Reading

Current Mood: hopeful

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Weekend Plans

Okay, let's figure out my plans for the weekend, shall we?

All of my big bills (hotel, storage unit, phone, PO Box) have already been paid, so unless something very unexpected happens I don't have to worry about any major expenses the rest of the year other than a vet bill on the 29th. So that's definitely something to be happy about, as it means I can focus on other things this weekend.

I think my plan is to get up tomorrow morning and do my usual weekend cleaning. That way, I can get all of those things done first thing. I'll wash clothes, do some vacuuming/dusting/mopping/etc., and then hopefully by mid-afternoon I'll be free to work on other things.

By which I mainly mean writing as many fics for Yuletide as I possibly can, to be fair. That said, I still need to watch this week episode of both The Mighty Nein and Critical Role, so I'd like to get that done tomorrow as well.

That way I can spend pretty much all of Sunday writing. 🤞🏻

Pole Vault Pole

https://xkcd.com/3183/

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

https://xkcd.com/3183/

[ SECRET POST #6923 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6923 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #988.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Munich

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Pluribus 1.08

In which someone becomes Sheherazade, but is it Zosia or is it Carol?

( Spoilers go on the charm offensive )

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METAL GEAR SOLID EXCHANGE - MGSX - SIGNUPS OPEN

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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Fanart Friday has arrived.

❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
Rec-cember Day 19

( A bunch of BG3 fanarts, heavy on the ladies. )

Current Mood: blank

Entry tags:

(no subject)

My grandmother passed yesterday morning. She's the last remaining of my grandparents. While dementia did claim all of her a year past, I guess it still hit me. I'll probably be a bit less responsive on here for a while.

Gosh, don't you just hate it

when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

*****************

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Current Mood: ambitious
Current Music: Best Winter - Tom McRae

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adventures in cooking

sleeping in the shadow of the empire state

I am officially on vacation - I don't have to go back to work until January 5th! Now the bakepocalypse can begin! I've made more work for myself, but I think it will all work out - I've been planning it in my head, and this is how it goes (please take "run dishwasher" as a given at least once and probably twice each day):

( 6-day plan )

I think adding in the roast pork and the pork buns and the orange cranberry rolls might be kind of nuts? But also having that food on hand will let me eat breakfast/dinner without having to do any real cooking or ordering in. (I will also have some ham and cheese to make sandwiches if it comes to that, and some granola bars for snacks/breakfast if the orange cranberry rolls don't happen.) And I think I do have time before the cupcake baking begins in earnest.

What I'm considering now is whether I should make the frostings and immediately put them in piping bags (with specific tips in) for storing in the fridge instead of trying to do the transfers all at once on Christmas Eve morning the way I usually do. Filling the bags and then keeping them in tupperware might be easier? But I've also found that sometimes my "time-saving" plans end up making things worse, so idk.

Anyway, that's my plan for the next 6 or so days! It's a good thing I enjoy cooking. *g*

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[ SECRET POST #6922 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6922 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #988.
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Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Fics - Bungou Stray Dogs

So, after discovering the show, the first things I wrote were dark smut. Vaguely smut; Everyone keeps their clothes no at all times.

Title : Take your breath away
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Bungou Stray Dogs
Characters/Ships : Akutagawa/Dazai
Genre : Smut, angst
Summary : Akutagawa feels new stirrings that he doesn't understand and feels quite ashamed about.
Rating : M
Disclaimer : This belongs to Asagiri Kakfa.
Word Count : ~1900
Warnings : Power imbalance, underage.

( Link to AO3 )

Title : To do anything at all
Author : Nelja (me) and my friend Onnastik
Fandom : Bungou Stray Dogs
Characters/Ships : Atsushi/Dazai/Akutagawa
Genre : Smut
Summary : To pass the time for the rest of the truck ride in volume 13, Dazai "invites" Atsushi to join in his and Akutagawa's kinky games.
Rating : M
Disclaimer : This belongs to Asagiri Kafka.
Word Count : ~2200
Warnings : Some dubious consent

( Link to AO3 )

Also! Have two A Softer World remixes (I love doing them and actually do them too rarely).

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Current Mood: sleepy

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d&d: aurendor

Aurendor D&D: Summary for 12/17 Game

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: accomplished

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ficathon: yuletide

Yuletide: The Last Update (For Now)

All fics that were due today have been posted! One of them might have been right down the wire, but it was posted on time so that's all that matters.

I'm giving it a rest until tomorrow, and then I'll go over them again to tweak a few things and maybe add one more scene to one of them. And then I can work on more Yuletide fics! Because it's me, and I'm bound and determined to write as many as I can possibly fit in before the archive goes live next week.

Entry tags:

books,
film

(no subject)

On the weekend I went to a showing of the 4k restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock, oddly suitable given I was halfway through the book at the time. Which I have now also finished, and enjoyed, though it's very weird and of its time.

