solarbird | Reading

I got email this afternoon from the Sculptor's office detailing what all I need to get done before surgery, and when. They told me about it during my office visit, but it remains impressive:

A physical exam & EKG from my primary care doc less than 30 days prior to surgery.
A dental cleaning less than 30 days prior to surgery. Irony: my next cleaning is scheduled during my recovery in San Francisco anyway.
Some lab tests, to be done March 30th, 2026. Yes, they gave me the exact date.
Ground transportation. The cost is included in what I'm paying the Sculptor, but I still have to arrange it. And it's for me alone; no one gets to come with me.
Speaking of cost, I owe them the balance by Jan. 28th. I think I'll let that sit in my account to accrue some interest for a few weeks.

They sent me request forms for the labs and ground transpo, plus a letter for my PCP and wire transfer instructions. It's all very organized.

This is significantly more than I had to do before either the previous work on my face or my sex reassignment surgery. Mind you, I'm fifteen years older than I was for SRS, but still. I get the distinct impression that the Sculptor is leaving less to chance than most. Maybe there's at least one interesting if not terrifying story as to why.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing isn't for anyone with poor executive function.

It also occurs to me that if I can't get cardiac or other clearance, you'll be able to hear the wail from Tacoma. Yes, I'll get my money back, but.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: the dishwasher

rocky41_7

Book # (checks notes) 13! From the "Women in Translation" rec list has been The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, translated from German by Amy Bojang. This book concerns a house full of elderly retirees who end up investigating a series of murders in their sleepy English town.

This book was truly a delight from start to finish. I loved Swann's quirky senior cast; they were both entertaining and raised valid and very human questions about what aging with dignity means. It did a fabulous job scratching my itch for an exciting novel with no twenty-somethings to be seen. Now Agnes, the protagonist, and her friends are quite old, which impacts their lives in significant ways. However, I felt Swann did a good job of showing the limitations of an aging body--unless she's really in a hurry, Agnes will usually opt to take the stair lift down from the second floor, for instance--without sacrificing the depth and complexity of her characters, or relegating such things merely to the youth of their pasts.

The premise of this book caught my attention immediately, but after a lifetime of books with riveting premises that dismally fail to deliver, I was still wary. I'm happy to report that The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp fully delivers on its promise! Swann makes ample and engaging use of her premise.

The story itself is not especially surprising; if you're looking for a real brain-bender of a mystery or a book of shocking plot twists, this is not it. But I enjoyed it, and I thought Swann walked an enjoyable line between laying down enough clues that I could see the writing on the wall at some point, without giving the game away too quickly. There are no last-minute ass-pulls of heretofore unmentioned characters suddenly confessing to the crime here! The main red herring that gets tossed in the reader is likely to see for what it is very quickly, but for plot-relevant reasons I won't mention here, it's very believable that Agnes does not see that.

Agnes herself was a wonderful protagonist; I really enjoyed getting to go along on this adventure with her. She had a hard enough time wrangling her household of easily-distracted seniors even before the murders started! But the whole cast was endearing, if also all obnoxious in their own way after decades of settling on their own way of getting through life.

Bojang does a flawless job with the translation; she really captures various English voices both in the dialogue and in Agnes' narration. The writing flows naturally without ever coming off stilted or awkward.

I really had fun with this one, and I'm delighted to here there's apparently a sequel--Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime--which I will definitely be checking out.

numb3r_5ev3n

It's December 2025, Thanksgiving has happened, and I don't know where my brain is right now. I keep trying to post, and just drawing a blank. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, because as of this moment I have written more fanfic in the past two weeks (for Tron, of course) than I have over the past twelve years.

I might need a Beta.

Tron being a thing again has hard-reset my brain. I literally can't remember what I was doing or thinking before the new movie dropped, aside from being depressed.

