hamsterwoman: (Default)
[personal profile] hamsterwoman
2. Elis James and John Robins, The Holy Vible – so this is the book Elis & John wrote together in ~2017 and toured in 2018. I actually bought it and started reading it really early in my Elis & John journey – May 2024 – because I thought it would be a “concentrated” way to get a feel for them as a duo. And it kind of works in that regard, but only to a point – some stuff is more reliant on already knowing the inside jokes, and most of it is enhanced by being able to hear certain key phrases in their voices (they recorded the audio book version, which I do think would be fun, especially for certain chapters, but I don’t think this is something I need to experience twice). Anyway, I started reading it back in May 2024, while I was still trying to figure out/decide how to catch up on the back catalogue, and fairly quickly decided this was not the best way. But I’ve now listened back to before this book was published, and that seemed like a very good time to go back to the rest of it, especially when I wanted something undemanding and light. More, with… spoilers of sorts, I suppose? )

This was definitely a better time at which to read this book, and I’m glad I can say I have done so now :) Probably audiobook would’ve been the better way to go from the start, but on the other hand, I already have hundreds of hours of audio content, and being able to change it up with the written word was probably good :)

*

Speaking of addenda to other media I’m consuming, after I watched The Goes Wrong Show, YouTube helpfully popped up the BBC broadcast version of the play Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and I watched it too. It was interesting to see this bunch / this humour at much longer form – the TV episodes are <30 min and the play was over an hour, so it was a slightly different vibe. More, with SPOILERS )

I then also watched A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, which was shorter and felt closer to the show, but I still like the show more. More, with spoilers )

*

stuff i love

Week 2 of Stuff I Love: Top 10 Edition (hosted by [personal profile] dreamersdare here) is Series. For week 1’s “Standalones”, I’d chosen to focus on SFF stories because I tend to favor SFF series. So I’m thinking of doing basically the opposite, for the same reason, for this week – usually if I read/watch a series, it’s almost certainly going to be a SFF series because it’s a chance to spend time in a constructed world, get to know magic rules or alien races, maybe even learn a bit of an invented language. So it’s much rarer for me to have a series I love that isn’t SFF – and that’s what I decided to go with here (partly because, y’all already know what my favorite SFF series are, it’s basically all my tags :)

Again, not trying to rank these:

Top 10 NON-SFF series I love )

It's not who you are, it's who you know

13 February 2026 07:15 pm
[syndicated profile] metafilter_feed

Posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi

"This was all grooming, and it was a continuum of grooming." Ezra Klein interviews Anand Ghidaras about Jefferey Epstein.

Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary. Because as you're saying, you look at these files, and there are a lot of people named in them. The number of people actually close to him, about whom you can get a lot by reading the files, we're talking in the low dozens, maybe. We're talking about the elites, the power networks, but actually most people didn't know Jeffrey Epstein. Most elites didn't have much to do with him. Plenty of people saw him for what he was. Tina Brown has this great line where she's invited to a dinner with Epstein, Prince Andrew and Woody Allen. And she responded: What the [expletive] is this — the pedophiles' ball? Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly. So is Epstein a way you see "the elite," or is this a subcategory? It's not telling us that much about power. It's telling us something about some set of powerful people, in which — as in any other culture or network — there are going to be people of better and worse judgment, higher and lower character, more and less transactional. Even in this JPMorgan Chase example I've been using, there are people in the bank who are fighting hard to cut ties with him. They lose until it becomes completely untenable for the bank to keep going. But they're there. I think that's right. It's an important point to dwell on for a second because you could take a narrow view that only the people who are actively involved in crimes of pedophilia here are really this group of people we should focus on, and everything else is a distraction. You could take the opposite view that this is an indictment of every person with more than $10 million in the bank. I think both of those are incorrect. I believe in this notion, and I've seen it in so many forms over the course of my years of reporting, of what I think about as concentric circles of enablement. There is no doubt that there is a core group of people who were knowledgeable about, engaged in and shared participation in crimes of pedophilia at the burning heart of this story — that is, obviously, its own circle of hell. We know from testimony of survivors that it was more people than just him. He was trafficking them to other people. We have some of the names, we don't have all the names, but that was happening, and that's the burning heart of this story that can't be forgotten. And then there's what made that possible. Very practically, that means: Who were the other people who didn't do that but who were aware of it, who facilitated it, for whom it was not a problem, who were not later discouraged by it when deciding whether to let him into something? Then: What was the circle around that? Universities that maybe knew that Larry Summers was pally with him or that were accepting money and just didn't stop the thing.

