askerian | Reading

So my work day started with two tenants coming in to say they'd locked themselves out of their bathroom, continued through twenty million leases to process, and ended with another tenant coming in literally one minute before closing to say they thought they had to fill out a form, maybe...? which was actually three forms, one of which I had to generate specially and then highlight the relevant sections because nobody ever fills it out correctly otherwise. *headdesk*

I mean, at least I will get paid for the extra twenty minutes I stayed? But holy gods, argh argh and above all, argh.

(The bathroom, incidentally, was an easy fix. All it takes is a judiciously applied paperclip! But I had to go apply the fix in person because apparently tenants are bad at comprehending verbal explanations at 9am when they really need to pee. (To be fair, I probably would be as well.))

...

On the bright side, I got a two-hour tax continuing education course finished before Mom Boss dumped the never-ending leases on me, so that's something.

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: ithaca, ny
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1044353.html

mme_hardy

This looks like another "young outcast discovers his powers" book. Wow, is it not. Trust me. In the very first scene, Kellen needs to fight a magecaster's duel.

There are three requirements to earning a mage's name among the JanTep. The first is the strength to defend your family. The second is the ability to wield the high magics that protect our people. The third is simply to reach the age of sixteen. I was a few weeks shy of my birthday when I learned that I wouldn't be doing any of those things.

And we're off, into the duel. Kellen's problem is that he doesn't have magic. This is not a survivable problem. But Kellep does have a very, very clever mind. In a lesser book, Kellep would discover his magic and wipe the floor with his opponent, winning the acclaim of the crowd.

This is not a lesser book. Spellslinger is actually about a young outcast discovering and creating his own moral fiber. Kellep's struggle, although he doesn't realize it early in the book, is to become a decent human being in an indecent society. This is a far more interesting coming-of-age story than you usually get. When the Mysterious Stranger shows up, she's not a kindly wizard mentor. She's (possibly) not a wizard at all. She doesn't teach Kellep: she gives him opportunities to teach himself. Kellep acquires some new resources, but they are challenges as much as gifts.

Oh, the Mysterious Stranger kicks ass. I can't say more, because it would be a spoiler. She is compelling and ambiguous and funny and tough.

The characters are engrossing. The worldbuilding is unusual and clever. It's partly based around an original variant of a Tarot deck, but is in no way woo-woo; the cards do not predict your future, but (sometimes) illuminate your choices. The cards are playing cards, but are also a weapon. The cards have nothing to do -- as far as we know -- with the magic of the JanTep.

The book itself is gorgeous, in a way that made me extremely nostalgic. The red-and-black cover has two line drawings of the main characters, presented as a face card. (Don't look too closely at Kellep; it's a spoiler.) Red is used as a spot color, very effectively. There are interior illustrations of relevant Tarot cards at the beginning of each section. And the page edges (forget the technical term) are red! Taken as a whole, the book looks a bit like a deck of cards, which is, I'm sure intentional.

Here's the catch. There (as of time of writing) no U.S. or Canadian distributor of Spellslinger or its sequel, Shadowblack. If you're in North America and want to read them, you'll have to order from the, in my experience, reliable, fast, and cheap www.bookdepository.com or an equivalent.

Note: de Castell's Greatcoat books are also awesome. If you like the Musketeers books, you should love them. The nice thing is that they preserve the essential "three duelists against the world" spirit without either copying the plots or being pastiche-y. The second nice thing is that the author is a stage fight choreographer and is able to communicate fights clearly to the non-fighter (me).

Current Mood: happy

krait

THIS FANGIRL!!

I am so pleased. My relationship with my laptop has been saved. Not to mention my relationship with DW, AO3, DragCave, online banking, and anything else requiring a login!

Rejoice with me by telling me what you've been up to lately. :D

edenfalling

rosaxx50 said: I would love something for Karen & Foggy & Matt (or ot3!) + libel! Something about how vigilante/law/media deals with a case of libel in some way. (400 words exactly)

Note: Three months late, but look! I wrote a thing! :D Also, insofar as this has a canon setting, it's in a happy future sometime post-Defenders.

