petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-07-25 11:04 am

Familect phrases

I love hearing about the phrases people have incorporated into their family dialect (familect) that require explanation.

Here are some examples from around my house:

A "fuzzy" is a polar fleece jacket. (source: unknown)

Cat food comes in two varieties: gooshy (wet) and crunchy (dry). (source: Two Lumps webcomic)

"Bloop bloop?" means "Would you care to engage in sexual intercourse with me?" (source: a Tumblr post from someone who heard elk mating calls, parsed them as 'bloop bloop,' and started using the noise with their partner for the purpose, which cracked us up)

"One day... when you least expect it..." means, "I am contemplating taking you to bed." We almost never say the "I WILL HAVE SEX WITH YOU!" bit. (source: the second linked George Takei PSA)

The cat, as is the way of cats, has a zillion nicknames, including "Bunny," "[The] Fur," "Miss Fuzzbutt," and "Catface." T. S. Eliot violently underestimated the number of names my cats tend to accumulate, and none of the options are effin' ineffable. (reference: not how he officially spelled it but what we all heard)
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selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote2025-07-25 06:17 pm
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-25 08:52 am

The Whisperer in White by Y. R. Liu



A young hunter's carelessly loosed arrow earns her imprisonment under the supervision of a mage.

The Whisperer in White by Y. R. Liu
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-07-24 05:51 pm

Fanfiction author/Gamer OTP

"Honey, why does the person you're playing a game with and watching a stream of look like that?"

"He's wearing a Mickey Mouse skin."

"I didn't know you could skin Mickey Mouse in your game."

"Yep."

"And you're the one with the socially acceptable hobby."
petra: Batman in silhouette with his hand on Spoiler's shoulder (Bruce & Steph - Keep the comm on)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-07-24 02:01 pm

Politics: Song recommendation: Independent Girls and Nasty Evil Gays



If Jeangu Macrooy gets two new fans today, one of them is me. If they get 1000 new fans today, I hope some are them are because [personal profile] buggery linked me to this video and I passed it on.

It's an earworm.
birdylion: picture of an exploding firework (Default)
birdylion ([personal profile] birdylion) wrote2025-07-24 12:40 pm
Entry tags:

Safety mechanisms in LARP fighting

Yesterday I learned that apparently there's a whole genre of youtube videos of people just filming themselves while watching other videos and saying what they think about it, and they make a whole youtube career out of it. Wild.

But more importantly I learned that apparently these people were blown away by learning about the German LARP scene. There's one video from 2 years ago (I'm always on top of trends, as you can see) that got a lot of attention: 10 Facts about Epic Empire

It's a presentation about one of the three biggest German larp events. She made videos about the other two too, but they didn't blow up as big.

I'm getting in the mood for the upcoming larp I'm going, so I was looking for larp content and came across all these reactions, mostly from US Americans. A lot of them were from people who had nothing to do with larp or even ttrpg, but some were from people who had some idea of or interest in it. These were interesting not because of what they said, but because of the implicit assumptions their reactions revealed - theirs, but also mine, and the presenter's.

For one, in the section about "rules", the presenter talks about:

  • play what you can realistically portray no telling like "please imagine I'm flying", but you can portray magic using special effects.
  • play to lose don't try to come out on top of every fight, more fun is had for everyone when you aim for cinematic fights instead of striking down your opponent

She does not talk about:

  • weapon safety: you are only allowed to use foam weapons and are responsible for making sure they are not broken and thus a danger to others
  • fight safety: there are a lot of mechanisms in play that make "hundreds of people against each other on a battlefield" as safe as possible.

I suppose the reason she doesn't talk about or even mention them are twofold: 1. it's a condensed "10 facts" video and not a documentary and certainly not an instruction. But I suspect 2. these safety rules are so basic for most people who go to these events that they are always implied, and she didn't think to mention them. But for someone outside of this culture, they're not obvious. So.

