lucymonster | Network

Here are a handful of little things I've posted elsewhere recently!

Firstly, I received an anonymous ask about writing on Tumblr, which I thought I'd share here with my response:

How do you write for a variety of fandoms, especially ones you're new to? I can't do that without obsessively reviewing the source material, and consequently don't get any writing done. I want your ability!

My writing process is essentially:

- get into a canon
- devour the canon until I have a good sense of the characters’ voices
- get a fic idea
- OKAY NOW WRITE WRITE WRITE, WRITE BEFORE IT’S GONE

The trouble is that, although there’s a period in which I can hear the characters’ voices clearly, that sense of voice fades very quickly! I have to get the fic written in the narrow window in which I have the characters’ voices in my head, or I’ve missed my opportunity and the fic will forever languish unfinished.

Because writing fanfiction is such a time-sensitive thing for me, my fics tend to be short, and the writing period is often brief and intense; a lot of my fics go from conception to completion over just a few days. Some of my writing takes longer, but, the longer it takes, the greater the risk that I’ll lose my ability to write for those characters. I’ll sometimes go back to a shelved fic and finish it the next time I revisit the canon.

I hope you’re able to get more writing done! I don’t know exactly what things you’re aiming to write, but, if you’re struggling with long things, I can suggest giving shorter fics a try. Everyone’s different, of course, but that’s what works for me!

Secondly,

abyssal_sylph tagged me for a meme on Tumblr: The last fictional character in your photo library is the person you gonna sit next to on a 8 hour flight!

My reaction was very much 'oh, God, I hope it’s not Robert Grove, please don’t let it be Robert Gr—'

(GIF by CornleyPolyTechnicDramaSociety on Tenor)

It’s Robert Grove, of course, and I am his captive audience. I suppose I’d better brace myself for eight hours of him performing monologues at me and expecting applause. At least the experience might cure me of my terrible attraction to him. (Let’s be honest: it will probably make it worse.)

Finally, a tiny Goes Wrong Show ficlet, in response to a prompt from JennyC on Discord: Robert's point of view after Summer Once Again.

( The Goes Wrong Show, Robert and Dennis, 250 words, set after Summer Once Again. )

If you have any Goes Wrong ficlet requests of your own, send them my way! I am, of course, going to be biased towards suggestions involving Robert; I am willing to have a crack at non-Robert-centric concepts, but I can't guarantee that Robert won't sneak in there.

nnozomi

Reading The Tempest with yaaurens and company; I think it’s the first time I’ve read it through. I was Sebastian, who is a minor conspirator nobody’s ever heard of and gets some remarkably good lines (“He receives comfort like cold porridge,” “[in response to “He misses not much”] No; he doth but mistake the truth totally,” “Thou dost snore distinctly; there’s meaning in thy snores”). The play also inevitably brings to mind Jason of Jason and the Bard, dreaming up a quaint device to make the banquet vanish, and of course Antonia Forest’s production—Ginty finding Ferdinand interesting only when he’s played by Patrick (not unreasonably, I think), Lawrie relishing Caliban’s most colorful speeches, Miranda longing for Jan as Prospero and making Nicola laugh with her line readings, and then her eerie, wistful “…were I human.”

Went to graduation at the nighttime junior high (from which you graduate after you acquire a certain number of credits, not a certain number of years; many people take five or six years or more and that’s fine). Nine people graduating: a big cheerful young Nepali guy, an equally big cheerful fortyish Japanese lady, and seven middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies, at least one in her eighties. C, the Japanese lady, has a son in his late teens who graduated from the same nighttime junior high school the previous year; he was there to cheer his mom on, and she will be following him to nighttime high school, as will M, who is in her late fifties or sixties, quiet and modest and very bright. They were both in snazzy skirt suits; several of the other women had on glorious chima chogori. Lots of enthusiastic applause and speeches, singing the school song and also 乾杯, not to be confused with its Chinese counterpart 干杯 lol (although I think the Chinese one would work as a graduation song too!). Curiously, there were very few family members there apart from C’s son F; I wonder how many of the older Korean women were only able to start school once their husbands were out of the picture.

