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life and stuff

Tortoise + stars

I helped rescue a tortoise today. On our way to my parents LB and I saw it walk across a sidewalk, and after a person from a nearby garden said they didn't know of any neighbors that had tortoises I first called my friend F the biologist, who identified it as a non-native Hermann's tortoise, and then animal rescue. They told us they'd come pick it up so we took it to my parents and watched it walk around the garden for a bit, very cute. The people from animal rescue were here within the hour and said that it seems to be around 10 years old and mostly healthy, apart from some malnutrition issues. I was glad they came even though it was a bank holiday.
(It reminded me a bit of a large toad L and I saw a short while ago, that was also very cute.)

Yesterday friends and I drove outside of the city for a bit to watch the Perseids. I saw the largest shooting star I've ever seen in my life, very cool. And some normal and smaller ones, too. As soon as the moon got higher it was a lot harder to see anything, I'd underestimated just how much of a difference that would make.

A silver lining, I guess, of having a chronic skin condition is that at least I get extra warning signs from my body when my stress levels increase, sometimes that takes me a while to notice. I had a very low energy week, and the temperatures certainly didn't help. The bank holiday today was very welcome; apart from visiting my parents I mostly spent it lying in bed reading. I have more classes this weekend and then the weekend after that, so I need every extra day to relax that I can get.

Current Mood: blank
Current Music: Shake it Up! - Super Junior

Entry tags:

007: Bronze; Onewe / The Kingdom; Thoughts about Reincarnation (Dongmyeong, Yang Dongsik | Louis)

Creator:

andersenmom
Title: Thoughts about Reincarnation
Rating: G
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 1026
Prompt: 007: Bronze
Fandom/Ship: Dongmyeong (Onewe), Yang Dongsik | Louis (The Kingdom)
Notes/Warnings: This relies heavily on the lore for The Kingdom, and for Oneus (the group Dongmyeong’s twin is in).
Summary Laughing at a mislabeled sword in a museum brought Louis a new friend, and possible reunification with some old friends.

Find the table with the list of fics here

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Multifandom: Piss, Piss, Fall in Love — A Multi-fandom Piss Zine

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Current Mood: busy

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Birdfeeding

Today is partly sunny and sweltering. :P

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/15/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/15/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a flock of sparrows and house finches.

.

Twinkle: Sherlock Holmes (ACD): Fanfic: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Title: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD): Ocelot Tales 'verse
Rating: G
Length: 200 words
Summary: The Ferret is singing a well-known song, but has, yet again, changed the words

( Twinkle, Twinkle, little star )

Entry tags:

writing

Scrivener, my beloved, also paragraphs length

Scrivener has been such a boon to my editing. Initially, I migrated stuff there mainly to be able to organise my worldbuilding notes and for the per-chapter/scene notes, but I'm finding so many little ways to make my life easier. Nearly every time I think "if only there was a way to...", I realise there is one. I could cry. What really helped me is watching a bunch of the webinars that Literature and Latte are running, especially Oliver Evensen just showing his actual workspace and how he's organising a whole series in one project. If you're just starting out, the sessions are totally overwhelming because it's often 20 or 25 small tips that make life easier, but half the time I'm like "omg I didn't know you could use labels and label colours this way! I didn't know metadata could be used like this! I didn't realise dynamic collections were a thing!" and everything is awesome, lego-style.

The software is kind of struggling to load if I accidentally load the entire manuscript in "Document" mode with the 5 billions beta-readers comments I imported (and that was a subset!) - still manages though. Because I noted which person said what, I feel like I'm hanging out everyday with the bunch of you who kindly took the time to share impressions, haha. Thanks again <3

I've had a couple of chuckles about paragraph length. In the novella, I was told a few times my paragraphs are too short or too broken down. Meanwhile, whenever I start working with a new beta-reader in fandom, they nearly always tell me my paragraphs are too long. It's related to screen size, I'm told. Looks overwhelming when it takes up the entire phone screen without any paragraph break.

I'm not reading a lot of fic at the moment, but I'm reading a toooooooooooooooooon of books and so my paragraphs are getting chonkier with this round of editing. Who knows what'll happen when I do the final-final (;D) proofreading afterward though...!!

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Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

Entry tags:

podcast: aggro goose

Aggro Goose #2

Watch on YouTube

Aggro Goose #2: mimesis is a vector quantity (worldbuilding, "fictive complaints")

(I think the one cuss word this time is...assholes? Badasses?)

My real agenda is to refine my vocal plugin chain, with sf/f discussion as a side-effect. That said, Aggro Goose is happy to take topic suggestions in comments or to yoon at yoonhalee dot com.

(FYI, I'm scarce right now thanks to orchestration homework &c.)

My google fu has failed so I turn to you.

