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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-04-23 08:54 am

Insomniacs After School, volume 9 by Makoto Ojiro



In which the weather does not conspire against Ganta and Isaki, although other things do.

Insomniacs After School, volume 9 by Makoto Ojiro
mecurtin: face of tuxedo tabby cat Purrcy looking smugly happy (purrcy face)
mecurtin ([personal profile] mecurtin) wrote2025-04-22 10:02 pm
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Purrcy, bees

#Purrcy was both happy and regal, sitting in my seat on the sofa with the sun coming the skylight on it. See how he smiles at me in Cat!
#cats #CatsOfBluesky

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is lightly curled on a brocade cushion, looking at the camera with ears alert, whiskers spread wide and white, eyes light green and pupils just slits. He is clearly very happy, as sunlight shines on the cushion and most of him.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is lightly curled on a brocade cushion, looking at the camera with ears alert, whiskers spread wide and white, eyes light green and pupils just slits. He is clearly very happy, as sunlight shines on the cushion and most of him.




I sat out on the porch to eat breakfast today, and the local hive of feral honeybees was awake, buzzing about looking for nectar. The crabapple flowers are opening, so they seem to have their timing just right. The carpenter bees were also out, inspecting the eaves. It was really good to have that 1/2 hour, even though it was so late in the morning (I had errands to run before my stomach was ready for breakfast) that I didn't see or hear any migrants.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-04-22 10:25 am
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james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-04-22 09:08 am
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Foxfire, Esq. by Noa (October)



Retired superhero turned lawyer, Naomi "Foxfire" Ziegler pursues a wrongful death case involving a fire, a young superhero and a host of shifty housing corporations.

Foxfire, Esq. by Noa (October)
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-04-21 02:16 pm
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Bundle of Holding: Coyote & Crow



This all-new Coyote & Crow Bundle presents Coyote & Crow, the alternate-history RPG set in the Free Lands of an uncolonized North America.

Bundle of Holding: Coyote & Crow
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-04-21 09:10 am
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Clarke Award Finalists 1994

1994: At least four MPs die from unrelated causes, Tony Blair uses his new position as leader of the Labour Party to make bold economic statements unbounded by reality, and in a bold rebuke of a half million years of effort to isolate Britain from the continent, the Chunnel opens.


Poll #33014 Clarke Award Finalists 1994
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60


Which 1994 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Vurt by Jeff Noon
10 (16.7%)

A Million Open Doors by John Barnes
17 (28.3%)

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
29 (48.3%)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
49 (81.7%)

The Broken God by David Zindell
6 (10.0%)

The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
29 (48.3%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 1994 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Vurt by Jeff Noon
A Million Open Doors by John Barnes
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Broken God by David Zindell
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
mecurtin: tabby cat pokes his cute face out of a box (purrcy)
mecurtin ([personal profile] mecurtin) wrote2025-04-20 09:39 pm
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Two Purrcys; housework

In general Purrcy is *not* allowed on the kitchen counters. But he seemed extremely interested in the back corner here, so I let him jump up and poke around as part of his Rodent Control Officer duties. No results at this time, but Constant Vigilance! is his watchword.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks back at the camera over his shoulder from where he stands in the corner between a tile wall and an uneven stone one. Plastic containers can be seen next to him. He looks quite concerned, but his eyes are a beautiful gray-green.



Purrcy jumped up on the kitchen Chair O Love and he was feeling *feisty*! He discovered a gap between the blanket & the chair, explored it, and saw that it was Good.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby crouches on a gray-green blanket-covered chair in a kitchen, looking a little wild.

A gray-green blanket is draped across a chair. The white-furred nose of a tabby cat peaks out the bottom, whiskers spread but eyes invisible.

A close-up of Purrcy the tuxedo tabby's face as he peers out from under a gray-green blanket on a worn brown vinyl chair. Only his eyes, little pink nose, and wide-spread whiskers can be seen.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby peeks out from where he crouches in a nook made by a gray-green blanket draped over a worn brown vinyl chair. His eyes look very large and solemn, his paws very small.



People on Bluesky were discussing a tweet by a TERF called June Slater, who posted:
These trans women. Do they ever do things like women actually do, run a home, cook, put the washer on, get the kids to school, visit relatives in care homes, budget the bills, clean the house, chauffeur kids about? You know the reality of being a woman!
One of the boggling aspects of this "thinking", to me, is the way she doesn't seem to be able to conceive of MEN cooking or taking care of children or living spaces.

Katherine Dickinson said
there’s a weird expectation of childishness in men among these women to the point it’s like these women aren’t attracted to functioning adults and it’s like two steps from Why Don’t You Take A Seat With Chris Hansen territory

And I remember things I'd read about the history of housekeeping and service work that I wrote up here, and wondered:
Compared to the US & the Continent, Brits tended to be resistant to labo(u)r-saving home tech & reliant on servants for the middle-to-upper classes right up to WW2. After the War, *huge* shock of not having servants like before, & I think maybe upper-middle/upper-class men just ...use their wives?

bcuz before the War they were certainly childishly dependent, by US standards. e.g. Gentleman's service flats, in UK, were bachelor apts with cleaning, cooking, and personal valet services provided. No equiv in US AFAIK
I looked at some stats about household work, but there's basically nothing about how the lives of upper-middle-class or richer people live in different countries.