The nighttime junior high is in a neighborhood with a skyrocketing Vietnamese population (judging from the fact that every time I go there there’s a new Vietnamese restaurant or grocery); since I won’t be back there for a few months I took the opportunity to go into a little café and buy a couple of banh mi for dinner. Immediate positive impression because the song playing when I went in was 小幸运! (not Bai Yu’s version, but still). There was a bookshelf behind the cash register containing the complete Harry Potter series (I know, but) in both Japanese and Vietnamese. The sandwiches were also pretty good—one roast pork and one ham-and-fried-egg, with all the tasty trimmings (although my idea of a good sandwich is one with just barely enough bread to retain its structural integrity, the bread is always too thick for me regardless of what kind it is, oh well).

It's high school baseball time and I have been collecting the most remarkable names among the players, as usual; this season’s bunch includes 慈愛久 (Jake), 満詩 (Miuta), 空飛 (Takato) and his teammate 蒼海 (So), whose “sky and sea” combination I like; 覇 (Howl, I am not kidding, a) how do you get that pronunciation from the character, and b) are his parents fans of DWJ and/or Ghibli); 芽空 (Hisoka, God knows how), and 夢生愛 (Muua, poor kid), whose older brothers are 飛美希 (Hibiki) and 輝夢 (Kiramu). It’s not even that none of these are nice names, they’re lovely! If not necessarily what you’d expect from tanned crewcut kids whose main preoccupation is getting to first base. Just, parents all, please think of your kid having to spend his whole life explaining how to spell and/or pronounce his name!

Music for today: something I came across at random on YouTube, a concerto for flute and flute orchestra. The piece itself isn’t all that exciting, but the sound of so many flutes together is fantastic, mellow and melting and cool as water, why aren’t there more pieces for this kind of group?
Also listening to Seong-Jin Cho play the Chopin Scherzos, just dazzling.

Y’s project of getting me to watch 1980s anime movies continues; this time it was Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor, which was really surprisingly good. Not as pretty visually as the Gundam ones, on the whole, but (except for some comic distortion here and there) realistic in a way that makes you feel you’re watching live-action postwar Japan with big robots, including wonderful visual scenes of ordinary-Showa-era downtowns and abandoned areas. There’s a lot less in the way of big robot fights than in Gundam, and the ones they do have are significantly plot-related as opposed to “big battle scenes are fun” (sorry, Gundam, I’m oversimplifying, but still); the whole thing is almost like a murder mystery in the way they gradually work out what’s happening and why and how to stop it, it’s fascinating. Also, nobody dies! I was sure Captain Gotoh was going to be a dead mentor guy, having made his stirring speech and gone off on his own into the storm, but nope, he was fine. Shinohara the male lead is actually not nearly as annoying as he might be, and again there are more women and less fanservice than I would have expected from the eighties—Izumi is fine too (and I do like it that she’s the pilot and Shinohara is the data guy), but I love Nagumo and her ponytail and her professionalism.

I finished reading The People at No. 1 Siwei Street (or rather I finished reading the Japanese edition; now I have a copy of the Chinese original from the library which I am trying to work my way through before I have to return it. It is mostly not hard to follow, except reading in 繁体字 gives me a headache; my brain has no problem reading 历史 as lìshǐ, but it insists on reading 歴史 as rekishi, and as for something like 號, my brain wants to know why I’m suddenly reading something published before the war (this book is from 2023). Oh well, if I lived in Taiwan for a while I’d get used to it). It was a lot of fun, with very memorable characters (including a Jiajia whom I keep picturing as the one from Guardian, since she’s happy and feisty, even though this one is explicitly described as strongly featured, beautiful, and very tall, plus she’s 家家 instead of 佳佳, but still). Happy ending allowing for a sad flashback which I still don’t understand in full, other than as a way to examine late-twentieth-century Taiwanese sociopolitical history through the relationship of two not-quite-cousins who hate each other but have a close bond). I would love to make an English translation and may play with one, but it really should be done by someone who can read the original fluently and really knows from Taiwan.
Also reading The Luka/Chika Sisters by Nagano Mayumi, an old favorite who likes to play around with gender and sexuality in interesting, weird, low-key ways; will report back.

Photos: Magnolia, forsythia, some things that are probably not pink lilies-of-the-valley, and some early cherry blossoms. The most unexpected vending machine I’ve seen yet, with flavors from dark chocolate to raspberry, pistachio, and yogurt. Scenes from a recent day trip, including three gorgeous vessels, holding respectively sake, abalone stew, and the most delicious yokan I’ve ever tasted, containing raisins, figs, and apricots. (One of the deer around here, not pictured, is recently said to have wandered about 30km to our city to prowl around eating people’s gardens; maybe even deer get bored in the countryside?).