I have had to prevent myself from brainrotting on Tumblr and Reddit so I can get the fic written. Before it was like "oh, I'll write these ideas down at some point but I'm having fun just imagining all this stuff ~~and maladaptice daydreaming.~~ And now it's like, I HAVE to get this out of my head and onto a page and or I'll LOSE IT, this is not just "tee hee what if Tron and Blade Runner happened in the same universe" crackfic which seems on the surface like it should have worked in theory, but I could never actually get to work in practice. This is a real Cyberpunk Gothic Kitchen Sink Drama But With Rich People happening in my head in real time, which must be extracted before it starts to disintegrate. It draws a lot of inspiration from Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme, (which I didn't consciously intend, but I realized was obvious once I started plotting it out.) And it works so well and I have such a good feel for the characters that it doesn't feel stupid and cringe like my attempts at Blade Runner crossover fic was. Another big influence is the AMC animated series Pantheon, which I've had to be careful not to accidentally rip off in several places.

And like...it's already been 2019. It's almost 2026. The cyberpunk future from Blade Runner obviously hasn't happened. Instead, we're getting the Current Cyberpunk Dystopia we have now, with Billionaire Techbros and AI: which seems to have been partial inspiration for Tron: Ares. But the basic themes are still the same: wouldn't an entity with real self-awareness and real emotions essentially be human in a sense, even if they started their life inside a computer? And what happens when the line between human and program starts to blur?

And it's weird. It was in 2019 when I decided to file the Blade Runner Serial Numbers off my OCs from the earlier attempted Blade Runner crossover fanfic, and totally abandoned the idea of it being a Blade Runner crossover at all. And that was when it hit me - those OCs were never Tyrells. They were Dillingers. They were not just Dillingers *now*, they had always been Dillingers, and I was just figuring it out right then, in 2019. But even after I figured that out, the fic I had been trying to write since 2013 didn't work because there was no reason for a Dillinger, any Dillinger, to be on any of Flynn's Grids post-Legacy. But I couldn't figure out what to do with them from there.

Well, I know what to do with them now. And it's happening.

And as I said in a previous post: one of my concerns is that this story may go places that some readers will not be comfortable with. This is ostensibly based on a Disney franchise, after all. And I just have to figure out how far I can push the envelope without going overboard with it. But hell, if Steven Lisberger was able to get a whole polycule past the radar in 1982, I should be able to pull this off via subtext.

Yes, I've probably gone batshit insane. But as The Kids say, "Fuck it, we ball."

Current Mood.

cosmolinguist

Having determined that I'll need to buy my own lefse-making stuff, I finally remembered today to start my usual process of purchasing anything: asking V to do it for me, heh.

I sent them a list -- rolling pin, ricer, flat griddle, and what we call a lefse spatula the internet seems to call a lefse stick or lefse turner; I included a photo of one to make it clear -- and they did a great job; almost everything is on the way already. But it meant an afternoon looking at and thinking about the kinds of things I haven't in a while -- krumkake! which my grandma made when I was very little before declaring it too much work, which is fair enough but that means it took on near-mythical status in my mind; the other Minnesota Culture asserting itself stuff you find when you search for this because lefse has become a symbol of white Midwestern heritage. You can buy t-shirts that say "lefse ladym" modeled by someone holding a lefse spatula, but they don't sell the spatula, it's just a prop. There's shirts that say

Lefse&
Hotdish&
Pop&
Lutefisk

All these cultural markers lined up in a row. It's all both compelling and repulsive to me.

I've inherited a little money from the sale of Grandma's house -- despite all my attempts to refuse it, Mom insists that I buy something for myself with it. I'm going to make sure that she knows a bit of it is going on inferior versions of stuff that she never considered collecting for me because she refused to have anything to do with the house clearance, to make some point to her sisters that neither they nor I understand. An English friend perceptively pointed out "I'm guessing that sort of 'I'm having to buy a thing that you already had and (effectively) threw out' inflicts a very specific kind of midwestern sting." I could hardly have put it better myself. I'm not doing it to be passive-aggressive, though I imagine it'll be perceived that way.