 

cut for length )
senmut: frontal view of Drizzt's face above his crossed blades (Forgotten Realms: Drizzt Face)
Asp ([personal profile] senmut) wrote2025-07-23 07:45 pm

No True Pair: Crossover Mini Event

Not a Hostage (350 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Legend of Drizzt Series - R. A. Salvatore, The Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson movies
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Drizzt Do'Urden, Catti-brie [Dungeons & Dragons], Original Human Character(s)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Women Being Awesome
Summary:

Drizzt knew that all was not as it seemed.



Not a Hostage

Drizzt did not pace or show any vexation as he watched the war-chieftain with his knife at Catti-brie's throat. It was sheer misfortune that had led to her capture, even as they traveled the lands to be the King's Eyes, much as they would have for goodly rulers in their first world.

It helped that Strider had befriended Drizzt many years before, when the drow had first fallen into this world by accident rather than design.

No, Drizzt looked at this man, an Easterling, and slowly smiled.

"We came to explore, to see what the people of Rhûn had made for themselves, now that King Elessar has made peace with your people," Drizzt began, forcing the chieftain to keep eyes on him as the one who was so unusual. "This is not a peaceful gesture. You should let her go now."

"Bah to your peace, and to your king! You will do as I say and disarm, for I hold your concubine as my hostage for your fate!"

Drizzt's smile only widened. "That is a very strong word, but I fear you have misinterpreted. I recommended the best solution for your survival, and that of your camp."

The man shifted, all but puffing up with rage —

— and Catti-brie moved, head back into the man's face, booted foot back and down the instep. Nor did the knife cut her more than a scratch, as she twisted free and proceeded to show dwarf-trained strength in her blows, leaving the war-chieftain crumpled. Drizzt hadn't been idle, even as he spared no more attention to his companion, taking the time to beat back the guards that had ringed them in.

He mostly let them live, disarming them with fast, impossible to parry blows. When Catti-brie joined him at his side, he made a gesture with the tip of a sword, and a way parted among the beaten, shocked guards.

The Easterling that had begun this all lay crumpled in a fetal position, breath coming in ragged painful gasps, and not a man moved to help him.

Drizzt thought they'd find a new chief soon.


Read at comm
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-23 02:16 pm
Entry tags:

Bundle of Holding: Neon Lords



The all-new Neon Lords Bundle featuring Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland, the gonzo slime-punk post-apocalyptic cassette-future tabletop roleplaying game from Super Savage Systems.

Bundle of Holding: Neon Lords
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
philomytha ([personal profile] philomytha) wrote2025-07-23 05:09 pm

a collection of book reviews

I write up books when I read them and forget to post the actual review, so here's a collection of books I've read sometime in the past six months.

The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran
As recommended by [personal profile] black_bentley, a constant pusher of fantastic books, thank you! This is all about fear and courage in warfare and their relationship with shell-shock and other psychological traumas of war. The author was a trench doctor in WW1 and then later became Churchill's personal physician, though this book is almost entirely about his WW1 experiences, written in 1942. It was a really fantastic read.

Sometimes the biases of the era come through: Moran occasionally comes out with stuff about how 'good racial stock' is required for avoiding shell shock and cowardice, but it always feels like those are platitudes he's occasionally diverted by before getting into the practical, vivid and very sensible things he has to say about the causes of mental breakdown, based on his WW1 observations. He has a lot to say about the differences between a professional standing army and a citizen army of conscripts, about how men in a citizen army react to danger, how good morale and esprit du corps are protective against mental trauma, how fear operates and how to combat it, what courage looks like, what kind of leadership soldiers respond to and its impact on the mental wellbeing of the soldiers - he doesn't use modern jargon for any of this, but that's what a modern reader would take from it. He talks a bit about the different branches of the service and how the air force and navy and submarine service have different impacts on mental health both because of the different demands of the service - the group isolation of a ship vs the largely solo isolation of a fighter pilot - and because of the different traditions and beliefs these services held about themselves, and compares that to experience of the infantryman in the trenches.

