Vessels [podfic; redux]

Sep. 20th, 2025 06:49 pm
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Posted by gallpall

by

“I thought I’d made this clear, love. I quite like what you’ve done with Giddy,” Pyrrha responds. “Jealousy, rage: that’s all a little more your shtick. It’s not what I’m gleaning from you at the moment, though—are you anxious, Commander Wake?”

Thanks for inspiring me to do this, Bree Rnanqo (mango was taken)! I could NOT have recorded this without your assistance and your own take on this as a podfic <3 Genuinely, you are the best griend I could ever ask for.

Soundcloud cover art by Taj <3 The things you do for me and others in "little" ways have endeared me to you for eternity.

Words: 4, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

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Posted by Joey Esposito

Over the years, Snopes has looked into a variety of claims about the National Football League, its players, teams and coaches.

Media Round Up: Mixed Feelings

Sep. 20th, 2025 09:32 am
forestofglory: Cup of tea on a pile of books (books)
[personal profile] forestofglory
Somehow I always go for long stretches without much to say about media and then finished several things at once, and suddenly its time to post here again.

Dominion and Devotion—Instead of watching any of the dramas I’ve already started I watched this mini drama (24 15 min episodes). I’ve had mixed luck with mini dramas but I enjoyed this one! It’s a crossdressing girl drama with enemies to lovers and political intrigue! The premise is that the FL has been raised from birth to pretend to be a young weak prince, in the hopes of someday escaping the palace. But instead she gets picked to be the puppet emperor.

The “AFAB person was raised as a boy for Reasons” variety of crossdressing girl stories really have a different vibe than the crossdressing girl adventures I grew up with, there’s just less of a sense of agency when the FL didn’t get to choose to crossdress.

Spoilers I was not expecting the tragic ending thought! I thought it would somehow turn out ok up until the last moment.


Content Notes: Child death, corporal punishment (children and adults), torture (presented as righteous), blood

Wow the Worldep 1-4—Yes, I’m watching yet another Chinese reality show featuring Liu Yuning. This travel show where a group of people visit a bunch of cities near the 40th parallel. It’s pretty charming! I love that there's a little cartoon planet that represents each person. I would prefer a bit more focus on the tourism – tell us more about these places, and describe the food please!

Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China by Stephen R. Bokenkamp—This was a super interesting book about Daoist ideas about the afterlife and how they evolved after contact with Buddhism. I kinda wish I had read this before finalizing my translation of the about Wei Huacun because she’s mentioned in this and there’s a bunch of useful context about early Daoist practice.

Dragon Steel by Laurence Yep—The second book in this series which I’m reading to the kid. Still holds up well, I enjoyed the under sea dragon kingdom which was one of the bits that stuck with me from my first reading. This one does have some fatphobia though, which I didn’t enjoy.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh—I tried so hard with this book! Well maybe that’s not strictly true because at first I wasn’t going to read it because I didn’t really like the one thing by Emily Tesh I had read before (Silver in the Wood) but then I found out more about the premise – a teacher a magical school who actually has to do paperwork, so I decided to give it a go.

I loved the first third of this book with its teaching and risk assessment and a big climatic battle that could be the end of a different book. Saving the world part way through and then having to live with the consequences would make for an interesting book, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. Instead we introduced a new very annoying character.

I was considering DNFing at that point but I asked some friends if he went away and they said that I could expect less of him, so I kept reading. And there was a lot less of him for a bit, but another thing started frustrating me: the story was providing big clues about something that the main character was not figuring out. I really don’t enjoy that kind of reader character knowledge mismatch! That’s been resolved now but I didn’t feel motivated to keep reading after that.

I really wanted to like this book because teaching at a magical school is a cool concept, and so many of my friends loved it but after the first third I found it pretty frustrating.
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Posted by Jack Izzo

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley released whistleblower files he claimed showed the FBI investigated "the entire Republican political apparatus."

Just One Thing (20 September 2025)

Sep. 20th, 2025 11:00 pm
lilysea: Serious (Default)
[personal profile] lilysea posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Almost two weeks' worth of reading

Sep. 19th, 2025 10:54 pm
umadoshi: (autumn leaves)
[personal profile] umadoshi
The seasonal crunch at Dayjob hasn't even started yet (so soon, though) and I already feel like I'm falling behind. >.< But I've been reading, so here's a fairly bare-bones post about that.

[personal profile] scruloose and I finished listening to Exit Strategy, and reluctantly are not moving forward until after said crunch period. This is a good resting point. We're both really enjoying these, which isn't really a surprise (heaven knows everyone raves about the Murderbot audiobooks!) except that I so thoroughly think of myself as not being someone who takes in much(/any) audio media other than music. It's possible that these are the first audiobooks I've listened to since...maybe since some Robert Asprin book on cassette during a family road trip when I was a teenager (which I only recall even that much of because the reader's delivery of "'Gleep', said the dragon" has stuck with me), and whatever snatches of audiobook I've heard while road tripping with Ginny and Kas.

Saint Death's Daughter (C.S.E. Cooney) was a really good read and rather brutal; I imagine I'll pick up the sequel at some point.

Julie Leong's The Teller of Small Fortunes was a much softer book (it may count as "cozy", but that seems to be a very subjective classification). It didn't leave much of a mark on me, but I enjoyed it.

