spiderwolves | Reading

A few months (?) ago, Discord updated on my computer and promptly stopped working. [It would technically launch, but the program window was just a blank rectangle.) Subsequent updates (which happen pretty much every time I relaunch my browser) installed cheerfully enough and made no difference. I grumpily chalked it up to not having updated my OS in ages (I'm very resistant, but usually enough things eventually get creaky or stop working that I give in and get

scruloose to update the system), and since Discord was still working on my phone, I figured that was that for the foreseeable future.

Then a couple of days ago, I let Discord install its newest update...and suddenly everything worked again. o_o I certainly wasn't going to complain, but it surprised me enough that I mentioned it to Kas on the weekend, and having just dealt with some Discord shenaniganry himself, he had an answer: Discord has decided it doesn't play nicely with some VPN locations, and I had happened to change my location setting to one it liked.

I mostly lurk on Discord, but there are a couple where I make tentative attempts at being social, and my dislike of typing more than a sentence or two at a time on my phone meant I was even quieter than usual for a while there, so this is a good development. But also, WTF, Discord.

Did I forget to mention the new-to-me Christmas ice cream here? It looks like I did.

A local ice creamery (Dee Dee's) does Advent calendars, which I had largely forgotten about until I saw mention of it on Bluesky, at which point I was safe from ordering one (too late!), but it got me to look at their seasonal flavors. Next thing I knew, I was asking

scruloose to stop at a local-groceries shop that carries their ice creams, because I had to know what the chicken bones* flavor was like.( more about that, plus a cheese stash )

Current Mood: blank
Current Music: Blackmore's Night - Christmas Eve

umadoshi

Blessed Yule and solstice, friends. May this next turn of the year be better to all of us than the one that's just ended.

Impressively and unexpectedly, we didn't lose power on the weekend (so many people did!); not really coincidentally, Bucky remains undecorated. We also haven't put up any lights or the wreath outside (probably just as well, given the winds), and I didn't even think of that until maybe yesterday. Oh, well.

(I no longer have any real hope of finishing a draft of this rewrite before Christmas, since I'm getting such a late start on work today and we have plans for much of Christmas Eve once

scruloose's half-day of work ends. It's fine. I've been doing other things. *shrugs*)

A few nights ago I guess I ~slept wrong~, as I woke up Saturday with a very unhappy neck. Yesterday was better, and today is better again, and I'm lucky to not have this kind of thing happen more often (*knocks wood*), but it's so annoying as well as painful. Body, if you're taking damage while sleeping, why don't you move to a better position?! Does the conscious brain need to handle everything around here? (Thankfully no.)

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Tori Amos - Star of Wonder

umadoshi

Since I'm vaguely tracking things we've been making: a few days ago we made Smitten Kitchen's gingerbread apple upside-down cake. It's tasty, although I didn't like it nearly as much as the SK Mom's Apple Cake that we made not that long ago. (

scruloose likes it more than I do, for the record.) Now I mostly just want to make an actual gingerbread. ^^;

(My brain keeps starting to compose a post or posts about my currently-annoyingly-complication feelings about holiday baked goods etc., between our intensely-covid-cautious life and my still-newish need to stay aware of my blood glucose, but will I actually manage to write about it? Who knows. It's exhausting.)

I started my first day of vacation waking ahead of my alarm from a weird, teeth-clenchingly stressful dream, possibly one of a sequence, and it takes me a while to shake off dreams like that. >.< I've gotten a couple of household things done/underway, though, and am sitting down to do some manga work once I've posted this.

We still haven't decorated Bucky; he comes with lights, which are the most important part of a Christmas tree, especially without the smell of a real tree, and at least one year we bought our tree and put lights on it and never did anything more, and that was fine. I guess it's possible this'll be another such year. (Although we're due for strong winds and heavy rain tonight and into tomorrow, and if we lose power, I guess that's something we could do tomorrow afternoon.)

But we got most of our other fragments of decor up last night, and this morning I put out my Nativity set for the first time in a few years. It's wooden, but a couple of the pieces have taken damage over the years nonetheless (before my time, or when I was young enough that I don't remember what happened), and having it out around the cats has made me nervous since my mother gave it to me* several years ago. But a few months ago I bought a piece of display wall shelving for my office (and my office mostly stays shut when I'm not in it for long), and the set fits in it fairly well, so now it's there and I've got my fingers crossed.

