elasticella | Network

It's Thursday, and I'm dreading today. I really don't know how my GYN appt is going to go. Not the diagnosis, but how badly it's going to hurt. I'm pretty good with. pain, and I do have weed now, but last time was SO bad that it's left a scar for many years. Nothing to do but go through it. Hopefully if I have pain, it's slightly shorter lived. I was going to see if the site would work me in for the Ultrasound I'm sure I will need, but I think I'll wait. We'll see how it goes.

Yesterday was very long. We've been getting killed this week at work. Just calls out the wazoo, and people out on vacation and out sick. It's been a mess. Yesterday we were so shorthanded that we had to pull people of doing the faxes and emails to get on the phones. That's how I ended up spending all day doing faxes. I don't mind doing them, but good lord, after a while, it gets tedious. On the plus side, we got the faxes down to about 10, from a starting point of nearly 200. And of course, more were coming in while we were doing it, so we probably killed off at least 400, because that fax was on fire yesterday. At one point, I was doing the new ones, and I swear, every time I did one, three more had come in. There were three of us actively working it at one point.

At 9:48am. I hopped into the Ticketmaster queue, and with some technological struggles, I was able to get Danny Elfman tickets. We're sitting in the balcony (which is the only place that has seats) in the first row. From the View From my Seat picture, it looks pretty choice.

I haven't gone to see someone I wrote a ton of porn about for years. It was fairly frequent when I was in wrestling fandom, but that was like 25 years ago. Since I'm not really in fandoms any more, it doesn't come up, but then this 73 year old motherfucker decided to tour.

I'm going to take like 2 hours PTO, and then we'll go down early, to avoid some traffic, and check in at the hotel and relax until it's time to go meet people for dinner. The show isn't til 8:30pm, so we were not going to be getting home at midnight. It will mean fighting DC traffic on the way home, but I'll deal. I'm going to take the morning off, so I won't need to be home til about 12:30.

During lunch, I went in to see baby, and she was SO sleepy.

I love the second picture, where she just looks like she's counting the minutes til she can nap some more.

After work, I decided to nap for 20min. So I go in the bedroom, and the cat greets me, and I lay down. Yoda is sitting outside the door whining because I dared to lock myself out of his reach. And then Lizzy starts meowing at him because she really wants to be his friend. I did not get much of a nap. You also have to know that Lizzy's meows sound like a sad bike horn. So I've got that and Yoda just whining his heart out.

I got up and started cooking early. In addition to the bacon and sausage, I made pancakes for Jess and eggs for my sister. It was a nice breakfast for dinner menu. It was pretty tasty. I kind of eyeballed the pancake recipe and almost forgot to add vanilla, but I caught myself. It turned out pretty well, though.

Tonight shall be basic hamburgers. I like to bake the patties, so it's super easy. I'll make my patties before I go to the appt, then Jess can throw them in the oven if I'm not up to doing it.

I have games every day this weekend, starting tomorrow with the Swedish horror one shot.

We realized that Monday, we'll have had Lizzy for one month! I'm thinking about getting her a tiny piece of sushi grade tuna and searing it for her as a little celebration.

With the Elfman concert, it turns out that we've got plans every month for the rest of the year. Sept was going to be our dry spell, but not so much. We've got Weird Al at the end of July, AEW Pro wrestling in August, Danny in Sept, the animation con in October, Undertale symphony in November, and Much Ado About Nothing in December. It's a lot. I'm still debating on a spring vacation, but we'll see. I was looking at the cruise again. The ship seems a bit of a letdown after the Koningsdam, and the food choices are not great. Everything that we'd probably do would be more money. The ship would be about the same size as the Konigsdam, but it's got a lot more entertainment shit, like a waterpark. We'd be going while kids were in school, though. I don't know. I'll think on it. Need to do research.

Okay, time for me to hop off and do some more prep work for the games and take a nice shower so I smell nice for the doctor. Everyone have a fantastic Thursday!

kalloway

Model kit of a fighting robot. It is white with pink highlights and is on a dark flat top stove.

Stargazer + Galaxy backpack + pink. Probably the quickest I've had an idea and then just bought and built it. Not an entirely clean job but given the circumstances, I'm really pleased with the end result.

dine

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anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. What would you do right now, if money were not an issue?

2. What would you do for the next three years, if money were not an issue?

3. What is bringing you the most joy right now that requires little or no money?

4. What types of things do you find enjoyable that require no money?

5. Is there anything you've been meaning to do for a long time, but put off because of money?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

vriddy

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

booknook.

