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I think I may have seen something in /r/whatsthatbook more baffling than

"It's set in a time when things were hard for black people in America" - a line which so flabbergasted me that I don't think I ever figured out what to say.

But this one may have topped it!

"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."

...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.

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Six Sentence Sunday

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Current Music: MGMT, "Mother Nature"

You know what comes right after the dark

My poem "The Avalon Procedure" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It is finally Arthuriana; it owes its title as well as a debt of argument to Bryher and the rest is diaspora and geology. I still have apples on my table from earlier, brighter this autumn, and their scent of sweet orchards and cooling earth. If you want in on the saddle-stapled pages of this enduringly black-and-white 'zine, I can only recommend it.

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Black Brothers Fest 2025-2026: Prompting Open Till December 15

Fest Name: Black Brothers Fest 2025-2026
Links: Tumblr | Discord | AO3 | Rules | Prompting
Type of Challenge: Anonymous prompt fest
Description: A fest exploring the relationship between the Black brothers, Sirius and Regulus. Prompting is open till December 15.
Ratings Restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length Restrictions:
Fic: Minimum 1,000 words; no maximum
Art: Minimum clean lineart or coloured sketch of one character (bust-up) on unlined paper (or digital equivalent)
Podfic: Minimum 10 minutes of podding a previously written work or minimum 500 words of written fic with an accompanying podfic of the same fic
Timeline:
Tagset Nominations & Prompting Open: November 15
Claiming Opens: November 30
Nominations and Prompting Close: December 15
Claiming Closes: December 31
Works Due: February 28, 11:59 PM EDT
Works Revealed: starting April 1
Creators Revealed: two weeks after all works go live.

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RJL Fest (Remus): Prompting Open Till November 29

Fest Name: RJL Fest
Links: Tumblr | Rules | Prompting
Type of Challenge: Anonymous prompt fest
Description: A Remus-centric fic and art fest. The use of any AI-powered software is not allowed for your submission. Prompting is open till November 29.
Ratings Restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length Restrictions:
Fic: Minimum 1000 words; no maximum
Art: None?
Timeline:
Prompting: November 15 - 29
Claiming: December 1 - February 28
Works due: March 1
Posting: March 10
Reveals: A week after posting is completed

Plans Change (by Goddess47) (Teen)

Shows: SGA
Rec Category: Apocafic
Characters: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Categories: M/M
Words: 950
Warnings: From the Author: It's an apocalypse, stuff happens you know! (but no AO3-type warnings apply, kind of)
Author on DW:

goddess47
Author's Website: Goddess47 on AO3
Link: Plans Change on LJ, and backup on Wayback
Why This Must Be Read: In a last-ditch effort, John readies himself to pilot the evacuated city, self-destruct ticking down, into a Wraith fleet massing to leave Pegasus and invade Earth. Only to discover that for this suicide run, he's not alone. A romantic apocafic with a hopeful ending!

( snippet of the fic under here )

Current Music: Dropkick Murphys, "Sirens"

When you turn a solemn promise to a blatant lie

Tubi had begun to endanger its status as an unrelieved treasure of free weird cinema earlier this fall when it suddenly disappeared two otherwise hard to come by movies of interest to me before I could recover enough from my hospitalization to write about them, and the recent appearance of an obtrusive encouragement to sign in at the start of each stream had not thrilled me, but then tonight I discovered that in the grand total of five nights since