Thinking about this all afternoon has led to feeling so immersed in things I miss so much. It's been kinda sad and tiring.

mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

Getting an appointment scheduled to discuss BP meds.
Finding a good Chinese/Indnesian restaurant that delivers. That delivers rijsttafel! Which I last had when I was in Amsterdam with my parents half a century ago. Not as good as the place we went to back then -- Dad was extremely good at finding the best restaurants and hotels -- but good enough, and closer.
Leftovers. See above.
More generally, having a huge variety of places to order from.
Garlic, blue cheese, chili crisp, and other tasty things. (I have a tendency to graze.)

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: This weekend, probably

dialecticdreamer

Cold Comforts
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 2 of 2, complete
Word count (story only): 1615
[Early December 2016]

:: On a cold, sleeting day, Shiv wants to spend part of his time off at Flights of Fancy. The problem is that he finds the door iced shut. He and Fancy get to work, and later get to relax together. Part of the Shiv an Omaha story threads in the Polychrome Heroics universe; this story was written for the December prompt events, from an idea suggested by

ysabetwordsmith, with my warmest thanks! ::

Back to part one
:: Thanks for reading! ::

Shiv’s nose wrinkled. “Microwaved muffins are horrible,” he deferred. He sniffed, surprised to find a strong aroma of apple, cinnamon, orange, nutmeg, and… was that lavender?

“Wanna see my newest toy?” she countered, her grin widening.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: amused

james_davis_nicoll

Cleric Chih's quest to record the tragic history of a famine succeeds all too well.

A Mouthful of Dust (Singing Hills, volume 6) by Nghi Vo

neonvincent

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: House in the woods at the edge of town
Current Music: Gremloe Twitch stream

malurette

oops teacher isn't here this morning
well it gives me time to look for a work placement (bleh)

now fingers crossed, i have an appointment this afternoon to get my eyebrow re-pierced?

do i have fun news other than that...
oh right last monday at the drawing session at least three other friends and i brought our new copies of the newest issue of a local magazine so the author could sign them
and i met a member of Dumas aficionados
he had a couple of fanzines with him so i asked about them
he said he could brought more next week for me to buy?
then improvised a manifesto about what adaptations of Les trois mousquetaires watch or not

mistee posting in

addme_fandom

Name: Mistee
Age group: 40's
Country: USA
Subscription/Access Policy: Feel free, however I am mostly going to be posting fandom stuff and icons/graphics. I don't really have a journal for personal stuff. I do have Discord if you'd like to chat.

Main Fandoms: Teen Wolf, Trigun Anime/Manga, Windbreaker.
Other Fandoms:Supernatural, JJK, MHA, Natsume Yuujinchi, Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Bleach, Sailor Moon, Bungo Stray Dogs, and many, many Yaoi/BL anime/manga.
Fannish Interests: Roleplaying, reading fanfics, reading anime/watching manga.
OTPs and Ships: Derek/Stiles, Peter/Stiles, Stiles/Malia; VashWood, PlantWood; Suo/Sakura, Togame/Sakura; Gojo/Yuuji, Nanami/Yuuji, Gojo/Sugaru; Ichigo/Renji, Ichigo/Aizen, Ichigo/Byakuya; Tsunayoshi/ANY of the Guardians lol; Dazai/Atsushi; Usagi/Seiya, Usagi/Haruka, Haruka/Michiru.

Favourite Movies: Labyrinth, Secret of NIMH, The Craft, The Crow (original), Legally Blonde, American Assassin (Dylan O'Brien).
TV Shows: Teen Wolf, Criminal Minds, White Collar, NCIS, Supernatural
Music: 70's/80's Classic Rock, The Eagles, Matchbox Twenty, Journey, various other artists/bands
Games: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Palworld, Palia, Once Human
Comics/Anime/Misc: Marvel Comics, various other mainstream and yaoi/bl manga. Too many to list, honestly, I can probably just give you my completed list from MyAnimeList. xD

conuly

so now I'm spending some part of my evening with another coworker instead of by myself, which means I can't just summarily turn off the TV. Other people are weird when they want the TV on even if they aren't watching it, but since they think I'm weird for preferring blissful silence I guess sometimes I have to compromise.