Promoted

vocab_drabbles.

princessofgeeks

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starwatcher posting in

fandom_checkin

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday July 08, to midnight on Thursday, July 09. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34813 Daily Check-in

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 8

How are you doing?

I am OK.
5 (62.5%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
3 (37.5%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
2 (25.0%)

One other person.
4 (50.0%)

More than one other person.
2 (25.0%)

<sigh> My apologies, folks. I simply forgot what day it was. 😢

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

peaked posting in

iconic

HERE @

shithouse!

peaked posting in

icons

HERE @

shithouse!

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: bitchy

princessofgeeks

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troisoiseaux

Finished Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, a slice-of-life novel set in "a village of four hundred souls" in '90s(?) Iceland, narrated in a sort of anonymous, collective community voice (opening line: "Now, we'd almost written that what made our village unique was that it wasn't unique at all, but apparently that isn't true"). Something of a connected short stories feel in the way each chapter does follow a different, specific story arc/plotline from beginning to end, but even then, there's a meandering, kaleidoscopic feel— I'd say it's somehow both sprawling and narrow in focus?— and a few running plot/story threads throughout. (I've seen the author described as an Icelandic Charles Dickens; I found myself thinking more of South Riding.) Particularly enjoyed this for having recently traveled to Iceland, because although we only drove past/through the type of very small, rural town/village where this is set, I did have enough of a sense of the buildings and landscape and the vibes to picture it as I read. (More than if I had read this before I went to Iceland, anyway...)

Finished Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand, a collection of short stories categorized into "Cockrill Cocktails" (featuring her recurring detective Inspector Cockrill), "Entrees" (longer stand-alones), "Petit Fours", and "Black Coffee." There was something generally flippant about the "Petit Fours", including two separate stories that made me think of the Mmm Whatcha Say SNL sketch, only one of them was about a jewel heist* and one about blackmail and murder; the latter also featured some cheerfully callous children, making two for two on a reaction of o__O towards the children in Brand's mystery stories, which does make me curious about the vibe of her novels for children. The "Black Coffee" stories were, as the name suggests, just plain dark: ( ... ) Bit of a grab bag, quality-wise, and I did skip a couple of stories— one had such a baffling opening sentence that I was like, you know what? I'll come back to this and then I didn't; one was just virulent fatphobia for the first couple of pages and I safely assumed it would not improve— and it ended on a sour note, since the second-to-last story hinged on an intentionally false accusation of sexual assault in a way that has aged extremely poorly. (Not sure when it was written, but this collection was published in the early '80s?) There were some good stories, though— particularly among the Cockrill ones, where I found I liked him more than in Brand's novels— so not an entirely disappointing experience.

* Actually, on double-checking, that one was filed under "Something to Clear the Palate" rather than a "Petit Four"— presumably as the one story in the collection that did not involve murder?— but I don't want to rewrite that whole sentence at this point.

andersenmom posting in

100ships

Creator:

andersenmom
Title: Color Therapy
Rating: G
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 763
Prompt: 059: Rose
Fandom/Ship: Xdinary Heroes, Seventeen; Kwak Jiseok | Gaon, Lee Seokmin | DK
Notes/Warnings: (eg. spoilers, triggers, warnings etc. or CNTW)
Summary: Jiseok just wanted some sort of peace.

Find the table with the list of fics here

Current Mood: frustrated

isis

Hello from Colorado, which is on fire :( We are not actually near any of the big fires, but we are getting smoke in the mornings from two of them, which means that several times in the past few weeks we've had to get up at 3 am and close the windows and turn on the air purifier. Anyway:

What I've recently read:

The Astrobiology Immersion Program by

startingatmidnight, short-novel-length (~50K) Project Hail Mary gen, I think

petra recommended it. AU in which on the way back to Erid, Rocky and Ryland Grace bodyswap. I love bodyswap as a trope and it's especially rich when the bodies are alien to each other. I thought it was a little long, and the handwaving a little handwavy, though the ultimate "why" resolution was super interesting, and I really liked that the story continues through to the consequences on Erid.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, which is a sort of literary dark-humor western, with a really fun narrative voice. Charlie and Eli Sisters are Bad Men With Guns who wield them for a mysterious mogul called the Commodore. Except Eli's got a sensitive side, and he's starting to wonder why he's killing people for money when he could just settle down and run a trading post somewhere. My favorite part, oddly, was the throughline of Eli being completely unable to hold onto any money; if he doesn't give it away out of soft-heartedness as soon as he gets it, it's stolen, and I was delighted every time it happened.

