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I'm on holiday!
I haven't been blogging much on this trip, because it's mostly a trip to see friends and family. But yesterday was all about tourism, and I spent the day in Aachen, Germany, in 36C heat. I came here once before with friend L, when she showed me the place briefly, and I knew I needed to come back. Six years later, here I am.

My favourite thing about Aachen, although I've no idea how true it is, is this quote from Wikivoyage:

"As Aachen is a legally recognised spa, it could call itself Bad Aachen, but refuses to do so, as it then would no longer be first in almost all alphabetical lists."

My second favourite thing about Aachen, and the reason I'm here, is undoubedly the cathedral. It's unique, and beautiful. The central octagonal part dates from the 9th century, while the gothic "extension" is newer. It was built as the seat of Charlemagne (and this is why the octagonal shape - it resembles an Orthodox cathedral and he was making a statement about being equal to the rulers of the eastern empire). The throne that was allegedly his, and almost certainly wasn't, is present in the upper level. But it's not really the history that interests me so much as the look of the thing, with wonderful mosaics on the ceilings and a general sense of opulance that actually - in contrast to most Catholic opulance - manages to look well-designed. I didn't bring my good camera on this trip, but here are some phonecam photos.

Exterior view showing a tall but narrow octagonal section between a larger gothic bit and a tower (which is actually part of the city hall)

Exterior view showing a tall but narrow octagonal section between a larger gothic bit and a tower (which is actually part of the city hall)

Interior, looking down at the octagon. A two-level space with marble walls and an intricate mosaic floor, seats for worshippers.

Tall choir in a gothic style. Stained glass either side, golden reliquaries on stands in the centre.

Blue and gold mosaic ceiling with a hanging lantern. Vaulting between marble-clad columns.

lassarina

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linky

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Current Mood: tired

linky

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Current Mood: contemplative

yourlibrarian

1) As part of

sunshine_revival's first challenge: "Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community."

I just shared some necklaces I made a few months back over at

everykindofcraft. I did a lot of beading in the first 13 years after I took it up, but things have been rather start and stop in the last 10. A craft store closeout + a challenge from a relative got me making some new things in the last few months. That probably also contributed to my starting

everykindofcraft here, because I saw various people posting wonderful stuff that not many people were seeing, whereas on Pillowfort some general craft communities there are always getting posts.

Hopefully we can get more crafters sharing here!

2) Have been watching a slew of Apple+ shows as our subscription cutoff nears. The miniseries Disclaimer was framed in an interesting way, one which I suspect had a lot more clarity in multimedia than in the book, but perhaps not. It uses multiple narrative voices and POV for the narration, including second person, first person, and some omniscient narrative. This was pretty relevant because of who was being framed (literally) and who actually got to have their voice(s) heard. ( Read more... )

3) Surface is a story told in a much more straightforward manner even though it also involves an unreliable narrator of sorts in that our central character had memory loss and is trying to piece together her past which also involves a parental mystery. ( Read more... )

4) Also saw the movie Wolfs, which is fine but largely a vehicle for us to watch Pitt and Clooney do fun stuff. ( Read more... )

5) Finished The Big Conn and Cowboy Cartel, two documentaries about big crime. I found the former much more interesting, even though I'd heard about the case before. What was probably the most striking about both was the role of the media in precipitating change. ( Read more... )

6) Careme was marketed as the story of the first celebrity chef, who served Napoleon, Tallyrand and others. It was certainly about far more than cooking. ( Read more... )

Poll #33317 Kudos Footer-529

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gremdark

(NSFW fics are fully indexed, but SFW is a work in progress)
Hello! Thank you so much for considering podficcing my work!
This is a list of fanfics written by me, matched to the Battleship 2025 tags they contain. It's very long, so you'll probably want to navigate by expanding the list and using CTRL + F.
This list is in good faith and as accurate as I can make it. Everything on my AO3 profiles (Emmalylis and gremdark) is under blanket permission for podfic and other recursive fanworks.
Format is Title (fandom, word count to nearest hundred): tag A, tag B, tag C

