Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 10:32 am
olivermoss: (Default)
[personal profile] olivermoss
Now that the Parallel Worlds bookstore has a larger space and can host events, they asked the community what they wanted. One big as was writing nights, and I think we mostly meant write ins? But what they did was a writing seminar type thing. They brought in some authors who are trying to get established in the self pub world to talk at us. It was okay. I'd go again just because I know some people there, but I am really not interested in hear people re-hash Save The Cat Writes a Novel at me, a writing book that I deeeeeeply disagree with.

But, there is another reason I am glad I went! After, some of us went over to a bar and chatted over beer. Two of the authors were on panels at the final year of Orycon and I got some info on how that went. They were on a women writer's panel, and the male moderator talked over them the whole time and they never spoke. They were completely weirded out by the culture there, how they were treated, etc. The third author had attended, but was not on the Orycon panel. He also talked about how terrible the culture was there. It was really interesting to hear from people who only caught the tag end of things. And, honestly, validating. Trying to find geek/queer community I spent way too much time in some shitty spaces and still feel like the problem was me. Well, the problem was me. I kept trying to find spaces to be and couldn't, so I kept going back to places like Ory because that's where people with my hobbies went. Anyway, not going to navel gaze about that. It was just validating to see people shaking their heads and fumbling for words to even talk about what it was like trying to be there for a weekend to promote their books.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 01:28 pm

213 ICONS BALDUR'S GATE 3 ( ASSORTED SECONDARIES )

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 11:13 am
mintesque: (pic#14151835)
[personal profile] mintesque in [community profile] dwrp_icons
CANON: Baldur's Gate 3
CHARACTERS: Dame Aylin, Isobel Thorm, Alfira, Orin, and a few other randoms.
ADDITIONAL INFO: This is part of secondary character icons that I've done for BG3. The post with the dudes can be found HERE.
CREDIT TO: [community profile] leifthrasir or [personal profile] mintesque



The rest of the icons can be found HERE.

Chore Accountability

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 12:10 pm
gremdark: Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club, sobbing in a fancy suit. (sobbing Tamaki)
[personal profile] gremdark
This always works for my brain when it's buzzing, and it's BUZZING today. So here's a post for me to edit with updates as I get writing done and tidy the house. ADHD meds, save me from myself! I've locked myself out of my phone for 120 minutes, so my only options are writing, chores, and staring into space.

Wrote a few hundred words on a Rare Kink Buffet prompt. When I'm this jittery with directionless ADHD energy, my cleaning hack is to do roughly five units each of several tasks instead of trying to pin myself to one. So I put away about five dishes, folded five pieces of clean laundry, and picked up five things from the bedroom floor.

200 words of a different Rare Kink Buffet prompt. I can really feel the hyperactivity (and associated misery) today. Absolutely horrid. I put away five more dishes, folded the rest of the laundry, cleaned the stovetop and counters, and spot-vacuumed the corners and under furniture. I know I took my meds this morning because I was there when I took them and the drink I got to take them with is still on the table. But I sure FEEL unmedicated and I'm glad I don't have to drive anywhere this afternoon.

200 words of a third prompt. I took a break for lunch, then put away the rest of the laundry and five dishes and cleaned the toilet. Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. Would you believe it if I told you that current geopolitics have me kind of on edge?

400 words of another prompt. I put away the rest of the dishes, then loaded the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher and did some vague kitchen tidying. It's beginning to look cleaner in here.  

Tumblr... grr.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 11:59 am
gremdark: A cluster of orange, many-petaled marigolds (Default)
[personal profile] gremdark
For those who aren't active on Tumblr right now, a tl;dr. A new update to how notes on reblogs work, which has so far rolled out on desktop and to some mobile users, is breaking the way most people use Tumblr. Each reblog-with-text now has its own likes, comments, and notes section. This means that not all interactions on posts are visible to the OP. Artists are in an uproar, but this also breaks aspects of the block function and removes the ability to turn off reblogs on posts that have been reblogged with text.

With that in mind, I've tentatively offered to give mutuals and longtime followers of my personal tumblr access to this account if they DM me. I'm nervous about that, because I like keeping my online identities pretty siloed. I'd previously only connected this account to my fandom identity. I have a good group of followers over there, though, and I'd be sad to lose them. 

