Bleargh

Mar. 15th, 2026 10:52
contrarywise: Glowing green trees along a road (Default)
[personal profile] contrarywise
Welp, I've come down with my first (hopefully only, but time will tell) cold of 2026. Last Wednesday I came home feeling unusually tired and a bit off, and Thursday woke up with a sore throat and congestion. Ditto for Friday, and I stayed home from work both days but did read and respond to emails. The cold has progressed from there and today it's entering the chest congestion/coughing phase. Hopefully that phase will also pass quickly and not linger for weeks. At least I've tested negative for COVID, so it's not that.

The timing of this illness sucks because I had Plans this weekend, namely attending 2 memorial events for old friends who died recently and the annual Old House and Barn Expo in Manchester, NH. I've heard it's a cool event, and also a guy I used to work for is the event's bookseller, and I was hoping to catch up with him in person while there.

One of my departed friends was a well-known and respected High Priestess in my local-ish community, a published author and an old tech writing colleague. She'd been fighting cancer for some time and had stopped attending various events some years ago, so I hadn't seen her in a long time or stayed in touch. I had kept up with her lightly through others, so I knew a bit about how she was doing, but hadn't known the cancer was at this stage. She was very funny, smart, generous, and spent many years supporting and nurturing connections in the local Pagan/Wiccan community.

The other friend is the one I've posted about here recently. On the bright side, because I was home sick on Friday I was able to join the livestream of MM's funeral service, which was lovely. I wish I could join today's memorial, but I'm feeling sick enough to know I need more rest, plus I don't want to risk sharing this ick with others if I can avoid it.

So, Hail the new Ancestors, and everyone else please take care!

Bitch (complimentary)

Mar. 15th, 2026 14:25
[syndicated profile] girlonthenet_feed

Posted by Girl on the net

Legend tells of a woman who reaches her early forties and suddenly realises that she’s sick of your bullshit. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to refer to her as Bitch (complimentary). My thirties were a lot of fun, but they were also marked by extreme anxiety, a crumbling sense of self-worth, and […]

The post Bitch (complimentary) appeared first on Girl on the Net.

Holme Gardens, March

Mar. 15th, 2026 15:20
puddleshark: (Default)
[personal profile] puddleshark
Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star', Holme Gardens
Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star'.

March was being very March-like this morning. Warm sun on my back, bitter cold wind blowing in my face. And vice versa. Walked round the forest. Mowed the lawn for the first time this year (carefully swerving round most of the daisies). Then headed over to Holme Gardens to enjoy the scent of the hyacinths, the sight of magnolia flowers against the March sky.

Surprisingly floral interlude )

Met "Live in HD" 2026/27

Mar. 15th, 2026 11:16
chickenfeet: (bull)
[personal profile] chickenfeet
Here’s my take on what’s coming up in the Met “Live in HD” cinema series in the 2026/27 series.

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/03/15/met-live-in-hd-2026-27/

Arousal-valence

Mar. 15th, 2026 15:04
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I had this tab open before, but I've only gotten around to reading it properly now that it seems to echo that emotional literacy thing.

It's the arousal-valence model.

By identifying your current level of arousal and valence, you can start to build awareness of your bodily sensations and the connection between those sensations and your emotions.

It looks like a good next step for me in "what to do next," like it's all well and good understanding that I'm bad at identifying and acknowledging my emotions, but now what can I do to make this less of a problem for me.

A little bit OPLA S2 stuff

Mar. 15th, 2026 15:37
naye: luffy looking at something with sparkles of awe (luffy - sparkle)
[personal profile] naye
Having been a One Piece fan since 2004, I was INCREDIBLY surprised when I went from "but why would you do that?" about the then forthcoming One Piece live action adaptation to head over heels in love with the writing, acting, production, and music. I was absolutely psyched for season two, which came out on Tuesday. My old friend [personal profile] shayera suggested getting together to watch it, so she came over to hang out with [personal profile] doctorskuld and me this weekend. We've all been into One Piece for 20+ years, and are fans of the magnitude where we have all written One Piece fic and made One Piece vid, as well as gone to events in Japan. (Seeing Oda Eiichiro live and getting to be in the crowd shouting "Arigatou!" at him is forever going to be a highlight of my fannish life.)

