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April 2024

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Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Maglor, Elrond, Maedhros, various others
Warnings: References to torture and trauma
Summary: Maglor keeps a promise, and comes to Valinor, only to find the ghosts he thought he'd left behind are alive and waiting for him.
Note: This fic is a sequel to Clear Pebbles of the Rain, which is itself a sequel to Unhappy Into Woe.

Prologue / Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

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Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: What About Us - P!nk

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Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Passenger - Noah Kahan

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My grandmother died over the weekend. It still feels very ureal. I'm not particularly upset, just feeling a bit disjointed and out of sync with normal time somehow. But basically okay.

I did write a ficlet today, about a last meeting between Rory Brandybuck and old Bilbo at the long-expected party. You know, growing old vs. not, saying goodbye vs. not, all that kind of thing. I can't quite decide if it's just therapy by another name or if it's something I want to turn into a properly edited and published story. There's no rush on that. Mostly it feels good to have written again. I do wish I still was able to do that under normal circumstances.

That's the news from around here. I hope you all have a good week.

And I may have noticed that I need something new to listen to.

Now, I've said this before and I'll definitely say it again, but audiodramas are, hands-down, the gayest media I have ever consumed. So, in honor of the occasion, three lists:

The End's collection of LGBTQ+ audiodrama with at least one completed season

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ creators

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ characters

The white rose (ok, pale yellow center) has new buds!! While it was struggling away trying to stay alive in it's old, shady location; battling oak tree roots for moisture; it could barely bloom at all. Some years it didn't bloom. This year, in its new, sunny location with plenty of water, it has sent out a second pair of buds {Edit: There are four!!}. This further confirms my suspicion that it is a climbing rose, not a rambling rose, especially since the roses are on new growth. After nosing around the internet I'm pretty sure it is a Lamarque Rose. Bred in 1830. It will be fun to see how it does, and whether we are a tad hot for it (in full sun) or not.

This is the same little squirrel that's been trying to break into my bedroom for the better part of the past ten days. Once it actually got into the house it was immediately chased by a cat and had cause to regret all its life choices.

We removed the cat and opened the front door very wide and absented ourselves from the area, so we think it's gone now.

( Image of the squirrel at my window )

I think it's a baby. Not just because it's so small, but because the other window squirrels will shamelessly stand up or bang on the glass if they think they can catch my eye, but when this one realized I was there it hunkered down very small and actually turned its face away a little.

I hope it's all right now that it's outside where it belongs.

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Happy Birthday to two very special friends,

halfmoon_mollie1 and

rosalind_franklin79. I hope you can both feel my hugs and don't mind Rena-pup's face-licks. She's very excited to celebrate with you. PartyCat is also very excited! ♥ ♥

Thursday and Friday were spent doggedly trying to get shade cloth set up for the garden. Last year the shade cloth undoubtedly saved the garden from burning up. My rule of thumb was to put the shade cloth up if it was over 103F. The shade cloth was stored on pipes, or pieces of wood that were attached to 7' or 8' t-posts. I would reef them up like sails when they weren't needed and then haul them out and hook their ends up to stretch them. Very labor intensive. This year I installed a new system. Each section of shade cloth gets shower curtain rings on each end. New, 10' tall t-posts have been installed with electrical conduit pipes as horizontal cross pieces. Here is a picture.

I need to spend a little time fine tuning the system, but it seems to work really well. Friday it got to 100F. I worked in the heat finishing the project and then loaded the car for the trip to Martinez. It was a quick trip, out Sat morning early with just one overnight but it still required a lot of stuff. I jammed the car full of camping equipment and 5 flats + of spare plants. Chena was quite miffed that the only space for her was in the front seat.
Donald met me at Martinez, did several nice walks with Chena and at least one with Cole, Susie's dog. It was hot in Martinez, 95F, and I got terribly hot and tired. Slept for 10 or 11 hours. Sunday was cooler and altogether nicer. We had a great group of riders with a number of new riders, all of whom seemed nice.
On Saturday night I was disappointed that only a very few plants had been taken. Sunday was another story entirely. Plants flew off the picnic table. I said they were free, though I would happily take a dollar donation to cover pots and soil costs. I think I collected $42. All of the plants I brought went to new homes. I'm so happy not to need to water them!!
I'm home now, tired. Need to remember to fix my camping mattress which has an air leak, or possibly a leaky valve.
Tomorrow or next day Firefly comes back. I will be glad to see her.

