low_delta

Having some Lapsang Souchong. The ice cream was great. I don't know why they don't publicize this more but they do this thing called a flight where you can have little scoops of six different flavors. I had chocolate, maple, banana, black walnut, butter pecan and mocha almond fudge. (I would have had eggnog but they ran out. Frankly if they sold eggnog in June I would buy it.)
Tonight I'm going to LoCoco to get Italian food and a glass of wine for dinner.

Current Music: Velvet Underground

Decorative divider

Gonna try to make a tradition of re-promoting myself yearly in January~

Name(s): Azure or Bede. I answer to both, so use whichever floats your boat!
Age: 20-something
Hobbies: Writing (fanfic, essays and fan analysis), drawing, editing (videos, images and gifs), coding, researching (almost exclusively things that don't matter), and gaming!
Fandoms: I mainly participate in video game fandoms! Right now, I'm really into Pokémon (my one true fandom), Cookie Run, Great God Grove, In Stars and Time, Kingdom Hearts, Vocaloid, and Splatoon. I'm at least passively interested in most Nintendo games, though. I'm also a furry (rabbit fursona)!

I mostly post about... My fandoms, non-fannish interests (including disability, queerness, the indie web, writing, art and alterhumanity), and some personal stuff!
I'm looking to meet people who... Have similar interests (whether that be fandom or non-fandom), or who just pass the vibe check and have interesting things to say.
My posting schedule tends to be... A little bit sporadic! I go through small periods of inactivity. When I come back, I always cross-post everything I've posted onto other platforms with the back-dating feature, though! I love commenting on other people's posts, and try to do it as often as possible.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are... Bigots, right-wingers, and AI "artists". Christians who try converting others, or who don't CW for religious discussion. (No offense to the latter, it's a personal thing.) Regarding fandom, I'm squicked out by Harry Potter (I'm trans; I hope you can understand!) and Hazbin Hotel, and have pedophilia/incest/rape as triggers.
Before you add me, you should know... I'm autistic and otherwise mentally disabled, so please be patient with me! I'm from the South of the USA, so I use petnames very casually ("honey, darling, dear," etc). You can also (or alternatively) add my account for my fanfic and fandom meta exclusively, fairyfic.

Current Mood: Into the Light - Splatoon OST

I know there aren’t any diehard Cormac McCarthy fans on the flist and that’s too bad. I will hold forth about him regardless. LOL. I do recognize that he’s a bit of a peculiar flavour for an unusual literary connoisseur. I was standing dumbly in the library wanting to read something and feeling that strange deep brain itch. What is it what is it? And my eye fell on the Cormac shelf and I thought HUH I never finished my plan last year to read the four Tennessee tomes. And when I reached up for the thin volume title Child of God, it was as though struck by lightning, and I remembered that I had loaned that to my father the year before he died. And that was all a complicated bit of emotion, but I drew it down anyway and decided to take that dark, unsettling plunge into fetid waters. This book is difficult. And I had to LOL when all the pearl clutchers were outraged that Cormac had some sort of underaged bird in a cage at some point in his life as though they were exposing a saint as a chronic masturbator and yet I’m pointing wildly to this book – PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE! This is the cat who wrote Child of God, puhleaze get yourselves comported. This book. Sheesh. And I thought my father should read this. WUT?! Actually he was a Cormac fan but like most Cormac fans, the SouthernGoth foursome are rarely known. We did discuss it at the time and then I loaned him Annihilation. Which he actually enjoyed muchly.

Anyway. I read CoG and spent most of yesterday in a dreamlike space in which my mind wandered the universe seeking out this man’s spirit. I love him so very very very desperately. He was a genius and a wordsmith, yes, but more, his was a Dangerous Intelligence and a life laid out with strange signposts and somehow someway he managed to take his brilliance and observational gifts from start to finish. The Tennessee four are IMPORTANT in his oeuvre and some in the Ivory Towers need to put Blood Meridian the eff down and study these four novels. They are biographical in that this man clearly had an issue with his Family of Origin because no one would write Child of God unless they truly wanted to self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves as a way to punish their father.

