aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-12 11:19 pm

(no subject)

Current events continue to be a lot, to say the least (I left voicemails for my congresspeople about some of it).

On a happier note, I saw chickadees multiple times today (apparently they're smaller than sparrows) as well as hummingbirds (one a few minutes after I refilled the feeder)!
mecurtin: WW2 We Can Do It! poster, showing white woman in red-and-white-spotted bandana, rolling up sleeve of blue work shirt and flexing arm, saying We Can Do It! (resistance)
mecurtin ([personal profile] mecurtin) wrote2025-06-12 10:21 pm

Indivisible #WhatsThePlan meeting of May 12 2025

Indivisible #WhatsThePlan meeting of May 12 2025
This is pretty much just C&P from my bluesky liveblog, plus links.

cut for length, US politics )
I really admire people who can write *most* of what happens in a meeting while they liveblog, Ezra & Leah both talk *really* fast & I just pull out highlights, really. whoosh.

Please reblog, signal boost. We are, as Leah says, in a time of autocratic breakthrough, and one way we fight back is to have as many people as possible, in as many places as possible, out peacefully on Saturday. We need to be *everywhere*, with *everyone*. Take American flags, they belong to *US*, not him.
ride_4ever: (Fraser - OTW)
ride_4ever ([personal profile] ride_4ever) wrote2025-06-11 10:11 pm
Entry tags:

PSA: beware this scam: it's not AO3

[personal profile] verushka70 will give you all the details about this comment scam being perpetrated by bots in fic comments on AO3. Do not react to the bot threats that falsely claim they are from AO3! Check out her very important warning in her DW post.

Please signal-boost this if you are so inclined.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-11 09:31 am

(no subject)

I've seen a bunch of wildlife around lately (fawns, a downy woodpecker, red shouldered hawks, cottontail rabbits, hummingbirds), which has brighten my day over the last week or so.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
seekingferret ([personal profile] seekingferret) wrote2025-06-10 10:42 am

(no subject)

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

I wasn't quite sure what this book wanted to be, it was doing three genres of middlebrow novel all at once and not quite pulling any of them off, but in the end I was not too unhappy to have kept with it.

Sara Marsala, our heroine, is the daughter of a messy Italian-American family. She is dealing with a divorce, the failure of her restaurant, and a general sense of failure and helplessness. When her beloved aunt dies, her aunt's will sends her back to the Old Country of rural Sicily, to Find Her Roots and see if an old deed for a plot of land in Sicily, passed down from her great-grandmother who never made it to America, is still valid. When she arrives in Sicily she is informed that her great grandmother was Murdered, contradicting family lote, and the plot is afoot.

The book tries to be a historical fiction novel about life in early 20th century Sicily, an action packed murder mystery, and an eat pray love European adventure, and the three visions of the book war with each other, not helped by lazy plotting with unjustified expository leaps obscuring story details I wanted to see fleshed out.

But it's the wanted to see fleshed out that frustrated me, because the story concept works and there are some really great characters both in the historical flashbacks and the modern narrative and I really was hoping that things would get worked out with just a bit more craft.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-09 08:55 am

(no subject)

I've belatedly found a way to view timecodes with milliseconds, which should make it much easier (and faster) for me to time subtitles (I'd been using VLC and guessing on the millisends and rewatching and adjusting stuff a bunch of times).
aurumcalendula: A woman in red in the middle of a swordfight with a woman in white (detail from Velinxi's cover of The Beauty's Blade) (The Beauty's Blade)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-06 11:39 am
Entry tags:

The Beauty's Blade

The The Beauty's Blade now has both cover art revealed and a translator officially listed!

I haven't read anything Yu's worked on yet, but I've heard good things about their work! I'm so thrilled about Velinxi doing the main cover!

cover art under the cut )
mecurtin: better living through chemisty motto with bubbling retort (better living thru chemistry)
mecurtin ([personal profile] mecurtin) wrote2025-06-05 11:58 pm
Entry tags:

3 Purrcys, chemical adventures

It's been a long time since I posted a Purrcy pic, I've let The Horrors eat up too much of my emotional energy. Here's what I saw first thing when I woke up the other day--a little latter than I meant to, but it was *so hard* to get out of bed!

And look at those toe beans!

