lirazel | Reading

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on

anime_manga.

Commented on

bnha_fans.

Commented on

common_nature.

abyss_valkyrie posting in

smallbatchicons

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

abyss_valkyrie

Sooo, there's a comm dedicated to ships at

ships20in0! I only found out a few days ago and decided to sign up with the couple Adachi X Kurosawa from the Japanese version of Cherry Magic.
The category icons had to be made from the video inspiration of Top Gun Maverick soundtrack-Hold my hand by Lady Gaga, so I took the inspo from 5 various moments which you can see below.
Song lyrics are from Taylor Swift's Stay Stay Stay.
Comments are loved. All icons are free to take and use.

Preview:

( 20 icons and ALTs of Cherry Magic )

miscellanium posting in

fandomcalendar

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

osprey_archer

Books I've Given Up On This Week

I regret to admit (or rather admit without regret) that I got deeply bored about a quarter of the way through Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and have therefore taken it back to the library. Sorry, Jean-Paul! This is simply not a season of my life where I am interested in you.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While looking for more Penelope Farmer books, as one does, I discovered that the author of Charlotte Sometimes also occasionally moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. Specifically, she and Amos Oz teamed up to translate Oz’s book Soumchi, a wistful childhood journey through British-occupied Jerusalem between the world wars.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book - the tip-off lies in the prologue, a melancholy reflection about how everything is changing all the time which is very “adult looking back at childhood.” A gentle period piece about a boy with a massive crush on his classmate Esthie and also absolutely zero common sense, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps making trades where he is fairly obviously getting the worse end of the deal.

Also continuing my Vivien Alcock explorations with A Kind of Thief, a contemporary novel about a girl whose father is arrested for theft. But before he’s marched off by the police, he manages to sneak her the information to pick up a bag at the railroad station. Does receiving these presumably stolen goods make her… a kind of thief?

I think Alcock’s work is stronger (or at least more tailored to my interests) when she’s exploring a fantastical premise. This is fun but not something I would suggest seeking out unless you’re an Alcock completist. (If you are an Alcock completist, I do own a copy and I would be happy to send it to a new home.)

Also zipped through Dorothy Gilman’s Kaleidoscope, the sequel to The Clairvoyant Countess, which I probably should have read first as Kaleidoscope is chock full of spoilers for the earlier book. On the other hand, I’ll probably have forgotten all the spoilers by the time I mosey around to The Clairvoyant Countess, so it’s fine.

Always love Gilman’s older heroines. This book is aptly named, a kaleidoscope of different fractured glimpses of other people’s lives, some of which appear once and some of which are threaded throughout the book. No strong through-line but lots of fun little interweaving stories.

What I’m Reading Now

Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu, a lavishly illustrated compilation of the legendary origin stories of many classic Chinese dishes. Just about the embark on the story of spring rolls.

What I Plan to Read Next

I know I keep saying I’m going to read E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, but I’m going to read Queen Lucia for real this time.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

vriddy

I just finished proofreading the latest draft that has aaaaall the changes that came from beta-reader feedback *stares into void* As usual, this is the only step of my process in which my word count gets smaller, although not that much (just by 1%!). Final (#2) draft stands at 58k words.

Unfortunately I've also reached the stage where I hate everything because clearly I'm a garbage person who can only write garbage stories etc etc etc *sigh* I wish that wasn't part of the process. Every time I finish reading a book and the author in the acknowledgements goes "Thanks to my spouse for talking me off the ledge whenever I started hating this story/stopped believing in it/etc" I grumble "WHERE IS MY SPOUSE!!!" lol. I'm going to wait a couple of weeks for the yucky feelings to scatter before contacting the kind souls who volunteered to beta-read. I was thinking of giving folks 5 weeks to beta again? I realise this might be smack-bang in the middle of end of academic year shenanigans for students and teachers though, so I'll have to ask and see if I should wait to align the timeline... I would prefer that over getting the feedback at random times over many months if possible, because I know my brain is going to start working on stuff as soon as the feedback comes in.

I also have a pretty graph!

A graph showing daily progress on scenes completed, time spent, over 17 days

A graph showing daily progress on scenes completed, time spent, over 17 days

I'm never tracking daily again!! Lol. I guess it's not really actionable. It reflects the rest of my life more than the writing. "Here I wasn't home... here I was sick... here something stressful was happening..." I like the idea of weekly tracking more, just like I like yearly challenges like

getyourwordsout more than once-off events like NaNoWriMo: even if it never feels like I'm doing enough, it's good to see that consistency even small pays off over time. Daily tracking is never consistent!!

You can also see how I went crazy last weekend, like "Fuck the plaaaaan I'm finishing THIS WEEKEND even if it KILLS ME LEROYYYYYY JENKIIIINS" and then it killed me and I wasn't anywhere near finished, but really burnt out instead. I did One Last Push this morning because the end felt so within sight. But the bad feels are still here :C And I had to change the graph to add more days and I'll have to write myself a tutorial about that because I fuck things up every time I try to tweak something.

What comes next? Well, for the witch, contacting beta-readers, getting feedback, praying there are no more structural issues lurking (but if there are, so be it), let the feedback simmer. Starting in a couple of weeks.

