settiai: (Critical Role -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
It's been ages since I've tried to do one of these, but I've typed up some reactions to the newest episode of Critical Role as I watched it. It's a combination of quotes, random thoughts, and some speculation, and it's full of spoilers (albeit vague ones in places).

Spoilers under the cut. )

There was so much to take in, especially with all of the new characters who were introduced and had various interpersonal relationships and interconnected histories. I definitely need to try to rewatch this episode sometime between now and next Thursday, possibly more than once, because I know that I missed somethings.

But for now? I'm going to attempt to convince my body to let me get a few hours of sleep, and then I'll go back to panicking about various things in the morning. It was nice to escape from reality for a few hours at least.

Dear Festividder 2025

2025-10-03 12:36 am
eruthros: Delenn from Babylon 5 with a startled expression and the text "omg!" (Default)
[personal profile] eruthros
Thank you for making me a vid!

I have a couple things that I put outside the cut tag, because I have two visual triggers:

1) Fast, high contrast flashes of lights or colors. This can be triggered by strobe lights, strobe effects, glitch effects, full-screen lighting effects, or repeated lightning strikes. It can also be triggered by stutter cuts (very fast intercuts of 2-3 frames) where there is high contrast in the footage used for the stutter effect. Stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, between a nighttime and daytime scene, etc. Flashing has to be very fast to bother me—think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).

2) Frame rate fuckery—when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame.

I'll call these out in the source notes below for any fandom where they're relevant.

Please also feel free to run a sample by [personal profile] thingswithwings. She can explain them with examples if that would be helpful.

The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!

General Preferences )

I asked for: Babylon 5, Backspot (2023) [SAFETY], Bring Them Home / Aiskótáhkapiyaaya (2024) [SAFETY], Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, Fancy Dance (2023) [SAFETY], The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV), Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA], Mythbusters (TV), Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, This Place (2022) [SAFETY]


Babylon 5 )

Backspot (2023) )

Bring Them Home / Aiskótáhkapiyaaya (2024) )

Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper )

Fancy Dance (2023) )

The Great Canadian Baking Show )

Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA] )

Mythbusters )

Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards )

This Place (2022) )
mekachu04: off topics, comments (VOIDWALKER)
[personal profile] mekachu04 posting in [community profile] anime_manga
Fandom: One Piece
Author/Artist: Mekachu04
Title: September Punk Aibou Sketches
Pairing: Eustass Kidd & Killer
Rating: teen? it varies from gen/all audience to teen
Word Count: art
Highlight for Warnings: *some implied death/violence but nothing graphic. all are unfinished sketches so clothes might not all be there. *
Disclaimer: Kidd, Killer, the Kidd Pirates and other characters belong to the world of One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. I'm just playing in the sandbox
AN: I'm trying to draw something everyday. So most of these are drawn at about 3-5am in about an hour or two at work during the down time.

thumbnails linking to each day under cut )
full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Nail Polish (Industry) (the AO3 tag, probably worded to disambiguate from at least two bands by that name. I’m calling it Nail Polish Blogosphere, since the characters are using and reviewing rather than manufacturing the nail polish.)
Pairings/Characters: Gen; OCs
Rating: General Audiences
Length: Only Once: 449; Only Once Remix: 1,960
Content Notes: modern in-universe folklore, nail polish connoisseurship, possible unreality, the sad beauty of transience
Creator Links: (AO3)[archiveofourown.org profile] Sineala; (Dreamwidth) [personal profile] sineala; (AO3) [archiveofourown.org profile] woodpusher
Theme: Uncommon Settings, Folklore & Fairytales, Friendship, Magic, Social Media
Summary:

[archiveofourown.org profile] Sinealla: The story of the most beautiful nail polish in the world.

[archiveofourown.org profile] woodpusher: Like a good manicurist, this story fills in some plot holes and smooths some rough edges from Only Once.