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, which was a recommendation from

merit - I couldn't resist the premise of a woman waking up with amnesia and learning, through letters written from her former self, that she's a high-up bureaucrat in a secret organization of people with supernatural powers who deal with supernatural crimes and threats to the country. Sort of like Rivers of London but with Ghostbusters-level humor. ETA: and now I am reminded of another reason I really liked this: the main character, Myfanwy Thomas, discovers (somewhat to her surprise) that she is frighteningly competent at her job. Also there is a fantastic female character with whom I ship her (and there is fic). Anyway, lots of fun, and I'm now reading the second book in this series, Stiletto.

What I've recently watched:

S4 of Dark Winds, which unfortunately had quite a bit of action in LA - not that I have anything against LA, it's just it's not the familiar Four Corners scenery. As soon as they (metaphorically) hung a German on the wall I was expecting it to fire (metaphorically) Karl May, and I was not disappointed.

We've just watched the first episode of S2 of the live-action One Piece. I love how goofy it is!

g_uava posting in

fictional_fans

I wrote about the different effects of creating a GIF (moving image) or a collage (compilation of multiple images into one static image out of frames from the same scene, which I thought might interest other photo editors. While writing it, I came across the Fanlore entry on the picspam that likens picspams to fanart. It's a first for me to see picspams described that way!

biteshelter

I am very bad at sticking to one topic per post. At the same time, I expect myself to have one clear topic per post. My drafts are many and my posts are few. Posting on Mastodon usually gets around this because my thoughts on a topic don’t have to be complete for me to feel like posting them, but (I rarely post there either and) my usual instance has been down. So, I’m back here.

Here’s what I’ve been working on.

Since I refuse to use LLM services personally, getting a job where these things are everywhere has been a whirlwind for me. There are so many little things that surprised me about how people here use and talk about LLMs. I learned how to download and host one locally so I could poke it around for a bit and figure out what the hell people are talking about. Unfortunately for me, setting up these things has some of the same draw as customizing a website or modding a video game. I ended up getting pulled into that for a bit. You can spend so much time comparing models, tweaking parameters, adjusting prompts… After the novelty wore off, I got tired of it pretty quickly and dropped it. Despite my temporary interest, my final opinion on these things is even more negative than before.

Rant

The gap between huge models and ones that can be run locally isn’t nearly as big as I thought it was. The majority of what actually makes an LLM produce more passable output is just… making it do less. You write code and then make the LLM summarize the output of the program, or put some variables in a list, or whatever. You write something and then have it repeat it back at you because the “most effective usage” of LLMs is just to give it what you want it to output in the first place. It either does fuck all or it’s an expensive accessory to you doing it yourself. I knew it was annoyingly bad, but something about how little difference it makes to take more data and train it more irritates me for some reason. It’s just so much nothing.

The good thing that came out of all that was the urge to double down on actually doing creative things. My Fandom Trumps Hate progress has been slow but I’m now at the last stage before my art is finished and ready to send to my bidder. The zine that I’ve horrifically over-scoped is also moving slowly, but it is moving.

I also made the self-gratifying decision of learning game development with a game engine specifically for Rust (Bevy). It is said to update with breaking changes about every three months. The concepts aren’t all new to me because I’ve worked with GLFW in C++ for game development, but I’ve never done any visuals in Rust and I’ve never even heard of ECS before. Maybe it’s a horrible choice. Maybe it’ll push me to do things with reasonable scopes and time frames, since they’re all learning projects for now. I just spent a couple hours the other night developing a system where you can click on a dialogue box to read the next bit of dialogue. Most game engines probably give you that out of the box. Still, I’m proud that I figured it out myself.

In the field of note-taking, I’ve been thinking about how to better incorporate fiction into my notes. I have no real place to save character notes or notes on my personal taste. My system was designed for studying. Stories appear intact in the input and output, but the process through mangles them and leaves them empty. They can’t be converted to a series of claims and principles and still emerge recognizable as a story. My previous struggle with this was my refusal to reserve a section of my notes specifically for dealing with fiction. The Zettelkasten system is not designed for sectioning. The idea is that not separating notes by topic makes it easier to draw conclusions across multiple topics. However, I’ve since accepted that (1) a single folder full of everything is horrible to look at and (2) some things simply have their own rhythm that can be better represented with a specialized structure.