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

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!theme day

Friday, August 15th - Craft

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Photos: Apple Blossoms (5/6/25)

I realized, as I looked back at my photo posts, that I never posted any photos of the apple blossoms! Granted, I was still wearing a walking shoe/boot at this time (and if I recall correctly, it was soaking wet all the time), so I couldn’t take any walks through the orchard, but the apple trees in front of the house blossomed nicely. Here are just a few pics from the early days. (All were taken on 5/6/25.)

( 8 more back here )

credit card hassles and triumphs: the saga

Further to the annoying scamming attempt that caused the bank to cancel my card and snail mail me a new one... from Aussie. (grrrrr) (yes, this is tl;dr but parts are mildly amusing plus you might learn something useful.)

I started to get annoyed "update payment details!" notifications from various apps. I figured I could live for 2-3 weeks without Netflix, Prime, Apple+, AMC, etc, (actually, doubtful) but then my main Apple account also got cross with my defunct card and I was scared I might lose all my iCloud storage. There are masses of images in there that it would be a bit tragic to lose. Unsure what else (all past emails? My stored Notes? My life is organised around those notes!) Plus the phone might stop working, I guess (my only phone).

Initial bank lady had said they would continue to fund Apple pay, but clearly that was bullshit. So I called them, and the bank guy cogitated a bit, then said if I installed the bank's payment app (called somethingmoney) I'd be able to call up my NEW credit card details and use those for all the online stuff that was expiring. Hallelujah!

So I tried to install their money app but despite it being TOTALLY FREE my phone kept saying my credit card was defunct. Did you know Apple won't let you install TOTALLY FREE apps if you don't have a payment system set up? Well, you can't. Fucking billionaires. All the bank dude could suggest was that I bring the phone into the bank next day so they could see for themselves what the problem was. This was completely that thing where something doesn't work and you assume the person doing it is an incompetent idiot and impatiently say "let me have a go".

So I was pissed off. It was clear to me that this was goddamn Apple bullshit, not something I was doing and that taking my phone to the bank would NOT solve it. Bank dude had regretfully informed me that the money app was for mobiles only, and all my mobile devices were Apple.

It was now about 4:45. Then I had a lightbulb moment - I needed a non-Apple device! So I decided to go to the Warehouse (a big box store, the cheapest one in Auckland). Yes! Out I go to my car, which won't start! Dash is covered by lit-up icons including the battery one. Woe - I called the AA, who amazingly arrived inside 30 minutes. Very nice AA man (AA men have replaced my dear departed dad in my life) got in and the car started immediately. Oh the embarrassment! He kindly explained that if you don't push the clutch pedal in really hard you get all the lights and it won't start. Showed me the green light I needed to make go away to be sure I was doing that.

Grateful and chagrined, and having proved all those bastards right who say "just let me have a go", I drove to the local Warehouse (open late every day of course the better to take our money) and got the cheapest Samsung smartphone they had.

At home, I dicked about trying to charge it but most of my fixtures only have the old usb sockets. Luckily it still had 45% charge (gradually dropping as I fumbled about). Baffled by how it worked, I had to DuckDuckGo a few key issues like "how to turn on Samsung" and "where is Samsung settings" (there was an online manual that failed to cover those minor points). Eventually I had it on even though it kept turning its screen off every 30 seconds. I found the google store and downloaded the money app. And it worked! Once I'd logged into my account I was able to see "card details" with my new card number etc. The CVV was called something else but it was the usual 3-number code.

Victory! I had card details and was able to update Apple, which sorted out the other apps.

But... then today I tried to update my Amazon, Paypal, and Uber eats payment details, and it rejected the CVV no. WTF? Now, as above, I'd had problems with the damn new phone switching the screen off every 30 sec, which meant it was hard to stay logged into the money app to copy my card details into all the other billionaire apps. So I'd cleverly taken a photo of the details, which solved it. Turned out that wasn't so clever for numerous reasons, one being that I failed to go back to the money app to recheck the new card's details. When I eventually did, hours later, they'd changed the damn CVV code! That's when I noticed the small print saying it wasn't a CVV code but was a "dynamic security code" that changed every 12 hours.

So now I'm sorted. It's been 9 working days since they supposedly mailed me the new card and of course no sign of it yet - could easily be another 9 days, if not more. And all I have to do is look up my new dynamic security code every day and update several payment systems. Plus I have a shiny new Samsung phone and very little idea how it works. Haven't dared inserting the SIM card yet - unclear if it takes the mini, micro or ultra-miniscule size, or whatever. That's a hoop to jump through on another day. At least I managed to locate a usb adaptor so I can charge it now.

Ah, the modern world, so restful.

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The Day in Spikedluv (Thursday, Aug 14)

I didn’t have to do any shopping this morning, but I did go to the bank for my aunt and got in a walk around the park while I was downtown. I dropped off a book at the library on my way to visit my aunt and talked to the librarian about it (and picked up another book). I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND folded), hand-washed dishes, took Grant for a walk, cut up chicken for the dogs’ meals, and scooped kitty litter.

