Long rant, can't sleep

Oct. 21st, 2025 11:19 am
fayanora: lil girl knife (lil girl knife)
[personal profile] fayanora
Concerning the continuing government shutdown, I am glad to see that the Democrats are finally growing a fucking spine about something for once, but at the same time I'm still pissed because where was this fucking spine when the tea party assholes started making shit difficult for Obama? We are in the fascist uprising that we are in currently because the Republicans started going well and truly insane at that time and blocked at least one of Obama's choices for Supreme Court justices. I don't remember if there were more than that, but that should have been the point at which the Democrats grew a spine and said, "No! He is getting this person for a Supreme Court justice because that is how this shit works, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourselves!"

Why is it, almost a year into this fascist uprising, that the Democrats are only just now growing a spine?

Long rant under cut )

Fuck the GOP

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:34 am
fayanora: FB avatar NO (FB avatar NO)
[personal profile] fayanora
Trump's big ugly bill finally starts fucking us over. Starting November 1st of this year, if you want SNAP benefits, you'll have to work for them. Luckily, the wording and the little table provided seem to exempt people who have been officially declared disabled. (Assuming I've read it correctly.) Of course that doesn't help people who are disabled but not officially declared so yet, and of course they made it a lot harder to do much of anything regarding the Social Security Administration (earlier in the year), as if that was necessary.1

Also, it looks like elderly people who are not also disabled will have to work, unless they are pregnant. Though I have no idea what they consider elderly for SNAP.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck Tronald Dumpsterfire. Fuck the GOP. Assholes, every fucking one of them. Big, hairy, stinky, shit-smeared, syphilis-infected assholes.

Moments before sending this, I got an email from the SSA with a headline reading "Go digital to avoid a trip to your local office during government shutdown" which made me laugh hysterically. IIRC, Elon Musk's interference with the SSA earlier in the year already shut down all the SSA offices and phone numbers, so you already had to do everything online, no government shutdown necessary. I could be misremembering the details, but I distinctly remember there being a huge to-do about it for over a month because they were saying computer-illiterate people were basically fucked because of it.

~

1 = I remember filling out the SSDI forms in 2008 or 2009, and it was so stressful that afterward I had literal tunnel vision the whole way back home, and also I had to drown out environmental sounds with my headphones at higher than usual volume. I was basically in a dissociative fugue state. And I'm a reasonably intelligent and capable person; I can't begin to imagine how much more difficult it is for people less intelligent and/or capable than me, especially people with intellectual deficiencies/disabilities.

Thirty-nine!

Oct. 20th, 2025 11:27 pm
fayanora: ahh! (ahh!)
[personal profile] fayanora
Went canboxing again. Didn't do very well for most of it because I didn't realize until about half an hour in that today was Monday, so all the can boxes likely got emptied earlier in the day. I think most of my finds were found just on the ground, despite it being night, with returnables in garbage containers at a second and yellow glass recycling boxes being in third (I don't know if you're supposed to put returnables in those or not, but people do anyway. Not just glass, either. In fact, some people put garbage in those which is for sure not allowed.) Meaning the actual can boxes placed fourth.

Anyway, I got 39, and now I have two full green bags of returnables, and half of a third, in the house. With the other two I turned in last week or so, I might have five bags credited to my account by the end of the month.

The biggest haul of today was when I found a massive pile of glass bottles in someone's yard, just there on the grass like someone had decided to dump it all there as a "prank." I don't know how many were there, but at least a third of my total haul was that pile. It was a mix of soda pop, root beer, fancy bottled water brands, and some beer bottles. One of the water bottle ones was broken in half, so I used the grabber to move that to the side so I could get the others, then left it. I dunno who put them there, but I sure as fuck wasn't gonna touch a broken bottle to try to find somewhere to dispose of it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Because the last two trips have yielded mostly glass bottles, and that shit is heavy, I moved some of the lighter things from the first complete bag to the second, half-full bag, then put a bunch of the new glass ones in the first bag, rather than have one entire bag full of just glass bottles. Even doing it that way, both full bags are so fucking heavy that I'm gonna have trouble getting them out when I take them in. My plan is to take one of the full bags in to New Season's Market tomorrow before the food boxes trip, and if I have enough time, come back and take the half bag full of glass bottles in to the Milwaukie recycling place and have those be counted manually so I don't have to deal with trying to deal with filling a third heavy bag all the way. Then the second bag I can take in tomorrow.

