solarbird | Network

Monday we visited Tuscola so I could take pictures of the holiday window paintings. These were done by Libby Neathery of Libby Jo Art Studio and there are 22 in this year's batch. I did not find quite all of them but I came close. Despite changing the camera batteries right before we left home, I barely got through the two sides of the block with Flesor's Candy Kitchen before the batteries died, so we had to stop and get new ones. I did manage to finish photographing the rest of the windows we found. I love seeing local artists do things like this, because it encourages people to get out and look for them. A little slice of Terramagne!

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

days_unfolding posting in

holiday_wishes

Hello,

I don't need anything for myself, but it would be fun to get a surprise package. (I no longer get Christmas presents because my mom, aunt, and uncle recently died, and my dad doesn't give presents for reasons known only to him. Not meant to be a pity party, it's just the way that it is.)

But anyway, I have three cats and two dogs who would love some toys. (I got them Christmas presents, but no toys.) I have an Amazon wishlist for them, but if you have a toy that your pets really like, we'd love to get it.

My address is:
Adrienne Radzvickas
401 S Anderson St.
Urbana, IL 61801

These are the pets. Cats: Zara, 16, gray; Oliver, 1, orange; Lily, 1, calico. Dogs: Bella, 1, black and white; Gracie, 1, brown, white, and black.

( Pet Pictures )

ysabetwordsmith

Today we visited Tuscola and Champaign for holiday activities.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: happy

proustbot

The Blackwell Epiphany (2014, PC) -- In the final game in the Blackwell point-and-click series, Rosa and Joey try to find some elusive ghosts in the dead of winter.

I gather that the reception of Epiphany has been mixed. I can see why, if you were playing all these games as they were released, Epiphany might come off as unsatisfyingly out-of-kilter with the tone of the series to that point. ("Wait, Rosa is semi-openly working with the cops now? Wait, Rosa is dealing with the end of the world now???") But playing the game more than a decade later, when it is obviously the grand finale to the series, makes Epiphany seem instead impressively audacious. We're going to tie off every single loose plot thread from the earlier games and have Rosa save New York City from annihilation? Hell yeah, why not! Let's go out with a blaze of glory! This is the end of the line!

In that mode, I really enjoyed Epiphany, which is long (five hours!!) and thoughtful and has an impressively gloomy tone. (That constant snow! That murdered child! That eternal night!) The downer ending is just the thematically appropriate cherry on top. Beyond that, though, I enjoyed that the game so heavily features such a variety of women -- young, old, rich, poor, powerful, vulnerable -- and writes them as distinct and rounded characters. This has been a strength of the whole series, which has always featured a diverse cast of secondary characters, but I think Epiphany does a particularly good job with its multiple middle-aged women, who are all furious about different things. (The plot twist with Tanya came as a shock, and the subsequent "reunion" was a genuinely affecting scene.) While some of the plot feels contrived, especially when it comes to the villain's very elaborate schemes, the game capably hits all the important emotional beats for Rosa and Joey. Epiphany is chilly and final and satisfying, and it makes me think of the entire Blackwell series very fondly. I'm glad I played these games.

billroper

There are serious things that I could post about today and honestly, I just don't feel like it.

I'll just say that Calvin the Dog seems to be healing up nicely after last week's surgery. Ruby is not sure this is a good thing.

Of course, Ruby is far from certain that *Calvin* is a good thing...

merrileemakes posting in

holiday_wishes

I think this is a lovely idea. This is my first time participating, I'm back on DW after a decade away and really enjoying the community here. Thank you to everyone who's already posted and inspired me, and thank you in advance to everyone who answers a wish!