More immediately, I'm taking a few days' breather then I'm going to start on the Soul Thief structural edits. I have the detailed plan, what needs to change, what needs to go, 15 new scenes to write for all the missing bits... I'm guessing it'll take a few months. I'm looking forward to it, though, and hopeful I'm truly solving the major problems early before any beta-reader takes a look!

I find it interesting, carrying the hopelessness of the Cursed Witch together with the joy/excitement/hope about the Soul Thief. Obviously, that one is incomplete so it still could be anything. This is one of the reasons I always want to find ways to write more. It's not just because "moar words moar better rawwwr", but if I have other projects in various stages to immediately lose myself into, I don't dwell as much on the bad, nor feel it as much. In 2020 and 2021, for Several Reasons (tm) I was writing about 20k words/month, and I think writing so much really fed into itself well: like, sure, damn, that story didn't work out the way I hoped it would. But rather than think "~~I am~~ This is crap" I could simply believe that the next story would be better, because I'd already started it, and if nothing else I wouldn't repeat the exact same mistake(s) with it.

Current Mood: staring into void
Current Location: Void edge
Current Music: perhaps yelling comes next??

renay posting in

ladybusiness

( let's get EMOTIONAL )

gelateria posting in

fandom_icons

CANON: House of the Dragon.
CHARACTERS: Alicent Hightower, Aemond Targaryen, Rhaenyra Targaryen, Jacaerys Velaryon, Baela Targaryen, Daemon Targaryen
ADDITIONAL INFO: Season 2, Episode 5
CREDIT TO:

gelateria

here at

gelateria

gelateria posting in

icons

gelateria

here at

gelateria

osprey_archer

I know I’ve read Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 before, because my ebook is spattered with my own highlights all the way to the very end. However, I have no memory of the book, and also apparently never posted about it, both of which are baffling because it’s an enjoyable and fascinating read.

The Empire Must Die is telling the intertwined stories of many different prominent figures in late tsarist Russia: not just the prominent political figures (both in the government and in the varyingly legal levels of opposition), but also figures in the arts, Chekov, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Nijinsky. It is both painting a picture of Russian high society and exploring the events that led to the downfall of that society.

Zygar is telling a story more than he is advancing a thesis, so he doesn’t advance the idea that this or that thing is the root cause of the ultimate Bolshevik takeover. And obviously any complex historical phenomenon has many causes: autocracy, the Russian orthodox church, a highly class-stratified society with huge income inequality, etc. etc.

However, it ultimately seemed to me that any of these problems might have been overcome were it not for Nicholas II, Russia’s weak-willed, vacillating, but also stunningly pigheaded final tsar. He’s like the guy in the parable who is sitting on top of a house roof in a flood, turning away a neighbor in a boat and a helicopter and what have you because he’s convinced that God will save him, except in Nicholas’s case he’s ignoring warning signs like “we just lost a war with Japan because of our antiquated military, so perhaps we should modernize before we get embroiled in a larger war?”

Or, rather, he repeatedly sees the warning signs, he agrees to direly needed reforms, and then he backtracks the next day after he’s had a chance to talk to his wife. Absolutely a case where both halves of an adoring couple made each other exponentially worse. Nicholas believed that any attempt to amend the autocracy was a violation of the oath he made to God at his coronation, and his wife Alix not only agreed wholeheartedly but remained steadfast in this belief when the weak-willed Nicholas wavered.

So much for the collapse of autocracy. After Nicholas abdicates, why do the Bolsheviks end up in power? Well, you’ve got three main parties vying for it.

The Kadets: the liberal democratic party. In favor of a republic or a constitutional monarchy. Popular among Russia’s middle class, which is not very large. Just can’t pull the numbers they need. Ideologically opposed to shooting people for political reasons.

The Socialist Revolutionaries (also known as SRs): in favor of peasants and the political assassinations of tsarist officials. Despite this history of violence, excited to work non-violently within the new state system that everyone is trying to patch together after the revolution of February 1917. Unfortunately, their two most charismatic leaders recently died, and also they discovered that Azef, the guy who organized most of their high profile political assassinations, was actually a police agent. Awkward. The SRs fail to kill him.

The Social Democrats (also known as the SDs; split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks): Marxists, in favor of the industrial proletariat; hate peasants, but canny enough to promise to distribute land to the peasants anyway. The Bolsheviks are ideologically in favor of shooting people for political reasons, which gives them a decisive edge while their opponents are fretting about whether it will fatally undermine their attempt to build democracy if they shoot political opponents who threaten to violently overthrow democracy. As it turns out, the answer is “probably yes, but do you know what will undermine democracy even more decisively? Being violently overthrown.”

yourlibrarian posting in

tv_talk

Laptop-TV combo with DVDs on top and smartphone on the desk

aurumcalendula reported last month that a set of Wiseguy DVDs had a non-working disc. And apparently Warner Bros DVDs made in 2006-2008 will all stop working. Earlier laser disc recordings also had similar issues.

Do you have a lot of DVDs? How long have you been collecting them? Have you run into problems with them? Is it important for you to preserve particular shows?

linky posting in

fandom_icons

A batch of 8 icons. Icons 4-8 were made for

smallbatchicons.

