rogueslayer452 | Network

m_findlow posting in

Theme Prompt: #302 - Champion
Title: We don’t need another hero
Fandom: Original
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Lenna’s brother has brought her to the tourney under false pretenses.

( Read more... )

fabiadrake

what I keep being tempted to write: a canon-divergent, probably somewhat lengthy thing for a minor character in a small fandom, probably requiring some historical research; this is gonna be high effort low reward, I can just tell

what I could more easily write and people would actually read it: LOTR WIZARDS (Radagast and the Blue Wizards are all automatically intriguing by virtue of their elusiveness; once you start digging, Alatar and Pallando are quite exciting but still need personalities, of which there is the subtlest of hints; nobody does Radagast justice — except possibly my guy John Rateliff — and there is some great potential material there)

And yes I do have my own stuff to be working on — fiction, history — but the ratio of research to actual writing is rather wearing, at least today. And writing things improves and tidies up my brain.

Current Mood: suitably embarrassed
Current Music: bbc radio 3

mific

Clean Sweep by YankingAwry, a favourite writer of mine. An AU where Shane's with the Metros and Ilya's a Janitor at Bell Centre (he and Irina having emigrated to Canada). Great writing, funny, interesting changes in both Shane and Ilya due to the AU.

Scott Hunter's Side Gig (series) by nestorius.
Most of nestorius's fics are a tad too grim for me, but these are great, although they're still a bit dark, being horror, but in a more amusing way. Scott is basically Dean Winchester when he's not playing for the NHL, and Kip turns out to be bitey, and to find Scott's side gig very hot. Ilya intermittently gets sucked into the madness, and finally Shane as well, although he immediately represses it. Extreme though the AU is it makes perfect sense with Scott's backstory. Very much recommended if you like darker stuff where only the monsters end up permanently dead. Great competency kink, too!

And

siegeofangels is writing HR! Well-written porn, with a twist:
Designated Penalty is a little like the Winners Room trope, with a League-mandated system where a "Designated Penalty" team member takes punishment for team losses, and provides a sexual reward for any player who does well. This year, the DP for the Centaurs is Shane. Siegeofangels writes this very explicit stuff in a no-nonsense style where it's all very much routine and "the way things are", and Ilya's fine with it, having been the DP himself with Boston, previously. Shane is of course very into being used and proud to "take it for the team", and the Centaurs are all lovely with him. Very hot and weirdly sweet, in a trippy idfic kind of way.

Swagger is omegaverse with Shane helping Ilya through a heat. The twist here is that Ilya's a dominant omega, and Shane's a subby service-alpha. Once again, very hot, interesting dynamics, and again with the straightforward writing, making the very cracky premise seem just another part of life.

dine

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luthien

Six-ish sentences from Chapter 3 of Angry Kitten:

"What are you doing?" Roz asks, frowning ferociously. He's radiating 'keep the fuck away from me' vibes. The tension practically ripples through his shoulders, and he's doing his very best to loom at Cliff despite the fact that Cliff has several inches on him.

"You can't drive to Montreal," Cliff says, and then adds quickly, as Roz's scowl deepens, "Not by yourself. You're tired and your ankle isn't healed" - plus, he doesn't say, you're in a deeply self-destructive mood - "and you'd probably drive yourself into a ditch before you got even halfway there."

"So, what? Are you offering to drive to Montreal with me in the middle of the fucking night, Marly?"

"Yes," Cliff says simply. "Someone has to save you from yourself. Might as well be me."

holmesticemods posting in

holmestice

Title: Different Kind of Love
Recipient: EstelRaca
Artist/Vidder: REDACTED
Verse: Rathbone movies
Characters/Pairings: Holmes, Watson, Holmes/Watson
Rating: G
Warnings: Canon depictions of violence
Summary: A vid about Rathbone's Holmes and Bruce's Watson and their adventures together

View On YouTube: A Different Kind of Love

sallymn posting in

1word1day

sprezzatura [sprets-uh-toor-uh]

noun:
1 seemingly effortless grace in manner or careless stylishness in dress; casual charisma or allure
2 a cultivated attitude of detachment or studied indifference, as if one's mastery requires no visible labor or concern

Examples:

True genius was defined by a quality of sprezzatura, creating brilliant work without any toil. (The many ways art goes missing, The Economist, May 2018)

In one of the marvelous essays in her posthumous collection The Unforgivable, Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923-January 10, 1977) offers the 16th-century Italian term sprezzatura for that ineffable quality of being upon which our deepest emotional, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic longings tremble. (Maria Popova, Finding Sanity in sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder, The Marginalian, March 2026)

