Weekly Chat

Aug. 16th, 2025 02:05 pm
dancing_serpent: (Nirvana in Fire - Mei Changsu)
[personal profile] dancing_serpent posting in [community profile] c_ent
The weekly chat posts are intended for just that, chatting among each other. What are you currently watching? Reading? What actor/idol are you currently following? What are you looking forward to? Are you busy writing, creating art? Or did you have no time at all for anything, and are bemoaning that fact?

Whatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes:
or
garryowen: (sherlock grimpen)
[personal profile] garryowen posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairings/Characters: Sherlock/John
Rating: Teen
Length: 2007 words + companion stories
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] waketosleep
Theme: Marriage of convenience

Summary:

"We should really get married."

John stared at the red mark on his wrist. "I'm sorry, what?"

Reccer's Notes: I almost never revisit this fandom, but when I recced waketosleep's Trek story for this theme, it came to my attention that w2s was a little obsessed with marriages of convenience and had a fantastic and charming gem of a fic where Sherlock co-opts John's life (again), and John (again) doesn't mind at all.

I don't know if I've ever seen hospital access as a reason for a marriage of convenience, but I am here for it! It's practical and a little grim, typical of Sherlock. The interactions between Sherlock and John are spot on and hilarious. In 2000 words, we also get Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, and Mycroft, all contributing to the comedy gold in their understated way.

This story belongs to two different series. The Intellectual Intercourse series is the easiest way to navigate everything if you want to read beyond this fic.

Fanwork Links: Declarations of Mutual Devotion

Murderbot fic: Natal Day Gifting

Aug. 15th, 2025 11:55 pm
sholio: murderbot group from episode 10 (Murderbot-family1)
[personal profile] sholio
Bookverse-compliant except for Pin-Lee's TV pronouns, written for a Tumblr prompt.

Title: Natal Day Gifting
Word Count: 1400 words
Characters: Gen, Murderbot & Gurathin, PresAux in general
Summary: Murderbot gets dragged along on a birthday present shopping expedition. It enjoys this surprisingly somewhat more than expected.
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69306156

Notes and Prompt )

Fic under the cut )

There's always more history to learn

Aug. 15th, 2025 03:54 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

TIL about the economics of managing a Chinese merchant ship in the 18th and 19th centuries:

The operations of junks were labor intensive — they required about ninety sailors per vessel — but these sailors were not paid. Instead, they were permitted to carry a certain amount in freight (by the early nineteenth century, about seven piculs — 933 pounds — in freight)."

Melissa Macauley, "Does the 'Indo-Pacific' Have a History?" American History Review, vol. 130 no. 2 (June 2025), p. 689.

They had to be giving things away

Aug. 15th, 2025 08:17 pm
cornerofmadness: (Default)
[personal profile] cornerofmadness
Mom and I hit Costco. There was ONE, count 'em, one buggy left. Dear god. Somehow we survived but since I have SO MUCH to cart back next week I passed on many of the things I wanted to buy. Ah well.


And since that was the most exciting thing to happen all day, here have the fandom recs for two weeks including this one!!

Warmth In The Chest Hazbin Hotel this was written for me in [community profile] fandomtrumpshate I haven't even had a chance to read it yet


Sleeping Beauties Torchwood

Thunder And Lightning Stargate SG-1

The Best (Friend) Hazbin Hotel

In The Doghouse Torchwood

Springtime Picnic FAKE

Chase Away the Cold Teen Wolf

To Be Tamaranean Teen Titan

Melolagnia Hazbin Hotel

Pizza 'Pology Hazbin Hotel

what we were searching for. KPop Demon Hunters

Goodbye For Now 光渊 | Justice in the Dark


Make It Count Hazbin Hotel

A Practical Gift Torchwood

What Friends Do Criminal Minds

Oops, I Married an Alien Eerie Indiana

None of It Was Accidental 逆爱 | Revenged Love

rewritten. 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù

Finding a New Home
9-1-1

The Final Straw. Teen Wolf

Breaking Free Stargate Atlantis

A radio demon's daisy in hell. Hazbin Hotel

Leap Of Disaster Torchwood

Transparent The Murderbot Diaries

What You Have Done to Me
Hazbin Hotel

Torchwood Life Torchwood

Too Many Times. Torchwood

Hurts To Say Goodbye
Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Drunk Hazbin Hotel

An Important Stop in the Journey 91-1
here, now (in this cage).
魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù

All The Girly Things Horrid Henry

Getting Picked Up Teen Wolf

Royal Flush Hazbin Hotel

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

here.

