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[personal profile] conuly
Morbid question, but let's be serious here: If you were trapped in a house with nothing to eat but your recently deceased pet, wouldn't you at least think about it?

People talk about this like it's so shocking, or like it means your pet obviously doesn't really love you, but c'mon. I love my cat, but I'd eat her in a heartbeat if she was already dead and there was nothing else left. She's my cat, she's not my baby. It's not like I've gone full on Donner Party - and let's be clear, if that was all that was left on the table, and they were already dead, I'd do that too. At least, I'd think about doing it. I suppose I might not be able to bring myself to go that far, but I wouldn't find it shocking if another person did!
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
ask a detailed question about phonology, such as "Do you really pronounce 'tr' as 'chr'?" (Yes, yes we do. We all do. It's almost impossible not to due to the physiology of those phonemes.)

And this will generate a burst of absolutely, frustratingly useless nonsense, because people just do not know how they talk. They don't know how they talk, they can't analyze their phonetics on the fly, and they are staggeringly unaware of these facts.

I keep telling these people to go to /r/linguistics instead, but thus far, nobody has taken my advice. Which is a pity, because I do give excellent advice, especially in this case.

But seriously - nobody knows how they talk. It's like trying to explain the biomechanics of walking. Sure, you've been doing it since you were a toddler (probably?), but that doesn't mean you have any understanding at all of what the hell you're doing as you propel yourself from place to place. I bet you can't even explain how you adjust for your varying center of balance!

Finally saw Zootopia 2!

Dec. 27th, 2025 04:00 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Before I say anything, A would like you to know how extremely annoying it is that they played those "Arabian Nights" riffs every time the snake (Barry) appeared, and it would be annoying even if the plot Read more... )

They wouldn't shut up about it, so there we go. They're not wrong.

Read more... )

Ancient Music by Ezra Pound

Dec. 25th, 2025 06:09 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.


***


Link

SGA Santa Stories

Dec. 26th, 2025 05:39 pm
melagan: Coffee cup with Atlantis in the rising steam (Default)
[personal profile] melagan
SGA Secret Santa Stories are up!

You can find them Here


I filled a pinch hit this year, as well as writing for my giftee. In return, I received two wonderful stories.

A Good Start and Real (with bonus art)


Lucky, lucky me!
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
And very heavy on the dudes. I'm not sure if women don't go into this sort of thing, or if they're just too classy when they do it, and thus don't get onto the playlist. Though I guess it would be strange for lesbians to sing an ode to Jingle Bell COCK. (Emphasis all theirs, and totally unnecessary. We know where the song was going.)


Anyway, in honor of this, I'm posting three belated Christmas videos. The last is Boynton and totally SFW.





This one won't let me embed it.

(no subject)

Dec. 26th, 2025 07:53 am
cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
Merry Christmas and happy Yuletide!

At some point I'll post more about the Christmas part of it (summary: very long day, ended up being fine but was not so sure it would be earlier in the day), but bc of RL holiday commitments I may not get around to yuletide recs (I will try my best, though!) and I wanted to make sure I mentioned my amazing Yuletide presents, especially since the fandoms weren't wrangled for, uh, well, all three of them, but two of them didn't even have Unspecified Fandom and so didn't show up in the fandoms list for a while. Although they're there now, all hail the Yuletide mods and fandom wranglers!!

In the order in which they were received:

Courting the Chamberlain (3740 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sieben Jahre - Tanja Kinkel, 18th Century CE RPF, Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum/Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Ludolf von Katte, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Additional Tags: Complicated Relationships, Character Study, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Male-Female Friendship, Yuletide Treat, Backstory, Unspecified Fandom - Freeform
Summary:

How Caroline Daum ended up marrying Frederick the Great's lover: or, how to find yourself a suitable match in Frederician Prussia.

So instead of requesting 18th CE RPF this year, I requested fic for the 18th CE RPF German novel Sieben Jahre which is all about, well, Frederick the Great and his brother Henry/Heinrich (my problematic fave!) and their entire super dysfunctional family, and all the fascinating people around them!! Caroline Fredersdorf shows up very briefly but is awesome and memorable, and one of my prompts was for her backstory -- and I got this great story, both tender and hilarious, about how she ended up getting married to the King's chamberlain and lover Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf! It doesn't require any book knowledge, although knowing enough of the 18th CE history to know that Fredersdorf was, in fact, Fritz's chamberlain and lover is probably useful :)

I also got two (!!) Tiptree stories! (!!) James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is one of those writers who had a fundamental effect on me as a young SF-reading adolescent. Yuletide rules allowed nominating anthologies this year, so I jumped on that because I love all these stories so much. And I adore how both of these stories interrogate the original stories' assumptions and open up new ways of looking at them!

That the Deity Who Kills for Pleasure Will Also Heal (6260 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., On The Last Afternoon - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Rape, Explicit Sexual Content, Ecocide, Agoraphobia, Background Human Sacrifice, Background Harm to Mice, Penis Fencing, Perhaps Something Will Be Saved From the Wreckage, Post-Canon
Summary:

Mysas says you’re gods from the sky, like the elders warned us. I think you’re just people. Gods wouldn’t look so frightened all the time, or sweat so much...

