b2mem | Member Posts

Guess who gets to put those kitty-medicating skills into practice this week! And needs to learn how to bathe two cats who will not like it, all by herself.

(Someone got worms, and now they both have them. Not a big deal, but definitely cause for a long, tired sigh.)

Current Mood: sleepy

starspray

Hopefully this year I can keep up with these a bit better.

So far I've only read one book in 2026, but I also want to mention the last few I finished in 2025:

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World, by Shelley Puhak - This is about two Merovingian queens, Brunhild and Fredegund--I didn't know anything about the Merovingians going into this, or much about that time period in Europe (6th century), so I learned a lot and it was really fascinating.

Nemesis: Medieval England's Greatest Enemy, by Catherine Hanley - More medeival history, this time about Philip Augustus, who in spite of my interest in the Plantagenets I didn't know much about. This book is a biography focusing primarily on his relationship with Henry II of England and his sons, which is fun.

The Impossible Fortune, by Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club books are always a great time. I think some of the various different POV segments were not quite necessary, but it didn't feel as egregious in this one as in the last Osman book I read (We Solve Murders, I think?).

And this year so far I've read:

Guilty by Definition, by Susie Dent - All the main characters work for a dictionary so there's lots of fancy vocabulary floating around, which was delightful to me. The story itself is also really great, the mystery engaging, takes place in Oxford. Tolkien got namedropped. I had fun!

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: I Will Never Die - Delta Rae

evandar

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I've already mentioned in this year's Snowflake Challenge that I create playlists for pairings/fandoms, so I'm going to share one of those. Like I've said before, listening to playlists like this helps me to write. They also help me to stay within a particular fandom vibe whenever I'm not actively writing fanfic as well as help process fic ideas. So.

These are not things I usually share. Argh.

( Read more... )

That isn't the whole playlist. Some of the songs that I've left out are there for "inexplicable vibes" reasons; some are there because I listened to them while obsessing over the fandom and accidentally assigned them to a character and now can't separate them.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Endlessness - Nightwish

shirebound

Happy Birthday to

monicaop and

slightlytookish! Hooray for your special day, ladies!

autobotscoutriella

Snowflake Challenge: A mug of coffee or hot chocolate with a snowflake shaped gingerbread cookie perched on the rim sits nestled amidst a softly bunched blanket. A few dried orange slices sit next to it.

Challenge #9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Listen, I'm not saying I have an extremely specific preference for ships between two very competent characters*, both a little bit abrasive but one a lot more blunt about it than the other**, with a professional connection in which one technically outranks the other and there's potential for a right-hand-man dynamic even if canon doesn't deliver***, at least one of them canonically has a really baffling career progression****, if they're human it's going to be some variation on blond/brunette and if they're robots their colors contrast similarly, and their backstories are vague enough I can work some kind of long-term personal connection between them into my headcanons if that's not actually canon - and also it's a rarepair, at least one of the characters involved has a much more popular (sometimes canon) ship with a different character, and at least one of the characters involved frequently gets underestimated/underused/forgotten by both canon and fandom.

I'm just saying it's weird that it happened to me four times.

And I didn't even notice until I was lining up a bunch of my favorite ships and went "...huh." Sure, some of it is headcanon because a lot of the characters involved are also underdeveloped, but if I'm coming up with similar headcanons for all of them, I think there's something there! It's so specific I don't think it even counts as a trope. Birds of a Feather + Right-Hand Man + a touch of Opposites Attract except they're not really that different, one just hides it better + Competence Kink + uh, whatever the trope name is for contrasting colors but specifically not red/blue?

*Look, I know popular Ace Attorney fanon is that Daryan's an idiot, but he's pretty clearly canonically not. He makes bad decisions under pressure, which is a different problem. He keeps up with Klavier fine.

**I think Ema and Franziska can match each other's abrasiveness beat for beat, but I know which of them I'd rather be locked in a car with for three hours.

***Did Transformers canon give me the Carly-and-Mikaela teamup it should have? Not even a little bit. But the compatible skillsets are there. Official diplomat/team mechanic is great, actually.

****Does any piece of Transformers canon manage to be consistent about what Elita's actual rank is, let alone Chromia's?

Current Mood: amused

independence1776

Challenge #6: Top 10 Challenge. The category(ies) you choose are up to you.

Have ten random fanworks I've read/watched/seen recently. I'm cutting this section for length, but it includes Tolkien fic and art and Star Wars art, fic, and a handful of fanfilms.
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Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

1. Creativity.
2. Taking active steps to be who I want to be.
3. Stubbornness.

Challenge 8: Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

My writing creative process these days is mostly mental screaming as I'm very much struggling with having the mental energy to write when I have an emotionally exhausting job. Basically, I write nothing for months, get a flash of inspiration, spend two weeks writing a 10k fic, and then go back to not writing.