So, I read The Orchard Keeper which is dismissed by academicians. I love it and it shows McCarthy reveling in his discovery of language. HIS LANGUAGE. Then I read Suttree which is his biographical masterpiece and most clearly obvious outloud musings about a symbolic meaning of Death. Then I had to gently gently return to my favourite novel of all time – Outer Dark and relish it entirely without wearing it too thin to hold onto. And yesterday I read Child of God. I find myself purged and resatiated and now am ready for the Westerns. Which I don’t care for as deeply as I care for the SouthernGoths, however, one must ruck through in order to reach the Dantean conclusion which is his twinpack – Stella Maris and Passenger.

That’s where my head and heart and body have been and currently are. I have time to wallow in this pit. But by tomorrow I have to return to what we call The Real World.

Last Saturday included a combination of things that made me wish that things were done better in general.

( I was annoyed by football fans and other things … )

( … and by further things. )

I just want things to work as they should and I still find it notable they seemed to work rather better back when I was staying in Metro Manila than they do in Glasgow. I know, I should be part of the solution but this is my journal so I can moan when I like when things don't go smoothly.

Way back in mid-December, the Quinnipiac University Poll, widely considered the gold standard in polls, was reporting Trump approval rates at 35% and disapproval rates at 57%. Quinnipiac hasn't done a poll since, but other subsequent polls are roughly in this range, too.

Does this mean Democrats will win the midterm elections?

Honestly, I don't know.

Most people vote from their wallets. And recently, Trump has floated two proposals in his unmedicated, late-night social media rants that, if implemented, could save these prospective voters a whole lotta bank: (1) banning private hedge funds from buying residential homes and (2) capping credit card debt at 10%.

Neither of these ideas will be implemented, I suspect. But that second one in particular is aimed straight at the populist base.

###

Also, the average American taxpayer will be saving on taxes this year. The standard deduction is going up by $750 for everyone, by $1,500 if you're married filing jointly, and by $6,000 if you're over 65. The child tax credit is increasing by $200. Tip income up to $25,000 is protected from taxation; ditto $12,500 in overtime income—particularly interesting if you think of the type of workers (construction workers, nurses, first responders, HVAC workers) who typically earn overtime, i.e. highly skilled workers who, despite the mythologies surrounding them, aren't culturally respected enough to be salaried employees.

If their own taxes drop by a couple of grand, will any of these people really care that billionaires are saving a whole lot more?

I suspect not.

On the other hand, 31% of U.S. tax filers paid no federal income taxes at all. This is the segment targeted by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party because this is the segment that benefits most from cheaper housing and subsidized healthcare. So maybe progressives are on to something from a strictly strategic point of view, as well as a humanitarian point of view. I dunno. The Delphic oracle is on hiatus.

Anyway, I remained hideously depressed all day yesterday.

The gym was crowded with New Year's Resolutioners, and supermarket prices are up by at least 25%, no matter what the official inflation rate is telling you. I bought some stuff at the ShopRite next door to the Schlock office, and I swear to God, their prices were higher than the non-discount grocery store 'cause why not gauge the rubes if they're wandering into your marketing trap, right?

Considering how down I'm feeling, the Work in Progress is going remarkably well. I mean, I have no idea if the prose is any good, but (first draft, first draft, first draft), it is materializing on the page.

I'm currently writing the second of the Hospital in the Time of COVID sections. Scene has to develop relationships with Debbie Reynolds & the New Millennium Kingdom girl, and also explore Grazia's ideas of what being a Good Person entails—picking up random garbage on the street, returning shopping carts to their rightful bin, liking Lost Pet notifications on Facebook, etc, etc, etc. At some point, as she gets nuttier, Grazia will begin anthropomorphizing her relationship with the universe, such that Neal notices and becomes alarmed in the phone conversation that fades out the section.

Old school cool brass sign for Norway's telecom provider in Bergen.

Current Music: Neil Diamond - Soolaimon

Teleconverter came in.

Okay, it came in like a week prior, but still. It's in. Reviews have said it's not officially supported for the 3-to-6 (300-600 f/4) so use at risk. I did a test with it at home in manual focus in case of any glass impact and it cleared without a problem. Other photographers said something very similar. Image quality is really solid despite the extra elements. Viltrox has found ways to turn me into more of a fanboy.

Speaking of which, dinged my fucking 35mm during a lens change, I'm so mad at myself for even letting that happen. It was in sand at least so a lot of the impact was reduced but fuck me I am going to bubble wrap my gear if I can't figure out a smarter technique when juggling my gear around.

On Friday, Michelle has been tracking the Sandy Hook Facebook group to better gauge when the seals pop in and determined that the seals do not come in right before low tide but a time before that. She said it was a risk, but if we try to get there two hours prior, we might see a seal.

