mekachu04: off topics, comments (VOIDWALKER)
Fandom: One Piece
Author/Artist: Mekachu04
Title: September Punk Aibou Sketches
Pairing: Eustass Kidd & Killer
Rating: teen? it varies from gen/all audience to teen
Word Count: art
Highlight for Warnings: *some implied death/violence but nothing graphic. all are unfinished sketches so clothes might not all be there. *
Disclaimer: Kidd, Killer, the Kidd Pirates and other characters belong to the world of One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. I'm just playing in the sandbox
AN: I'm trying to draw something everyday. So most of these are drawn at about 3-5am in about an hour or two at work during the down time.

thumbnails linking to each day under cut )
conuly: (Default)
Honestly, my worst thoughts about what was going to happen in that meeting of the generals were both so much more terrible and so much less terrible than what actually went on.

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


Read more... )
fennectik: Anime (Anime)
Didn't realized it had one to be honest, but I know I'll be enjoying it all the same.







Hang in there Legosi
lydamorehouse: (ichigo freaked)
 Tonight there will be two events for Gaylaxicon. First is the private dinner with the GoHs and the concom who have agreed to come. This will not include Nghi Vo, I presume, since she is very COVID cautious and I don't believe she is eating with others. Which is a shame because, for me, the fun part of the private GoH party is getting to see what people are like when they're not "on." But, I will get to meet her at the reading at Dreamhaven, which follows all of this at 7 pm.

Then, of course, tomorrow things kick off.

I don't know how I'm feeling. Am I ready? Am I ready for this to be over? Am I excited? I think I'm all the things at once, if I'm honest. I'm pretty sure that my family is ready for convention season to be over. Everything around here has been Gaylaxicon, Gaylaxicon, Gaylaxicon.

I had my phone chat with Ashley from AccentCare, the folks I'd be working with if I end up doing hospice volunteering. I almost missed it because my phone continues to be weird, but at about half past the hour she was meant to call I emailed her to tell her that my phone has been flakey and I am still around if she has time. I have been priming our fence to be painted, so I had nothing else going on until it was time to go fetch Shawn from work.

Ashley called less than a minute later. We had a nice chat. I was very clear with Ashley that I'm really uncertain if I have the emotional resiliance for this job as I feel things very deeply, and she had no advice for me other than to acknowledge that the work is hard and not for everyone. However, they are very aware of the emotional strain and so in-person hospice workers are only assigned at MOST two families, whom you see through their entire journey, including following up with the family after the funeral, etc. She seemed excited when I mentioned my wife in passing because they are always looking for under represented/marginalized folks to pair with like, though she did note that a lot of their patients/clients are Hmong. So, I'd be expected to be culturally sensitive, which honestly, made the job more interesting, in a way. (Though suddenly I'm looking at Duolingo wondering if I can learn a more useful language besides Japanese.) Similarly, she brought up that they also serve Jewish families, etc., as I think a lot of their volunteers do it for Jesus. (I was clear on my application that I'm not Christian.) I was glad to hear, too, that they will provide training, though it sounds like it's hours of online videos. Still, I'll take what I can get. 

Next steps seems to be meeting in-person and getting started on background checks, etc. We arranged to meet at my favorite coffee shop at 9 am next Thursday. Wish me luck? (I'm still not sure I'm up for this, but I would like to see if I can do it.)

Shawn and I talked about it a bit last night. She noted that, selfishly, she's hoping that if I get some of this training it will help when the time comes for her elder brother Keven. (Who has, by the way, responded really well to treatment. There's noticible shrinkage of his cancer, but it's all, in many ways, just about extending life and quality of life.) I thought about that, too, and I've been thinking, of course, of Terry Garey who I haven't seen since she moved to the Edina place, years ago. I think I'm hoping that learning more about this will make it easier for me to just make time to see Terry. I send cards and think about her a lot, but I feel really badly that I haven't been to see her in so long. I know that Laramie has been hired to care for her, so she's not alone--but Terry was one of my writing mentors.

Ayway, that's my own stuff that I need to work out, certainly before taking on this kind of volunteering for others.

Let's see, other news.

Yeah, so I alluded to the fence above. We had a new fence put in a couple of years ago and we have needed to either seal/stain it or paint it and I am FINALLY getting around to that. It's been good, actually, to have something physical to be doing, given how anxious I get sometimes around whether everything will work out (or not!) with Gaylaxicon. 

