immortalje
23 September 2026 @ 10:17 pm

Today's prompt is: crowd



• You have 2 days time to submit an icon for this prompt (in other words, until prompt 2982 gets posted)!
• Prompt 2978 has been closed.
• If you have any questions regarding the prompt, feel free to ask in a comment.
• To submit an icon you simply reply to this post with the following information:
Icon:
Claim: (only necessary if it's a specific claim)
Status: (e.g. #1/10 - number of icon completed/table size)

Pre-formatted
 
 
Guy Pamplemousse
23 September 2026 @ 03:39 pm

books


About a month ago, I read and adored The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey Morrison (2026). I have been trying to write a review ever since. It is set in the near future, roughly 40 years after the global political order fractured and rearranged. Workers and the oppressed around the world established a communist alliance, leaving the formerly dominant powers to shuffle themselves around. details )

Alien ships start appearing. This is a first contact story, but on its own, idiosyncratic terms. The novel follows several characters -- a Kerala politician who has the first alien encounter; a Persian poet on a collective farm; an anonymous author, possibly a lunatic; a Haitian-Canadian hospital worker; and a US spy/agent provocateur -- in the years that follow contact. Different power centers seek to exploit the alien encounters for their own gains, but that is a minor plot thread.

This is a terrible attempt at a review, I'm sorry. I feel like I have to give all this background in order to enthuse about it, but at the same time, I don't want to spoil it. (I dislike spoilerphobia enormously, but there is something to the pleasure of discovery when first experiencing something as beautifully crafted as this book, so I'm torn.)

I love this book for how much it challenges itself and the reader. It loves the Red world it has conjured; and its critiques of our contemporary shitstorms are fantastic -- for example ex )

The book is in love with people, with literature, with human expression, with art and language, and I love that so much. A recurring image, of course, is Alexander the Great, figure of imperial conquest, preserved in his coffin of honey, but the narrative also encompasses/includes the Persian epic Shahnameh's accounts of his life. References to world poetry and film and narrative literature and folk song abound, from Malayalam ghazals to Genet's experience in Beirut, and together they braid into a celebration of human creative potential in a way that I cannot fully express. That creativity can connect us, that expression is a social technology for solidarity, that art matters: these convictions animate the book. It awards beauty, and the appreciation of beauty (aesthetics), to the people, and I can't get over that.

It's also beautifully written:
She was writing a poisonous golden cry, au hasard, the sound of a universe breaking open from love run ragged, raspy, unromantic, almost dinosaur-like in its rawness.
And the voices change, depending on whose perspective is being assumed; the USian disinfo provocateur might as well be in an entirely different book, for instance.

I'm not doing justice to this, I'm sorry. I just love and admire it so much. It imagines a whole world and then it builds a complex, beautiful exploration of it that pays tribute to human beauty and expression in so many different forms.

*
By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.
This week I read J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country (1980), which is a brief, terrifically powerful account of a man restoring a painting in a small Yorkshire church in the summer of 1920. I can't get over how directly and simply this is told, yet how affecting it is. He has survived hell on Earth in the war; now he is half-alive. His time in the village helps him, but in no way fully heals him. There's still so much regret, so much left undone and unsaid. Rather than his trauma being directly depicted (or even named), as it would be in a novel published today, it instead emerges sidewise, glancing, in what he feels and what he does not feel. So his recovery, if you can even call it that, is similarly flickering and incomplete. The connections he makes, both "in space" with locals and back through time with the church's original painter, are at best half-formed, but that is, somehow, deeply affecting. This is Melancholy: The Book, and I loved it. (I did have one nitpick: ... )

*

I don't know what I'm reading next. I've been doing a lot of "research" for [community profile] ficinabox project(s) but I guess talking about that would run counter to the whole anon thing (and, anyway, the research is just stressing me out more about getting things wrong and irrevocably fucking up, so).

I thought about checking out the new Emily St. John Mandel but I haven't read her other work and apparently I would miss stuff? Argh. I'm also considering Hamid Ismailov's We Computers (2025) and Naomi Alderman's The Strangers (2026).

I started, then stopped, Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron (2014) and Ariel by Steven Boyett (1983). They were both excruciating.
 
 
sovay
Happy autumn! Behold [personal profile] selkie's forthcoming short novel, Ochre, Quartz, or Ivy, long known in these parts as the queer Iron Age Arthuriana.



