Final Project Hell has begun at school 😭 Or, well technically I still have one class with the final project unassigned as yet? But still!

For Social Problems, I need to do a creative project on, well, a social problem, and write an accompanying paper. And there's some regular homework in addition to that.

For Ceramics, I need to interview a living ceramicist and do a creative project on them. The interview has to be done vocally (in person, over the phone, or via video call). Plus our final unit project, the slab houses.

Intro to Human Services hasn't been assigned yet, but guess what, it's another interview! This time with a Human Services professional. Looks like it has the same "interview has to be done vocally" restrictions as the Ceramics interview. Separate from that is a final paper, "Developing Your Personal Mission Statement as a Human Services Professional".

I need to go to the Learning Commons or something and get all of this bullshit untangled, because my ADHD brain has gone into Panic Mode.

I just sat down and scheduled posts-by-email for moodthemeinayear for almost the rest of the year; I haven't done the final wrap-up post, but that's still a good six more weeks I won't have to worry about manually updating there! Er, provided I did everything right, at any rate 😅 I guess I'll find out next week!

This book is very hard to describe without spoilers, so I'll just cover the setup. Aspiring actress/current waitress Jess is having a bad night that gets much worse when she finds a scared little boy who's run away from his father. Things get extremely strange from there. This book is a wild ride.

I read it in a single sitting, so it's very propulsive. It's also very dark/bleak, despite some absurdist humor arising from the premise. I enjoyed it a lot while I read it, but it's now months later and it hasn't quite stuck with me the way some other books have. Nestlings is still my favorite of his.

Content notes: Child abuse/harm is central to the story. So is an accidental needle-stick with a possibly contaminated needle.

Spoilers! Also contains some light spoilers for Stephen King's Firestarter.

( Read more... )

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Autumn Gold. Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden. Fear is the end of the battle and you can't find your captain.

B. Burn. Original Work. The revolutionary hides her face to conceal her identity. The princess silences her voice to preserve her purity. They know each other. And they don't...

C. The Colors of Lorbanery. Earthsea. The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

D. Dorset: Portal to the House. Piranesi/Grand Designs. Maggie and Olabisi plan to transform a ruin containing a portal to the House into a cozy home with an artist's studio. But the ruin's status as a scheduled monument and the unique challenges of its proximity to the House endanger their project.

E. Eilonwy Wanderer. The Prydain Chronicles.. Eilonwy travels Prydain in search of her place in life.

F. Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him. A Song of Ice and Fire. A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

G. The Goddess of Suffering Scam. The Lies of Locke Lamora. In the early days of the Gentleman Bastards, Locke impersonates a self-flagellating acolyte of the Goddess of Suffering, and Jean stands by as the muscle in case the mark catches on. You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

H. A Hatching at Half-Circle Sea Hold. Dragonriders of Pern. “That’s a rather extraordinary proposal, Menolly,” said the Masterharper.

I. IP, YEVRAG NIVEK. The Leftovers. Kevin Garvey makes another visit to the hotel.

J. The Journey. Annihilation - movie. Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

K. Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November. Original Work. When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.

L. The Life of a Cell. Annihilation - movie. The being that leaves the Shimmer carries with it some of both Lena and Dr. Ventress.

M. Men Sell Not Such In Any Town. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. I have fruit that shatters like glass and fruit that must be spooned up like pudding, fruit that tastes like caramel and fruit that tastes like roasted meat, fruit that glitters and fruit so translucent you can see your fingers through it and fruit that glows golden at twilight, fruit like silver coins and monstrous hands and autumn fog, fruit that loses all its flavor unless you eat it straight off the tree as it tries to coil around your tongue.

N. No Reservations: Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia/No Reservations. I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

O. one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. The Stand - Stephen King. Flagg rewards Lloyd for doing a good job.

P. Professor Xavier's Haunted Mansion. X-Men comics. The ghosts of dead (or temporarily dead, or dead in another timeline) X-Men and villains haunt the halls of Professor X's mansion.

Q. The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. You are no doubt familiar with the major genres of tardigrade literature.

R. The Realm of Persephone. Greek mythology. Persephone takes Hades blackberry picking.

S. The Story of Marli-Hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle. Watership Down. What lies on the dark side of the moon? Ask the Black Rabbit. He knows.

T. To See a World in a Grain of Sand. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick. Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.

U. An Unexpected Catch. Dragonriders of Pern. Lessa and other Benden women visit Southern Weyr to help out with a fishing tradition; things don't go as planned.

V. Vintage Year. The Fall of the House of Usher - TV. Verna visits Arthur Pym in prison.

W. The Woman Who Watches the King. Piranesi. For some, the House is a prison. For some, it's a place of healing.

X.

Y. You're Wrong About Misericorde. The Dark Tower. You're Wrong About podcast. Sarah tells Mike about the lost horror movie that became an urban legend. Digressions include the chemical formula for mescaline, Sarah imitating Ethan Hawke imitating a Yorkshire prop witch, and where the fat goes after it gets vibrated out of your body by a $19.99 girdle sold on late-night TV.

Z.

We all seem to be getting stuck on X and Z. But I also almost got stuck on J, the only letter where I couldn't select from multiple possible stories.

I successfully finished all my required objects for my wheel project in Ceramics! (A total of eleven objects, for various reasons, one of them being that we had to make duplicates of everything to manually destroy to simulate losing half of our work in the kiln. (I made a triplicate of one item.))

Anyway, with that done, we're on to our final project for the semester: Slab Houses.

