First things first: the week wound up being unexpectedly tiring/ill-making but for good reasons if also stressful ones, so that made me erratic again. But at this point it would be erratic of me not to be erratic, I suppose.
Anyway, got a lovely yuletide assignment, so fingers crossed, but I was very happy not to be an initial pinch hit! Not in itself, because that can be very cool and the only time I was a fairly early (I don't think it was initial) pinch hit I got 3 treats, BUT I went all out for 4 super-obscure requests and I nevertheless matched with someone! There was a visible offer for Enigma which also made me happy, but that means nothing, as bucket offers are invisible & visible ones may well be offering/not offering characters that would prevent matchability. BUT STILL. Someone not me also looked at it and went, yes, there should be fic! XD
I'm determined to catch up a bit with my watching posts, and we now enter the point that it really did become the summer of the cosy detectives, and this is still not all of them, and I didn't even bother including s3 of Beyond Paradise which I also watched in this same stretch, or started, anyway:
* The Drama channel finally came through with s2 & 3 of Miss Scarlet & the Duke! They showed s1 in 2023, which I loved, and I've had to wait all that time for more & I thought they'd lost the rights to it or something. It felt like at least three years! Unfortunately, I did accidentally manage to miss the first two episodes, but overall, again a thoroughly engaging run & I enjoyed it a lot. My favourite ep was where she and her rival detective guy (not the Duke) got snowed in a hotel in France or somewhere and had to work together and against each other to solve it. Top notch, full marks for trapped together and rivals forced to work together tropes done v well.
Not technically a cosy though. It is a lot of fun and isn't especially dark but nevertheless nothing with this banger of an opening credit sequence can be counted as cosy. Only downmarks being for William and Eliza clearly never going to be getting together, although, tbf, they do have good reason for it. Anyway, excellent, would totally be fannish if I was writing much and could get hold of it properly.
* Ch5 then chimed in with Murder Most Puzzling, which was only 4 episodes long and my DVR bailed on recording two of them (there were a lot of things all on TV at the same time, it was difficult for it), but this was daft yet surprisingly good in many ways and starred Phyllis Logan, finally freed from Downton Abbey and allowed to swear and also solve crime as the famous Puzzle Lady, with the complication of her not in fact creating her own puzzles - her brilliant introverted niece with relationship issues actually did that. Is a bit hard to rate exactly due to missing half of a very short series.
* Drama's original series Outrageous, about the Mitfords, which I mentioned several times while I was watching it, and does remain one of the best new TV series I've seen in a while - lively, engaging, able to navigate the more serious aspects pretty well too & a great cast.
* Finally gave up on Ghosts (US) about two or three eps into s4, though, because while it can be fun and sweet itself too, there's just so much painfully formulaic writing in so many of the episodes, the scales tipped from fun-if-flawed to just not worth it any longer and I remembered that I can just tap out if I want to, so I did. (I mean, it does make me appreciate how damn good UK Ghosts was, but I can do that by rewatching it).
Then there were some films I watched upstairs (whether by iPlayer on my tablet, or managed to get to on the dvd despite summer) which I will write about and some I watched downstairs which I cannot write about because I watched them. They were good. I was extremely tired (ill). It was summer. It is ridiculous with the ME/CFS to note that, at the same time, with the same level of brain and (lack of) energy, I took in significantly more of the things I watched upstairs on a bed whereas things I had to watch downstairs sitting up, I'm just *shrug* I watched it. (I listed all these in a post once before, so I mentioned them already). But, yeah. It's ridiculous. It's no wonder people always just wind up thinking we're making it all up. (Please don't open the window, all my energy will depart and I need to be lying down to watch films, sorry. By myself. Quarter of an hour at a time. Very slowly.)
So here it is: the rest of autumn spread out before us, post-Hallowe'en and pre-Christmas with (in Canada) mainly the gray blur of November in between.
(It's really just as well we have our harvest celebration in October, but as always, I do envy the placement of it between Hallowe'en and Christmas in the US just in terms of not having the stretch between seasonal holidays. [I say, as if US Thanksgiving isn't horribly fraught in so many ways.] I don't know why I have such strong feelings about this. I had them before I stumbled into wanting seasonal decor at home for more than just Christmas and started feeling all adrift in that sense at this time of year.)
