princessofburundi

As always, Evil!Janeway is hot, though less so than the Living Witness version. It's the eyes - our main characters all have huge eyes, so the somewhat more realistically animated adult human characters look slightly uncanny valley, even though their eyes ought to make sense.

Also, damn, Chakotay has got some arms! Is this true IRL? I don't remember ever seeing the live actor ever without sleeves....

Also also, I honestly love every time Gwen gets a moment of happiness, no matter how small. She really has had a miserable life. Every second chasing replicated pie over the ship, or squirting whipped cream into her mouth, or, one hopes, finally spending some time playing goofy holodeck games, is a second worth living. And so, I will say, I appreciate that the animators took the time to let her smirk a little when Evil!Chakotay proposed starting his torture session with "the cute one", aka Murf the Indestructible. You gotta find those moments of joy when you can, sweetie!

(Question: Are mirror tribbles... nice? What about their new team pet, Bribble? Would Bribble have a goatee and be evil in the mirror verse? How sapient is that thing, anyway?)

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( Read more... )

conuly

I don't want this getting lost in the links: A Journey Through the Dystopiaverse (some of those poems hit hard)

In personal news, how many nos is one expected to get before they get a yes?

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( I managed to find some non-doom-and-gloom links to shove in here as well )

conuly

Watch on YouTube

tielan

Anyone for mail?

If I already have your address, then you might end up with a postcard anyway. I also can't guarantee it won't be like a postcard I've sent you in the past, either. I'm just trying to work through my postcards...

dorchadas

Today was the parental information session for new families at Laila's new school, and while I couldn't go, I watched Laila while

sashagee went. It ran over the hour they had set and

sashagee didn't get to grab any coffee before she came home, but she took copious notes. Among those notes:

It's an International Baccalaureate school, so it follows a standardized curriculum through all of its instruction (preschool through middle school).
The school has a whole system of communications that goes through tiers, from emails and website announcements and fliers home and so on.
There are a bunch of parent groups you can join, including some Facebook groups she said I should join.
Breakfast and lunch are offered but optional, important because sashagee wants to make meals for Laila.
There will be a "welcome back" day where we can take a tour of the school.

Something else that stuck out in her memory was overhearing a conversation about the condo to the south of us that was just on sale. A month or so ago, we were walking out on the sidewalk and I heard some people outside the condo showing say they already had twenty offers. Today,

sashagee said she heard other people talking about wanting to move into the neighborhood to secure their kid a spot at the local school for kindergarten since if you're already in the school you don't have to change mid-year and it's possible that you'll get to stay in future years (depending on the school administration, how many students the school has, their admissions policies, the phases of the moon, and so on), and that the same condo had closed with over thirty offers and gone for 120K over asking price! Once again, me being very lucky has worked out in my favor--just a few blocks over and we'd be in another school district, none of which are as good as our local one.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: Azurah - The Year of Akatosh

conuly

( Read more... )

tielan

But that's because I woke up at 2:30am and then read a book until 5:30 and doomscrolled until 6:30. Then had a nap.

But it's lunchtime now, I have (mostly) survived the morning after a long weekend ("King's Birthday" long weekend), and I think I might end up skipping hockey training tonight because my knee has been feeling a bit weird the last couple of weeks and maybe I should go to the physio and get it checked out?

IDK. Maybe see how it holds up this weekend? We're already down one player that we're probably going to need...

--

I think I'm going to sign up for

iddyiddybangbang because I have a lot of exceedingly iddish stories that aren't going to get finished otherwise. I don't know if the creativity will come back, but I figure I should at least give it a go...

Now, the question of which story. Unfortunately most of the stories that I feel I want to finish and the ones that are half-done already. (Is the WIP Big Bang running this year? Anyone know?)

I know that I won't get many readers, I know that it's going to be something that not many people are going to read. I just want to get a few ideas out there.

--

Finished my 'the women sort out the MCU Civil War' fic.

The Civilian Peace (7073 words) by tielan
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Helen Cho & Jane Foster & Maria Hill & Pepper Potts
Characters: Helen Cho, Pepper Potts, Maria Hill, Jane Foster, Okoye (Marvel), T'Challa (Marvel), Avengers Team Members (Marvel), James "Bucky" Barnes
Additional Tags: Not Canon Compliant with Movie: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Summary: What does it mean to be human, anyway?

Have a plan for the Psy-Changeling universe, it's gotten a little more complex.

--

Editing on the novel is going slowly; I just feel like it's boring and terrible and ugh. Which it might very well be. Are more dramatic things needed at this point? IDEK.

