yuletart

I'm very much in winter mode here as although some days are sunny, it's cold, and a lot of days are very wet. So not going outside much and not doing gardening, which I don't feel great about. I seem a bit beset by inertia in terms of things physical, possibly a mid-winter slump, but I'm doing indoors things just fine - well, the things I like doing, anyway. Not cleaning or organising! I do tidy up once a week before Fionna comes to vacuum, and occasionally the dishes get washed, but that's about it.

I've started another longer podfic - this one for the due South Big Bang. Am also continuing to add lots of new podfics to the Audiofic Archive (we got inundated by >600 short ones from a recent Voiceteam challenge). And I finished a personal project with the Audiofic Archive of adding streaming links to all the SGA podfics there so they can be enjoyed easily with no need to download zip files. That's 138 pages of SGA podfics! - and increasing each week, as we make more. Next fandom to complete is due South.

In the process I stumbled on Lim's old Fanvid page on Wayback, and the vid downloads still worked. Lim made avant garde vids with lots of altered graphics. Some are on AO3 but a lot of the SGA ones aren't. The Wayback page is here (with additional info and credits), and I downloaded the SGA ones and converted them to mp4 format here. CW for flashing, fast cuts, loud music in some of them. One, Mission Report, (lyrics) is a multimedia podvid where Lim created the lyrics, music, and vid, and sang it for the SGA flashfic comm.

In "first world problem" news, a grocery mix-up. My online delivery packer needs help with alliums! Ordered a bunch of spring (green) onions:
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And got a giant leek. Size matters! (in terms of making salads, anyway)

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Finally, I saw this amazing poem on tumblr, apparently written by nine-for-a-kiss as a teenager. It's very Dark-is-Rising-ish.

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).

What I'm reading now:

My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.

What I recently finished watching:

American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.

I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.

What I'm about to start watching:

Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.

What I'm playing now:

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.

mific

I turned back on the AI functions for my iPad again so as to write a fic with minimal impediments (I have enough inbuilt impediments these days not to want more). So that's autocapitalisation, autocorrect, and predictive text. And JFC, but it's bossy! Constantly changing words from the way I wanted to write them to some AI bullshit of its own. I had to be super-vigilant with the betaing. Have since turned predictive text off again to see if that's better. I hate the AI aspect but it's such a tiresome slog correcting my own (numerous) typos with it all turned off.

Bum music, a bit of YT whimsy. In Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights panel there's a guy, face down, bum up, with sheet music stacked on his ass. So Amelia Hamrick transcribed it, James Spalink arranged it, and played it using period-type instruments. It's actually not bad.

I managed a short fic for into-a-bar. I've been using the challenge to add to my Losers in Pegasus series but was hoist with my own petard this time by being allocated an SGA character I'd killed off in the last fic! Finally figured out a solution (enter the clones!) but was unable to finish the longer fic (that gets Pooch to Atlantis) by the deadline, so that one will come later.

Still mostly doing art, and podficcing. And the podfics mean cover art so that's always fun. I now tend to beta-listen while working on the cover, although that makes it tricky to note down bits that I've flubbed.

My Mexican sunflower still has some flowers, which the bees will be grateful for. Pretty amazing, now we're past the shortest day of winter, but it's slowly winding up its flowering season. 10/10, will see how many years it can manage encores.

I have a few recs, but will do a separate post for those. Summer sounds a bit brutal up north (for many reasons). Hope you're all OK.

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