I'll try to remember to post some pictures when I'm done with it. We are painting it emerald green again. The problem is the posts. When we first got the original verson of this fence the wood was so BLAH and already painted an ugly brown. So we painted it a cheery green to spruce things up. Now that we could have a plain wooden fence, the posts are all dark green. We're sort of stuck with green unless we wanted to paint the whole thing a different color. And, part of me wants to keep the memory of our old neighbor, from 1990-whenever we were first painting it--looking across at it, not knowing I was in the yard, and muttering, "Those Micks will paint ANYTHING green!"  Which. Do people still use that slur? Also, I'm Polish, Czech and English? (That last one being the direct opposite of Irish.)  Shawn's family is pretty green--though, despite the whole Shawn Patricia, Keven Kerry, and Gregory Bryce (and her father being Kerry Patrick) the Rounds seem to mostly consider themselves Germans from Russia, at least in terms of the food they eat. Anyway, I still think that whole interaction was kind of funny, so I'm going to keep painting ANYTHING green. :-)

Hope you're all doing well, and maybe I'll see some of you local folks at Gaylaxicon this weekend!

I will, of course, try to do a con report, though given my schedule it may happen after the fact. I'll take copious notes, however!
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)


A field agent armed with privacy-violating technology searches for Nazi loot--stolen diamonds--on behalf of a South African diamond cartel.

Probe (Search, # 1) by Leslie Stevens & Russ Mayberry
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
I dreamed I discovered a weapon in Half Life 2 that would generate and hurl at considerable speed empty shipping containers.

[admin post] Admin Post: October Challenge

2025-10-01 23:28[personal profile] hhimring posting in [community profile] tolkienshortfanworks
hhimring: Estel, inscription by D. Salo (Default)
Thank you for your engagement with this community during the past month!

Here is the tolkienshortfanworks challenge for October.

Thematic prompt:

Below is an alphabetic list of plants said to grown in Ithilien. Pick at least one plant name to include in your fanwork. The fanwork can be set in Ithilien, but does not need to be.

Anemone, ash-tree, asphodel; bay, briars; cedar, celandine, clematis, cypress; eglantine; fir; ilex, iris; juniper; lebethron, lily; marjoram, myrtles; oak, olive tree; parsley, primerole; rose; sage, saxifrage, stonecrop; tamarisk, terebinth, thyme; water-lily, wood hyacinth.

[Helpful hint, if you are interested in combining this prompt with the SWG's Jumble Sale challenge: this list has a couple of additional plant names that are not included in the bingo card I compiled on the same subject for SWG.]

Formal challenge:

Your fanwork should include one or more set of in-universe instructions; for instance, instructions for tasks in botany, agriculture, cookery, medicine, etc.
These could be written or traditional oral instructions.

As usual, these two prompt sets can be filled separately or combined.

Usual reminder that in order to post the fill to this community or to the related collection on AO3 (linked in a sticky post at the top), the fanwork can only have a word count up to 1000 words and must be linked to a Tolkien fandom.
Rec lists and podfics can be posted as fills for thematic prompts, as long as the fanworks concerned meet those conditions.

Also we continue to welcome other pieces unrelated to any challenge, of course, including cross-posts and older stories, as long as they meet the criteria!

Dear Vidder

2025-10-01 20:51[personal profile] naye
naye: Text: I heart vids. Background: Adobe Premiere window with clips from Guardian. (vidding - i ♥ vids)
Dear Festividder,

I am so thrilled that we've matched on something, and know I will love whatever you want to make! I just adore the art form of vidding, and all the different ways people use existing sources to create something new.

Cut for length - but for anyone NOT participating in Festivids, this post contains the rare actual rec from me, for 7 TV shows, 1 movie, 1 book and 1 manga/anime! )
ldybastet: (SasaMiya)
Title: Nature's Innuendo
Fandom/Pairing: Sasaki to Miyano - Sasaki/Miyano
Summary: Sasaki has tickets to the aquarium, and he and Miyano find a new exhibition there, an exhibition that proves that sometimes nature is bizarre and obscenity is in the eye of the beholder.
Rating: PG-13
Content: Teen boys romance, dating, naughty thoughts.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters, they belong to Harusono Shô. I'm just borrowing them to act out my fantasies, while not earning any money whatsoever from it.
Notes: ~1200 words. I am so sorry about this, but I saw a video about these creatures and I just couldn't stop myself. ;) The Choriaster Granulatus, or Granulated Sea Star, is a starfish that grow up to 27 cm in diameter, and all of its five arms look like dicks. They're awesome! LOL Many thanks to my beta [personal profile] zabimitsuki for the beta and also for encouraging my weirdness. :)

Read it here: DW | AO3
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Bona Fide Masks currently has covid tests and combination flu+covid tests on sale at a good price. With a discount code they sent me, BFM15, I just paid $41 for a total of six covid+flu combo tests (three boxes of two), with free shipping. For both kinds of test, they list the expiration dates. The website is https://www.bonafidemasks.com I've bought KN95 masks from them; this is the first time I've ordered tests from them, but the company has been reliable.