(This probably isn't why some people have non-holiday decor that can be swapped in and out, thus having more options, but it's a nice side effect, I imagine. *contemplates* Please feel free to tell me about your non-Hallowe'en decor! Full-on harvest stuff is not terribly seasonal here, but surely there are other options?)
Anyway. It's noticeably cooler here now, and still bright outside rather than all gray-skewed like my mental picture of the season, but the month is young.
If there are things you love about November, please share? Last time we ordered groceries, I got a bag of Granny Smith apples with intentions of baking, and that...uh, that hasn't happened yet. Hopefully today after I get some work done, assuming nothing horrible has happened to them. (I worry about overestimating the durability of things like apples. And cabbage. We also have a cabbage. >.> It's been around longer.)
As for what to bake...well, I have my eyes on two Smitten Kitchen cakes and two RecipeTin Eats cakes (all new to us), and there's also an a cake we made last year, or just doing baked apples or crisp. We'll see. In cat news, the other night Sinha was being a tremendous pest to Jinksy (as is typical), and unexpectedly, Jinksy remembered (???) how to scruff him! He scruffed Sinha a couple of times a couple years ago, and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever actually made Sinha back the fuck off, but then that was it. Maybe he won't go another year or more without remembering about it again. (It's such a complicated feeling for us, because Sinha makes the most pathetic keening noises and gets really upset about it [and the other night it took an hour or so of him racing around the house grumbling to himself before he settled down, which was awkward since we were trying to sleep], so it's a bit heartbreaking, but we are absolutely in favor of Jinksy standing up for himself and saying, "NO. You will STOP.")
I wound up reading fourteen novels/novellas in October! Here's what I've read since my last reading check-in.
KJ Charles' The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal (historical M/M) is a neat setup, where the narrator has been partnered for years with a paranormal investigator and has written famous accounts of the cases they faced, and is now much more privately writing about their personal history and the cases that instigated and shaped their romantic partnership (with, of course, many references to cases he's already written about for the public eye).
Dweller on the Threshold is my second read by Skyla Dawn Cameron, in which a woman inherits a probably-haunted house early in the covid pandemic. It's creepy and well-done and much weirder than it initially seemed likely to be (although to nowhere near the degree of weirdness that her The Taiga Ridge Murders, which I read late last year, turned out to be).
Dreadful Company (Vivian Shaw) was a quick, fun read. It's the second Dr. Greta Helsing novel, and it left me in the odd-feeling (but not uncommon for me, really) position of having enjoyed it without feeling any particular need to seek out the following books.
What Stalks the Deep is the third of T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier novellas, which due to the increasingly-horrifying prices of ebooks (in particular novellas, IMO) I borrowed from the library. OT1H, that's deeply annoying, because I generally really like Ursula Vernon's writing and would like to simply buy everything, if only to support her (and yes, I do know library borrows do contribute to that as well); OTOH, I avoided spending something like $20 on a NOVELLA and was (briefly) spared the need to decide what to read next, because when this became available at the library, it became my obvious next read once I'd finished Dreadful Company. Also, I enjoyed it; I wouldn't recommend reading it without at least reading the first book in this set, and if you've read and liked the previous ones, you'll presumably like this one too.
(Before my many-years-ago-now decision to spend a year [ha!] reading mainly/only from books I'd purchased but never read--which has pretty much been ongoing ever since, because I keep buying books--I almost never had to think about what to read next, because I had several hundred holds on hard copies at the library, and basically would just put something on hold and immediately suspend the hold for a year or two [whatever the maximum was], and then frequently scroll through the list and re-suspend books if I caught them in the window between them being automatically unsuspended and actually heading my way. Whatever books I didn't catch in that window arrived for borrowing at the library, so I'd pick them up and read them, whatever they were.)
Also scruloose and I finished Fugitive Telemetry, although it took us long enough that I had to check it out from the library a second time (which I'd rather avoid, given my understanding of how ridiculous the ebook/audiobook situation is for libraries >.<). When we circle back to listen to the first novel, we'll definitely have to be ready to actively focus on finding time for it. Current reading/watching: I'm a few chapters into Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (V.E. Schwab), and on the non-fiction front, a little ways into Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.