So. I now have a new folder for fiction. I’m calling it “world-building” for now, and tagging its contents as various “story elements.” I expect either for the terminology to change or for me to forget it was ever a choice. So far, working with it has already been noticeably different from the usual ZK process. The ZK is about breaking down media and experience into evidence and theories, then collecting notes with recurring themes into a conclusion. This has been more like putting down a large outline, sectioning it into segments, and filling it in piece by piece. Top-down instead of bottom-up. The whole is the primary unit, instead of whole media only being the input and output with a sea of small notes in the middle. We’ll see how it goes for creating new things instead of just migrating old story notes (from memory, because I seem to have lost much of them).

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Music" - underscores

bluedreaming

Unexpected bingo square: Nietzsche quote in my Thai BL 😂

(I originally shared this on discord because that’s where I put microposting these days and then I figured: why not here?)

birdandmoon_feed

https://www.tumblr.com/birdandmoon/821591248664150016

My first comics collection, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, is redesigned and getting reissued on July 28. If you preorder it (or already preordered it!) you can fill out this form and get a printable PDF of one of my most popular comics, a comic I don’t offer online as a print!

https://www.tumblr.com/birdandmoon/821591248664150016

veronyxk84 posting in

anythingdrabble

Title: Night Intruder
Fandom: Viola come il mare
Author:

veronyxk84
Pairing: Viola Vitale/Francesco Demir
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Word count: 100 (Ellipsus)
Spoilers/Setting: Set during S2.
Summary: A night emergency sends Viola straight to Francesco’s door.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Challenge: #447 - Knock

Crossposted:

drabble_zone, My journal (with bonus Italian version), “Chiamami Ancora Amore” - the Series

—
( READ: Night Intruder )

☙ ☙ ☙

oursin

What I read

Finished Second Wind, which was really a bit kitchen-sinky in all the stuff that happened to Our Hero the Physicist Turned Weatherman - I thought Rare Form of Bovine TB was really going a bit far after all the flying through hurricanes etc.

Finished Free for the book-group - account of growing up in Albania just before and just after the Fall of Communism, in a family with rather a lot of intricate backstory on both sides. And a lot of it narrated via perspective of very young person who is, understandably, not being told everything by the parents and living under that particular regime.

Then read JD Robb, Stolen in Death, (In Death #62) (2026), and while I am always pleased when Dallas is not chasing a serial killer or someone with weird perverse agenda, this one did not seem to me one of the top entries in the series, quite apart from the jewel theft from the TATE!!! blooper. (I was trying to construct any scenarios in which there would be v pricey jewels on display alongside, you know, all the PAINTINGS and some sculptures.)

Then I re-read, the first time in a Very Long Time, George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). A lot of it reads like practice-steps for Middlemarch, which has so much more going for it. The plot-stuff to do with legacies, lost heirs, etc, is pretty clunky. Felix himself is somewhat of a pain. There's not much of her humour. Even so, there's some terrific stuff there.

On the go

Winifred Holtby, Poor Caroline (1931), which I appear to have re-read slightly more recently than I thought, though still not very recently.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review. Otherwise, feel I am on a bit of a re-reading things kick.

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elasticella

June 2026

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Page Summary

beanside - You get down on your knees and you cry, cry for absolution.
kalloway - Galaxygazer Concept
dine - English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 10 July 2026
vriddy - Community Thursday
princessofgeeks - HR S2 watch: Hair edition
starwatcher in fandom_checkin - Daily Check-In
peaked in iconic - 259 HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (1x01).
peaked in icons - 259 HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (1x01).
princessofgeeks - Datelandia, what the fuck edition
princessofgeeks - update
troisoiseaux - Reading Wednesday
andersenmom in 100ships - 059: Rose; Xdinary Heroes, Seventeen; Color Therapy (Kwak Jiseok | Gaon, Lee Seokmin | DK)
isis - wednesday reads and things
g_uava in fictional_fans - Creating a GIF or a collage
biteshelter - Check-In and Creative Progress
bluedreaming - small amusements in media references
birdandmoon_feed - My first comics collection, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, is redesigned and getting reissued on
veronyxk84 in anythingdrabble - [Challenge #447] Viola come il mare / Night Intruder
oursin - Wednesday has made an appointment to see the dentist

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