lannamichaels: "Sunset Towers faced east" (westing game)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Title: The Deere Files Podcast Presents: The Heirs Of Samuel Westing.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: The Westing Game
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: What do a Supreme Court Justice, the chairwoman of the board of the largest employer in Wisconsin, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, the inventor of Hoo's Little Foot-Eze innersoles, and a dead union organizer who didn't exist have in common?


There was no such person as Barney Northrup )

What Else is AI Doing?

Nov. 22nd, 2025 01:13 pm
yourlibrarian: Spock knows that's not canon (TREK-NotCanon)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) Saw the One to One: John and Yoko documentary. It was, I thought, a clever way of creating one with very little new footage or audio recordings. It focuses on a 2 year period where they are in a small apartment in the Village and basically drops in bits about the two within a larger documentary weaving pop culture and political activity clips as if switching TV channels. Read more... )

2) Disney+ to Allow User-Generated Content Via AI. It's hard for me to imagine how this could possibly work. The only thing I can figure is that they plan to use a version of AI that is more like a choose your own adventure option, than something open to user input.

In other AI news however: "A staggering 97% of listeners cannot distinguish between artificial intelligence-generated and human-composed songs...underscoring growing concerns that AI could upend how music is created, consumed and monetized.

The findings of the survey, for which Ipsos polled 9,000 participants across eight countries, including the U.S., Britain and France...found that 73% of respondents supported disclosure when AI-generated tracks are recommended, 45% sought filtering options, and 40% said they would skip AI-generated songs entirely. Around 71% expressed surprise at their inability to distinguish between human-made and synthetic tracks." Read more... )

3) Big Tech banks on our laziness."Like any new technology, AI is a natural threat to these businesses, whose basic technology is already decades old. There’s a very real threat that a newcomer like OpenAI could mount a successful challenge to Google Search or Amazon Web Services. Yet, ingeniously, the platforms may manage to ward off AI challengers by using AI themselves to reinforce their dominance, protecting monopoly positions and justifying their large investments. Doing so depends, more than anything, on using AI to further increase our dependence and that sense of couchlock....Read more... )

4) Webtoon Entertainment Inc. is partnering with Walt Disney to bring Star Wars and Marvel comics to Webtoon's English platform and with Warner Bros. Animation to co-produce animated series for global distribution.

5) Although this article focused on how many people want to listen to music made with AI, it was rather an interesting picture painted of how people consume music at all, what they know about artist pay, and what sorts of music related things they're willing to spend money on.

One thing I found personally interesting is that they either were not asked or did not respond, that a main way to encounter new music was via TV or movies, even though some of them mentioned that soundtracks were their favorite genre. I know it's been one of my big 3 ways for decades now.

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current fandom comms/events

Nov. 21st, 2025 10:18 pm
svgurl: (smallville: clark/lois/oliver ot3)
[personal profile] svgurl
[tumblr.com profile] hurtcember is a prompt a day event in December based on "hurt" themes.

[tumblr.com profile] medcember is a medical whump themed prompt a day event that will take place in December.

[tumblr.com profile] depress-december is a prompt a day event in December with prompts based on depression and mental health.

[tumblr.com profile] daddecember is a 30 day daily prompt fest taking place in December based on father & child platonic relationships.

[community profile] animatedfanfiction is a community for posting any fanfiction based on animation, including any type of cartoons, animated films/shows, or anime.

[community profile] austenexchange is running a Jane Austen fest to celebrate her 250th birthday. Prompting for all her works is welcome until 8AM UTC on December 16th, when works will be revealed, but you can still posts fills after that.

[community profile] fandomtrees, a multi fandom gifting fest, is open for sign-ups until December 5th, 11:59PM UTC.

[community profile] smallfandombang, a big bang for small fandoms, has opened artist sign-ups until January 31st, 2026.

[community profile] womansplace is going to host Rec-Cember, an event where you can post meta and recs of fic, vids, art, podfic, meta, graphics, etc - any fannish endeavor you enjoy that are focused on women throughout the month of December.




[community profile] holly_poly signups are now open.

They will remain so until 11:00am UTC on 26 November.

Check the signup post here and the tagset here.

october booklog

Nov. 20th, 2025 09:21 pm
wychwood: Rodney is surrounded by idiots (SGA - Rodney surrounded by idiots)
[personal profile] wychwood
Pro-tip: reading two books called "The Seven [nouns] of Evelyn [surname]" at the same time is a bad idea and will lead to confusion.

The Commonweal books 2-5 - Graydon Saunders ) A very satisfying series; I look forward to the next book when it comes out!


