Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 10:24 pm
It's no meeting week at work, which is the best week! And then I'm on PTO next week. I carefully portioned out my to-do list so that I have one main thing to do every day (on top of whatever comes up each day) and it's so satisfying to mostly just cross things off it and not have to go to any meetings (which always add things to my list).

Yesterday, it was so quiet that I was able to read a whole book! Just sitting at my desk and answering email occasionally! So, Wednesday reading!

What I've just finished
Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch, the very latest Rivers of London book. And when I say, "very latest" I mean it was released yesterday. I enjoyed it! spoilers )

What I'm reading next
Idk, I'll keep opening books in my library until I find one that holds my interest, I guess.

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Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 12:45 pm
The View from Pike Place Market
The View from Pike Place Market
Seattle, Washington • June 14, 2025
Nikon Z6 • NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S
f/4 @ 24mm • 1/2000s • ISO 100

On the second day of our two-day trip to Washington state, Jenni and I planned on a leisurely trip back home. We had planned a few stops.

tl;dr: Jenni and I Visit Seattle, Washington )
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 12:13 pm
2025 Edmonds Art Festival
2025 Edmonds Art Festival
Edmonds, Washington • June 13, 2025
iPhone 13 mini photo

(I am waaay behind on my journaling, and I rely on my blog as a compilation of memories I can refer to years down the road. It’s been almost a month since Jenni and Amy’s Excellent Adventure in Washington State. My schedule continues to be a mess.)

I had hoped to attend this year’s OCF with my friend Jenni, but she had a schedule conflict with a family wedding, so she had to skip OCF this year. To make up for missing out on that road trip, I suggested a road trip to Seattle to attend the Edmonds Art Festival. I had been to this festival just once – 20 Years Ago. Jenni had never been, and she agreed to go.

tl;dr: Jenni and I Visit Edmonds, Washington )
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 10:29 am
I ended up nominating a few things for Enemies to Lovers (hush, I'm using it as a bribe for finishing my other assignments xD) and this made me spend some time thinking about which of my ships actually qualify - I had some trouble coming up with a third fandom, and trying to figure out where exactly I'd draw the line. (Like, I wouldn't call Sam/Bucky E2L - more like people who mildly antagonize each other to friends/lovers. But some might!)

So I got to wondering how other people define it. I selected check boxes since some people might have more than one answer. I mean, *I'm* not even sure where I fall in all of this!

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42


How would you define Enemies to Lovers? (or Enemies to Friends, if you're not a shipper)

View Answers

Must try to kill each other (or at least want to), or be on opposite sides of a conflict with life-or-death stakes
14 (33.3%)

Rivalries like sports rivalries are fine, but there needs to be a strong personal element and/or unhealthy fixation on each other (not just regular sports team conflict)
21 (50.0%)

Any kind of rivalry or antagonism will do
9 (21.4%)

For me it's about the Vibe™ - from distrust/antagonism to trust, whatever form that takes
17 (40.5%)

I do not accept it as proper E2L if there's any softening at all - they must remain antagonists
0 (0.0%)

I know it when I see it but don't get too fussed about definitions
6 (14.3%)

My thoughts are too complex for your ticky boxes (answer in comments)
1 (2.4%)

Not my trope so I don't care, but I want to click something.
3 (7.1%)

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 01:25 pm
I have discovered Enemies to Lovers exchange. o deer.

THAT being said, I really need to put a cork in the new exchange signups for a bit. Summer of Horror and Temperature Flash both reveal somewhere around this weekend, as well as that being the Casefic submission deadline. I have a pinch hit, I have things to edit, and I haven't even started Just Married.

Today it's rainy AND smoky, a wonderful combination.
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 03:59 pm
First Date (400 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Marvels [2023]
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hank McCoy/Maria Rambeau
Characters: Henry "Hank" McCoy | Beast, Maria Rambeau
Additional Tags: Drabble Sequence
Summary:

First Dates can be interesting.



First Date

Maria had spent time touching up her nails, dithering over which outfit to wear, deciding on the shoes that looked best with it.

Hank, for his part, had done all he could to tidy his appearance, currently stuck in 'blue', 'furry', and 'large', but he knew those factors didn't matter to her.