I was trying to boost my readership so welcome to the newly gifted.

Comments are welcome!


Author’s Notes: Cut_for_length. )

Reccer's Notes: Cut_for_length. )

Fanwork Links:
Only Once, by [archiveofourown.org profile] Sineala for [archiveofourown.org profile] Lysimache; Yuletide Madness 2011
Only Once Remix, by [archiveofourown.org profile] woodpusher for [archiveofourown.org profile] Sineala, [archiveofourown.org profile] Meltha, [archiveofourown.org profile] kuramas30, [archiveofourown.org profile] Viridian5, [archiveofourown.org profile] Qem, and [archiveofourown.org profile] Lysimache.

🔊 Daily music

2025-10-02 09:25 pm
bluapapilio: sampo and gepard from one of their eidolons, fro the game honkai star rail (hsr eidolons samgep)
[personal profile] bluapapilio

Out of the embers
You and I are gonna light up the room
Out of the embers
There's a fire burning for you
I feel it heatin' up
There's still a chance for us 🎵

James Newman – Embers
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
So that was definitely the Yom Kippur that was, but I have eaten a phenomenal quantity of unagi and seaweed salad as well as a sweet rice donut with red bean paste inside and part of [personal profile] selkie's cream bread and am inordinately entertained by this TikTok from the Fenimore Art Museum which N. shared with me. [personal profile] spatch lit last night's yahrzeit candle for remembrance of the dead. The rest of us are still here at the start on the other side. G'mar tov. My godchild gave my laptop existential angst.

Queen Demon Playlist

2025-10-02 08:42 pm
marthawells: (Witch King)
[personal profile] marthawells
I did a playlist for Witch King (https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/627157.html) when it first came out in 2023, and now here's one for Queen Demon:



Seven Devils - Florence + Machine

Burning - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Bando - ANNA with MadMan and Gemitaiz

Bringing Murder to the Land - Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison

Bulletproof vs. Release Me - The Outfit

I Owe You Nothing - Seinabo Sey

W.I.T.C.H. - Devon Cole

Egun (theme from Manhunt) - Danielle Ponder

Warm - SG Lewis

Disease - Lady Gaga

Which Witch (Demo) - Florence + Machine

you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish

Bakunawa - Rudy Ibarra, with June Millington, Han Han, and Ouida.

Daily Check-In

2025-10-02 08:24 pm
mecurtin: Icon of a globe with a check-mark (fandom_checkin)
[personal profile] mecurtin posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, October 2, to midnight on Friday, October 3 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33686 Daily check-in poll
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 19

How are you doing?

I am OK
13 (68.4%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
6 (31.6%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
6 (33.3%)

One other person
7 (38.9%)

More than one other person
5 (27.8%)



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

(no subject)

2025-10-02 07:11 pm
i_like_the_stars: Kayama Nemuri (MHA) looking off to the side and drawn dramatically with blue greys. A tear is on her cheek. (Nemuri drawing sad blue)
[personal profile] i_like_the_stars
Reread “My Broken Mariko” in the library since we have a copy and I had to try SO hard not to bawl my friggin eyes out, man 😭 I also took it off YA Graphic Novel and made it Adult Graphic Novel because our teen/YA room frequently has middle schoolers and this manga is a Little too heavy for them I think, haha. Why was it in there in the first place? I have no clue. Headquarters decides where to put the books, but even then I have no idea how they go about doing that, especially for manga. I would assume they would go by the demographic of the magazine the works were published in, but we have Shounen Jump books in Adult Graphic Novels??? So I have zero clue what their metric is. And it’s bad.
musesfool: kara cutting her hair (strangle the stars)
[personal profile] musesfool
Ugh, I woke up at 3:30 this morning coughing my lungs out and didn't really sleep much after that. It's that itchiness in my throat and chest that make me think allergies, especially given that I haven't really been around people except at the dentist's office yesterday, so I don't think it's covid? But who knows at this point? My quest to get this year's flu/covid shots has been derailed a couple of times but I am off again next Friday, so that is going to be my next attempt.