Apparently it is also the day for bisexuals to be visible. We're going to make oatcakes.
 
 
Current Music: Sam Phillips, "Edge of the World"
 
 
AurumCalendula
23 September 2026 @ 11:03 am
I found a Whoosh! article about a Jan 1998 convention that had a neat section on fanvids and talked about the author's efforts at making fanvids which involved using a camcorder, a VCR, and a boombox, before switching to digital. I'm so curious about the 1996 fanvids that were mentioned!

It sounds like from July 1998 through 2001 Creation was showing fanvids made by Matt at their Xena Conventions (and gave out free tickets in exchange for using them), which makes me wonder if they showed ones by other fans besides the Xenaversity folks. Creation said they didn't keep records of what fanvids were shown at their conventions, so I can't use that to narrow down the years of the Sept 1999 - 2001 ones, but I did find some con reports that mentions the fanvids shown (unfortunately not all mentioned the songs used, or who made them).
 
 
lucy_roman
23 September 2026 @ 04:09 pm
Title: Spot the Cat
Author: [personal profile] lucy_roman
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Teen and up
Summary: Peter has a surprise for Tony
Characters: Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Spot
Pairing: Peter/Tony
Word Count: 744

Spot the Cat )
 
 
thistle in grey
23 September 2026 @ 07:34 am
I'm halfway through Mirror Touch (2017) by Joel Salinas. So far, it's part personal memoir, part case-driven exploration of neurological/psychiatric topics. (As he notes, the two domains were split mid-C20, not so long ago.) The case examples are mercifully short, and they cover a wide range without forming a unified narrative. Salinas doesn't try wearing Sacks's gifted-intermediary hat; these are people he's met.

What threads through every aspect of the text is how Salinas experiences synaesthesia.

In my limited exposure, this subgenre-cluster (semi-medical journalism? not self-help, rather a neighbor to this) often presents one of two types of toxic narrator---either trying to reassure the reader that they're not alone in having certain issues, or worse, trying to assert at the reader that the writer isn't alone in having certain issues. Salinas, by contrast, is comfortable with being an outlier. There are so many ways of having and being in community. (I learned of Mirror Touch while trying to skim a different book that I won't name, whose writer wanted so strongly not to feel alone that it distorted the text.)
Tags:
 
 
seekingferret
23 September 2026 @ 09:46 am
 
I've wanted to have a record player for a while and now I have space. I bought the cheapest possible one on Amazon, it was about 30 bucks and though its turntable is only big enough for 45s, through clever engineering it can play LPs that stick out of its case. It also doubles as a Bluetooth speaker. The speaker sound is not amazing, but I'm not an audiophile and it's fine. And there is an rca out in case I want to upgrade the speakers.

I feel like my adventures in vinyl are going about exactly as you'd expect. I've bought about a half dozen LPs of some of my absolute favorite albums of all time, music I already own on CD and MP3. TMBG's Flood, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, Josh Ritter's Hello Starling, Alphaville's Afternoons in Utopia, Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire, The Postal Service's Give Up.

But being me, I also bought a couple of bulk lots of random LPs and 45s from ebay, to give some proper chaos to my music collection. The 45s are a delightful mishmash of pop and rock music from the 50s through 70s. The LPs... are about 50 percent Neil Diamond by volume.

Already two weeks in, I think this experiment is a wild success. I love the tactility of the process of loading in a record and putting the needle down, and I like cooking with music playing. The fact that it doubles as a podcast player is a nice bonus. It feels slightly silly to be using this archaic technology to play music I can more easily play off my computer, but that silliness is a bonus, not a flaw. I am a silly person.

And I say it's just as easy to play the music off my computer, but that hasn't entirely been true. Granted, now that I have the record player's Bluetooth speaker in my dining room it is basically true, but before that I didn't have a convenient way to play music from rooms other than the room the computer is actually in, so in practice I haven't been listening to my music collection as often as I would really like. Having the record player right there is motivating, and not only to listen to records but also to use the speaker to play my existing mp3 collection.
Tags:
 
 
james_davis_nicoll


In which it dawns on the teens that they will soon graduate high school. What then?

Insomniacs After School, volume 12 by Makoto Ojiro
 
 
 
beanside
It's Wednesday! Halfway through the work week!

