Titansfall D&D: Summary for 7/13 Game

Jul. 13th, 2025 10:56 pm
settiai: (Sim -- settiai (TriaElf9))
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Media Round Up: Ups and Downs

Jul. 13th, 2025 04:14 pm
forestofglory: A drawing of a woman wearing white riding a leaping brown horse (The Long Ballad)
[personal profile] forestofglory
Since it's more than halfway through the year I started to write a reflection on my reading goal for the year: "Read Joyfully" But I found I didn't have much to say about it other than it turns out its easier to engage with new to me fiction when I actually get enough sleep.

However I do have some thoughts on things I've read and watched recently to share:

The Truth Season 3cases 9 and 10 — The last two cases, I’m sad that this is over now! This was so, so much fun! The second to last case featured my favorite costumes of the whole show in show with many excellent costumes. This really a fairly frivolous show but I love it so much! (Content note: the final case involved a dead kid)

Mu Guiying Takes Command ep 1-4— I wanted to love this. It is an adaptation of The Generals of the Yang Family, a story dating back to at least the Ming Dynasty that features women in command of the military. The FL is very badass. However I got fed up with how childish both the leads were acting.

Also this was released in 2012 which isn’t really that long ago but it feels like a whole different era.

Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400 by Patricia Blessing, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, Eiren L. Shea— This is a novella length overview of the topic. About 80 pages with a lot of pictures. I liked how it tied together such a big area and a long time period. Zooming out helped me put the stuff I know about (Chinese textiles, mostly Tang dynasty) into a larger context. I read it for the FTH biography I’m creating on Liao textiles.

A Song for You & I by Kay O'Neill— My friend Maureen, who is a children’s librarian, recced this graphic novel by the author of the Tea Dragon Society books in her most recent newsletter. And I’m glad she did because I haven’t been keeping up with recent releases and this was really good. It's a very gentle story that’s kind of coming of age with a lot of travel. One of the characters has a flying horse! The art is really good. I kept stoping to admire the color gradients. Just a very lovely book.

Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliott— Reading a A Song for You & I reminded me that my library has lots of graphic novels and I checked out a whole pile of them including this one. Please Be My Star is a YA romance featuring teens putting on a play. It was very cute though once or twice I got a little too much second hand embarrassment.

Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born ep 1-4— This kdrama sounded so exactly my thing. It’s got preforming arts, tons of women, and crossdressing girls! It’s also very pretty and well done. So I’m baffled as to why after four episodes all I feel about it is “meh”

Sunshine Revival Challenge #4

Jul. 13th, 2025 10:25 am
pauraque: common raven in silhouette among bare branches (raven)
[personal profile] pauraque
[community profile] sunshine_revival's next challenge is:
Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.
Birds always make me smile, so let's do a bird list! To narrow it down a bit, I'll talk about a few of the birds I only got to know after I left San Francisco and moved to New England. The order is going to be arbitrary because of course all birds are equally fantastic, but I'll play along with the top 10 theme.

Top Ten New England Birds [photo heavy] )

Photo cross-post

Jul. 13th, 2025 07:24 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


My primate family.

The exhibition at the museum is very quiet and rather good. Recommended!
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Foundation 3.01

Jul. 13th, 2025 11:26 am
selenak: (Demerzel and Terminus)
[personal profile] selenak
In which we make another time jump, the Foundation is now in its monarchical phase, while Empire seems to approach its version of the Third Century Crisis. Also: Demerzel is still my favourite.

Spoilers are explaining the Three Laws of Robotics and the Zeroth Law )
mific: (Sinners)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fanart_recs
Fandom: Sinners
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Smoke, Stack, Sammie (Preacherboy), Annie, Mary, Bo Chow, Grace Chow, Delta Slim, Pearline
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: doodlesnoff on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A great montage of them all dancing at the Juke, before everything goes to hell. I love the warm colours and the joy.
Link: "for a few hours, we were free"

get down, get down

Jul. 12th, 2025 09:52 pm
musesfool: iconic supergirl (up up and away)
[personal profile] musesfool
As I may have mentioned, Baby Miss L loves potatoes, so when I saw a t-shirt on Etsy that said, "Potatoes gonna potate!" around a picture of a potato, I thought, I have to get it for her! Unfortunately, it was only available in neon green, which I did not like the look of. Luckily, many other vendors were also selling t-shirts with pictures of friendly potatoes on them, so I got her this one that says, "Tater tot!"