Ten thousand afternoons later, space travelers make contact again.

Post-canon for "On the Last Afternoon," dealing with what it means to be human; and the battle between humans and the ecosystem, and where does one draw the line? This can be read without knowing canon (it takes place generations after canon, in fact), although it's definitely very much in dialogue with the very different mindset of that story. (Sorry, I can't find an online version of the canon story.)

Remembering the Director of the Seventh Recitation: Oral Histories from the Imperial Archive (3597 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., The Women Men Don't See - James Tiptree Jr., The Last Flight of Dr. Ain - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Ruth Parsons
Additional Tags: Oral History, Post-Canon, "Main Character Death" Just In the Sense That Everyone Dies Eventually, Background Ruth Parsons & Althea Parsons, Vietnam War, Lunar Forestry
Summary:

Five memories of Ruth Parsons, afterwards.

Post-canon for "The Women Men Don't See," with some worldbuilding taken from "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain." Just a really interesting set of interviews with a diverse set of aliens and humans and fascinating worldbuilding, about a potential future for Ruth Parsons and her life, that has a lot of thoughts about axes other than the women/men axis. Just really great. This can definitely be read without knowing "Flight," and while helpful to know "Women," it's not necessary, I think, to enjoy it. (The canon story is archived here, although the formatting is a little weird.)

Decorating Atlantis

Dec. 23rd, 2025 12:37 pm
melagan: Coffee cup with Atlantis in the rising steam (Default)
[personal profile] melagan
You know this is exactly what would happen if John and Rodney were tasked with decorating Atlantis.

John-and-Rodney-decorate-Atlantis.png
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
So, I'm reading something about an abusive relationship. So toxic, in every tiny respect. But the commenters! You've got a handful of them happily chirping things like "Oh, Abuser is trying so hard! He's really just controlling because he's worried, but look, he's trying to make Abusee happy!" and we've got another handful saying things like "I don't get why Abusee doesn't just leave. I mean, he's in public, is he scared of getting hit? In public? Like, geez."

Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?

Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.

(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)

***********************


Read more... )
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
The music is great, but the plot + worldbuilding raises some issues that they don't bother to even attempt to address properly.

Read more... )

*******************************************


Read more... )

The longest night of the year

Dec. 21st, 2025 12:00 pm
melagan: Coffee cup with Atlantis in the rising steam (Default)
[personal profile] melagan
There's something magical about the longest night of the year.

no title

Happy Solstice!

Gosh, don't you just hate it

Dec. 19th, 2025 01:35 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

*****************


Read more... )

Anybody have any explanatory links?

Dec. 18th, 2025 04:09 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
As we all know - or anyway, as most of us know - words are capitalized like names if they're used like names and titles.

This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"

But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.

It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.

The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.

I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.

Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.

(no subject)

Dec. 16th, 2025 04:35 pm
cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
December! Time for my annual freaking out post.

Music: Two major (church) and two minor (kid) events; one of each is DONE. The major church event was the big stake recital one, with a combined stake choir and orchestra, and went better than I had expected. I actually had to do very little this year (no organization, as other people took that on (which I feel a bit guilty about, but not actually guilty enough to do anything about it), just show up at rehearsals and recital and boss people around when necessary and maybe some support stuff on the edges, which is how I like it) but it still seemed to take more executive function than I felt it should. Probably partially because I was trying hard to get people from my ward to join, with mixed results, and also partially because I was also sorting two children and five musical instruments for the orchestra -- E intensely dislikes playing anything else but viola, but A might have played either violin or viola this year (he ended up on violin), and I also was floating between violin and "viola" (I don't actually play viola or read alto clef, but I borrowed E's old 14" viola and ended up doubling cello an octave up). The other major church event is our ward Christmas program, so rather smaller, but I have to actually learn these piano parts which I have been super slacking on.

Yuletide: please send help, this is getting out of control. But it will all be okay. I am pretty sure. Maybe not quite as ambitiously okay as I want it to be.

Christmas prep: I finally got family presents sorted today, more or less. And D corralled us to go get a tree. More things to do here. We did get the ornaments on the tree and one of the nativity sets is up but the other one is not (yes, it would take about 5 minutes, I just forgot about it until writing this, lol)

something to go with the socks

Dec. 16th, 2025 11:11 am
melagan: (snowglobe)
[personal profile] melagan
red gloves

I've made gloves for family, but this is the first time I've made some for me!

I'm recovering from a 24-hour (nasty- sooo nasty) stomach bug and all I want right now is a cozy Christmas-y McShep fic to make me feel better.


Yes, that's blatant begging. Aided by Chkc's wonderful Chibi art.

Watched the weather report today.

Dec. 15th, 2025 04:08 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Today's temperatures: Started below 20, "feels like" in the single digits. But not to worry, within a week we should be in the 50s!

And they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.

And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.

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