Be safe and well.

gingicat

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Current Mood: grateful

sabotabby

There was a lot of great content this week but one particularly moved me, and that's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's "If Not Us Than Who: The Russian Partisans at War Against Putin." (Part 1, Part 2).

My biggest disagreement with people who I'm otherwise in political lockstep with is Ukraine. Most (North American) leftists are wrong about this. I know this because I have actually been to Ukraine (and Russia), not just in touristy areas, and they for the most part haven't and don't know what they're talking about and are generally basing their opinions on either Cold War nostalgia, residual anti-imperialist trauma, or the appalling behaviour of some diaspora Ukrainian communities. My shitlib position is that you shouldn't invade other people's countries and kill them because you want their land or resources. Even if—and this is critical when we're talking about Palestine or Iran too—you don't like them and some of them are bad people. If that makes me a NATO stooge or CIA asset so be it.

Margaret and guest Charles McBryde share my opinion and also argue with other leftists about this, so you already know I'm going to agree with them. (Though not totally—we are all leftists here after all.) And you know who else does? A fuck of a lot of Russians. These two episodes focus on the frankly heroic actions of the Russian activists who resist Putin's authoritarianism, including Ruslan Siddiqui, who is genuinely cool not just for his political convictions but with the truly brass balls panache with which he acted. Margaret refers to him as the most cyberpunk guy she's ever heard of and this is true. I should write to him.

Anyway, it's a really wild ride about how to resist authoritarianism when regular political channels are cut off, which is of relevance in Russia and only in Russia, given that it's the only country that disappears people off the streets, murders its dissidents, and cracks down on freedom of expression.

regshoe

...on the back he saw a neat little résumé in Miss Pembroke’s handwriting, intended for such as him. “Allegory. Man = modern civilization (in bad sense). Girl = getting into touch with Nature.”

—The Longest Journey, chapter 12

~~Pan Pipes~~ The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911) is a collection of various of E. M. Forster's short stories originally published in magazines over the previous decade or so; it is dedicated to The Independent Review, one of those magazines and evidently an Apostles/Bloomsbury project, which had ceased publication some time previously. The stories are a delight and I enjoyed them very much, but I fear an attempt to explain why risks falling into the triteness quoted above, or else perhaps the other, at least more entertaining, way of getting things right-but-wrong (or wrong-but-right) of Charles Sayle's view on 'The Story of a Panic', described by Forster in the essay 'My Books and I':

Then he showed Maynard what the story was about. B—— by a waiter at the hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat on that valley where I had sat. In the subsequent chapters, he tells the waiter how nice it has been and they try to b—— each other again. [...] I was horrified and did not want to meet Charles Sayle. In after years I realised that in a stupid and unprofitable way he was right and that this was the cause of my indignation.

What shall I say about them, then? The stories, which may or may not be variously about Nature and b——y, are all more or less fantastical. The title story is meant very literally; it's about an omnibus that goes to Heaven (from Surbiton), and the bus is driven and Heaven peopled by famous authors and literary characters from through the ages. 'The Story of a Panic', 'The Road from Colonus' and 'The Curate's Friend' all feature classical themes; the first two are set in Italy and Greece respectively, while the Faun of the latter, haunting the hills of (of course) Wiltshire and usually 'only speaking to children' who forget him when they grow up, reminded me for a moment of Kipling's Puck, though Forster does more adult things with him. 'The Other Side of the Hedge' is also about Modern Civilisation and what it loses sight of, and is really more of an allegory than 'Other Kingdom', despite Agnes Pembroke's comment on the latter—for, what delighted me most of all in this collection, that story is (with a few minor alterations of detail) Rickie's story about the Dryad described in chapters 7 and 12 of The Longest Journey. Apparently Forster had written but not yet published it when he put it in the novel. Important and highly recommended reading for any Forster fan and anyone else who thinks this sort of thing sounds worthwhile.

the_comfortable_courtesan

We are pleas'd to announce the publickation today of Choices: Taking Decisions (Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, #25), in elecktronical form and as a pretty bound volume:

A Parliamentary election causes considerable upheaval to the summer plans of Society in general, and of Clorinda and her circle. But besides any choices concerning the government of the nation, several of them find that they have to make decisions touching on more personal matters.

though there is alas some delay in the production of the Google edition.

It is anticipat'd that the work will shortly be available via Overdrive for libraries.

