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Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings (by Hth) (Explicit)

Shows: SGA
Rec Category: Ronon Dex
Characters: Ronon Dex/Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex & John Sheppard, Ronon Dex & Teyla Emmagan, past Ronon Dex/Tyre
Categories: M/M (but mostly a Ronon-centric character piece)
Words: 2463
Warnings: moderate angst
Author on DW:

hth
Author's Website: Hth on AO3
Link: Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings on DW
Why This Must Be Read: An episode tag to 'Broken Ties', the story explores Ronon's reaction to having temporarily abandoned Atlantis and become a slave to the Wraith after going to join Tyre and his old team. It's very much hurt comfort, showing him grappling with what happened and feeling broken, and how his relationships with, in particular, Rodney, and John, help him through this. Rodney's his lover in this but without it being particularly romantic, and, at the end, it's left unclear what his relationship with John is, but to me it reads as comfort, and a healing of their friendship. It's beautifully written, with pain but also redemption, and gives us the feels that canon glossed over. Powerful.

( snippet of fic )

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meme

the old skin has to be shed before the new one can come

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fandom: red white and royal blue

History Never Dies by autiacorart (SFW)

Fandom: Red White and Royal Blue (RWRB)
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Alex/Henry
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: autiacorart on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A bit of fun - a James Bond AU, which they fit remarkably well. Seems like Alex is the "Bond girl" in this one, or possibly the sexy villain, and the king looks to be "M"!
Link: History Never Dies

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(no subject)

I said I was going to give myself a break between the end of the filler arc and the beginning of the Fullbring arc, but I watched episodes 343 and 344 of Bleach anyway. I enjoyed them! I've relaxed on the Fullbring arc since I first read it forever ago and enjoy it a lot more, and thus far I'm liking the anime version. Captures Ichigo's obvious denial about how much he misses his powers and his shinigami friends well, and the way he's drifted back to spending more time with Keigo and Mizuiro without sharing anything real or deep with them, and I love the scene where he and Ishida argue while fighting that gang just as much animated. They're so funny and so silly. And TBH, I love that so many of the characters have after school jobs. I'm preparing myself to be disappointed all over again with how it deals with Chad, but I think I'm going to enjoy how it deals with Ichigo and Ishida all over again.

Famed Australian film critic David Stratton died last week, so I decided to watch more movies in his honour. Unfortunately um I watched Rashomon and was underwhelmed. I guess every serious film fan will disown me now. It really does feel like a short story unnecessarily dragged out to movie length. Longest 88 minutes of my life. The best part is the fourth memory, which isn't even from Akutagawa's stories, but has better acting from everyone. There are good bits, but also... it's too long. I mostly feel it's too long.

OTOH, I watched When Harry Met Sally for the first time, and you know what? It's good. It's really good and really funny, and captures an emotional truth. The joke about Ethiopian film has not aged well, but everything else is delightful. That romantic ending speech really brought a tear to my eye. And remember when people were allowed to look like that on screen? No one in this movie is bad looking but everyone looks so normal.

Current Mood: grumpy

Aaaaaahhhhh!

Classes start up again on Monday!

Okay, I'm cool, I'm good, I'm collected; I can do this.

Right now I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to me to start taking the bus to and from classes. There's a specific bus that goes from my hometown to the college campus I'm attending, a thirty minute drive away, and financially it might be a good idea overall. It's just that one of the classes I'm taking would have me out the door by 8:30 AM, and that's a smidge earlier than I like to get up these days 😅

Still, it's doable! The bus stop for the in town bus is under a block from my house, so it's not a particularly arduous walk—or at least it's not too much worse than just walking to where I've parked my car. It would be better for the environment and would save wear and tear on my (aging) vehicle. Even taking the bus three days a week might be good enough.

So my plan is, probably on Thursday and maybe on Friday as well, take the (free) in town bus to the interchange and then back home. If I really want to give a solid go of it, I'll also give the town-to-campus bus a try, but we'll see how I feel about spending $7 on that. I'll also want to start turning the lights out earlier, preferably tonight.

Fingers crossed for cheap textbooks and sparse homework!