Today, it’s a 19-room hotel owned by my best friend, Marie-Louise Sciò, who has preserved its vintage glamour while borrowing some of the sprezzatura from her family’s other property, the iconic Hotel Il Pellicano. (11 Hotels to Visit in Your Dreams, New York Times, November 2020)

Of course, in this advanced age of the handheld vocabulary, everyone on earth knows what sprezzatura means, but in 2000 I had no idea, and I reached for an Italian dictionary. (John McPhee. Frame of Reference, The New Yorker, March 2015)

The modernist era was pure international sprezzatura. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound invented polylingual constructions, with polylingual traditions. (Adam Thirlwell, All the world’s a page, Times Literary Supplement, May 2016)

No poet has created a world of larger and nobler images, designed with the sprezzatura of indifference to mere gracefulness, but all the more fascinating because of the artist's negligence. (John Addington Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece)

Origin:
The word sprezzatura is borrowed from Italian, and it dates back to the 1500s, during the Renaissance. It was used to describe a desirable quality amongst the nobles - making difficult things appear easy and acting in a cool, nonchalant manner. Today, the word is often used in the arts, especially in fashion, where it refers to a relaxed but stylish look that seems like you didn't really bother (but you did) - eg, a partially untucked shirt, a slightly crooked tie, a fancy dress paired with sneakers. (Vocabulary.com)

haunted_cherries

On today’s episode of “What an Interesting Thing to Research for Fanfic”: DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA! ^ o^)/
( Read more... )

Current Mood: relaxed

enchanted_jae

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Current Mood: okay

scaramouche

I'd had a hankering for some earthscience reading, so I picked up Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, published in 2005, about the infamous 1883 Krakatoa explosion, the deadliest in modern memory.

The book is well-written and the prose compelling, but only about 70% enjoyable for me, with the remaining 30% being irritating as the dickens. More on that in a bit.

The book has a good narrative, through a breakdown of the science of the Pacific Ring of Fire, of subduction, plate tectonics and continental drift, all those fascinating topics for the destructive power of volcanoes, but told effectively through the historical research that was done to elucidate these sciences. There's a nice little section on Alfred Russel Wallace's research in the area and the Wallace Line that marks the meeting of two plates, that's always fun. Then there's the history of the Sunda Strait as the location of the original Krakatau volcano (MORE ON THAT IN A BIT) followed by history of volcanic activity.

And then the heart of the story, I suppose, which is the record of what happened in the area in the months building up, and then description of the eruptions through Sunday, 26th of August 1883 before the final BIG eruption on Monday, 27th August, followed the days-to-months-to-years long fallout all over the planet. Shockwaves, tsunamis, ash in the air. The scale of human suffering, followed by recovery and revival, and also the generation of art and new discoveries in earth sciences as Anak Krakatau became the site of study for the recovery of life post-eruptions. That's all really interesting, and Winchester has a good argument for the eruption happening in a world where telegrams now exist, enabled the eruption to be a global phenomenon, and perhaps one of the first shared.

( Now to get to my complaints about this book. )

Current Mood: aggravated

conuly

Either the Knicks won or… I can’t actually imagine an or for this sentence.

Go Knicks!

james_davis_nicoll

Scarcely a month goes by when I don’t receive an email, phone call, or manuscript from someone, more often than not a retired engineer, who has their own theory of relativity. These people have read something about Einstein’s theory of relativity, noticed that something about it doesn’t accord with their own intuition, decided that therefore Einstein must be wrong, and come up with their own theory which they are convinced must be right. It is certainly true that there are aspects of relativity that are counterintuitive, not only to retired engineers but also to many physicists. Therefore if one’s own intuition were to be the final arbiter of correctness of a theory, that would be good reason to reject relativity. But of course science doesn’t work that way: the final arbiter for correctness of a theory is experimental evidence. So if a counterintuitive theory is supported by the evidence, one should retrain ones intuition to think in the ways required by the theory.

princessofgeeks

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flemmings

Another hot blowy day. Played clothesline bingo, got several tanktops and sleep bottoms out to dry/ bleach in the hot hot sun, and lost a tanktop and a shirt to the birds, not the cherries. The cherries themselves are beginning to both ripen and fall so that's it for clotheslines until maybe a month from now. Underwear of course is hanging from the living room chandelier and drying in the living room fan.

