Daily Check-In: Day 28
Jun. 28th, 2025 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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- Starting a new fic
- Working on a current draft
- Editing it myself/with my beta reader
- Going to post it somewhere in the week
- Taking a break
- Working on something else
- Life has other plans at the moment
Get in the Car, Loser! (2021)
Jun. 28th, 2025 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

The story primarily focuses on Sam, an anxious goth trans girl who's studying magic in college. Her classmate Grace steals a mystical sword and then recruits Sam to be her party's healer on a quest to defeat the evil Machine Devil (who, disappointingly, isn't this guy). It's going to be a bit of a drive to the Machine Devil's lair, but fortunately Grace's nonbinary partner Valentin has a car, and also serves as the party's tank. The contemporary-fantasy worldbuilding is only lightly sketched but that's all that's needed; the quest to beat the Machine Devil just provides a framework for the characters to talk to each other, build connections, and grapple with their own insecurities and inner conflicts.
( Read more... )
Get in the Car, Loser! is normally $24.99 USD on Steam, but is currently on sale for $17.49 USD, so this would be a good time to pick it up if it sounds like your thing!
Daily Check-In: Day 27
Jun. 27th, 2025 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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- Great!
- Good
- Alright
- Could be better/could be worse
- Poorly...
- I haven't written today.
- I have thought about it here and there.
half an hour earlier tomorrow
Jun. 26th, 2025 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
My brain: don't go chasing breaking balls, stick to the sliders and the fastballs you're used to
*facepalm*
*
Daily Check-In: Day 26
Jun. 26th, 2025 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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- Yes
- No
- I have thought about it.
My poem: stupid motel fridge by okapi
Jun. 26th, 2025 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I hear it. Doubt. Wait. Know. My refuge
Is anything but. It has found me.
The monster I have been running from
Is right here. In the room. With me. Now.
I listen. I hone in, creeping nearer,
Like one of those dull, topless slasher girls
Ineffably drawn to her doom.
The door resists at first, then rips
Like silver duct tape torn from the mouth
Of a hostage. Confirmed, justified,
fear and dread. T/here. Water where water should not be.
Falling. In drops. In wet rhythm.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
I can’t find a plug to yank.
I won’t invite a stranger
Into this. I know better. The dial
Clicks to clacks. Coolest. Off. Wait. Watch. Count.
Like Kabir’s moon and sun.
Then I am rolling terry cloth
To mop up the flood suspended on glass
And deaden the sound. Dead.en.sound.
I go back to bed. I get up
Again. Check. Go back. Listen
For noise I’ve made sure I won’t hear
Like the last girl standing before the credits roll.
Mereth Aderthad Interview: Interview with Anérea and Shadow
Jun. 26th, 2025 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Anérea and Shadow are the featured artist and featured writer, respectively, for Zhie's Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentation, "How To Make a Star From a Tree: The Science of Telperion and Laurelin." They sat down together to chat about their work on Zhie's presentation and on Mereth Aderthad more broadly, as both are involved as volunteers for the event, and Shadow has also written a story for Maglor's presentation "Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor." They spoke about the appeal of light in Tolkien's world, about achieving freedom from perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and the special role that fanworks and fan communities play in so many of our lives.
Book Bingo: June 2025 (#2)
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This bingo card was created by
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Recommended: The Seamstress [also titled The Time In Between] by María Dueñas is one that
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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YA/Children's: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. This was on the list of books for 4th graders and Minisculus and I read it. It was about a young boy living in a poor rural American setting who wants to be a fast runner. He also loves to draw but hides his enthusiasm due to stigma. He makes friends with the new girl over the summer, and they invent a make-believe land in a secret hideout near their homes. Very tragic ending.
Sci-fi/Fantasy: Death Note vol. 1. by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. This is a Japanese manga (which Minisculus much prefers to the reading list!). I wasn't sure if it fit this category but simple wikipedia calls it a 'supernatural thriller fantasy manga. It is the story of a Japanese high schooler who comes into possession of a mystical notebook and he finds he has the power to kill anybody whose name he enters in it. I enjoyed it even though reading right to left and back to front was a bit awkward. I wouldn't mind knowing what happens next but I don't think I'll seek another one out. [G-N-1: Book from a genre I typically avoid]
Word: Camphoric
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
...camphoric.
1. pertaining to or derived from camphor.
That's not helpful because I don't know that I know and/or remember what camphor is like. This was one of my prompts in my last Yahtzee roll. I was mainly interested in how it's used. And I discovered it is mainly perfume descriptions:
As soon as I sprayed it on I felt the presence of the original, in the heavy, bitter almond opening standing in for that famous camphoric tuberose-anise-incense blast.
Facing Down the Beast: Dior Hypnotic Poison, Marina Geigert, 2009
Narcissus is here, but it's the earthy, almost camphoric kind, not the sweeter type.
Perfume-Smellin' Things Perfume Blog, 2010
Latest new exhibits in the LLM-Generated Garbage hall of shame
Jun. 25th, 2025 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame: “What these bots are designed to do is essentially a matter of statistical programming, and presenting them as reliable sources of information can be misguided, foolish, exploitative, or even dangerous, as demonstrated by the examples on this list.”
Similarly, AI Hallucination Cases: “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments.”
Not to be confused with cases about AI hallucinations. “A solar firm in Minnesota is suing Google for defamation after the tech giant’s shoddy AI Overviews feature allegedly made up wild lies about the company — and significantly hurt its business as a result.”
“The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time. This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult.”
“Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can’t fund any projects if they don’t pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it’s the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don’t need developers.”
My website host, Siteground, has been trying to shove AI hype into their services lately. I can’t help wondering how many customers are actually asking for this, versus how many VCs and managers are insisting they’ve gotta be on the bandwagon. Especially given my fun new personal experience of bringing a problem to their customer-service LLM, where its very first response included a hallucination — advising me to change a nonexistent setting it just made up.
what the mama saw, it was against the law
Jun. 25th, 2025 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
*
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
Jun. 25th, 2025 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.
Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. So it's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.
The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unafraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.
Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.
I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.
Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.
Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 5: Clearing the air
Jun. 25th, 2025 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: camphoric
Summary: A riddle turns into a case.
( Read more... )
Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 4: Too many clocks, not enough time
Jun. 25th, 2025 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt:

Summary: A death at a nursing home leaves Sally with more questions than answers.
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Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 3: A night in
Jun. 25th, 2025 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: extrovert
Summary: Sally suggests a night in.
( Read more... )