red_eft | Reading

A bit late, but I have 12 recs in 8 fandoms: Cherry Magic, Khemjira, Moby Dick, Never Let Me Go, The Old Kingdom, Perfect 10 Liners, Thai Actor RPF, and ThamePo Heart That Skips a Beat.

See them here.

yourlibrarian in

common_nature

This photo wasn't the year's first sunset but rather the first one that was really a "wow". Loved the colors.

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minoanmiss

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minoanmiss

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Current Mood: ecstatic

maevedarcy in

fandomcalendar

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mific in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: judestlispenard on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A gorgeous double portrait on the cover of an imaginary hockey magazine - really good likenesses, and they got Ilya's eye colour right! (none of this "his piercing blue eyes" crap). Beautiful work, and a cute snippet of their dialogue below.
Link: Hockey Magazine Portraits, backup link here

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: hopeful

cimorene

Duke’s certainly did not rely for its popularity on external display. It was approached by three flights of narrow and rickety stairs, and the visitors had to satisfy two rather seedy-looking janitors, not in uniform, at top and bottom. And, when they entered the Club itself, Ellery had a still greater surprise. The famous Duke’s consisted of one very long low room—or rather of three long, low attics which had been amateurishly knocked into one. The decorations were old and faded, and the places where the partitions had been were still marked by patches of new paper pasted on to hide the rents in the old. The ventilation was abominable, and what windows there were did not seem to have been cleaned for months. The furniture—a few seedy divans and a large number of common Windsor chairs and kitchen tables—seemed to have been picked up at secondhand from some very inferior dealer. Tables and floor were stained with countless spillings of food and drink, and a thick cloud of tobacco smoke made it quite impossible to see any distance along the room. There was only one redeeming feature, and Ellery’s eye fell upon it almost as soon as he entered the place. Near the door was a magnificent grand piano, on which someone was playing really well an arrangement from Borodine’s Prince Igor.

—GDH Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)

supermario128 in

fan_flashworks

Title: Unique Methods
Fandom: Jimmy Neutron
Ship: Judy Neutron x King Goobot x Hugh Neutron
Rating: G for General Audiences
Length: 246 words
Notes: Also written for

100ships prompt “green”. Mid-episode “The Egg-Pire Strikes Back Part 1”, canon divergent. A little crack-y. (Second chances as in this being a villain’s second chance at doing their evil plan [though the second attempt has admittedly gone off the rails].)
Summary: Ooblar questions his brother’s methods when it comes to getting the DNA regenerator.

( Story )

rydra_wong

And I am still buzzing and I am so so so proud of myself and I need to talk about it and I only know two people who know what it means.

If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:

Watch on YouTube

Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.

Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.

(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)

The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.

He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.

I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.

I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.

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minoanmiss

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Current Mood: shook

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minoanmiss

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bluedreaming in

fan_flashworks

Fandom: Original
Rating: T
Length: 100 words
Content notes: non-specific references to nonfictional massacres
Author notes: The bones of this story came to me as a mental image, ( … )

Summary: Human memory is both long and short, aided by reminders that can’t be dismissed.

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darkjediqueen in

fan_flashworks

Title: Second Chance At Love
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No Warnings Apply
Fandom: S.W.A.T.
Relationships: Donovan Rocker/Molly Hicks
Tags: Established Relationship
Summary: Donny was enjoying his second chance at love.
Word Count: 1,260

( Second Chance At Love )

vass

Books
Finished Evelyn Araluen's The Rot, which was, as mentioned last week, very good indeed.

Reading KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning and Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff.

Tech
Still working the phone side of my tech problems: prolonged backup of All The Things onto a different external drive. But I did also run Slay the Spire on my desktop once, just to confirm whether that would cause it to shut down: it did not. But of course it's less resource-hungry than Hollow Knight.

Garden
Three more ripe tomatoes. I tried to plant some basil, but it didn't survive the heat.

Cats
Ash's nose looking good. Both cats coping with the heat as well as can be expected, i.e. better than I am but still largely horizontal.

Nature
I am a delicate flower and do not like hot weather. This is a problem at this time of year. Slight understatement. But only slight. (My part of the state is not the worst-off. Our highs are low 40s, not high 40s. And I have aircon at home and don't have to go out. It's still bad, and I do have medical conditions that make me more sensitive to heat.)
Also I sustained mosquito bites on my arms while doing my nightly "try to keep the plants alive" water, and am very itchy, which at least has the advantage of being a small problem to grumble about without the undercurrent of constant dread.

Current Events
Australia Day bringing out the racists. Some unmitigated arsehole threw a bomb at an Indigenous elder at one of the Survival Day protests. I didn't protest: couldn't manage the logistics of getting to a protest.
Watching the events in Minnesota and thinking of you all.