Check In: Day 7

Nov. 7th, 2025 05:13 pm
glitteringstars: (day to day)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hi everyone! How is writing going today?

emotional support spinning

Nov. 7th, 2025 07:21 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee


Happily, there's more of this so I can spin up more for a 2-ply. Destined for weft for the Saori loom - I have promised Joe a smol, semifunctional blanket. :3
radiantfracture: Two cat characters from the 1985 anime lean out the train window (Night on the Galactic Railroad)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
Who was it who said something like -- in a way all books are games, whether they are actual gamebooks or not, because all readers engage with a novel (I feel like they said novel?) with some level of imaginary wiggle room, constantly envisioning alternatives?

Queer reading is one form of this, but any reading contains some aspect of this push-pull. I think this person said that this is in fact an inevitable part of reading a story, this alternate acceptance and refusal, this shimmering of possibility, such that (famously) you can read a story over and over again and still always hope at a particular point that a character will make a different decision?

(I may have asked this before, because it is an idea that intermittently preoccupies me.)

(Possibly several times, because it might be in my notes from 2023, but who can find those?)

(Now I feel paranoid that I never stop asking this question)

(Also I got double vaccinated today and I am a teeny bit feverish)

§rf§
[syndicated profile] wwdn_feed

Posted by Wil

Oh shit. I just hit publish, so the email already went out, and I am not going to send another. I can’t believe I forgot to even mention that Lego revealed a whole lot about the Enterprise D set that drops later this month. Can you believe I forgot this? It’s been such a full and exciting day, this got eclipsed like Darth Cheney finally joining Kissinger at the War Criminal’s table on Tuesday.

I woke up to a flood of text messages from friends who all wanted to make sure I knew about it (I love my friends so much) but my favorite one said “new contact image for you just dropped” with this image attached

I am beside myself. I’m a minifig, you guys! And I am so so so so happy that they chose this version of Wesley, specifically. Way to go, buddy!

Okay, I now turn you over to me from about ten minutes ago:

I should have posted this yesterday. My bad! I’m working all week on a narration that I have wanted permission to do for years. YEARS. Every night I go to sleep super excited to get back to work, and every morning I wake up excited that I get to do this.

That said, it’s been hard work, and I’m exhausted. You’d never believe it was possible to get exhausted, I bet, sitting in a chair and reading all day. And you’d probably be right, if that’s all I was doing. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed it, myself, if I didn’t have firsthand experience. But it’s performance, if you’re doing it right, and performance takes energy. Four straight hours of performance is a lot of performance, it turns out.

To be clear: I love that I’m exhausted. It feels earned and it’s satisfying. It’s also, uh, exhausting. I am entirely out of mana at the end of the day, and I didn’t think reaching into hit points for my blog was the best idea.1

I don’t know when I can get into the details of this — I have such a story to tell about today’s work — but I hope it’s soon.

Oh! This is SUCH a good excuse to put in my subscribe thingy. If you don’t want to miss that post, or any other post, you can do that here:

Nice.

If you follow my Instagram, you may recognize that I’m working in the same booth where I record It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. Allow me to use THAT to now fulfill the promise of the blog title, and tell you that a new episode dropped yesterday.

This week’s story is The Odyssey Problem, by Chris Willrich, originally published in Clarkesworld Magazizne. Ohhhh it is so good. I’d love to hear what you think.

It’s Story Time With Wil Wheaton is available wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now at

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Oh! Oh! Reminder that Corey, Jerry, and I are coming to a city near you2 with a 35mm print of Stand By Me. Tickets are available for three screenings:

December 5 at Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey

December 4 at Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire.

December 6 at Lynn Memorial Auditorium in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Everything you need to know, including how to buy tickets and VIP packages is at stand by me live dot com

Hey, hasn’t it great to wake up yesterday and finally have the day you voted for? It feels good, doesn’t it?The beginning of his end is upon us, friends.