The usual notes on Allusions and References have been provid'd.

vilakins posting in

no_true_pair

Title: Empty
Fandom: Blake's 7
Pairing/Characters: Kerr Avon & Roj Blake
Content Notes: None
Prompt: 27 March - Avon & Blake with the title "Empty"

Empty

swan_tower

Ars longa, vita brevis -- but even art doesn't last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you're doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there's notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it's much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom -- which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don't have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn't mean it's lasting. I've talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn't durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it's specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what's poetically known as "slow fire," gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, "preservation" usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don't need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it's perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it's less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another -- sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they've latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we're trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they're using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it's actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That's because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath -- and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original -- but where the line is between "touching up" and "adding your own ideas" may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to "restore" the missing portions according to their own vision -- look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de' Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the "restorers" Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it's fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/kvMTkk)

silverusagi

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Current Mood: tired

thistleingrey

No laptop games lately; taking notes on coursework has earned me a second referral to a occupational therapist specializing in hands. Not much leisure reading lately, due to eyestrain issues.

I've tried some diversions on my Android phone, over some months:

* CookieRun: Oven Smash (released this week) brings the franchise's extant characters into ad hoc PvP (player versus player), initially three against three. I like the idea that one may fall into combat alongside strangers and work together (presumably one may also play alongside in-game friends), but I'm not into real-time PvP. Time elapsed: about 15 minutes, including listening to the cutscenes---I set it to English text and Korean audio.
( there's a bunch of these because none of them lasted )

That's a lot of casual disappointments that didn't matter! The thing about many puzzle diversions that're slightly more challenging than "too simple" is that they increase eyestrain or require my hands in ways that I currently can't support. Like, I very briefly tried Strange Jigsaws on the laptop, and then I stopped because of eyestrain and hands. It's good, though!

Laptop demos I haven't tried yet (but have installed): Aethus, Hozy, Momento, Relooted, Scriptorium, Winter Burrow.

Have you played something lately that you didn't dislike? I'm still looking. :)

ysabetwordsmith posting in

common_nature

Yesterday we visited the Coles County Community Garden. (See the right side and left side of the Charleston Food Forest.)

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

mistressofmuses

What a lovely summer we're having this spring...

We set an all time record for a high temperature in March yesterday. The previous high temp record for the month was set... last Saturday. That broke the previous all-time record that was set... last Thursday. So yeah, we broke that all time high temp record three times in seven days! This is normal and fine!

Callery pears, my beloathed. But look how happy the bees are!

Seven pictures of mainly flowers and pets:

Went to Petco to get crickets, but they had their Halloween stuff on clearance. So Bella got a planchette costume, with "ouija board" blanket, haha. (The orange fish was also on clearance. It has proven to be quite a hit!)

A few pictures from last week:

A little bird nest, presumably from last year.

I was trying to get a picture of a bee here, too, but instead just caught it flying away, ha.

From last weekend, at my mom and Taylor's house:

Someone left a Thanksgiving turkey on the floor. (Poor Jaspurr, it's not his fault he looks like a turkey.)

Sometimes he doesn't look like a turkey! Look how comfy he is!

My mom's lemon tree is blooming. It smelled lovely!

Daffodils in my mom's front garden!

And then a couple pictures from today:

Redbud blooming!

The very sudden emergence of an early lilac flower!

(This makes me think of

spikedluv. I miss you.)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

yuuago

Still in the process of deciding what to do with my computer - the one whose hard drive died earlier in the week. (Well, I'm pretty sure it's dead.)

If I do end up getting something entirely new, I'm not sure what kind of specifications I should look for. Typically I get the most beefed-up laptop that I can afford and then run it until it dies. This previous one lasted seven years, and the one before that lasted ten and a half. So, I guess you could say I had expected to get about three more years out of this thing. (And it was running totally fine until a few days ago!)

...Come to think of it, if I just replace the hard drive, I'll also have to do research on that because it's not like you can just buy any old drive and plop it in and expect it to work, right? It's never that simple. :Va

Right now I'm using the small notebook with Linux Mint installed on it, the one I use for travel. And like... it's fine, I do love it, but definitely not optimal for extended everyday use, since it's pretty tiny.

bluapapilio

Watch on YouTube

@ Spotify

I'll jump, I'll jump, if you ask,
I'll say, "How high?"
I'll run like a shiver down your spine
For you, I would give you my own life 🎵
Faouzia - Fur Elise

Current Mood: full

mallorys_camera

The world is a fuckin' mess.

