Oct. 27th, 2025 11:14 pm

(no subject)

skygiants: Hazel, from the cover of Breadcrumbs, about to venture into the Snow Queen's forest (into the woods)
[personal profile] skygiants
Speaking of literary sff about how humans project out their loss and grief, Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells is sort of the opposite of Luminous -- where Luminous sprawls out into big branching intersecting plotlines and detailed, evocative worldbuilding, The Place of Shells spirals in on itself, carefully layering its metaphors on top of each other as the world echoes its protagonist's own interiority.

The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.

As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.

I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.
Oct. 26th, 2025 08:23 am

(no subject)

skygiants: Tory from Battlestar Galactica; text "I can't get no relief" (tory got shafted)
[personal profile] skygiants
ME, THREE CHAPTERS INTO SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: I often experience powerful sad pet emotions in books about humanoid robots so I think it's unfair for Luminous to also contain actual dead pet emotions
MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE: if it helps I don't think there are a lot of sad pet emotions in the rest of the book, I think you've hit the worst of it! the robots are not really sad pets
ME, WITH AN EMOTIONAL HANGOVER AFTER FINISHING SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: well, broadly speaking, you were right about the robots, but you were absolutely wrong about hitting the end of the sad pet emotions --

So Luminous, as you may have gathered, is a book that made me feel emotions; also a literary science fiction novel about humanoid robots; also a near-future cyberpunk noir; also a bittersweet children's adventure; also, or perhaps most of all, a family saga about three estranged siblings in post-unification Korea:

Jun, the middle child, a transmasc army veteran turned robot crimes cop whose war injuries have resulted in a VR addiction, an unsurmountable amount of debt, and a messy combination of gender euphoria and dysphoria about his new mostly-cyborg body
Morgan, the baby of the family, a successful MIT graduate with a well-paying tech job in robot design and a secret illegal off-the-books robot housekeeper-slash-personal-assistant-slash-boyfriend designed to help her get over her miserable insecurities, a task at which they are both Unfortunately Aware that he is Not Succeeding
and Yoyo, oldest and forever youngest, the advanced prototype child robot designed by their brilliant roboticist father who entered Jun and Morgan's lives as children and played the role of big brother for a few critical years, leaving them both haunted by his absence and his ghost

Where is their brilliant father now, aside from living rent-free inside his children's brains? Great question. For mysterious reasons he's decided he no longer wants to work on humanoid robots and has bounced offscreen to Boston to work on designing robot whales and tigers and so on, a project that museums love but which most serious roboticists think is rather silly.

Where is Yoyo now, aside from living rent-free inside his siblings' brains? Also great question! Two of the book's plotlines (cyberpunk noir) follow Jun investigating the increasingly troubling case of a missing child robot, and Morgan working on the launch of a new next-gen child robot, Boy X. (Crimes against robots are not illegal broadly except as theft, but crimes against child robots are illegal in the same sort of way that child porn is illegal.) In the third major plotline (bittersweet children's adventure), classmates Ruijie and Taewon -- a bright girl from a wealthy family with doting parents and the best high-tech leg braces for her advancing neurodegenerative disorder, and a bitter North Korean refugee boy more-or-less under the care of his criminal uncle, respectively -- find a strangely advanced child robot abandoned in a junkyard ...

(In this near-future Korea, btw, reunification was brought about by an event that propaganda cheerfully characterizes as "the Bloodless War" because it was mostly fought by robots. The experiences of several of the characters beg to differ with this characterization.)

There's a massive amount going on in this book, and all of it is complicated and none of it maps onto simple metaphors. For all the POVs that we get in the book, for all the fact that unexpected robot actions are frequently driving the plot, we're never in the heads of any of the robots themselves: all we can really know is what the various characters project onto them, an endless sea of human emotions about gender and disability and parenthood and childhood and societal expectations and trauma and grief.