Title: now showing

Artist: jetblackfeeling Writer: alexcat
Universe: MCU
Rating: Explicit for art and fic
Fic Wordcount: 5571
Summary:

How can a simple malfunction in a building's computer keep two people apart? It can when they're both too stubborn to talk to one another and too embarrassed to take anyone's advice. OR - this is what happens when you accidentally become a porn star to your own friends.

Link to jetblackfeeling's art on AO3 Link to alexcat's fic on AO3

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which is a soap opera with many of the trappings of a space opera. Interestingly, the show never comes down with a final opinion on whether or not it's a bad thing for those little planets to get absorbed by the empire/space UN or not - the protagonists mostly feel like it's awful, but almost everybody they meet who isn't from their home planets seems to think that it hardly matters who technically rules the planet so long as somebody does. But most of those people either have no context to claim an informed opinion or are themselves from the PSA, so....

On a different note, I continue to hold the opinion that their deceased friend may have had strong convictions, and he died for his beliefs, and he might even have been as remarkable and amazing as the two protagonists seem to believe, but he also sounds like a lot. Like the sort of person who doesn't want to get a cat because of abstruse concepts of moral philosophy that nobody cares about but him, but who sure is willing to keep arguing about it until they cave from sheer exhaustion, and then presumably keep arguing because they ought to have caved due to agreeing with his position.

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at one point Holden sleeps over at a former teacher's house and wakes up to find that teacher patting his head, which prompts Holden to leave.

And I guess we can interpret that scene and the teacher's motive in a lot of ways, but I gotta say, I never expected one of those ways to be "Well, it's obviously innocuous, and the fact that Holden interpreted it as a sexual advance proves he's lying about the 20 times he claims he's been the victim of sexual assault already".

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Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Vigilantes chit-chat on

bnha_fans, and a comment on

booknook!

Tags:

dreamwidth: community thursdays

Which, I'm told, has prompted all the usual gross comments about the girl playing Hermione. Ugh. Why are people so disgusting?

(Also, fuck JKR, but she's not the one being awful inside this complaint. Not to fear, I'm sure she'll find a way to outclass them soon enough.)

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thebiballerina wrote up a really nice explanation of what is going on with the hidden AI bots on Discord, with links and citations, explaining what the bots can and cannot do.

The image editing tools being discussed here are user applications. These particular applications are more visible due to being promoted by Discord, but they operate the same as other third-party user applications. The individual user has to choose to enable these applications, and choose which images they use them on, entirely at their discretion. It is functionally equivalent to saving the image to one's computer and uploading it on another website.

A user application cannot read content in a server of its own accord, and thus cannot "scrape" a server for AI training data.

Link: Claims of Hidden AI Bots on Discord: An Explanation

I've seen people in Discord servers share User IDs (a string of numbers) to ban them, and then more people showing up with even more IDs to ban. I don't know if in the backend, the server owner can see the "name" of the user being banned this way (and then confirm that it's an AI bot name), but for me that reminded me a bit too much of when Twitter users had to share blocklists for bots and those lists then had legitimate users added to them in order to silence them. Either way, as per the article, the banning does nothing as the app can still be added AND the bots only see the data that a user specifically shares with them (like a photo a user explicitly uses with the app).

I also appreciated the pointers to Discord's terms around using data for AI training, which I wasn't aware of. Very informative post.

Current Mood: pensive

That, or we have a new dog on the block that sounds a lot like a turkey and which will not shut up.

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Happy Birthday,

_celebrian and

sartorias! Pupcakes for all!

That's another post that was due back in January ;) I mentioned that I'd asked beta-readers if they would be up for trying out Ellipsus with me for beta-reading the Cursed Witch. Unfortunately, after a couple of them agreed and started, I ended up having to ask folks to use another platform.

I know a few people in my circles are using Ellipsus for writing - if some of this information is out of date, let me know! From extracting the beta-reader comments and feedback this month, I think the pieces that are deal-breakers for me are still present. I still massively support Ellipsus and the stance they're taking against generative AI. We need more small independent writer-friendly companies like this.

As an additional note, if you stay subscribed to the email "welcome" sequence after joining, at the end they send you a friendly email from one of the co-founders asking for feedback, which I did share. I received a very gracious reply explaining what they were working on at the moment and when they'd hopefully get to these issues. I understand the need to prioritise, and I'm totally rooting for them.