Index:

Main "Dear Creator" letter (Likes and DNWs)
Podfic "Glossary" (You are here)
Anime, RPF, Music, and Podcast Prompts
Books & Literature Prompts
Cartoon & Webcomic Prompts
Movie & TV Prompts

( NSFW Fics: )

SFW Fics:

The Mystery of Agreste Manor (Father Brown, Miraculous Ladybug, 3.6k): Advice, Angst, Apologies, Chronic Illness, Coming of Age, Complicated Relationships, Disabled Character, Epiphany, Exploration, Family, Fealty/Devotion, Genius, Grief/Mourning, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Kindness, Law, Loneliness, Magical Girls (Genre), Middle-Aged Protagonist, POV Outsider, Regret, Religious Guilt, Secret Identity, Teamwork,

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat D'égout (Ratatouille (2007), Miraculous Ladybug, 1.2k): Adoption, Bonding, Complicated Relationships, Costume, Cuddling & Snuggling, Family, Found Family, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Oblivious Character, Secret Identity, Siblings

Fever Dreams (Miraculous Ladybug, 1k): Altered Mental States, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Ambiguous/Undefined Relationships, Angst, Anything For You, Caretaking, Chronic Illness (This is canon), Complicated Relationships, Disabled Character, Exhaustion, Fealty/Devotion, Forehead Kisses, Forehead Touching, Headaches and Migraines, Illness/Injury Recovery, Major Illness/Injury, Nausea, Romantic Gestures, Sickfic/art, Tenderness, Villainous Love Interest, Vulnerability, Waking Up Sick, Worsening Illness

The Long Wait (Miraculous Ladybug, 1.1k): Angst, Cosy Domesticity, Established Relationship, Family, Gentle Touches, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, Kindness, Loyalty, Middle-aged Protagonist, News Media, Old Married Couple (Or a middle aged one, anyway)

Rice Pudding and the Promise of Peace (Miraculous Ladybug, 3.1k): Amnesia, Angst, Bed Sharing, Bittersweet, Childhood Backstory, Cosy Domesticity, Crying, Established Relationship, Family, Forehead Kisses, Gentle Touches, Grief/Mourning, Happiness, Memories, Non-sexual Intimacy, Post-Canon, Sharing Food/Drinks, Tenderness, Vulnerability

Something Old, Something New, Something Spotted, and Something Mew (Miraculous Ladybug, 1.8k): Best Friends, Celebrations, Costume, Crying, Forehead Kisses, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Magical Girls (Genre), Secret Relationship, Sewing

ursamajor

When

belladonna shares a tweet that got screencapped and put up on Insta:

@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now

and I was like "Yeah! There was this whole thing about NYC's tap water possibly being not kosher because of copepods in the water supply a few years back. Which might've meant that NYC bagels, whose lauded taste and texture were credited to the tap water used to boil them, were potentially treyf. But then other rabbis weighed in and said as long as the proportion of these microscopic crustaceans was less than 1/60th of the total volume, it was okay by the principle of בטל בשישים (bitul b'shishim/beteil beshishim), thank you Shabot6000."

... and then I realized "a few years back" was 21 years ago.

Current Mood: silly

winterfirelight

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

The first goal of July is learning more html to use on Dreamwidth!

...starting with this li'l collapsible, and continuing with bullet points. This is fun! Other goals for July include:

Completing an online course for the CompTIA A+ exam that I don't intend to take yet but would like to learn the material for regardless

Gifting someone IRL an herbal gift of some kind - don't care who or what, I'm just running out of space and need to make room!

Giving my cat more attention, apparently, as he tries to sit on my arm while I type this. As if he doesn't get enough attention by screaming to be held all day long. I love this obnoxious little man <3

Starting on the next section of my longfic! Bonus stretch goal is finishing that section, but that's a longshot, especially with everything else going on. My overarching goal is to finish the entire work before the end of the year.