On a plot level, I'm not at all sure it fully comes together at the end -- there's so much going on that 'coming together' seems almost impossible, tbh -- or that I actually understood all of what had, technically, happened, per se. On an emotional level, I will reiterate that the book made me feel feelings!! laudatory!!!
Oct. 25th, 2025 02:02 pm

(no subject)

skygiants: the Phantom of the Opera, reaching out (creeper of the opera)
[personal profile] skygiants
Last night [personal profile] genarti and I took advantage of Skirball Theater's remote Halloween production, a virtual Phantom of the Opera broadcast live every night for the next two weeks from a tiny apartment in New York City with a handful of actors, a variety of very small sets and very large cardboard props, and a lot of neat visual/camera tricks.

As a bonus feature, you can see exactly how most of the visual/camera tricks work because there's a second camera set up from the front of the apartment that shows the broader view of the cast and crew rushing around to cram themselves into the tiny sets and lurk in front of walls to cast dramatic shadows and so on. As a viewer, you always have the option to toggle between the main, intended view and the backstage view to see how they're doing whatever they're doing -- tbh this in itself made it worth the price of admission for me, as a person who loves practical effects. See Carlotta's entry evoked by a giant high-heeled foot and then toggle over to the crew member carefully dangling the foot into the frame! Superb!

The production itself evokes the aesthetics of German expressionist film, with an operatic organ soundtrack and most of the dialogue conveyed by classic silent film inter-, sub- or supertitles. It's a shock when the Phantom speaks out loud to Christine, and she speaks back to him. When Raoul says he heard someone in her dressing room, Christine looks understandably baffled by the way this breaks the rules: how could a silent film man hear an angel speak?

Christine can also break the silent film framework to sing, as trained, and, eventually, talk out loud about the Phantom as well as to him, but not about anything else. I love this conceit and I think it's probably the coolest thing the show does thematically. [personal profile] genarti remarked while watching that she'd also never seen a Phantom with this much actual opera in it. The production is definitely interested in Opera qua opera -- trying to say something about Art and the temporality of all artistic media and the fact that opera itself is a dying form, and tbh I'm not sure that it fully landed for me. However this may have been because these Themes were mostly conveyed in a big speech by the Phantom actor at the beginning as he puts on his makeup, and the biggest technical problem with the show (at least on the night that we saw it) was that the Phantom actor's mic was way out of balance with the background music and he was always kind of hard to hear. Which perhaps is thematic in and of itself!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience, worth my $20 to sit on my couch with the lights out and toggle between a Spooky Silent Phantom and a tiny apartment full of theater professionals moving tiny sets back and forth to make Spooky Silent Phantom happen, would recommend.
Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am

Database maintenance

mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Oct. 24th, 2025 08:31 am

(no subject)

skygiants: Cha Song Joo and Lee Su Hyun from Capital Scandal in a swing pose (got that swing)
[personal profile] skygiants
I recently had the excuse to reread my favorite epistolary romance, Zen Cho's novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which I love just as much now as I did when it came out in 2012, if not more.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is set among the avant-garde literary circles of 1920s London, and Jade herself is a sharp young Malaysian writer who accidentally becomes the main character of the day by penning a scathing review of the latest book by Literary Darling Sebastian Hardie. Fortunately or unfortunately, Hardie thinks this is the hottest thing he's ever seen anyone do; moreover, Hardie's very accepting wife thinks Jade is so charming; and as for what Jade's handsome and serious editor Ravi thinks ... well, events unfold from there, carried along by Jade's unique and delightful and irrepressible voice. If every first-person protagonist I met had even a quarter of Jade's verve and personality, I would be content, but the fact that they do not just makes me cherish Jade all the more.

If you've not met Jade Yeo, or if like me you have indeed already met her and would like her to live in your house forever, the book is getting a new print edition through the small press Homeward Books and preorders have just opened!

(The Kickstarter also has NYC and Seattle book rec party tiers which unfortunately I cannot attend as i will not be anywhere near those locations but I very much hope someone else does and tells me about them.)
Tags:
Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:23 pm

Studying for the Bar, in the Bar

take_that: jacket off (jacket off)
[personal profile] take_that posting in [community profile] milliways_bar
 Phoenix is in the bar, at a table with his nose in a book. Next to it is a notebook, in which he occasionally scribbles a sentence or two.

Anyone passing by might notice that he's clean shaven, and has switched out his tracksuit for a sweater and jeans.