spatch and I last rummaged through its digital shelves the service had turned account-only. Without one, the most I was offered of any movie was a fifteen-minute preview. With one, its catalogue remains purportedly free—though presumably still in need of a hard adblock—but it had always been a huge attractor for me that in addition to resembling the experience of browsing the remoter regions of a video store where the schlock and the art films were all jumbled together, the service did not have to track its users. I never created an account. I enjoyed it not knowing what to recommend me. Any data the internet does not successfully scrape from me these days feels like a victory. Rob has offered to create effectively a burner account for me so that I do not lose access to some movies I had intentions of trying to write about, but I am feeling much more dejected about them and about the further algorithmic constriction of the world, besides which their equally recent, randomly mid-month deep-sixing of their library of classic Doctor Who makes it not impossible, but once again harder for me to rewatch Vengeance on Varos (1985) in memoriam Nabil Shaban. I am aware that far worse disasters are on constant rotation. But I just had my other social media nuked for not allowing it to extort my biometrics and I just had to wrestle my word processor back from the grip of unasked-for AI and I enjoyed being able to point people toward the occasional film that, region-dependent, they could just dial up and watch without it filing their history away for future advertisement. I just heard from my health insurance that it will cost even more in the coming year and it is already functionally unaffordable, except that I have too many specialists I can afford even less to lose. It just does not feel necessary for anything to be more difficult, even the unprofitable watching of B-movies for fun.

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due South: Ghost Song by exeterlinden

Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski, Diefenbaker, Victoria
Rating: author's rating is ?NC-17 for angst and violent imagery. I'd rate it Mature.
Length: 9998
Content Notes: see rating note above. No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: exeterlinden on AO3, exeterlinden on DW
Themes: Mystery and Suspense, Mythical Creatures: werewolves, Angst with a happy ending, Friends to lovers, AU: fork in the road

Summary: It appears on the fire escape one late evening in early winter, big and dark and silent.

Reccer's Notes: This gripping and spooky story starts with a different version of Fraser's chase and snowy huddling with Victoria, then segues into current (AU) canon with Ray Kowalski baffled by the big, black, mysterious, wolflike dog that intermittently appears on his fire escape, trying to get in, sometimes with Dief trying to chivvy it away. Also, Fraser's been distancing himself, and when he finds out about the dog's visits he's most unhappy. Things get weirder, and Fraser gets weirder, and then Victoria returns to push them all into crisis. The ending took me by surprise, and I liked it a lot! An excellent read.

Fanwork Links: Ghost Song on AO3 and Ghost Song on Dreamwidth

Celebrity20in20 • Round 21

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Lesson, Door

This morning I gave a lesson to a new student. Her horse is a lot more reactive than Lisa's horse but he was also not very respectful. He learned fast and was pretty cooperative by the end of the lesson. My student also needed some of the basics, how to sit in balance, how to hold the arms and reins so you are very soft with the horse's mouth. The horse has one very unfortunate habit. He shies violently when she dismounts. She sent him to a trainer, and has a work-around to get off safely, but it is a big spook and is pretty scary. I think the horse was once really scared by a dismount. Now it is a habit. Time and desensitization should help.
The woodshed door project is coming along. Both sides of the plywood is primed and all the wood is roughly cut to length. Next is a top coat of brown paint on the plywood and to start assembly.

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pinch hitters' prompts

Pinch Hitter Prompts 2025

Every year, well over a hundred pinch hitters take on extra assignments. Many of these pinch hitters are signed up to Yuletide, with an assigned writer and recipient from the start. Some are not!

Though these supporting pinch hitters are not guaranteed a gift, we'd like to make it a possibility. On this post, we're collecting prompts from the pinch hitters who are not signed up to Yuletide, so that others may give them treats.

To writers
Please consider writing a treat for a pinch hitter! See instructions for how, where, and when to post a treat. Full-length gifts for pinch hitters are welcome in the Main collection.

To pinch hitters
If you are signed up to Yuletide this year, this post does not apply to you, but we still hope you enjoy your gift(s).

If you are not signed up to Yuletide this year but you have claimed or posted a pinch hit, please comment to this post with your requests! Please limit yourself to Yuletide-eligible fandoms, but you can ask for more than 8 different fandoms.

Yuletide 2025 tag set on AO3
Tag set as a browser app

You can treat your comment as a Dear Writer letter, with likes and prompts, or include a link to a letter. Either way, please include the following information when you comment:

-your AO3 name
-your requested fandoms [please format the fandoms exactly as they are in the tag set if possible]
-your requested characters

and, optionally, ideas for what you would like to receive, DNWs, and/or (a) link(s) to other places where you have written about what you would like. You're welcome to comment on mini-challenge posts!

