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Posted by Mike Glyer

By Vincent Docherty:  Summary:  In more detail: The traditional Q&A was held at SMOFcon 42 on Saturday 6th December 2025 in the Dieselverkstaden Culture House in Stockholm, Sweden.  The Q&A was hosted by Vincent Docherty and Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf, chair of SMOFcon 42, and featured presentations by and questions … Continue reading
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Posted by Mike Glyer

The Critics Choice Association announced today the nominees for the 31st annual Critics Choice Awards on December 5.  Notably, four new categories have been added to this year’s show: Best Variety Series, Best Stunt Design, Best Casting and Ensemble, and Best Sound. … Continue reading
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I figured that I'd group these together as they're by the same author. I wanted to talk about this anyway, because this is one of the more gratifying experiences I've had with leaving comments on older fic. Basically, I commented on a long WIP that hadn't been updated in several years, and the author not only wrote the rest of it but ALSO, to my delighted amazement, posted another long fic in the same universe, and started posting some new fanart too. It was wonderful. ♥ Never be afraid to comment even years later; sometimes you not only make someone's day but get lovely fanworks in return.

3 Londo/G'Kar Babylon 5 recs (by the same creator) cut for spoilers )

More Joy Day

Dec. 7th, 2025 01:51 am
ysabetwordsmith: Text says New Year Resolutions on notebook (resolutions)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] goals_on_dw
This holiday may suit those of you with goals about happiness, creativity, or helping others.


More Joy Day is BACK

Every year since 2008, in the interest of spreading more joy, I’ve proposed that on a designated day in early January we each engage in one act, either online or physical space (or both!), which brings joy to another person, in the hopes that that person will spread that joy further, and exponentially onward.

This act can be as simple as leaving a comment on a fanwork to as complicated as planting a tree or flower in someone’s honor and sharing a photo of it and why you chose that person. If you want the longer version (and more suggestions) you can check out this post from 2024 which provides both.

The 19th annual More Joy Day is on Thursday, January 8, 2026.

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Posted by Mike Glyer

The LAcon V Worldcon committee today announced the schedule for the 2026 WSFS Virtual Business Meeting. The committee chose the dates taking into consideration the 147 responses received to their survey of the science fiction and fantasy community. The committee … Continue reading
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
[personal profile] asakiyume
Still not as online as I'd like to be, but here are some easy things to share. First, tendrils!

I planted some seeds from a passion fruit and got some seedlings, and I noticed the other day that they'd started sending out tendrils. Here one tendril is reaching round a ginger leaf:

passion fruit tendril reaching round a ginger leaf

I broke off a dried asparagus fern skeleton from the outside garden and brought that in for the passion fruit to climb on instead:

passion fruit seedling curling round a dried asparagus fern skeleton

And then I thought everyone could enjoy "Nope," demonstrated both by enlarged emoji and by Little Springtime. It was in my old hometown's public library for a display of picture books about saying no to stuff.

little springtime and nope sign

Now the verbal images. I was at R's place because I was going to take her and her kids to get green card photos, and I'd taken off my boots in the apartment. The boots are tall--they go to my knees. Her younger son looked at them standing by the door and said, "They're like military boots," and demonstrated marching. Which, wow. You compare a thing to things you're familiar with. I've been told the refugee camp these guys were in was close to active fighting.

And this last isn't so much an image as a metaphysical something-something. Or a failure of Google Translate. Or both. At a different point in the day, R and I were waiting in my car for her kids to get off the bus, and she typed a question into Google translate. I could see the English words change and rearrange themselves as she rephrased and added to the Tigrinya. The final result was:

How do I know what I don't know?

I wrote back, That's a very big question!

I think, based on her efforts to narrow down what she was asking, that she wanted to know about cars, about eventually getting a car, but the 10,000-foot-level question was a great one.
sovay: (I Claudius)
[personal profile] sovay
Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with [personal profile] rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went immediately to fact-check this assertion because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Obstacle Practice

Dec. 6th, 2025 08:08 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
We had a good time at practice today.  Only 5 riders, but three of them were new.  I got Firefly out and walked her through several obstacles. Then got on and did more obstacles. I also asked her to stand quietly a lot, not something she is always good about.  Fortunately several of the horses around us were providing a good role model and she did great. 
Tomorrow we have eight riders, I think.  Had 10 signed up, but two canceled.   One I had expected to cancel, the other is slightly surprising, but this morning was really foggy and they have to haul over a twisty road.  Tomorrow is supposed to be clear, but I'm not betting on it. 
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Posted by Mike Glyer

(1) IT COULD ALWAYS GET WORSE. “Nineteen Eighty-Four is here? Not quite, says Orwell lecturer”. Britain is not living in an Orwellian dystopia despite fears that Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true, the eminent Harvard professor Steven Pinker has concluded. Prof Pinker, the … Continue reading

cat health worries

Dec. 6th, 2025 09:13 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
First: The cat in question seems to be basically well.