An even keener eye might notice that the book he's reading is a textbook for this year's bar exam.

Slowly but surely, Phoenix is getting his life back on track.
cupcake_goth: (Default)
[personal profile] cupcake_goth
Yesterday was Miss Erzabet No Biting's first vet appointment since right before we moved. Not only was it time, but we were hoping for information or answers about her inappropriate voiding (how the vet referred to her peeing and pooping anywhere she felt like), and (what worried me most) the very slight intermittent tremor of her head that has developed.

The vet's diagnosis, now confirmed by the blood tests: she has developed hyperthyroidism. I'm waiting on the call from the vet where he'll give me more information. I did some quick research and it looks like the two main treatments are either daily meds or having radioactive iodine injected into the thyroid, which involves a multi-day stay at the vet. I still kinda-sorta prefer that option to meds, because she isn't easy to pill. But then again, how will she react to being somewhere strange and away from me? The last time we did that (when she was at a kitty emergency place because of difficulty breathing) she refused to eat or drink, and spent two days hidden under the blanket in the cage. 

Shockingly, she was such a good girl about going to the vet! Previous trips involved her fighting being put in the carrier, peeing herself, and being completely silent and hyperventilating. There was none of that this trip! She was very vocal, but didn't sound distressed, thank goodness. It took her about three minutes of being home before she forgave me and was trying to herd me to the couch for cuddles.


Oct. 21st, 2025 11:26 am

sign of the season

twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
[personal profile] twistedchick
I was going absolutely insane, trying to figure out which of my 50-odd tabs was playing holiday music. Nothing showed up on the tab list. Finally I hit command-option-escape, to list what was open, and discovered that the very nice holiday advent calendar a friend sent me had decided to serenade me. I shut it down; sanity restored.
Oct. 20th, 2025 09:19 pm

(no subject)

skygiants: Kozue from Revolutionary Girl Utena, in black rose gear, holding her sword (salute)
[personal profile] skygiants
For our friend/former roommate M's birthday last weekend he decided to host a screening of the recent two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation, D'Artagnan and Milady.

Apparently this is the first French film adaptation in sixty years?! (which I did not know before looking at the Wikipedia just now) and I think we all had a vague conception that, being French, it was likelier to be moderately book-accurate than the run of modern English film adaptations. As it turns out this was foolish and prejudiced of us. French directors have just as much fun picking and choosing their favorite bits of The Three Musketeers and jettisoning the rest as anybody else.

That said: I think most of the changes are quite fun and interesting! Perhaps most notably, this is the most successful Milady Positive Musketeers adaptation that I've yet encountered. At least 50% of the plot changes are in service of ensuring that the Musketeers continue to see Milady as a primary antagonist while ensuring that we-the-viewers are tilting our heads like 'hmm ... but is she though ......'

Case in point: the biggest plot change is that suddenly we are very concerned about Huguenots. Athos now comes from a Protestant family and has an ardent Huguenot brother who is on the other side in La Rochelle; meanwhile the whole conflict is being escalated by Gaston of Orléans, who's the real villain of the piece. Why does Gaston of Orléans need to be the real villain of the piece? So that by comparison Cardinal Richelieu is not so bad, so that the schemes on which he's sending Milady are really not so bad, so actually --

more Milady changes, big spoilers )

The other two biggest plot changes are also very funny to me .... one is that the creative team were like "what do Porthos and Aramis have going on with the Milady plot? Well ... nothing really. So instead we are going to give them a comic b-plot about finding which hot soldier knocked up Aramis' feisty sister. Since when does Aramis have a feisty sister SINCE NOW." more spoilers )

The other is that midway through movie two they slide in a new semi-historical OC (semi-historical because he's based on this guy but sixty years too early) who immediately steals the show in every possible way; he drops the best one-liners in the film, saunters casually in to save the Musketeer's asses on at least two different occasions, and is also the hottest man on the screen. To be clear I love this, big ups to the New Improved Musketeer, absolutely in the spirit of Dumas Pere. It did not at all shock me to learn that the creative team were now angling to make a TV show with this guy as the lead. I hope it succeeds because I'd watch the hell out of it.