(no subject)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250819.html

Over 500,000 light years across,

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250819.html

Current Mood: busy

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Find Your Otherkin Friends

There has been a recent influx of new users after Othercon, most of whom are otherkin, alterhuman, etc. This post is especially for them and others like them, who may wish to reconnect with people they know from that venue or similar contexts.

Use this post to tell folks that you are on Dreamwidth, what your fursona or other nickname is, and who you're looking for here. You can use the template in a comment below, on your blog, or anywhere else you find it useful. This one is shorter than the more detailed "Introduction / Friending Meme" is. Skip anything you don't want to share; add anything you feel is relevant.

Otherkin Connection Template

Did you attend Othercon recently, or find out about this some other way?
What is your fursona, otherkin name(s), or other nickname(s)?
What type(s) of otherkin / alterhuman are you?
What kind of content do you / will you post about?
What are some other online platforms where people can find you now?
Who are some of your otherkin friends that you hope to find on Dreamwidth or elsenet?
Do you have anything else important to share that will help networking?

Fort Bragg and Back

Last night was pear pickup down at Pete Johnson's pear shed. Pete is a lovely guy. We loaded up some cardboard boxes for

loup_noir and then stood around talking. Turns out that Pete's Aunt and Uncle ran a lodge up at Denali (Alaska) and that their kids, like M's kids, worked on the railway for the cruse companies during the summer. I swear there is only 2 degrees of separation in this world. Pete had sent of something like 18 tons of pears that day, headed for a Del Monte cannery. We were loading 2nds into our boxes, but they were still lovely pears.

( Cut for medical description. )

After my session Chena & I took the walk that was strongly suggested before getting in the car and heading south to meet with

loup_noir and her husband. Their house is definitely well out toward the very end of the road, so a fun and pretty drive. I very much enjoyed seeing the garden and orchard, not to mention the tutorial on catching gophers. I'll be putting that information into practice very soon. They gifted me with some lovely, and yummy potatoes and a big bunch of equally yummy kale.

The drive home was through Anderson Valley and Boonville which was very pleasant. It is an easier road than highway 20 which I usually take and made sense since I was already quite far south from Fort Bragg. Usually it just adds 25 or 30 minutes to an already long drive.

hitting the wall

I'm putting the Substack column aside for a while. It's just too wearing, looking at the cruelties and misbehavior and idiocy and outright lawlessness of the current regime and writing commentary about it that essentially mirrors what others write.

I need some time not spending up to four days a week writing two columns for no money, columns that are at best depressing.

If I were still at a newspaper doing this, I'd have people who were in the business to bounce ideas off, and some support for the research needed. I am not Robert Reich, who has paid staff. I have me and a computer and occasionally a bookshelf.

And I want to do some lifegiving things for myself, like making more music and creating art and (as long as ICE is not present anywhere near me) going out into the park and breathing the green air of trees. I want to not have the heaviness of the column hanging over my head. I would rather play my flutes, and guitar, and maybe try harp. We have one that belongs to my husband, but he doesn't play often.

And I want to write things like poetry and fiction that don't require me to wear my reductive Inverted-Pyramid-style brain.

So I will notify people, later this week, that it will be more occasional and probably less political.

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Library Update #6: Eviction

Specialty Paper

Every day I am packing up items from my office/library. If I can trash items, I route them to the trash pile. But most things, like the reams of paper above, I can’t bear to part with.

This room needs to be vacated by the end of the month – and there is a lot of stuff to deal with. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the boxes of stuff that have no home for the next couple of months.

( Hard to Let Go, Below the Cut )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Murder She Wrote

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fannish 50,
picspam

1001 fires going

at work. Gonna be a fun semester...not. However I have BIG classes this time out. It's a good thing. It's a bad thing. It's good to have many students. It's bad the way they made this happen. Sigh. Here's hoping that the students will be good. If nothing else I've had several already reaching out to tell me their 'i'm going to be away for sports' schedules, what book are we using, can I get a jump on things. At least some of them are excited and that makes it good for me.