Meanwhile, scruloose and I are two episodes into season 2 of Silo.
Description:This event focuses on rare pair ships for all Yugioh series (including crossovers), open to writers, artists, and image & video editors. We use tiered rulings to determine rarity for this event based on ao3 statistics. See our FAQ for more info on rarity requirements.
For this year's mini bang, writers will draft a fic for their chosen rare pair, meeting the 4000 word minimum. Then artists will claim at least 1 fic to use as inspiration for their art. Partners will collaborate and share their fanworks together during the posting period for this event. Please read our specifications page for more details about expectations for event works.
After an embarrassingly long time of sporadically reminding myself that I specifically bought a tiny low-powered laptop explicitly for use down in the living room (and used her accordingly for a while, until the spring Dayjob crunch threw me out of the still-forming habit), I've finally got Haruna up and running again. Will this help me leave fewer tabs open, or just result in them being split among more places? Happy Hallowe'en and blessed Samhain, as applicable! It's a quiet one here. The wind and rain were wild for much of the day, but did calm down in the late afternoon, as hoped. Reports from online locals indicate that a lot of people got way fewer trick-or-treaters than usual (if any), although some spots seemed to get normal levels.
We don't really know what our neighborhood "normal" is, either in the area in general or along our condo corp's road, since for the last few years we've just been setting out the candy and refilling as needed. Some or most of it has generally vanished, but that doesn't say much about numbers vs. the likelihood that at least a few kids take it by the fistful. But tonight scruloose decided to actually answer the door and hand it out (in a hazmat suit, because why not?) and not a single kid came by during the window of time when they were down there. (That said, they got down there somewhat later than would probably have been ideal, and the doorbell did ring once before that point [and go unanswered, but all of our lights were off until scruloose was ready]. So if we try it again next year, earlier might make a bit of difference.)
I've mostly been chilling on the main level with the cats, who've been barred from the ground floor for the evening. (We had the window open during that span of time when more kids might've been on the move out there, but I heard only the occasional young voice echoing over from the main road.) After finishing up at Dayjob for the day, I put on my Hallowe'en onesie, and scruloose made the first hot cocoa of the season, and we finally finished listening to Fugitive Telemetry before dinner was made and scruloose bagged up candy. (;_;)
I hope you're all having a fun/peaceful time of it.
Falling Apart (and Being Remade) (12000 words) by Settiai, LuckyWizard Chapters: 1/1 Fandom:Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age - All Media Types Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Carver Hawke & Male Hawke Characters: Bethany Hawke, Carver Hawke, Female Amell (Dragon Age), Leandra Hawke, Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Original Fereldan Character(s) Additional Tags: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Brothers, Cameos, Complicated Relationships, Darkspawn, Dragon Age Reverse Big Bang, Embedded Images, Family, Fanart, Inspired by Art, Minor Character Death, Ostagar (Dragon Age), Serious Injuries, Violence Summary:Everything changed at Ostagar, whether the Hawke brothers realized it at the time or not.
This post indexes my Kinktober limericks, all on the theme of Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker feat. Padmé et al.
It is my ambition for November not to post an average of two poems a day, and thereby hopefully retain the few stragglers who are still subscribed to me on AO3 after the last two months of constant limericks. 对不起不对不起 (Sorry, not sorry.)
If, on the other hand, I have to write drabbles and limericks for people who request them as food bank donation thank-yous, I will spam the crap out of the AO3 and all my subscribers can just deal.
Yesterday, for example, I posted 4 drabbles for people who informed me that they had donated at least 25 USD worth of food or money to food pantries and/or banks in their area. If you like my writing and you can spare a quarter-Benjamin, support the food-insecure people near you and request something from me.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, queen of the queer cult movies, long may she reign. It may come as a surprise to some of you that in my misspent youth I belonged to a RHPS shadowcast, which is a thing where people get up on stage and act out the movie while it is playing at weekly midnight showings. (This complicates the question of how many hundreds of times I've "seen" the movie, because much of the time I was facing away from it.)