Anyway, 39 is $3.90.

whirlwind few months

Oct. 20th, 2025 04:46 pm
ofmonstrouswords: (religion: manannan)
[personal profile] ofmonstrouswords
I'll try to sum up in bullet points.
  •  first chunk of summer was spent unpacking, job-hunting, and recovering from my back going out, as well as falling deep into a writing/publishing burnout I have yet to recover fully from (but there is hope on the horizon)
  • July I started getting spinal decompression treatments at a local chiro. Back pain is...well, still there, but different now, and no where near as bad as it was. I can feel the results. 
  • still not done unpacking. I fear the task is eternal.
  • in August got a bite on job-hunting; landed an interview the day after my birthday.
  • the day I got the notice I was hired, my sister messaged me to let me know my dad was in palliative care and didn't have long.
  • cue: very quick trip up to see him one last time, made possible by a friend of my mom's driving me up to her home, and her driving me across the water to Dad's care home.
  • Dad was asleep the entire visit, entirely non-responsive to my presence or the presence of Sirius when I brought him up. (Sirius wagged his tail and went right up to Dad's bed, clearly saying "Hi Granddad!!") however, I think--I believe--he knew I was there, and that my presence was a benefit for him. I spoke to him. Told him about my life. Told him I forgave him. Told him it was okay to go and that we'd all be okay, and I kissed his cheek. 
  • Dad passed 2 days after I saw him, on the exact same day my Oma passed 15 years ago.
  • end of August held my annual trip with my husband to Pirates and Fairies, where I proceeded to try and ruin our marriage in my grief-driven crashout. 
  • I did not succeed; Mr. Monstrous and I just celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary this weekend and we are stronger than ever. I married a very patient man (it's the Earth sign stellium).
  • new job started in September. Training is officially over and I'm on a 4-on, 4-off schedule, which I think will be much better for me overall in terms of work-life balance and not being 100% exhausted all the time.
  • it is a relief having an income again. I hope it helps us out of the debt we are currently in (last few weeks before my first paycheque was us living on credit cards/line of credit). 
thoughts on the loss of my father:


I could probably write a novel on my complicated feelings and thoughts regarding this, but this post was brought to you by a brief break in my house-cleaning on my second day off this week. the Fortis guys are coming tomorrow and they need to access things like the fire place, so I have to move our Hades/Persephone altar and all my witchcraft shit sitting in front of it. 
 anyway, I am alive, and I think I'm going to give up on trying to reply to previous comments from months ago, and just try to be better about replying to future ones. sometimes I do wish Dreamwidth had a "like" button--as much as I hate social media, sometimes the like button (or heart, or w/e) is just great when I don't have the words to reply, or really no lengthy reply is necessary, but I want to make sure the person commenting knows I saw their comment and am acknowledging its existence/saying thank you for the response. 

Dear Yuletide author, happy Yuletide!

Oct. 19th, 2025 07:43 pm
jenett: Big and Little Dipper constellations on a blue watercolor background (Default)
[personal profile] jenett
It's been two years since I signed up for Yuletide, but I'm looking forward to it this year!

Thank you so much for writing for me, and I hope you also have a fantastic Yuletide exchange, whatever that looks like for you. I've included both what I particularly like about each canon and a couple of prompt ideas, but I'm up for anything that doesn't hit my DNWs and includes the characters.

General notes, things I love, my do not wants )
All Of Us Murderers - K.J. Charles )
Greta Helsing Series - Vivian Shaw )
England Series - K. J. Charles )
The Odyssey - Homer )

It's Agatha Christie time!

Oct. 18th, 2025 08:42 am
scaramouche: Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, from Singin' in the Rain (singin' in the rain - umbrella)
[personal profile] scaramouche
I might've waited longer to make a post, but I just finished The Listerdale Mystery, which is a collection of twelve short stories, and I had such a fun time I had to post ASAP! It's different from the previous short story collections I've read in that only one is a proper murder mystery, while the rest are murder without the mystery, murder adjacent, or do not come anywhere near murder at all! (Look at me being so excited, when it may turn out Christie has plenty of these.)

Some of the stories were centered on a twist that, by virtue of being a short story, made the twist far more important to the story itself, like anthology episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Twilight Zone (in terms of story structure, but with mundane concepts instead of fantastical). By the time I got to story ten there were some tropey repeats, especially featuring a man being pulled into an adventure by mysterious girl, but overall it's a fun mix and I really enjoyed myself.

Only caveat I would say that classism is particularly strong throughout in terms of justification for certain characters' successes or assumptions being proven right, but sometimes it seems earnest and others it seems ironic. I say that because another repeated topic of the stories is to not believe that people are who they say they are without proof, but the working class characters who get scammed this way tend to be rescued by their honesty, while the upper class characters who get scammed are either able to brush it off or are able to notice just enough truth through the scam to be rewarded by it.