In more fannish news, I read that Dungeon Crawler Carl has been optioned for tv, and now I want a Carl vid to Mike Ness's version of "Don't Think Twice."

*

Festivids letter placeholder

2025-10-02 06:41 pm
fairestcat: Dreadful the cat (Default)
[personal profile] fairestcat
The letter will be here soon.

Books read, late September

2025-10-02 05:13 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet. This is one of the most overtly gay books I have ever read. Gosh is there plot-essential homosexuality going on here. It's largely about the relationships between Ghanaians and the Americans who are visiting for Ghana's Year of Return, and we don't get many books like this in the US and I'm glad that's shifting, but also it means that some books will be quite a lot of "interesting in ways for which I am not the target audience."

Sylvie Cathrall, A Letter from the Lonesome Shore. Second and so far as I know last in its series. Not as strong as the first one. When I say that I like books with established pairings and not just watching people form new relationships all the time, this is not what I mean. It felt to me like the central couple's excitement and nervousness in dealing with each other was the main source of tension/anticipation in the first book in retrospect, because here it was a lot of cooing at/about each other in ways that...if these people were my real life friends, I would be happy for them but I would also want to get back to the subject at hand. Same with this. Ah well, still worth reading and I'll keep an eye out for what she does next.

Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. Reread. Oh gosh I love this collection. It's one of my favorites, and with each story I reread, I thought, "oh, this one! I love this one!" Yay. Yay.

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie?. I like cryptics, and I like Paul Cornell's work, but I probably wouldn't have sought this graphic novel out on my own. But since someone else brought it into the house I was perfectly happy to read it; it was fun.

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy. Kindle. Davis uses the art movements of 20th century crisis eras to discuss different responses possible and how well they work. Interesting stuff, useful for the current moment.

Margaret Frazer, Strange Gods, Strange Men. Kindle. Another of her short pieces, a little farther afield but not particularly substantive. I expected this; I've already read the substantive ones.

Carolyn Ives Gilman, Arkfall. Kindle. This was an airplane double-feature with the Cathrall above; I had no idea that the theme of that flight was going to be "undersea science fiction and getting along with our neighbors," but it was and that was just fine with me. The setting was particularly vivid here.

Matthew Goodwin, Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy. Read for book club. Most of the stories I liked were by authors I already liked, and the amount of sexism was startling considering how old a book it isn't. Not a favorite, I'm afraid, despite having some favorite authors in it.

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland and Finn Family Moomintroll. Rereads. For a mysterious upcoming project. Is it ever a bad choice to revisit Moomins: of course it is not. Unless you have not visited them in the first place, in which case what joy you have ahead.

Selma Lagerlöf, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Reread. So mysterious. The least of the rereads of this fortnight for me, because its didacticism suits me less well than the other books (and in fact less well than this author's adult works; I'm glad I went on to read them, because they're a different beast). On the other hand: idyllic romantic Swedish landscape writing, am I the target audience for that, sure, absolutely.

Suzanne Levine, Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir. This is an example of a person who lived an interesting life but did not necessarily write an interesting memoir about it. I would have loved more about her translation work, more nitty gritty, what it was like to work with the notable authors she worked with. Instead it was a not particularly deep, not particularly vivid memoir without most of what made the subject of the memoir interesting to me. I suppose we're allowed to be interesting to ourselves in different ways than the obvious ones.

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Goes on Board, and Pippi in the South Seas. Rereads. What could this mysterious project pertain to, it is a mystery that is very mysterious. Anyway it had been quite some time since I reread Pippi, and it was interesting which places I had the text so memorized that I could think to myself, "ah, they translated that differently than in the edition I had, they said barley soup in mine." I was actually surprised, given the element of making Ephraim Longstocking "king" of "South Sea Island" that there wasn't more horrifying racism than there was. Granted Pippi lies about people from other countries all the time. But she does lie; it's presented as lies, and it's generally not the shape of lie that reinforces ethnic stereotypes. So okay then, glad to find fewer razor blades than I feared in that lot of Halloween candy.