( With Only Mild Complaining )

And now I will go eat lunch. :)

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: ithaca, ny
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1044076.html

qem_chibati

Dear Creator for Holidays!!! on Ice,

Firstly thank you! I'm really looking forward to whatever you produce. If you want to know more about what I like you can see the sort of art I reblog here on tumblr or you can see my fic bookmarks here on ao3. I also made a longer list of likes and dislikes here.

Best Wishes
Qem

( Read more... )

Current Mood: hopeful

mme_hardy

Nothing ages faster than style guides; the language moves on while the guide continues to shake a fist at the previous generation's shibboleths. (Lookin' at you, Strunk and White. Fowler is at least funny.)

Today, I give you Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right, published 1909. There are gems on every page, but here are a few:

THE BLACKLIST
A for An. "A hotel." "A heroic man." Before an unaccented aspirate use an. The contrary usage in this country comes of too strongly stressing our aspirates.
Note that this means he thinks you should say "HOtel". Some people (*cough*fuddyduddies*cough* still agitate for "An heroic", but I've never seen anybody objecting to "A hotel".

Chivalrous. The word is popularly used in the Southern States only, and commonly has reference to men's manner toward women. Archaic, stilted and fantastic.
I kind of love this. Boy, would Bierce hate "kind of".

Every for Ever. "Every now and then." This is nonsense: there can be no such thing as a now and then, nor, of course, a number of now and thens. Now and then is itself bad enough, reversing as it does the sequence of things, but it is idiomatic and there is no quarreling with it. But "every" is here a corruption of ever, meaning repeatedly, continually.
Good old false etymology.

Some forgotten slang and dialect:
Avoirdupois for Weight. Mere slang.
Clever for Obliging. In this sense the word was once in general use in the United States, but is now seldom heard and life here is less insupportable.
Decidedly for Very, or Certainly. "It is decidedly cold."
Gent for Gentleman. Vulgar exceedingly.

So. Tell me your favorites!

edenfalling

I heard the most godawful noises coming from outside my window around 9:30pm, whereupon I went outside and discovered Wilson (my diagonal neighbors' cat) in a standoff on the porch railing with an unfamiliar tailless, all-black cat.

Wilson then dived off the railing and under Upstairs Neighbor E's bicycle, where he proceded to make continuous upset noises while the stranger prowled silently along the railing and scented my windowframe.

I attempted to see if Wilson wanted rescue, but he swiped at me. Then I attempted to shoo the stranger cat away, but it swiped at me in turn.

Wilson was very polite about the swiping -- soft paws, no claws. The stranger made me bleed in seven places.

I went inside to clean and disinfect my wounds, after which I returned to see if Wilson was feeling any better/safer. The stranger cat was gone, but Wilson was still on edge, and swiped at me even though I approached very slowly and never got within two feet of him. So I went back inside again and applied a bandaid to the one cut that hadn't stopped bleeding.

When I returned to the porch a third time, Wilson was once again feeling relaxed. He came into the foyer as I opened the door, meowed in greeting, and asked for petting. So I scratched behind his ears for a couple minutes, before he decided it was time to head upstairs and find his people.

I've heard similar noises from the porch occasionally over the past month, and now I wonder if this is an ongoing conflict between Wilson and the stranger...

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: ithaca, ny
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1043848.html

mme_hardy

Does anybody remember a prose-poem about a young man who is determined to see the truth of everything? The important part is the ending, in which the man, grown old, looks into the eyes of young men and sees a kindly old gentleman who is fond of sunsets. The last line is something close to

"That is what he saw in the eyes of those wicked young men".

I thought this was by Stephen Crane. Does anybody recognize it?

edenfalling

I started my increased dose of Celexa on Sunday. For whatever reason, it is not technically possible to get a 30mg pill of Celexa (or generic), so our choices were either take one-and-a-half 20mg pills, or take three 10mg pills. Splitting pills is a pain, so my doctor and I went the second route. The pills are so tiny, I always feel like I'm going to lose them in the gaps between my fingers no matter how tightly I press them together. *hands*

Anyway, I have been absurdly exhausted this week, but as always I am unsure how much of that is the medication and how much is my generally terrible sleep patterns. However, I have noticed that I've been sleeping... not badly, exactly, but more lightly/less deeply? Also having more weird dreams, or at least more weird dreams that I remember because I'm just awake/aware enough to notice them as they happen. And I am pretty sure that part is a medication side-effect.

