nathanjw | Network

lullabymoon posting in

fandom_on_dw

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3183/

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

https://xkcd.com/3183/

azurelunatic

My hyperfocus does still work to the extent that when I was reading earlier today, I tuned out the various scraping and occasional hammering noises from the roof. I could not, however, sleep through the hammering.

Which is perhaps why Belovedest is on the shopping trip without me today. I was too cold and tired to get ready, let alone go out into the cold and dark.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Yuletide works are scheduled to go live a little under five days from now, at 9pm UTC 24 December (if all goes well and there are no further pinch hits needed).

COUNTDOWN TO REVEALS

Treats

Treats in both the Madness and Main Yuletide collections are enthusiastically welcomed. You can post a treat for someone in the main collection up until 9pm UTC 24 December, and in the Madness collection up until 9pm UTC 25 December. There's more information about posting treats here. If you're hunting for inspiration, see also the mini-challenges tag at

yuletide, and of course, please consider treats for pinch hitters.

Pinch hits

We’re still looking for intrepid writers to take on post-deadline pinch hits. As of this post, we need writers for:

PH #184: Aveyond (Video Games), Quasimorph (Video Game), Geneforge

PH #198: even if TEMPEST 宵闇にかく語りき魔女 (Visual Novel), Flowers Series (Visual Novels), Lkyt. (Visual Novel)

As well as offers from writers, we're keen to hear (yuletideadmin@gmail.com) from anyone with tips on how to consume or review details of these canons!

Please look at our outstanding pinch hit details, and help if you can!

Beta requests

Can you help out a fellow writer by beta-reading their work? Please check the hippo-want-ads at the Discord server, or email mods if you can help with one of the following requests and we’ll get you in touch.

As of this post, beta readers are needed for the following requests (click/expand to view):

1.2K T-rated Mayor of Kingstown
15k+ E-rated Damien/Gerald Coldfire Trilogy
7k Batman Wayne Family Adventures
Racepicker and sensitivity reader for a 10k fic featuring a young Black English girl
4.7k slang and other dialogue choices right for a Gen Z Black Londoner, Rivers of London
13k Lunar Chronicles
2.8k fic for The Odd Couple (TV 1970)
4k Nicked by M.T. Anderson

We also have some less time-sensitive beta requests in the server's betas-wanted channel:
WH40k
The Witcher III/Chronicles of Narnia
The Stakeout from Inside No. 9
Daria (Cartoon)

Meanwhile, please check your work

Please check that you uploaded the right draft. Mistakes can happen to anyone, but checking that everything looks right is a crucial part of posting. Make sure your work has a title and that the summary doesn't say "tbd". Please check that all the text is there and you didn't post the version with [name?] and [thing goes here] notes. Any uploaded version must be a complete story that is readable as it is, even if you're still making edits between now and reveals. Please don't risk disappointing your recipient or requiring mods to seek a back-up pinch hit.

Please check that all required characters feature in the work. This is likely to mean all the characters your recipient tagged, not just the ones they wrote prompts for. Or, if they selected Any, a character from the tag set. They may have selected additional tags that give further guidance about which characters to include - please check that too. If your recipient selected Worldbuilding and you're not sure there's enough of it, get a second opinion - a friend, a beta. If there is any doubt about whether your story contains all the characters it needs to contain, please check with mods. Prompts alone are not automatically permission to leave characters out. The use of additional tags may still leave some grey areas.

Please review your author's notes. Yuletide stories are anonymous for one week - do not give your name or link to your personal sites or socials in your author's note. Do not promise expanded, future, or replacement gifts - your work needs to stand alone. And do not apologise for your work in your author's note, or talk about what a struggle it was to write. People often feel doubt as well as excitement when giving someone a story, but don't give your recipient your doubts as part of their gift. In your author's note, please follow the principle that if you cannot say something positive, don't say anything at all.

Please check your recipient's Do-Not-Wants. Yes, again.