Which is to say: we are probably the worst kind of audience to try to please. But, of course, we all loved it. It is a tour de force in every way. THIS is how you adapt a manga! This is how you pour your heart and soul into making something so good it's impossible not to be won over by it.

I really was excited when the incomparable Sonya Belousova & Giona Ostinelli released two tracks from the S2 OST (not yet released) ahead of the premiere. The first was the absolutely epic Pray to the Sun, featuring none other than THE HU as well as Declan de Barra. Listen to that sound! That is 100% what Elbaph music sounds like! It's got such a wild range of instruments, from Nordic nyckelharpa to Mongolian morin khuur, and those lyrics are - well. Let's just say that if you're up to date on the anime they will mean more than you may think.

Then they released their collaboration with baritone saxofonist Leo P, Whiskey Peak Saloon. Amazing energy! Amazing fun! I highly recommend Sonya Belousova's Instagram for lots of informative (and enthusiastic!) behind the scenes information on the OST.

As for the eight episodes - I am so glad season 3 is already in production, because I need more immediately. It's so bonkers and fun in the best way, at the same time as it manages to capture both the emotional heart of the story. And the production is so good?? Not just the amazing quality of everything from costume and props to sets, but the level of details that goes into everything - and also the way they've adapted the story...! There were so many great easter eggs, shout-outs, and treats for fans of the manga and anime, and I've put several on Tumblr already. Let's see...

This moment, when Dragon turns around in episode 1, and the camera focuses on the man standing behind him? Yeah, I made a teakettle noise of surprised delight. I also think there may be a relevant Wanted poster very out of focus in the background when they enter Loguetown.

Another fun Loguetown background thing that actually comes back in episode 5 is Hero of the Marines: The Musical about Garp. Just. The amount of namedropping that happens in the legible part of the review of said musical is astounding.

There's also a lot of legible text in the Baroque Works files that we see in episode 5.

Finally, for fans who've watched through Wano there is a huge easter egg standing around on Dorry's chest in episode 4. (I believe for fans up to date on the manga there are two Easter Eggs.

...I say "finally" though I am pretty sure I am not done with discovering fun things in OPLA. I mean. I haven't even made a gif set for it yet...!
colls: (SW Andor-Cassian)
[personal profile] colls in [community profile] swbookclub
Mid-month check-in!
This is a themed month. The idea is to read any Star Wars book you'd like that can be applied to the theme. The material can be anything - adult, YA, comics, even story-centric games. <---(not applicable this month)

1. Have you started? If so, how's it going so far?

2. What other comic miniseries have you read?

3. What story or character focus would you like to see explored in comic format?


COMING UP NEXT
April: Brotherhood by Mike Chen
seleneheart: (woodcut surfboard)
[personal profile] seleneheart
The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang



Blurb:
I'm going to put the blurb behind cut tags because I feel like it spoils too much of the book. the blurb )

This read like a history book instead of a novel. Like the history of a fantasy land. I found it hard to really engage with it. Like if we had The Silmarillion but not The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. Would we care about The Silm if we didn't have the experience of the previous works?

As far as a collection of myths go, it was delightful.
selenak: (Time Lords by Crazy Celebrian)
[personal profile] selenak
Dark Winds, Season 3: continues to be both beautifully acted, thoughtfully and empathically written, and a visual feast. Also heartbreaking in the day it follows up on s2's conclusion for Joe Leaphorn and his wife Emma. Small spoilery remark. ) Also I was more grateful than ever that the show takes place in the 1970s and wasn't updated to the present because Bern's new job with border patrol would have felt very differently even before her subplot kicks in.

Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion something extremely plot spoilery ) But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? Spoilers were very entertained indeed by the result ) Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.
shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
[personal profile] shadaras
1.
I'd love for the weather to settle down; over the last week I think I've had... two days of feeling Actually Definitely Human, two days of feeling terrible (weather-linked migraines yay), and the rest in muted tiredness where I'm like "well this is tolerable but still not good." Tomorrow evening is when the next storm is supposed to hit here, which means probably both tomorrow and Tuesday are going to be very "haha you wanted to have a brain? and function?" days, which is frustrating but... so it goes, shall manage.