Particular shoutouts to:
  • The opening "The Listerdale Mystery", about a widowed mother who finds a house for rent that seems to good to be true; the story is, if you think about it for two seconds, a ridiculous concept, but it's a particular kind of romantic id that you'd be well used to if familiar with Bollywood films and I found it kinda charming for that;

  • "Philomel Cottage", the most Alfred Hitchcock Presents of the bunch, with a recently-married woman realizing that her new husband might be planning to murder her;

  • "Accident", where a retired inspector suspects that a neighbour is a twice-murderess who is going to kill her current husband and wants to try to prevent it, spoilers )

Besides that, I've also read two more Christie short story collections, both of which are Poirot collections and thus more traditional mysteries: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and Murder in the Mews. The best thing about short Poirot stories is that Poirot can show up at a scene of the crime, take one turn of it and solve the mystery immediately. Which is neat!

In Christmas Pudding, I did like the one about the elderly estranged twin men, which kind of deceives you into thinking it'll be a switcheroo between the twins but is actually a switcheroo of a different kind. But quite a few (three, I think) stories involve disguises to make the murder appear to have happened differently or at a different time, and it kind of kicked my disbelief a bit too hard, especially the one that hinges on the murderer leaving it to chance that another character won't see the body after the murder.

Murder in the Mews has four short stories, with three being meatier than the fourth, and they’re kind of bound together with the theming of the "crime" isn’t exactly what it looks like. Well, the third one, "Dead Man's Mirror" is way more in line with Christie's precise murders, right down to the layout of the room being key to what's happened, but all of them are in the same realm. The only qualm I'd have is with the last one, "Triangle at Rhodes" which is the shortest of the lot and the assumptions are a bit of a stretch for me, in terms of what Poirot observes of the relationships that's happening vs. what we the reader are shown of those same relationships.
fayanora: steph oh shit (steph oh shit)
[personal profile] fayanora
So on a YouTube video by Vsauce, I was introduced to the idea of "constrained poetry." IE, poetry that has certain constraints, like "you can only use words with the letter 'o'. Use that O as much as you want, but no other vowels can be in the poem." Thus, on a whim, I took up the challenge, with the letter O. Here is what I made:

O! Do bloody bombs of old long go,
For holy blood to grossly flow!
Folk of blood, do not long swoon,
Opt to jog, to trot, to croon!
O! Croon so on yon holy chord
Shoots lofty words for world concord!
Knock on rooftops, knock on doors,
From tor tops lofty to yon low moors!
For who so wroth, so forg'd of scorn,
Chops down concord, short of sons forsworn?

~

Hope y'all enjoy it, I spent like two hours on this whim. The last sentence was the hardest, because I was trying to say something along the lines of "who could forswear peace?" and let me tell you, trying to find alternate words for could or would that only have O vowels in them was so damned frustrating. I was even looking into the etymology of the word, and archaic ways to do it, and I was sooo tempted to just use "wood" instead of "would," but I like what I did instead.

Yeah I also added the constraint of "it has to rhyme," too, which added another level of difficulty to it.

Fifty-three

Oct. 16th, 2025 09:10 pm
fayanora: qrcode (Default)
[personal profile] fayanora
Went can-boxing tonight. (Looking for returnables worth money.) Found fifty-three returnables, which is worth $5.30. So my third green bag from before is filled all the way, and a fourth one is half full. Already took in the first two bags a few days ago, so just these two now. Fun thing: these full green bags fit in the new cart with so much room to spare I can easily carry two of them at once. Same thing was barely doable at all with a lot of struggling, using the smaller cart that's broken now.

While I was out, I got a few things at the grocery store, too.

Amadeus

Oct. 17th, 2025 11:34 am
scaramouche: Freddie Mercury in profile, with "Hello again, my beauties" in text (freddie hello my beauties)
[personal profile] scaramouche
A friend and I had a loose resolution to check out more non-pop orchestral performances next year (since the ones we've gone to so far have all been for pop culture music, eg. movie and video game soundtracks), so she shared the 2026 season for the Malaysian Philharmonic and I thought maybe I'd check out their upcoming Mozart concert which is in conjunction with his 270th birthday.

Coincidentally, or maybe not because of said birthday, there's a new adaptation of Amadeus! Looks like a miniseries instead of a movie, but still, excitedly hopeful!

Book Log: Where am I Now?

Oct. 15th, 2025 03:14 pm
scaramouche: Kerry Ellis as Elphaba from Wicked (elphaba reaching)
[personal profile] scaramouche
I must've gotten Mara Wilson's memoir Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame during one of my trips to UK, because it has a price tag in pounds, but heck if I can remember when. What I do remember is that I put the book at the back of the drawer because I was annoyed and/or upset at her for something she'd said online. I no longer remember what it was! So I suppose it's time to be reading.