Thank you, pinch hitters! And thank you to anyone on the lookout to pick up a pinch hit - we will post them at

yuletide_pinch_hits throughout the exchange.

November Night by Adelaide Crapsey

Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

***

Link

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(no subject)

mm, Things! since I wanted to complain about this first thing and therefore I will remember to talk about the rest too. xD

1.
Apparently at some point in the last month-ish the CVS I pick up T from changed their computer refill phone tree so that you need to respond with your voice instead of being allowed to just input numbers on your phone's keypad. Rude, honestly. This doesn't take longer, it's just annoying.

2.
That I'm actually keeping up with Critical Role: Araman astounds me. I have, however, determined that I'm more prone to listening to it as a podcast than watching it as a video, and for all that they're actor-people who like using their bodies and showing off their pretty battle maps, I do not feel like I am missing that much. Probably someone will tell me if there's an important visual moment I should look at.

3.
I've spent the last like two weeks reading the first four volumes of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is overall very fun and makes me want to read more LitRPG stuff just so that I can have more thoughts about how LitRPG and Infinite Flow overlap in form, because DCC is exactly the kind of thing I expect from an Infinite Flow novel. xD It's pretty much gen, though, with background het vibes and if there's any queerness it hasn't pinged like at all to me, which tbh is a shame but not super surprising. It's fun. I care more about the worldbuilding about the setting than about the plot or main character, in a lot of ways, but hey I am having a great time with the secondary and side characters. And with the general goal of "fuck this system, it's fucking us over and needs to end".

4.
Oh yes the last time I posted here was just before my friend took shodan! That test went great, it was so fun, I think they could've just taken nidan but that wasn't what they wanted. I got thrown around a bunch. At some point I should get a video of the test, which I am excited for, since seeing the test and being test uke are different experiences.

Also while I'm in aikido mode: I should be taking my nidan test at the end of May at my dojo's 50th anniversary seminar! This is very exciting for many reasons!

5.
The consequences of missing the afternoon classes for my friend's test are as follows:
- had to take two online quizzes for a total of like maybe an hour of work (this is what welding did last time)
- spent the part of today's CAD class I otherwise would've spent doing basically nothing (or possibly working ahead) making up work for shop
- I guess it counts as an absence but I lost absolutely zero information via doing this so whatever

6.
I have a lot of feelings about ttrpgs via the three-shot

hafnia ran over Halloween season (horror is when you are made SAD about existential implications and must do terrible things because any other choice is worse) (also it's so fun playing with a new person and immediately finding a fun dynamic that proceeds to be a central axis of the game) and also prep for the 5-session short campaign she's planning to run in the new year.

aka: I have too many feelings about Eberron as a setting and I can pull more information out of my head while I'm supposed to be in class than I think. xD Love to infodump about something that was absolutely a bit of a special interest for my childself and which I still adore but haven't had reason to re-up knowledge on recently.

7.
I would like to protest that it is DARK out now and I do not like this! it is WINTER and also daylight savings happened and it makes me go UGH about how little I get to be free of work/school and able to be in the sun.

Alas, dryer

The washer saga ended a little while ago, with a brand repair tech who corrected something simple. Thursday night (the start of Friday wash day) the dryer gave up.

Since the dryer had been leaving unsightly rust streaks on all the lights, I have not been subtle in my campaign for a new one.

Delivery is scheduled for today, of a dryer with a steam cycle but without wifi.

(no subject)

Ao3's Sweet Sixteen is today! It was launched November 15th, 2009.

Were you an early adopter, or did it take you a while to start posting? Were you writing fanfic elsewhere at the time, or were you not into fic yet? How has your writing changed since the first fic you posted? Do you even use Ao3 now, or do you post somewhere else?

This post is not sponsored by Ao3. I'm just a dork.