  1. Actually, I can confirm this, as I just realized while proofing this post that I am currently dipping into hit points. ↩
  2. Offer valid if you live near Red Bank, NJ, Concord, NH, or Lynn, MA. Offer void in Iceland, for some stupid reason. ↩

Check In: Day 6

Nov. 6th, 2025 05:10 pm
glitteringstars: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello!

How's writing going? If you didn't write, did you edit? Brainstorm?

Kitty training

Nov. 6th, 2025 10:50 pm
cimorene: A very small cat peeking wide-eyed from behind the edge of a blanket (cat)
[personal profile] cimorene
Sipuli can now touch a target and also touch it by sort of standing up on her hind legs. That did take extra training and I am giving another verbal cue, but it's really the same trick and I'm not sure what to do next. She sits most of the time by default, which would make that hard. Maybe lie down, or turn in a circle?

I started training Tristana yesterday too (the sessions are about 5 minutes, so it's not really a burden), and she is getting better about touching the target but doesn't fully understand yet.

Saori WX60 floor loom assembly WIP

Nov. 6th, 2025 05:55 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
cat and floor loom

cat and floor loom

Loom assembly to continue...after...catten removes herself from possibly having screws DROPPED on her... /o\

Special thanks to Jill of Saori Santa Cruz, [personal profile] merrileemakes, and my husband for helping me figure out which part of assembly I borked yesterday!

Check In: Day 4

Nov. 5th, 2025 06:28 pm
glitteringstars: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello! We're halfway through the week already, huh?

How's writing going? Doing any editing?
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


This book is very hard to describe without spoilers, so I'll just cover the setup. Aspiring actress/current waitress Jess is having a bad night that gets much worse when she finds a scared little boy who's run away from his father. Things get extremely strange from there. This book is a wild ride.

I read it in a single sitting, so it's very propulsive. It's also very dark/bleak, despite some absurdist humor arising from the premise. I enjoyed it a lot while I read it, but it's now months later and it hasn't quite stuck with me the way some other books have. Nestlings is still my favorite of his.

Content notes: Child abuse/harm is central to the story. So is an accidental needle-stick with a possibly contaminated needle.

Spoilers! Also contains some light spoilers for Stephen King's Firestarter.

Read more... )
cimorene: an abstract arrangement of primary-colored rectangles and black lines on beige (bauhaus)
[personal profile] cimorene
When I called the health center in late October and said "My last refill of ADHD medication came with a note that said 'book appointment with doctor for checkup'", they told me that there were no appointments available until December, and to call back at the beginning of November when the December appointment slots open up.

I called after lunch today, and the receptionist told me that all the slots had been filled already (even though the slots only opened for booking this morning - I checked their hours - at 8 am) so I would have to call back on November 17th when the next batch of appointment slots (for later in December I guess) opens up, "and preferably as early as possible in the morning!"

This isn't a functional system.

It might be the best way they can manage the resources they have, but it's clearly a health center that doesn't have enough doctors.

This is not an acceptable way to access a doctor's care in a public health system!!!!

(It's because conservative governments have had control in Finland and have been shoving through 'healthcare reforms' and insane cutbacks to all the social services over the last few years.)

An appointment with a private GP at the chain of private health centers with a branch in town has a base price of 100€, but it's 140€ for specialists and I suspect might be more for psychiatrists. (I haven't seriously considered going there, so I didn't check the specifics. Checking how the psychiatric medications are going for me is theoretically a more long-term monitoring anyway, not a one-time visit.)

Check In: Day 3

Nov. 4th, 2025 05:07 pm
glitteringstars: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello, yes, I know what day of the month it is lol

How has writing gone today?
cimorene: painting of two women in Regency gowns drinking tea (austen)
[personal profile] cimorene
When I saw her a few weeks ago my vegan-and-gluten-free-bc-allergies friend said that she loves oat milk and it tastes much better than soy or almond milk, especially in coffee, so I got some to try.