And speaking of good for me, I finished the Hazbin Hotel

wipbigbang during the author's zoom tonight. WOO HOO (it's over 32K HOW?) That means I can be plotting the remaining The Owl House chapters for that entry into

wipbigbang on the trip home tomorrow. Or if not that then my outstanding

fandomtrumpshate story because damn I'm behind.

Hey look at me doing a fandom tuesday again after so long. I think I'll stick with Star Trek for the time being. So, The Next Generation...so many women to choose from, Beverly, Deanna, Laxwana, Natasha, Ro, Keiko, just to name a few. And as much as I would like to feature Laxwana because Majel really is the first woman of ST, she was rather one note for a long time.

However Beverly wasn't an instant love for me either

She was more Mom at first and let's be honest they rarely knew what to do with ANY of the women back in the 80s and 90s ST. Some of it was rough until we got to DS9/Voyager.

But as I said in my sabbatical presentation, I had zero rep to look at to see women doctors. All I had was Beverly to look at and say yes women CAN be doctors and in charge. So she became important to me. I loved seeing her. I hated some of her episodes of course (OMG the gothic romance Irish space ghost sex)

But for the most part she was smart, resourceful and strong. I could have had worse role models as an older teen.

But there is a one off character (okay 2 off) that might be my absolute favorite female in TNG: K'Ehleyr

To this day I want to have a pair of cats named Worf and K'Ehleyr (even though I ended up less thrilled with Worf by the end).

K'Ehleyr was also incredibly strong, smart and resourceful. She was sarcastic and a smart mouth and I saw a lot of myself in her. I loved that she flew in the face of Klingon traditions (which changed from more equals to whatever misogynistic nonsense it became on DS9 with Bergman)

What I hated was that they fridged her. I think that might have been one of the first times that happened in a show I really loved and it made me so angry. I'm still angry.

If you have never seen Star Trek: TNG I highly recommend it.

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Recovering from the infection, returning to work

My illness ran the usual course of a cold, though it took its time somewhat. From yesterday, my head felt rather clearer, even though I still had plenty of physical symptoms. So, I could work, and felt like doing other things too, rather than just sitting and resting. I still have some congestion and a sore throat but they're just inconvenient, I don't feel anywhere near as rotten.

I'll head into the office today. Because of other things going on at home, e.g., I have a dental appointment on Friday morning, today would end up being my only day onsite this week, so I want to go in at least sometime, and in recovery I would think I am well past being infectious.

I am up in the middle of the night because something happened with the toilet cistern so it wouldn't stop filling. I don't know how it gets into that mode, it's easy enough to remedy temporarily, but anything non-trivial in the middle of the night wakes me up. What annoying timing, I already didn't feel great and now I get to be sleep-deprived before commuting for a full day in another city.

I'd feel better if I were already more productive at work. It feels as if I take a while to get to grips with each aspect of what they do and my colleagues already have much of that familiarity. And, whenever it feels like I'm getting nearer finished with a task, it becomes apparent that actually I am not. Nobody's said, goodness, you're dangerously slow here, what's your issue? but I feel it plenty just from myself.

Part of it is getting used to Java again but more of it that I have never used some of their frameworks (my relevant background is mostly Hibernate and Spring) and I am still learning how their code is arranged, and how people like things to be done. It's certainly clear that my intuition often doesn't match others', sometimes quite strongly; each time I misjudge that, more time is wasted. I don't see why I won't get there in the end but, a couple of months in now, I would already rather like to be contributing better than I am. In the meantime, I'll keep on plodding through, and hoping that others remain more patient with me than I am with myself.

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OWO 2025 Letter

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Current Mood: blank

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Long Weekend

Welp. I've been posting about this under lock, but let's make a public one too. My younger brother and his wife were supposed to be visiting me this week (with them arriving today), but those plans were cancelled at the last minute due to a combination of several reasons.

I'd already asked off work for the rest of the week, and I'm not taking it back. I'm just going to take a five day weekend and call it a day. Which, you know, I could use the break from work, so it's not a bad thing. And, hey, this way I won't have to worry about a lack of spoons when I have to go back to work like I did when I was off for the Fourth of July and playing D&D all weekend.