(Also, this year I bought an old-fashioned ceramic tree from a local artist, and it's on a speaker under the wall display, so realistically, if a cat gets up on my desk where they shouldn't be, I'll know about it from the tree going down. [Which I really hope it doesn't, because it's breakable and the lights aren't actually attached, so that's all kinds of cat hazard in a package. And thus, it's in my office; if the cats were actually prone to getting on my desk and messing with things, I wouldn't have bought the tree at all, but even Sinha is really pretty good about it.])

*I think I mentioned at the time that this is the Nativity set of my childhood, carved of olive wood. My mother's parents once--in the '50s, I think? When she was a kid--were in Jerusalem over Christmastime, and brought it home. Mum deciding to pass it on to me is genuinely one of the best gifts she's ever given me.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Annie Lennox - The First Noel

erinptah

…not actually a full-on review post, I just couldn’t think of a pithier title, when the actual subject is:

The weird experience of reading/watching two different things right in a row that both went “btw, Hell is official canon here, people are actively being tortured, ok moving on, none of our heroes are gonna have any concern about that ever again.”

One was the recent movie Genie, where, yeah, it was a throwaway gag. And the movie overall was one of those “MC gets infinite wishes, never even thinks to drop by the nearest hospital and start wishing cures on people” stories. So you can’t expect much.

(MC does wish for his greedy boss’s fortune to be donated to a housing nonprofit! I was delighted when that came up! Then…he time-travels and retcons it, and never re-wishes it. Whyyy.)

But still! This happens:

Careless statement of “I wish you would go to hell”
(This part is fine, it’s a genie story, gotta get in a valuable lesson about being careful what you wish for)
Hasty “I wish he would come back from hell!”
Victim reappears, sooty and singed, understandably ticked off
So now we know some form of eternal flaming torment is real, AND there’s no foolproof filter on who goes there, AND your genie pal has the power to free people from it
None of this is ever mentioned or thought about again ever!

Nobody involved in making this movie ever second-guessed that…?

—

Anyway, the other incident is Camp Damascus, the “what if Chuck Tingle decided to write serious horror” novel. (For a YA level of “serious horror.” Which is about the level I like to deal with, so that worked for me.)

Real mixed feelings about this book. It has good points, it has bad points. Not mad that I spent my time reading it, but it did kinda feel like the first draft of a better book.

But, uh. It sure is A Choice to write a novel about the literalized horrors of religious abuse and anti-gay conversion therapy, and have part of the worldbuilding be “some form of Hell is real! Demons are real! They really do put people through agonizing horror-movie torture scenarios! Just not to gay people.”

The MC spends most of the book afraid of these demons doing horrible brutal murderous things to her, and/or the people she loves.

Then in the climactic showdown, demons do even more horrible brutal things to a bunch of camp counselors, and she’s just…unmoved.

Because, hey, the demons were only threatening gay people because of the church’s control. And now they’re free! So now their standards for “whose limbs do we get to rip off” are…uh, MC explicitly doesn’t know what their standards are…but she doesn’t spend any time stressing over whether the new victims deserve it any more than the old ones did.

To be clear! This is not part of a reveal that the counselors were one-dimensional evil!

The MC is friends with a former counselor. Who’s also gay, and has also been living with the threat of demon-torture. They’ve had heartfelt conversations about how, yes, he did bad things at the camp, but he can’t be too hard on himself, he was being manipulated by a cult, and he can make up for it now that he’s free.

How many of the present-day counselors are in the same situation? Who knows! And nobody left in the book has any interest in finding out.

Someone could write a dissertation about which “assumptions baked into this kind of Christian worldview” Camp Damascus takes the time to unpack, compared to which ones it just…doesn’t question or second-guess at all.

I won’t — I’m not nearly invested enough to do the rereading it would take to get all the details right — just saying that in general, wow, there is A Lot here, if anyone was interested.

—

Gonna wrap this up with a Hazbin Hotel reference.

