wembley | Reading

10:31pm: Yes indeed, I guess the waking up early to watch skating has finally caught up with me and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open.

Still, I better give some updates, firstly we got third place in Trivia tonight! We were a team of four and as it happened two of them are very up to speed on vegetables, which considering they were the theme of one round. I was also helpful with all my random knowledge, LOL.

3rd place garnered us a $25 gift voucher so next time we go we can get cheaper drinks and/or food, so hooray! Although I've just realised that the other three are all ex-employees of the library, hmmm,

Today was also the day of our old Church friend Ivan's funeral. Unfortunately, it was also a day where my digestive system decided to be less than polite, so for half the day I felt a bit ick. However I managed to make it to the church and not too late - although I managed to not get off at the nearest bus stop to the Church, so had to walk swiftly all the way back. Grumble, grumble. I didn't actually miss much of the church service, but I did only hear half of the eulogy, dang. I didn't know that Ivan had such a big family, but he did! I've never met any of them, so when the service was over I decided not to approach them, well that and the fact I needed to head back to the library so I wouldn't be back too late. My mother's friend was also there but she had to leave before the end of the service.

Once I got back to work I spent the rest of the day rounding up magazines - it was the last day for our mail carrier, I hope the new person is nice, but it's possible they'll just drop the mail in the library mail boxes downstairs so we'll never see them. I also had a second desk shift - I managed to arrive on time for the first thing in the morning so go me.

On a final note, today is Pancake Day/Strove Tuesday/Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday and my digestive system felt better enough to make some pancakes from the mix I bought yesterday. I still can't quite figure out how to use the pancake pan I have with faces on them, I can't quite get the faces to imprint on the pancake, not sure why that is.

Ah too sleepy to write more, but I think that sums up my day pretty well, so Moose out!

Hunger

Comfort

Hygiene

Energy

Fun

Social

Bladder

Room

Trivia

Reach for the laser with Antic's Sims-ulator!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: On My Acer in my Apartment
Current Music: SydSquad Live from Sydney Airport - YouTube

dine

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wembley

So I've been pretty open about these two pseuds being connected for a while now, but ~~because I'm always thirsty for comments~~ I might as well let you guys know that, off and on, I've been writing Orignal Works pornography as

kuntar. Most of these involve:

an arrogant, wealthy, evil and very slutty fop of a sorcerer who gets Whumped Intensely by Even Worse Dudes who make Archive Warnings Apply to him, heavily

a kind, brawny paladin who begrudgingly saves his life a lot even though they're enemies and the sorcerer kind of ruined his life

they smooch a lot

The most recent story (which I just finished finally editing, woooo!):

Sweet Honey, Loathsome | 20k, Complete | M/M, Explicit | Vaunted, a kind paladin, opens his door to find that his longtime enemy, the evil wizard Wrathbyrne, has been stripped of his powers and placed under a curse: Wrathbyrne has to get fucked once a day or he dies.

Previous stories, all of which are standalones that each exist in their own little universes, slightly "canon"-divergent from one another:

Lord Wrathbyrne's Highly Unpleasant Year | 72k, WIP | M/M, Explicit | An evil wizard gets non-conned by a bunch of other evil dudes and then rescued by Fake He-Man.

Roadside Attractions | 5k, Complete | M/M, Explicit | A cartoonishly evil wizard and his heroic, good guy foe are handcuffed together in a sitcom predicament. Then they get dosed with sex pollen.

Reformation | 13k, WIP | M/M, Explicit | The Good Council of Good has a soft-spoken death cleric attempt to rehabilitate the evil wizard and turn him into a good man. Obviously, this is just an excuse for whump and Archive Warnings To Apply to the evil wizard, who hopes local hero, Vaunted the nice paladin, will save him. Even though the nice paladin is the one who arrested him in the first place. Oops.

Anyway, if any of this sounds up your alley, I hope you check 'em out, I love my little guys. <3

troisoiseaux

In War and Peace, I've read through Book Three and the unglamorous shambles of the battle of Austerlitz, and one theme that's stuck out to me is the sort of... grim bureaucracy(?) of war: the Russian-Austrian war council adopts a battle strategy that many of them know won't work, more or less because they want get out of this meeting and it's basically already in place/too late to change their approach; the commanders actually in the field are mostly worried about not being the person blamed for anything going wrong:

Not wishing to agree to Dolgorukov's demand to commence the action, and wishing to avert responsibility from himself, Prince Bagration proposed to Dolgorukov to send to inquire of the commander in chief. Bagration knew that as the distance between the two flanks was more than six miles, even if the messenger were not killed (which he very likely would be), and found the commander in chief (which would be very difficult), he would not be able to get back before evening.