Please check your story in general! You don't have to get it beta read, but please check spelling and grammar. Please make sure that it’s not a wall of text with no spacing between paragraphs - and, conversely, that there aren’t too many blank lines between paragraphs.

(And, having fully prepared for reveals - we hope that you are excited for them! We are!)

Miscellaneous

If you're unlikely to be able to comment until the end of the anon period or later, consider letting your author know at the AFK post.
You can find beta volunteers at this post or at the Discord server.

james

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umadoshi

Since I'm vaguely tracking things we've been making: a few days ago we made Smitten Kitchen's gingerbread apple upside-down cake. It's tasty, although I didn't like it nearly as much as the SK Mom's Apple Cake that we made not that long ago. (

scruloose likes it more than I do, for the record.) Now I mostly just want to make an actual gingerbread. ^^;

(My brain keeps starting to compose a post or posts about my currently-annoyingly-complication feelings about holiday baked goods etc., between our intensely-covid-cautious life and my still-newish need to stay aware of my blood glucose, but will I actually manage to write about it? Who knows. It's exhausting.)

I started my first day of vacation waking ahead of my alarm from a weird, teeth-clenchingly stressful dream, possibly one of a sequence, and it takes me a while to shake off dreams like that. >.< I've gotten a couple of household things done/underway, though, and am sitting down to do some manga work once I've posted this.

We still haven't decorated Bucky; he comes with lights, which are the most important part of a Christmas tree, especially without the smell of a real tree, and at least one year we bought our tree and put lights on it and never did anything more, and that was fine. I guess it's possible this'll be another such year. (Although we're due for strong winds and heavy rain tonight and into tomorrow, and if we lose power, I guess that's something we could do tomorrow afternoon.)

But we got most of our other fragments of decor up last night, and this morning I put out my Nativity set for the first time in a few years. It's wooden, but a couple of the pieces have taken damage over the years nonetheless (before my time, or when I was young enough that I don't remember what happened), and having it out around the cats has made me nervous since my mother gave it to me* several years ago. But a few months ago I bought a piece of display wall shelving for my office (and my office mostly stays shut when I'm not in it for long), and the set fits in it fairly well, so now it's there and I've got my fingers crossed.

(Also, this year I bought an old-fashioned ceramic tree from a local artist, and it's on a speaker under the wall display, so realistically, if a cat gets up on my desk where they shouldn't be, I'll know about it from the tree going down. [Which I really hope it doesn't, because it's breakable and the lights aren't actually attached, so that's all kinds of cat hazard in a package. And thus, it's in my office; if the cats were actually prone to getting on my desk and messing with things, I wouldn't have bought the tree at all, but even Sinha is really pretty good about it.])

*I think I mentioned at the time that this is the Nativity set of my childhood, carved of olive wood. My mother's parents once--in the '50s, I think? When she was a kid--were in Jerusalem over Christmastime, and brought it home. Mum deciding to pass it on to me is genuinely one of the best gifts she's ever given me.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Annie Lennox - The First Noel

chestnut_pod

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Current Mood: giddy
Current Music: I'll Believe in Anything -- Wolf Parade

umadoshi

"Yona of the Dawn Gets Sequel Anime". [Anime News Network]

I'm delighted both that this is happening and that it was announced so promptly on the heels of the manga ending. (;_;) As we learned from the second Fruits Basket anime arriving thirteen years after that manga ended, anything is possible, but it's sure nicer to have this sort of thing happen with a speed that makes more sense.

ANN says "sequel anime", which I'd imagine means it'll pick up where the first one left off, but how OAVs factor into that, I'm not even going to try to guess.

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Sting - A Winter's Night Live From Durham Cathedral2009

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3182/

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

https://xkcd.com/3182/

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The deadline has passed, and the main collection is temporarily closed. ETA - now open again!

Congratulations to everyone who has posted! Pat yourself on the back, take a breath, and then please check wordcount, formatting, html; check that you've uploaded the correct version, and that all your text is actually there. You can get to what you've submitted from your Statistics page, or from your Works in Collections. Your story should be marked as "complete" rather than one or more of multiple chapters yet to come.