Ach, I shall quit this now and finish my Andor re-watch, so Dirk and I can watch the new eps when they drop on Tuesday.
gwyn: (teevee jim ward morris)
gwyn ([personal profile] gwyn) wrote2025-04-19 09:30 pm
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Movie rec

Hey, if you are going to theatres to see movies these days, I can highly recommend Sinners, with Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld. It's about twin brothers (played by Jordan) who return to their town in Mississippi in 1932 to open a juke joint, and run up against vampires. I'm not much of a vampire person at all, but I think this would probably satisfy both the vampire loving crowd as well as the crowd like me, because the whole first hour is mostly a slow build of who the twins are and who the people in their lives are, and what's happened to them to make them what they are (not the least of which is of course generational trauma from racism), and also background for the character who becomes central to both their story and to the vampires' story.

The music is fucking off the charts amazing (Ludwig Göransson does the soundtrack and a lot of the music stuff) and worth it alone. There are two music sequences that left me kind of gobsmacked. I've never seen anything like it.

There's definitely gore and jump scares, but overall I didn't find it too horror-y, more like a modern monster movie in terms of the violence and such. It was definitely R-rated, with some very sexual scenes. Anyways, if you were considering it, I loved it. (It was directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame.)
beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
beccaelizabeth ([personal profile] beccaelizabeth) wrote2025-04-20 02:24 am
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Doctor Who: Lux

That was quite good :-)
I recommend watching it without spoilers. I think it would have been better if I had not forgotten what time it was and looked on tumblr before viewing. I think the first watch version where it is all Surprise Twists would be even better than the version Oh It's That Bit Cool.
It seemed clever and fun and Doctor Who.

I do not have very detailed thoughts on it this week. I woke up in the middle of my sleep because the food delivery slots were odd this week. I am thinking mostly that more sleep might be quite nice.
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donutsweeper ([personal profile] donutsweeper) wrote2025-04-19 07:08 pm
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april babble

Ugh this month. I am on take 3 of my h/c assignment. Here's hoping this one actually works. After finishing that blanket and oven mitt I decided to try to use a recently adopted skein into shawl/scarf/wrap thing and only after completing a shawl I realized I hated the shape (it was one of those 'start with tiny triangle and increase in the first and last stitch of every row' things and the resulting shape was weird and extreme) so I puttered about with a few different patterns before finally finding one that worked (technically a pattern called the 'Gratitude Wrap'). I'll probably never wear it, but whatever. Lookie:

Light blue wrap
(Terrible picture, but I actually blocked this and it made such a difference, growing from 52"x13.5" to 62x 15.5

I then decided to make a string/market bag thing and have just frogged my 4th attempt. No idea why none are working but boy they are not. Time to put that project on the back burner for a while.

I don't *think* tumblr will go down any time soon, but the most recent round of 'the sky is falling' posts there got me to start weeding through my favorited posts (aka stuff to look at later posts) and, while I've still tons to go through, I've added a few dozen more links to various of my Resource Posts (here's the link to the Masterpost. And yes, at some point I will figure out how to either organize the stupidly long history (etc) and randomness posts or split them into two posts each or just a new third one? Or something, I don't know). Ugh. Both posts are such a mess. But, to be fair, when I first collected the links for posting them (SEVEN years ago, wow) there was just under 800 or so links in total between the 10 posts. Now there's over 2k and 11 posts, so it's not surprising organization has fallen by the wayside a little.

And, last but not least, several weeks worth of [community profile] recthething recs (MDZS/Untamed fics and tumblr art for a bunch of different fandoms):

Last(?) Loop by PyrrhaIphis (10k)
Summary Snippet: Have you ever wondered what a time loop story looks like to the people who aren't doing the looping? This is that fic! Wei Wuxian is living his life over and over again, and this time he thinks he's finally figured out how to get it right so no one he cares about will die. But we're only getting to see the effects of what he's doing through the eyes of others. (really neat take on a time travel fix-it)

Documented Fact by Scrippio (7k)
Summary: In which Zizhen transfers schools and can't quite believe his new professors are rivals the way everyone else says. Or: 5 times no one listened to Zizhen and 1 confirmation (adorable modern-with-cultivation Cultivation University Zizhen POV fic)

The Devil Went Down to Gusu by Nomme_dePlume (21k)
Summary Snippet: Wei Wuxian laughed. “Ah, Lan Zhan, I like you! Let’s be friends! And as a sign of friendship, I’ll tell you a little secret.” He leaned forward, and as he did, his sweet, amused smile curled into something nasty, and his eyes glowed a red so bright, the clearing looked bathed in blood. “I’m as much of a devil as I need to be to cleanse this world of the unrighteous.” He winked again. “Tell your friends about me.” (really great canon divergent AU where WWX has been a story told by the cultivation sects for years and finally makes an appearance)

tumblr art:
Babylon 5
- Vir is best boy. (delightful animation of one of Vir's most iconic scenes)

M*A*S*H*:
- P*E*A*N*U*T*S (various characters drawn in 'Peanuts' style. Adorable!)

MDZS/The Untamed
- they're just so happy (really cute yunmeng trio)
- YLLZ sunshot campaign ver. (spooky wwx at his yiling laozhu best)
- "He has been proper and righteous his whole life, untouched by the corruption of the secular world. The only mistake he has ever made in his life is you!" (powerful art of what the whipping scene might have looked like)

The Muppets
- an album cover for Rowlf (mockup of what a record by rowlf might look like, loved it)

Sylvester - Georgette Heyer
- embroidered hot water bottle cover (excellently done!)

I suspect I'm going to run out of stuff to rec soon, which is a shame since I've been reccing every week there for close to 4 years but I guess it was bound to happen eventually.