I don't think this is The Big One where everyone flees the Tumblr site like rats from a sinking ship, but it does feel as big as the 2018 porn ban, with the added uncertainty that these changes rolled out the day they were announced. The Changes blog on Tumblr has blithely said that they can see the userbase has strong feelings, which they claim they'll monitor over the "next weeks" of this rollout. I'm certainly concerned and making backup plans.

Those of you who use Tumblr, what do you think of all this? What are you planning?
delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
[personal profile] delphi
Fandom 50 #4

Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, how could I kick off the '80s and not go for some pulpy lesbian new wave?

High School Confidential by Rough Trade

Round 185 Theme Poll

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 09:38 am
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun in [community profile] fancake
April will be a Flashback round where we revisit a classic theme from the early years of the comm.

Poll #34378 round 185 theme poll
This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 98

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Arranged Marriage
50 (51.0%)

Forced Proximity
23 (23.5%)

Threesome
25 (25.5%)

fun with errors

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 11:22 am
julian: Picture of the sign for Julian Street. (Default)
[personal profile] julian
There's this Utah murder case I just found out about, with this woman who killed her husband with Fentanyl, who then wrote a children's book on grief and loss called "Are You With Me?"

I tried looking this up on Amazon, and presumably the listing's been taken down due to the, you know, murder parts, so the first result in the search currently leads to another author's book...

There Are Moms Way Worse Than You.

No, no, I don't... quite think so.

( Are You With Me? looks syrupy but perfectly fine. Meanwhile, There Are Moms Way Worse Than You looks quite fun.)

Physical books today

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 07:51 am
brightknightie: Schanke reading Emily's novel (Reads)
[personal profile] brightknightie
On Friday evening, at the grocery store, I found the vestigial books-and-magazines section gone. Not relocated: vanished. Some of the remaining magazines seem to have been squeezed into the impulse racks near each register, but that looks temporary.

On Sunday afternoon, at the department store, I did not find any of the three items I went there for, and decided to swing by their books section before coming home. I was overwhelmed with the new-to-me "vocabulary" of contemporary book covers. This has been coming on slowly for quite a while, but it bowled me over in that moment. I could not tell the genres at a glance. No cover has traditional paintings or photographs. Everything is bright (or shiny/glittery on dark) shapes and single objects, or, if it's people, they are "cut outs," like that certain kind of clip art often used on business trainings. The edges of the pages are all gilded or otherwise painted, which used to be a sign of a very fancy special edition, like Franklin Mint or better, but seems now the norm. I couldn't even tell which were for adults versus young adults at a glance at their exteriors. (And few were not thick. I saw very, very few that physically signaled "quick read" to me.)

On Monday evening, at the drug store, I was relived to find their vestigial books-and-magazines section intact. It's not much, and the magazines are a lower tier than many the grocery store had sold, but it's there. Interestingly, other than a few -- leftovers? -- in the traditional mass-market form factor, most of its books were what I guess must be the new mass-market form factor: they are as tall as trade paperbacks, but not as deep. On your shelf, spine out or pages out (which I gather is a thing now: weird), they will look like trade paperbacks. They use a little more paper, I suspect, than a traditional mass-market book, but perhaps not a lot. However, they definitely won't fit in even a generous pocket.

capri0mni: A black Skull & Crossbones with the Online Disability Pride Flag as a background (Default)
[personal profile] capri0mni
Because of the latest Tumblr Update regarding Reblogs and Replies

I with be disabling both options, and cross-posting all my longer Original Blog Entries to my Dreamwidth Journal at Capri0mni.dreamwidth.org/.

I will include a link to all such cross-posts at the end of each Tumblr entry. If you wish to converse with me there, you are free to do so anonymously (no need for a Dreamwidth account). Note that all anonymous replies will be screened and invisible to everyone but me until I release them. Your IP address will also be logged. And if you are abusive to myself or anyone else, I will not hesitate to block you.
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
Such utter insanity.

Let's first talk about Polymarket. It's a mostly legal form of gambling, betting on things that might happen in the future. There are rules as to what constitutes a true outcome for the bet. In this particular case, the bet was whether or not an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10. However, it had a condition that in the event the missile was intercepted, whether or not it subsequently struck Israel, it would not constitute a win for the bet.

There's a lot more that can be said about Polymarket and their ability to wiggle out of paying bets in either direction, but that's not what this post is about.

On March 10, an Iranian missile struck Israel. It was not intercepted. Fortunately it missed the town that it was aimed at and hit a wooded area about 500 meters from homes. Emergency services responded and determined there were no injuries or deaths. Reporter Emanuel Fabian working for The Times of Israel reported on the incident.