This is probably only relevant to people who live in the US.

I still have a few of the free covid tests we got from the city of Boston last fall, but these tests are well past their expiration dates. The city stopped giving them away over the summer, and I don't know if they're going to restart the program.
wychwood: Ivanova in dress uniform (B5 - Ivanova grey)
It's October at last! Sadly my calendar is not actually much better, although I am at least only having to go into the office a normal amount at the moment. We also held the annual new altar server training at church and I have either done or fobbed off onto an appropriate person all the follow-up tasks, except for a one-off training for someone who couldn't make the session and getting my DBS paperwork filled out again. Apparently they expire every three years but no one actually tells you when it happens so it's just, like, up to you to know this and remember to do something about it?? But now I know, and have forms to collect at the weekend.

Apparently I also have to provide three forms of ID, which sounds pretty intense, especially since a) I've been DBSed before (admittedly in 2018) and b) I've been serving here for over thirty years, but hopefully I do actually have enough documents for the purpose. It's easier now that I'm the one paying the bills and council tax on my residence (living with my parents, I really didn't have much!), but most of that's email these days, not paper, so it starts getting complicated again.

Yesterday was a dead loss, and today wasn't much better, but I did eventually get the initial monthly reports out to all the teams, which is something even if a good day would normally see them sent out before noon rather than after my official finishing time for the day. And yesterday I went out after work for my eye screening, except the bus didn't show up (or was at least 4 minutes early) and the next one was twenty minutes later and meant I'd be at least fifteen minutes late, so I had to cancel the appointment and rebook for later in the month (in a week when I was already out four week-nights, to make a full set of five!!). Tonight is choir, which I'm hoping will be less of a wash out; my lift made it back home in time to collect me, after saying this morning that I'd have to take the train, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

I'm feeling very burned out at the moment, but also I can't take any annual leave this month because there's urgent testing for the next three weeks, so I'm back to turning down everything I can and trying to go to bed on time instead of revenge procrastinating to make myself feel like I'm in control of something...
prixmium: (Default)
I have mentioned probably that specifically since July my creativity has kind of crashed and burned. It sucks a lot, and I had a very bad few days recently with my mental health. I feel a bit better at the moment, but I am still worried about my ability to maintain this outlook.

Currently, I am signed up for the bingo challenge at [community profile] fandom_empire and have been trying to track things over at [community profile] communal_creators.

Someone over at the latter suggested this word tracking spreadsheet template. Decided to try using it from today.
lydamorehouse: (ichigo hot)
 Last night was a comedy of errors. 

I had really wanted to go to the badge party for Gaylaxicon because I had made a whole bunch of stickers for program participants to have their schedules on the back of their badges. I figured that since I made them, I could help put them on. But, I could not figure out what the plan was supposed to be. The information I got was "we will me back at Don's place after the hotel walk-through, oh, and here's a link to the concom Zoom meeting at 6 pm." Upon reading this, my brain went through these steps. Imagine this as one of those decision trees.

Okay, they aren't likely to have the Zoom meeting at the hotel, will they?  (Yes/No. I choose the No path). So then, probably the plan is to have the people meet in-person that can and Zoom in the rest.  (Yes/No. I choose the Yes path) So best guess is that the tour will be done by 6 pm and so meeting everyone at Don's house will work out.

I still dont' know the right answer to some of these questions, but at some point I definitely went down the wrong tree, as it were.

Because I showed up at Don's at 6 pm and found no one there.  Hopping on to Discord showed that Andrew didn't know where to meet people at the hotel and so then it dawned on me that, oh, okay, maybe the tour is at 6 pm despite the fact that's when the Zoom meeting is?  But, since Andrew was also confused, I decided to download Zoom onto my phone so that I could jump on to the meeting at 6 pm. That seemed like a smart bet since the Zoom meeting was DEFINITELY scheduled for 6 pm.  Only, when I finally got online, I discovered only two other people there, neither of them were Don and neither of them knew anything about where people were supposed to be or even WHEN we were supposed to be there. 

Then, I thought, I'm being dumb. I'll just text Don directly. He confirmed that the tour was happening at six. Now, here's where I could have solved this by driving to the hotel and trying to meet everyone there. Instead, I thought, "Well, by the time I get there, the tour will be over and they'll be headed back here." So, I let Don know that I was going to hangout at a Starbucks and, if he could be so kind, I'd wait for a text on when to come over. 