The selected messenger ends up being Nikolai Rostov, who does not die (despite, among other incidents, finding himself directly in the path of a unit of hussars charging at full gallop, because of course he did) but does fumble the chance to meet his idol Emperor Alexander: "But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter the thoughts he has dreamed of for nights," he's too shy to approach him even though he literally has an excuse to do so?? On the other hand, Prince Andrei is personally taken prisoner by his hero, Napoleon, although at that point he's kind of over it, having had an ongoing near-death experience and an accompanying revelation about "the insignificance of greatness."

I ended up skipping ahead in Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and Other Writings to read "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" (1933), which was the main basis for the musical Guys & Dolls— it turns out that in the original story, there's no bet over whether gambler Sky Masterson can convince "missionary doll" Sarah Brown to join him on a day trip to Havana; he just falls for her on sight, tries to woo her by winning a guy's soul in a craps game to build up her mission, and then she catches on and comes marching in to gamble for his soul, which really ought to have made it into the musical but I've decided is how they make up off-stage between "Marry the Man Today" and the finale. (On the other hand, Sky's father's warning about not taking a bet from guys who "show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken" and "offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear," because "as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider," is wholesale Runyon.) I agree with

osprey_archer that someone really ought to write a crossover between Runyon's dim-witted gangsters and P.G. Wodehouse's dim-witted toffs, especially because the last few (as read in order) stories have in fact involved befriending random civilians: in one, a trio of American gangsters are hired to assassinate the king of a small European country, only to discover that the king is about six and really keen on Al Capone and baseball; in another, a group of tough guys running a ticket-scalping racket (maybe more surprised than I should have been to discover this was a thing since at least the 1930s??) adopt a nice little doll who got stood up at the Harvard vs. Yale football game, and learn to love the epic highs and lows of college football in the process.

Current Music: Rocks In My Pockets - The Mountain Goats

aethel

1. A fun link: neal.fun. I haven't tried all of them yet, but I did spend a while launching asteroids at the Earth. Infinite Craft is fun too.

2. I watched I Am Dragon, a silly Russian fantasy film. It was not as good as it could have been, but there aren't too many films where the love interest is a dragon, so I was entertained.

3. Books: I keep picking up books containing a climate apocalypse, fascism, or both. Least depressing: After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations by Eric Cline. Most depressing: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower was written in 1993 and set in the "near future" of 2024--the unfolding catastrophe is too close for comfort and doesn't feel very science fictional. (I assume it was at least partly inspired by the 1992 Rodney King riots.) I'm now rereading The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes until I recover enough to continue with They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.

scaramouche

Watch on YouTube

We're having a rainy Chinese New Year this time, which is quite unusual, though I vaguely remember we've had that before recently. Maybe the stereotype of a super hot CNY is no longer as typical?

Current Mood: lazy

dine

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aurumcalendula

Title: One Woman Army
Fandom: Multifandom
Music: One Woman Army by Porcelain Black
Summary: 'I'm a one woman army'
Notes: Premiered at TGIFemslash 2026!
Warnings: quick cuts, flashing lights, violence

( streaming )

AO3 | bsky | tumblr | YouTube

( Additional Notes )

( sources )

yourlibrarian

1) Apparently I never mentioned here that my partner and I went to see The Harlem Globetrotters last month. He said he'd always wanted to see them. It turned out to be different from what we expected. ( Read more... )

2) I also tend to work on a lot of jigsaw puzzles in December and January. It's nice to sit by the sunny window and watch TV in the background while working on them. I've now put away the jigsaw board and sold off the puzzles, but Ahsoka and Grogu were a favorite ( Read more... )

3) I was listening to the Mutant Enemy Writer's Room Reunion recorded on March 17, 2015. Over 10 years ago now, but at the time it was already a decade on from the ending of all the Mutant Enemy shows. It was a really interesting listen, in terms of how those shows were written vs. the writers' experiences on other shows (especially broadcast network shows). But it also amazed me how, while rewrites were apparently rare, it was also not at all unusual that scripts were unfinished even as episodes were being filmed. ( Read more... )

4) In recent months I've been listening to a radio show from the 50s and 60s that does a variety of non-rock/pop tunes, as opposed to stuff like mambos, sambas, novelty songs, and other stuff that doesn't tend to make oldies' playlists. Sometimes they have TV theme songs in there too. Not sure I'd heard the Route 66 theme before, but the version I was listening to sounded like The Simpsons theme in that the main repeated phrase was similar. Made me eyebrow raise a little since it's one of the most profitable show themes ever written.