Having said that, here's why Ellipsus didn't work for me for beta-reading compared to a tool like GoogleDoc or LibreOffice.

Finding the changes

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Can't see both comments and in-text suggestions at the same time

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Email stuff, minor and a bit annoying though not a deal breaker

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So that's been my experience! The third one can be avoided with some email filtering, but from starting to incorporate comments and feedback from beta-reading this month, I believe the two deal-breakers are still a problem. However, this is all for a very specific, "beta-reader" use case rather than actual writing. I understand Ellipsus is an amazing GDoc replacement for that use case, and excellent for real-time collaborative writing. If you've been looking for GDoc alternative for your writing, one that doesn't feed your work to an AI training corpus, consider it!

And if you're using Ellipsus already, would love to hear about your experience so I can understand better what it does well and less well, and more easily recommend it when applicable to people looking for a new tool :)

Tags:

writing

kimaracretak -->

fiachairecht. You can still call me Kimara.

Thank you again to the person who gifted me the rename token, idk if you want to be named publically but it meant a lot <3

Tags:

blogkeeping

OP: Hey, looking for a board book series from when I was a kid! It was traditional fairy tales and fables, and the part I really remember is the illustrations! I'm sure if I see those illustrations I'll know it's the right book!

Me: Care to describe these illustrations? Even a little? Were they brightly colorful or more muted, or maybe black and white? Were they realistic or cartoony?

OP: Oh, they looked similar to the hare and the tortoise board game! Like, when I saw that I first thought it was the books!

Me: Oh, I guess you're gonna make me google that instead of providing a link, cool.

Guys, it turns out there are at least five different editions of this game, each one with a totally different art style.

Meanwhile, on a different thread on the same post:

Other Commenter: Could it be Aesop's fables?

Me, silently: WTF, buddy? That's not a suggestion.

OP: Oh, no, it was more colorful than that!

Me, a bit less silently: WTF? Like... what edition are we talking about? You need to help us help you!

All comments are paraphrased, but seriously.

Edit: I am absolutely dying at this point to ask who, exactly, OP thinks Aesop is, but that conversation is not going to go anywhere productive. I'd really better forget the whole thing.

Watch on YouTube

Apparently it references a short story. Who knew?

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Page Summary

starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Twenty Six
starspray - High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Twenty Five
marta_bee - (no subject)
conuly - You may have noticed that it's Pride Month
ranunculus - White Rose
conuly - Well, I just got jumped by a squirrel in my own bathroom
shirebound - Birthdays!
ranunculus - ETS Martinez, Shade Cloth
alexcat - FIC:" Now Showing
conuly - Finishing up a relisten of The Pasithea Powder
conuly - Just to refresh your memory of Catcher in the Rye
vriddy - Community Thursday
conuly - Welp, they've cast the main trio for the Harry Potter tv show
vriddy - Signal boost: Claims of Hidden AI Bots on Discord: An Explanation
conuly - It's turkey o'clock.
shirebound - It's a birthday!
vriddy - Beta-reading on Ellipsus
fiachairecht - name change, as threatened
conuly - Geez, maybe today is not the day to hang out at /r/whatsthatbook....
conuly - I woke up today with "Video Killed the Radio Star" inexplicably running through my head

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Style: Elegant Notebook for Gold Leaf by rosecarmine
Resources: Yusuke Kamiyamane and Atle Mo

Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

she of the brown dusty attic-smelling wings

People I Follow |

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April 2024

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High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Twenty Six

High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Twenty Five

(no subject)

You may have noticed that it's Pride Month

White Rose

Well, I just got jumped by a squirrel in my own bathroom

Birthdays!

ETS Martinez, Shade Cloth

FIC:" Now Showing

Finishing up a relisten of The Pasithea Powder

Just to refresh your memory of Catcher in the Rye

Community Thursday

Welp, they've cast the main trio for the Harry Potter tv show

Signal boost: Claims of Hidden AI Bots on Discord: An Explanation

It's turkey o'clock.

It's a birthday!

Beta-reading on Ellipsus

Finding the changes

Can't see both comments and in-text suggestions at the same time

Email stuff, minor and a bit annoying though not a deal breaker

name change, as threatened

Geez, maybe today is not the day to hang out at /r/whatsthatbook....

I woke up today with "Video Killed the Radio Star" inexplicably running through my head

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