Writing on the new story is going to need at least one screen, preferably two. And a lot of editing. More ugh.

conuly

Every day is perfect, if
when you wake, you hear birds
in the garden, in the yard. Birds

up and down, ushering in one more day
in all the houses on Shaker Way. Birds
on telephone lines, light posts. Birds

twit, twittering on trees
hailing fellow birds
with a nod of beak—gray kingbird;

top-hatted, streamertail
tuxedoed, doctor bird—
busy-bodied hummingbird

tucking in, out, of pink, red ixoras
punch-drunk in love. Birds
preening for, chatting up other birds—

the oriole, the grass quit, in mid-song
on the lawn, in a dance of birds
an all-day-long conference of bird;

red-headed woodpecker
—drummer boy, or girl bird
in this daily symphony of birds

—an orchestra on Shaker Way
in serenade of each perfect day with birds—
from the very first mockingbird

heralding, in solo warble
one more day, filled with birds—
brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:

precious, diamond-throated
sweet song, miracle-toting birds
the-gift-of-day-is-here birds.

Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird.
You lift me up bird.
You sing the day beautiful, bird.

***********

_Link

conuly

Rok continues to be the best at everything, and deserves all the hugs. Though I remain baffled how ST thinks they can on one hand have post-scarcity nearly everywhere (including, one presumes, in places just outside of the Federation where they can easily abscond with probable Federation citizens) and also have seedy underbellies everywhere as well. The problem is that they never actually worked out how it all works, and I think the only solution is to ditch the idea that even the Federation really has no currency and is totally post-scarcity. Everybody has their basic needs met, I'll agree is supported by the writing. Anything past that, no.

Anyway, Rok's friend in her tragic backstory was clearly no more able to leave that situation than she was and though I can see there's too much plot for that to happen in canon I really hope they could rescue him.

Speaking of tragic backstories, I cannot believe a. that Dal tried to say his was the worst and b. his version of being "the worst" absolutely skips past the part where ( Read more... ) But seriously, dude, you grew up as a slave on a mine full of child slaves. It's not a situation people get into because their life was just so great beforehand. If everything was hunky-dory, none of you would've been targeted in the first damn place. You all have a terrible backstory, you don't need to prove it!

Moving on, Murf continues to also be the best, but ffs, can somebody get him an AAC? Or a whiteboard, at least? Teach him sign language? This is a solved problem even in the real world, surely Starfleet can figure it out!

Nothing to say about Jankom, he's just there. *shrug* And I feel kinda ditto about Zero, tbh. I mean, I like them, but....

Ma'Jel, between her cool hair and her increasingly consternated expression as the turbolift got more and more crowded, is clearly not one of the most unemotional Vulcans out there. (I don't care what Vulcans say, the opposite of "logical" is not "emotional", it's just "illogical".) I feel like she and our darling T'Lyn would have a lot to talk about.

The adults on the ship - this show is clearly trying to walk a fine line between keeping them competent and allowing the kids to run circles around them. I'm not sure it always works, but I appreciate the effort, and also I appreciate how they were careful to make it clear that the adults, whether they're being strict or a bit Too Much, are only acting the way they do because they're sympathetic. (Frankly, all the kids could stand to appreciate their new situation a bit more - except Rok, she already gets it - but I understand why they're struggling a bit.)

( Gets a bit spoilery )

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( Ugh, the news )

conuly

Or, anyway, I glanced at the headlines and oh fuck no. Can I just go back to bed, and somebody wake me when things improve?

cosmolinguist

The other day I overhead D telling someone that I now naturally have the voice that I put on for my character in our D&D game a couple of years ago.

I was an orc barbarian, heh.

I was delighted to hear this because I hadn't consciously been doing a voice for Bulrik (I went through dozens of orc names I hated in one of the online name generators before finding one I could live with at all, only much later realizing it's most of the name I chose for my self!) and I didn't know that's what I sound like all the time now! How delightful.

I haven't done any conscious voice training at all, just let the testosterone do its work. And I didn't record my voice at any point with the intent of tracking the change, which I guess is a norm in some online cultures. Both of these choices have been conscious decisions made to protect my mental health and I feel really good about that, but it does mean my boundless self-absorption has nothing to work with here! So it's nice to have some external observation.

The other stuff I've been meaning to write about is gonna have to wait; I'm too tired now apparently.

cosmolinguist

I went to the park with haggis and her kid this morning.

There was one point where I was pushing said kid on the swings (a lot of the morning was haggis, D and I doing as we were directed and I'd been specifically told to push her at this point) next to a nice young man doing the same with his own toddler.

He said hello by asking me "How old is she?" to which I of course panicked because I'm not sure these days. "...Four??" I said eventually. haggis came over and saved me from more of this peril by making normal parent conversation herself.

Then the guy said "Is she the only one you guys have?" and my thoughts hadn't gotten any further than what, here with us today?

haggis said the kid is hers, and her husband's but I'm not her husband, and meanwhile I was like oh shit he thinks I'm the husband! or the new dad! Oh no! So I joked about being a gay uncle.

I don't think I've ever been mistaken for a husband before! I probably would've thought it was fun, if I wasn't too confused at the time to know that it was happening...

conuly

A shocking number of people will blithely tell us all about the book they read, in English, on an English-language subreddit, and never tell us that they didn't read it in English. I can only catch so many of them - if they don't say "English isn't my first language" or make any obvious foreign language errors then I'll never know. (Some of them say "I read this in my own language" and then don't tell us what that language was.)