Obviously it’s not the first story to do “okay, some form of Hell is canon real, now let’s actually stop and dig into the implications.” But it’s almost certainly the first one to drop the banger line “if Hell is forever, then Heaven must be a lie” in the middle of a song, and I think that’s beautiful.

umadoshi

"Yona of the Dawn Gets Sequel Anime". [Anime News Network]

I'm delighted both that this is happening and that it was announced so promptly on the heels of the manga ending. (;_;) As we learned from the second Fruits Basket anime arriving thirteen years after that manga ended, anything is possible, but it's sure nicer to have this sort of thing happen with a speed that makes more sense.

ANN says "sequel anime", which I'd imagine means it'll pick up where the first one left off, but how OAVs factor into that, I'm not even going to try to guess.

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Sting - A Winter's Night Live From Durham Cathedral2009

umadoshi

What I Just Finished Reading: Legendborn (Tracy Deonn) and Season of Love (Helena Greer), both of which fall into the category of "I enjoyed this but I don't feel any urge to pick up the sequel".

And not that recent, but I did finish Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope not terribly long ago.

What I am Currently Reading: Llinos Cathryn Thomas' Advent novella All is Bright, one chapter per day. And

scruloose and I are a few chapters into the audiobook of System Collapse.

What I Plan to Read Next: Very possibly The Dark is Rising, with solstice nipping at our heels.

Bonus TV note:

scruloose and I have finished season 2 of Silo!

When we finish System Collapse, that'll be the end of Murderbot listening until sometime after the new book comes out. Listening to the audiobooks together has cut way into our shared TV watching, but does have the advantage of being easier to drop in and out of if we don't have a lot of time in an evening, so I've been trying to see what our iteration of Hoopla has that

scruloose might be into. It does have Gideon the Ninth, which they might get a kick out of, but that's a significantly longer book, and we already had to check Network Effect out twice to get through it.

Last night it occurred to me that the Queen's Thief books are on the shorter side, and lo, Hoopla has them all! Have any of you listened to them? Any comments on how their reader is? It remains possible that finding out that I really like the Murderbot audiobooks isn't a sign of anything other than that I like that narrator in particular. ^^;

Current Mood: drained

erinptah

In that last post about pruning my tag-wrangling assignments, I mentioned the “got 1 fic, the fandom tag got canonized, then nobody ever used it again” fandoms.

Then it occurred to me that there’s an even smaller type: the “nobody used it again, and the original author deleted, so the fandom tag is still around but has 0 works” fandoms.

If there’s an automatic way to find how many of these you wrangle, I don’t know what it is. So I just did a pass through my fandoms with 0 unfilterable/unwrangleable tags attached, and double-checked the work counts.

You know how AO3 will give you a “Retry later” error if you try to load too many pages in a row? Yeah, it made me take at least four breaks while I was going through this process.

The payoff is, now I’m down to 1338 fandoms. Knocked a full 62 empty tags off the list.

(Their tags are still canonical, but they won’t show up on the Unassigned Fandoms list, until/unless some user posts another fanwork that makes them 1-use again.)

erinptah

About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.

So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.

To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.

The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”

( I’ll take tiny fandoms in other areas of personal interest, too... )

ptahrrific

Threads Looping Back Through The World (9168 words) by ErinPtah
Chapters: 3/11
Fandom: Thunderbolts (Movie 2025), Moon Knight (TV 2022), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Yelena Belova, Yelena Belova & Thunderbolts Team Members, Steven Grant/Jake Lockley/Marc Spector, Aurora Beaubier & Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, Yelena Belova/Kate Bishop, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Yelena Belova, Alexei Shostakov, Kate Bishop, Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, Aurora Beaubier, Marc Spector, Jake Lockley, Steven Grant, Robert "Bob" Reynolds, Jack "Nomad" Monroe, Bucky | Jack Monroe's Daughter, Other Character Tags to Be Added
Additional Tags: Rescue Missions, Competence Kink, Alternate Thunderbolts Team, The Void Shame Rooms (Thunderbolts 2025), canon-typical trauma
Series: Part 27 of Cover of Knight Cinematic Universe
Summary:

In this continuity, Yelena has been running "vigilante missions with teams of ex-Black Widows, wayward super-soldiers, other misfit antiheroes, and sometimes Kate Bishop" for years. (Bucky was regularly part of them! Then he ran for Congress.)