I have just bought a tablet and styles to write with and have discovered the joy of digital notebooks, I would love recommendations of sites to get free planner templates and digital stickers.
I would love any colour palettes, colour inspiration or sources you use for colour combinations. I'm always on the look out for colour combos to use in weaving designs.
If you post about your hobbies on DW I would love to add you to my reading list! Doesn't have to be fibre craft or any hobbies I'm into, I enjoy learning about almost everything.
Photos of your cat, your friend's cat, your bodega's cat, your cousin's friend's piano teacher's cat. Bonus if you include a cute comment or story about them.
Give back to your community in any way you can - donate your cash, time or goodwill to make this hell year a little easier.
Make space for yourself during the holidays. Say no to an event that you're dreading, go hide from your family that are driving you crazy and scroll on your phone, or block your opinionated uncle on FB. Or do something for you after a stressful or draining event.
Post about your favourite podcast or audio entertainment in my new comm voiceinnyear
Buy something, no matter how small, from a BIPOC- or LGBT-run business or creator.
Be kind to animals. If you're in the southern hemisphere but some water out for the birds, if your in the northern hemisphere put out some food.
If you're so inclined I would love an Etsy gift voucher. Please ask for my email address.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3178/

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

https://xkcd.com/3178/

ysabetwordsmith posting in

birdfeeding

Today is sunny and quite cold.

I fed the birds. I've seen a large mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus a male cardinal.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 12/8/25 -- While we were out, we saw a small flock of white birds with long necks. They may have been swans or geese. Trumpeter swans are the largest of those found in Illinois and tend to hold their necks straight, which these were doing, and the juveniles are gray, which I also saw. Tundra swans are similar but smaller. The pictures of geese are stockier with much shorter necks, so I'm thinking we saw swans.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Current Mood: busy

mindstalk

So, yesterday: I worried I'd gotten a germ after all, since I woke up with a slight sore throat and almost-congestion. There was an alternative explanation, "sleeping in a cold dry room", but who knows. I went out for a walk and ended up out for 3 hours, which suggests good health, though I was doing easy pace. ( Read more... )

sovay

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

Current Music: Big Thief, "Incomprehensible"

minoanmiss

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

snickfic

ficinabox reveals have happened, and after being a post-deadline pinch hit (and then a post-post-deadline pinch hit...) and being a little nervous about it, I got some great things. :3 More recs to come once I get a chance to explore the rest of the collection.

i said farewell (i meant don't go), Red Sonja (2025), Sonja/Petra, 7k. Petra survives the arena, goes traveling with Sonja after the end of the movie, and absolute does not pine or have any feelings about it (and then gets abducted by an eldritch cult, oh no). Jaded traumatized warrior women/young earnest warrior woman, what an excellent ship. :') The writing here is gorgeous, and the fic hits that good tropey goodness in a way that can be hard to find in femslash.

Probably readable canon-blind? If this sounds like your jam at all, I definitely recommend. This fandom is SO SMALL that the tag is unwrangled on AO3, and I worry that no one but me is going to find this fic and read it.

The Lonely Ones, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Alexis Rigby pre-slash, 5k. One misterable stormy night, Alexis appears on Booth's doorstep, to their mutual surprise. This is the first fic for this ship longer than a drabble, and I am so delighted it exists. The writing is really delicate and lovely, and very careful, as it needs to be when writing Booth making new personal connections (whether he wants or not).

Reflections, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 3k. Despite his best intentions, Ratcliffe loses touch with Booth and then starts to form some suspicions about why that might be. I love this premise of Booth being a kind of liminal being as well, which fits right in with some of the ways Monette treats time and setting in canon. A nice shippy little ghost(?) story.

shadaras

okay, some updates while I'm thinking about it at all:

1.
I never did say that I did get my ears repierced, did I xD But I did! It's been like a month! The piercer was like "so, let's just re-open those old holes, I bet they're still fine, just maybe a little finicky", and she was correct. A lot easier to heal from something that's just expanding old scar tissue than making a new hole in the body, obviously, which is good because tbh I wasn't excited about tending to a new wound.