114. A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine ) I loved the first book, but found this one a slog for slightly inexplicable reasons.


115. The Trials of Life - David Attenborough ) Entertaining as ever.


117. Nettle and Bone - T Kingfisher ) I don't know if it's me or Kingfisher who has changed, but I don't enjoy these as much as I did. This is fine! But I used to find her books better than fine.


120. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid ) This was so much better than I had anticipated; I'm definitely looking out for her Fleetwood Mac book now.


121. DallerGut Dream Department Store - Miye Lee ) I enjoyed it enough that I kept reading, but I was glad it wasn't longer.


122. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches - Sangu Mandanna ) This was very fluffy and pleasant, but had just enough depth that I enjoyed it instead of getting annoyed.


123. Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After - Ben Aaronovitch, Celeste Bronfman, Andrew Cartmel, Jose Maria Beroy, and Jordi Escuin Llorach ) Not especially memorable, but fun enough.


124. The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society - CM Waggoner ) I really enjoyed this, and the way it's messing around with genre; I think I'd like to re-read it, and see how it feels when I know where it's going.


125. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton ) I suppose this is cleverly done, but it was all so loathsome I really had to drag myself through it, and by the time we found out all the answers I didn't even really care.


126. Translation State - Ann Leckie ) I liked this more on re-read, and I liked it quite a bit the first time! Just so many nice people doing their best, and complicated politics, and it's so good.


127. England - John Lewis-Stempel ) A generally solid nature writer; I don't know if I'll read more by him, but I did enjoy the English focus.


128. Leviathan Wakes - James SA Corey ) Much less space-opera-y than I had osmosed, but this was pretty gripping, and I'll definitely be reading the next book.


129. The Feud in the Chalet School - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) this is solid as ever.


130. Phonogram vol 1: Rue Britannia - Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie ) This is clearly well done, despite my somewhat mixed feelings; I feel like it's probably a must-read for actual Britpop fans, but even outside that there's still something good in there.


131. Testimony of Mute Things - Lois McMaster Bujold ) If you like this series, you'll enjoy this; I did. And it was nice to see baby Penric again!


132. Deeds of Youth - Elizabeth Moon ) I enjoy this world, and the stories she tells in it, but ultimately I think I mostly want more about the specific characters I already know and love! But I enjoyed these anyway.


133. Batgirls: One Way or Another - Becky Cloonan, Michael W Conrad, Jorge Corona, and Sarah Stern ) I have less patience for the actual High Stakes Superheroing than I used to, but I loved watching the three Batgirls working together. Delightful.


134. Stress in the Workplace - Howard Edwards ) The failure mode of satire is dull, as this book demonstrates capably.

Fandom Trees!

Nov. 20th, 2025 09:19 pm
trobadora: (Discworld: Hogfather)
[personal profile] trobadora
[community profile] fandomtrees posts have been going up, and mine was in the most recent batch, yay! This is one of my favourite events of the season (next to Yuletide) - I loved [livejournal.com profile] fandom_stocking back in the day, and this is still just as much fun.

Here's my tree, and this is what I'm requesting this year:
  • Grimm
  • 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
  • Grimm/Guardian crossover
  • 镇魂 | Guardian RPF
  • Legend of the Seeker
  • Sherlock (BBC)
  • 绅探 | Detective L
  • 山河令 | Word of Honor, 天涯客 | Faraway Wanderers
  • Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
  • Chinese fic recs
  • food or cooking icons
Hoping to see some of you there too! Especially since this is one of those events where you're doing people a favour by signing up - the more requests there are, the more other people can find someone to create something for. :D

ETA: Sign-ups here!

New Stargate?!

Nov. 19th, 2025 10:23 pm
trobadora: (McShep bronzed by ahkna)
[personal profile] trobadora
According to Gateworld, Amazon (which owns the franchise now *sighs*) has greenlighted a new Stargate series! And it's not a reboot!

I was never into SG-1, and I still resent Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi for the way they ditched SGA in favour of SGU, dumped on SGA's female fans, and then were offended when SGA fans weren't interested in SGU. But I really loved Stargate Atlantis. It was my main fandom for many years, and I have so many fond memories both of the show and the fandom. I haven't rewatched it in a while, but it's one of the things on my list that I definitely want to go back to when I have some time and no energy for new stuff.

