sage: close up of a red poppy (season: spring)
[personal profile] sage
The Vampire Lestat new trailer


gnu MinoanMiss/Rubynye
update on Ny's cause of death: she had an asymptomatic covid infection, which caused the heart attacks, which caused the brain edema.
Covid: Speaking Out About Rubynye (1268 words) by werpiper
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work, Public Health - Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Me | Fanwork Creator(s), Rubynye
Additional Tags: COVID-19, Death
Summary:

Dearly loved fandom artist and author Rubynye died of covid, at age fifty.

She was a precious friend to me, and I talked about this at a memorial held for her online six weeks after. These are my notes.

GNU Ny.



books (Cline, Cline, Jackson Bennett, Puhak, Kingfisher, Wodehouse) )

yarning
2 kickbunny orders! one green and one gray. Discovered late Saturday that I didn't have enough light green or enough gray yarn to finish either bunny. I got the green at walmart, but I had to order the gray from Amazon. (Evil empires either way, but cheaper than any other option.) Still putting them together, slower than usual, due to busted thumb.

healthcrap
Tendinosis in my left thumb again, from distal all the way to the wrist. Really super annoying. Almost as annoying as going to the allergist for a shot and being denied one because I'm having to use albuterol with my symbicort at night to stop me from coughing all night. And there was no earlier appt for me to move mine to (a month out), so I guess I'm not getting back to maintenance dose after all. She did prescribe me some nasal antihistamine I forget the name of, and they're delivering it, so I don't have to drive all the way over there again. SIGH.

astrology )

#resist
May 1: No Kings 4: the general strike

I hope all of you are doing well! Happy Earth Day! I hope y'all can enjoy a bit of nature today! <333

Me-and-media update

Apr. 17th, 2026 10:05 am
china_shop: An orange cartoon dog waving, with a blue-green abstract background. (Bingo!)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the Stoic hurt/comfort poll, 44.2% of respondents prefer the stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly providing comfort, vs 41.9% who prefer them receiving comfort (pretty sure that's within the margin of error, though); and 27.9% said it depends. Three people (including me) checked "I'm not into hurt/comfort." <3

In ticky-boxes, appreciating being able to breathe through your nose came second to hugs, 62.8% to 79.1%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
I finished The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar, a m/m clockpunk fantasy novel set in ancient Thebes. I especially enjoyed the Theban POV, and I grew increasingly more engaged as it progressed. Might read it again sometime in text.

Still making my way through Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. I'm up to the advice for third drafts.

Andrew and I finished Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner, while polishing off a jigsaw, and have started The Vor Game, in which Miles is instructed to learn to respect authority, and immediately sets out to manipulate everyone around him.

Kdramas
The same four as last week: Phantom Lawyer, You're Beautiful (ahhhh!), Love Scout, and Lovely Runner. The latter involves the female lead time-travelling 15 years into her past self, and she seems weirdly unaware of the age gap between her and the school-age male lead. Maybe this isn't a romance? (Writing this made me consider an alternate version where her contemporary self just sends her diary or something to the past instead, so her teen self would be armed with all the knowledge but still age-appropriate.)

Other TV
Finished Paper Girls (argh, permanent cliffhanger ending!) and Connections (BBC). Still watching The Pitt, Rooster, and Scrubs. Zoomed through all of Big Mistakes, a Netflix romp starring Dan Levy, which ended with a set-up for season 2.

Fringe (which is losing the plot, wow) and Bluey with my sister.

And we saw Hoppers at the cinema, and had a great time with it. Aww! Such an optimistic view of the world.

Audio entertainment
Dreaming Against the Machine (new podcast by Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever), episode 1: "Futurists, with Reo Eveleth". The podcast is about "envisioning a realistic and hopeful future", and this episode was really great. I found it via the Better Offline episode "More, Everything, Forever with Adam Becker".

(Aside: something about DAtM made me think that podcasts are the blogs of today: thoughtful people making their ideas and conversations public, very voicey and intimate in a way. And presumably just as hard to break into (in the English-language sphere) if you're not a confident user of the English language...)

Writing/making things
Getting back into the swing of writers' hour now it's moved to 8am for the winter -- which is timely, because I have a 520 Day assignment fic to write. (I was aiming for short, but it's already over 1500w 2300w, with at least two scenes to go. Which is what happens when you mostly read novels, I guess.)

Life/health/mental state things
We've had a few days of gorgeous weather (and next week is looking dire), which has meant a lot of biking. Plus I have builders working on reputtying some of my windows, which is disruptive and dusty, so I've been out a lot; yesterday I worked on my 520 fic at our newly re-opened central public library. All of which is to say that my arms are pretty mad at me. Bluetooth keyboards are great, but so is my home ergonomic setup. And I can only handle so much biking atm.

The window work is in a race against the weather, and weather forecasting has got less accurate since some @#$#*ing incompetent shitheads @#(*ed up the US Weather Service. So who knows if my house will be weatherproof next week? No one!