So I can wear ear shinies now! I need to acquire more of them, especially more interesting studs that I can wear during work/aikido. xD Dangly earrings are pretty but inconvenient when doing very physical stuff.

she was ALSO like "you have skinny earlobes!" and I was like "uh?" and she was cheerfully like "this means that even the tiniest studs I have are going to be a little loose on you and the average stud will be noticeably loose" (true, btw) and then "do your ears get cold particularly easily?" (no, actually, they don't?). It was all very "this is not a body part I think about the variance in very often but yeah someone who does body mods/piercings sure would have thoughts about this!". xD

2.
The heater in our dojo, which has been dying for years, has finally given up the ghost. Considering that our dojo barely breaks even most of the time, uh, not good to need to replace that in the middle of winter. We shall see how paying for that ends up working, considering that it only broke like last Friday and we only got someone to look at it today, and they haven't provided a specific estimate yet (just a rough ballpark upon identifying the failed part). Fun times!

3.
It is WINTER and COLD now.

...yeah that's about it.

This does mean my cat will paw at the blanket I keep on my couch and then curl up in expectation that I shall Tuck Her In, which is absolutely adorable of her. <3

4.
I finished my Yuletide draft and made eyes at a friend who also knows the canon to beta-read it, so I don't need to worry about that until they get back to me. I had a lot of fun doing canon review for this one! One of those canons where I didn't have any particular ideas but did think it'd be fun to write for someone who had some prompts/thoughts about it, and: I was right!

5.
Talked to my dad yesterday about family and life and books, and it's very funny how at once I got so much of my taste in books from him and how much more willing he is to read moderately shitty epic fantasy than I am. Admittedly, this may just be a factor of age and that he grew up reading more stuff in that genre (by which I mean: Male Gaze Power Fantasy) than I did, and so has way more tolerance for it than I do. He's perfectly happy to read whatever else I place in front of him! And he enjoys it! He just also reads these. xD

6.
god, idk, did I have other things to say

work is work. it's fine. I would like more sleep. whatever.

7.
I'm still somehow keeping up with Critical Role: Araman? I zone out of combat (normal) but this mostly just means that I'm willing to listen to that while doing other things even moreso than the more story-centric content that I'll listen to while driving or doing dishes etc. I think the part I enjoy most is that they're doing multiple tables and focusing on one table at a time, but the opening scene for each episode is from one of the other groups, a teaser of what they're getting up to/going to be doing when the focus switches to them.

diffrentcolours

Just replaced the BIOS battery in mother_bones' laptop. A CR2016 cell costs about 50p and we happened to have a spare one in the battery box; the laptop SKU replacement part is just one of those, with two electrodes attached to a small connector. It's shrink-wrapped so you can't easily replace the battery within. A replacement part costs about £8-20.

So I carefully disassembled the part, cutting open the shrink rap with a craft knife, removing the electrodes from the cell with a spudger, and removing the last of the shrink wrap. I replaced the cell, and reconstructed the part as best I could, sellotaping it back together.

It's a bodge, but it works - no more clock complaints on boot-up. Saved us a few quid, and I got it fixed tonight rather than having to wait for a part to arrive.

redbird

I went out in the cold today, took a shuttle buses that was replacing the central part of the green line, and walked into a Fidelity office to get the medallion signature I need on the BNY form.

They provided the medallion for my signature, but the woman who handled that told me she thought I would need to redo the _Fidelity_ forms once BNY had transferred the funds, because the inherited IRA would need a brand-new account, not the one I created for the purpose a few weeks ago. Having printed and signed those forms, I asked her to keep them, in case they are usable. (She may have been thinking I'm trying to move the money into an account that already has money in it.)

She also said I do need to put the form with the medallion signature in the mail to BNY, Fidelity can't send it to them electronically. I brought the medallion-ized form home with me, but before I put it in the mail I'm going to scan it and upload the scan to the Fidelity website, in case the previous advisor is right and they can do this electronically.

So that will be another outing in the cold, to a post office, in the hope the letter gets to BNY in good season despite both Christmas packages and the Republican effort to destroy the postal service. Fortunately, there are post office branches at this end of the green line, the part that's still running trolleys.

ETA: I scanned the document, and just uploaded it to the Fidelity website, with a message explaining that I will be mailing the hardcopy to BNY tomorrow.

superfangirl1 posting in

scans_daily

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falena

I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell anyone what this show is about, not least because the name is pretty much self-explanatory, lol.