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is curled in a gentle arch, just waking up. His white fluffy tummy is partly visible, and one front paw is stretched out to pull up a back foot just a little, enough to expose a few pink and black toe beans.
-----------
After an exciting session of tail!shenanigans in the empty shelf, Purrcy sat down as a rather plump loaf and stared at me with both light-green eyebeams.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby sits in loaf position on an empty white shelf, facing front, white whiskers outspread, light green eyes staring intently at the viewer.

----
Sometimes #Purrcy gets overstimulated and wants his playtime to involve Fierce Fighting With Mom. I'm trying to train him to go for alternatives that do NOT involve human bloodshed -- like displacement scratching, that works!
#cats #CatsOfBluesky

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is on his cat perch, fur on his back raised, pupils dialated, one paw raised as though about to thwap the person holding the camera. He is not joking!

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby crouches on his cat perch, scratching at the corner as he glares at the camera. The fur on his back is standing up, his pupils are dialated, he is NOT happy with the human




There was a mess-up with one of my prescriptions, and I went off one of my "minor" brain meds cold turkey this week. By today it was NOT minor, but I finally got the right pills and within 30 minutes I felt like myself again. And then had to have a nap, because mania does NOT lead to adequate sleep.

Fortunately, my family could tell what was going on and mostly refused to engage, and didn't hold it against me. But I've had enough therapy recently talking about my mother & our relationship that I can now really see why a friend who's a shrink told me years ago, "You know your mother's bipolar, right?"

I mean, I took her word for it, diagnosing people was her *job*. But I really *felt* it today, when I realized that I'd been having a (mild-medium) manic episode and I was reacting to things *just the way my mother did*.

So. I'll make sure to remember those feelings--which include a fair bit of paranoia as well as driving intensity--and know what to call them, and look first for the chemical imbalance behind them, knowing that they lie.

"Trust your feelings" yeah no, I like *data*.
gwyn: (pussypad kerry beary)
gwyn ([personal profile] gwyn) wrote2025-06-04 09:25 pm
Entry tags:

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

Ugh, there's nothing like having to get a new roof on your house. Just the whole thing: the heinous cost, especially at a time when tariff bullshit/supply chain/tanking economy makes that 100 percent more devastating, the having to get multiple bids, then the having to tell people you went with someone else when they're awesome too...it's like something specially designed to make me miserable. I ended up getting bids from some great roofers, and it came down to two and it was so hard to make a decision, they were within a few hundred dollars of each other and they both had 4-star ratings everywhere and lots of good references. But I'm such a coward, the part where you have to tell the one company that you went with the other one is just excruciating omg.

Anyways, in about a month to six weeks, I'll be getting a new roof on the house. Poor Blues will be a wreck, but I don't know where I can really take him so he doesn't have to deal with the noise. I didn't have him when I did the kitchen remodel/addition, and Olive was the chillest cat you could ever have and she was fine with the construction (she literally slept through jackhammering my old concrete back stairs out), but my little sick, decrepit old man Blues will NOT do well in this situation. Home ownership sucks sometimes, so much.

I've been doing small things sporadically here and there--a tiny bit of writing, a bit of reading, lots of watching things. It doesn't feel like I ever accomplish much of anything; some days, the side effects are just awful enough that I don't really have the wherewithal to get much done. I'm trying to do accountability buddies with [personal profile] belmanoir to force myself to walk at least a few days a week, but if I'm having a lot of side effects, even that can be hard to make myself to do.

I *have* been watching things on TV, though--I signed up for a couple months of Disney and Max so I could watch a couple shows there, even though I couldn't really afford it. But the most important one to me was Andor, and so I can't regret spending the money.

Andor season 2 was just...wow. Holy crap. SO FUCKING GOOD. I mean, I can always find things to quibble with or critique, but when something is that amazing, it's just easy to handwave the details. What an incredible series, what an incredible season, what an incredible showcase for good writing and real production values instead of plastic manufactured crap filmed in that giant egg thing they call the volume. The costumes, the sets, the acting, it's all astounding and adult in the best way. I want to talk more at length about it, but I'm still digesting it all, and I need to sit down and rewatch it again, really take it in now that I know where it's going.