Sadly, I don't have much in the way of extra money right now, so I can't do anything fun while I'm off work. I'm fairly stocked on groceries at least, so I won't have to worry about that. I'll take what I can get on that front.

Right now, my plans are to basically switch between playing video games, reading fanfiction, and writing fanfiction (specifically for Black Emporium and the Dragon Age Reverse Bang) for the next five days. We'll see if that changes, but that's what I'm aiming for right now at least.

Current Mood: sleepy

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Final Destination Movie Extravaganza!

Guess who just found out that ALL the Final Destination movies (including the new one) are on streaming services and can FINALLY have their movie marathon this Saturday??

So now despite the incredibly terrifying passage of time, I am EXCITED for this weekend!! I was also gonna try to go see the sing-a-long version of Kpop Demon Hunters since it comes to theaters this weekend, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the spoons or not, so I’ll see how this week pans out and make a decision from there! Saturday for sure is DEFINITELY Final Destination day!! >:D

My mom would’ve been so GEEKED that there was another FD movie, so I hope her spirit can live through me when I watch it. ; u; That and Final Destination is one of my top favorite old school horror movies, so I’m OVER THE MOON about this!! 🥰

Hope everyone is having a good week so far!! Been in one of those “fuck it, WE BALL” kinda moods when it comes to writing, so look forward to some writing here this week!! ^ o^)/

Barbie Inspiring Women Sally Ride doll

My office-mate Victoria, who some of you met at my party, gave me a Sally Ride Barbie https://creations.mattel.com/products/sally-ride-barbie-inspiring-women-doll-fxd77. She didn't expect to be sent three of them when she ordered it, so I've now got two of them, and have the goal of uniting the extra one with the person who really needs it. If you're that person, or if you know that person, let me know!

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Twinkle: PMD: Destruction Call x Cassette Beasts: Art: barkley under the stars

Fandom: PMD: Destruction Call (can tag as just pokemon) x Cassette Beasts
Rating: G/General
Artist notes: i have no idea how to tag cbcs/dekudogs sorry if im not doin it right lol
Content notes: it's a gif! also this is an au of barkley where instead of getting isekai'd into new wirral he ended up in the pmd: dc universe as one of the local fakemon (a laelapis specifically, he's also a delta pokemon, too.) lol
Summary: barkley under the stars!!!

( nice night under the stars... )

moar yarn

What I do when sick: more spinning.

Now that I can spin wool blends at all, next up: working on consistency.

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personal

(no subject)

. hi! its been a really long time, but i really want to get back to posting.

i haven't been doing great, to be honest. my ocd has spiraled out of control in the last few days and i've just now started to feel more grounded. thoughts about what happens after death, if i'm a terrible person, about my ex friend, all kinda happening at the same time and ugh. it was overwhelming.

i'm kinda done with the thoughts about being a bad person. they don't feel as strong anymore. but the death thoughts are still there and they make me really uncomfortable. i am going to die some day. that is so fucking unnerving to think of. i wish an afterlife was guaranteed... it would give me a lot of peace of mind to be honest.

it doesn't matter if there is or isn't though. not right now, at least. i am here for now. so i have to make the best life i can.

i think spirituality would probably ease my anxieties a bit, because i do tend to feel connected to spiritual ideas, but there's always uncertainty and i wish i could... not care.i have a friend who is convinced of his religious beliefs and i envy him for it, really. i hate the thought of leaving this behind. i like existing! i do not want to stop doing this. but a part of me says that this is all there is. that once i die it all goes poof. and that's it. and i guess that's not too bad? nothingness is neither good nor bad, i wont even feel it, but thats the scary thing isnt it? how can *i* not exist? its impossible to imagine.

i tell myself it'll be just like going to sleep. i know that's not it, but it's the closest thing i can think of.

i have hopes for... something. i dont know what. something beyond the physical. an afterlife sounds beautiful to me. but just because it sounds beautiful... doesnt mean its true.

being said, i guess if there really is nothing, theres no harm in exploring whatever ideas make sense to me though. and at least i'll die feeling more at peace if i really do end up believing in something of the sort.

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(no subject)

The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

( ungenerous readings below )