong.org/all-the-things/

In May 2022, we formed a Task Force of clinicians, patients, and community members to discuss what works (and does not work) to manage these medical conditions or symptoms. We also gathered information from more than 100 autistic adults. These individuals gave feedback based on their personal experiences. The content we share on this website combines evidence-based medicine, lived experience, and our clinical experiences treating patients with these conditions.

Would this count as meta-scamming?

Apr. 25th, 2026 04:31 pm
oursin: Hedgehog saying boggled hedgehog is boggled (Boggled hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

Janet Fordham died in crash after travelling to see man who claimed he would help to recover money from earlier scams.

Woman in question was clearly the despair of her family and the local police who failed to discourage her from sending £££ to a series of romance scammers.

The family even spoke to her doctor, who said she was of sound mind, merely 'brainwashed'.

Eventually she

was contacted by a man in Ghana known as Kofi. He claimed he was a doctor and had found out she was being scammed when he came across her details while working part-time in a phone shop. Kofi told her he would help her get her money back and she flew to Accra in October 2022.... The relationship with the man appeared to develop into a romance and Fordham agreed to marry him, the inquest heard.

I am now wondering if there is a whole further layer of scams which are 'HAVE YOU BEEN SCAMMED? I/WE WILL HELP YOU GET YOUR MONEY BACK'. Meta-scamming?

This also makes me think of a possible historical sort of parallel, whereby in the days of belief in witchcraft if you got cursed, there was also - well, perhaps not quite a profession - a class of individuals whose job it was to lift curses, cunningfolk. (Am not going to rush off and delve into the fairly numerous works on the subject around here.)

And more generally on the topic of spam, that conference in Kyoto is still anxiously asking for my response on whether I will be joining them.

[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read The Thinking is Cloudy, But the Prices Are Clear

Customer: "I'll pay cash."
And then for some reason, he starts trying to mess with the iPad that's facing him and showing him his total (it's not interactive, literally just a screen that shows the items and total).
Me: "It's not touchscreen."
Customer: "Yeah, it is!"

Read The Thinking is Cloudy, But the Prices Are Clear

Zero Tragedy Means Zero Chance

Apr. 25th, 2026 02:30 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read Zero Tragedy Means Zero Chance

Me: "I'm going to apply for America's Got Talent."
Mom: "You'll never get on that show."
Me: "Why? You said I have a good voice."
Mom: "You do, but all the winners of that show have that sad backstory. Your life has been all fun and rainbows. You'd be boring."

Read Zero Tragedy Means Zero Chance

dewline: Snoopy screaming in frustration (Augh)
[personal profile] dewline
I should not have to set police and lawyers on someone else in order to get physiotherapy, dammit. No one else in similar straits should, either. They should be able to just take their prescription for such treatment to the appropriate clinic and get going without paying out of pocket.

Yes, I do expect that to come out of my OHIP premiums to Queens Park. (Adapt as needed to your home jurisdiction.)

and now this part

Apr. 25th, 2026 09:36 am
heresluck: (vidding: freaking out)
[personal profile] heresluck
I am now in the stage of watching my own vid draft export over and over like I can make the necessary changes through sheer force of will. (I have been testing this theory off and on for more than two decades. It does not work.)

Speaking of which, I realized yesterday that sometime this month is the 24th anniversary of finishing my first vid. This is not the sort of thing I generally keep track of, so it was a startling realization. My current students, even the oldest of them, were very much not born yet when I started vidding. Time: just keeps happening!

Anyhow -- I made [personal profile] sdwolfpup give me a virtual high-five for finishing the draft even though she does not care about Heated Rivalry AT ALL (the truest friends love you even when, etc.), and I've gotten suggestions from [personal profile] sisabet and am waiting for [personal profile] kouredios to watch on a larger screen this morning, and there is definitely still some work to do (dear showrunners: I know you want to make your shows ~aesthetic~ or whatever, and I appreciate the commitment, I do, but all this color grading makes life difficult for vidders). But I am going to spend as much of the day as possible in the garden, because spring weather waits for no one, and vidding does, especially when the vid in question has already been seen by a third of its expected audience. Heh.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Don't get me wrong, I love doing them - five hours of reading, three hours of work, what's not to love? - but talking about them? Don't get me started. Every single time it's a back and forth to confirm the actual day the shift starts.

I got a shift through the staffing agency, and I say "So, to confirm, I go to work at midnight Monday?" and he goes "No, Sunday". "So, I leave my house at 11:30 today...?"

No, he meant midnight Monday to 8am Monday.

Every time I look at the schedule at the usual place I find myself momentarily baffled by the fact that the overnight shift is at the top, as the first shift of the day.

Also, literally as I typed that last sentence a spam text came in with the word "lpuuuu", which seems low effort even for a spam text. I get that their business model depends on weeding out everybody smart enough to say "Seems fake!", but seriously?