He showed up promptly — actually early but didn't approach the house right away — and rang the doorbell. She answered it, her smile lighting her eyes in a way that made Hank feel almost normal again.

"Shall we?" he invited, pointing to his car.

An explosion answered for her.




After dealing with the alien being chased by space cops — not Carol's set, thankfully — Binary and Beast sat up on a rooftop, drinks cups and to-go containers of food between them.

"For a date, it was a little rocky," she offered, smiling despite the bruise darkening her face.

"I promise you, I can do better," he replied, self-consciously smoothing singed fur on his arm.

She reached out and covered his hand. "Why don't you take me back to your place, and we'll see about the aftercare first?" Maria invited, and Hank had to suck in a deep breath of anticipation.




Treating each other's scrapes had led to their clothes being discarded, leading to a brazen challenge to see if they fit as well in a bed as they did in combat.

Hank was never going to feel anything short of awe for how easily Maria accepted his mutated appearance. He could only gasp and keep his hands on her lightly as she touched, petted, and kissed him. He laid back and let her have control… until she turned the tables, bringing his hand to her breast.

The half-slitted eyes gazing down as he touched her wrecked him, making her purr.




Maria could get used to the feel of Hank's body under her, the strength and dexterity he used in a fight leashed to their mutual desires. She might even welcome waking up with him… but she wasn't going to rush things. She knew he was struggling at times with who — what — he was.

She had experience managing that, and was still growing accustomed to her powers.

Now, resting in what was hopefully a brief respite, she ran a finger along his cheek fur, making him shift into the touch.

"Next date, fewer aliens."

He chuckled, and then saw to kissing her.


Written for uc_xmen drabble-a-thon/prompt meme on Dreamwidth, prompt: MCU - Hank McCoy/Maria Rambeau - (any), it was supposed to be date night
Monday, July 7th, 2025 11:19 pm
"The Gate of the Feral Gods" and "The Butcher's Masquerade." I'd say this series is pretty solidly scifi now, so I'm tagging it that way.

Random spoilers )

Moving on soon to book 6, "The Eye of the Bedlam Bride"! No future spoilers, please!
Monday, July 7th, 2025 05:27 pm
Ayumu Niikura
Should we tell her that DSLRs are passé?
Ayumu Niikura
CITY the Animation, Episode 1

I used to start every anime season with an orderly sampling of every new show – and begin the evaluation of which shows I’ll follow through the season. I no longer have the time nor patience, and my schedule is highly stressed this month. At the moment I’m just randomly viewing shows, looking for quick decisions. Orderly, this is not.

However, there are some continuing series that I will definitely be watching. Most will fall into my Time Permitting list. Later on, I’ll figure out my mandatories. I don’t even have to sample the shows. So I’m seeding the Time Permitting list with:

Dan Da Dan S2 (Thu)
Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus (Sat)
New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (Wed)(Amazon Prime)
My Dress-Up Darling S2 (Sat)
I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince... S2 (Wed)
The Rising of the Shield Hero S4 (Wed)

Special note for CITY the Animation. KyoAni is one of my favorite studios, and Sakuga Blog has done stellar work in doing a deep dive with CITY the Animation Production Notes 01. As always, their stuff is worth reading.

New Shows I’ve Sampled, Below This Cut )

I’ve been too busy to do my final writeup for the Spring Anime Season. Sorry!

Bonus: Looking ahead – New Trailer for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End S2
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Monday, July 7th, 2025 06:51 pm
[community profile] sylph_and_asp is members-locked access now. Just. I've got a lot of political posts over there from previous years, plus, as good as dreamwidth does try to protect us from crawlers, I feel better locking my writing down.
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 08:50 pm
Unwanteds (41367 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 30/30
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Original Universe, Superheroes, Post-Apocalypse, Rebuilding, Asexual Character(s), Queer Relationships, Magic-Users, Future Technology, Age Difference
Summary:

In the aftermath of the Collapse, life finds new ways, making new paths, and there are heroes rising from the ashes --

-- just as villains remain to tear it all down again.



Content Notes: Fascism as history and antagonist, liberty with cultural mythology, comic-book level violence

Author's Note: This universe has been built from the ground up with many influences of pop culture and history. It was began in 2005. I posted the last main part of the story in 2023. There is a prequel and sequel both forming in my plans for the future. When I began crafting it... we were not so far down the fascism slide in real life. I very nearly did not touch it again after 2016. Ultimately though, I needed to let the good guys win.