And it's so good! I'm only making cocoa with it right now, but it impressed me right away. I use lactose-free dairy products usually, but I suspect that they disagree with me too, just mildly, especially cocoa made with milk. I've always been too lazy to test that systematically. Eliminating all dairy for an extended period (which I have a few times) isn't rigorous enough because other things can upset my stomach too, including just... anxiety.

I really love lattes - mostly chai and matcha, but I like coffee lattes too - and I've been wanting to make them for years and years. I was originally planning to get a milk steamer as a reward when and if I ever pass the driving test, but currently I'm trying a caffeine-free diet to see if it helps my anxiety. I'm not sure if I will decide to consume it again when the trial is over (I'm doing two and a half months minimum on physician's advice), and there's no point buying one if not.

There's popcorn flavored oat milk at the store. Bewildered and concerned. Don't like that.

October TV shows

Nov. 4th, 2025 09:43 pm
dolorosa_12: (city lights)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
Somewhat belatedly, let me catch up on TV logging. I watched five shows this month (although I'm cheating a bit as I only finished the fifth this evening), which were the usual mishmash of genres and tones. The shows in question were:

  • Season 3 of Blue Lights, a BBC police procedural miniseries set in Belfast. Although the characters are a familiar mix of well-worn stereotypes (the idealistic rookie, the maternal type who cares too much, the one who's joined the police in spite of a backlash from her community, the world-weary old hand, the maverick), they're written with heart and humanity. The true pleasure in this series, however, lies its sense of place — it's deeply grounded in its Belfast setting, and does a great job of showing the various political and social currents buffetting the city, and the wider region. The real villain, though, is austerity, in a way that I don't think I've seen explored so bluntly on UK TV in contemporary times.


  • A Thousand Blows, a fabulous historical miniseries by Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders), set in the East End of London in Victorian times. Here we encounter a variety of deprived, traumatised, down-on-their luck characters, who converge both in a series of boxing matches (initially bare-knuckled affairs in the local pub, later more genteel competitions organised by the aristocracy in the West End), and in a heist plot. The characters are fantastic, the writing is as lurid and melodramatic as a penny dreadful, and in essence it's a great retread of two concepts that Knight explored well in Peaky Blinders: certain people who were made to feel vulnerable and afraid become singlemindedly relentless in pursuing an existence where they will never feel fear or vulnerability again, even if they have to burn down the world and destroy all their meaningful relationships in the process, and communities battered by poverty, exploitation and lack of opportunity who accept a certain degree of violence and exploitation done to them (e.g. by gangs offering their 'protection') as long as it's people they perceive as being from their own community doing the violence. This is familiar ground for Steven Knight, and he explores it to great effect here — and hopefully in subsequent seasons!


  • Film Club, a sweet little six-part BBC miniseries about two rather lost twentysomethings who started a rather intense film club (no phones during the viewing, full thematic fancy dress, elaborate snacks, etc) during their university years and are desperately trying to keep its magic going some years after their graduation, when the realities of professional adult life have begun to wear them down. One character has had some form of psychological breakdown and moved back into the family home with her mother and sister, and remains trapped there by agoraphobia, and the other character is on the verge of leaving for a new job in a new city, and worrying how it will affect their friendship. It's a sweet-natured love story, with teeth, and in spite of a somewhat cinematic sense of heightened reality, the depiction of quarter life crisis existential angst is grounded in a truth that resonates a bit too much.


  • The latest season of Only Murders in the Building, which I thought was a massive return to form. This time, our trio of true crime podcast sleuths investigate the death of their apartment complex's doorman, which inevitably uncovers sometime much bigger, managing to skewer local New York politics (prior to today's election), oligarchy, housing pressures, and more. My patience with this series had been wearing thin two seasons ago, and I felt it was fast approaching over-milked cash cow territory, so I'm delighted to have been proved wrong. Your patience for this latest outing will probably hinge on your tolerance for New York (and New Yorker fiction about New York) nonsense, which it continues to lampoon with affection.