Forgot one

Apr. 25th, 2026 07:38 am
petrea_mitchell: (Default)
[personal profile] petrea_mitchell posting in [community profile] anime_manga
One other show I'm watching this anime season: Nippon Sangoku: The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun. It's set in a future Japan which, for various reasons that should not be thought too hard about, has regressed to a feudal-ish society but with early 20th century technology. The first episode leaned hard into feudal-level corruption and cruelty, so despite the excellent production values I did not plan to watch any more of it, but another viewer at my favorite anime Discord server assured me that episode 2 was a lot less like that.

There are probably a lot of references to Japanese history and/or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that are going over my head, but that's okay for now.

minimal (health) update

Apr. 25th, 2026 09:57 pm
fred_mouse: bright red 'love' heart with stethoscope (health)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

last update was a week ago. At some point I'll have the energy to get back to the posting frequency I was happy with. Probably not until the con is over though.

healing: I thought the peeling was done - nope, skin on nipple is not shedding correctly and builds up. Fine if I notice before it itches, but has to be manually removed. However, nipple and general breast soreness is enough better that I'm wearing a regular rather than surgical recovery bra without the protective ring, so I'm calling that a win. Fatigue continues to hit sooner and harder than I expect.

medication: I have now been on the hormone suppressant for a week and a bit. I'm not noticing mood effects, but it is mucking with my sleep to the point that I'm back trying melatonin so that I can fall asleep before 2am. As side effects go, this is manageable, especially if the melatonin works to get me back into a sensible cycle, because if it works as previous I can get the sleep pattern back on track in a couple of weeks.

Beyond that, I have achieved bugger all today, and I'm so tired, but not in a 'could fall asleep' so not attempting other updates.

Reading

Apr. 25th, 2026 09:29 am
moon_custafer: Doodle of a generic Penguin Books cover (penguin)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
H. R. Wakefield is mainly remembered for his ghost stories, and for frustrating scholars of the genre by saying he’d had “over a hundred” published, of which only sixty or so are known, and nobody’s sure if he was exaggerating or if there are still a bunch out there.

Meanwhile, a lot of the stories in the anthologies I’ve downloaded aren’t stories, or even weird fiction or sff, at all. ‘Swim-Ease’ is a lightly comic novella about a woman attempting the first-ever cross-Atlantic swim, on behalf of a bathing-suit manufacturer. It’s a delight, and I wish some studio had turned it into a quota-quickie.

last contract, radiant star

Apr. 25th, 2026 09:23 am
ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
[personal profile] ursula
Porting a pair of book reviews over from Bluesky:

Fonda Lee's Last Contract of Isako is terraforming cyberpunk. It's also a samurai movie in book form--directly, rather than in the secondhand way you'd get by riffing on cyberpunk without knowing the sources. Last Contract of Isako is thinking through what it means to have a moral code--an unrelenting and in some ways horrifying code--in service to someone who has no ethics at all. It comes down more or less on the side that some ethics are better than none, which is refreshing when you're used to grimdark, or real-world nihilism. It's also tremendously tightly plotted, in that way where as a reader you know one thing will happen but aren't ready for the sudden unfurling of ramifications!

Last Contract pairs well with Ann Leckie's Radiant Star, in the sense that both are portraits of people who are fucking things up for deeply embedded cultural reasons. Though the book I think you should read Radiant Star against is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Leckie loves point of view experiments, and Radiant Star is experimenting with an opinionated nineteenth-century style narrator who can dip in and out of other points of view.

Like Jonathan Strange, Radiant Star is particularly interested in the ways that social stratification of various kinds leads people to ignore the knowledge of those they think are inferior, at great peril. When the narrator of Radiant Star comments that a decision is really very understandable, it is about to become a giant clusterfuck, and this becomes funnier and funnier (and scarier and scarier) as the book goes on. You can read most of Radiant Star with general awareness of Ancillary Justice, but the end will be most satisfying if you remember the events of Ancillary Mercy (it's close in time to that book, though places & characters don't repeat).

I requested both of these books from Netgalley, and I'm very glad I did.

The Whole Restaurant’s A Stage

Apr. 25th, 2026 01:00 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read The Whole Restaurant’s A Stage

He stands up, walks to the middle of the floor, and asks:
Customer: "What can I get to eat around here?!"
His date is reading the menu, so I point to her and say politely:
Me: "Maybe you should follow her lead."

Read The Whole Restaurant’s A Stage

(no subject)

Apr. 25th, 2026 12:45 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read

While I was in line to make a return, I passed the five-minute-tops wait time by reading the signs around me. Most of it was stuff like return policy and numbers to call for assistance, but one sign near the register caught my eye. It was instructions to follow if returning “personal intimate massagers.” Being […]

Read

Friday Phrase: Spit the dummy

Apr. 24th, 2026 06:47 am
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
[personal profile] calzephyr posting in [community profile] 1word1day
Spit the dummy

An Austrlian idiom to describe someone who is overreacting or acting wildly childish.



(no subject)

Apr. 25th, 2026 11:45 am
[syndicated profile] notalwaysright_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read

It’s a normal day in the office doing people’s taxes so that they can get their refunds. It’s a relatively quiet day, early may, and we’re mostly filing taxes for people who got extensions. Suddenly a massive pickup truck comes BARELLING THROUGH THE WINDOW. One of those REALLY BIG pickup trucks that looks like it’d […]

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