So here's the catch: low tide is at 5pm and rain was scheduled to come... at 6pm.

So under Michelle's calculations, there is a chance we'd see some seals if we pop in around 3-4, right before sunset.

So, one 30 minute drive later and we were the only ones standing around their favorite spot looking for the seals.

And we saw them! We saw them at 4:45pm, finally making landfall right as it was becoming near-impossible to see them, lol.

I did get to field test the 3-to-6 teleconverter combo at least. It works, though the focus range takes some getting used to, but it's very promising.

But also any images we have of these seals is at unusable ISOs, so not much in the way of our progress lmao

Aside from this,

My head is still in holiday mode, meaning I am having a hard time getting myself back into workaholic mode. I'm not saying this as a way to say "I hate my job" (this is still the best place I've worked at so far), but I am saying I'm annoyed at myself for taking this long to getting myself to wind up. At least I had a meeting with the boss and gave her a laugh when I talked about that Niagara trip.

Yesterday was relentless rain in cold weather which, seen it, done that, so spent it at home and did some chores, worked on a model kit. Not much to write about.

I'm chronologically parsing through photos and made it to Niagara Falls. There's a lot here, obviously, and a fair share of it not that good; mostly tourist shots but snapshot stuff so fairly boring by my standards. There's good stuff in here though, just... ironically not too many in the places where I paid for it lol

I'll set up a photo post before I step out.

Susan Lieu is the daughter of two people who fled Communism in Vietnam. She grows up in the family's nail salon in California with her siblings, her parents, and her aunts.

( Something bad happens. )

In college, Lieu joins a cult as she searches for a mother figure.

She turns a reflection on loss, where she is going through the stages of grief slowly without the support of her family, into a performance that is finally turned into this book.

Her relationship with food throughout this book made me squeamish. She is overeating because she wants to show obedience, that she will not waste food. Then, she may be overeating because she loves food. Her relatives are constantly body shaming her telling her that she will get fat if she eats too much but also constantly serving delicious food. Life is hard.

Public

Voices of Desire (1972)

Okay, this one's going to need a bit of explaining. Basically, after finding out how badly Sandra Peabody was mistreated while making The Last House on the Left, I wanted to watch the two other movies where she had a starring role. Her film career was pretty minor and in exploitation pictures of one kind or another, apart from a couple of early films that are lost. I'll be writing about Teenage Hitchhikers (which is better than that title makes it sound but even more a product of its time) at some point in the future, but Voices of Desire comes earlier chronologically. So, as it's its star's 78th birthday today, here's my review of that:

Sandra Peabody is not known to have been psychologically or emotionally abused by any of her co-stars while making this movie, which automatically makes Voices of Desire her best film of 1972. As a piece of cinema, though, this picture by "Mark Urbell" (actually Chuck Vincent, in his feature direction debut) is... odd. Very odd. Peabody, billed under the pseudonym Liyda [sic] Cassell, stars as Anna, a young woman who after answering a New York payphone hears heavy breathing and creepy voices and ends up in the clutches of some kind of sex cult. It's told in flashback as she tells her story to a policeman.

The film is a weird mixture of eroticism, bits of genuinely creepy horror, piano music and arthouse weirdness, and the storyline is not always easy to follow. Expect substantial quantities of 1970s-style softcore sex and nudity, male and female. The print I saw was pretty poor quality, and I needed the (third-party) French subtitles to work out some of the English dialogue! It often feels slow for its 70-minute runtime, though the ending is surprisingly satisfying. Still, Voices of Desire is almost certainly the best film ever made in which a woman delightedly rubs the entire contents of a fruit bowl over her naked body as plinky classical music plays. ★★

Current Mood: thoughtful

Here's a bit of admin I didn't manage to do while I was away. For yuletide this year, I got the following story from

ryfkah:

More A Comment Than A Question (2285 words) by ryfkah
Fandom: The Day Before the Revolution - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
Characters: Laia Asieo Odo, Sadik (The Dispossessed)

Odo!

“I’m Laia.” If the voice wanted her father, she thought, crossly, it could go and get him; why was it bothering her?

Oh. The voice sounded startled. You’re too small. I got it wrong. Then, hopefully: Do you have any thoughts yet about anarchism and the necessity of constant revolution?