5) The recent Fansplaining article The Success of Heated Rivalry Should Not Be a Surprise contains other surprises. For one, the author is bewildered by most articles on the show covering (for the 1 millionth time) the "women interested in gay sex" aspect, and then also why there are so many more connections to Asian BL fandoms rather than more close-to-home slash fandoms including RPF fandoms. ( Read more... )

Poll #34232 Kudos Footer-557

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rachelmanija

Five high school friends go on a camping trip and find a mysterious staircase in the woods. One of them climbs it and vanishes. Twenty years later, the staircase reappears, and they go to face it again.

I loved this premise and the cover. The staircase leading nowhere is spooky and beautiful, a weird melding of nature and civilization, so I was hoping for something that matched that vibe, like Annihilation or Revelator.

That was absolutely not what I got. The Staicase in the Woods is the misbegotten mutant child of It, King Sorrow, and Tumblr-speak. Every single character is insufferable. The teenagers are boring, and the adults are all the worst people you meet at parties. There are four men and one woman/nonbinary person, and she/they reads exactly like what MAGA thinks liberal women/trans people are like -- AuHD, blue hair, Tumblr-speak, angry, preachy, kinky sex etc. She/they says "My pronouns are she/them," then is only ever referred to as she and a woman. The staircase itself is barely in the story, where it leads is a letdown, and the ending combines the worst elements of being dumb and unresolved.

I got partway in and then skimmed because I was curious about the staircase and the vanished kid.

Angry spoilers for the whole book.

( Read more... )

extrapenguin

Space Swap assignments are out, and that means I return to the music meme! In keeping with the recent music theme, have a song that came out this year! In 2026! And a good thing too, because it's the only possible answer to this week's question:

a song that proves that you have good taste
Synthwailer - Iron Arch

Watch on YouTube

This one's on Bandcamp! The band itself describes it as:

Inspired by early-2000s trance melodies, industrial metal, and Middle Eastern tonal colors, the song tells the tale of a world trapped in eternal twilight — where the sun itself is chained above a black citadel, stolen as a symbol of power. As the march continues, the voice of the hollow sun awakens those who once served the machine, turning obedience into defiance.

And yeah, that tracks! It's symphonic metal, trance, electronic, industrial, and 100% amazing. It's so great I immediately bought it (despite the fact I generally only buy albums on Bandcamp), and then vidded it, thus listening to it 198374938 times on repeat, and I still want to listen to it on repeat! I love this.

prompts under the cut

a song you discovered this month
a song that makes you smile
a song that makes you cry
a song that you know all the lyrics of
a song that proves that you have good taste
a song title that is in all lowercase
a song title that is in all uppercase
an underrated song
a song that has three words
a song from your childhood
a song that reminds you of summertime
a song that you feel nostalgic to
the first song that plays on shuffle
a song that someone showed you
a song from a movie soundtrack
a song from a television soundtrack
a song about being 17
a song that reminds you of somebody
a song to drive to
a song with a number in the title
a song that you listen to at 3am in the morning
a song with a long title
a song with a color in the title
a song that gets stuck in your head
a song in a different language
a song that helps you fall asleep at night
a song that describes how you feel right now
a song that you used to hate but love today
a song that you downloaded
a song that you want to share

shallowness

Miss Scarlet and the Duke - 3.1 The Vanishing

( Read more... )

erinptah

Liveblog roundup from the rest of Part Two.

Light spoilers for the whole book in my annotations. Go wild in the comments.

Previous HDM-related posts here. To start from the earliest Book of Dust reactions, see The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

It’s getting harder to find relevant HDM TV moments to screencap for some of these parts. Sometimes I just went “eh, this is very loosely relevant, and Pan is cute, so I’ll go with it.”

( Hasn’t heard of alkahest, but he’s a bookish guy, so he does the very obvious thing of Picking Up A Dictionary. )

shipperslist

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princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: busy

nialla

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cimorene

I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.

anonymoose_au

10:26pm: Or maybe it's the new string I have for my bow! Well, it's not actually a new string, it's someone's old one, but they're going to make me a new one (I pay for materials and labour). It has 15 twists in it and while it doesn't feel that different, there is a difference and the arrow feels like it's going straighter. That might because I was only shooting from 18m, but it was on a very small target face and I didn't miss out on getting a score too much. So I'm feeling good.

Moving on from archery, I got a phone call from Mum at work with some sad news, Ivan the older gentleman from the church our family went to back in the early 2000s (geeze, that makes me feel old), died and his funeral is tomorrow. :O( This is quite unfortunate, since I only found out he was still with us a few weeks back and actually considered visiting him and now, alas it's too late. He was 96 years old, which means he would have been in his late 70s when I first met him. That's my father's age now! Which is rather weird to think about...