I took my Trulicity shot yesterday and am definitely feeling the effects. I feel a little trapped right now. Ultimately, I need to get my colonoscopy and D&C done, preferrably soon. But I'm stuck waiting for my sugar to get under control, and the medicine to do it is horrible. Every week, I have to give myself a shot that will cause nausea, diarrhea, headache and heartburn so bad that it damages my vocal cords. It's madness, and I hate it. In the meantime, I'm trying to revamp how we're eating and it's hard to come up with enthusiasm for food while my stomach is a wreck. It makes it difficult to think about dinner, which I need to do, because I do want to stop eating out so much. It's just generally exhausting. And on top of all of it, I'm supposed to start exercising more. And I'm just...wiped.

My stupid capybara app isn't helping. It's telling me how much of everything I'm supposed to be eating, and I have no fucking clue how I'm supposed to approach that. I don't drink the water, I don't get the fiber, and I sure as shit don't get the protein to make the GLP-1 work to it's fullest.

I'm just feeling a little down this morning, like nothing I can do will fix this, but at the same time, I'm going to have to deal with feeling like utter shit in the hopes that maybe it waves it's magic wand and makes things better. I already bumped my surgery once. I'm probably going to have to do it again if the Trulicity and Metformin don't start working. I'm probably going to have to increase the dose of both, and I don't know if that'll help or not.

It's just really stressful. And added on, my coworker R has to leave early two nights a week, and I'm on the hook to cover them, so I'm working at least four hours OT per week. Normally that's nothing, but right now, it's adding to my struggle.

It's just been really shitty right now, and I'm not seeing results yet that would make it all worth it.

I'm rather queasy this morning and stuck working for 11 hours today. I'm not excited about it. I would honestly prefer to crawl back under the covers.

At least I have D&D and things to look forward to. Marchen has been the most consistently good thing I've had. I may feel like shit, but I can always escape into my own fairytale world with my friends. I was afraid I'd lose that too with the way my vocal cords were, but that seems to be under control. And this weekend we have Marchen and then the Mooncake festival. (Trulicity vs Asian street food, fight!) Next weekend is the Animate! Philadelphia convention, which should be fun. I'll get to meet some of the stars of Hazbin Hotel and Amazing Digital Circuis, so that'll be good.

I know this is temporary. Things are shitty right now, but they won't always be. But goddamn, right now they suck.

Now I'm going to grab a shower and get ready for work. Everyone have a wonderful Wednesday!
 
 
Oliver Moss
22 September 2026 @ 11:06 pm
 
* One take on Seattle last year was that 'Brandon Montour isn't scoring much, or getting any hatties, because the people he plays with suck' There was a lot of 'someone save Monty from being stuck in Seattle' talk.

The team just disclosed some BTS on the team last year and, turns out, Monty had a foot injury the whole season. His low production was blamed on everyone on the team but him, and it turns out that for like 6 weeks they couldn't even lace his skate due to how thick the bandaging was, and he was just playing through it.

Outside of some public practices, he didn't even practice with the team. Basically, if there wasn't a camera on him he didn't touch the ice. Of course his teammates had trouble passing to him at the right time, or knowing what passes he can take/convert, he had to skip almost every practice the entire season.

They say that he and Canner are both healthy now, but both were skating injured *all last season*. If everyone really is healthy, that would be huge for us. I'd love to see them both at full power.

Everyone clocked Canner's injury, but all the takes on Monty were 'he can't thrive because he's held back by this team'

For context, Monty is an extremely good offensive defenseman and him having signed with us in UFA is a big deal. He has one of the fastest shots in the league and has hoisted the Stanley Cup.

My take on him had been that his commit level was insane, but he always seemed to be kind of playing a slightly different game than everyone else, taking positions that seemed to confuse the other players. And yeah, that tracks. What I had backward was that I thought they should be taking cues from him, letting him QB plays, and it sounds like the problem was more him not being able to click with them.

* Other news out of Seattle's preseason is that Matty has decided to adopt not one, but two other players, and they'll be living together.
 
 

Posted by therealmorticia

Are you a frequent Bluesky and Twitter | X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok user who enjoys helping others? Are you a developer experienced with a server-side programming language? Are you interested in facilitating communication and helping teams run smoothly? Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? Are you a writer with an eye for technical details? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:

  • Communications TikTok Moderator – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC or after 60 applications
  • Communications Social Media Moderator – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC or after 60 applications
  • Accessibility, Design, & Technology Software Developer – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC
  • User Response Translation Committee Volunteer Coordinator – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC
  • User Response Translation Committee Translator – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC
  • AO3 Documentation Editor – closing 30th September 2026 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. We only accept volunteers who are 18 years of age or older. If you don’t see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our e-mail address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Communications TikTok Moderator

Do you use TikTok? Do you like making videos? Do you want to connect with your fellow fans?