I just broke up a fight in the Stewart’s parking lot. Guy parked in a handicapped space, another guy called him on it. They were actually exchanging blows. I got between them, screaming, "Stop it, stop it, stop it," (which was a really stupid thing to do), and when they saw that I’m an old lady, they backed down.

I’m still shaking.

###

This came on top of a brutal day.

Phillip Osario (not his real name) forgot one of his W2s yesterday.

He brought it in today.

Phillip Osario is working four jobs just to stay afloat, but the paltry amount he made at that fourth job shaved $2,000 off his refund.

He stared at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes: "So, don't put the fourth job in."

I sighed and shook my head. "Doesn't work that way. I have to."

"But I don't want you to!"

"I know," I said. "But if I know about the job, I have to put it in."

Phillip Osario glared at me through slitted eyes.

If I had to guess, I'd guess he was a reformed gangbanger. Beautiful face, Orpheus in the asphalt underworld, with a tattoo of a woman's name in ornate copperplate script veering alongside his left eye. I made up a bio for him: Something—the birth of a child?—had made him want to make an abrupt about-face in his life, but now he was struggling in a world that had no use for him, had no place for him. I felt every hour of the meaningless drudgery he put in to get by—a few hours in Walmart, a few hours at the Home Depot. An underling. The lowest of the low whose real job was to let other people order him around. I wanted to tell him, Take the $3,000 and enroll in a HVAC course at a community college! You'll make $100,000 a year. But I didn't. Because we didn't have a telepathic bond, much as I wanted to pretend we did.

So, instead, I lectured him on all the dire things that befall people who lie to the IRS about their revenue streams. "They impose interest and high penalties. They garnish your wages. And in this day of AI, nobody gets away with lying to the IRS anymore. It's impossible, they will find you out. It's just a matter of time."

Eventually, I talked him into filing.

But I felt like crying.

###

He left, and Angel Meduro (not his real name) came in.

Angel Meduro looked a lot like Angel Batista in Dexter, right down to the porkpie hat. And he made a shitload of money doing something for the U.S. Treasury.

Angel Meduro wanted to do Married Filing Separately.

"How long have you been separated?" I asked.

"Oh, we live together," he said. "But I got debts & things I want to protect her from."

"That's fine," I said. "We'll still need her social security number though."

"They didn't need it last year," said Angel Meduro.

"Really?" I said. "Then whoever did your taxes last year did them wrong. That's a hard and fast requirement for Married Filing Separately."

We went back and forth a little, and eventually, he started trying to call his wife to get her permission to use her social security number.

She answered the sixth time he called.

He had her on speaker phone.

"What the fuck are you calling me for?" she asked furiously. "I told you I was going to the acupuncture guy!"

"Sorry, mami. But I'm with the tax lady, and she says I need your social security number—"

"What are you, some kind of fucking moron? I am not giving my social security number—"
She said a bunch of other things, too, that I can't remember except that they were all pretty humiliating, and after she finally hung up the phone, he looked at me with haunted eyes: "Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I can't do this."

The light bulb had already gone off over my head by this time: She was falsifying her filing status! Probably filing as Head of Household so she could rake in the earned income and child tax credits, and didn't want him imperiling her scam!

Poor Angel Meduro.

I hope she gives good blow jobs.

shuufleur93 posting in

100fandoms

Fandoms are: Fire Country, 9-1-1, Mission: Impossible (Movies), Doctor Odyssey, Younger

006. home. Équilibre (3414 words), Doctor Odyssey, Max Bankman/Avery Morgan/Tristan Silva. Written in French. Summary: Max and Tristan were eager to see Avery again after she left for medical school, but a few setbacks will delay their reunion.

018. fix. Lifesaver (622 words), Younger, Kelsey Peters & Diana Trout. Summary: Kelsey has a surprising new partner-in-crime for a gala.

019. crack. L'annonce (596 words), Fire Country, Luke Leone & Manny Perez. Written in French. Summary: Luke tells Manny he's leaving.

027. fear. Dernier souffle (601 words), Mission: Impossible, Ilsa Faust/Ethan Hunt. Written in French. Summary: Ethan is running. After criminals, terrorists, his friends, his enemies. And now, after Ilsa. Hoping he’ll make it in time.

034. fall. Face contre terre (1117 words), 9-1-1, Evan "Buck" Buckely & Tommy Kinnard. Written in French. Summary: Tommy was no stranger to death, but seeing Buck collapse was perhaps more than he could bear.