  • Riot Women, Sally Wainwright's latest love letter to the north of England and the strong, complex women who live there — this time, our cast of characters are a multigenerational group of misfits who start an all-woman punk band, with songs about menopause, feeling invisible and underappreciated, and so on. All of them are dealing with struggles at once soap operatic and banal: family tensions, empty-nested loss of sense of purpose, sandwiched pressure between troubled adult children and elderly parents in nursing homes, or showing early signs of dementia. Women's invisible labour is front and centre, but also women's anger, turned inwards and outwards. As always with Wainwright, the characters feel painfully real, and she does an incredible job of capturing the stories of the types of older women working ceaselessly (and often without much acknowledgement) upholding messy, multigenerational family households, doing all the work that no one ever notices, but whose absence would certainly be noticed. It's an absolute masterpiece — with an incredible soundtrack. (And, since this is not always a given with ostensibly feminist British cultural figures, it was fantastic to have unambiguous confirmation that Sally Wainwright's feminism is most definitely trans-inclusive.)


  • I don't think there was a single dud in this collection of shows!

    Check In: Day 11

    Nov. 3rd, 2025 06:35 pm
    glitteringstars: (ttrpg)
    [personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
    Hello and Happy Monday!

    How has writing gone today?
    cimorene: A small bronze table lamp with triple-layered orange glass shades (stylish)
    [personal profile] cimorene
    I finally managed to find good information about getting rust off of a cast iron woodstove by using Marginalia Search Engine, a specialty search engine that is intended to resurface the "old web" of private websites and bulletin boards and stuff instead of SEO and corporate slop.

    A few years ago in the winter when we were using the cast iron woodstove sometimes, someone (me) uhmmmmm absent-mindedly left some candle holders sitting on top of it with candles in them and those included ones carved out of solid blocks of pink rock salt (hideous, they belonged to my MIL, who was addicted to candles. Why didn't we just get rid of them? We hated them. Natural aversion to throwing things away. We have since thrown them out). So it turns out that ummm the candles completely liquefy if you do that and then light a fire in the stove, and they like cause the salt to run and melt onto the surface of the wood stove and salt is bad for cast iron. So. Big rust spots.

    And the rust spots have got worse with time, because when it first happened and we tried to get them off, we tried with normal google and duckduckgo searches and got no better advice than sandpaper and steel wool. We only managed to get a tiny bit of the rust off and determined that getting it all off would have taken about 5000 hours of hand-sanding. Since that was not a worthwhile proposition, we left it that way for another year.

    So anyway, I tried Marginalia a month ago or something, and it only took a few minutes to unearth a thread about restoring cast iron woodstoves on an old-fashioned bulletin board on "finishing.com, the home of the finishing industry". It's straight out of the internet 20 years ago. And the information was MUCH better!

    • WD-40 softens rust

    • wire brushes, not sandpaper or sandblasting (although industrial, like, having the stove ripped out and taking it to someone who will sandblast it is the nuclear option if it's completely covered in rust everywhere)

    • wire brush attachments for power drills


    That was all the info we needed! WD-40 never seemed stinky to me when I was using it on door hinges and stuff, but when you spray it over the visible rust on a wood stove it is noticeable, though not TERRIBLE; it smells kinda like you're in an auto shop, but not in the middle of the car part. Like by the entrance.

    You can get visible change on small rust spots with a handheld wire brush. A few hours on two days with the drill attachment has seemed to do the majority of it. It's very hard to work in eye protection goggles and a high filtration mask though. I have to stop, lift the glasses to look, then lower them and start again every minute or so. We are not planning to repaint the spots that have been taken back to the silvery iron, according again to the advice on this bulletin board. Apparently lighting a fire after the WD-40 is already going to be stinky enough and the paint would be worse. You can get protective stove polishes of some kind apparently.