So, [personal profile] cattitude has been worrying on and off that our cat Kaja was getting skinny. A few days agp. that got to the point of calling the vet and then taking the cat in for a check-up.

At the exam, the vet told Cattitude that Kaja has not lost weight; if anything, she has gained an ounce or two. What's going on is, the cat has lost some muscle mass, which has led to some redistribution of her weight, and what Cattitude noted was that her legs were thinner. The vet said it was probably arthritis, drew blood to test for some more serious problems, and sent her home.

We got the results this morning, and they are reassuring: Kaja's kidney function, liver function, and thyroid are all fine. So is her blood sugar.

The email said we could have them do X-rays to check for arthritis, but that would require sedating the cat.

Or, they can assume it's arthritis, and give her monthly injections of a pain-killer to treat that, and see how she's doing in a few months.

The third choice is to just monitor the cat's health for now, and give her omega-3 supplements. We need to discuss the choices, but it's Saturday, and none of them involves "so call the vet and set this up right away."
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


I just read The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls by Valorie Lee Schaefer for content, focusing on a few things, but primarily ovulation and eating disorders. It doesn't mention ovulation, and while the eating disorder section itself is fine, I wasn't impressed with the overall section on food, and there were other parts of this book that really rubbed me wrong, especially the emphasis on smiling. It's weirdly anti-salt and doesn't seem to believe that insomnia exists.

This book kept making me think "this would be great to use in some kind of dissertation on a very specific culture that this came out of, telling the young girls in this culture how best to grow up to be women." The examples alone of what concerns they thought the girls had about their bodies and their social interactions (they all seem to have very mean friends and want larger breasts, except for the one girl with large breasts, whose friends all dropped her for being ugly and fat. No one is actually fat in this book. Also their bra size chart doesn't go above 36D; people thinking that breasts can't possibly be beyond that was the source of a great many problems in my life, and I kept thinking, while reading this book, that this book would have been negatively helpful to me in my actual experience of puberty.)

So.

Does anyone have recommendations for "what to expect when you're expecting to go through puberty" that are fat-positive? You know, something like "it's very genetic and it's not because you ate too much junk food"?

And is more honest about period pain, and mentions -- at the very least -- ovulation. And that you can get back pain from your breasts.

And also -- okay, there were a bunch of things in this book that made me go "this is the opposite of helpful, I understand why you think it's helpful, but trust me, while you're not contributing to the problem, you're also not helping."

But really, the fat-positive thing would be helpful, and also more realistic about numbers on scales, please and thank you.

(And maybe ones that don't assume everyone has a mom???? I'm just. I'm just. This book is so oddly heteronormative for a book that has nothing in it about dating.)

If Wishes were kittens…

Dec. 7th, 2025 12:18 am
sabethea: (Portugal sunrise)
[personal profile] sabethea posting in [community profile] holiday_wishes
Hello, I participated in this back in LJ days and then I have on and off on here. I hope to be able to fulfill some wishes for other people. I’m Sab, 47, chronically ill, mostly bedbound person who tends to gain a new!exciting! illness each year. I’m also trans genderqueer, and being trans and disabled in the UK right now is not the most fun thing. Otoh, I have a lovely supportive spouse who is also my carer, and a fantastic son, plus two cats. So yay? Yay.

Please comment or message if you need my physical address for anything. As I say, I am in the UK.

1. If people could send good thoughts, light candles, petition their gods etc to make my Dad well, that would be the best Christmas present I could get. He’s had two bleeds on the brain in the last fortnight and it’s been really scary, involving two lots of brain surgery and concerns about survival prospects. So worldwide good thoughts aimed our way would be good.

2. Because I am incredibly wishful today, I would love someone (not AI!) to write new BBC Merlin Merlin/Arthur fics which are over 20k (the longer the better, tbh: there’s nothing more exciting than a new, good, long fic that I know will keep me going at least a day). HEA a must, and no infidelity or miscarriages, but otherwise I read pretty much anything. (If you wrote me Teen Wolf Stiles/Derek or Peter/Stiles with the same criteria, I would be exceedingly happy, too.)