It felt hotter than yesterday, which is probably the difference between going outside at noon like today, and 4 pm like yesterday. But what I wanted was a Johnson cocktail-- that's gin, dry vermouth and sweet vermouth-- and I didn't want to go out to buy the fixings. So I put in an order with UberEats and all was tickety-boo until the very end when they wanted me to take a photo of my ID, take a photo of myself, and upload both. Previously it's been the delivery guy who photo'd my ID and in each case had extreme difficulty in so doing, so I was pretty sure I wouldn't manage it either. So hell, let's try SkipTheDishes, even if I keep having to correct my address with them. They said the Dupont LCBO has gin and sweet vermouth but no dry; the Bathurst outlet has gin and dry vermouth but no sweet. Uber said they could get both. Yeah, and both Skip and Uber's interface lagged like a lagging thing. The hell with it, I said, and closed the browser. Johnson cocktail erases the owies better than anything but my system really hates it, a fact I tried to ignore.

SNDs were out back gardening. He-SND was hacking away at the great overgrown clump of vines on the fence between our yards, with a battery operated trimmer and a manual hacksaw. And even with both those and a male's upper body strength was finding it hard going, so thick are the stems now. I have a bigger trimmer that might work but I've never used it in the seven years I've had it and discover that it needs some assembly. Also an outlet and extension cord, of course.

But tomorrow will be rain all day so no gardening happening. I slept with just the fan last night but am not sure that will work tonight: and I did keep waking up sweating. A modest hydro bill came in last week and I overpaid 300% so maybe I can afford the luxury of a window AC, especially since next week is forecast to be window fan cool at night.

greghousesgf

Had a nice time going out for breakfast (I had hush puppies) and hanging out in the Haight with my friend, then I went home and went swimming.

Current Music: Bach

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: impressed

bluapapilio

Used my anime TBR boardgame. I watched 6/6 for my last challenge.

Avatar:

Laios
Skill: Do 1 extra roll if you have 5+ anime on your list

Roll #1:

A 2, prompt: contemporary - Uta no☆Prince-sama♪ Maji Love Revolutions.

Roll #2:

An 8, prompt: supernatural element. I don't know know much I remember from the last episode but Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire.

Roll #3:

A 5, prompt: original (not an adaptation) - High Card.

Roll #4:

A 4, prompt: dystopia/apocalypse - Dr. Stone.

Roll #5:

A 9, prompt: oldest anime on list - I guess that'd be Slayers.

Roll #6:

A 4, using skill to add +2 so 6. I think next time I'll use both dice. Prompt: popular anime. Digimon was at one point right?? Digimon Adventure 02.

Roll #7:

An 8 and the end, reward is Fairy Ranmaru.

Most looking forward to: Dr. Stone
Least looking forward to: Slayers

~Anime PTW List~

[Music] Uta no☆Prince-sama♪ Maji Love Revolutions
[Action/Supernatural] Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire
[Action/Fantasy] High Card
[Sci-Fi/Adventure] Dr. Stone
[Adventure/Fantasy] Slayers
[Action/Adventure] Digimon Adventure 02
[Action/Fantasy] Fairy Ranmaru

Current Mood: tired

bluapapilio

For my anime PTW challenge

Watched ep. 11 of Uta no Prince-sama

Watched ep. 17 of Cardfight!! Vanguard.

Watched ep. 32 of Digimon Adventure 02.

Watched ep. 9 of Bikkurimen.

Watched ep. 17 of Slayers.

Watched ep. 10 if Akatsuki no Yona.

Current Mood: hot

senmut

I don't want "misunderstood villains" or "trying for redemption". Tell me a villain that is THE VILLAIN, they did do all that, and you absolutely hope the heroes get the upper hand every time!

The first one that defined this concept for me? J. R. Ewing of Dallas. When I compare Babylon 5's Bester to him, I mean it as a solid compliment. I don't want tragic stories pasted on, other characters 'fixing' them, or any of that. I want them to be as bad and as nasty as they do so well... and I will cheer any and every person that gets the upper hand on them.

Because, my lovely friends, heroes ARE measured by what they overcome, and that includes the antagonist.

sovay

I can't remember if it ever occurred to me before last night's re-read of Jane Yolen's Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk (1982) that her Greyling (1968) resembles Gordon Bok's "Peter Kagan and the Wind" (1971) in that both are stories of selkies who return to their seal-selves not despite the bonds of human love but because of them—a father in one case, a husband in the other, both fishermen in peril on the sea. Bok and Yolen knew one another; she partly dedicated the collection to him. It's slightly nuts to me that he never set either of her sea-songs published in it, since it takes so little imagination to hear "The Ballad of the White Seal Maid" or "The Selchie's Midnight Song" in his deep-grained swell of a voice. I don't know whose version coalesced first. I grew up on both of them.

Via

regshoe, a book meme.