This morning, I received a series of glamour shots and a video of Baby Miss L thoroughly excited about wearing the t-shirt. It was so great!

I also learned that The Muppets covering Jungle Boogie is one of her current favorite videos. AMAZING!

On all counts, her vibes are immaculate.

Tomorrow, I'm going to a birthday bbq at my brother's, and I'm bringing her the Batman and Robin t-shirts, plus some toddler books about Batman and the Justice League. Hopefully she enjoys them almost as much! (I also recently sent her a Captain America t-shirt, which I believe she wore for the 4th, and I also got pics of her in the Superman dress, with her arms up like she was flying. 😍😍😍)

In other news, I found this review of the new Superman movie really moving. Will I venture out to a theater to see it? Probably not, but I will be very excited to watch it when it makes its way onto HBO in a few months.

*

(no subject)

Jul. 12th, 2025 11:29 am
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
lest you think that having returned The Pushcart War to its rightful owner I went away with my bookshelves lighter! I did NOT, as she pushed 84, Charing Cross Road into my hands at the airport as I was leaving again with strict instructions to read it ASAP.

This is another one that's been on my list for years -- specifically, since I read Between Silk and Cyanide, as cryptography wunderkind Leo Marks chronicling the desperate heroism and impossible failures of the SOE is of course the son of the owner of Marks & Co., the bookstore featuring in 84, Charing Cross Road, because the whole of England contains approximately fifteen people tops.

84, Charing Cross Road collects the correspondence between jobbing writer Helene Hanff -- who started ordering various idiosyncratic books at Marks & Co. in 1949 -- and the various bookstore employees, primarily but not exclusively chief buyer Frank Doel. Not only does Hanff has strong and funny opinions about the books she wants to read and the editions she's being sent, she also spends much of the late forties and early fifties expressing her appreciation by sending parcels of rationed items to the store employees. A friendship develops, and the store employees enthusiastically invite Hanff to visit them in England, but there always seems to be something that comes up to prevent it. Hanff gets and loses jobs, and some of the staff move on. Rationing ends, and Hanff doesn't send so many parcels, but keeps buying books. Twenty years go by like this.

Since 84, Charing Cross Road was a bestseller in 1970 and subsequently multiply adapted to stage and screen, and Between Silk and Cyanide did not receive publication permission until 1998, I think most people familiar with these two books have read them in the reverse order that I did. I think it did make sort of a difference to feel the shadow of Between Silk and Cyanide hanging over this charming correspondence -- not for the worse, as an experience, just certain elements emphasized. Something about the strength and fragility of a letter or a telegram as a thread to connect people, and how much of a story it does and doesn't tell.

As a sidenote, in looking up specific publication dates I have also learned by way of Wikipedia that there is apparently a Chinese romcom about two people who both independently read 84, Charing Cross Road, decide that the book has ruined their lives for reasons that are obscure to me in the Wikipedia summary, write angry letters to the address 84 Charing Cross Road, and then get matchmade by the man who lives there now. Extremely funny and I kind of do want to watch it.

Photo cross-post

Jul. 12th, 2025 11:30 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


Off on an awfully big adventure
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

settiai: (Kes -- settiai (TriaElf9))
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Weekend Plans

Jul. 11th, 2025 04:54 pm
settiai: (Veilguard -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
I'm trying to get a bunch of things done before D&D tonight, including cleaning up the hotel suite. I still need to wash clothes this weekend, but I'm holding off on that until Sunday so that I can fit as many as possible into a single load since it's $8 to wash/dry each one.

My hope, however, is to get everything but that done today so that I can properly settle in and play video games all day long tomorrow. I keep saying that's the plan for the weekend, and then something comes up to prevent it, so I'm really going to try my best this time because I know it will help on the mental health front to lose myself in another world for an entire day.

I'm leaning towards Baldur's Gate 3, but I might go with Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead. Or even Mass Effect. I definitely think it's going to be something I've already played before, though, because something new-to-me requires a different headspace that I don't think I'm in at the moment.