Not sitting and staring uselessly at my work computer when I have nothing to do and instead using that time for something actually productive even if it's not work (the hardest on this list, tbh)

I am tempted by the creative prompt too, but I think I'll let it lie for today. Inspiration may strike later in the month, and I'll plan to tackle it at that point.

yourlibrarian

All work posted at this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

trobadora

It rained for three hours straight - thunderstorm, hail and torrential rain - and didn't cool done one bit. That shouldn't be allowed. And now we have all the heat and all the humidity, and ugh.

(Hi! I'm still here. Things are just very busy and I can't seem to find the time or energy for posting, much less keeping up with anything other than the

sid_guardian discussions ... I hope everyone's doing well, whether you're caught in this heat wave too or not.)

lannamichaels

Title: Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: Captain America
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Aliens wrote Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford built the pyramids, and Steve Rogers was never Captain America.

( I started this in 2019 and then ignored it every time I saw it instead of getting it to fit wordcount )

swaldman

HOT

But aside from that, partly in search of a/c, I went to the Royal Academy summer exhibition. Mostly it was stuff that did nothing for me, but clearly thought very worthy. That’s OK, art is about personal taste. THe things I liked were generally £15000 or more, but that's also OK, as I didn't go in with the intention of buying anything - I know that buying art at the Royal Academy isn't for the likes of me.

Except, right at the end, there was a screenprint of wind turbines that spoke to me; it really captured the amount of energy in the air in a way that photos of a wind farm can’t. I bought a limited edition print for a just-about affordable amount.

The next day I met up with friend L and we went to see the musical of Benjamin Button. I was a little sceptical of this, but it won me over: An intimate show in a small theatre, and not a typical West End show. Musically it's folky, trying (and succeeding) to be anchored in Cornwall. There is no orchestra per se. The actors all play instruments - usually more than one - and switch between singing, acting, and playing, fluidly, sometimes within a line of a song. Must have been a nightmare to cast for. If I have a criticism it's that the lyrics don't have great depth, but that doesn't really matter. It's good music, it's good storytelling with impact and humour, it's nicely lit, and most of all it is really well directed - with the exception of the titular character it's an ensemble piece where the audience’s attention has to be guided slickly around the stage, and it accomplishes this with ease.
Worth a visit if this appeals to you. Act 2 is a tearjerker...

Current Mood: hot

yourlibrarian

1) A few more trip photos posted over at

common_nature, these of Oneonta Gorge.

2) Saw The Flash film and found it better than expected but also so-so. The big problem to me was the lead himself. Granted his character isn't really written to have any charm but a good bit of the humor fell flat for me, and when he was on screen twice as much it made it worse. ( Read more... )

3) Just an update about the bed situation listed in my last post. Everything went well! The youngsters delivering the bed had no problem with taking the old one down to the moving truck, and moving the other one to another room. ( Read more... )

4) A new wrinkle in the last few weeks is that during yet another heavy rain we got a leak near our front door. ( Read more... )

5) I quite liked this diagram of the interaction between entertainment production and fan activities. This came from an interview on Henry Jenkins' blog about a new set of textbooks for studying fandom.

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lassarina

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gremdark

Polyamory in fic has plenty of group sex and non-Euclidean cuddle arrangements, but not much representation of the frantic cat-herding energy necessary to travel anywhere with even a subset of the group. This makes sense, because cat-herding is seldom romantic. I’m often the biggest bitch in any given room, so this weekend I was chief cat-herder.

Our short, clean three hour road trip (1) to a local Pride festival ballooned as more and more people remembered friends or girlfriends or brothers of girlfriends who might like to come along. What in past years had been a 3-5 person trip became a fourteen person trip, to my slow horror. Cue groupchat avalanche!

Among the party were my fiancé, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, two additional girlfriends of hers, my best friend, his roommate, and a local college friend. Never let it be said that I am into timely or organized people. Opposites attract!