If you haven't watched it at all, it's probably because medical dramas are not your thing or because you're very young and think that old television is not worth wasting your time over (your loss).

I grew up with ER, John Carter has been my first tv crush, I learnt English to be able to keep up with the show as it aired in the US...so I can't just be objective about it. Season 1 through 3 hold a very special place in my heart.

I honestly wish I had been in fandom back then, but I wasn't, so I'm sure I missed out on a lot of fic. Most of the fic I eventually read was in archives that are no longer online... Fannish life before the Ao3 came along was hard.

Through the Door by C.Midori. I can't believe I'm linking to FF.net! This story is 23 years old, guys. I remember loving it back then, I had it saved as a Word file on my computer, lolol. It's Abby/Carter, a ship I honestly don't remember much about and FF.net makes my eyes bleed so I haven't re-read it before reccing it, sorry. It does seem well-written. It was very angsty, this much I remember. Set around season 8, I think.

Two For The Show by jumpfall. 2.3K words. Gen. Set in the first season, I suppose. This is Carter!whump and H/C at its finest. I love found family stories. And true ensemble pieces like this, with excellent use of the medical setting.

three dates by cicak. 13.6K words.Cater/Benton. Set in season 2 or 3. Carter’s not sure exactly when he first learned about the patented Peter Benton Dating Algorithm, but it must have been early on, because he internalised it like it was any other scrap of information he’d gleaned and hoarded like a crazy person, like his GPA (3.8), his birthday (September 9th) or his blood type (B positive). Now, I personally don't see the Carter/Benton relationship as romantic. At. All. cicak writes so well and still keeps Carter and Benton completely in character that they just made me buy it.

The Pitt

Like Brothers We Meet by Siria. 17.5k words. Gen. After a chance encounter, Robby finds out that he's got a half-brother he never knew about—an emergency physician from Chicago called John Carter. A fair number of stories that try to tie in/blend ER and The Pitt while explaining the uncanny similarity between Carter and Robby have naturally popped up. This is the best of them all. Totally believable, blends the two canon seamlessly. Robby is our viewpoint character here. Fascinating read, highly recommended.

luzula

Alibi sentence, sigh. How about you?

Tally:
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Day 7:

badly_knitted,

goddess47,

garonne,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

chanter1944,

chestnut_pod,

cornerofmadness,

carenejeans,

sanguinity,

china_shop

Day 8:

china_shop

Bonus farm news: We hosted a seed swap, which was fun! We've been learning about harvesting our own seed from vegetables during the year, and had some of our own to offer. And it was a good way to meet some new people in the area, too.

sanguinity

An anon on tumblr asked me about my writing habits, and since half of my writing community is over here, I thought I'd cross-post the question and answer, in case it's interesting to anyone else.

would you be willing to elaborate on your writing routine? you seem like a very consistent writer, and as someone who's not, i'm always curious how people approach their writing. do you set aside a particular amount of time/word goal/just go with the flow? do you have a single piece that you'll work on or does it jump around? do you have a way to push through writer's block or do you take a break? feel free to say as much or as little as you want ofc, but i've just been curious after seeing the few things you've said on here about it, and i'm trying to get better about my own writing routine 😅

( General process )

( Specific questions )

(Side note: does anyone know if DW has markdown code for adding a cut? Copying from tumblr to DW would have been a lot easier with it...)

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solarbird

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

cheers, love - the cavalry's queer!

Network

Photos: Tuscola Winter Window Walk Part 1

My Pets Would Love Some Toys

Today's Adventures

Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns

Nothing Serious

'Tis the season

Hyperacute Interdynamics

Birdfeeding

Birdfeeding

Fujisawa 2025-Dec-08

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder

For Maximum Melodrama

FIAB fics!

(no subject)

Coins for Coins

more IRA paperwork

JSA #13 Year One Part 2

Rec-cember Day 8: ER

Write every day: Day 8

It's all Idiosyncracy, All the Way Down

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