Anyway, I am trying a new policy of going the fuck to bed by 11pm every night. I have not had great luck imposing bedtimes on myself in the past, but I think part of the problem is that my previous bedtime attempts have been more in the nature of "if you are still up at this hour, something has gone Terribly Wrong and you must initiate Emergency Sleep Protocols immediately" and by the time I've reached that point, I am so tired I can't make good decisions anymore so I just stay up even later. I figure 11pm is early enough to avoid that pitfall, and also making my cutoff happen before midnight avoids another mental pitfall of "oh well it's tomorrow already; I might as well stay up another hour." So fingers crossed, I guess.

...

Tangentially, today I failed to give blood for the second month in a row, because I am a little bit under the Red Cross's minimum acceptable hemoglobin levels -- not to the point where I'm medically anemic, but still. I wonder if that might be a medication side-effect as well, and/or if it's contributing to my tiredness. I have been having some minor gastrointestinal issues that could mean I'm not getting as many nutrients from food as usual, in which case supplements might be worth looking into...

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: ithaca, ny
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1043641.html

krait

Does anybody know what became of priestess_grrrl on LJ?

I'd planned to ask her to 'port the old lovelessdiscuss comm on LJ over to DW, but her LJ profile doesn't give any of her new locations and, although I thought I'd found her here a while ago, looking through my flist I'm not seeing any names that ring a bell.

edenfalling

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get a fic in one of the fandoms I asked for. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

---------------

( General Information )

Okay. On to specific fandoms.

---------------

( The Lions of Al-Rassan )

( Saga of the Skolian Empire )

( Daredevil (Comics) )

( The Dispossessed )

And that is that. Thank you again, and happy writing!

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: ithaca, ny
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1043396.html

dira

Placeholder!

ETA: Oh god assignments went out early! I am so sorry this is still a placeholder, I promise I will update it soon!! And in the meantime, optional details are optional so do not be afraid that whatever thoughts you are having are going to be the wrong thoughts, I am just so happy that you offered to write for one of my tiny favorite things!

(Also I have added the Yuletide tag, so if you want to look back at my past years' Dear Author letters, uh, tbh this year's will not wind up being much different.)

dira

Ahhh, much better! Mostly thanks to Kinktober, but still, writing! progress!

WIPs currently active: 6

Words written this week: 6,051

WIPs that got no words this week: 0

WIPs that did get words this week:

Codename: Aluminum Bastard (aka broken dick epic): 112

Born in the Blood: 254

Slavefic #6: 405

Wildly Unmanageable Ace!Bitty Longfic: 287

Jack/Bitty angsty happy ending kidfic: 23, shhh it’s more than zero

Kinktober Day 1: 672

Kinktober Day 2: 1,877

~~Kinktober Day 6~~: 1,017, and then it did not work out, so... I’ll come back around to that one sometime. Probably.

Kinktober Day 8: 1,404, annnnnnd counting. I should finish that, huh?

Crossposts: https://dsudis.livejournal.com/763502.html

mme_hardy

Turkish doesn't have gender markers on pronouns.

Try this.

1. Go to http://translate.google.com.
2. Select English as the language in the left-hand field.
3. Enter

she is a babysitter
he is a doctor

4. Select Turkish as the language in the right-hand field.
5. Click translate.
You get

o bir bebek bakıcısı
o bir doktor

6. Select the button with two arrows above the top right of the left-hand field. This reverses the translation and translates back from Turkish to English.

Have fun.

edenfalling

I had my one-month followup appointment this morning.

We are upping my Celexa dose from 20mg to 30mg per day, with another followup appointment in early November, to see if that helps get me past the motivation/executive dysfunction issues. I also have the phone number of a local mental health organization, which should either be able to provide some therapy or direct me to someone with openings if I want to troubleshoot my coping strategies.

And I got a flu shot while I was at the office, because my insurance covers it and why not. :)

I'll pick up the new prescription tomorrow when I do my grocery run. Hopefully this time there won't be as many (or even any?) weird side-effects, since it's just a dosage increase instead of throwing a completely new and weird chemical at my body.

Current Mood: sore
Current Location: rental company office
Crossposts: https://edenfalling.livejournal.com/1043151.html

dira

Two weeks in a row! Look at me go! I managed to function like a human being for like the entire day today, it was sort of amazing. So now I will continue my impressive accomplishments by making a blog post.