We'll see how it goes, I suppose? 🤞🏻

the read on the speed-meter says

Jul. 11th, 2025 03:20 pm
musesfool: (easy like sunday morning)
[personal profile] musesfool
Two guys came and measured the space for my new dishwasher and it will apparently fit, but there are as always several - okay, 2 - unexpected wrinkles: 1. the current machine is hardwired into the electric, but the new dishwasher needs a plug, so the installers are going to have to build an outlet? These 2 guys didn't seem to think it was a big deal but it is another $75, which at this point is whatever, fine. Secondly, they were concerned that the installation might damage the drain pipe under my sink, and I was like, can we wrap it in something to protect it from being dinged? and they were like, "Eh, maybe, but if it breaks you're responsible for fixing it." Which, thanks. I suppose I can get under there and wrap a towel around it if necessary.

So we'll see how this goes on Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't completely wreck my kitchen!

Speaking of wrecking my kitchen, my current HGTV viewing is "Help! I wrecked my house!" which I'm enjoying, but oh my god, the sheer hubris of some of these mediocre white men, who think they can demo a kitchen or a bathroom down to the studs and then figure out how to put in a new one, and then have to call Jasmine because of course they can't. I don't understand these people, tbh. There is nothing wrong with asking a trained professional to come in and do that kind of work, especially if you're not particularly handy. (And even you are handy in the "can change a washer in the faucet" variety, what makes you think you can install a shower from the ground up??? WTF?) On the other hand, I am really sympathetic to the folks who did hire a contractor who turned out to be shady and didn't do the work properly and stiffed them of their money to boot!

In other news, I am now on vacation and very excited about it! Except shit, I forgot to set up my out of office message. I will have to log back in and do that.

*
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
[personal profile] pauraque
In this first book of a hard SF trilogy, nanomaterials expert Wang Miao is recruited to help investigate the suicides of several prominent scientists. His inquiries lead him to a strange VR video game called Three Body, in which the player is challenged to solve the mystery of why the game's simulated world keeps falling victim to unpredictable changes in climate that cause its civilizations to inevitably collapse. Interwoven with the book's near-future narrative is a story of the past, in which an astrophysicist who lost everything in Mao's Cultural Revolution is assigned to a secret military base that she comes to realize is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. These two seemingly unrelated threads come together to reveal a multilayered conspiracy of world-ending stakes.

I had this on my TBR list for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it was about, and I think that worked out well for my experience of it. I never knew where it was going to go next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Liu has a flair for creating epic set pieces of jaw-dropping cinematic scope that nonetheless follow naturally from the speculative science. I consumed a lot of popular science media in the 2000s, specifically, so for me the science in this book felt... oddly nostalgic? Not that it's obsolete, necessarily, but the particular preoccupations of that era and what was cutting-edge are strongly represented here. It made me want to go read a Brian Greene book.

The translation by Ken Liu reads nicely and I appreciated the informative but not excessive footnotes helping with some points about Chinese culture and history. I love that they let him write an afterword about the translation process!

The book is definitely more interested in ideas than people, and it's particularly weak on female characters. I was not entirely surprised to hear that the Netflix adaptation makes some of the male characters women, including Wang Miao. (I guess it also changes the nationality of a lot of characters, which makes less sense to me since the Chinese setting seems crucial to the book's themes, but I haven't actually watched the adaptation so it's not for me to say how well it works.)

I do plan to continue with the trilogy, though I have a suspicion that it might turn out to be too pessimistic in its outlook on the future for my taste? But I guess it depends on where the story ends up. My library hold on the second book just came in.
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Right now (7:30am) it is 14 degrees outside.

It is 24 degrees in our bedroom, despite the windows being open all night. Humidity is 92%.

This afternoon it will rise to 26 degrees. I'm glad the office has air conditioning. I'm not looking forward to tonight.

(no subject)

Jul. 10th, 2025 11:33 pm
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
I mentioned that I did in fact read a couple of good books in my late-June travels to counterbalance the bad ones. One of them was The Pushcart War, which I conveniently discovered in my backpack right as I was heading out to stay with the friend who'd loaned it to me a year ago.

I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.

The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.

Aurendor D&D: Summary for 7/9 Game

Jul. 10th, 2025 12:22 am
settiai: (Siân -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

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