And the next day he started receiving mysterious messages asking him if it was actually interceptor missile fragments, and to post an update to his story stating such. Then the messages started getting rougher, ultimately getting threatening, to the point of saying he had the choice of updating the story to say it was intercepted, and he'd get a nice amount of cash for it, or if he didn't do it he'd be killed. These people went to the extreme of making posts on the bet on the Polymarket web site in his name that he was in the process of updating his story and had sent the change to his editors when he had done no such thing. Ultimately he went to the Israeli police and either he or the police reported this harassment to the Polymarket people.

Ultimately Polymarket posted that the people involved in threatening Fabian had been banned from their site.

It's an interesting read. But I do have to wonder if it is the end of the story.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/210211/polymarket-gamblers-threaten-to-kill-journalist-over-iran-missile-story
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
Six years ago, the Pokemon Go app was updated to let users do 'field research' and scan statues and things. Niantic used photos and such to build 3D models of environments and mapped those into navigable fields for delivery robots.

Niantic thanks Pokemon Go players for their free contributions to Niantic's corporate bottom line. But no money will be forthcoming unless you're a stockholder.

From the article:
"This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokémon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS)—a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short."

Once again, if you're not paying for the product, then YOU are the thing being sold. The problem is, if you're a paying customer, you're still getting your data harvested and re-sold. You can't win, and you can't quit the game.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/2136229/pokemon-go-players-unknowingly-trained-delivery-robots-with-30-billion-images

goose on the loose

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 10:09 am
autobotscoutriella: an ocelot sitting in a tree (Ocelot)
[personal profile] autobotscoutriella in [community profile] common_nature
a Canada goose, sitting on grass, looking peeved

The geese have returned! This one was NOT happy to see me.
capri0mni: A black Skull & Crossbones with the Online Disability Pride Flag as a background (Default)
[personal profile] capri0mni
Because Tumblr has orders of magnitude more traffic, and I couldn't keep up with conversations on both sites simultaneously.

That will be changing as of today.

Yesterday, Tumblr changed the way it organizes conversations, making it more like Twitter, and making it impossible for the author of a post to keep track of who's sharing their work, or what they're saying in reply to it.

(If I wanted a Twitter-like experience, I would have gotten a Twitter account! [or Bluesky, or wherever])

So from here on in, I will be blocking all Tumblr reblogs and replies by default, and cross-posting my longer, more thought-out entries here. I'll put a link to the Dreamwidth versions at the end of the Tumblr posts, so if people want to comment can do so where I can see and filter them.

(I'm currently working on a behemoth of a post on the Bechdel test, and working out other metrics for representing marginalized identities in storytelling (whether fiction or nonfiction) -- most notably, on a personal level, disability representation.

Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 08:54 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A doctor is drawn into the search for her missing mentor.

Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo

tuesday

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 08:39 am
summersgate: (Default)
[personal profile] summersgate
DSC_0817.jpg
I finished this little set of toys in the front that I want to give to Kathy's great-grandson Zaden when I get to Florida next month. Zaden will be around 15 months old then and I'm imagining that he'll like throwing a ball. They are lightweight so they can't hurt anything. Yesterday I got a book of patterns for making finger puppets. That's the next thing I want to tackle. I'm thinking that doing crochet patterns is good for my brain. Not exactly easy for me. So many abbreviations in this new book. And they aren't in american crochet terms so there is transposing needing to be done in my brain. Maybe it'll help hold off the senility.

It's in the low 20s this morning and we have about 2 inches of snow on the ground. My plan for the day: write in my paper journal, art-a-day and then crochet. I've been watching Monk. I watched the whole series a couple years ago but I'm watching it again. Laughter is good.
lucymonster: (skullheart)
[personal profile] lucymonster
[REC] (2007): This is Spanish found footage horror about a zombie virus outbreak in an apartment complex, filmed by a TV reporting duo who get trapped in there while accompanying first responders for a workplace documentary feature. On the whole I thought it was well executed. The lead reporter went off the deep end and into "We have to film every second of this!!! We have to show them what's really happening!!!!!" territory faster than I thought was entirely convincing, but I was happy to write it off in-universe as her way of coping so that I could kick back and enjoy the grisly terror that ensued.

There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with spoilers ) had me breathless.

Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.

This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.

I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.

Profile

erika: (Default)
Erika

November 2025

S M T W T F S
      1
2 345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Wednesday, March 25th, 2026 04:51 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios