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Hi everybody!

I exist! I'm mostly on tumblr these days and of course ao3... well.

How's everyone holding up?

right, so this is my tumblr if you wanna say hi: tumblr it's mostly about Interview with the Vampire/the Vampire Lestat right now. I've been wanting to change the name to novembermond and change the icon to this one for a while now, to match up with my ao3 and dw but I've never done it and now... this has been one of my longest running social media accounts ever (except dw) so I feel weird changing anything.

yourlibrarian

1) I knew there was something else Halloween related I wanted to post about yesterday. My partner and a number of his students dressed up for Halloween. He told me about one whose costume was hilarious. She dressed up as Patrick from Spongebob in an inflatable outfit. Because the class required various physical activities, she'd have to keep deflating and inflating herself to do them!

2) We watched a "Halloween" themed pair of episodes from Ghosts US over dinner, but later in the evening watched Star Trek Generations instead. It's the only Trek project with both Walter Koenig and Patrick Stewart in it (at least in person -- Koenig also does a voice part in Picard). I hadn't seen it in ages, possibly since I originally did at the cinema. I'd forgotten how much it dealt with mortality. ( Read more... )

3) November looks to be a quick month for me. This week will bring a blessed relief in the end of the midterm elections here (I don't want to build up my hopes as to the result). Next weekend we'll be out of town for a few days. The week after a friend comes to visit. Then the next week I've got delayed appointments and it's Thanksgiving, which means Christmas decorating. And then November is over.

All of which is to say that the extra hour due to the time change could not have been more appreciated.

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linky

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Current Mood: sleepy

lannamichaels

I really need to figure out what all is going on locally for the big siyum. Every time I ask about it in venues that contain people who should know what's getting organized, I get zero actual information. It cannot possibly be necessary for me to organize it. That's just not possible. Are the organizers just not organized, not telling anyone, or are planning to do it in a location where they can just get the room and the information out a month in advance? Who knows, not me! You have seven and a half years notice for this.

But anyway, we continue in firstborns until November 18th. Then a bunch of short ones!

( Read more... )

linky

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Current Mood: creative
Current Music: One Shot

wychwood

The week has been somewhat depressing, between the deaths of Walter Koenig and Patrick Stewart, AO3 going down for several weeks, and then me making a particularly bad decision at work on Friday and having to have a Little Conversation with my boss about my choices. However, I did reach the end of a major stage of the big urgent task I've been working on, so that was nice.

This week's

thefridayfive looked quite fun, though:

01. Name all the orange items in the room you are in.
I don't have many orange things! I've got an ancient jar full of copper coins which has a giant orange lid (it's one of those 1970s food storage things), and most of this room is walled with bookcases so there's a few orange books - at a glance, I can see my Messiah score, N K Jemisin's How Long Til Black Future Month?, David Lodge's How Far Can You Go?, Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and Georgette Heyer's The Masqueraders, which is a fun slice of my interests!

02. What's your favorite fall treat?
I do like butternut squash! We don't have as much of that sort of thing as in the US, and most of what we do have is imports from the US... I've never really liked toffee apples very much, and I can't think of much else specifically autumn-themed.

03. What's your favorite Halloween candy?
Don't think we really have any! Do toffee apples count there also?

04. What's your favorite scary/horror movie?
I don't like horror or scary things generally, but I did really like M Night Shyamalan's Signs, which has some extremely creepy bits. And I'm re-watching Stardust right now, which has lots of evil witches and similarly horror-ish trappings, even if it's not very horrific itself.

05. What are you doing on October 31?
Hah! With Halloween falling on Saturday this year, it meant I was actually at church for the All Hallows Eve Mass. All the altar servers, including the three new ones, turned up so we had a very crowded sanctuary - seven of us! Trying to train that many newbies at once is a complicated affair, but it's a delight to have them all.

I was mildly amused watching a crowd of children piling out of a Halloween party as I walked home afterwards and thinking that technically we'd been celebrating the same thing. One of the houses just along from here goes all-out on garden decorations all year round, and right now they have a huge Halloween display - and clearly also a party, tonight.

Current Mood: melancholy

yourlibrarian

1) Although Halloween may be over for many,

allaboutfood is doing a poll about your Halloween treats.

2) Ads that played on living room TVs accounted for more than one-third of all YouTube ad revenue, Google parent Alphabet reported earlier this week, highlighting how meaningful TV watching has become to both the company and the broader entertainment ecosystem. By contrast Netflix has been shedding a lot of employees and it's stock has dropped almost 50% over a year, as people are largely staying subscribed but watching less.

3) In reading a "10 years later" follow-up on a poll about fanfiction tropes, I commented over at a post

cathexys made that seeing this callback right now makes me think that the way AO3 has brought story types to the fore has had a lot to do with where we are now. AO3's temporary inaccessibility has led to fanfic being treated like disposable content packaged together for dumping into online spaces. ( Read more... )

4) Is anyone planning some special Halloween viewing? And what about tunes?

Poll #35370 Halloween Sounds

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

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Do you like to have Halloween sounds as part of celebrating?

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Yes, a specific playlist
4 (18.2%)

Yes, different Halloween or spooky pop songs
7 (31.8%)

Yes, classical or soundtrack music
2 (9.1%)

Yes, sound effects
0 (0.0%)

Something else I'll mention in comments
2 (9.1%)

No
7 (31.8%)

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jducoeur

I confess, I've never really gotten into Ursula LeGuin. Not sure why exactly -- I think her ideas are great, but her writing style has never really clicked for me, so I haven't read the majority of her works yet.

But I'm always a comics nerd, so when I noticed the Wizard of Earthsea graphic novel on the shelves at Comicazi, I figure I should check it out, and I'm glad I did.

I'm not sure I've ever read the original book, so I can't compare and contrast, but taken on its own, this is an absolute work of art.

Summarizing the story briefly: this is basically a coming-of-age story. Set on the world of Earthsea (a world sea with a large archipelago of islands), our protagonist Ged (known to others as Sparrowhawk) is a wizard of remarkable potential but not always the best control. At a young age he (with the best of intentions) unleashes a dark force that continues to haunt him as he is growing up, until he finally has to stop running from it and confront it.

It's adapted by Fred Fordham, and the word that most comes to mind in this adaptation is "confident". I'm sure that it's not at all word-for-word -- just looking at it, surely a lot of the words have been turned into artwork. But the result is quiet and clear, letting that art set the stage and show the action, using captions mainly for the "historical" narrative voice, setting the stage and the passage of time.

The art is downright painterly, in a way that I don't often see in comics -- each page is very much a set of paintings, putting mood first and centering the important bits, not sweating extraneous detail but letting the details in where they matter. (Ged's scars are always visible, clear and consistent.) The book takes its time, letting entire sequences of pages just show artwork with no words, when words would be extraneous.

That "quiet" is consistent throughout, and it's striking: comics are often a loud medium, full of action and words, but this is going for a very different vibe -- subdued, thoughtful and introspective.

Those who are fond of the original can speak to how faithful the adaptation is, but by itself this is a top-notch book, well worth a read. Highly recommended!

yourlibrarian

1) Reddit is moving to a logged in only format. ( Read more... )

2)

elisi has posted a good reminder of being cautious with YouTube links. Without deleting their source identifier from the link, it can link people to accounts and other people.

3) As I mentioned yesterday, I made

allaboutfood a paid community, and would like to ask if someone who does not have a paid account but who would like to test out the kudos footer would be willing to do so there, so we can see whether the paid status will enable them to do so.

4) I have been quite enjoying Matlock. I am about 5 episodes from being caught up now, and am finding it intriguing how they converted an episodic series about a folksy lawyer into a very serialized one about a woman using the folksy persona in a den of unscrupulous corporate law to solve a mystery over several seasons. Seems like it says a lot about the direction the TV industry has headed in.

This also ties in with my recently finishing Lost Federations: The (Unofficial) Unmade History of Star Trek. ( Read more... )

5) I have also been plowing through Jennifer Ashley's Mrs. Holloway series. I wasn't that taken at first, but have gotten more intrigued as it went along and am now glad that there are 5 more books I've yet to read. Another example, to me, of how serialization not only helps with character development, but makes a verse richer.

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lassarina

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jducoeur

Ewww.

tl;dr — basically, Proton is going completely all-in on LLM-based engineering, to the point of basically implying that engineers who aren’t 100% behind All AI, All the Time will be shown the door before long.

I mean, I do most of my programming via LLM at this point, and generally quite like it, but I still think this is borderline nuts, especially for a company whose brand is all about security. It’s AI-as-religion, without critical thinking about how and when to use it appropriately.

(And the impression it gives of a toxic work environment make all of that even scarier.)

Really pretty sad, but makes me glad I never got around to setting up a Proton account…

jducoeur

I just came across the Haskell GHC policy on LLM contributions to the codebase.

It's relatively long as these things go (not long-long, but more than a page), but by a fair mile the best such policy I've yet come across: thoughtful, balanced, with clear priorities and motivations.

It's broadly similar to the policies I've wound up evolving at my dayjob, and where Typelevel has been getting to -- I feel like a consensus is emerging, at least among those of us who are in the middle ground of this subject.

Well worth a read, for anybody involved in code!

winterfirelight

As many have noted already, Ao3 is unexpectedly down, and they seem to anticipate being so for... 2-4 weeks. I don't know what the cause is, and though there are some wide-ranging speculations I've seen floating around, I'm content to not know until they manage to tell us. For now, I'm sure all the volunteers are running absolutely mad trying to resolve it, whatever it is, and I don't want them having to expend yet more energy trying to placate the masses while they're at it.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that it gives me time to build up more of a buffer for my current WIP. I'll probably also take it as an opportunity to get more of my stuff cross-posted over here on DW. Most of it's already here, I think, except for the latter half of The Long Longfic and the one I've been posting lately.

I'm enjoying the new one I've been working on. An alternate version of Red Hood: The Lost Days, in which Jason Todd actually cares about how he managed to come back from the dead and goes to seek some answers during his journey towards becoming Red Hood. No Talia or Lazarus Pits in this one - no disrespect to them or anything, there just wasn't room for them in the particular story I wanted to tell. His resurrection in canon doesn't really make any more sense with them in the picture, anyway.

And he's a fun character to explore. I tend to hold myself back from getting into new stuff because of the amount to which I lose myself in it (I have made my partner promise never to let me get into X-Men again because I'd like to stay gainfully employed) so I suppose it's no surprise I didn't read much in the way of his comics before now. But as I'm writing, I am finding it interesting how many accidental parallels are working their way in between this work and The Long Longfic. I suppose certain themes have always been interesting to me. Mortality, morality, duality.

(Am I writing about this in part to distract myself from the news about Patrick Stewart? Yes. Yes I am. My partner is working late tonight and I don't think he's heard and I don't want to devastate him with it until he's got bandwidth for it, but I am lowkey hoping we can manage a light Star Trek marathon tonight.)

Current Mood: pensive

yourlibrarian

I have tried to start a post six times today and keep getting stalled by something else.

1) What a week: Walter Koenig, Patrick Stewart, AO3 being down for weeks, still so much going on re: Pillowfort migrations. Tiring and sad.

2) Frustrating morning. Was doing the grocery run to two stores to get items for a Halloween dinner. Realized after unpacking everything that we were low on Worcestershire sauce and I'd forgotten to put it on my list. Decided to walk back to get my steps in and take our old phone for trade-in at Best Buy. ( Read more... )

3) Someone told me this week that with a paid account I can post polls wherever I post. I haven't tried it out yet but I will. What I was thinking is that I could do this for the communities I run so that others can enable Kudos polls at those locations as well.

4) My last Pillowfort Blanket Box: Pillowfort Eulogy Blanketbox by iimpavid (Originally posted October 20, 2026) ( Read more... )

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returnofcor

I don't usually post about celebrity deaths, but oh man Patrick Stewart. I almost can't believe it, you know? He was my captain, how can he be gone?

Current Mood: sad

trobadora

Hi! *waves*

Health:

My cold improved for a few days ... and then abruptly got drastically worse. I was completely out of commission for two days last week, I don't think I was out of bed for more than four hours or so a day. Then things started gradually improving again, and now the cold is much better except for a nasty persistent cough. Keeping up with work was about all I could manage to do this week, though - I have a lot of DW posts to catch up on!

Exchanges:

Yuletide assignments are out and requests are revealed! And I already have plenty of ideas for what I'm going to write. Looking forward to playing with this, but first ...

ficinabox! I gotan extension for this, since I was sick basically most of October and not much writing happened at all. But I've known what I want to write since the start, so now all I have to do is sit down and write. Hopefully I can make some significant inroads this weekend!

AO3 outage:

Of course all deadlines are uncertain right now depending on what happens with AO3. Because there's an outage - and the site might not be fully back for 2-4 weeks ... Fingers crossed they'll get some part of things up again much sooner. No news on what happened yet, but that's a pretty serious issue that can take the site down that long!

I've been slacking off on crossposting my fic, so maybe this weekend I'll make a project of doing that. It's a simple thing to do for when I don't have enought focus left to write more!

linky

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Current Mood: tired
Current Music: One Shot

lassarina

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zvi

Dear Yule Goat,

Thank you for making something for me. The bottom line, if you're scanning the letter quickly. I would like some happy endings or fun worldbuilding for the canons and characters I have requested.

I have given you a lot of ideas below. This list is intended to reduce stress and anxiety for you. Please pick a few suggestions you will find interesting or easy or fun to work with, and feel free to ignore where our kinks and favorites conflict. I hope to get a creation with one or two things I like, do not feel any pressure to cram all of my likes in one piece.

Sincerely,

zvi LikesTV

P.S. I will copy and paste my requests and optional details below, but I put all of my canon-specific suggestions in the optional details.

P.P.S. I am open to receiving interactive fiction, epistolary fiction, and other formal writing experiments as my main gift, but I am not open to poetry or song lyrics. I am open to receiving non-textual work as a treat.

How this letter is organized

Some stuff I like in general: themes and tropes I do want
Do Not Wants: Broken down by stylistic stuff, themes, genres, sex acts
Requests and optional details
( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful

yourlibrarian

As a reminder, all of these can be found at

pillowfortu_haul. Funnily enough, while I remembered filling out this next Blanket Box, I actually forgot I created it! I'm also going to amend some choices, given the time that has passed.

1) 5 Media Formats Blanket Box (originally posted September 3, 2018)

The first rule is that there are no rules.
Interpret and respond to the prompts however you'd like -- change the media formats to games, comics, animation, theater, whatever formats you're fannish about content in.
Feel free to add prompts or questions. ( Read more... )

2) Stuff that makes me happy by prettyarbitrary (Originally posted December 4, 2019) ( Read more... )

3) Pillowfort Anniversary Blanket Box coordinated by enchantedsleeper (Originally posted April 3, 2026) ( Read more... )

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