Link to my card (20/100).

senmut posting in

no_true_pair

Title: Propriety
Fandom: Talents Series (Anne McCaffrey)
Pairing/Characters: Afra Lyon & Isthia Raven
Content Notes: None
Prompt: 26 Afra Lyon asks Isthia Raven to go to the [choice] because...

( Propriety )

julian

Crash upshot: I didn't even get a headache. Fuckin' weird. Calluna was basically vague and headachy and a little concussed for 2 days, and is now mostly OK.

( Crash stuff and emotions, cut because slightly long. )

In other news, I have now gotten one of my new ATM cards, but not the other, and I haven't gotten my new updated-address driver's license or registration yet, nor my new wallet, so I have presents still upcoming. (Presents from myself. I like presents, so sue me.) The new wallet will be purple, and is redundant for now, since I was able to (finally) get to the Arlington Police Department a couple days ago and get my old wallet, which still had my $20 cash in it, and also my cat's prescription for her meds, and all the cards and stuff, so thank you universe for being gentle.

Also, I have been being frustrated in my photography habit because I couldn't find the charger for the specific camera I really wanted to use, currently, and I found two of them in my excavation of my car! Woo. (There's another one *somewhere* that I carefully packed in *some box or bag*, but I don't know where it iiiiiis. I was about to buy another one, but now don't have to.)

And now, a picture of my car (at the scene, with cell phone), cut because one cuts pictures. For some reason I didn't take any pictures, at the scene or elsewhere, of the entire length of the passenger's side, but one can see the issues. Also, I have been trying, for the past more-than-a-month, to fix my passenger side mirror, which I had munged in my garage. I kept having to reschedule because of Other Things Going On. So uh, don't have to worry about *that* anymore...

( Picture. )

*good call, Gingi

stonepicnicking_okapi

Today, my baby turns 11! Happy birthday Minisculus!

1. I need to make the cake. Now. [Edited to add: it's in the oven now]

2. The other big thing is that BTS dropped their new album Arirang. The seven have finished their military service obligation and are getting ready to go on a world tour. They performed a one-hour showcase of the new songs in a historic square in Seoul and now are making the rounds doing promotions.

I like the album more and more as I listen to it. I am so glad I got the Netflix. I think I have watched the showcase at least 10 times (more in bits and pieces) since it aired live on Saturday morning. I pre-ordered a version of the album and it came but I wasn't entirely smitten with my photocards so I ordered a different version of the album today which comes with STICKERS (very important) and photocards I think I am going to like more. For ARMY reading this, I got the simple Rooted in Music version and the other version I ordered today is Living Legends. Needless to say, I did not tell the boys' father I ordered another version of the same album. These are the secrets which keep a marriage strong. I am looking forward to

bethctg visiting in August and going to the concert when they come here. RM seems to be recovering from his sprained ankle and I hope the boys stay healthy and strong for the long journey ahead. They performed at the Guggenheim in NYC which was very nice, elegant, classy. I will be posting videos and fan cams as we go along. They did a Spotify event in NYC and were looking very good, more fuck boy style.

So when I was a nurse in the nursing home a long time ago, there was a resident who was a fan of Prince and she had a little VCR and watched Prince videos (concerts, Purple Rain, etc) day and night and I always thought it was a bit bizarre but I will be her one day with my BTS videos.

3. So air force guy moved two weeks ago and I have been filling in here and there at work, picking up shifts when regulars go on vacation or call out. I had a VERY stressful lady last week. I had a quiet guy yesterday. I am supposed to start a regular next Wednesday. I still have jazz man and my Indian lady as regulars.

4. Minor is doing track and chorus. Minisculus is doing soccer and gaming.

5. I am reading The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. I am listening to Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals read by the author Oliver Burkeman. Stil trying to get through the contemporary black poetry anthology This is Honey.

6. I watched The Glass Onion (Knives Out) and loved it. This is my kind of film. I really loved Brick, too, back in the day.

Here is a fan cam of the Spotify event:

Watch on YouTube

5. No weight loss. Sigh.

bluapapilio

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

teach me the art of war

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When The Plane Landed, He Would Invoice Me For My Attendance.

meaning in thy snores

it's good to ask for help

podcast friday

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E. M. Forster

Another publickation day

Empty (Blake's 7 - Kerr Avon & Roj Blake)

New Worlds: Art Conservation

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recentish android game tastings

Photos: Coles County Community Garden

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The World Is Nuts

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Fic: "Propriety" (Talents Series, Afra and Isthia)

A subject line about a car

Into the Void: Baby not Baby no more edition

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