I was caught right in the maelstrom of the day 1 de-anonning - as in, had opened the tab with the author's name on it and then went back to the laptop every few minutes for an hour to look at the recipe in the next tab - and learned later that I had been an unwitting part of a greater scheme of deception! But honestly I was thrilled at the news Becca was writing me regardless, she is the best and this story is wonderful: does such a good job at catching on to the themes of the original, and does this via a funny little time travel scenario that fits brilliantly into the original. I highly recommend it.

I wrote the following stories:

Flowering (4850 words) by raven
Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Relationships: Cat Chant & Christopher Chant
Characters: Cat Chant, Christopher Chant, Millie Chant
Additional Tags: Coming of Age, Queer Themes
Summary:

“Keep the home fires burning, Cat, will you,” Chrestomanci says lazily, and Millie blows Cat a kiss before the portal shuts.

My assigned story, and a couple of people can attest how much I hated it, hated writing it, and how much I wanted to burn it to the ground. I'm in a phase right now where writing fiction is just beyond my ken. It's too hard and it makes my soul ache. But I had been on a podcast, Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, on an episode about The Lives of Christopher Chant, so I thought I was feeling Chrestomanci sufficiently much to write it. I was not and I could not. But then I missed the deadline for no-fault default, and felt masochistic enough to continue somehow. I eventually resolved to orphan the story once yuletide was over - I have not done this. Quite a lot of people liked it and I'm grateful to them for saying so! But I learned my lesson here about giving up when I'm ahead.

promises made to be broken, made to last (1988 words) by raven
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Relationships: Ruth Calder/Alison McIntosh
Characters: Ruth Calder, Alison McIntosh
Additional Tags: New Year's Eve, Romance, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft
Summary:

Ruth's not much of a witch, not really. Kneeling beside a corpse on the year’s turn is something any woman can do.

Here's one that was different! I've seen some of this show, I've been to the islands, but hadn't been particularly inspired to write for it. But then

walkthegale was having a bad time just before Christmas, and I'd been promising her something for nearly a year, and, and. On the morning of 24 December I texted her lovely wife with a neverending slew of canon questions and scribbled and scribbled. I got this written finally an hour before the deadline and it was all worth it because C loved her gift and guessed it was me even before the de-anon. I was really pleased this whole thing came off.

ashes, ashes (2099 words) by raven
Fandom: The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sapphire “Saffy” Walden/Laura Kenning
Characters: Sapphire “Saffy” Walden, Laura Kenning
Additional Tags: Aftermath, Recovery, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

It was time to go, and Laura said, “Saffy, you could come with me”—and Saffy said maybe, and it meant something but neither of them knew yet what.

I don't know that I have much to say about this one! I wrote it a few months ago, before the creative void, so it was nice to have a story in the archive that I definitely liked that wasn't written in a mad hurry. The recipient didn't show up, but we can't have everything.

I got a personalized bingo card from An Owomoyela, here thank you!

unicorns	octopus	enemies to friends	magic	cozy
music	prehistory	world building	dancing	love
disability	ancient humans	FREE SPACE	sewing	spaceships
mercy	magic school	deep sea	dragons	narrowboats
elves	grace	tolkien	ecology	trees

When I wrote one of my age of sail novels, I wrote 100 drabbles to fit a prompt square, all interlinked, instead of a plot plan, and then expanded them into the larger story, and that worked really well. So instead of doing an individual short story for each of these, I think I'll do the same for the cozy fantasy I'm writing now, and use them as prompts for the chapters I have left.

Speaking of original fiction, I thought I would start a community in which original fic writers could discuss fic writing, get support and advice from each other etc. So if that would be a thing you are interested in, you can find it here https://original-fic.dreamwidth.org/

Happy birthday,

par_avion!

1. Getting a Job: The Motherhood Penalty: (tags:motherhood bias jobs OhForFucksSake patriarchy )
2. Drones that 'perch' like birds to recharge on power lines.: (tags:drone electricity cables )

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594052530-10163078841447626-4612344612152172823-n

I've been meaning to get better about sharing pictures on here. I figured this would just be a quick one that shows who Wiley and Fynn are! :)
For those of you who don't know - Wiley we adopted from the local shelter a bit over a year ago. And Fynn we got when my father passed away, he was my father's dog.

Current Mood: touched

A bright cold morning, the fields silvered with frost, and the paths an entertaining mix of ice and mud.