On Dreamwidth, must join comm (Click and scroll to the bottom for the beginning. SqWA account needed to read it in chaptered format at link above)
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 05:07 pm
I know I had some stuff I wanted to post about but now I can't remember what it was. Oh well.

I finally watched Captain America: Brave New World and it was fine. spoilers )

*

RIP Julian McMahon and Mark Snow.

*
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 11:02 am
[personal profile] scruloose and I did make it to the little farmers' market down the road for its opening day of the season, and even managed to get there earlier than later! (I think it's open from 8 to 1, and we probably were there...a bit after 10?)

We made it home with two quarts of strawberries and one of cherries, new potatoes, a dozen eggs, and boneless chicken thighs, plus a bee balm for the garden, which we quickly tucked into a fairly open space in our little garden bed yesterday evening. (What was there before? UNKNOWN. Will I manage to reconstruct it from old posts or something? Also unknown. But hey, a plant!)

Reading: I finished Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi), which was fantastic. On the fiction front, I followed it up with Tamsyn Muir's novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (not really my thing--I continue to rarely bond with novellas, I guess--but interestingly done), Sacha Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (marvelous), and Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (again, didn't really bond emotionally, but it executed what it was doing beautifully).

Non-fiction: David Chang and Priya Krishna's Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave), which is, like...primarily actually a David Chang book that Priya Krishna did a ton of heavy-lifting assisting on (which may be very normal for co-written cookbooks, but in this case she was interjecting and clarifying in her own voice as well as doing a fair bit of the actual writing in his voice, and it was all very transparent that it was being done that way, but also a little odd to read). I think I bought this as a sale ebook before hearing that Chang (the Momofuku guy) is something of an asshole, but then when I was reading it, it felt really promising as a book that might be genuinely useful for me (and even by cookbook standards, its ebook is terribly formatted), so I was pleasantly surprised to readily find a used half-price hard copy available on line, which is winging its way to me now. I've also made sure that Krishna's own Indian-Ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family is now on the wishlist where I keep an eye out for ebook sales.

And now I'm reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler, which is a cookbook mostly in the form of essays on cooking as a thoughtful/mindful practice.

Watching: One more Murderbot episode to go in this season, and oh, I hope we get a second one. I'm going to miss this little show.

We finished watching the second season of Kingdom (the historical zombies k-drama), which I found very satisfying. The ending very much sets up a subsequent season, and there's a movie out that fills in the backstory of the person/people we glimpse at the end of season 2 who would presumably be extremely central in any further season, but I don't think we feel inspired to watch said backstory movie unless a third season of the show is ever announced and it becomes relevant in that way.
Saturday, July 5th, 2025 07:06 pm
The Berry Patch
The Berry Patch
Portland Farmers Market • PSU Campus
Portland, Oregon • July 5, 2025
Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S
f/2 @ 85mm • 1/750s • ISO 100

I’m trying to do too many things at once. And then I look up and the year is half over. I keep task lists – but tasks get deferred or ignored because I can’t possibly do everything.

One of the items that kept sliding down my task list was to go into Portland and photograph the Farmers Market and the Saturday Market. This wasn’t just because I like to do this every year – it was also because I needed to learn how to use my new Nikon Z8 in the field. The Z8 is very complicated. I needed to be able to shoot very quickly at OCF. And then, all of a sudden, OCF is next week!

A last second mad dash is all that’s left.

Nikon Z8 Photography, Below This Cut )
Friday, July 4th, 2025 11:31 pm
[community profile] hurtcomfortex released today! I happened to be driving a backcountry highway with no cell service at the time (coming home from Mom Things), but it was lovely to find my gifts waiting for me when I got back.

Hold a Candle To (MASH, 3400 wds, gen) delivered some lovely Charles drug withdrawal h/c with teamy affection, and A Way Out (Biggles, 4400 wds, gen) let me roll around in excellent Biggles & von Stalhein enemies-era reluctant cooperation and sympathy. Truly a lovely haul!
Friday, July 4th, 2025 03:54 pm
At the start of the month I entertained the fleeting thought of trying to post every day in July, especially with [community profile] sunshine_revival (in which I have in no way participated) going on, but. Well. *gestures at current date* And as we all know, something-something-only-perfect-results-matter, etc. etc. etc.