General Questions

This week I'm reading: I am currently in the middle of Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), the paperback reprint sent me by

boxofdelights in 2022 as a replacement for my long-lost, lent-out college copy. Also re-reading Yolen's Merlin's Booke (1986), the Ace first edition inherited from my god-aunt in 2000 which I had not then read since my childhood in the Cambridge Public Library. For the first time, Jonas Kreppel's Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes (trans. Mikhl Yashinsky, 1908/2025), a present from my parents earlier this year. With snail-mortifying slowness, I am continuing to poke at the modern Greek of Nikos Kavvadias' Πούσι (1947).

My favourite book of all time is: Impossible to answer. I did that hundred books meme last spring and kept having to append titles that had slipped my mind.

My current favourite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): With apologies to Molly Crabapple and Seamus Heaney, almost certainly Leon Garfield's The Stolen Watch (1988).

The last book I bought was: Joan Coggins' Dancing with Death (1947), a present for my mother which she promptly loaned back to me so that she could discuss it. The last book I bought for myself was Andrew Hiller's Hornytown Chutzpah (2026), brought to my attention by

mrissa.

The first book I bought with my own money: No clue. My first real job was in a science fiction and fantasy bookstore when I was fifteen and they might as well have paid me off the shelves.

The first book I received as a gift: Equally impossible to estimate. I can remember receiving Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983) early on, but it would not have been the first.

The last book I received as a gift was: Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026), courtesy of

a_reasonable_man.

The last book I borrowed from the library: Either Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) or What Time Is This Place? (1972), whichever was not checked out first.

The book physically closest to me right now: Robinson Jeffers' Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937), the burgundy-boarded, jacketless first edition from my grandparents' house. After that, Imogen Sara Smith's Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy (2008), which I gave some years ago to

spatch.

Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favourite bookshop fic? I don't think I have ever read a bookshop fic. I read Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023) when

spatch gave it to me for our last anniversary.

This or That

Physical book or e-book: Physical book if at all possible, since I process them differently. E-book in the inevitable event that I can't get hold of something and there's one copy digitized maddeningly on the Internet Archive.

Used or new: As a reading experience, I don't think it makes much difference to me. If I own a book, I try to keep it in good shape.

Fiction or non-fiction: At the moment I seem to be reading more fiction than nonfiction, which may or may not be the case in another three months.

Read at a coffee shop or at the park: I haven't been inside a coffee shop in years. Last Friday I was reading on the stone wall overlooking the water at Spy Pond Park while waiting for

ladymondegreen.

Paperback or hardcover: In terms of preferred reading format? I don't think it makes much difference to me, either.

Romance or Crime: More crime than romance.

Yes or No

Stream of consciousness? Yes.

Poetry? Yes.

Memoirs? Yes.

Philosophy? Yes.

Thrillers? Yes.

Chronicles? What?

Dialogue heavy? Alan Garner?

Current Music: Gordon Bok, "Peter Kagan and the Wind"

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June 2026

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Page Summary

m_findlow in fandomweekly - [#302] WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO (ORIGINAL)
fabiadrake - “Must you?” I sigh disdainfully, at myself
mific - HR recs
dine - never try to outstubborn a cat
luthien - Six Sentence Sunday
holmesticemods in holmestice - Vid for EstelRaca: Different Kind of Love
sallymn in 1word1day - Sunday Word: Sprezzatura
haunted_cherries - Researching is Just As Important as Writing *nod nod*
enchanted_jae - Story of my life
scaramouche - Book Log: Krakatoa
conuly - Judging by the hollering
james_davis_nicoll - Relativity for Retired Engineers by David Garfinkle
princessofgeeks - Heated Rivalry rec
flemmings - (no subject)
greghousesgf - (no subject)
princessofgeeks - Heated Rivalry rec
bluapapilio - June Anime PTW
bluapapilio - May Anime Wrap-Up 4
senmut - June 13 - Share a Villain You Love to Hate
sovay - Down the smoking sea she came and over the rail of the dory she came and laughing to his arms

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Page generated Jun. 14th, 2026 09:07 am

Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer...

Dei Kobol una apita uthoukarana

Network

[#302] WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO (ORIGINAL)

“Must you?” I sigh disdainfully, at myself

HR recs

never try to outstubborn a cat

Six Sentence Sunday

Vid for EstelRaca: Different Kind of Love

Sunday Word: Sprezzatura

Researching is Just As Important as Writing nod nod

Story of my life

Book Log: Krakatoa

Judging by the hollering

Relativity for Retired Engineers by David Garfinkle

Heated Rivalry rec

(no subject)

(no subject)

Heated Rivalry rec

June Anime PTW

May Anime Wrap-Up 4

June 13 - Share a Villain You Love to Hate

Down the smoking sea she came and over the rail of the dory she came and laughing to his arms

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June 2026

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