Linda Pastan, Almost an Elegy: New & Later Selected Poems. These are very straightforward, in places headlong, poems, and they deal with late-life issues for oneself and loved ones, but generally with a fairly light hand. I wanted to connect more than I did, but I'm not sorry to have read them.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. Kindle. And speaking of not sorry to have read: oh gosh. Well, I see why this was shocking at the time and redefined a whole direction of literature. It was a harrowing reading experience. Glad I read it, glad I'm done reading it.

Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Reread. One of my very favorites. I reread this for my panel on monarchy and non-monarchical forms of government in fantasy, and it was so good about that, and I loved the shape of ending, I loved how it finally completed a social arc that began before Swordspoint, gosh I love this book.

Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. This is very short and full of photos. I think it's mainly for Solnit completists and people with a strong interest in turn of the millennium San Francisco. I lived in the Bay Area at the time and not before or after, so in some ways my snapshot was Solnit's turning point, which is a very weird place to stand.

Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister. Kindle. My least favorite Trollope that I've actually finished. The politics stuff is fun and interesting and I like the arc of it over the novel. The other plot, though, oh HELL NO. The Antisemitism! The general, quite intense, narratively supported xenophobia! The convenience of both an infant death and a suicide! I cannot recommend this, and I don't.

Katy Watson, A Deadly Night at the Theatre. When I was reading this, I said to some friends that I felt I'd wished on the monkey's paw for more books that are centered on friendship, only to get this one where the friends can have just as many stupid misunderstandings based on poor communication as any couple in a romance. Sigh. The mystery plot was fine, but I don't actually read mysteries for the mystery plot, so...I hope she figures out other shapes of friend plot to do.

Amy Wilson, Owl and the Lost Boy. Second in its series, and the titular characters are fighting off what seems like an endless summer--in magical form. I like it when people recognize that summer is not infinitely good, and that endless hot weather is in fact quite terrifying in 2025. Also it was a beautiful MG with friend plots that I liked much better than the adult mystery above.

Ovidia Yu, The Rose Apple Tree Mystery. Well, they can't all be bangers. I've really enjoyed this series of murder mysteries set in mid-twentieth century Singapore, and I intend to continue reading it, but the characterization in this was very flat, and the twist was so obvious that I was writhing and yelling at the book for at least half its page count, someone just figure out the thing already.

rhi: Darius, smiling.  "And I bless the day I met you, and the bad news is, you're gone." (Darius gone)
[personal profile] rhi
Mint Twist (1584 words) by Gryphonrhi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Highlander: The Series, Captain America (Chris Evans Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Darius (Highlander), Jim Morita
Additional Tags: Inkvent, Prompt Fic, Crossover
Summary:

Planting peace is hard work that takes patience, many hands, and a willingness to weed.



Another Invent fic; enjoy! Now to go fight through more of them before December....
rhi: Sam Axe with a sawed-off shotgun, Fiona Glenanne, and Michael Westen, all in suits. (Suit Up Burn Notice)
[personal profile] rhi
It's not December yet. I may actually make it through these prompts! Until then, however, have some more ink-inspired craziness:

Sam Axe trying to get some intel before the Losers do. Mind, Sam has no idea someone else is after it....



Mojitos and Gold Rushes (1221 words) by Gryphonrhi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Burn Notice (TV 2007), The Losers (2010)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sam Axe & Fiona Glenanne
Characters: Sam Axe, Fiona Glenanne, Franklin Clay
Additional Tags: Crossover, Inkvent, Prompt Fic
Summary:

Gathering intel is a skill; keeping it is a separate skill.

August 2025

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