Reading

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Heather and Broom, which is accidentally a reread, because I bafflingly forgot to record it the first time I read it. I suspected this from the first story and was sure after the second, which is about a woman who bakes marvelous cakes who gets kidnapped by the fairies. Bake us a cake, they said! But of course, the woman said craftily. I’ll just need my big mixing bowl… and my spoon… and all my ingredients… and I can’t stir at the right rate without the thump of my dog’s tail to guide me, and can’t focus without my baby here so I can see he’s all right (the baby begins to cry incessantly), and ooooh did you remember to get me an oven??

At which point the exhausted fairies send her home, and the baker (as kind-hearted as she is clever) promises to leave them a cake once a week on the mound.

So you can see why I decided to keep on and reread all the stories over again. That one’s my favorite, but they’re all a good time.

I also finished Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery (translated by Sarah Jane Hails), which I’ve been meaning to read for years, and… maybe I should have read it years ago, when I read Sophie’s World and The Christmas Mystery. Reading it now, I found the philosophizing repetitive (isn’t it amazing that the world exists at all! Well, maybe it was the first ten times you said it), and although the way the whole story fits together has a charming puzzle-box neatness, at the same time ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, because I was under the impression that it was a story collection by Sorche Nic Leodhas, but in fact it is an anthology that showed up in my Sorche Nic Leodhas search because it has one (1) story by her. Reading it anyway because who doesn’t like a good sea legend! Started off with a bang with a story about a girl who gives up her soul to become a mermaid to join her drowned lover… only in giving up her soul, she brought him back to life, and now he lives on land and she in the sea and ne’er the twain shall meet.

What I Plan to Read Next

After the two aforementioned failed attempts, I will at last achieve my Sorche Nic Leodhas book with Sea-Spell and Moor-Magic.

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sighs (Harry Potter thoughts, sorta)

Just looked up Dalgliesh on Wikipedia to see if there's more forthcoming TV that I'll forget to actually watch.

No word on if/when season four.

So I clicked over to Bertie Carvel's page to see if he was busy. ( negativity about the HP show )

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Autumntide

October is almost upon us! Although the weather (after an early burst of lovely cool temperatures) is feeling summery again, I’ve got autumn on my mind, as I feel that the Hummingbird Cottage deserves to be properly decorated for the season.

First of all, I’m going in for decorative gourds this year. I’ve made a decorative gourd centerpiece, strategically based gourds in my china cabinet and the tea nook, and am considering a small gourd art installation in the upstairs bathroom when my guest comes to visit for Feast of the Hunter’s Moon.

Once the gourds have spent sufficient time being decorative, most of them will be roasted and eaten, although a few are too small and also of unknown species so will probably escape the general conflagration.

Second, I’m hard at work on a Halloween cross-stitch. This pattern is from Lindsay Swearingen’s Creepy Cross Stitch, but I also cracked and bought Witchy Stitching, because apparently “spooky” is how I like my cross stitch. Actually I would like to do cross-stitches for ALL the holidays and switch them out seasonally, but I’ve had more luck finding patterns I like for Halloween than many of the others. A lot of cross-stitch patterns are in a cutesy Mary Englebreit-meets-Precious Moments style which is not my thing. Particularly a problem for Christmas patterns!

But returning to the Halloween cross stitch. I’m on track to finish the stitching in plenty of time; the real question is whether I have the stamina to get it ironed and framed, as the pattern is too big to display in an embroidery hoop.

Bramble, being a black cat, brings a Halloween atmosphere with him wherever he goes.

And of course I’m planning a few of my favorite autumn treats: pumpkin bread, pecan bars, perhaps some mulled apple cider. Have already acquired my beloved hard cider Autumntide.

Last but not least, I’ve stocked on spooky books for Halloween: Tasha Tudor’s Pumpkin Moonshine, L. M. Montgomery’s Among the Shadows (a collection of Montgomery’s darker short stories), Vivien Alcock’s The Cuckoo Sister and The Stonewalkers, Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. And at long last I’m having a crack at Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire!