My main ship was McShep, but even more than that, Sheppard was my favourite character, and I loved reading Sheppard gen. My secondary ship - a tiny pool noodle of a rarepair - was Teyla/Bates, and I still wish it had been more popular. (Maybe if I'd written fic myself? Unlikely, but ... *g*)

Still, even though I was very active in SGA - I co-ran [livejournal.com profile] sga_newsletter, co-modded [community profile] mcshep_match and [livejournal.com profile] mensa_au and [livejournal.com profile] teyla_bates, among other things - I never wrote any fic for it. Part of it is that I got into SGA during my three-year writers' block (which Doctor Who eventually broke), but even afterwards, despite my brain being constantly full of scenarios, they never crossed that line into writing. Possibly in part because the fandom was big and kept me busy! But surely that can't explain it entirely, and I'm honestly not sure what other reasons there might be. (Why do some fandoms never make me write? A mystery for the ages! *g*) Anyway, it'll be interesing to see, when I eventually rewatch again, whether that'll change ...

And it's very unlikely the same magic will happen twice, but when/if a new Stargate show does happen, unless the premise is itself unappealing, I'm absolutely giving it a chance.
wychwood: Trip staggering (Ent - broken)
[personal profile] wychwood
First day back at work fairly whizzed by; between catching up with email, Teams messages, and the spam queue, redoing and circulating all the team monthly reports because it turned out we didn't have any data for 30 or 31 October when I did them, and my interim PDR I was fairly bushed by the end of the day. The PDR went well, but was quite intense. Then I staggered off to my singing lesson, but surprisingly was somewhat revived by Schumann, who is not normally that inspiring for me.

Then I came home and tackled a pile of evening tasks. The cleaner is coming tomorrow, and I had an accumulation of things in my to-do list that I hadn't got to. There's still quite a few left, but I have least ordered the things I wanted from Boots. Or Miss H did it for me, at least, after a catalogue of disasters including six successful orders cancelled immediately after I placed them, Paypal getting into a loop where I had to input a 2FA code in order to be shown a captcha which then told me I had completed it successfully and hung indefinitely (at least three times), attempts involving two payment methods, three computers, two different web browsers, on multiple days... all of them identically unsuccessful. As I said despairingly to Miss H, I just wanted to buy some insoles, how could it possibly be so hard.

It worked fine for her, anyway, and I've paid her back so soon I will have my spare hot water bottle etc.

And on that note of triumph I am going to transport myself to bed where hopefully the current hot water bottle will have made everything lovely.

This one's on me, I admit it.

Nov. 16th, 2025 11:28 am
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd) has now joined Breakfast In America (Supertramp) in the storied annals of: *actually pays attention to the lyrics for the first time* this song's about WHAT?


"Lanna, what did you think Free Bird was about?"

IDK, SOMEONE WHO LIKES TRAVELING!

Alas, dryer

Nov. 15th, 2025 02:37 pm
azurelunatic: panic button.  (panic)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
The washer saga ended a little while ago, with a brand repair tech who corrected something simple. Thursday night (the start of Friday wash day) the dryer gave up.

Since the dryer had been leaving unsightly rust streaks on all the lights, I have not been subtle in my campaign for a new one.

Delivery is scheduled for today, of a dryer with a steam cycle but without wifi.

pootling through life

Nov. 14th, 2025 10:07 pm
wychwood: Xena in front of a flaming building (XWP - death destroyer of worlds)
[personal profile] wychwood
Annual leave is so nice but now I have to go back to work on Monday :(. On the other hand, I do still have a whole weekend first, even if it's relatively busy. The deacon trainee is being ordained acolyte and lector on Sunday and some of the training people showed up last weekend and Announced that we would be providing more servers than we actually have seats for and also a thurifer, and since I am presently the only thurifer available, I have to go. Truly I am punished for not having arranged the training I was supposed to be organising back in the spring before Mum got sick. Fortunately one of my four Sunday video calls has rescheduled so it's a slightly less ludicrous calendar than might have been the case.

Anyhow. I have done very little; read two turn-of-the-century novels (nineteenth to twentieth, that is), finally caught up with laundry after getting out of cycle while I was with Mum, got through the three Tablet issues I had waiting and started the one that arrived today, did the tragically overdue washing up, and went to the cinema to see The Choral. I enjoyed it! I would say it was a war story more than a choir story, but Gerontius is important to the plot and I did like what they did with it. And, much as I love superhero films, it's nice to see something that isn't one of the endless sequels, remakes, shared universes, etc etc, that make up most cinema these days.

