Daily Check-In: Day 28

Jun. 28th, 2025 03:39 pm
miscellaneous_section: A knight in the middle of chanting a poem for the spell of Fear. (Default)
[personal profile] miscellaneous_section posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hi everyone! What are your plans for next week?
  • 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
pauraque: bird flying over the trans flag (trans pride)
[personal profile] pauraque
Concluding Pride Month media, I played Get in the Car, Loser! which is a queer road trip fantasy RPG. The lead developer Christine Love is a trans woman, and I'm not sure if everyone who worked on the game is trans but it looks like it's at least a high proportion.

combat scene where queer gen Z kids do battle with weird fantasy monsters

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
miscellaneous_section: An older knight petting a cat after saving it from under rubble. (cindarr)
[personal profile] miscellaneous_section posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
 How's the writing session going?
  • 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
musesfool: a baseball and bat on the grass (the crack of ash on horsehide)
[personal profile] musesfool
Todd Zeile: Pete's been chasing breaking balls
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
miscellaneous_section: A knight in the middle of chanting a poem for the spell of Fear. (Default)
[personal profile] miscellaneous_section posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
 So, have you written today?
  • Yes
  • No
  • I have thought about it.

My poem: stupid motel fridge by okapi

Jun. 26th, 2025 11:24 am
stonepicnicking_okapi: otherwords (otherwords)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
stupid motel fridge by okapi

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.
daughterofshadows: A photograph of a nebula and stars (Default)
[personal profile] daughterofshadows posting in [community profile] silwritersguild
Mereth Aderthad 2025 Interview with Anrea and Shadow. Featured artist and author for "How to Make a Star From a Tree: The Science of Telperion and Laurelin."

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.

You can read and listen to their conversation here.


Book Bingo: June 2025 (#2)

Jun. 25th, 2025 10:37 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: books (books)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
My thought is 3 books make a post.

This bingo card was created by [personal profile] kingstoken. More about the challenge here: https://kingstoken.dreamwidth.org/109837.html




Recommended: The Seamstress [also titled The Time In Between] by María Dueñas is one that [personal profile] smallhobbit recommended as one of her favourites. It is the story of a young Spanish girl with a talent for dressmaking. Her loves, betrayals, breakdowns, and triumphs set against the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II. She flees to Morocco and there is a lot about life there. She ends up being a spy. Very engaging, compelling. It's long. 600+ pages but I definitely got sucked in. [I am also trying to do as many squares as I can of [personal profile] garonne's 2025 Book Bingo here: https://garonne.dreamwidth.org/58219.html so I think this qualifies as G-G-1: Not set in UK/US/France/Germany.]

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
stonepicnicking_okapi: letters (letters)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Wednesday's word is...

...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
erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)
[personal profile] erinptah

Google AI overview explaining that Santa uses reindeer because of their speed, dependability, and that they don't experience jet lag

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.


musesfool: Jason Toddler shows off his new costume to Dick (everybody starts somewhere)
[personal profile] musesfool
In addition to various Spider-Man and Captain America-themed items, I ordered a Batman shirt and a Robin shirt for Baby Miss L and then I was like, but does she know who Batman and Robin even are??? So I went looking for toddler-friendly Bat-stuff, and lo and behold, there is a show called Batwheels on Cartoon Network (and HBO Max) about the Batmobile and other Bat vehicles (the Redbird, Batgirl's bike) coming to life like the toys in Toy Story! With DUKE as ROBIN and CASS as BATGIRL!!! I love this!!! (mainly because I was afraid it was going to be Damian as Robin and Babs as Batgirl and that's just weird.) I don't know if any of the other kids exist, but there is a Batplane they call Wing, so maybe Nightwing is around? I didn't watch it, just read the wiki, but I mentioned it to my niece, so maybe Baby Miss L can get started early on loving Robin, and she can enjoy Tiny Titans when she's a little bit older. (I am still sad and bitter that Tiny Titans was cancelled so unceremoniously because it was the best.)

*

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)

Jun. 25th, 2025 03:34 pm
pauraque: bird flying over the trans flag (trans pride)
[personal profile] pauraque
Note: Emezi is nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender them, as does the jacket bio.

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.
stonepicnicking_okapi: butterflycard (butterflycard)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Title: Clearing the air
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: camphoric
Summary: A riddle turns into a case.

Read more... )
stonepicnicking_okapi: butterflycard (butterflycard)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Title: Too many clocks, not enough time
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.

Read more... )

Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 3: A night in

Jun. 25th, 2025 02:36 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: butterflycard (butterflycard)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Title: A night in
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: extrovert
Summary: Sally suggests a night in.
Read more... )

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