I'm not as cranky as this sounds. Just a bit stressed, and my house is covered in a fine layer of dust. Guess I'm looking at a thorough spring autumn clean once this is all done.

Had a flu jab on Wednesday.

Link dump
Get your Letter to the Editor published. Every. Time. | AO3 admin post about Spambot Comments on AO3 (different types, and what to do about them) | Remarkable survival after hawk trapped in car grille | Mom cat shows her kittens the German shepherd is safe (Youtube, via [personal profile] starandrea).

Good things
Lovely weather. Mobile technology and ebikes. Writing!! Friendly builders. Andrew and Halle and friends and Dreamwidth.

Poll #34482 Fanfic vs Profic
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49


Do you have different prose standards for reading profic vs fanfic?

View Answers

no, I'm pretty relaxed about prose quality if other aspects of the story capture me
9 (18.4%)

yes, I'm more picky about fanfic
0 (0.0%)

yes, I'm more picky about profic...
20 (40.8%)

... with the exception of certain genres
5 (10.2%)

no, I'm picky across the board
19 (38.8%)

other
7 (14.3%)

ticky-box of to read makes our speaking English good
22 (44.9%)

ticky-box full of podcasts
5 (10.2%)

ticky-box of how many rivers must an otter swim down before you can call it an otter
28 (57.1%)

ticky-box full of 42
24 (49.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
32 (65.3%)

Update

Apr. 16th, 2026 11:19 am
mergatrude: eucalypt flower (eucalypt flower)
[personal profile] mergatrude
Reading: I finished listening to the audiobook of Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch, after having read the text version last year. I'm wondering which almost unintelligible accent Aaronovitch is going to make Kobna Holbrook-Smith do next. ('Straya, please! We have so many ancient places the genius loci would be amazing!) I thought Shvorne Marks did an amazing job, and it was fun to hear Abigail's version of Nightingale's accent as compared to Peter's. cut for possible spoilers and self-indulgence )

Currently, I'm listening to the audiobook of Project Hail Mary, and I'm glad I saw the movie first. I think I would have struggled with the amount of maths and science without the context of the film, and without my pre-established fondness for the characters. It's a reminder (to myself) that the 'book vs film' debate is mostly wind as both mediums have different strengths.

Watching (and listening): I haven't been watching anything with intent recently. We bought a huge-ass TV with our leftover christmas fund (we put money every fortnight into a christmas club account which can only be accessed in Dec/Jan) and I find it kind of repelling. Dude has been playing me a bunch of Gorillaz videos on youtube, catching me up on the lore following the release of The Mountain. I love the album (I've always had an interest in Indian music) and have been listening to it quite a bit. Dude is currently into collecting CDs and has bought a couple of earlier Gorillaz albums, which have been fun to listen to.

Making: I've been slowly working on a sweater for my brother, but it's lots of boring knitting. I'm itching to spin something, but I don't know what. I used up some leftover multi-coloured yarn with some white Cormo to make fingerless mitts for a colleague and they turned out well. The (free) pattern is Prisma Mitts and is great for a gradient yarn.

fingerless mitts for Amy

I need to do more two-colour knitting rather than trying to dye all my colours into a single yarn. *g*

Other: We're upgrading our solar system, adding more panels and a larger battery which we hope will zero-out our electricity bill. The feed-in tariff has dropped to 4 cents/kW and we expect it to drop further, so more storage is our goal.

Work is still a schmozzle. The Uni featured heavily in a recent Four Corners exposé about governance in the tertiary sector, however I don't see them rolling back the (ridiculous, terrible) organisational changes any time soon. Sigh.

Autumn is finally here. After a long summer the nights dropping to below 5C is a bit of a shock. The cat is unimpressed and insists on being wrapped in her blanket.

ashah in grey blanket

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Apr. 15th, 2026 07:09 pm
sage: two polar bears embracing (bear hug original)
[personal profile] sage
gnu MinoanMiss/Rubynye/Ny
The memorial was so lovely. I cried a lot. I miss her so much.

books
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer. 2006. Imperialism is so gross.

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer. 2013. These guys were such jackasses. I only knew about their Latin American horrors, not the rest of it.

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. 1934. My Wodehouse is all over the place and I didn't keep track of what I read when, so I'm rereading. This was cute and fast-paced.

The Jeeves Omnibus Vol. 1 by P.G. Wodehouse.
Thank You, Jeeves: Really pissed off at Bertie's repeated "n-word minstrels", and the disaster blackface, augh, though Jeeves at least uses "negro." SIGH. I guess it was 1934, but GAH.
The Code of the Woosters: a bit tedious. Needed more Dahlia. 1937.
The Inimitable Jeeves: Needed more Jeeves and less gambling. 1923.

healthcrap
Had an allergy shot Monday and I need one more to get back on maintenance after falling behind.

taxes
I tried twice today to free-file my taxes, only to get to the end of the long long long process and have then say, no, this isn't free after all. So I paid a semi-random amount and got an extension. I think I got an extension. Did I get an extension? Now I need to double check. Gah.

#resist
May 1: No Kings 4

I hope you're all doing well! <333
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