OTW TikTok Moderators create content for the OTW TikTok account, including drafting scripts, recording and editing videos, and reviewing other moderators’ scripts and videos. Moderators address user comments on videos by responding to user questions, removing comments that violate our policies, and flagging comments for video topics. Moderators also try to regularly engage with fandom on TikTok by interacting with relevant, appropriate videos and liking, reposting, and/or commenting.

You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We are looking for volunteers familiar with TikTok and passionate about outreach on the platform. They should be able to maintain a consistent level of work, collaborate inside the team and with other committees, ask for help when needed, and commit to making fair decisions about how to handle comments.

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC or after 60 applications.

Apply to be a Communications TikTok Moderator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Communications Social Media Moderator

Are you an active Bluesky and Twitter | X, Facebook, or Instagram user? Do you want to help connect the public with the OTW?

The Communications committee is recruiting for Social Media Moderators to help us manage our Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter | X. Social Media Moderators work collaboratively to help the OTW maintain an active presence on their platforms, creating and reblogging relevant posts of interest to the OTW’s users, and doing outreach to fan groups and individuals on the site. Moderators are also responsible for handling user questions and comments on their platform.

For this position, we are seeking people who are familiar with the conventions of at least one of these platforms and who ideally have experience moderating a social media page. We are also interested in hearing from those with customer service experience, especially in an online environment. We expect you to have an interest in fandom at large and an understanding of the concerns and activities of the OTW (although we will, of course, provide you with training once you start). For those interested in Bluesky or Twitter, please note that these platforms are managed jointly by the same team of people so you will be joining as a Moderator for both.

You must be 18+ and able to dedicate at least 3-4 hours each week to the OTW in order to apply for this role. If you’re a frequent Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter | X user who enjoys helping others, has wide-ranging interests across the fandom space, and is curious and willing to learn, we’d love for you to apply!

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC or after 60 applications.

Apply to be a Communications Social Media Moderator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Accessibility, Design, & Technology Software Developer

The Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) committee coordinates design and development of the software that powers the Archive of Our Own. It is currently seeking Ruby on Rails developers to enhance features, fix bugs, review code, and test new changes in line with the priorities established by AD&T committee chairs and senior developers.

Please note: applicants must have submitted a minimum of two pull requests – at least one for an issue with medium or higher difficulty – to the otwarchive GitHub repository that have been deployed to production prior to applying for the software developer position.

If you don’t have the time to commit to formally volunteering for the OTW, we gratefully accept bug fixes from anyone on GitHub! Please check out our contributing guidelines before submitting a pull request.

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC.

Apply to be an Accessibility, Design, & Technology Software Developer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

User Response Translation Committee Volunteer Coordinator

Are you interested in helping to facilitate communication with AO3 users in their own languages? Are you an organized person who enjoys managing people and tasks and is interested in helping teams run smoothly?

As a Volunteer Coordinator for the User Response Translation Committee, you would be responsible for helping to manage the teams that translate responses from Policy & Abuse and Support into some of AO3’s fastest-growing languages. Your responsibilities would include assigning tasks, performing check-ins with translators, facilitating committee discussions, and helping to recruit and train new volunteers.

We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old. Capability in languages other than English is helpful but not required for this role.

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC.

Apply to be a User Response Translation Committee Volunteer Coordinator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

User Response Translation Committee Translator

Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?

User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.

We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC.

Apply to be a User Response Translation Committee Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

AO3 Documentation Editor

Do you love creating clear, useful documentation? Are you a writer with an eye for technical details? If so, then consider joining the AO3 Documentation Committee!

AO3 Documentation (Docs for short) is the committee that writes and updates FAQs, tutorials, and other user-facing documents for AO3 and beyond. We’re looking for people who love using AO3 and have relevant experience in writing and proofreading user help documentation. If that sounds like you, then follow the link for more information and apply today!

Applications are due Wednesday 30th September 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications.