Anyway, Mum mentioned that neither she nor Dad would be able to go to the funeral and wanted to know if I could maybe get a few hours off to go. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to since it was quite short notice, but since it is for a funeral when I asked my boss he said that was fine. The only issue was going to be that the only black dress I had (or at least thought I had) isn't really funeral appropriate as it's kinda short. Mum called me again while I was at archery to ask if I could get some steak from Grandpa and bring it over to the parental abode, when I mentioned my clothing dilemma she said she had a possibility for me which at least made my steak delivery worth my while LOL. Plus it was good to see Grandpa settling well back in his house, he was messing around with computers when I arrived, hopefully he got it working.

Then after dropping off the steak and picking up the dress (it's black with white polka-dots) I headed for home but had to make a quick stop at the supermarket for cereal and some pancake mix (tomorrow is Strove Tuesday aka Pancake Day) and some mini-marshmallows. Then finally I got petrol for my car - now watch the price go down - it's pretty low right now, but if my luck holds...

Anywho, I'm all caught up now, I was going to do the Friday Five, but it's all about kissing, which I have absolutely zero experience with so now point doing that one LOL.

On a final note though, the Pairs Short Program was on today feature our new Aussie pair who alas did not make it to the Free Skate, but they had a really good performance today, so they know they did their best. They're a young team, just out of Juniors so there's time. The Free skate is tomorrow morning, but as I also have to get my butt to work on time for my 9am desk shift so I probably won't be able to focus on it. It's also the 20th anniversary of Plushy's Olympic Gold in 2006, damn.

On the topic of time flying, I've got distracted a few times during this entry and now it's almost 11pm and I need to get my butt to bed!

Ta-ta!

Hunger

Comfort

Hygiene

Energy

Fun

Social

Bladder

Room

Archery

Reach for the laser with Antic's Sims-ulator!

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: On My Acer in my Apartment
Current Music: SydSquad Live from Sydney Airport - YouTube

luzula

Still not reading much, but I did read some books during the past two months!

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (2025)
Listened to the audiobook for my book club. This is the first book in a while that grabbed me in a page-turney way, and I enjoyed it a lot! I'm sure it can be picked at, and we did so during book club, but for me it was mostly notable in being a book I was immersed in while reading, which for me these days is rare.

The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray (2023)
When I first started reading this, my feeling was that "yeah, I read a lot of posts on the author's DW about this book, and I guess the book is exactly what I was expecting it to be". Like, in a way I felt as though I didn't even have to read the book. But this feeling passed when I got into the particulars of the characters and their relationships so that they felt real to me, so that it wasn't just about the Idea of the book any longer, and then I thoroughly enjoyed it. (The Idea of the book being, if you haven't heard of the book before, the contrast between what was allowable in male friendships in 1860 and 1960.)

I also listened to about half of The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2024), also for book club. I feel like the book had a lot of Gormenghast DNA, and I enjoyed the weird worldbuiling, but I didn't end up finishing it.

dine

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wembley

February 2026

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Page Summary

anonymoose_au - Too Sleepy To Think of a Good Title
dine - I’m so normal about this fandom. so very normal
wembley - so are you guys into evil wizards getting dicked down or what
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
aethel - (no subject)
scaramouche - YEAR OF HORSE
dine - Music Monday
aurumcalendula - One Woman Army | Multifandom
yourlibrarian - Of Shows, Puzzles and Meta
rachelmanija - The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig
extrapenguin - Monday Music Meme
shallowness - Return to the Victorian lady detective show
erinptah - Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 2b (chapters 16-22)
shipperslist - Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition, week 3: music
princessofgeeks - idle question
nialla - The Em Dash
cimorene - Talking about the weather...
anonymoose_au - What A Difference A Day Makes...
luzula - Recent reading
dine - how's it going, boys, girls, & squirrels?

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Reading List

Reading

Too Sleepy To Think of a Good Title

I’m so normal about this fandom. so very normal

so are you guys into evil wizards getting dicked down or what

Recent reading

(no subject)

YEAR OF HORSE

Music Monday

One Woman Army | Multifandom

Of Shows, Puzzles and Meta

The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig

Monday Music Meme

Return to the Victorian lady detective show

Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 2b (chapters 16-22)

Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition, week 3: music

idle question

The Em Dash

Talking about the weather...

What A Difference A Day Makes...

Recent reading

how's it going, boys, girls, & squirrels?

Profile

February 2026

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