2.
[community profile] seasonalremix's due date for works came by yesterday and everyone got things in on time! It's delightful! I'm excited for the remixes to be revealed next week so everyone can see them!

If you're interested in participating in the next round, sign-ups will open next week and we're currently inviting people to suggest tropes to add to our trope list.

3.
Yesterday afternoon a friend organized a party that was six people (inclusive of them) who had all gone to college together (not all in the same year, but I think we all overlapped by at least one year) and one person who (a) knows me and the organizing friend well and (b) has a house that's good for hosting groups. Fascinating set of people. Mostly we played board/card games! And learned that we could understand the rules for Four Doors (co-op game about gathering relics and lighting a beacon), a game none of us had played before (and which was very fun; would play again. the last round was especially delightful as we worked out how to min-max our way to finishing the game in one turn rather than three. and by "we" I mean "one other friend and I, as the people who understood the rules and Cared A Lot"), more easily than Zounds (Shakespearean Go Fish with a few extra rules, more or less), a game which... also none of us had played before but you'd think that "it's basically Go Fish" would be more comprehensible. xD (Unsurprisingly, the Shakespeare nerd who owned that game won it even before the extra points for completing the quotes on the cards were tallied up.)

It's also a bit... mm, I hadn't seen two of those friends since graduating, pretty much? So it's been like a decade? (Might've seen them once or twice in passing since then, but not for an extended time?) But yeah, nah, fundamentally we're still the same kind of people/friends as back then, despite that time. Just one of those things where you have a bunch of introverts and only sometimes can manage the whole "keep in touch when an external force isn't maintaining that connection for you" thing.

(Also I think that the Zounds thing of "the person who goes first is the person who most recently acted in a play" should've been expanded to "person who most recently played a ttrpg/larped" for that group, since that would've gotten it to something that happened in the last month rather than something from uh over a decade ago. xD Whatever, we can Play By The Rules I Guess since people did have an answer for that. But I think that roleplaying games are Close Enough when you've got a group of nerds who are mostly not theater nerds but who have, at some point, played a ttrpg...)

4.
[personal profile] hafnia wrote me a 15k story as a celebration of two years of friendship. <3 Unsurprisingly, I adore it (it was written for me! by someone who knows me very well! with like zero input from me other than "idk, you could write me wingfic?", a thing that she was like "well YEAH OBVIOUSLY" about, so it's like no input at all xD) (she's going to be like YOU HAD INPUT and yeah I guess but it was all "yeah that sounds good <3" and "yesssss :3" and the like) and I would like more people to read it.

The fuzzy line between intimate friendship and romance! Knowing where you fit in each other's lives! Finding balance between two lifestyles which might seem incompatible at first glance! Wings! Art and language and community!
The Winged City (Original Work, 15k, F/NB, rated E for "oh yeah there's a short sex scene in there" but mostly it's T-rated FEELINGS)

5.
Have some more Mouse <3 I think it's funny that this chapter is one I'm calling "The Voyage" and it has been 2.6k and the ship has not yet departed on said voyage. This is fine. The vibe/focus is still accurate, and I'm almost to the ship taking its leave...
Mouse orbits the atrium. The priest watches from their vestibule, but Mouse knows when their attention turns away, the priest satisfied that Mouse knows the rites and is comfortable performing them alone. There is ease in them, a kind of dance as they make their bows and sign their wishes—words being too easily overheard—to the symbols of the moon’s many phases. The entryway is the closed eye; opposite it is the open one. The walls between are lined with other doors framed with idols, most of which would open into full shrines to the god’s aspects.

They halt at the moon’s open eye, which here—in a city of contracts and arguments of truth—is considered the primary aspect of the Lord of the Moon. Mouse doesn’t know if they believe that. The closed eye is the one they turn too most often, but right now…

“Your eye is upon me,” they murmur, and hear it ripple through the open chamber and up the tower to the god’s ears. “May it continue to bring me good fortune.”