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fandom: dc

fandoms past

Forgot to include this in my last post: I've been getting a bunch of comments on my Ted/Booster long fic, so I thought maybe there was new canon for them. After realising that most of my old resource sites have changed since I was last in comics fandom, I turned up that DC doesn't seem to have done any major comics with either character in about ten years. I feel like DCEU (and maybe even James Gunn) teased a Booster Gold TV show a couple times? And Ted was in the Blue Beetle movie that immediately got made non canonical. But nothing recently.

Then I reread the long fic (I'm doing school work, I swear!), and remembered how much I loved my stupid boys, and also how rushed that fic was, and that it maybe needed another editing pass or five. Oh well. Heady days of early fandom love and tight exchange deadlines.

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Scattered Thoughts (Mostly fandom, & 2 recs)

Democracy Now: Black Liberation Activist Assata Shakur, 78, Dies in Cuba After Decades in Exile.

I'm grateful for all the work she did, and all the people she inspired. I'm sorry she never got to go home. I don't know what she believed about death, but I hope she's home now.

I've been engaging in fandom very little, but here's a couple things I really loved:

The Tailor by

SoHeresDaThing
Fandom: The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Ben Grimm/Female Reader)
Word Count: WIP (34k and counting).
Rating: Mature
Summary: You were just a tailor. A nobody. An old friend of Sue's from college she happened to remember before her wedding. You'd helped her then, gotten them all fitted before the big day. That was... before everything. Now they were different. Now the world saw them different. And still, after it all, Sue's calling you again to come help her friend.
Notes: This is a WIP, but the author is updating regularly, so I think she's good for it. It's also readerfic, and if that's not your thing... maybe give it a try? There's no Y/N stuff, and the reader is more of a fully realised OFC than the ephemeral readers you get for say tumblr prompt fills, so this is basically a romance novel in second person. There's a plot and everything. The relationship is really sweet, and there's both lovely angst and a cool look at the team's life before the film.

As It Was by

GlendyLucast
Fandom: The Pacific (Andy/Eddie)
Word Count: ART!
Rating: NSFW
Summary: A mini comic inspired by Hozier "As It Was" featuring my favorite pair from The Pacific.
Notes: I don't know the song, but this art is really really beautiful, and really really sad. Bang on for this pairing. Love it! (Apparently this got their tumblr banned, so it'd be extra nice to send them some love on AO3.)

Is anyone else really enjoying the Deluxe* edition of Miley Cyrus' Something Beautiful? It's so 1980s and off kilter, like someone spun a Madonna album into slightly abstract electronica with a bunch of spoken word, but also kept some of the pop hits. Pitchfork complained that it's a "concept album without a concept" which is fair, but might also be why I like it so much.

The pop queens being into the 1980s is working for me, generally. We're getting it from Miley, Sabrina and Doja Cat this year, that I can think of off the top of my head.

RAYE's ramping up for a second album, and I don't know what to think. I love everything she does, of course, but there's no way she can/should try for the intensity of My 21st-Century Blues, and the singles so far seem like it's going to be more jazzy.

* I'm so tired of deluxe editions. This is why no one buys music anymore! You just roll out an album, and then days/weeks/months later there's the same album again but with more songs on it. What's the point? If you have more songs, and can't wait for the next album cycle, put out a fucking EP! It's not quite as obnoxious as the Album Part 1/Full Album Later thing, but it's still very annoying to me. I'm not blaming the artists, though, as I assume it's B.S. from the label.

Me: I'm trying to manifest more time to read non-school stuff by getting novels from the library.
Brother: Is that working?
Me: No. Now I just have a pile of library books.

I was really excited for the new season of Peacemaker, then haven't been watching it. Or anything else.

Tarot Spread for Mabon

Done somewhat belatedly, see card #3.

Reading as usual from

TheWitchOfTheForest: Mabon & Ostara (Someone still needs to talk to her about her special fonts, but oh well.)