Yelena is babysitting for one of her colleagues when he goes MIA. On a cleanup mission for Valentina de Fontaine.

So now there's a whole team coming to the rescue -- complete with super-speed, trick arrows, mysterious moon powers, and a vehicle that actually works. Maybe, just maybe, they'll even be able to outmaneuver Val...?

umadoshi

Luck was not with us in the first attempt at clementines this year. (The batch we got are far from inedible, at least, but...not very good.) They're such a gamble these years. :/

Our new freezer arrived a week ago, and the plan is to finally get it in place today once

scruloose gets back from a market run. That hasn't happened yet due to a combination of factors and timing, the biggest of which is the fact that it'll require shifting some things out of the garage onto the driveway to make room for us to work with two upright freezers in play. (

scruloose is going to take a stab at moving the old one out of its place without emptying it, via a hand cart, but we have no idea how likely that is to actually work. It'd sure be convenient, though.)

My hair is dyed! It is. Um. Very dark. By which I mean it's not so much dark purple as "functionally black with some purple highlights that are probably some of my silver hair, but there's less of that than there is silver, so it's a little confusing". Oh, well. It looks fine, other than maybe making me look a bit washed out, and I don't much care about that.

(I might care more when I finally get

scruloose to take a headshot of me to send HR at Dayjob so they can update my long-expired work pass. [Part of why I decided to finally just go ahead and dye my hair was in the name of having it done for this photo.] These days, the process involves just filling out a form and emailing that and a photo that meets their technical requirements to the department handling passes and also to my boss, presumably so the boss can look at the photo and confirm "yes, that is the employee in question". But this means we can make potentially-endless attempts at getting a photo I don't hate, and honestly, if I can live with the horror of my provincial ID photo, I can probably live with just about anything.)

A few links:

--

mrissa's annual lussekatter posts are always good for my heart.

--Jenny Hamilton's "Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition" (covering ep. 1-2).

--"‘Pushing Daisies’ Season 3 In The Works, Says Creator Bryan Fuller".

Current Mood: stressed

erinptah

Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and make sporadic comparisons to the original Tokyopop translation.

Chapters 1-3 were covered here. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here. The rest of this post is the notes I microblogged in a Mastodon thread and a Bluesky thread.

( Dreizehn and Dragon and Dice, oh my... )

erinptah

Just got the first two volumes of Seven Seas’ new PSOH Collector’s Edition. (Here’s my list of the series on bookshop.org, for anyone who wants to buy them in a way that gives a kickback to (a) local bookstores, (b) me, and (c) not Amazon.)

I already had the whole series in the original Tokyopop edition, but wow, the print quality on this new release is such an upgrade. The lineart, the toning, it has so many fine details and subtle gradations that didn’t get to shine nearly this much in the first version.

It’s also a brand-new translation of the text. I’m resisting the urge to do a whole line-by-line comparison — I want to just read and enjoy the stories, without looking back-and-forth between two books on every single page — but I keep getting curious and spot-checking individual lines/panels…

Guess I’m liveblogging this now, huh.

(Thread on Mastodon, duplicate thread on Bluesky, I made those by copying this post as I wrote it, bit-by-bit.)

( Dream and Despair and Daughter, under the cut )

Profile

everything is exciting, particularly existence

October 2014

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Page Summary

umadoshi - Discord weirdness | Holiday dairy foods
umadoshi - Slightly belated Yule/solstice wishes + a very low-key update
umadoshi - Belated cake note | First morning of vacation
erinptah - Erin Watches/Reads: Genie (2023), Camp Damascus
umadoshi - The hoped-for silver lining of the Yona manga ending!
umadoshi - Reading Wednesday 12/17/25 | Has anyone listened to the Queen's Thief audiobooks?
erinptah - Fandom-dropping update: A secret fourth strategy
erinptah - Tag wrangling diaries: This fandom-dropping process
ptahrrific - Thunderbolts, Moon Knight | a whole team | T | Threads Looping Back Through The World 1-3
umadoshi - Saturday mishmash--household stuff, dyed hair [and work stuff], and a few links
erinptah - Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition, post 2 (volume 1, chapters 4-6)
erinptah - Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition, post 1 (volume 1, chapters 1-3)

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