Most of these people, if prompted, will tell you what language they read it in. Three times now, I've had to ask twice because they refused to answer the question in a useful way, and every time that person has been Greek.

I thought it was a little funny the second time, but three times is the start of a worrying pattern, especially as it's not at all the most popular not-English language posted there. Maybe there's something going badly wrong with their school system?

(And, sidenote, even if you're certain it was translated from English you still ought to tell us the language it was written in. At least in theory this can help us weed out false positives, although I may be expecting too much of fellow commenters to that subreddit.)

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( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

Last month I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.

What a good day.

I was excited to meet another trans immigrant... so much that I immediately behaved as if there was a kind of intimacy between us that does not in fact exist: I teased him about how he only had a few hours left until he started being stinky...and then as we were leaving he asked me "wait, so about that smell thing, was that serious, because I've been wondering...."

oh no!

But! It worked out okay: I saw him again a fortnight later, and he made a point of telling me I was right about the stinkiness. Which made me smile but also gave me a chance to apologize for saying something that could be so easily misconstrued. I tried to explain about the false sense of intimacy I immediately felt when

He said it was fine, it was funny. To be understood as I'd intended was a relief!

He told me that the person standing next to him, an acquaintance of mine, someone he had been draped over all evening, has been counting his facial hairs.

As of that day there were eight of them.

It was so heartwarming and delightful to see early transition so intimately documented like that. Especially for a masc person; the loving detail is something I'm so much more used to seeing from trans fems.

conuly

has got to be shrinkflation of dumb phone games.

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( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

Every afternoon this week, I reach a point in the afternoon where I stumble away from my work computer and end up in the kitchen, and there on the countertop I see a handful (or more!) of strawberries, which V has harvested and washed.

And I try to only eat half (which was easier today because they ended up telling me they'd already eaten half of what they'd picked, and they'd finished off the blueberries in the fridge along with it; basically that was their lunch), and it's just the thing I need to get through the rest of the day.

Strawberry season is the best season. And I'm so grateful that don't even have to pick them myself!

dorchadas

Canadian wildfires once again:

If you can't read Japanese, that's 154 on the AQI scale, which is moderate pollution (中程度の汚染), which is not good. I haven't been outside since Wednesday and don't plan to go out unless I have, though Laila is getting pretty annoyed about not being able to go outside.

It's supposed to last for the next couple days. Hopefully that's all--two years ago we lost most of the summer to Canadian wildfires. Hopefully our neighbors to the north can get the fires contained soon and not too much damage is done.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Fast-Flowing Waterworks

tielan

1. Have you ever been to summer camp?

No. But 'summer camp' is not a thing here in Australia the way it seems to have been in the USA. There were camps, yes, but they were very directly related to school - a week is the longest that I remember and I was 12. After that, it was school excusions, yes, or band camps, and a couple of times Beach Mission (yes, literally, Christian mission in the middle of summer at a beach).

2. Have you ever made a s'more?

Yes! Back visiting some friends in upstate NY in the early 2000s when their sons were just born. Her family had a holiday house on a lake and we went and stayed there, and they taught me about making s'mores.

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)?

Possibly, depending on how you take it. I've slept on a wooden porch, huddled up with a bunch of other people. We were doing an "all nighter" purely for the sake of doing it. It wasn't fun.

Actually, wait yes, I have slept under the stars. At a 'B&S' (Bachelors' and Spinsters' ball) out west, in the tray of a utility truck. We'd tossed a bunch of mattresses in, and there were about a half-dozen of us all sprawled out to sleep after the ball. It wasn't terrible. We were young, and that makes a difference!

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleep over at your house?

Only after I became an adult. House-sharing in Sydney means you have housemates who have all sorts of people staying over.

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)?

Twin. I had a queen-size at our last house (and had a queen-size pretty much since I was 24) but when we moved out into this place, there wasn't space for a queen-sized bed, so I downsized to an IKEA twin with an under-bed storage space. And, as it turns out, the queen-mattress fitted sheets fit on the twin-size when you have a super-thick mattress.

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princessofburundi

Reading

Oooh! Prodigy has a Mirror Universe episode!

Why do things always go from bad to worse? Why can't they go from bad to somewhat less bad?

(no subject)

mail call

Your friendly neighborhood school

Prodigy

tired and writing

Birdsong of Shaker Way by Ann-Margaret Lim

Trying to rapidly finish Prodigy, on Season 2

Well, I read the news

Odds and ends about my voice (part 1 of a series apparently)

I do like being a gay uncle.

JFC what is it about Greeks?

intimacies

Absolutely the worst, most insulting sort of shrinkflation

Wonders never cease

Let me just go outside and-

Friday Five - oh why not

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May 2017

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