The homoeroticism is off the charts; not just all the school girls being in love with Miranda, but also whatever was going on with Mike and Albert. I honestly had not remembered much about those characters in the movie, so seeing the level of homoeroticism there, and then discovering it's even more intense in the book was a surprise! There's stuff in the book I'm glad isn't in the movie - the fate of the Lumleys and all the stuffing about with Irma and Michael would have been a bit too soap operatic for the dreamy, vaguely horror-toned vibe Peter Weir was going for. And I do like the tighter focus allowing the vibe of 'the real horror is the school', though there is some nice atmospheric prose in the book.

I went with a friend to see the movie and we both laughed at the judgmental koala around Hanging Rock, lmao.

Though seeing some of the things non-Australians have written about this novel and movie has me like, sigh, can people try not to be weird and xenophobic about Australia?? It's not scary or strange for the southern hemisphere to have opposite seasons to the northern hemisphere, and you don't have to go on about how ~exotic~ and ~bizarre~ you find Australian things.

Telescope Types

https://xkcd.com/3182/

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

https://xkcd.com/3182/

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aaaand three minutes before midnight ALSO still counts!

+ Watched Wake Up Dead Man today, and out of the three I can safely say it’s my favorite. The setting, characters, theme, all hit home for me. Honestly one I wouldn’t mind rewatching.

Reactor Mag has an excellent article up on it: Entirely Too Many Thoughts About Wake Up Dead Man.

Btw does anyone want some screengrabs to make icons from uploaded to

capshare? (Not the very best quality possible, but serviceable) If so, specific characters?

❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
Rec-cember Day 17

Gilmore Girls
They Go Just as Quickly as They Come by

petpluto (2,004 words). Richard dies. Emily goes on living.
At first, its emptiness wasn’t as pervasive. She accepted the house, and the stillness.

It hadn’t been so long. Not really. Richard had spent longer away on business trips. The house was empty, but not unfamiliarly so. But there came a time when, if Richard had been away on a business trip, he would have been back from it. And the emptiness pressed in until it is all she can see, all she can feel.

The house is empty.

She doesn’t wander the halls. She doesn’t throw herself at his portrait. She does not have a portrait made. She doesn’t shutter the windows and regress. She doesn’t dress in all black. She isn’t part of some maudlin tale, some piece of fiction Rory and Richard had once fawned over together. She is a graduate of Smith, after all. She still belongs to any number of groups, of charities and clubs and associations. She fills her days, just as she did before.

The house, though, is still empty, when she returns to it.

[ SECRET POST #6921 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6921 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #988.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"

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Book. Is. Done.

As of this afternoon, Apocollapse is, finally, finished!

Of course, this is the version of "done" that still includes some find-a-better-word brackets, and a couple small chunks that I keep waffling about whether I need or not. One of which depends on whether I split the inordinately large last chapter into two, which might change the title of the epilogue-chapter, which might or might not carry that load.... But it is a coherent hunk of text with a beginning and an end and no gaps in between. Hooray!

It clocks in at an overwhelming 134,665 words. Woof! It is by far the longest thing I've ever written.

It has taken me two years and one-and-a-half months, which despite feeling like it was taking forever is actually pretty fast for me, for a novel. Faster by half than books that were 25%-40% shorter! And that time includes the better part of a year when I was dealing with Mom's medical care and then her estate, and doing very little writing at all.

I shall hand it over to the alpha-reader tonight, and give it a full proper read-through myself fairly soon. For now, though, it is Done. And Done is a very good thing for a book to be.

Anybody have any explanatory links?

As we all know - or anyway, as most of us know - words are capitalized like names if they're used like names and titles.

This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"

But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.

It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.

The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.

I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.

Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.

Entry tags:

with an open smile and with open doors

Today I mostly Power Automated. Or attempted to. I had to call in the expert several times, and at least one of them he was like "yeah I don't know why it's not working either", which was at least validating. My first flow is now sending emails, although I still need to tweak it a bit.

Also: honestly what sort of bullshit is it that you can't get Microsoft Forms to send an email to the person who filled out the form with their details in! That's been, like, basic form functionality for at least fifteen years, and it's all very well saying "oh well you can do it with Power Automate", but that is much more complicated than ticking a "send submissions to user" box and requires access to a whole separate system plus someone to set up all the permissions for you to use whatever Outlook mailbox, etc etc etc...

Anyway. I have three? four? forms that my boss wants me to have up and running before Christmas. Now I've got all the accesses and permissions configured that should hopefully be possible, which is good because I did promise...

On the home front, I have now ordered all the remaining Christmas presents I can do before Christmas Day itself (why do so few places allow you to buy gift-cards to ship on a particular date!), wrapped all the physical things I already have, sorted out the last grocery delivery before Christmas so I won't accidentally starve, and checked in with my siblings to discover that other people have been working on the stocking presents for my parents, and what isn't bought is at least planned.

I built a beautiful tracking spreadsheet that shows what each parent is getting, calculates how much each of us has spent, and checks that against the notional budget for hopefully easier working out who owes what to whom once we're done. And so far no one has got super mad at me for being "bossy" or declared refusal to participate, which is unfortunately what tends to happens. I'm trying to back off now while we're still OK!

Now off to choir!