To say anything else here, where the priest listens as well as the god, would be too much. Mouse bows again, then continues their unhurried honoring of every phase of Jiraci Mooneye. They are all one, in the end, and Mouse cannot say for certain which showed him House Ilizana’s sigil and thus the path to a new life.

When they return to the entryway, the closed eye of the god inset in onyx above it, the priest says, “Walk in the moon’s light, sibling mine.”

“I’d rather walk in the moon’s shadow,” Mouse says, and for a moment they think the priest will scold them.

Instead, the priest laughs. “Perhaps one day I will see you wearing his eyelid as a cloak,” they say. “May he watch over you until you find your path.”

Mouse turns to face the priest, unsettled, but their eyes are closed and a smile peaceful on their face as if they’ve been dozing the whole time.

There is nothing to be done but to make their final prayers—May your shadow be warm and welcoming, may those who wish ill upon me overlook my presence, may my footsteps be quiet and my eyes open to the night’s mysteries—before they exit to rejoin Rhei in the city’s streets.

A Reckoning of Swords 74

Mar. 15th, 2026 05:10
kalloway: (Xmas Lights 18 C7 Tangle)
[personal profile] kalloway
Many swords, again... worked on archiving and got a decent bit done. Close to a half-dozen new fandom pages? Felt pretty good. ^_^ I've refined my workflow and while I don't know if it's actually going any faster, it feels faster. Before, I would code up five or so pieces, put them on Neocities, and then put them on DW. Now I'm just doing one at a time, putting it on Neocities then immediately putting it on DW and logging it. Makes it a little easier to pause, if nothing else.

I do wish I'd put a little more forethought into how I'm logging what I've done, but I don't think there's any perfect solution there. After a point it'll be much easier, like when I'm just cruising through AO3 by fandom when there's only a few dense fandoms left. Right now I'm all over the place and logging things into composition books is getting kind of gnarly.

Worked a bit more on MG Tallgeese Flugel, but mostly worked on stuff for 30 Minute Label Day. Definitely not a prize-winning display, but a fun one. And that's honestly what I want - a fun display and one people can interact with. Like, I'll offer to let people touch, gently, and check out articulation and details and whatever. There's not much that can be broken beyond repair, if anything. Need to get back to my [Redacted] contest entry, too, as that's coming due very soon.

Goal for the week is getting my desk cleaned up. What even is going on here?!
[syndicated profile] polyrecsdaily_feed
Title of the Story (Stargate: Atlantis):

Title of the Story, by torch. Nestra: The blurb in which I say funny and insightful things about the story in two sentences or less, while trying not to repeat myself. Pithy quote from the story.

Theatre with music in it

Mar. 15th, 2026 09:27
antisoppist: (Default)
[personal profile] antisoppist
Peter Grimes (Opera North)

Read more... )


Operation Mincemeat (Touring Cast, Bath Theatre Royal)

Read more... )
andrewducker: (Vaudeville for the next five miles)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Following yesterday's illness, I was vaguely hoping that he would stay asleep through the night. Alas:

12:05
"I need a wee"
Took him to the toilet.
"Daddy, my tummy hurts"
Gave him some medicine
"Do you want to be in pyjamas or just straight back to bed?"
"Back to bed"
And then he closed his eyes.

12:20
Thundering footsteps "Daddy, I feel sick"
Told him to go to the toilet. Kept him company, got him a bucket.
He wasn't sick.
Persuaded him to take the bucket to bed.
Sat on the floor next to his bed until he closed his eyes.

12:35
More thundering steps
"Daddy, my arm and leg hurt"
By the time I'd found him medicine he was asleep again.
But woke up again and let me give him some Calpol.

03:30
"I'm hungry" (not surprising as he didn't eat yesterday)
We agreed on cream cheese crackers.
He ate ⅘ of the cracker and drank some juice and passed out again.

06:30
"I checked the light coming under the curtain and it's morning time"
I told him to go play games on the Switch downstairs.
Fifteen minutes later I could still hear him wandering about and I hadn't heard any game noises.
Went to check on him and he told him that he'd found various points around the house where the floor isn't flat.
Got him settled with the Switch, and then went back to bed and stared vacantly at my phone for an hour, before getting up to face the day.

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