1. What needs to be harvested in my life right now?
Six of Swords (Oh. Wow. Okay.)

2. How do I welcome and sustain more balance in my life?
Two of Pentacles (I mean... yeah. Fuck you, deck.)

3. What areas of my life need more balance?
Page of Pentacles (I'M AWARE!)

4. What good will emerge from the darkness?
The Moon (Oh. That's really beautiful.)

5. How can I continue to grow in the dark half of the year?
Three of Swords (And now I'm going to go cry.)

Steel Magnolias + Global Fest

We've hit the busy season at work, so I haven't been posting much, but a student just canceled at the last minute and I have a couple of recent shows I want to write about!

1. The local Civic Theater put on Steel Magnolias. I've seen the movie (in a packed cinema full of women about twenty years older than I am; this must have been a formative film for a generation) and although I didn't love it, I was curious about the stage play because I heard that it all took place in one room, the hair-dresser's salon.

So of course when I had a chance to see the stage play I jumped at it, and of course Civic Theater was ALSO full of women about twenty years older than I am, because once again this film was apparently formative for a generation. I thought the first act dragged a bit, but overall I quite liked it. The single set and limited cast (you hear about but never see the men) heightens the emotion, I think. M'Lynn knocked it out of the park in the last act, and of course grumpy Eeyore-ish Ouiser is always a good time.

2. I also went to Global Fest, which is not a show per se but a festival with food booths, craft booths, a stage with mostly dance and singing shows, etc. When I was a kid we went every year (my mom helped with the food booths for years) and I always liked to hit up the bonsai room, watch the bobbin lace makers, stop in the pottery workshop... The pottery was not exactly global-themed, but the pottery workshop lived in the building where most of Global Fest took place, so why not?

In the intervening years, Global Fest has changed management, and I was distrait to discover that the only free attraction remaining is the stage show. Which is not negligible! Who doesn't love a lion dance! But there's no more bonsai room, no more craft demonstrations, no more pottery, just a bunch of booths selling stuff. I enjoy buying a pastry as much as the next person, but it felt like a lot of the soul had gone out of the event.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I Just Finished Reading

The busy season has struck at work, so my reading has slowed down, but I’m still chugging along. I picked up Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? (translated by Bruno Navasky) because I liked the cover, learned from the front cover flap that it’s one of Miyazaki’s favorite books, and therefore of course I had to read it. The novel was intended as a guidebook to ethics for Japanese schoolchildren, and I think would have blown my tiny mind if I read it at thirteen. I’ve missed the window for it to become a formative text for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, as a glimpse of a very different side of Japan in the 1930s. (Yoshino never mentions Japan’s wars of imperialist expansion, presumably because everything he would have liked to say would have gotten him thrown back in prison, where he had already languished for 18 months for his socialist beliefs.)

Mary Stolz’s Ferris Wheel, one of Stolz’s weaker books, as it ambles around without going anywhere. Our heroine Polly doesn’t get along with her little brother Rusty, is losing her best friend Kate because Kate is moving to California, meets a new girl who might be a friend but really seems like kind of a boring friend candidate… Good descriptions of life in Vermont, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached Part III of A Sand County Almanac. The first two parts are both close observations of places that Leopold knows well, and therefore perennially fascinating as well-considered firsthand observation always is. Part III is more about the Theory of Wilderness, which is less interesting to me, but I keep on keeping on.

What I Plan to Read Next

Despite my reservations about Ferris Wheel, I still plan to read the sequel Cider Days, just because the title sounds so perfectly autumnal.

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itpe

2025 Dear Podficcer Letter

Thank you so much for making podfic! It is my life-blood when my day job gets monotonous. Here’s some of my preferences, including favorite characters/ships. However, I'm very multishippy and also enjoy Gen so please don't feel super beholden to my faves. I’d rather you do something you enjoy working on :-)

Fandoms/Ships:

KPop Demon Hunters: Current obsession, shipping Mira/Rumi/Zoey and sub-combinations thereof. I don't mind Jinu but I'm pretty uninterested in the other demon boys. Bobby is very fun and I love when he shows up in fics. My Celine take is that she tried her best and still fucked up, so I would prefer not to receive fics with her as the over the top villain.