In theory, I love this project. The teacher showed us some examples from previous years, and it has so much potential to be fun and quirky! The assignment is to make a home that tells a story about who or whatever lives in it. We also need two "roof angles" (not two sides of the same roof, as in an upside-down "v", but another roof thing in addition to that).

Unfortunately, the last constraint is killing me: There need to be a minimum of two slabs of 11" x 8.5". Holes can be cut into them, and structures built onto them, but they must otherwise retain those dimensions, because this project is ultimately about building slabs. Oh, and it also can't be more than like, 18" in diameter in any direction.

Idea sketches were due on Wednesday. I had five ideas for slab structures, and ended up finalizing one of the two I was least enthusiastic about because it's easy for the design to follow the "two piece-of-paper-sized slabs" rule.

We had to make models of our idea for a skill builder, due by 4:30pm today, and mine is. Not great. We're allowed to skip a lot of the final embellishments, and mine is still not great. Chiefly because it has a flat roof, and I didn't think through why that was a horrible idea. But it was also literally the only idea that would really work without being too big.

I've since come up with a couple of other ideas out of desperation, but I don't know if I'll be able to switch to one of them at this point. Still, it's gotta be better than my current attempt 😩

Guess who just remembered that ey've already written some "Image Hosting on Dreamwidth" tutorials?

They're just still stuck on Tumblr and not Dreamwidth at the moment.

Links, so I can get to migrating them later:

Brief tutorial with no images, Tutorial with images.

There's also this one, which is not by me, but covers posting images by email.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine I used to work with at AnimeIowa contacted me with questions about running Accessibility for the convention he's since joined; I've rounded up everything I could think of and sent it to him, though I don't doubt I'll be thinking of things I missed for a while longer 😛

Anyway, that was more floating around the back of my mind than anything, until I found out about TwitchCon's major accessibility fails, including (among other things) not having a ramp to the main stage for one of their Guests of Honor, for three years running. I'm no professional, just a passionate, self-taught amateur, but even I can fix something that egregious after the first time!

With that in mind, I'm going to do my best to start sharing some of the stuff I thought about and planned for Accessibility back when I was running it for AnimeIowa. I've got a bare bones timeline for stuff to do posted at access_fandom already (with questions and input very welcome!), and am planning to share more there as I get the wherewithal. Because my efforts and knowledge aren't perfect, but I still somehow did better than a convention with corporate funding to throw around.

If by any chance you read my book Traitor, the final book in The Change series, a review anywhere would be fantastic. It doesn't have to be positive or appear literally on my birthday.

Sherwood and I managed to release it on possibly the second-worst date we could have, which was October 2024. (The worst would have been November 2024). So a little belated publicity would be nice. I'd be happy to provide a review copy if you'd like.

An excellent used bookshop in Tucson, The Book Stop, may be closing down unless the current owner, who is retiring, can find someone to take it over. Her contact info is on the "contact" page.

Anyone want to run a used bookshop in Tucson? It's really great and has an excellent location. I can vouch that being a bookshop owner is the best job ever unless you want to make lots of money.

Feel free to link or copy this.

A YA novel about five friends who once played a spooky game that only four of them survived. Four years later, their friendship now broken, the ghost of their dead friend returns to drag them into a gameworld based on Japanese folklore. They must play again, for higher stakes, or else.

I like Japanese folklore, "years ago our group of friends did something bad that's now come back to haunt us," and deathworlds/gameworlds. This book sometimes hit the spot for me but more often didn't; it feels like the bones of a good book that needed a couple more drafts. The main issue, I think, is pacing. It's very fast-paced once it hits the gameworld, to the point where it feels like it's rushing from one scenario to the next, without having time to breathe. This also affects character. The characters are there, but they're a bit shallow because of the go-go-go pacing.

The best parts are a really excellent twist I did not at all see coming, and the scene where they all have to play truth or dare with younger versions of themselves at the ages they were when they first played the game. That part digs into character and relationships, not to mention the feeling of that game itself, in a really satisfying way. If the whole book worked on that level, it would have been much better.

There's a sequel that doesn't sound like it goes anywhere interesting.

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

H'okay. Grades from our first Current Event Journal for Social Problems are finally in.

...I got 100%.

I'm more confident about my second CEJ than I was about my first, even with overhearing the teacher say she was planning to grade the first very liberally. Like the Asynchronous Class Notes assignments for the first third of the semester, we are assigned three of these, of which the lowest scored will ultimately be dropped from our grade.

Methinks I might indulge myself and take a zero on the final one.


After stopping by the ceramics lab this afternoon, I finished my pieces for the throwing assignment! I've got doubles of each piece, as assigned, which is more than rather a lot of my classmates can say 😓 Apparently, including the wheel in Ceramics 1 is specifically a community college thing in this state, while other institutes will have coil-and-pinch and slab stuff in Ceramics 1 and save throwing for Ceramics 2. With all the trouble my classmates are having, I can understand that! In any case, I'm glad I managed to finish my stuff. Pics soon, I hope!


Finally, I made a new mood theme! No pics as yet, as I am being lazy about it, but I'm submitting it for consideration as another official mood theme, so hopefully everyone will get to see it soon anyway 😉 I must confess that I stole an idea from someone's planning at the beginning of last year and made cloud moods. Still, I did my best to follow the official mood theme preferences to a T this time around, which meant a maximum of 30x30 pixels in size, which is tiny. I expect that someone who wanted to work with the full 100x100 pixel space, or even 50x50 pixels, would have a better time of it!

I may see about getting a basic screencap of the moods up at some point, but I'm not sure I'll be uploading all of them individually this time 😅