    This stove is a Jøtul 3 Classic cast iron woodstove, in a traditional 19th century style. It's completely inappropriate for this 1950 modern-style house. The expected stove in the livingroom is (and no doubt was) a masonry stove, which is much better at heating an area because the ceramic conserves heat and releases it gradually. The form of masonry stoves, which are of course built on-site, was typically streamlined in the years after this house was built. Nowadays you can't build them yourself anymore and that makes them more expensive, so somebody probably replaced the original one when it failed with this cast iron stove perhaps in the 1980s, which was the last time this model was made. But crucially, although a woodstove is completely inappropriate to the house and less functional, there were and are woodstoves that are more minimal and modern in form and they could've just got one of those. But nope.

    Anyway, we can't afford a masonry stove like, ever, but our ambition is to replace this woodstove with a Porin Matti, a cheaper alternative to a masonry stove that is still slightly better at retaining heat than a cast iron stove, and which also (a) was in popular use in 1950 and (b) looks similar to the style of masonry stoves typically found in our type of house. These only cost about 2500€ (not counting labor), in contrast to masonry stoves which are typically over 8000€ not counting labor (and requiring much more labor because the mason has to build it on site out of blocks and tiles). We would've been able to buy one this year probably if we hadn't had this broken sewage pipe issue, which ended up costing around 10k. (We had previously earmarked that money, an inheritance from my great-uncle who died recently, for restoring the outer front door and maybe a stove; but the last of it got used on the plumbing instead.)

    emotional support fiber

    Nov. 2nd, 2025 06:56 pm
    yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
    [personal profile] yhlee
    weaving WIP

    I slightly less half-assedly fixed the warp on the Clover Sakiori loom (Japanese).

    weaving WIP close-up

    I didn't bring a comb for the weft and was using a tapestry needle, but catten remains unlikely to mind imperfect weaving.

    Also, further adventures in dyeing wool yarn. I'd like to test on dyeing combed top for cotton, ramie, and silk (mulberry/bombyx, eri, tussah, and maybe a small sample of my treasured stash of muga); and then try some on alpaca or mohair after I've processed some more.

    dyed yarn

    Later in the season, in natural dyes, I might experiment with the traditional hoary old standby of onion skins; rose hips (several of my roses shrubs produce them); and find out if windfall figs from the no-longer-quite-so-baby fig tree do anything interested as dyes. Osage orange, common madder, true and false indigo, hibiscus, and elderberry grow in Louisiana so making a dye plant plot might be entertaining. That or I sacrifice e.g. a bunch of beets lol. For personal use, I don't care about consistency (I prefer chaos ball colors) and I'm not that fussed about reliable fastness. "Throw it in a pot and also an ~appropriate mordant" for personal experiment promises to be very entertaining.

    Check In: Day 2

    Nov. 2nd, 2025 03:14 pm
    glitteringstars: (writing)
    [personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
    Hi all! Happy Sunday! And a Happy fresh month of writing!

    How has writing gone today? Do you have any particular goals for this month?
    dolorosa_12: (fever ray)
    [personal profile] dolorosa_12
    I survived the busiest time of the year at work! All of my timetabled start-of-the-academic-year classes are done, I've reassured the first round of stressed out postgraduate students that they are capable of the research skills expected of them, and after this week, the remainder of the busyness is no longer my responsibility. It's felt easier than it has done in years, due to the fact that I actually have a full complement of colleagues to share the load.