I planned many human delays into our itinerary, so everyone ended up fed, entertained, and (with one exception) non-sunburnt. Along the way we met up for meals and hugs and lake time with several old friends, including my best friend from the second grade. We spent a few hours swimming in a lake a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up. Then we showered (2), glittered up, and went to a used bookstore along the parade route to meet up with friends. 8/10 of the people I set out to bring to the Pride parade itself made it there in the end, and 80% is pretty good! (3)

After the parade, we went back into the bookstore to wait for crowds to disperse. It’s this labyrinthine little shop that seems to grow every time I visit, and I always walk away with a copious amount of new reading material. This trip’s acquisitions include The Key To Rondo (a childhood favorite), a Marianne Moore collection, and this gorgeous old book of Longfellow’s poetry bound in green fabric, with gilt lilies on the cover.

I also managed to score a few birthday treats for my best friend. I found a lovely little chest at Goodwill a few months ago, cleaned it up, and have been steadily filling it with small trinkets and presents. His birthday’s in two months, and by then the chest will be full. All it’s missing now is a Weird Sex Object of some description. (Comment-suggestions for weird sex objects under 25 USD welcome.)

All in all, it was a good, if hectic, weekend. I am excited to put the cat-herding behind me and get some rest.

(1) American style, as one of my Discord servers put it.

(2) Don’t talk to me until you’ve marshaled six people through a hotel shower in under an hour.

(3) The other two dressed very slowly, arrived an hour after the parade was over, and went for cocktails. My fiancé’s stepmom calls this “queer time” when she does it. I find it irritating, but tolerable in non-load-bearing situations.

Current Mood: proud

ursamajor

hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: ride e canta nel sole l'infinita nostra felicita // gloria a te!

lannamichaels

I'm not sure if it's a sign of improving mental health (less hoarding/control tendencies!) or a sign of worsening mental health (lack of interest/care about things) in that after discovering that, no, even logging in with my RSS reader to ao3 won't make archive-locked fics show up in RSS feed, my reaction is: eh, that's the author's problem that I never see their fic, not mine.

I fully disagree with a lot of the reasons people lock their fic on ao3 (especially the way many people on tumblr frame it as them being "forced" to do so) but hey, it's their decision.

Once upon a time, if you wanted people to see your fic, you would do things about it. Maybe you'd send it to a mailing list. Maybe you'd post on a LJ community.

And now what people seem to do a lot of is just post it to ao3 and never crosspost about it anywhere. Their assumption is, you'll see it on Ao3.

But I don't. Because a small one fandom archive, sure, I could look at it every so often and see the what's new.

But I'm following a lot of ao3 tags and I am not checking ao3 for 1) any locked fics, which don't show up in RSS, 2) any fics posted to collections which, because of changes ao3 made years ago, do not show up in the feed if there are 20 fics posted since that was posted.

And once upon a time, I was like "I need to see all these fics, especially ones in tiny fandoms I'd never see otherwise!"

And now I'm just like. Meh. That's their problem that I'll never see their fic, not mine.

Possibly this is because my "to read" list is so very very long and so is my author subscription emails that haven't been read yet.

But also it's like. If you make it hard for me to find your fic. Then you're just like those people back on LJ who would post a fic to a community with a note that they were going to friends-lock the fic after 3 days, and if you want to see previous ones in the series, you have to get them to add you to their friends list.

Because honestly why bother. If you're going to make it hard for me to read your fic, then clearly you don't want me personally to read it, and that's okay. There's plenty of others, from people who aren't making it hard.

Because, no, I am not going to be checking every single ao3 tag even monthly for archive locked/collections fics. I'm sure some people are checking them frequently. Those people will read your fic. And that's fine, honestly.

But I'm not putting in the work. And if I miss the world's great fic because I don't see it, then yeah, okay. That's fine. Go with god, do your own thing. Not my problem.

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Aachen

What Are You Playing Wednesday

2025 Sunshine Revival Post #1

Jetman Thoughts, Eps 41-42

Sunshine Revival Post

Battleship Exchange 2025: Podfic "Glossary"

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Sunshine Revival: Challenge #1

Content License

what fresh hell is this?

"Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians." (Captain America) G

Arty stuff in London

All is Well

theoretically I do things but what do I do

Happy Pride!

the squirrels are in the tree

fanfiction as it is done

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