Challenge 9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

I have always been fond of canon divergent AUs, hurt/comfort and whump, and I have an abiding love of Star Wars-Tolkien crossovers. I adore Maglor wandering in the modern day fanworks. I have a quiet love of rule 63/always-a-woman fics, especially for Maglor in The Silmarillion and Cal Kestis in Star Wars. (The latter pretty much doesn't exist, and it annoys me to no end that the game devs basically said that the reason Cal's not a woman is because they thought it was too unrelatable and no one would play the game.)

Challenge 10: Big Mood (Board) CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I'm going with Depa Billaba! She's my favorite minor character in Star Wars, specifically the Kanan comics version (there are three versions, two of which belong to Disney canon). I love her to pieces. In the comics, she carries a green lightsaber, but they also show how she's grown and healed after surviving a traumatic battle. She's drawn with a lot of plants in her chamber in the Jedi Temple. And the third link is for a fanart portrait that really captures her personality and it makes me happy to look at it.

Green and healing
Plants
Fanart portrait

starspray

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.

Prologue / Previous Chapter

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Level Up - Vienna Teng

evandar

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

( Read more... )

Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Mary on a Cross - Ghost

smilebackwards

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. Skipped to book 4 for my second try at Lord Peter Wimsey. Again I'm going to say solid but I'm not sold on loving Lord Peter. I am going to try Strong Poison per like a dozen people's recommendation. I did really like ( several things about this! )

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. LOVED THIS <3 The prose was so good and there was so much yearning and devotion and tragedy and it had time travel/time loop and academia and fighting fascism and personally I love second person so the first/second person POV was very enjoyable and it had swap POV of the (mostly) same events and secret code and dragons!? I could go on. I feel like this was written with me in mind.

bunn

Yesterday, the rescue came to collect the foster kittens to be neutered, and later they emailled to say that the ops had gone well, but a home had come up, and would it be OK by us if they went straight to their forever home?

I was a bit sad for their mum, Binx, who was clearly unhappy on her own and calling for them, but so it goes for cats. They don’t get to be families for long ( and often don’t want to be).

But! Then the rescue called to say the new home hadn’t worked out and could we have the kittens back? I was delighted. Binx was even more delighted (even if after 20 minutes of wild kitten shenanigans she looked rather less enthusiastic about them).

Right now they are all snuggled up together and she’s feeding them while they all purr. I’m glad they will have at least another weekend together.
I'll try to get some photos tomorrow.

autobotscoutriella

Today's writing project: The Daryan-in-prison sequel to Sonata. I have a rough draft, I have thoughts, I just need to sit down and start writing on it. Someone come yell at me in ~8 hours to see if I did that.

I also have at least three fills I could be working on for the kink meme and a couple I never crossposted here. So if I'm going to procrastinate on the sequel, I can do it with that.

(For anyone who saw the Snowflake post yesterday: this, too, is part of the creative process. Just Sit Down And Do It.)

Current Mood: optimistic

evandar

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

( Read more... )

So, that's how I write things. I quite enjoyed writing for this challenge: it was nice to thing about how I do things and compare them to how I used to do it. There's been a lot of trial and error over the years.

I used to have to write analyses of my own writing for university (my BA is in English Lit and Creative Writing, and we had to do that for the CW part) and it used to make me want to die inside from how fucking pretentious the whole exercise was. They were never really accurate either, mostly because they talked about symbolism more than "I wrote this for a grade and I hate this teacher, so fuck it." But now I'm now kind of wondering what an analysis piece would look like for one of my fics. Huh. Let me know if you want to see one someday, I guess.

Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Run - SKALD

autobotscoutriella

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

Ah, my creative process! A thing that is definitely not at all comparable to herding a pack of several dozen rabid plot bunnies!

( cut to spare reading pages )

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Weird Al - Albuquerque

autobotscoutriella

Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

1.) I am so good at making cheesecake. Cheesecake is finicky and I can make it turn out pretty much every single time. Granted, I have a lot of easy recipes (King Arthur Baking's chocolate cheesecake is my favorite and the one I usually default to), but I'm still proud of it.

2.) I can give cats medication! Pills, liquids, eye drops, ear drops, gel, you name it, I have given it to a cat that wanted to maul me about it. Which I think is a pretty impressive skillset for someone who is not remotely in a veterinary field and has no training. I had my cat Prowl for ten years, and she needed lots of meds for five of those years; she was also semi-feral, not particularly food motivated, opposed to getting meds in any form, and an automatic sedation at the vet for everybody's safety. So the fact that I reliably got meds into her at home by myself for five years is worth celebrating, I think.

3.) I write good :D Sure, some of it is a matter of personal taste and most of what I write is tailored to me specifically, but still, I think my writing's pretty good! And maybe more on the topic of this post, I can always come up with something to write. I have half a dozen ideas living in my head at any given time, and I think that's fantastic.

Current Mood: busy

evandar

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want

1. I like my creativity. I think I'm a fairly solid writer, and I enjoy reading back over my own stuff at times because I'm the audience I write for the most. I've also spent the last year or so learning how to paint with oils, which has been pretty fun to explore.