Books: I'm five or six chapters into The Soldier's Scoundrel by Cat Sebastian, and after the first three chapters I stopped and bought the next two books in the series on Amazon, so, yes, am enjoying! And juuust stuck a bookmark in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country to start reading next. (I usually have one ebook and one physical book on the go at a given time, and I'm trying to remember to read some of the unread books I actually own in between taking out all sorts of things from the library. We'll see how that goes when I'm using the quiet study room at the library five days a week to get writing and other work done.)

Books finished:

Hello Forever by Sarina Bowen, a loosely connected ~sequel~ to Goodbye Paradise. Both of these m/m romances where one or both heroes have faced severe homophobia were originally published under a different name, and have been republished this year as Sarina Bowen titles. AND THEY ARE GREAT. If you are into that kind of angst, which. I am. As it turns out. I loved the way this one handled Cax's resistance to being with a guy, giving him a situation that he feels trapped by for utterly legitimate reasons, and the way his resistance gives way piece by piece (and then, as they say, all at once). <3

The Proposal by Mary Balogh, the first book of the Survivors' Club series, in which it becomes clear that this series is actually a spinoff of at least two OTHER series so now I need a family tree with all of Mary Balogh's books clearly indicated on it to figure out what ELSE I want to read because these are delightful. (Notwithstanding the occasional startling anachronism, like a heroine comparing something from which nothing escapes to a black hole. In 1819 or so. BUT WHATEVER, RECOVERY LOVE STORIES FOR EVERYONE.)

Fic: Today was another day featuring the blessing of a WIP update, this time from Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail which is of course The Best. The Olds!! <3______<3 (also the endnotes say there was a huge continuity error in this chapter but I'm reading at the same pace as chapters are posting so I have totally lost track of continuity anyway so it was just delightful.) Otherwise I have six tabs open, 155 things marked for later, and 34 marked to reread. Oh and now that I have a physical copy I am slowly making my way through Not Without You, which is staggeringly beautiful and A Delight. <3 <3 <3

Fic finished:
(A sampling of stuff I’ve bookmarked recently–you can see all my bookmarks at http://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/bookmarks)

I Do (please say you want me) by ceeainthereforthat (Bucky/Steve, E, 82k) - Bucky is a professional dominant, and Steve is the son of a vice president who grew up in the public eye; they meet running together in the same DC neighborhood, and just when they're starting to actually get involved, Bucky's professional life becomes front page news. Steve proceeds to Be Maximum Steve Rogers about it and refuses to cut off contact or throw Bucky under the bus--and for the sake of PR it's decided that Steve should play out a whirlwind romance with Bucky instead, getting married (with a pre-nup guaranteeing Bucky millions of dollars upon their scheduled divorce five years later). EXCEPT GUESS WHAT THEY FALL IN FABULOUSLY KINKY LOVE. Ughhh this was so great, and I adored the pace of reveals and the way they kept edging further and further into actual intimacy. <3 <3 <3

Just Spit It Out by PorcupineGirl (Bitty/Jack, G, 2k) - What happens when you live in a first-words soulmark universe and you hear your soulmate say the words on your wrist--and then realize that YOU now need to say the words HE'S been waiting for for his entire life. And you are, say, a deeply anxious Canadian hockey robot. IT MIGHT BE DIFFICULT. But hooray for fate (and Shitty). <3

All I Ever Wanted by sevenfists (Sid/Geno, E, 10k) - A really lovely story about two dudes finally being ready to be in love with each other. And doing some high altitude training during their bye week, because Sidney Crosby.

Crossposts: https://dsudis.livejournal.com/763264.html

Life and Times of Teh Asuka

Mwahahahaha.

wherein Liz has a day of argh

Book rec: Sebastien de Castell, Spellslinger

GUESS WHO HAS INTERNET?

[Fic] "With Only Mild Complaining" -- Daredevil (MCU)

Dear Creator - Holidays!!! on Ice

A Voice From The Attic: Ambrose Bierce's Write it Right

cat fight

Poem help!

Celexa update

Fandom phonebook?

Dear Yuletide Writer 2017

Dear Yulewriter

This week in writing, 10/8

It's all about the algorithm

Depression update

What I'm Reading Wednesday, 10/4/2017

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October 2017

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