Other notes: the costuming is very brown in the way that is clearly intended to shout "historical accuracy!" while demonstrating the exact opposite. One of the friends attendant at the party is a historical costume hobbyist and she spent the whole evening glowering at the screen muttering 'where is everyone's LACE?' And then every so often someone would show up with a plasticky lace border around their neckline and we'd all shout 'LOOK! LACE!' which strangely did not soothe her.

ON the other hand, at one point a character in a fraught chase sequence is shown actually changing horses, which so delighted the horse-knowers among us that they immediately forgave Eva Green every implausible corset lugged straight off the set of Penny Dreadful.

On the third hand: no valets. WHEN will someone make a Three Musketeers adaptation with valets?
cupcake_goth: (Default)
[personal profile] cupcake_goth
Have I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to the new Florence + the Machine album? SO MUCH I NEED IT NOW NOW NOW okay fine I'll wait for Halloween.

This weekend I did a bit of spellwork that I learned about online: wring writing. You think of a phrase that sums up something that's been troubling you or something that you want to let go, then write it over and over on a piece of paper until the paper is completely blocked out. Write the phrase on top of the phrase until individual words can't be seen. Then burn the paper, take the ashes, and put them in a jar with whatever things say "protection" to you. I used salt, cinnamon, and roses.

Let me tell you, this spell takes ENERGY. I haven't been that wiped out from a magical working in a very long time; once I was done with everything, I was hit with the shakes and had to flop for a bit. BUT, I certainly felt lighter after it. I'm going to do this with the particular phrase I settled on ("I can't ask for help") for the next few weekends.

When I told my therapist about this bit of spellwork, she was fascinated. She said she was probably going to adopt it herself, and also told me that doing it was my "therapy homework" for the week. More proof my therapist is the correct one for me.
Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am

AWS outage

alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
askerian: Serious Karkat in a red long-sleeved shirt (Default)
[personal profile] askerian
hello! hope youre doing well!! im on a bit of a homestuck kick lately with the animated pilot coming out and all i started rereading all my old fav fics. battlefield terra is still so amazing after all these years! i forgot how funny it was at parts and how the emotional or serious bits were such gut punches, and gamkar reunion arghhh. still hits right! i know beens been a damn long time, and i hope im not coming off as pushy, but i hope youll come back and give us a summary of what would have happened next. or not, no pressure! anyway thanks for writing 10/10 will read again!



hey, thank you. :)
i've been meaning to write the summary for BT for years and it keeps eating all my spoons. idk if you've seen this post which has the next chapter's first scene (fallout from the kiss and preparation for battle) but then i got bogged down in battle stuff. there was some vriska shenanigans VS karkat/john mindmeld and it was so damn hard to convey properly.
it's been so long now that i don't really remember any details. it's not like MotDP where i have the last two-three chapters plotted out pretty dang tight and know exactly where it ends. if i had kept going, BT would have been at a minimum 300k long (more likely to be 500-600k considering the chapters kept doing the accordion on me) and the later arcs were very "handwave it happens somehow".
i'm looking through my notes though and will paste them under there


more rambles and chatlogs there )
Oct. 19th, 2025 11:56 am

Dear Yuletide Writer!

twistedchick: Yuletide polar bears, by me (Yuletide bears)
[personal profile] twistedchick
I am so happy you're willing to write a story for me!

Here are a few notes on the universes, and DNWs: behind cut )

Thank you so much, and I hope you have a very happy Yuletide yourself.
Oct. 18th, 2025 01:24 pm

[admin post] Admin Post: Admin Post: Year-End Marathon 2025

gywomod: (Default)
[personal profile] gywomod posting in [community profile] getyourwordsout
At the end of the year, it can be tempting to give up on your writing goals. But giving up is not the Get Your Words Out way! We believe in writing. We believe in trying. We believe that any progress is good progress. So even if your big writing goals are out of reach, you can still reach a goal.

Let's set that new goal today.

Join us for the Year-End Marathon. And this is a special party, because we are inviting everyone!