But here. It's Friday. The world is terrifying, but at least for this moment the sun is out. I spent most of my workday in a style guide meeting, which was genuinely pretty fun; tonight we're seeing Ginny and Kas because this week it's better for them than our usual Saturday hangout.

Tomorrow the (very) wee farmers' market that's only a few blocks away is getting underway for the season. I have ambitions of actually rolling out of bed and walking over in hopes of strawberries, even though tomorrow and Sunday are also Eevee community day in Pokemon Go, so I'm also hoping to leave the house those afternoons. Leaving the house twice in one day is not exactly a thing that happens often, and as a result, the prospect of it is exhausting. ^^; But here's hoping!

There's been zero doubt for a long time now that my only actual investment in Pokemon Go is the pursuit of shinies, and community days are the best chance to get shinies of a given critter, and Eevee, see, has EIGHT possible evolutions, so if there's any faint hope of ever having a full set of shinies of those, well, it's this weekend.

(I can't remember if I've said here that this is a crystalized perfect demonstration of why it's really, really good that I don't gamble. I'm usually pleased when I catch a new-to-me Pokemon, but it's pretty minor. But rather than setting the game aside, since it mostly hasn't resulted in me actually getting outside and walking much more than I had been, the hope of catching a shiny critter keeps me opening it back up. Nobody get me into slot machines, okay? [That sounds facetious, but I mean it very seriously.])

That's all I've got right now. Stay well, friends.
Friday, July 4th, 2025 01:40 am
While there are still a few weeks before we actually begin construction work, I’m having to relocate my existing bookcases – some will be repurposed and some will be given away (probably to ReStore).

The first step is to pack up all the books. It’s like moving, and I hate moving.

Photos, Below This Cut )
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 09:09 pm
This show is such a freakin' delight.

Spoilers )
Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 07:47 pm
Library / Kitchen Floor Plan, Proposed
Library / Kitchen Floor Plan, Proposed
Extracted from my requirements / vision proposal

At the start of 2025 I vowed to finally restart the home library remodel that got put on hold when the pandemic began in 2020. The interior designer I had selected had moved from Portland to California, and I basically had to start over.

Instead of describing everything in detail, I’m simply listing the chronology of events. Excluded is all the email correspondence I’ve had with my designer, Hannah Lichtenthaler at Allison Smith Design. Also, for now, I’m skipping over all the design decisions. In short, here’s how I got to where we are today:

Library Remodel, Chronology of Events
Library Remodel, Chronology of Events
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 08:16 pm
The Old Guard 2 aka 2 Old 2 Guard dropped yesterday. I enjoyed it for the most part. spoilers )

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Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025 09:08 pm
The whole Diddy thing. It doesn't matter how much proof there is.

Brad Pitt, who is known to have struck his wife and his children then perpetuated lawfare on them for years to the point where several of his kids no longer want contact with him, has the number one movie right now. Best opening weekend of his career. Most of the coverage doesn't even mention the violence.

On the anniversary of Tortoise Media publishing allegations of rape and sexual assault against Neil Gaiman, Netflix is dropping season two of The Sandman. Meanwhile, Gaiman is forcing one of his victims into arbitration. Not because she's libling him, but because she broke an NDA. Everything's gone very quiet, which I assume is what he wanted.

Some thoughts from smarter people:

Rebecca Solnit: Cynicism Is the Enemy of Action.

Tarana Burke: Tarana Burke doesn’t define #MeToo’s success by society’s failure.
Some people want to judge the movement on specific outcomes, so when a case is overturned, Burke said, “people are like, ‘Oh the #MeToo movement has failed.’” Instead, she said, such outcomes are proof of the difficulty of the work.

“It’s not about the failure of the movement; it’s the failure of the systems,” Burke explained. “These systems are not designed to help survivors, they’re not designed to give us justice, they’re not designed to end sexual violence.”

“When we bind ourselves to the outcomes of these cases, we are constantly up and down with our disappointment, our highs and lows,” Burke continued. “What they tell us is just how much work we need to change the laws and the policies but most importantly, to change the culture that creates the people who commit, who perpetrate acts of harm.”