firecat

wingficex is a fanwork event in its third year, focused on characters with wings. 16 works were created this year.

I wrote about Mazikeen/Lucifer from the Lucifer series. I like how it came out.

I received two very cute fics from the same author, both about Hercule Poirot!

What I wrote:
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What I received:
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rarepairexchange is an exchange event for ships (pairs and moresomes) with fewer than 250 works on AO3. This is the first year this particular event has run, although there are a number of other events devoted to less popular fandoms and ships.

221 signups, 266 works in 191 fandoms!

I am the satisfied writer of the first fic on AO3 featuring Royal Abbott/Wayne Tillerson from the Weird West series Outer Range.

I received a mixed-media work about Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares, which delightfully subverts the infidelity story usually associated with them. As far as I can tell, it's the first work on AO3 that is written specifically about their relationship. Did I mention I really like rare fandom and ship events?

What I wrote:
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What I received:
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Seeking advice about buying a hospital bed for use at home. The person needing the bed is aged 91, can walk a little with a walker and balance assistance, and has dementia. He has 24/7 care.

I'm just overwhelmed by the options and wildly varying prices.

I know I can rent one but I'd rather buy because I expect he'll be using it for a while.

A drabble is a work with exactly 100 words, and seasonsofdrabbles is an exchange for works with word counts in multiples of 100. It runs several rounds per year. I picked up a pinch hit for the July 2023 exchange and wrote a triple drabble for the series Constantine.

A Favor Is Asked (300 words) by firecat
Fandom: Constantine (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: John Constantine/Jim Corrigan
Characters: John Constantine, Jim Corrigan (DCU), Papa Midnite, Mary "Zed" Martin
Additional Tags: Triple Drabble, Pre-Relationship, Healing Sex, Episode: s01e05 Danse Vaudou

Can't wait!

( trailer under cut )

The AO3 Automagic App is going to be 2 years old and it's having a birthday party exchange.
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/hAPPy_birthday_flash_exchange_2/profile
I was looking at the profile and I found this:

You can go to https://autoao3.herokuapp.com/export/user/USERNAME_HERE/tagset to export a list of all the fandoms/relationships/freeforms you've ever requested as a .csv!

Or you can use =IMPORTDATA("https://autoao3.herokuapp.com/export/user/USERNAME_HERE/tagset" in Google Sheets to import directly!

When I used the =IMPORTDATA thing I couldn't get it to work right, but importing the downloaded .csv into Google Sheets worked fine.

The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa by Jonathan B. Losos

Cribbed from my review on Audible.

A delight for cat lovers of all stripes

Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist. His primary research is on lizards but he spends a lot of time keeping up with cat science too, and teaches a college class on cat science. He reads the Audible version of the book and I found him easy to listen to.

Although the book is loosely strung together with the theme of evolution, the author ranges into a number of other subjects too, particularly the state of general scientific knowledge about cats (there are far too few studies, he complains), how new breeds of cats are developed and recognized, and ethical issues involving cats (indoor vs outdoor, wildlife vs feral cats, creation of breeds that vary a lot from the general traits of cats, such as the Munchkin, which has very short legs.

Anyway, I absolutely loved most of this book. It had just the right balance for me of “yeah I knew that” / "yeah I thought so" and “huh, I didn’t know that.” Losos does a great job of explaining scientific concepts so that they would be easy for non-scientists to understand. He is delightfully enthusiastic about his subject matter. The wide variety of material is organized well. I really liked the way he explained the need for certain research, described the research methods abstractly, and then included fun anecdotes about how particular studies actually went. (The parts about studying cats outdoors using GPS collars and cat cams were particularly enjoyable.) I especially learned a lot in the section about creating new breeds of cat, and found out I had some misunderstandings about domestic cat–wild cat hybrid breeds. I'm glad to know more and I feel a little less uncomfortable about them now than I did before.

There were a couple of things I didn't love as much. Losos has a habit of describing two sides of an ethical conflict and placing himself smack in the middle of the two camps with a smug "of course, I'm right" attitude. I also didn't like his enthusiasm for the idea of creating saber-toothed cats using CRISPR! Ew! But that's not a complaint about the quality of the book.

OceanGate Was Warned of Potential for ‘Catastrophic’ Problems With Titanic Mission:

In an unsigned 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?” [which timed out when I tried to open it]…OceanGate said…“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years,” he [Stockton Rush] told Smithsonian magazine in a profile published in 2019. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/worlds-first-deep-diving-submarine-plans-tourists-see-titanic-180972179/] “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus

Season 3 of Ragnarok coming to Netflix on August 24! [happy dance]