Find them here at

chemyxstory.

linky posting in

icons

A batch of 8 icons. Icons 4-8 were made for

smallbatchicons.

Find them here at

chemyxstory.

pauraque

We are going out of town for spring break! I expect to be back on Sunday. 🏖️

minutia_r posting in

fandomcalendar

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

falkner posting in

fandomcalendar

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

rekishi

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

troisoiseaux

Read Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a graphic novel in translation from Arabic, set in a world where wishes are real, and regulated, commodities, but most people can only afford sketchy third-class wishes; in Cairo, Egypt, a small neighborhood kiosk with three genuine, first-class wishes for sale changes three lives - a recent widow barely scraping by; a wealthy student struggling with depression; and the kiosk's owner - for better or worse. Clever world-building, with interludes between the three volumes/chapters(?) in the form of world-building infographics and an eye to the way inequality could/would still exist in a world where, theoretically, anyone could wish themselves rich, to solve world hunger or for world peace, etc. (The short answer is who has access to wishes as a resource, on both an individual level and, e.g., which countries have the raw resources vs. the corporate headquarters, a la the history of extractive colonialism.)

Read Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, a contemporary Japanese novel about a budding friendship between two socially isolated thirty-year-old women - an office worker and a homemaker blogger - that quickly grows toxic; picked this up at

osprey_archer's recommendation. From the description, it seems like the plot should be "Misery, but about a parasocial relationship with a social media personality," and might have been more satisfying if it was, but actually I found it most interesting when the two women's storylines ran in parallel, exploring themes of, like... to what extent is any given interaction with someone else a matter of performing the version of yourself that they expect...? And, like, the extent to which other people can have such different worldviews - not even in a political or religious sense, but just, a way of approaching things - that when trying to interact they both just end up baffled. (Speaking of which, I did find the recurring, and perhaps overall, theme of Gendered Expectations in Friendships utterly baffling myself— I think it is to some extent reflective of a cultural difference, but I have definitely encountered the American version of this online in terms of, like, she's a girl's girl! or POV your boyfriend's pick-me girl friend and it always makes me feel like a space alien.) ANYWAY. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler, which is to say I found this deeply off-putting but couldn't put it down. ( ... )

It is officially LIBRARY USED BOOK SALE SEASON; I acquired a box set of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series from the one I went to last weekend, so I guess I will finally get around to reading that. As 2025 was the Year of Twelfth Night, 2026 really is shaking out to be the Year of As You Like It, because I also stumbled across and acquired a copy of Rosalind: Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine by Angela Thirlwell, a self-described "biography" of the character through interviews with actors, directors, etc.

Current Music: Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave - Will Wood

pauraque

This is the first part of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now, an anthology of speculative fiction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. I was glad to see that the introduction included the editor's thoughts about each piece (something that has been lacking in some of the anthologies we've read). The editor says that Aboriginal authors of SF have have historically had more success publishing their work as literary fiction than in SF outlets, suggesting a disconnect between white and Indigenous understandings of what "speculative" looks like. They point out, for example, that a time travel story may look very different through a cultural lens that doesn't see time as entirely linear in the first place.

The editor also says that they solicited several stories for the collection from writers who had never written SF before. Perhaps it is unfair that my reaction was to brace myself; I'll strive to be open minded. (It was also pointed out in the discussion that the Indigenous population of Australia is pretty small, so the pool of potential authors may not have been as deep as the editor might have wished.)

Some group members were not thrilled to learn that the book includes some excerpts from novels. We've run into this before and it tends to frustrate our purpose as a discussion group because we end up having the same conversation over and over, which is just "this didn't feel complete... because it isn't complete." The first three pieces we read are actual short stories, though!

"Muyum, a Transgression" by Evelyn Araluen (2017)

( A ghost travels the ruins of the world, finding that what seemed dead can come back. )

"Clatter Tongue" by K.A. Ren Wyld (2020)

[Note: The book lists this story under the author's former name Karen Wyld.]

( A grieving girl literally vomits the detritus of colonization when she is threatened. )

"Closing Time" by Samuel Wagan Watson (2020)

( In the early days of covid, a man wanders aimlessly. )

Profile

lirazel

Scribblings

April 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Practicality by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Citrusy by krja

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2026 12:32 pm

swamp ophelia

i been digging too deep, i always do

Reading

Community Thursday

Cherry Magic

20+ icons from Cherry Magic for Round 6 @ ships20in20

Hellsing: Hellsing Mini Exchange 2026

Wednesday Reading Meme

Search maintenance

Cursed Witch: proofreading complete

I'm a Hugo Finalist!?

85 icons of HOTD S02E05

85 icons of HOTD S02E05

Book Review: The Empire Must Die

TV Tuesday: Long Term Preservation

Witch Hat Atelier Icons

Witch Hat Atelier Icons

out of office

Jukebox Exchange - Nominations!

Multi-fandom: Springcest 2026

2012 called and want their playoffs back (The Battle of Pennsylvania)

Recent reading

This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 1]

Profile

April 2026

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags