Network

Current Music: Nation of Language, "Inept Apollo"

Wish they'd drop the knife in the peep-show parking lot

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt.

spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice glossed over in the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have less longevity than its premise, but I like the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

arkessian and

ironed_orchid!

(no subject)

Dear Meghan: Our 11-year-old daughter is not motivated by personal hygiene. She will shower when reminded to, but she does not wash her hair effectively (I still have to wash it for her sometimes to make sure it gets clean). She is in puberty and is starting to get pimples on her face, but she will not wash her face at night unless I basically walk her into the bathroom and do it with her. When she brushes her teeth in the morning, she still has morning breath afterward, so clearly is not doing an effective job.

I am at a loss. We have worked with her and, frankly, nagged her for years, and I’m just tired of it. Is this developmentally appropriate? We do not believe she is neurodivergent, and she’s a great kid — smart, social and involved in a lot of activities. I don’t understand this refusal to do the basics of effective personal hygiene. The approach we’ve been taking is clearly not working, so I would love some advice. Thank you!

— Nagging Not Working

( Read more... )

(no subject)

Dear Carolyn: I made the horrible mistake of developing a relationship with a parent of one of my child’s friends that ultimately led to me cheating on my boyfriend of two years. The affair lasted about two months. My boyfriend found out and confronted me about two months ago, at which point I owned up to it, albeit after much resistance and hedging on my part.

The affair is over because my affair partner broke up with me upon finding out I had not broken up with my boyfriend as he had demanded. I want very much to repair things with my boyfriend. This whole experience has shown me how artificial the affair was and how I was willing to throw away my relationship for what was ultimately a facade.

The past two months have been hell — being insulted and called horrible names, constant sarcasm, throwing things I’ve said back in my face, refusal to hear my apologies, etc. My boyfriend has since started dating other people after telling me he’s going to do to me what I did to him: try other people out. How long do I keep fighting to fix this and make amends? At this point, I just agree with everything he says about the affair, even if it’s not true, just to avoid another daily argument. My hope is almost gone, I’m defeated, and he seems to take joy in being mean and hurtful toward me. Do I cut my losses? When I ask him if he even wants to try to repair this, he flips the question back on me.
— “I’m so sorry, but please stop beating me up”

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

tv:murderbot

Murderbot 1x06

( Spoilers )

Edit: Also a spoilery thing about show vs trailer.

( More spoilers )

Entry tags:

I is for [Requiescat] In Pace

Title: I is for [Requiescat] In Pace
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 5 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson
Prompt: acidic
Warning: Major Character Death
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes (for the fifth times) and elects not to accompany Holmes to the Falls.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

My ficlet: I is for Indurate

Title: I is for Indurate
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 4 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson & Moriarty
Prompt: selcouth
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes and discovers Holmes has set a trap for Moriarty.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

My ficlet: I is for Incarnate

Title: I is for Incarnate
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 3 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson & Moriarty & Moran
Prompt: timid
Warning: Major Character Death, elements of the supernatural
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes and discovers Moriarty more than what he seems.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: All of Us, from Considering Matthew Shepard

The Friday Five for 13 June 2025

This week's questions were suggested by

pleepleus.

1. What item would you be embarrassed for people to know you own?

2. What is something you splurged on just for you?

3. What is something that you own with no real world value that is priceless to you?

4. Do you collect anything?

5. What item belonging to a friend/family member do you covet?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Entry tags:

Poet's Corner: Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy

Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy

‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

Entry tags:

My poem & Rilke

So I am a week behind on my 52 poem challenge. Last week the prompt was to write a poem about a famous person (who is dead) and the focus is on a small incident in their lives. So I chose Rilke and found an anecdote about how he had received a business letter and was composing a response, pacing near the castle where he was staying, and the first line of the first of the Duino Elegies came to him. So that's what I wrote about.

Dear Sir: Regarding a matter which requires your urgent attention... by okapi

The letter arrived in the morning post.
The envelope was dull, the lettering
was careful and upright. The poet sighed.
He slit the shroud, unfolded the dead words,
and read and sighed again. It must be deal with.
Sums would be required. On paper too fine
for the purpose, he began then stopped, stood,
and left, marching from castle to bastions
overlooking the sea, he paced the length,
back and forth, as the strong bora wind blew,
his mind was full of numbers and figures,
back and forth, he paced, back and forth until—
he heard it
on the roar—
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?”
by nightfall, there would be a birth, a verse
long-awaited as well as a piece
of correspondence, dull, careful, upright
left unanswered on the edge of a desk.

---

And here is the first stanza of the first elegy of the Duino Elegies

from The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke [trans. Stephen Mitchell}

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Entry tags:

Think the rot set in with spell-check, honestly

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

Entry tags:

on the road

Minneapolis

It's very poignant to be here again. I'm in Minneapolis so rarely that I can still distinguish each visit, but the overall sense is one of extended memory, that is not just of my own, but of anecdotes from my mother and grandmother about their lives here, my grandmother as a (very) young adult, and my mother as a kid.

Not all the memories of mine are good--the week we spent in Bloomington ranged from weird to horrific, the axis we kid spun around was the sound of my mother crying in the bathroom when my bio grandfather started his daily drinking and turned into a monster. We kids at least escaped with his bio kids (our age, his second marriage) but mom couldn't escape--we had the car.

The city that was best to them all (though mom only got to visit, never got to live there) was Red Wing. I adore that place! There's something so peaceful about Red Wing. And extended memory is very complete, as we heard ALL the stories about life on the farm, etc. But it wasn't idyllic--my grandmother and her older sister had to go--that was the conditions my great-grandmother accepted when she remarried in order to save the farm, around 1930, with the Depression really digging in. The man said he could abide the two younger girls but the sixteen year old (my grandmother) and her older sister had to get out and find their way on their own. Which they did, in Minneapolis, waiting tables.

Anyway I'm here for a con. I came a day early, knowing that getting in at one in the morning would leave me a zombie for a day. The weather is perfect--cool and cloudy. I think I'll go out for another walk.

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

music,
youtube

The true meaning of Metal

Anyone can be shouty, edgy, and black.

There seems to be more than one band with a pink logo, but this song surely features the most metal instrument of all times:

the recorder.

Watch on YouTube

(For Germans: This is Torfrock. Brings back memories. I got there via Platt folk songs: Dat Du meen Leevsten büst -> Nakich bün ick gor nich mehr so schmuck (from recommendations - c'mon, I had to listen to that [*]) -> other Torfrock songs -> WTF???)

[*] There's an English language folk song, 'I just don't look good naked anymore' of which this is riffing off. And in typical Torfrock manner, it's a lot more direct. ('schmuck' is an adjective used for attractive people, so... yeah. I still understand a fair bit of it. Not all, though, which is annoying.).

Watch on YouTube

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

ase!

Entry tags:

polls

Contemplating July activities

After a couple of years of really struggling with mood and creativity, between burnout and family issues and god knows what (and I know I've been hard to deal with in fandom, at times), things are suddenly ... good! I can write again, I'm signing up for exchanges, whatever has been blocking me has gotten a whole lot better.

July is my birthday month, therefore Best Month, obviously, and I would really like to try to do some kind of "post a short fic every day" thing if I can make it work. Unfortunately I'm suffering a dearth of appropriate challenges, because of course now that I want one and have the mental bandwidth to do something with one, daily month-long prompt challenges and/or bingo card challenges for July are nowhere in sight. The closest thing is July Break Bingo, but I've asked for cards for this before, and I just ... never really do anything with them; I appreciate that it exists, but I think I need more of a - I don't know, social element to it, I guess? Less open-ended, more directed? Their cards just don't really click with me somehow. And I can't find a Tumblr prompt/whump/whatever themed promptfest thing for July.

So I'm kicking around a few different ideas. Why not throw it out to a completely nonbinding poll?

Poll #33243

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

View Respondents

What should I do for July?

View Answers

A custom bingo card/prompt list created (by me) from all my favorite tropes
13 (52.0%)

A personal challenge to finish older inbox prompts/unwritten prompts from past fests
8 (32.0%)

Find a prompt list from a previous (non-July) fest that I didn't do at the time, and use that
5 (20.0%)

Ask my flist for new prompts until I get 31 of them for fresh inspiration
9 (36.0%)

Run a comment fest over at the Biggles comm
6 (24.0%)

Something else that I will suggest in comments
0 (0.0%)

Entry tags:

householdery

Shelf status

Three shelves (10' length, more or less) have been assembled, put up on the north wall, and filled to great effect. This emptied 1 entire Billy (with slight double stacking). We therefore need bookends.