( Read more... )

Woke up feeling like I hit the sleep jackpot last night. Even with the little one calling out, “I need a drink of water,” I somehow slipped right back into dreamland. Rare, glorious, actual rest. I’m holding onto this win and hoping tonight plays along too.

Name: Ciacconne

Age: Mid 30s

I mostly post about: My life, health, and fandom stuff.

My hobbies are: Writing, reading, gaming, and art.

My fandoms are: Harry Potter, FF16, FF7, Frieren, Slayers, Gintama, Kekkai Sensen, YGO— basically game and anime fandoms.

I'm looking to meet people who: Share my interests and fandoms.

My posting schedule tends to be: daily/weekly/monthly/sporadic/etc — I post daily, or will try to post daily now.

When I add people, my dealbreakers are: People who are antis.

Before adding me, you should know: I focus a lot on my health, be it mental or physical.

So I'm reading this book, An Immense World by Ed Yong (Random House, 2022), about animal senses, some of which are very different from our own. (But what kind of book about animals says virtually nothing about cats?) And this chapter concerns the sense of temperature, and this section is discussing animals which live under extreme temperatures.

When scientists study these so-called extremophiles, they tend to focus on adaptations like heat-reflecting hairs in their bodies or self-made antifreeze in their blood. But such adaptations would be useless if an animal's sensory system were constantly screaming it it, triggering feelings of pain. If you want to live in the Sahara, or at the bottom of the ocean, or on a glacier, you'd better tweak your sense to like it.
This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it's easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they'd be in discomfort because we'd be in discomfort. But their sense are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn't distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don't mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn't bother them anyway.

I hope I don't have to ...

65 books for $18!

We've got Sarah Monet, Elizabeth Bear, Vonda McIntyre, Jo Walton, Cherie Priest, Nancy Kress, Catherine Asaro, and Andre Norton, among others! We have John W. Campbell Award winners, Tiptree Award winners, Hugo winners, Nebula winners, Bram Stoker winners, Nebula winners, Philip K. Dick winners, among others!

THAT'S A LOT OF BOOKS, PEOPLE!

All in epub format, which is easily converted to Kindle format via Calibre.

The bundle supports Active Minds, "...the nation's leading nonprofit promoting mental health for young adults ages 14-24. Their focus is on changing the culture around mental health, by changing the way we talk about, care for, and value mental health in our lives and in our communities. They're best known for their National Chapter Network at high schools and universities, an iconic Send Silence Packing suicide-prevention exhibit, Active Minds Speakers, and their new work corporate programs."

It just launched and will be available for another 20 days.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/fierce-women-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-open-road-media-books

The question, to paraphrase, was that if Obama or Biden had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped Maduro, that liberals would be fine with it.

The respondent said, in essence, 'Nope, we wouldn't. Because we have a moral compass. You don't.'

And since it's a fairly short response, I'm going to quote most of it whole:
"You lack an internal moral compass. Your sense of right and wrong depends on what the authority you personally submit to says it is.

People without an inner moral compass literally cannot understand what it feels like to have one. Your sense of morality comes from outside authority, so you believe everyone feels that way.

You like Trump, so you think what Trump does is good. You imagine that people who like Obama think that whatever Obama does is good.

Nope.

Overthrowing a sovereign government to take their stuff is wrong. It was wrong when Trump did it, and it would still be wrong if Obama did it. The fact you struggle to imagine that is a you problem, not a liberal problem."

This is an argument that I need to remember if I ever get into a "discussion" with a Trumper.

I also see a lot of Religious Zealot vs Atheist posts on Quora, and several of them devolve into 'You can't have ethics without religion'. While you can define some ethical guidelines from religion, you can also define some really, really twisted ones from religion. I think I'll take my ethics and morality from logic and observation and readings. Yeah, I may be selectively cutting and pasting to make my personal honor code, but so many religions do the same thing that I don't see much of a difference.

https://qr.ae/pCZFf8

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Network

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I'm smart AND stupid — it's called being flexible

ReRead McCarthy's Tennessee Novels

A frustrating day

The Delphic Oracle Is On Hiatus

Bergen, Years ago

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The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu

Film post: Voices of Desire (1972)

Yuletide 2025

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Interesting Links for 11-01-2026

Fynn (left) and Wiley (right)

January bridleways

Woohoo

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Humble Bundle: Fierce Women of Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror!

An interesting post on Quora re: the invasion/kidnapping in Venezuela

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January 2026

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