The most recent novel I finished was When Women Were Dragons (Kelly Barnhill), which was one of those books where I didn't think I had much idea of what it would be like but then found it was nothing like I'd (subconsciously, I guess) expected, based on having read a few sentences about it somewhere. It too was good, and the fact that both the tone and the actual unfolding of the concept threw me is on me, not it.

Now I'm reading The Starving Saints (Caitlin Starling), but I'm only a few chapters in.

Non-fiction: Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World is not a fast read, but then, I didn't suppose it would be. Slow progress is still being made.

I mostly don't mention cookbooks I've read, but a couple days ago I finished reading the ebook of The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World by Lisa Kyung Gross and the Women of the League of Kitchens Cooking School, with Rachel Wharton. And then the second book of collected Murderbot novellas (3-4) popped up on Book Outlet, tempting me to place an order even though I ordered from them pretty recently, and they also had the hard copy of The League of Kitchens Cookbook, so I pounced on it.

I don't remember where I heard about it, but someone somewhere mentioned it and then I snapped it up a while back when the ebook was on sale. I had no real idea what the League of Kitchens was until I was reading, and it turns out to be such a neat thing! From the book copy:
Founded in 2014 by Lisa Kyung Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, League of Kitchens is a unique cooking school that empowers immigrant women to share culinary expertise and culture through hands-on cooking workshops, both in their homes and online. The instructors pass on their knowledge, skills, recipes, and most importantly, their secrets for how to cook with love. At its heart, League of Kitchens is a celebration of the invaluable contributions of immigrants to our food culture and society.
IIRC from the intro to the book, they don't/didn't go searching for people from specific backgrounds as instructors; rather, it's about finding people who match what they're looking for, regardless of their country of origin. (Here's their current list of instructors.) Some classes are taught online, which is tempting, although I don't realistically like my odds of ever actually signing up.

(One thing I really like about the book is that the recipe instructions are broken down into incredible detail. I pretty much always want more detail than I'm given when learning something or being asked to do something. When I was still very early in the book, I was excitedly calling out to [personal profile] scruloose about how the recipe I was reading--which was not for something super-complicated, I don't think--was broken down into seventeen steps. SEVENTEEN. Yes, please!)

Family Reunion

Sep. 19th, 2025 09:21 pm
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Posted by CodeGay

by

“Dearest,” she brushed the thick blonde curls back off her shoulders, gathering her hair in her hands and playing with it, “Are you being good for me?”

Corona ducked her head. “Mmph.

“I have to say,” Ianthe gathered her hair into one hand, twisting it around her knuckles like a leash, her breath brushing against Corona’s plump cheek, “I’m disappointed.”
-

Coronabeth is done with her little Blood of Eden thing.

Words: 1416, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

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Posted by Jack Izzo

According to local news, the temporary installation was independently funded by a group of cryptocurrency investors.
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Posted by Rae Deng

The rumor originated from New York Times reporting about the Trump administration destroying $10 million in contraceptives meant to go abroad.
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Posted by Joey Esposito

The country music star is very involved in homelessness and addiction activism, but this particular rumor was not true.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

... and doesn't quite make it.

On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:

At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.

In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.

(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)

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Posted by Jordan Liles

Kirk, a conservative activist killed in September 2025, previously made negative remarks about the seven-time, Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast.
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Posted by Anna Rascouët-Paz

An animated video spread the claim, but Snopes found no evidence he had fabricated such a lie.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
White shirt, pink text "The Cake Boys". It just ended up in their laundry, so it's hers now.

She was worried about what the motto might mean - I mean, it's *probably* a bakery, but what if it's some neonazi slogan she's unaware of? - but a little googling reveals that "The Cake Boys are a NYC based network highlighting local drag kings, trans and non-binary performers, and queer artists through live and digital media." Well, alrighty then!

*********************


Read more... )

spinning tow flax!

Sep. 19th, 2025 11:10 am
foxmoth: (Default)
[personal profile] foxmoth posting in [community profile] prototypediablerie


I'm wet-spinning this based on advice in a couple books and on r/Handspinning (= small bowl of water where I dampen my fingers periodically). This unbleached tow flax has a staple length of around 4" to 6" (estimated) and to my surprise, it's a pretty pleasant and straightforward spin with the bit of water to smooth down all the flyaway strands. I'm on scotch tension on an Ashford Traveller: slower take-up, comparatively faster spin and higher drive band tension BUT I tend to treadle quite fast (I'm told) because my WHEEL stalls at slower speeds and I run on nervous energy. I'm actually on the LARGEST whorl (lowest ratio) on my Ashford Traveller because that's the whorl setting I can most reliably get the wheel to work with AT ALL; likely a user learning curve problem. This is somewhat uneven and not all that lovely but I'm having fun! I do also have samples of bleached tow flax and two of ramie from different sellers. I'm hoping to budget for line flax in October to see if I can learn to spin that but that's going to inherently be pricier.

Unrelated:



Even if you have zero interest in wool processing, the first couple minutes shows a catten just LOLLING AROUND IN THE FLEECE clearly living its best catten life. :D :D :D Cloud does that, although she appears to prefer alpaca to mohair. XD