But now I am old and boring and go to bed at 10:30, so instead I spend my free time playing video games that are nearly as old as I am, such as The Rocky Horror Show for the Commodore 64, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. I like the blood dripping from the playscreen. Someone worked hard on that Since it doesn't have "picture" in the title, I guess the game is nominally an adaptation of the 1973 stage musical on which the movie is based, though it does use visual details from the movie. But the movie follows the play closely, so it doesn't really matter either way. You can choose to play as either Brad or Janet, two all-American kids whose car breaks down, forcing them to seek help at a nearby castle (castles don't have telephones, asshole!—no, no, I'm not doing this, I'm stopping now) where they encounter Dr. Frank N. Furter, who besides being a mad scientist is also the one thing that is the most threatening to 1950s all-American mores: a fabulous drag queen.
You can play The Rocky Horror Show in your browser on the Internet Archive. Note that it wants a numpad for the controls, so if you're like me and use a laptop without one, you'll have to either play it on a different machine or confuse the hell out of yourself trying to control it with the number row.
... okay, yes, there was also some news about the new Nintendo Switch 2 edition being released, but I didn't pay much attention to that one. I'm lucky to have a still-working Switch Lite considering just how old it is at this point, and I think it's safe to say that a new system isn't in my budget in the foreseeable future. So I'm much more interested in the update for everyone who already has the game.
ACNH has been my comfort game for over five years now. I'd never played any of the Animal Crossing games before, but one of the players in my Friday D&D group convinced the rest of us to all buy the game after D&D the day it was released back in 2020. The world had just gone into lockdown, and it was a lifesaver then and has continued to be over the years.
It's amazing just how much my mood has been lifted hearing that there's something new coming for it. I honestly didn't think they would be doing another update. 💕
I wrote the drabbles linked in this post for people who donated at least 25 USD in cash or in-kind to food banks. Hopefully the US federal government will not be allowed to stiff food stamp recipients, but if they try, many people will need support. My Wayfinder has good resource coverage near me, and may have useful information near you, too.
At her majesty's pleasure (100 words) by Petra Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Bloody Jack Adventures - L. A. Meyer Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Underage Sex Relationships: Ching Shih | Zheng Yi Sao/Jacky Faber, Jacky Faber/Jaimy Fletcher Characters: Ching Shih | Zheng Yi Sao, Jacky Faber Additional Tags: Drabble, Yearning Summary:
Jacky wants to go home, but not just yet.
*
When you lose control, it touches my soul (100 words) by Petra Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: due South Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Benton Fraser & Ray Characters: Benton Fraser Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Murderbot Diaries Fusion Series: Part 9 of SecUnit Fraser Summary:
Fraser and Ray reminisce.
*
Soup's on (100 words) by Petra Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus Characters: Gideon Nav, Harrowhark Nonagesimus Additional Tags: Drabble, Awkward Conversations Summary:
Gideon attempts to look after Harrow.
*
I got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night (100 words) by Petra Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: White Collar (TV 2009) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Elizabeth Burke/Peter Burke/Neal Caffrey Characters: Elizabeth Burke (White Collar), Peter Burke, Neal Caffrey Additional Tags: Drabble, Seasonal Affective Disorder Summary:
I've made this post a few times without any luck, but I wanted to try again just in case. Would anyone be interested in any of the following Nintendo Switch games?
If you're not interested but know someone who might be, please point them my way. I'm trying to cover the hotel bill due today, and it would help a lot if I could at least sell the Pokémon one since it's worth the most.
For payment, I have CashApp ($Settiai), PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle (nancy.lynn.foster@gmail.com).
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thisbluespirit) wrote2025-11-02 07:54 pm![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
yuletide assignment, so fingers crossed, but I was very happy not to be an initial pinch hit! Not in itself, because that can be very cool and the only time I was a fairly early (I don't think it was initial) pinch hit I got 3 treats, BUT I went all out for 4 super-obscure requests and I nevertheless matched with someone! There was a visible offer for Enigma which also made me happy, but that means nothing, as bucket offers are invisible & visible ones may well be offering/not offering characters that would prevent matchability. BUT STILL. Someone not me also looked at it and went, yes, there should be fic! XD