Apply to be an AO3 Docs Editor at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

 
 
labingi
22 September 2026 @ 07:43 pm
Better late than totally belated, here's my annual post. (Today was the first day of the teaching term and I almost forgot this in the hectic rush.) In the great crossover 'verse in my head, this one makes Frodo 97. Bilbo has passed away, but do that math if you want.

Out of sheer exhaustion, I'm posting an essay I wrote a couple of years ago for the degrowth master's program on the economy of the Shire and the need for a just economy to meet people's needs.

The Most Absurd Line in The Lord of the Rings
And How It Calls Us to Change Our Economy


When we think of the Tolkien’s marvelous metal, mithril, we might recall Bilbo’s mithril shirt saving Frodo from an Orc spear in Moria. Just as thematically important, however, is a scene shortly before this, in which Gandalf and Gimli discuss the value of mithril to the Dwarves who mined it. Gandalf says of Bilbo’s shirt, “I never told him, but its worth was greater than the value of the whole Shire and everything in it” (Tolkien, Fellowship 414).

This, I submit, is the most absurd statement in The Lord of the Rings. Read the rest at my Substack, but comments are very welcome here.
Tags: ,
 
 
 
AurumCalendula
22 September 2026 @ 08:17 pm
 
The time I've spent recently trying to figure out the approximate year some early Xena and Voyager vids were made making me consider putting years in my vid end credits (although lately I've had a bunch premiere at cons a year later or so after I made them, so I suspect it might end up a bit confusing).
 
 
 
sovay
22 September 2026 @ 04:48 pm
Yesterday I was so melted on conclusion of services that after consuming an—entirely symbolic, no one in this house is medically constituted to fast—break-fast of kebabs with the family and failing to go to bed on account of conversational nearness of [personal profile] selkie, I sat up reading Kenneth Morris' Book of the Three Dragons (1930) and some of the more official of a cache of Big Finish scripts which I found on the Internet Archive until I passed out for six to eight hours in the uninterrupted darkness. This afternoon I am curled on a couch while the rain bounces steadily off the tangle of pokeweed outside the window behind me, having eaten a tin of smoked mackerel on the thin square rice cakes that always feel ritzy to me, kibitzing a not so secret project with the mother of my godchild. The honeycake from my mother arrived in the mail. I have made a cup of pour-over coffee for the first time in my life and the fumes haven't given me a detectable migraine yet, on top of which it's been rated drinkable by the person I made it for. We are agreed that this sweater looks in the most complimentary sense as though it just came out of a bog. I am deeply entertained by the recent findings that if Venus ever had a moon, it almost certainly ate it.

P.S. I have moved my return ticket out another night.

 
 
Current Music: Sam Phillips, "Love Is Everywhere I Go"
 
 
 
immortalje
22 September 2026 @ 09:53 pm

Today's prompt is: feet



• You have 2 days time to submit an icon for this prompt (in other words, until prompt 2981 gets posted)!
• Prompt 2977 has been closed.
• If you have any questions regarding the prompt, feel free to ask in a comment.
• To submit an icon you simply reply to this post with the following information:
Icon:
Claim: (only necessary if it's a specific claim)
Status: (e.g. #1/10 - number of icon completed/table size)

Pre-formatted
 
 
Ysabet
22 September 2026 @ 04:11 pm
Hoping the coming season holds good things for all of you, whichever season you're entering. <3

Last night I finished reading A Parade of Horribles, so I am no longer contending with trying to get through all of the available DCC novels quickly to retain as many details as possible. It's a lot of details, and that was quite a bit of reading, and yet I never did move beyond "curious about what'll happen" to "actually invested". I guess we'll see what happens whenever book 9 comes out (which I assume is a while away, since this one was so recent--but then, the series didn't actually start all that long ago, did it?).

Now I have so many books waiting to be read, so trying to pick one may result in some choice paralysis. I know I don't want to tackle anything too long right away, since a) I want to get back to watching Zhan Zhao Adventures and b) the next October Daye book is out next week.

As planned, [personal profile] scruloose made a roast chicken with schmaltzy cabbage on Sunday, and friends, the tiny cabbage was hilarious. I knew it was small to begin with and would cook down substantially, but it turned into the tiniest bowlful in the end--several good-sized mouthfuls each, but not what you'd call a bountiful side dish. But! It also benefited dramatically from the treatment; I think it was the tastiest cabbage we've gotten yet from this recipe.