Andeincascade (Ande)

Aug. 16th, 2025 01:12 pm
mific: (DS blue)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] ds_noticeboard
From a post by [personal profile] starwatcher:

A week ago -- Aug 8 -- I got the news that Ande, AKA Andeincascade at DW and AO3, has also died. I don't have any more information than that.

I thought due South fans might want to know.

August: Only Two

Aug. 15th, 2025 11:06 pm
prisca: (sweet short mod small)
[personal profile] prisca posting in [community profile] sweetandshort
For this challenge, you will have two options to participate.

You are a writer? Then the challenge Sentences might be for you.

I offer you two sentences:
1. It’s not every girl who finds out her mom is a centuries-old superhero.
2. The party went splendidly until the blood splattered on my favorite pillow.


Your mission, if you want to accept the challenge, is to grab one of the sentences and use it as your story starter or your last line.
You are welcome to use both sentences in one story (as the starter and the last line).
Feel free to change personal pronouns.
Allowed are fics up to 500 words (+ the given sentence)

You are an icon lover? Then the challenge Themes might be for you.

I offer you two themes:
1. plain background
2. double


Your mission, if you want to accept the challenge, is to grab one of the themes and create a minimum of four icons for it.
Icons should fit DW standard (100 x 100 px).


For both challenges: all fandoms, genres, and ratings are welcome, as are original work and real-person work.

You want to mix up both challenges? Go ahead, but stay to the requirements of every challenge.

When posting directly to [community profile] sweetandshort, please use a header of your choice and put bigger works under a cut. You can also post your work at any other place, but please leave a header and a link here to keep the community running.

Please tag your work with any appropriate tag.

This challenge runs until August 31, midnight in your timezone.

:::

Challenge Reminder:
10 out of 20
This or That

Book review: "Concerning My Daughter"

Aug. 15th, 2025 01:44 pm
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] booknook

Title: Concerning My Daughter
Author: Kim Hye-Jin (translation by Jamie Chang)
Genre: Fiction, literary fiction

Today I finished book #11 on the "Women in Translation" rec list: Concerning My Daught  by Kim Hye-Jin, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang. This book is about an a widow in her mid-70s who ends up sharing a home with her adult daughter and her daughter's partner. Her contentious relationship with her daughter pits her long-held beliefs and societal viewpoints against her love for her child; simultaneously, she struggles in her job caring for an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home.

The protagonist is a person who values, above all, keeping your head down and doing what's expected of you. She does not believe in standing out; she does not believe in involving yourself in other people's problems; perhaps for these reasons, she believes the only people you can ever count on are family. This is how she's lived her whole life, and she believes it was for the best. However, this mindset puts her directly in conflict with her daughter, a lesbian activist who is fighting for equal employment treatment for queer professors and teachers in the South Korean educational system. 

When her daughter, Green, runs out of money to pay rent after a quarrel with the university where she was lecturing, the protagonist allows Green and her partner Lane to move in, despite their fractious relationship.

 

Read more... )
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] books
Today I finished book #11 on the "Women in Translation" rec list: Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang. This book is about an a widow in her mid-70s who ends up sharing a home with her adult daughter and her daughter's partner. Her contentious relationship with her daughter pits her long-held beliefs and societal viewpoints against her love for her child; simultaneously, she struggles in her job caring for an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home.
 
The protagonist is a person who values, above all, keeping your head down and doing what's expected of you. She does not believe in standing out; she does not believe in involving yourself in other people's problems; perhaps for these reasons, she believes the only people you can ever count on are family. This is how she's lived her whole life, and she believes it was for the best. However, this mindset puts her directly in conflict with her daughter, a lesbian activist who is fighting for equal employment treatment for queer professors and teachers in the South Korean educational system. 
 
When her daughter, Green, runs out of money to pay rent after a quarrel with the university where she was lecturing, the protagonist allows Green and her partner Lane to move in, despite their fractious relationship.