3. I would love Christmas decorations if anyone wanted to send me any. A lot of ours are old and tatty, apart from a few I’ve been gifted through this through the years. It’s a sort of Christmas wishlist tradition. (Please dm me for address if you don’t know it)

4. I’d love comments on my NON-Harry Potter fics on AO3, if anyone felt like reading any of the other things I’ve written there as iamisaac. (BBC Merlin mainly, also Teen Wolf, Chalet School, Malory Towers, and many more)

5. Anything from my Amazon wish list would be great https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/1WPQ37WC4CXCI/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_2

6. Help and advice on setting up a trans website and meeting group for people local to me would be appreciated, bearing in mind that we have no money and I can’t get out much (there are further complications which make it sound like I’m being as difficult as possible and I’m not, life is).

7. Buy my books! They make great gifts for other people…though perhaps not people with very conservative right wing values. Either by Penelope Friday (Petticoats and Promises, The Sisterhood - lesbian historical fiction) or PA Friday (the Maths series: Love Plus One, One Plus One, Three’s The Charm - contemporary erotic gay ménage fiction), available at Bella/Nine Star Press (linked) or Amazon and various others.

8. Cat toys would be appreciated by the furrier members of our household, I am sure. Especially ones that stimulate them when people aren’t around to play with them as I’m sometimes not up even to cat company.

9. Assuming you do feel that way, I’d really appreciate it if you were open about your belief in trans rights, and your sympathy towards immigrants and disabled people (particularly with mental illnesses or autism/ADHD). There’s an unbelievable amount of crap being thrown at the moment and not enough regular people saying “that’s not okay” loudly when someone says something unkind.

10. Anyone want to buy me an electric wheelchair which works in the rain, can manage difficult terrain, and has a headrest?! (This is a joke request really, they’re about ten grand, but gods, I could really do with one. I can’t go out alone at the moment, ever.)
goddess47: Emu! (Default)
[personal profile] goddess47 posting in [community profile] sweetandshort
Title: Lovegood's Tea Shoppe
Author: [personal profile] goddess47
Character(s): Harry Potter, Severus Snape, Luna Lovegood
Pairing(s): Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Rating: PG
Length: 100


Summary:

It was the perfect place to take a break!


Notes:

For [community profile] adventdrabbles prompt Day 6 - fancy Christmas tea

For [community profile] sweetandshort December 2025 prompt - egg nog


Lovegood's Tea Shoppe on AO3

 

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Posted by John Scalzi

Trading Places takes place within the holiday season, with two of the big moments happening on Christmas and New Year’s Eve; does this make it a holiday movie? I suppose it might, although unlike Die Hard and a couple of other films, no one has ever made make a huge stink on the Internet about it. The Die Hard question was solved once they started making Hans Gruber advent calendars, although ironically it is Trading Places that is actually all about someone’s fall, albeit in personal circumstances, not from the top of a skyscraper.

The fall in question is that of Louis Winthrope, a smug young man from old money, played by Dan Ackroyd at his most unctuous. Winthorpe is the classic example of someone being born on third and thinking he’d hit a triple. He’s got a job as a commodities trader at the venerable Duke & Duke firm, has a great townhouse complete with butler (both paid for by his company), and he’s affianced to the sleek-haired Penelope, who looks like she models for the LL Bean catalogue (and as Kristin Holby, who played her, was indeed a fashion model, she may well have). Everything’s coming up Winthorpe!

Until he literally bumps into Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy, in his second movie role), a fast-talking but not especially successful street con. Valentine’s trying to avoid the police when he collides with Winthrope, and he picks up the trader’s fallen briefcase to return it to him. Winthorpe panics because he’s a soft white man, and screams for the police. Valentine runs into the stuffy private club Winthorpe just came out of, and finds himself arrested; Winthrope, who demands to press charges against Valentine, is hailed as a hero by his fellow finance bros.

None of this escapes the attention of Mortimer and Randolph Duke, the heads of the firm. Randolph in particular believes that Billy Ray’s general misfortune is the product of his deprived environment; Mortimer, the more openly racist of the two, thinks it’s due to race. The two make a wager on it: They will raise up Valentine and humble Winthorpe, and see whether circumstances make the man, or not.

And thus does Winthorpe fall, and hard. And equally, Valentine rises, to become the toast of Philadelphia’s financial elite. obviously, Winthorpe and Valentine are destined to collide again later in the film, as the facts of what has happened to them both, and why, come out.

Trading Places is a very funny movie, but there are lots of very funny movies that don’t end up being the fourth-highest-grossing film of their year, in a year that also has a Star Wars movie (Return of the Jedi) and a James Bond flick (the egregiously-named Octopussy). Funny or not, neither the story nor script of Trading Places is so revolutionary or consistently hilarious that in themselves they should have been expected to be near the top of the end of the year charts.