2. I'm pretty adventurous. I'm up for trying pretty much anything at least once (my hard limit is cave diving), whether it's an activity or something to eat. I was raised to not say I don't like something without trying it first, and that's kind of stuck with me. It's led to me eating ready salted crickets (crunchy, but not much in the way of flavour), but it's stuck regardless. I also enjoy learning how to cook different things, and experimenting with putting new ingredients together.

3. I've developed some good boundaries. I used to be a bit of a people-pleaser, but I've become a lot more sure of myself in recent years. I've also stopped caring so much about what other people think of me, and while I'm still generally a kind and helpful person, I'm a lot more protective of myself.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Ghost House Heart - Delain

evandar

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

I decided to write about the top 10 books and short stories that I read this year. I read less this year than I did in 2024. Partially due to availability: English books are possible to buy here, and I'm a big fan of a ~~not very~~ local second-hand bookshop that primarily buys from and sells to the expat community. The bookshop in my local mall also has a surprisingly large selection of foreign-language books, although they're a lot more expensive ~~and the organisation of that section relies on a system that I haven't been able to decipher yet, so there's no way to find anything quickly. You can only go if you're prepared to browse for hours.~~

Anyway, here's the list! It's not in any particular order; it's just ten things I liked.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Shoemaker - Nightwish

marhelf

ЖЖ уж поздравил так поздравил... И даже предложил поделиться поздравлением:) С собой, разумеется, потому что другие варианты там мне недоступны.

starspray

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Beautiful Dawn - The Wailin' Jennys

autobotscoutriella

Challenge #6: Top 10 Challenge

Picking my favorite 10 of anything is hard! That list changes every time I find something new, and I'm never good at filtering it down. (This happens every time I mention reading as a hobby and a new coworker asks about my favorite book, too. Well, right now it's the really fun new one I just read, and also the new-to-me one I read last week, but what about all the ones I could re-read any time and still love...) So instead, here's ten random selections from my very long list of Ace Attorney Fic I Really Like. Some of these I've probably recced before, and a lot of them are explicit rarepair fic.

Like A Record, Baby: Klavier/Daryan PWP from the kink meme. I like basically everything this author ever did (their Klavdar first time fic is amazing), but this one in particular is a lot of fun. Ambidextrous Daryan showing off in the bedroom. (Or, well, the kitchen, technically, but you get the point.)

on the perils of babygays and underage drinking: Anybody who's been following my Dreamwidth knows how much I love genderbent lesbian Klavier/Daryan, and this is an excellent version of it. 10/10 disastrous teenage pining.

Leaves from the Vine: Mia Fey-focused Ace Attorney/Pokemon crossover in which Charley the office plant is a Bulbasaur that she brought with her from Kurain Village. This one made me actually cry. Absolutely gorgeous, very nicely meshes the two canons together.

Turnabout Skeleton: Larry Butz is arrested for allegedly murdering a man with a twelve-foot artisanal injection-molded plastic skeleton. Edgeworth's life gets weirder from there. Absolutely hysterical casefic, mostly gen unless you want to read subtext into things. Some of the best pun names I've ever seen in Ace Attorney fic, and that is saying something.

Like A Sinner Before: Lana/Mia PWP where they have sex on a motorcycle. It's fantastic. I'm a big fan of all Mia stuff that incorporates her motorcycle from the early concept art into canon, and this is both extremely hot and my favorite characterization for both of them.

Mediation: Klavier/Daryan/Apollo kinky PWP (and I strongly recommend the sequel linked from the attached series, too). I don't usually go for sub!Daryan, but this one is fun, hot, and about my OT3, so I'm sold!

The Music Our Collisions Make: Franziska/Ema PWP, one of the fics that originally convinced me to give the pairing a shot. Ema's voice is fantastic here (both of them are, but it's from her POV) and it's exactly the kind of messy it's-complicated situationship I love for them.

#DaryanCrescendIsOverParty: Social media fandom reacts to Turnabout Serenade and Daryan's arrest. Hilariously accurate fandom meltdown, 10/10 read if you enjoy social media fic and/or fandom drama with zero stakes (because the drama is not real). #anyway stan Jangly Justice

we go together or we don't: And speaking of Jangly Justice, the Daryan/Apollo AA5-bad-end AU that's mostly porn but also has the fantastic subthread of Daryan being obsessed with this one random indie musician as a teen, only to find out, well, about that Justice guy that sent you to jail... Also extremely fun.

Anyway, Here's Guilty Love: And the longest fic on the list: Klavier/Apollo with past Klavier/Daryan, AA4 college AU retelling. Okay, so, listen. I don't usually read college AUs. I don't usually like college AUs. But this is the one college AU that not only worked for me, it worked for me well enough to convince me to give Klapollo another chance after reading some fic I Did Not Like. And the Daryan characterization in this is fantastic - I'm always down for fic that lets Daryan and Apollo begrudgingly work together. ~~I'm not saying I'm headcanoning an eventual threesome way in the future, but...the fic doesn't rule it out.~~ Linking to the full series because the prequel and tie-in are also great.