There is a feeling at the start that Wilson was way too young to be writing a memoir, but upon reading it it does make sense, because the bulk is about her time as a child actress and the fallout of that into the neuroses of teenhood and young adulthood. And going through that same thing we all do, where in growing up we become conscious of certain kinds of privilege we don't have and having to reckon with that, except Wilson's realization of the importance of looking traditionally pretty isn't just about trying to fit in and get friends, but also to get acting work. (Ow.) She namechecks as specific examples her peers Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson who beat her to roles and did get to make the transition to acting adults, and her raw frustration that this was not something she could balance out with talent.

Tangled up in that is the intense celebrity-adjacent subculture of growing up in Burbank, California surrounded by peers who want to "make it" into the business and thus have feelings about those who do when they do not. Mean girl culture in a greater Hollywood setting, baby! (Ooofff.) This is probably the most fascinating section of the book to me, of how that world warps the expectations of children and teenagers who feel they're in the pipeline to showbiz greatness. Also, by her reckoning, there's lore than the Californian school subculture of show choirs that she participated in was what inspired Ryan Murphy to make Glee, though that may be more guesswork than cold hard facts.

Wilson specifically lived through some rough times (including the early death of her mother), but she got out of showbiz with relatively less trauma than other child actors, but it's still only other child actors who could understand what it was like to grow up in that environment and have so much of your personality and looks dissected by people who don't know you. Also, to have creepers think it's fun to ask a child questions about mature topics they haven't yet grappled with. Toxic and sadly familiar.
fayanora: Aghast (Aghast)
[personal profile] fayanora
This German kids' song with a techno beat is legit a banger, and I think I actually learned something from it! Might have found a cheat code for learning a foreign language!

PS = As you can tell from the title, I just basically doubled my German vocabulary. I had to look back to the video to spell gesehen because it isn't spelled at all like how its pronounced, but that was the only one I had to look up after about a dozen repetitions of the song.

Dear Yuletide 2025 Author

Oct. 13th, 2025 11:09 am
thefourthvine: A weird festive creature. Text: "Yuletide squee!" (Yuletide Woot!)
[personal profile] thefourthvine
Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details I can, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these fandoms. See you on the 25th!

(And if you're not my writer, thank you for looking at my letter! I am entirely open to treats of any length.)

Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )


Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )


blink-182 )


Blue Prince, Worldbuildling, Simon P. Jones )


Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

Woe betide my errant skills

Oct. 13th, 2025 04:37 am
fayanora: qrcode (Default)
[personal profile] fayanora
Sometimes I wish I was a better artist, so that I could get my visions onto the page better. I've tried drawing the Myrkalves / Nua Sidhe before, and I can never quite capture how creepy they can look in their true form. They're described in the books like... well the Nua Sidhe are basically the Gray Aliens from folklore, but that doesn't really do them justice either. Both are avian beings; Nua Sidhe are usually entirely featherless with pale skin (ranging from paper white to medium gray, generally), but the Myrkalves have downy feathers where a human would have hair, but also on their arms. Both have backwards-bending knees and feet like giant ravens, and similar hands. And while they can look quite pleasant most of the time (IMHO), I have this image in my mind of their apparently tiny mouths widening into these impossibly wide grins that go literally from one ear-hole to the other, with two rows of sharp and pointed teeth.

Avian, yes, but also not. Their biggest obvious difference from birds is their large, almond-shaped compound eyes.

In case it wasn't obvious, they are technically the same species but the two peoples hate each other, mostly. For good reason. The Nua Sidhe have a tendency to abduct people. They initially did it to the Myrkalves, to enslave them. But they also do it to humans for various reasons ranging from pranks to much more serious things like experimenting on or even killing humans.
caramarie: Icon of Zen from Zanki Zero, sleeping on Ryo's shoulder. (zen and ryo)
[personal profile] caramarie
A funny thing about playing The Hundred Line with H is learning about our different taste in characters. For instance, it seems his first instinct is not to spend all his time with the closest white-haired guy?? Weird.

We are 75 days into the first route. H was concerned there hadn’t been enough twists yet, given who the writers for this game are, and I had to tell him I hadn’t been joking when I referred to the ‘other hundred routes’.

(Okay I was wrong and that’s the number of endings not the number of routes but still.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game with someone where neither of us have played it before, and it’s fun getting to speculate together. It is a very inefficient way to play though – we’re managing about an evening a fortnight. I’ll make my own save file once we finish the first route :p I might have to do some research though to make sure H and I can play the most Darumi-heavy routes together ... he loves her ...

H (looking to make a gift for Darumi): Damn, we can’t make any sexy games.

Darumi (next time we see her): So you wanna know my thoughts on depressing eroge?

Her fourth wall-breaking powers truly are astounding.

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