Read more... )Read more... )
badly_knitted: (Ficlet Zone Mod)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] ficlet_zone


This month's challenge is:






Click on the challenge, pick any song title, or more than one, as inspiration, and start writing!


Reminder of Rules

Entries can be any length you like. You can post as many entries to each challenge as you're inspired to write.
If posting direct to the community, please place the body of your entry behind a cut.
Tag with the appropriate Category, Challenge, Fandom, Type, and Ratings tags. If a tag for your fandom doesn't exist, leave a request on the Tag Request post and I'll create the tags you need. You can request as many fandom tags as you want.
You don't need to use the challenge word or phrase in your fic, though you can if you like. Please include the song or episode title you use in your header.
Suggestions for future challenges are welcome on the Questions & Suggestions post.
There is no deadline for entries.

Have fun!




The Proving Trail

Aug. 15th, 2025 12:57 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli posting in [community profile] books
The Proving Trail by Louis L'Amour

The young narrator of this tale leaves his job herding cattle to find his father, and learns that his father was murdered after a night of successful gambling.
Read more... )

Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Aug. 15th, 2025 09:52 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


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).

(no subject)

Aug. 15th, 2025 03:47 pm
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep posting in [community profile] endings
Maybe no one understands smallness better than a child. Maybe no one is more invested in scale. Certainly my friend was old enough to grapple with what is and what isn't. We start early on the project of what is fleeting and what will stay.
linaewen: Girl Writing (Girl Writing)
[personal profile] linaewen posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello on Friday!  Looking back at the day today -- or yesterday, if today hasn't gotten going yet -- how did it go?

   - I thought about my fic once or twice
   - I wrote
   - I did some planning and/or research
   - I edited
   - I've sent my fic off to my beta
   - I posted today!
   - I'm taking a break
   - I did something else that I'll talk about in a comment

Looking forward, how are you planning to spend your weekend?

   - I'm going to make up for not writing all week by having a writing marathon
   - I'm going to keep writing at my current rate and see how it goes
   - I have other plans, but I might have time to get some writing in
   - I'm going to take a break from writing
douqi: (fayi)
[personal profile] douqi posting in [community profile] baihe_media
The Empty Ship (空船, pinyin: kong chuan) was in many ways a refreshing change from my standard menu of baihe reading. It's set in a small town, and features determinedly unglamorous main characters. The main interest in the novel is seeing the main characters' journey towards (some degree of) self-realisation and towards a romantic relationship with each other, which for the most part it accomplishes quite gradually, unobtrusively and naturally.

Our protagonist is Jiang Xiaohui, a pre-school teacher's assistant (on account of not having the qualifications needed to be an actual pre-school teacher, nor the ambition to acquire them). A retiring, socially awkward woman who keeps the world at arm's length, her life has been overshadowed by two major tragedies. The first is the sudden death of her parents and her consequent loss of her (Christian) faith, leading to her leaving the close-knit religious community she'd grown up in (I found this fairly detailed, overt depiction of religious life interesting, because I don't see it that often in webnovels). The second is that, seven years ago, she witnessed the brutal murder of one of her students in her own classroom. At the start of the novel, she's sort of marking time, quietly drifting through life in a semi-dissociative state. Things change when she discovers that a strange and rather alarming woman is stalking her in a rather determined fashion.

some very vague spoilers, one very-early-book reveal )

I read the Chinese original of The Empty Ship here on JJWXC. Unfortunately the author has stopped writing due to what sounds like fairly horrific online harassment (I suspect from the radfems who make up an unfortunately and I suspect disproportionately vocal portion of the baihe readership. They probably objected to the main characters having had prior romantic and sexual relationships with men).

Due South and c6d recs

Aug. 15th, 2025 11:31 pm
mific: (DS green)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] ds_noticeboard
Hi guys - just to mention that I'll be doing several fic/podfic recs a month over at [community profile] dsvirtualbar. This month the theme is the threesome: Fraser/Ray/Ray.
The first one is here.

Collage Journaling: jellyfish!

Aug. 15th, 2025 06:50 am
stonepicnicking_okapi: journal (journal)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Thank you to [personal profile] dine for the wonderful postcard and to [personal profile] debriswoman for the sci-fi pod-pattern paper which went so well with the theme.

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