I visited mom, read some fanfic, finished the Kindle cozy and started another, and read more about Hatshepsut. (I have already concluded that this is not a book I’m going to be able to just sit down and read through. My plan is to read a little bit each day, and read something light in between.) I also received another GC (the Bakery) for my birthday! And tomorrow is breakfast with my used bookstore friends to round out the celebration.

Temps started out at 63.5(F) and reached 88.7. Today was supposed to be the first in a string of (supposedly) cooler days. o_O

Mom Update:

Mom was doing better than yesterday, but not great. ( more back here )

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: London

Entry tags:

Superman (2025)

Very enjoyable indeed, and it seems we’re finally free from the Snyder influence as well as the colour-drained imagery. This is Superman not just in primary colours but as an unabashed boy scout, a good person who often lets a nice, calming remark go with the rescue of an understandably frightened person. I was often reminded of JMS’ memoirs in which he wrote what Clark Kent meant to him as a child - someone who is above all other things kind, who combines his strength with decency, who was a friend. (Given JMS had the abusive childhood from hell, fictional Superman was literally the only person who was.) Also, director James Gunn doesn’t go for the relentless slapstick/gag machinery which had put me off the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie for a while (and off Thor: Ragnarök), which isn’t so say the movie is without humour, absolutely not, but it’s used in a way that leaves the more serious scenes room to breathe. Perhaps the fact helps that we have here in the year 2025 a movie with a hero who is an illegal alien (and gets explicitly attacked for that reason), whose enemy is a demagogic techbro billionaire who uses literal evil monkeys on social media to campaign against him (and that’s the most restrained thing he does, his other plots going all the way to the usual world endangerment as par the supervillain course), and a US government who thinks nothing of teaming up both with the billionaire and with villainous foreign dictators, outsourcing the imprisonment of our immigrant hero to them to get rid of the pesky human rights he’d nominally have on US shore…. Yeah.

(Subtle, this movie is not.)

I loved how absolutely committed to its comics origin the film is, most obviously with Krypto. If you’ve seen the trailer: Krypto’s appearances in the movie are all like this in tone during the movie, and it’s adorable even for a cat person like me. Most of all, I loved that Lois Lane, played by Rachel “Mrs. Maisel” Brosnahan, really gets to be a reporter in every fibre of her being, in a show, not tell manner. The scene in which after Clark made the mistake of saying he’d let her interview him as Superman she relentlessly grills him (not in an unfair way, I hasten to add, but asking exactly all the questions which a good reporter WOULD ask in this particular situation) is as good as advertised, and it’s Lois’ reporter instincts that hugely lead to saving the day. (Along with various other factors and people, making this in addition to everything else a good ensemble movie. Also, since the movie starts with her and Clark already in a relationship and with her knowing he’s Superman, we skip the Lois-Clark-Superman-secret identity trope. (Look, I loved Lois & Clark in the 1990s, but it really would not work anymore today if we’re to believe in Lois the excellent reporter. )

( Somewhat more spoilery from here )

In conclusion, I really liked this one, and look forward to Gunn’s further contributions to the DC movieverse.

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Murderbot promptfic from Tumblr

Cross-posting a couple of ficlets I wrote for Tumblr prompts earlier in the week.

***

1. A prompt for Murderbot and Gurathin undercover in the Corporation Rim. Originally posted here.

( 1000 words or so )

2. A request for de-aged Gurathin. Originally posted here.

( About 1100 words )

Current Mood: busy

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followfriday

Follow Friday 8-15-25

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

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Follow Friday 8-15-25: Indie

Today's theme is Indie.

i_love_games -- A Gaming Community
An Active Gaming Community created July 5th, 2013.
[Somewhat active with last post in December 2024.]

indie_games -- Indie Games
Indie games discussion, recs, and squee.
[Somewhat active with last post in June.]

indie_lifestyle -- Indie coolness and all that.
[Dormant with last post in November 2020, but posting is open to all members so this should be revivable.]

musicianships -- The Freaks Club: Musicianships
This Community is for everyone who is involved in music in any way.
[Active with one post in August.]

onesongaday -- One Song A Day
You love music? Come share, listen, enjoy.
[Active with multiple posts in August.]

thefreaksclub -- TFC // The Anti-Thesis Social Network
Everything related to darker alternative subcutlures. Discussion on books, the occult, music, & more.
[Active with one post in August.]

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Terraria: Fanfiction: Starry Night

Title: Starry Night
Fandom: Terraria
Rating: G
Length: 52 words
Summary: Tonight is a peaceful night.

( Read more... )

[ SECRET POST #6796 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6796 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #972.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: busy

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Affordable Housing

These futuristic 3D-printed homes start at just $200K. One city is building 80 of them.

The development will include energy-efficient, high-quality homes with an average size of about 1,360 square feet.

HiveASMBLD plans to print two unique home designs, each with a two-bedroom and two and a half bathroom configuration, as well as an office or flex space, and a covered patio.

Pricing for these homes starts in the mid to high $200,000s.

( Read more... )