The empty Billy is now in the living room, with the top few shelves embookinated and various plastic craft-adjacent boxes on the lower shelves. This is making a significant dent in the chaos by my desk.

The shorter bookshelf is currently at the end of the hall, for lack of a better place to put it. I expect that if it stays there long, I will start racking up another set of incredible bruises, and I still don't know where the one on my right arm CAME from. (I remember that I walked into some corner on my sleepy and unstable way to bed and then went "well, THAT'll leave a mark!" but do I remember what that something WAS? No more than I remembered what things I'd rammed into when I was taking Drama in high school, and my legs were forever dotted with black and blue marks.)

Today after work, Belovedest has put up all the standards (upright rails) on the south wall, embracketed them with however many brackets we currently have, and has started to assemble board pieces into full length shelves.

Coincidentally, today I also got a notification from the hardware store that they are shipping the backordered brackets.

There is one free-loving* free-standing bookshelf remaining in the room, where it is cheerfully getting in the way. I suggested a different method of assembly which neither requires turning the boards lengthwise nor doing the assembly behind the Billy, which suggestion was well-received.

Eventually there will be enough Shelf in the media room that some of the things taking up floor space will be able to go on them.

Today I roused in the morning long enough to feel bleugh, then woke up in the afternoon feeling competent to Lounge. Still craving bacon at intervals.

* My high school freshman Biology class had a crucial typo in a sentence about free-living organisms. We reacted about how you'd expect.

Current Music: Billy Bragg, "A Pict Song"

And then we shall dance on your graves

I got home to find the day's mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #83, containing my poem "Below Surface." It is a poem of empire; I wrote it at the start of the third week in January after shouting, "I ran out of curse tablets!" It bears about as much relation to the realities of the Emperors who died at Eboracum as the medieval Welsh legends of Constantius and I see no reason that should impair its efficacy. The issue it belongs to is gone, showcasing the elusive fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Christian Fiachra Stevens, J. M. Vesper, Vincent Bae, and more. John and Flo Stanton contribute interior art as well as the reliable spirit photography of their front and back covers. You might as well pick up a copy before it disappears.

I photographed some ghost windows. I bought myself some white chocolate peanut butter cups.

selkie's gift of tinned mackerel with lemon did not survive the night.

Entry tags:

wordy wednesday

Word: Skookum

This Wednesday's word is brought to you via new DW friend

daryl_wor:

skookum

A lot of different definitions:

adjective

1. marked by strength or power
2. marked by excellent quality, first-rate
3. reliable or hard-working.

noun

1. an evil spirit or a woodland monster

origins

Chinook Jargon. Chinook Jargon developed as a language among Indigenous peoples and European traders in the Pacific Northwest (of the US), particularly around the Columbia River. It emerged in the late 18th century, primarily as a means of communication in trade, and incorporated elements from various languages, including Chinook, French, and English.

Entry tags:

Wednesday somehow agitated the feelings of a small dog in the park

What I read

Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (2024) - rather slight, one for the completist, which I suppose I am.

Robert Rodi, Bitch Goddess (2014): 'told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions', the story of the star of a lot of dire B-movies who has a later-life move into soap-stardom. I hadn't read this one before and it was a lot of campy fun.

TC Parker, Tradwife (2024) - another of those mystery/thrillers which riffs off true-crime style investigation - somebody here I think mentioned it? - I thought it went a few narrative twists too far though was pretty readable up till then.

On the go

Apart from those, still ticking on with Upton Sinclair, Wide Is The Gate (Lanny Budd, #4), boy I am glad that I am reading these in e-form, because they must be monstrous great bricks otherwise. In this one he actually ventures back to Germany, his marriage starts to crumble, he continues his delicate dance between all the various opposed interests in his life while managing to get support to the anti-Nazi/Fascist cause, Spain is now in the picture, and I have just seen a passing mention to Earl Russell being sent down for his Reno divorce (that wasn't quite the story, but one can quite imagine that was what gossip might have made of it 30 years down the line).

Up next

New Literary Review.

The three books for the essay review.

I think more Robert Rodi might be a nice change of pace from Lanny's ordeals.