    Although I don't tend to do much in the way of Halloween, this weekend ended up being one of dust and echoes, haunting and memory, and light and warmth against the turn towards winter almost unintentionally. We didn't get any trick-or-treaters, but I've had candles lit almost constantly since Friday night, and I spent a pleasant half-hour last night watching the fireworks (in advance of 5 November) from the guest bedroom window. This annual event has a whole capitalistic carnival apparatus around it — the hill (usually a public park) from which the fireworks can be viewed is cordoned off, accessible only with a fee, there are fairground-type stalls, and so on. The fact that you have to pay to get in, and that it's cold, always puts me off, and this year I felt more smug than usual at this decision, as it also rained heavily for about an hour before the fireworks began. Far better to watch for free from my warm house!

    I've been doing all the normal maintenance activities of the weekend — two hours at classes in the gym yesterday, followed by market lunch, 1km in the pool this morning, coffee and bookshop browsing and a drink in the courtyard garden of the best bar in town today — plus trying to get the garden ready to hibernate over winter. The fact that half the plants are still flowering in November is impeding this somewhat, but I can hardly be annoyed at raised beds still filled with a riot of cornflowers, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, marigolds and dahlias.

    In addition to all that, I worked on this year's Yuletide assignment, and made good progress.

    Other cool things: [personal profile] goodbyebird has set up a new comm, [community profile] rec_cember. As per the description of the comm, it involves:

    [a] month long reccing event for December. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!


    This weekend's (re)reading was deliberately seasonal: the annual The Grey King (Susan Cooper) reread on Friday, and A Lane to the Land of the Dead (Adèle Geras) yesterday. The former remains as exquisite and devastating as ever, the latter was a reminder to me of Geras's versatility as an author: an accomplished collection of ghost stories, set in various parts of Manchester in the mid-1990s (contemporary to the time at which she was writing), with an incredible sense of place. I first visited the city in the 2020s, so never encountered it in the decaying, collapsing, impoverished state that Geras depicts, but she makes it come alive. This after I first encountered Geras as a writer of historical children's fiction, and of YA fairytale retellings set in a British girls' boarding school in the 1960s. Both books, in very different ways, understand haunting not only as the supernatural (although of course this is a strong presence) but also in land, and the built environment, and the memories they retain and transmit, and the bitterness people carry and refuse to let go. I'm glad I chose to read both at the time I did.

    emotional support fiber: weaving

    Nov. 1st, 2025 05:04 pm
    yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
    [personal profile] yhlee
    This is beginner mode weaving on a Clover Sakiori tabletop ~portable loom. It has an unbelievably easy warping setup based on the reeds, with what I think of affectionately as typically beautifully overengineered Japanese design and terrific documentation; I don't read Japanese but the pictures + diagrams are extraordinarily clear. I'm US-based so tariffs are a vexed situation, but these tend to run ~$200 USD plus international shipping off eBay. I do also own a Lojan Flex rigid heddle loom, but I like the ease of warping so much better on the Clover Sakiori. I'm also that extremely boring person who just wants to plainweave forever; if I want to embellish fabric, I will embroider.

    I half-assed the warp and it shows, but at the level of "can I set this up at all," the answer is yes. Also, catten is unlikely to be a HARSH critic of a tiny little catten blankie to shed all over, so.

    warping a Clover Sakiori loom

    weaving WIP on a Clover Sakior loom



    Just look at those warping layouts! I'm too lazy to check the trigonometry, but I'm betting it's correct.

    I'm struggling with weaving (English-language [1]) vocabulary so I can't describe the action further. This YouTube playlist by Renee Johnson Studio shows it in action, though.

    [1] There is probably random Korean terminology buried in my head because of my mom, but it's not helpful in sussing out help in English...

    I need to lie down now but it was a good day for exploratory weaving.

    A month of theatre

    Nov. 1st, 2025 09:39 pm
    vae: (Leverage: Parker happy dance)
    [personal profile] vae
    It's been rather a while since I went to the theatre with anything like the frequency I used to pre-lockdown, and it feels a little like I've been trying to catch up over the last month!

    Eddie Izzard's Hamlet )

    The Importance of Being Earnest )

    Hamilton )

    Born With Teeth )

    The Producers )

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