To all who didn't make it this year: it happens, and we hope you enjoy the collection reveals.

To all who are still working on beta jobs, treats, or pinch hits: thank you and good luck!

Pinch hits coming!!
Post-deadline pinch hits will be available soon at

yuletide_pinch_hits. This next round will be due at 9 AM UTC, 22 December.

See what time that is in YOUR timezone
See countdown

Beta requests
We have outstanding beta requests on the Yuletide Discord (please see the #hippo-want-ads channel), and more betas are always welcome at the Dreamwidth beta post.

There is also an Away from Keyboard post up on the participant community, for you to (optionally) let your author know if it'll be a while before you can read your gift.

If there seems to be an issue with your posted work, we'll contact you via the email address associated with your AO3 account. Please check you can access that!

umadoshi

What I Just Finished Reading: Legendborn (Tracy Deonn) and Season of Love (Helena Greer), both of which fall into the category of "I enjoyed this but I don't feel any urge to pick up the sequel".

And not that recent, but I did finish Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope not terribly long ago.

What I am Currently Reading: Llinos Cathryn Thomas' Advent novella All is Bright, one chapter per day. And

scruloose and I are a few chapters into the audiobook of System Collapse.

What I Plan to Read Next: Very possibly The Dark is Rising, with solstice nipping at our heels.

Bonus TV note:

scruloose and I have finished season 2 of Silo!

When we finish System Collapse, that'll be the end of Murderbot listening until sometime after the new book comes out. Listening to the audiobooks together has cut way into our shared TV watching, but does have the advantage of being easier to drop in and out of if we don't have a lot of time in an evening, so I've been trying to see what our iteration of Hoopla has that

scruloose might be into. It does have Gideon the Ninth, which they might get a kick out of, but that's a significantly longer book, and we already had to check Network Effect out twice to get through it.

Last night it occurred to me that the Queen's Thief books are on the shorter side, and lo, Hoopla has them all! Have any of you listened to them? Any comments on how their reader is? It remains possible that finding out that I really like the Murderbot audiobooks isn't a sign of anything other than that I like that narrator in particular. ^^;

Current Mood: drained

ysabetwordsmith posting in

fandom_on_dw

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Current Mood: busy

james

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3181/

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

https://xkcd.com/3181/

azurelunatic

I lost the beads I was going to use for the two crocheted necklaces. (I think it's safe to say in *this* venue that I got commissioned to make a second one, and the second one is going more smoothly than the first one in all respects so far.)

Since the replacement beads included ones shipped from Czechoslovakia, I've been nervous that I won't be able to finish on time. (Which I still probably won't, but I can make An Effort now.)

The last of the replacement beads arrived today, and I am very happy with this. Will I get cracking on it? Well, probably not today.

Additionally, it's been a not as terrible as usual leg day. Hooray for physical therapy (and remembering to do it), and hooray for pain meds. (Yesterday I completely spaced my pain meds until bedtime. Surprised Pikachu was surprised at how horrible a leg day it was.)

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The assignments that you received when signing up, and pinch hits #1-96, are due at 9pm UTC 17 December (see countdown). It's nearly here. For most people, it'll be Wednesday. Please check the links!

When you post your story, please make sure...

It is at least 1,000 of your own original words and marked as complete. You can update and edit your story after the deadline, but any version you upload must be a complete story that could be read in that state, with a beginning, middle, and end, and no placeholder text.

It is not posted as a draft. If your work is still in Draft status on AO3 at the deadline, it will not count as fulfilling the assignment, as no one but you can access it. To check if your work is a draft, go to your assignments. If you see a work title and the 'Fulfill' button, your work is a draft and you have not yet fulfilled the assignment. You can also check your drafts at the 'Drafts' sidebar link from your main AO3 page. Fully-posted works can be viewed from your Stats page and from Works in Collections. You can also reach out to mods to check!