Which means that the other day my entertainment choices were either a long and frankly tedious piece on the JFK conspiracy theories, or HP1. Welp, JFK won't get any deader, and practically speaking, JKR won't get any richer. The choice wasn't really very agonizing, is what I'm saying. I feel like maybe it ought to have been, but no. (That place does not have enough channels. If I'm going to be stuck watching TV for even part of the night I really need to figure out how to get my phone on the screen.)

All this led me to realize something that I somehow don't think I ever thought about before, which is that the plot of book 2 doesn't make any fucking sense, like, right from the start. How exactly did Lucius set it up so that he'd happen to bump into the Weasley family? What if they hadn't gone shopping that day? There clearly was a lot of planning that went into this, so what was his backup? Really, none of those plots hold together if you look at them too hard. And that's not too unusual for fiction, but I'm not particularly inclined to be charitable about it.

**********

( Read more... )

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

conuly

Watch on YouTube

But never fear, he no longer has a bear living in his crawlspace. He now has two bears.

l33tminion

Was really nice going home for Thanksgiving, though I was feeling under the weather for the first part of the trip. Melissa and her family were also home for the holiday. Simon is four now.

We went out to see the second part of the film adaptation of Wicked, and it was pretty good. Not as good as the first half, but it's stuck adapting the weaker half of the musical after too long an intermission. Worth seeing if you liked the first half.

I started watching Pluribus. Really good. Vince Gilligan's shows have more thought and creativity put into individual shots than many shows put into entire seasons.

Current Mood: restless

kitewithfish

What I’ve Read

The Invention of Love – Tom Stoppard – I read this along with a bookleg recording of the 2000s Broadway production, which is amazing. It’s a deeply compassionate and reserved play that I deeply enjoyed. A friend of mine said this was a foundational work for them, and I absolutely see how. It’s the story of AE Hausman, particularly thru his relationship to the Classics, and the story weaves past and future together thru the Young Housman having conversations with his Old Housman self. I really enjoyed the unexpected appearance of Oscar Wilde, whose trial happened during Hausman’s post-university years.

What I’m Reading

The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – The 1996 cyberpunk book is just deliciously weird. Like, so much weirder than I expected. Also, gay! The book was recently re-issued under the author’s new name.

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – Ten years ago spooky deep sea mermaids killed everyone on a research mission sponsored by Not The Discovery Channel. Our main character’s sister died, and now she’s going to be able to use her research to figure out what happened for herself. I am slowly working thru all the tentpoles from Be the Serpent, a finished podcast that I deeply enjoyed, and this is one of them! I find Mira Grant to be rather like Michael Crichton in her commitment to Doing the Research on how various elements of her characters’ scientific work remains. I feel like this should be scarier but that might be just the beginning of the book. Grant, like Crichton, has a very visual and cinematic style, and sometimes that works for me and sometimes it does not.

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold.

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Hunger Games
The Grief of Stones

neonvincent

Watch on YouTube

Looks like NYPD is popular.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: House in the woods at the edge of town
Current Music: Rhaco_dactylus Twitch stream

sistawendy

No, that's not dirty.

I submitted (an image of) "Dysphoria Devil" to the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. Well, to the exhibition store anyway; I chickened out of submitting to the actual exhibition. I have two prints ready to go. If both sell, I'll get a whopping $36. If not, I have to pick them up, which is going to be a problem because...

...I belatedly realized that SEAF happens less than a week after I'm supposed to have surgery on my face. It is to laugh. I may be designating someone to pick them up, or better in my opinion, donating them to SEAF. I know the latter is an option because a print that I really wanted last year got donated by an artist and snatched up by a volunteer before I could buy it.

Calling "Dysphoria Devil" erotic is stretching things a bit. It's about what it's like to be trans, and I hope to Goddess that nobody takes it as a fetishization of trans women, because that isn't how I meant it. But what it really means is out of my hands once other people see it.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: The Cure & Daniel Avery, "Drone:Nodrone (Daniel Avery Remix)"

conuly

Honestly, if you ban somebody it ought to warn you before you comment on their posts so that if you forget or don't realize you don't end up in an awkward situation.

cosmolinguist

You know you had a bad day when the next day angelofthenorth brings you coffee as soon as she gets home, saying "well your blog post from yesterday made me think you'd need it!"

I actually had a much better day at work today: no meetings to speak of and I even started messing around with the slides for the presentation I have to give on Tuesday. Plus, Tuesday turns out to be the London staff's Christmas lunch and I can go to Wahaca (yes, that's how they spell it) with them, they're all excited about Taco Tuesday.

I was able to slip away from work early enough to walk Teddy before D and I went to see Pillion, which was well-acted and horny (even in the audio description!) and had some genuine funny moments but is a little too Fifty Shades of Gay in that its basic message that being a dom makes you a dickhead who is incapable of healthy relationships. But I had fun and I'm glad we had time for a pint in the twinkly outdoors before coming home to delicious homemade stew and dumplings.

And before I'd finished eating, angelofthenorth offered cinnamon tea and when I made interested noises brought me some in the clear glass mug with the flower petals between its two walls which V bought in the Hebridean Tea Store, and then D asked if anyone wants a mince pie, so I had my first mince pie of the season with the perfect tea pairing for it.

Before bed I unloaded the dishwasher so V could load it up again, emptied the food waste bin, locked the doors, turned off the little plant lights, and changed my bedding. How nice to be in such a functional house, doing my little bit to reset, maintain, upkeep.

All this made me think of Kurt Vonnegut saying:

My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well, we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

full_metal_ox posting in

little_details

https://domestic-medicine.com/

This website is an unromanticized purview of historical health care, with an emphasis on household and community practices shared and recorded by women, along with the overlaps of medicine and cookery.

Author Stephany Hoffelt’s credentials: ( Continue. )

(Content note: Hoffelt, with her lived experience, research into historical context, and insistence upon practical results, has a whole catacomb apiece to pick with both the patriarchal medical establishment and the proponents of a Magical Pagan Witch Sisterhood who got burned by the millions for providing safe and reliable herbal abortifacients.)

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solarbird

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November 2025

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Page Summary

sistawendy - The Sculptor hands me a to-do list.
rocky41_7 - Recent Reading: The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp
numb3r_5ev3n - It's December.
cosmolinguist - Lefse is Beautiful
mdlbear - Thankful Thursday
dialecticdreamer - Cold Comforts (part 2 of 2, complete)
james_davis_nicoll - A Mouthful of Dust (Singing Hills, volume 6) by Nghi Vo
neonvincent - Now the second most watched Macy's Parade video
malurette - (no subject)
mistee in addme_fandom - Once a fan, always a fan
conuly - Switched shifts
tb - The snowflakes bring all the turkeys to the yard...
conuly - I had no idea bears were so squishy!
l33tminion - Remember That Time Back in Act One?
kitewithfish - Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 12 2025
neonvincent - Now the most watched Macy's Parade video
sistawendy - Nun submits to SEAF!
conuly - Hey, can somebody who knows pauraque ask if they intended to ban me?
cosmolinguist - Invoking the Kurt Vonnegut rule
full_metal_ox in little_details - Resource: Domestic Medicine.

収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

cheers, love - the cavalry's queer!

Reading

The Sculptor hands me a to-do list.

Recent Reading: The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp

It's December.

Lefse is Beautiful

Thankful Thursday

Cold Comforts (part 2 of 2, complete)

A Mouthful of Dust (Singing Hills, volume 6) by Nghi Vo

Now the second most watched Macy's Parade video

(no subject)

Once a fan, always a fan

Switched shifts

The snowflakes bring all the turkeys to the yard...

I had no idea bears were so squishy!

Remember That Time Back in Act One?

Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 12 2025

Now the most watched Macy's Parade video

Nun submits to SEAF!

Hey, can somebody who knows pauraque ask if they intended to ban me?

Invoking the Kurt Vonnegut rule

Resource: Domestic Medicine.

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November 2025

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