In an odd way I found it a very relatable and reassuring book. It made me realise that I'm pretty confident I have the type of courage Moran talks about, to hold firm when horrifying things are happening because others are depending on you holding firm, and confident not in a sort of wishful-thinking I'm-sure-I-could-do-that way, but the same way I'm confident I can spell miscellaneous: I've done it, or something as like to it as a middle-aged woman in peacetime can get, lots of times before. I recogised a lot of the emotional dynamics he describes, the way you recover after a sudden shock of violence, the temporary unravelling and how your mind and body heal up again, and I also recognised the factors that protect, or in their absence damage, your ability to hold firm, both practical - food, sleep, rest breaks, humour, health - and moral - the belief in what you are doing and why, social support from others doing the same thing, the conviction that failure is not an option. A really good, insightful book.


Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans, Daniel Cowling
Apologies if the title causes you to get a song stuck in your head for the next week, I already had the song stuck in my head and then tripped over the book. This is a decent general overview of the British occupation of Germany 1945-9; Cowling doesn't go into anything in tremendous detail but gives a little bit of lots of things. I've read books that take a much deeper dive into certain aspects - the Berlin Airlift, the T-Force memoir and also the bonkers sigint book, plus a general book on the postwar atrocities across Europe - and so some of this was a bit top-down overview compared to that. The chapter on 'fratting', for instance, was interesting read against the memoir with its candid details about German women selling sex for food, and the relationship with the former owners when living in requisitioned property. Though, given the memoir's emphasis on partying and having fun and hiring one's friends, that certainly backed up Cowling's chapter on the ineptitude and bad behaviour of the military and civilian government. Cowling's argument comes across a bit incoherent at times - there's an awful lot of 'wow the occupiers were awful and incompetent and made a total mess' followed by a chapter on the rapid recovery, economic growth and stable democratic government in West Germany afterwards, so you're left wondering just how Cowling thinks these two accounts fit together.

There was quite a lot about the economics of the occupation, I did love the chapter on the black market and some of the unforeseen consequences. The 'money for old smokes' scandal was ridiculous: British soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany got a free ration of cigarettes, fifty a week. Cigarettes were the de facto currency of German civilians, the mark being essentially worthless in 1945-6, and so you could trade your cigarettes with German civilians for anything from accordions to dental care (though sex was usually paid for in chocolate or other food). And one thing you could trade them for was German marks, lots of them. But there was one place where German marks were used at their official exchange rate, and that was NAAFI shops. So you could take your free cigarettes, sell them for an awful lot of German marks, then take the German marks and exchange them in the NAAFI shops for whatever you wanted. Which included postal orders and savings bonds in sterling, which you could deposit in your nice British bank account. If you saved up your free cigarettes for a few months, with 500 cigarettes you could easily get £100, which was a tidy sum. And it seems that practically everyone stationed in Germany realised this at once, because this particular type of transaction led to a £50 million hole in the occupation's budget. Which is an argument for the incompetence of the British administration, certainly.

And as for the title, Cowling doesn't ever really engage with the question: were we beastly to the Germans, and should we have been. It's interesting to compare this book to Keith Lowe's Savage Continent, which is a much broader book in scope and yet also vastly more detailed and incisive: Lowe really engages with the question of human suffering on all levels and the historian's ethics, he talks about the lack of acknowledgement of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war attempts to prosecute war crimes and care for refugees, about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe and how the very real suffering this caused is used by historians of particular political bents who want to argue that the Germans were the real victims of WW2 and setting it in the context of what else was happening and to who... by contrast Cowling never really gets into the difficult questions. He quotes an awful lot of British newspapers and their opinions of how generous or harsh we should be to German civilians postwar - in many ways this is a British newspaper account of the occupation: how it was perceived at home in the context of what was happening politically in the UK, and that's about the level on which Cowling engages with the question. He gives brief snapshots of varying attitudes - a display in London of daily rations for German civilians which was designed to show how much worse off they were in 1946 than British civilians (whose food was rationed even more severely than in wartime) ended up with a lot of people thinking the Germans were still getting much too generous an allocation. On the other hand Cowling also includes stories of British soldiers routinely handing over their rations to famished German children. But he never really engages with it beyond this superficial skim of attitudes, and he also avoids exploring the German perspectives and what they thought about it. So, a good general overview of the occupation and introduction to it all, but go elsewhere for insight and detailed analysis.