It features *all* requested characters or follows exceptions specified in the additional tags ("My gift must feature..."). Please see this post for a reminder of how the additional tags work. Regarding Worldbuilding: if your recipient has not selected characters beyond that tag, whether to flesh out the world using original characters or canon characters is up to you. If they have vetoed specific characters, obey those DNWs.

It does not contain Do Not Wants. Please check that your story does not contain any of the Do Not Wants (DNWs) listed in your recipient's Optional Details. If you have any doubt about the meaning of your recipient’s DNWs, please contact the mods.

Its title and other metadata are not placeholders. Please don't call your work Placeholder Title or Yuletide 2025 Work - upload a title that reflects the unique work. You don't need to write a summary or append detailed tags, but please make sure that if you do include that information, the information is real.

Other important notes

Stay anonymous! Yuletide is a secret exchange. Don't give away publicly what you're writing or who you're writing it for. Don't add your work to an existing series on AO3, or a personal works collection. Don't identify yourself in your author's notes by, for example, linking to your tumblr or dreamwidth.

No AI! This is a creative writing challenge - do not use ChatGPT, Claude, or any other similar generative text tool to write any part of your story, summary, or notes.

Please don’t use author’s notes to apologise for your story, to go into detail about the difficulties you had writing it, or to promise a fix or a continuation.

Please check your story immediately after posting to ensure it is showing up okay.

james

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yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The DEADLINE is getting closer and closer!

At deadline time - 9pm UTC on 17 December - your Yuletide assignment must be posted (published, not a draft!) to the Yuletide collection as a complete work.

Before then, we need your help, Yuletide! We have an outstanding pinch hit (#121) for the fandoms:
SMPLive
Roughhouse SMP
Mirai SMP - XYouly
Highcraft (Web Series)

See details here. Please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com if you can help, and spread the word if you have friends who might be interested. This pinch hit is due at 9pm UTC on 19 December.

More pinch hits will be advertised at

yuletide_pinch_hits, especially after 9pm UTC on the 17th.

Additionally, we love beta reader volunteers! You can connect with writers at this post by filling out a Google form, or you can join the Discord and keep an eye out for beta requests advertised by members with the Hippo role.

Good luck to everyone facing down the deadline!

umadoshi

Luck was not with us in the first attempt at clementines this year. (The batch we got are far from inedible, at least, but...not very good.) They're such a gamble these years. :/

Our new freezer arrived a week ago, and the plan is to finally get it in place today once

scruloose gets back from a market run. That hasn't happened yet due to a combination of factors and timing, the biggest of which is the fact that it'll require shifting some things out of the garage onto the driveway to make room for us to work with two upright freezers in play. (

scruloose is going to take a stab at moving the old one out of its place without emptying it, via a hand cart, but we have no idea how likely that is to actually work. It'd sure be convenient, though.)

My hair is dyed! It is. Um. Very dark. By which I mean it's not so much dark purple as "functionally black with some purple highlights that are probably some of my silver hair, but there's less of that than there is silver, so it's a little confusing". Oh, well. It looks fine, other than maybe making me look a bit washed out, and I don't much care about that.

(I might care more when I finally get

scruloose to take a headshot of me to send HR at Dayjob so they can update my long-expired work pass. [Part of why I decided to finally just go ahead and dye my hair was in the name of having it done for this photo.] These days, the process involves just filling out a form and emailing that and a photo that meets their technical requirements to the department handling passes and also to my boss, presumably so the boss can look at the photo and confirm "yes, that is the employee in question". But this means we can make potentially-endless attempts at getting a photo I don't hate, and honestly, if I can live with the horror of my provincial ID photo, I can probably live with just about anything.)

A few links:

--

mrissa's annual lussekatter posts are always good for my heart.

--Jenny Hamilton's "Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition" (covering ep. 1-2).

--"‘Pushing Daisies’ Season 3 In The Works, Says Creator Bryan Fuller".