Check-In Post - Feb 13th 2026

13 February 2026 07:22 pm
badly_knitted: (Get Knitted)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] get_knitted

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.


This Week's Question: What is your favourite thing to make?


If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!



The Platonic Ideal

13 February 2026 02:12 pm
settiai: (Dragon Age -- offensive)
[personal profile] settiai
The Platonic Ideal, a Dragon Age exchange focused on platonic relationships, went live earlier today. I got not one, not two, but three lovely gifts this year!

The Only Crown He Ever Wore (the Sibling Induced Tension Headache), focusing on the relationship between Bhelen Aeducan, Female Aeducan, and Trian Aeducan from childhood until everything went wrong with them in the game itself.

Between Stone and Sky, focusing on the relationship between Fenris and Merrill.

Let Sleeping Elves Lie , focusing on the relationship between Dorian and a Female Inquisitor (with a side of Solas).

Austin Powers

13 February 2026 07:07 pm
[syndicated profile] metafilter_feed

Posted by chavenet

The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested. "It's easy to see when other people lack these things," Redstone said. "It's harder to see in themselves." Redstone hastens to add this isn't just a failure at UATX. It's fair to ask whether any university lives up to these ideas. Fair to ask, too, whether any institution can truly commit itself to first principles or if the instinct to shape outcomes and inject one's personal politics is irresistible. from They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. [Politico]

(no subject)

13 February 2026 10:55 am
greghousesgf: (Boingboing)
[personal profile] greghousesgf
Not much going on here right now, unless something unusual happens I'm going to the deYoung tomorrow.

Slow reading start to the year

13 February 2026 06:43 pm
vivdunstan: Photo of some of my books (books)
[personal profile] vivdunstan
Slow start to the year with my recreational reading. Too heavily sedated. But do have various books on the go, generally ebooks with gargantuan fonts needed due to my progressive neurological disease. So having fun. But don't expect to read as much as I did last year, or the year before.

Current main reads include Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox, Echolands on the trail of Boudica by Duncan Mackay, and 1001 Nights in Time & Space (Doctor Who) by Steve Cole and Paul Magrs. Well through them all, switching between as I feel like it. A happy (albeit slow!) reader.

I have finished 4 other books already this year, and will post here about finished books in the next few weeks. But it's still looking like I'll end up reading vastly fewer than I've managed in previous years. To be fair I've been flaring dramatically since November. But I think the flare's subsiding now, and I'm dealing more with continuing disease progression.

Any Updates on the LJ Situation?

13 February 2026 10:20 am
muccamukk: Text reading: "If there ain't no body, there ain't nobody fuckin' dead!" (BoB: Ain't No Body)
[personal profile] muccamukk
(I've basically peaced out on answering comments, apologies. I'll try to catch up on at least the fandom ones. I appreciate you all!)

[staff profile] denise posted the thread about LJ going Russia-locked (ETA: see comments for corrections) and/or selling off six weeks ago now, which feels like twenty years in Internet time, but is probably not that long in business time. Has anyone heard updates on what's happening with LJ since then? Is this like the x-number of times ff.net was definitely going offline?

Relatedly, is anyone in touch with the mods of [livejournal.com profile] camp_toccoa, [livejournal.com profile] skyearth85 and/or [livejournal.com profile] skew_whiff? Sky used to be active on Discord, but I haven't seen her in ages. Has there been any talk of moving that comm to Dreamwidth?

I remember it was a bit of a voyage through broken links and broken dreams last time I looked at it, but there's still a bunch of fic that never moved to either AO3 or DW.

Poem: "Choosing to Sprout"

13 February 2026 12:53 pm
jjhunter: watercolor & ink blue bird raises its wings and opens its beak in joyous song (blue bird singing)
[personal profile] jjhunter
The seeds lying in their wombs of earth are turning now
preparing to kick out taproots through their coats
I rewatch the video of bluebird chicks cracking their own eggshells
Wondering at babies battering through barriers to birth themselves
Choosing again and again to leave every womb that once held them
Protected and confined

===
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

DAY 12 - FIC - NARUTO - UZUMAKI KUSHINA

13 February 2026 02:46 pm
lovelytomeetyou: (Default)
[personal profile] lovelytomeetyou posting in [community profile] halfamoon
Day 12 - Her Sanctuary  

Title: Inside a Spiral 
Fandom: Naruto
Characters: Kushina Uzumaki/Namikaze Minato
Rating: Gen
Summary: If someone were to tell the young Kushina who recently arrived at Konohagakure, that her son would be named after food — one of her favorites, to be fair — and after a book from a sketchy writer at best, that someone best grit their teeth because a punch was soon to follow. Or: Kushina dealing with Kyuubi being difficult and Minato is there for her.