Paid To Be Safe, Margaret Morrison & Pamela Tulk-Hart
The final of my IWM wartime novels, written together by two ATA ferry pilots about a fictional ATA ferry pilot. So not quite a memoir, but strongly based on real experiences and set at real airfields. I really enjoyed this, it's deftly written, captures the essense of the experience beautifully and is full of fascinating detail. And also death: this is a book in which a lot of the characters die, because it's wartime and that's what happens in wartime and I don't doubt that the main character's experience of multiple bereavements is both realistic and realistically written.

Our heroine is Susan Sandyman, who managed to escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive and has just arrived back in England, with husband and infant child both dead and desperately in need of something to think about that isn't that. And she learned to fly back when she lived in Malaya, and so she joins the ATA to become a ferry pilot, and we follow her adventures until the end of the war. There's a tremendous amount of fantastic detail about the training process, vivid descriptions of life in the training schools, the different people Susan meets and what the training is like, and all the things she learns about all the different aircraft and the process of learning how to cope with a job where you might fly five different types of aircraft in one day, compared to the normal RAF training where you might only ever fly one or two. There were some fantastic stories that must have been drawn from life like how a caterpillar in a pitot tube can very nearly make you crash.

The title, Paid To Be Safe, is what was drummed into the ferry pilots: their job is not to take any risks, their job is to transport the valuable and much-needed aircraft safely from A to B, their job is to keep themselves and their aircraft safe at all times and to know how to never get into dangerous situations in the first place. Despite this it is still a dangerous job, and ferry pilots die in training and in service - as I said, this is a book where sudden death can happen to anyone at any point, whether it's disease or bombs or airplane crashes, a very wartime book with this constant thread of trauma running underneath everything else.


The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
This was a really good Terror forced proximity AU readerfic that had an incoherent plot sellotaped to it. Loved the time travellers getting to know each other and the modern world, and their characters were drawn fairly well, but all the other characters were pretty bland, and the main character and narrator in particular was very much a generic-tumblr narrative voice. There was plenty of drama and excitement and events, I whizzed through the book waiting for the moment when it would all make sense, but it never did, the plot was just tacked on to try to explain to the non-fandom world why the author was writing Graham Gore/modern reader self insert. But despite that I'd have read another 100k of Time Travellers Have Adventures With Bikes And Spotify, especially if it had involved more about one of the secondary time travel characters, Captain Arthur Reginald Smyth, retrieved from the Somme about five minutes before his death and by far my favourite of the characters for highly predictable reasons. A fun but frustrating book.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-23 10:01 am
Entry tags:
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-23 09:05 am

The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, volume 1 by Haruo Iwamune



Fifty years after the Great Disaster, special investigator Saya searches for survivors. There are a few... but none are human.

The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, volume 1 by Haruo Iwamune
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-07-23 07:41 am
Entry tags:
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-07-22 08:35 pm

The future has candy



Back in the bygone days of last millennium, I would read a children's book series, and I think it was in Baby Sitter's Club that this happened but frankly I don't remember, where the characters would do something called sucking the filling out of a twinkie.

I had no idea what a twinkie was. The only candy I knew that was hollow and you could suck things out of was twizzlers, because we'd do things like bite the ends off of twizzlers and then use them as straws for ginger ale and then eat the twizzler. So I assumed twinkies were some kind of filled twizzlers.

Many years later -- I was about 16? -- I saw twinkies for the first time and discovered that they're nothing like twizzlers. The betrayal. The confusion. Etc.