Then the true comedy hit.

Randomly and quite suddenly, my phone decided it didn't want to accept any data, including messages. 

At least I managed to hear from [personal profile] tallgeese  who noted that I could come hang out at his place until the text came through. At this point, since I got his message, I was unaware that my phone had decided to temporarily bork itself. So we hung out and chatted about life, the universe, and everything. That was quite lovely. I finally got to meet his two dogs in person, having seen them a bunch on Zoom during our Star Trek: Adventures games. No text came, however. I was, for reasons known only to my phone, able to go to Discord and noticed that someone was franically posting on all channels that "the Zoom meeting has started!" so, I hung out a tiny bit longer, and made my way back to Don's... only to still find no one at home. So, who knows where they were Zooming from? 

At this point, I gave up.

I left the badge stickers underneath a FedEx package outside Don's door. Then, I left him a message on Discord explaining what I'd done, and headed home. It was 8 pm by the time I got home. 

What a night!

I am only a little concerned that the stickers are going to remain AWOL. But, worst case scenario (and one I am planning on) I will bring a second set to the convention early and stick them on badges myself. 

In other news, there are a couple of previous items I wanted to update you all on. Remember how I speculated that people might be filming the exhibits at the National Africian-American History & Cultural Museum (Smithsonian) in order to preserve them? Well, my friend John spotted this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/citizen-historians-document-smithsonian-exhibits-under-white-house-scrutiny  It turns out, I was right! 

Likewise, remember when I was talking about how stressful it was to leave a voice mail "tip" for The Racket? Well, they ran a story about us, which I found out about thanks to [personal profile] magenta : https://racketmn.com/gaylaxicon-wits-returns-oktoberfests-this-weeks-best-events  !!!!  They got some of the information wrong? Dungeons, Dragons & Drinks isn't running our D&D one-shots (though they will be one of our community tablers), Tower Games is doing our games. But, hey, The Racket listed us as one of this week's best events, so I'LL TAKE IT. I have zero idea if this will actually result in people signing up, but, you know, I feel like I gave this whole publicity thing a real try and 'nothing ventured, nothing gained.' 

I honestly kind of enjoyed the stress of the voice mail? I've been thinking about offering my services to other geek venues. (Personally, I think they should hire me to be their geek on the street!)  THIS would be a fun job for me. Instead, today I applied to work as an impound lot customer service attendant. Fun times. 

Today, too, at 2 pm, I'm going to be getting a call about volunteering to be a hospice worker. I will have to be honest that I'm currently looking for work and so might not be able to be as available as I normally would be. And, I know they're going to ask me why I want to do this work, and I don't have a very good answer for them. No one really likes the job of sitting with people at a time like that, but (and this is the part I have to work out how to articulate) the world is spiralling into chaos thanks to the current presidental administration and I don't know what I can DO to stop it. However, one thing I can do is sit with someone, talk about the weather, hold a hand, read a book, or otherwise offer comfort. Fascism wants us to devalue certain lives and this is one way for me to say NO.

Can I say that in an interview? I don't know, but it's the truth.
ericcoleman: (Default)
We will be playing the Best Hero Songs and Best Villain Songs nominees. You can find all of the info at this link, oh, and you can vote, but I would wait two weeks.

https://www.ovff.org/pegasus/2025finalballot.html

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com
beatrice_otter: Miss Piggy in a superhero costume: Were you looking for flying pigs? (Were you looking for flying pigs?)
Back in the day, there were a lot of different fanfic archives. And then AO3 came along, and everyone moved there. And there's a lot to be said for having a central multifandom archive! I love AO3! But there's also something to be said for communities having their own space.

The OTW has always said they their code is open source and they want people to use it to make their own archives, but it is ... not very user-friendly, shall we say. But now there are several people who have gotten their own instance of the OTW-A code up and running for their own archives.

And now there is another! There is now a femslash-focused archive called Sunset! It was just created and is still very tiny, but if you are into femslash, either writing it or reading it, you might find it interesting. It is run by Agnes the Alien.

Sunset is a website established in 2025 dedicated to hosting femslash (F/F) fanworks. It holds pro-freedom of fiction, queer and trans inclusive, anti-racist and generally compassionate ideals. We're here to have fun and love women. Sunset is run by one person, Agnes the Alien, who dreamed this up in zher bedroom. Please be nice to zher!

 ...

THIS IS AN 18+ ARCHIVE.

I'd also like to shout out Squidgeworld, Superlove, Ad Astra, and Comic Fanfiction Authors Archive.



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