Story in ao3

This was a story written last year that fit today's theme.
rfemod: (Default)
[personal profile] rfemod posting in [community profile] pinchhits
Event: Rare Femslash Exchange
Event link: [community profile] rarefemslashexchange
Pinch hit link: Pinch Hit Post
Due date: February 18th, 10PM PST/UTC-8 [Countdown] [In Your Timezone]

Rare Femslash Exchange is a multi fandom exchange focused on f/f ships with two or more female characters (canon or genderbent) and/or genderqueer characters that you feel would fit in a f/f exchange, with less than 250 works on AO3- completed, in English, using the otp:true filter. The minimum requirements are either a 500 word fic or a nice sketch.

There are three post deadline pinch hits that can be claimed at the post.

Pinch Hit #19 (fic, art): アキバ冥途戦争 | Akiba Maid War (Anime), かげきしょうじょ!! | Kageki Shoujo!! | Opera Girl! (Anime), ちはやふる | Chihayafuru (Anime & Manga), ユリ熊嵐 | Yuri Kuma Arashi

CLAIMED! Pinch Hit #27 (fic): The Game and the Candle - Eleanor M. Ingram, Don Estevan's Honor - Eleanor M. Ingram, Lucifer's Wife - Eleanor M. Ingram

Pinch Hit #28 (fic, art): The Magnus Archives (Podcast), 原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game), Original Work, Stranger Things (TV 2016)

Biscoff Creme Egg

13 February 2026 05:20 pm
vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
[personal profile] vivdunstan
Another day, another Creme Egg crossover taste test. This time a Biscoff paste filled Creme Egg - loads of soft Biscoff inside the chocolate shell. This is more like it, and totally delicious.

It’s much less sweet than a normal Creme Egg, so Martin liked it much more. It has that crunchy/smooth combo of the Biscoff, which it’s generously filled with.
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
It's amazing that my mood depends so much on what my children remember to bring home from school.

(Yesterday, down two bus passes and a backpack, misery.
Today, all of their belongings, relief!)
galadhir: a blue octopus sits in a golden armchair reading a black backed novel (Default)
[personal profile] galadhir

As the title says, The Boat of Small Mysteries is out today :)

BoSM cover art

You can get it on Amazon here, or everywhere else (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple etc) over here.

~

When a new disability ruins Emily’s life and family turns her out, she finds herself forced into a nomadic life on a narrowboat. With very little money and even less physical stamina, she doesn’t know if she has it in her to forge a whole new future on her own.

In the idyllic surroundings of the British waterways, as she moves from place to place she encounters a series of small mysteries. Can she solve them and find a new purpose for herself in the process? Or must a missing person remain lost and the case of the body in the lock remain unsolved?

Half cozy mystery and half fond ode to the narrowboat life, ‘The Boat of Small Mysteries,’ is a charming tale of resilience and intuition, sure to appeal to anyone who enjoys BBC Four’s Canal Boat Diaries, or the gentle adventures of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

~

Currently it's out in ebook only. The paperback is in the works but I am waiting for the proof copy to arrive so that I can check that it's ok before I release it.

It's also currently at 0.99c as an early bird discount, but it will be going up from that probably on the first of March - to the heady heights of $2.99

First book in seven years! I am sick with nerves over how it will go. There's a lot to be said for a few years of rest--it's all new to me again.

Sex Workers Of The World Unite

13 February 2026 05:02 pm
[syndicated profile] metafilter_feed

Posted by NoxAeternum

In response to onerous contracts that would grant the brothel control over their intellectual property rights and power of attorney, the sex workers at Sheri's Ranch in Pahrump, NV are actively unionizing under the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a first in unionization efforts. (SLNevada Independent)

In response to the move by the workers, the owners of Sheri's Ranch have engaged in unionbusting activities, including firing several organizers and asserting the workers at the brothel are independent contractors.