Good Omens: Pretty much read Aziraphale/Crowley for shipping, but I'd also be interested in Nina/Maggie and Muriel. I've read the book in addition to seeing the show and am still enjoying reading/re-reading things from throughout the history of the fandom.

MCU: Favorite movies/shows are

Captain America: The Winter Soldier,
Black Panther
Captain Marvel
Black Widow
Ms. Marvel
Agent Carter

I lean towards stories arising from those or featuring the characters that appear in those and I especially enjoy F/F in the fandom

Wonder Woman: Diana/Etta and/or Steve, assorted pairings of Amazons. I have read some comics runs and loved the 2017 movie; I am mostly ignoring WW1989, but I have seen it if there's a fic that incorporates it you think is good.

Check, Please!: Jack/Bitty, Ransom/Holster, Snowy/Tater are my faves, don't enjoy Jack/Parse

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: Phryne/Jack, Phryne/Mac

Ratings: Any

Favorite things:
Slow Burn/Angst with a Happy Ending, Pining, Magical/Supernatural AUs, Crossover AUs, Fake Relationships, Kink Negotiation, BDSM, Funny Ensemble Shenanigans, Humor in general. Things I've written or bookmarked are also always good options, if you're feeling stuck. My ao3 is

justaphage

Not for me:
Age play/Pedophilia (mentions of past abuse as a child okay, if brief) , Daddy/Mommy Kink, Watersports/Scat, Infidelity of a protagonist, Permanent major character death.

Fic meme from impala_chick

Haven't done this one in a while. Following AO3, not the drabbles/ficlets only posted to DW. Also haven't written in a while, so most of these are a few years old.

Share the first and last lines of the last five stories you have posted to AO3.

The Fire and the Ember, Masters of the Air, Marge/Peggy

First: They didn't really need to climb in through Marge's bedroom window, it wasn't like her parents didn't know that Peggy was spending the weekend, but it was tradition at this point.

Last: She pressed her nose against the back of Marge's neck, and did just that.

A Fire in Arkansas, Band of Brothers, Johnny/Bull

First: Johnny figured that the old saw "smooth runs the water where the brook is deep" had been invented by someone who'd known Bull Randleman, but even he didn't expect what his corporal said as they sat in a meagre pool of shade half a mile out of Helena, Arkansas.

Last: He clapped Bull on the arm, Bull shoved him back, and they jogged forward towards the rising sun.

Natasha's Christmas Plans, Top Gun: Maverick, Natasha/Callie

First: "So here's the plan," Natasha said as she closed the hatch to the stateroom she shared with Callie.

Last: First chance she got, she was going to find some plastic mistletoe to tape to the bottom of her bunk, but for now they didn't need it.

Across the Waves, Across the Heather, Kidnapped! by RLS, Davie/Alan

First: Alan landed on the deck of the Covenant breathless and reeling, all those good men dead, and nearly himself as well.

Last: "Oh, I could kiss you!" Alan cried, and then did.

Every Time He Hears Their Voices (An End of the Affair Remix), Band of Brothers, Don/Skip/Alex

First: This is the moment Don has lived in since the tenth of January 1945: He's tucked back away from the line, catching a few minutes rest as he tries to choke down beans that half froze the instant Joe Domingo ladled them onto his plate.

Last: This is what does: all of the days after.

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poetry

A Poem

"Beatitudes for a Queerer Church" by Jay Hulme

Blessed are the outcasts;
the ostracized, the outsiders.

Blessed are the scared;
the scarred, the silent.

Blessed are the broken;
for they are not broken.

Blessed are the hated;
for they are not worthy of hate.

Blessed are those who try;
those who transform, who transition.

Blessed are the closeted;
God sees you shine anyway.

Blessed are the queers;
who love creation enough to live the truth of it,
despite a world that tells them they cannot.

And blessed are those
who believe themselves unworthy of blessing;
what inconceivable wonders you hold.

Very Done with Gen AI this week

Watch on YouTube

Content notes for suicide, self harm and grooming, on this one. I'd seen reference to this story, but hadn't realised how bad it was.