I also progressed my ebook catalogue a bit - went through all my StoryBundle purchases, downloaded anything that wasn't on my phone and therefore in the catalogue already, and added them to the catalogue (along with the source) and the phone. Also added a sheet for audiobooks and put in the ones I've bought from libro.fm since I started my subscription. Next up would be the various Humble Bundles, which is a much larger number of bundles and piles of audiobooks as well as ebooks, so I've put that off until another week...

bobby nash icons

Nov. 14th, 2025 11:14 am
svgurl: (stock: lighthouse)
[personal profile] svgurl
I made Bobby Nash (9-1-1) icons for the [community profile] seasons_of_fandom 'the graveyard' challenge.

icons )

lannamichaels: "Sunset Towers faced east" (sunset towers)
[personal profile] lannamichaels

  • -the book does not take place in a specific year but it takes place on specific days of the week corresponding to days of the month: November 15th is explicitly a Saturday.

    The book was published in 1978. November 15th was not a Saturday in 1978. In previous fics, I've just set it in 1978 anyway, because who cares. And I did that here but it's bothering me that, especially when I need to reference things on a specific date, the day/week doesn't match up.

    So I opened Excel to find what year(s) in the 1970s had a date/weekday correspondance. And it's only 1975.

    The moon phases don't match up to 1975 but the moon phases are not something that is going to bother me; me specifically having the start of the game happen in the middle of the week instead of Sunday, that bothers me.

    And still I dithered because I'd made myself a reference table with the heirs's birth years based on their ages in canon and then how old they'd be in 2007, when the fic is set, and I'd used that throughout the fic, and if I changed it to 1975, I'd have to change all of that. aldkfa;ldkfja;lkdjsfalks

    But I'm going to do it anyway, and not only because I was like "okay wait, when you change everything and actually save the excel file this time instead of just copying the table with | into scrivener, make sure you have Crow's birthyear right because her birthday is Nov 15, so her age given in her bio will not be the year she turns during canon" and it turns out I'd had it wrong in the reference table anyway.

    So now I need to change every single year that is mentioned at any point in the fic but at least it won't bother me anymore, the day of the week problems.


  • THEY UPDATED THE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK

    All right. So. Rosalie, Flora Baumbach's daughter. She is referred to as a "Mongoloid" child in the book. She is referred to as that in both physical copies of the book I have.

    But also I got the ebook out from the library to have on my phone too while doing this because why the hell not, and! it turns out! that the line that was originally "She had a retarded daughter, Rosalie, a Mongoloid child", now it just says "She had a disabled child, Rosalie"! (I give them only half a point in cutting "retarded" since they keep "retarded" in the discussion between Theo and Mrs. Baumbach about Chris)

    Now, yes, I am fine with them removing both those terms BUT BUT BUT now since they just went with "disabled", now you have to rely on context clues and physical description of Rosalie to know that she had Down's!

    It's an incredibly minor characterization detail, but I think it's a VERY IMPORTANT minor characterization detail in how Mrs. Baumbach relates to 1) Chris, and 2) Turtle, that Rosalie had Down's. And now it's "idek, figure it out from the clues we'll pepper in". JUST SAY SHE HAD DOWN'S SYNDROME. IT'S IMPORTANT.


  • And great, from a canon review/consistency stage, now I have to worry what else was changed in the book. (I haven't spotted any other changes but I did spot a typo: Sam Westing is called "Sara Westing" at one point. THAT WOULD BE A VERY DIFFERENT BOOK. DON'T GET ME WRONG, I WOULD READ THAT BOOK. BUT THAT IS NOT THIS BOOK.)


  • It was not until this day (or, uh, yesterday? Two days ago? Some point in recent history) that I realized that... maybe Flora Baumbach is Jewish? Jake Wexler is textually. But... was I supposed to get the impression that Flora Baumbauch, nee Miller, is Jewish? Because the character never did that for me at any point at any time in the decades I have been rereading this book, but some of her various backstory details... uh, is she Jewish and I just never noticed?


  • Also Denton Deere seems to have massively changed medical specialties during the book but you know what, that's unimportant.


  • I appreciate that the book tells me that Turtle did not change her name upon marriage. I had to make an executive decision that Alice is just Deere, she is not hyphenated, even though she'd be in peak generational and peak socio-economical to be Wexler-Deere. But I made it just Deere for narrative reasons.

    Why do I keep stumbling into fandoms where I have to make decisions about the last name of canonical children of the characters. Why.

    Also I had to decide if Angela changed her name but at least that's not a load-bearing decision. She's an orthopedic surgeon. She's probably Dr. Wexler at work! But did she otherwise change it? Did she hyphenate? There's a good chance she hyphenated.

    Dr. Deere is her husband, Dr. Wexler is her father... Angela, what did you do. (I have it as Dr. Deere right now and will likely keep it that way, on the theory that Grace pushed her hard to change her name and Angela went along with it.)

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