Everyone—whether you're a current or previous GYWO member or have never even heard of this thing (is it a writing community? how do you pronounce "GYWO" anyway?)—EVERYONE is invited to join the 2025 GYWO writers in this marathon to the end of the year.


What Is the Year-End Marathon?

The Year-End Marathon begins Nov 1 and runs through Dec 31.

Make a pledge to write 15 Days each month (a total of 30 days) or 15,000 words each month (a total of 30,000 words).

Join other writers with the same goals on the GYWO Discord server in a set of channels exclusive to the YEM challenge where the moderators will be hosting special discussion topics and challenges for our YEM writers. YEM writers will also have access to GYWO writing sprints hosted on our Discord.

This year, we’re incorporating public, unlocked Dreamwidth discussion posts for you to participate in, as well as extra challenges and discussion posts on Bluesky, and a 30K leaderboard on Trackbear.

If you're new to GYWO, this can be a way to see if this community is right for you before our pledge drive for 2026 begins. And if you're a GYWO 2025 writer, this can be a chance to seize your goals and put in some concentrated effort at the end of the year so you can start 2026 on the right foot.


What Are the Requirements?

🤝 Like writers who sign up for the year-long GYWO challenge, you must have an account on Dreamwidth or through OpenID. GYWO usernames are based on Dreamwidth or OpenID usernames. New writers signing up for the Year-End Marathon will not have full access to the GYWO Dreamwidth community at this time, but there will be two unlocked discussion posts per month that YEM members may participate in. We hope you understand keeping our naming system consistent means the mod team doesn't have to sort duplicate usernames.

✍️ Write your words! The whole purpose of this challenge is to develop and maintain your writing life, so write something! All words and time counted toward your pledge progress must be your own work. Use of generative AI or passing off the work of a collaborator as your own is against the spirit of Get Your Words Out. See our website for an overview of what words count for the word count pledge and what activities count for a habit pledge.

🌈 Be a rainbow, not a pain-bow. We would love for you to participate in our Discord community and basically ask that you not be a jerk when doing so. Disrespect of the community and its members, along with hate speech, harassment, abuse, and endangerment may result in your removal from the community. We're pretty chill and ask that you be chill, too. (Also, if you have a problem with a member or find a conversation veering into uncomfortable territory, alert a moderator and we'll be on it as quick as can be.)

A monthly check-in specific to the Year-End Marathon will be posted for your own accountability, but attendance will not be taken and it is not a required part of your membership.
(Current GYWO writers—you're still responsible to check-in as part of your GYWO 2025 membership. Attendance is taken there, not on the Year-End Marathon check-in, so make sure to check in as usual.)


How Do I Participate?

To participate in the Year-End Marathon, complete the Year-End Marathon Pledge Form.

If you choose to join our Discord server, once your pledge has been processed, a moderator will assign you a pledge role to give you access to the YEM-exclusive area and writing sprints channel. Join other YEM writers to chat about the challenge, writing in general, and your writing life in particular.

On Discord: each week, moderators will post either a discussion topic or a writing activity for YEM writers. You can respond directly to the moderator as a reply or join in the wider discussion with other writers, depending on your comfort level.

On Bluesky: each week, moderators will post either a discussion question or writing challenge. Feel free to reply, quote post, tag us at getyourwordsout.bsky.social, or use the #gywo hashtag.

On Dreamwidth: twice a month, moderators will post discussion posts where you can talk about your progress and chat with fellow YEM participants.

All moderator-led engagement is crafted to support a wide range of writers, so whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry or you engage in horror, romance, absurdism, or fanfic we do our best to find something to support your writing life.

✅To participate in the monthly check-in specific to the Year-End Marathon, you'll need to have access to the GYWO Discord server. The link to check in for the YEM challenge will only be posted on Discord. Check-in is optional but recommended.


Have you picked your pledge for the Year-End Marathon?
Remember, your choices are 15 Days per month (30 days total) or 15,000 Words per month (30,000 words total).

Pledging for the GYWO Year-End Marathon Ends Nov 7, 2025.

Pledge for the Year-End Marathon


If you have any questions, we're happy to answer them!
For more information about Get Your Words Out, please visit our website. Pledging for 2026 will open around December 12.

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