What Trading Places had going for it was heat, particularly in the form of Eddie Murphy. It’s hard for the couple of generations of adults who know Eddie Murphy from the Shrek franchise and/or a run of undistinguished and indistinguishable comedies in the late 90s and early 2000s to really appreciate just how much of a generational talent Murphy was seen as in the 80s, especially in the first half of the decade. He was to comedy what Michael Jackson was to music (a comparison that doesn’t sound that great here in the third decade of the 21st century, admittedly, but still apt). Trading Places got him on the upswing of that, coming in hot from the critical and commercial success of the film 48 Hours, and from him being literally the only reason people watched Saturday Night Live in the early 80s (sorry, Joe Piscopo).

Murphy was so hot in this era that when he branched out into a pop music career in 1985, his (deeply underwhelming in retrospect) song “Party all the Time” actually went to #2, stopped only by the pop behemoth that was Lionel Richie. Not everything Murphy touched in this era turned to gold (see: Best Defense, or, actually, please don’t), but it took a lot for it not to, and Trading Places was more than good enough on its own.

Also! The film was directed by John Landis, who was himself in the middle of a run of remarkably popular films, starting with Animal House and continuing on through The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London, and Dan Ackroyd, while less white-hot than his director and co-star, had seen a big hit in the Landis-directed The Blues Brothers and had residual audience affection from his SNL days. Jamie Lee Curtis, as Ophelia, the streetwalker who takes pity on Winthorpe, was mostly known as a “scream queen” but was ready to show her range, and her body, in this film. Neither were to be discounted.

Basically, everyone involved would have had to work really hard to fuck this one up. They did not.

More than that, it turned out that Ackroyd’s ability to project smarmy self-satisfaction first contrasted and then meshed perfectly with Murphy’s antic hustle, with Curtis’ surprising warmth grounding the two of them. Landis’s direction doesn’t show the hallmarks of greatness here, but with this cast it didn’t have to; it mostly had to not get in the way. The story hits all the marks in Winthorpe’s and Valentine’s respective fall and rise, their eventual understanding of what’s happening, and their decision to set things right — through insider trading, as it happens. What a gloriously ambiguous way to secure a comeuppance!

But the comeuppance is what we’re here for, and it’s what resonantes in the film, first in the Reagan era and now in our oligarch one, and what makes it a fulfilling rewatch.

Viewers coming new to this film in 2025 or later are hereby put on notice that there are several parts of this film that have aged extremely poorly, none more than the film’s fourth act, which features Dan Ackroyd in blackface, sporting a frankly terrible Jamaican accent, not to mention non-consensual encounters with great apes. This is a recurring curse of 80s comedies, where casual racism/sexism/etc is part of the background radiation of the time.

The flip side of this is that some folks might grump that this is why “you couldn’t make this film today,” which is nonsense, and not true — none of the casual racism, sexism, etc is needed for the story, and could be chucked aside for new and better jokes and writing. The intentional racism of the film, in the form of the Duke brothers and their terrible bet, on the other hand, is at the heart of the tale, and is, alas, as relevant today as it was 40 years ago, now that we have tech dudes running around trying to make eugenics happen all over again.

In fact, it might be time for another filmmaker to take a new swing at the Trading Places concept, this time having it take place in Silicon Valley, with the bet makers being tech bros who wager a single crypto coin, or whatever. I think there would be an audience for seeing some of this new generation of terrible rich people getting theirs at the hands of the people whose lives they are trying to destroy. These days, as in the 80s, you would have to work real hard for that not to be a hit. Set it during the holiday season, too. Let these turkeys get stuffed.

— JS

[Daf Yomi] Zevachim perek 6-8

Dec. 6th, 2025 05:40 pm
lannamichaels: Brachos 2a, caption: "There's a debate about that" (daf yomi)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


My notes on these. Still not much to say but it's been, quite frankly, better than Nashim.

Read more... )

some good things (a post)

Dec. 6th, 2025 11:28 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Breakfast in bed, accompanied by completing my first ever playthrough of the main body of Monument Valley. I think I wound up getting two prompts from A, who also spent a significant chunk of the afternoon attempting to get it working on two different large-format touchscreen devices -- I'd been struggling with the trackpad, and was gratified when A reported that they'd had a go at playing the very first level with a trackpad and it really was kind of wretched. (Made it to approximately halfway through Appendix 1 before deciding I needed to call it for the day...)
  2. smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto continues fantastic.
  3. 'tis The Season for my current Favourite Chocolate (I'm not sure if it's available year-round but the company we get groceries from only carries them during the winter, and I honestly probably enjoy them more because of the Seasonal Availability). I am writing this post with one of them + a mug of warm milk.
  4. The box of meds I dropped in an airport this Monday gone has successfully been picked up! First step in a pass-the-parcel that will hopefully conclude weekend after next...
  5. Got a substantial increase on my highest score in one of the silly clicky games in Flight Rising :)

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