While I had HBO Max (or just max or whatever the fuck it's called), I figured I'd try The Pitt, even though I swore off hospital/medical shows a long time ago (I think anyone who knows my history, especially with regards to my sister's death, knows why). But I couldn't escape it on tumblr, and so somehow ended up deciding to give it a whirl, and...well, it is definitely as good as most people say. I do hate the medical show thing where everything has to be ramped up to 11, like, regular medicine in an emergency setting isn't dramatic enough, no, we have to have a mass casualty event. Okay.

I liked most of the characters, and while I've never cared about Noah Wyle, I will say that as Dr. Robby, he was much more appealing to me: I simply can't resist the broken, damaged, compassionate, competent guy who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, fuck my life. And also, *of course* I fall for the piping hot mess of a dude that is Langdon--he has a total WWII Bucky thing going on with his looks (tell me he couldn't be Bucky's double in First Avenger), so it just figures. I *had* to go for the guy with Big Problems who's a little bit of an asshole underneath the really good doctor veneer. I absolutely loathe Santos, every minute with her was torture, and I couldn't stand Javadi, either, with her perpetually wide eyes and grimaced mouth. They are both awful. Lest this sound like I just hate women characters, everyone else I loved, especially Mohan and McKay and Collins and OMG Dana. I adore Dana, I am really hoping she's coming back. And Dr. Ellis, I think was her name? at the end there, please tell me she's going to be front and center next season. It's funny, too, that I despised Shawn Hatosy after Southland, like, he was just the *worst* character ever and so obnoxious that it seemed like it had to be because of the actor, so color me shocked that I kinda...love him? on this show as Abbot. Very weird.

After Andor, I went over to Netflix to find something mindless and soft to watch, and checked out Mike Shur's latest show with Ted Danson, A Man on the Inside. It was very cute, but I couldn't get over the fact that this retirement center, which was very much like my dad's luxurious retirement center (in that it had the same apartment-->assisted living/memory care-->nursing facility progression structure), had only 100 residents and all those incredible amenities. Like, there is just no way to run something that incredible (it made my dad's place look like a dump) with so few residents, especially in the middle of downtown San Francisco. It would cost like $10,000 a week. It's a charming show, but I just could not stop thinking about the financial structure the whole time I watched. But if you're looking for something soft and short, it's a good show, especially if you enjoyed The Good Place.

And as so many people are, I'm enjoying the hell out of Murderbot. I really side-eyed the casting of ASkars as SecUnit, but I have to say, his inherent weirdness and goofiness is really turning out to be an asset. Some of the changes to the stories threw me a bit, but when I went back and rewatched the eps knowing what the changes were, it felt a little less jarring, and now the show really feels like it's hitting its stride. I am excited about Friday nights! I love the casting for Dr. Mensah and of course, the glimpses of Sanctuary Moon are just the fucking best. And anytime John Cho is on my TV is a good time.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-03 12:18 am
Entry tags:

some recent reading

Ballad of Sword and Wine, Vol. 4 by Tang Jiu Qing (translated by XiA, Jia, and amixy):

Read more... )

Copper Script by KJ Charles:

Read more... )
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
AurumCalendula ([personal profile] aurumcalendula) wrote2025-06-02 09:08 am
Entry tags:

(no subject)

I saw a hummingbird on Saturday!

I think my premieres went over well at VidUKon! I definitely going be catching up on/ rewatching vishows this week (timezone stuff meant a missed watching a bunch of them live).

I made a bunch of progress on my Georgiou vid (it went from a timeline that was maybe a third full to one that is ~80% full). ...although this did mean I didn't make any subtitle timing progress (I'm planning on working on that tonight).
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
seekingferret ([personal profile] seekingferret) wrote2025-06-01 01:22 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

My VidUKon premiere for the GPOY show. I've had this idea for years and given the prompt I couldn't help myself.

Its premise is Magneto explaining Jewish trauma to Kitty Pryde in the context of the muddle that is the X movies' Mutant Metaphor. Also Jews dance in this vid in spite of the fact that they don't dance in the X Movies. Nothing in the world could stop me from including Jews dancing in this vid.


The Sweet and the Bitter (8 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: X-Men (Movieverse)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr & Kitty Pryde
Characters: Erik Lehnsherr, Kitty Pryde
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Holocaust
Summary:

They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat: An intersectional tale from Erik to Kitty.