Anyway turns out we're in the future and they now make twizzlers with a filling inside.

I haven't eaten them. They seem to be a different, softer formulation of twizzler to make it work, and I don't feel the need to explore this at this juncture.

But.

This is exactly what I thought twinkies were.

senmut: Old house in the woods (Scenic: Old House)
Asp ([personal profile] senmut) wrote2025-07-22 09:06 am

No True Pair: Crossover MiniEvent

Required Rudeness (200 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson movies, Sword-Dancer Saga - Jennifer Roberson
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Samwise "Sam" Gamgee, Sandtiger [Sword-Singer Saga]
Additional Tags: Double Drabble, Alternate Universe - Fusion
Summary:

Samwise has to be rude, to keep his people safe.



Required Rudeness

The surly horse actually caught Samwise's attention before the man, but then he took note of the shoulder-scabbarded sword and decided he'd best do his duty. They didn't need more trouble at all, and he meant to make that happen!

"Here now, traveler, the Shire has no wish of men that live by the sword," Samwise said in a direct breach of being kind and hospitable. Then again, it was his job to be brusque, as he knew the signs of danger better than most.

"Seeking directions to a place called the Grey Havens," the man said in an accent Samwise could not place. "Word is my basha headed that way."

Samwise's eyebrows rose into his hairline, but if the man was bent on that pilgrimage, he'd let the elves deal with it.

"West a bit more, straight on to the river," Samwise offered.

The man nodded and rode on, taking his strangeness — and that well-used sword — away from the Shire. Maybe nothing would have come from inviting him to rest with them a time, but Samwise didn't put his faith in maybe. He dusted off his hands, well-shod of duty for the day and went to find a pipe.



Or read at the community
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-22 08:59 am

Tarnsman of Gor (Gor, volume 1) by John Norman



In this ERB pastiche, unremarkable academic Tarl Cabot reinvents himself as a man of action on the counter-Earth, Gor. There's much less BDSM than the series' reputation would lead one to expect.

Tarnsman of Gor (Gor, volume 1) by John Norman
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams ([personal profile] dewline) wrote2025-07-21 09:20 pm
Entry tags:

At Least the Climate Isn't Oppressive Today

I actually felt halfway okay walking around today, but for the knee and ankle joints.

Calling it an early night here.
senmut: a bright blue tribal seahorse (General: Tribal Seahorse)
Asp ([personal profile] senmut) wrote2025-07-21 07:06 pm

No True Pair: Crossover Mini Event

Seeking Knowledge (500 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragonlance, The Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson movies
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tanis Half-Elven [Dragonlance], Aragorn II Elessar
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fusion
Summary:

Sometimes Aragon wanders and meets interesting people.



Seeking Knowledge

Despite his office in life, sometimes Aragorn felt the need to be Strider. In such times, Arwen would cover his absences with typical elven political excuses, well-able to lead the minor matters in her own right. No one expected the king in well-worn clothes of an adventurer to wander between places, seeking inns and taverns to listen to the people.

On this particular wandering, he found himself staring at a man of medium frame and a bit tall, his hair and beard quite red like the tales of Maedhros spoke of. A bow and quiver were visible against the wall behind the man's chair. Aragorn was all but certain he had heard a tale of this man, and observed more details. Something about foreign lands plagued by dragons, another offshoot — or more — of Elves. It was likely something Faramir had mentioned to him in correspondence, now that he considered it.

Yes, the weave of cloth, the crafting of tools and leather all had a different appearance than items made in Aragorn's extensive roving. The red hair and beard finally sparked the final piece of Faramir's descriptions, and Aragorn realized he was looking at another noble hiding among commoners. Granted, the man was from far enough away that he had a much easier time just wandering anonymously.

He finished appraising everything from the bar he'd stopped at, took the mug of ale he'd asked for and headed straight for the man's small table.

"Greetings, Far-Traveler," Aragorn said with a disarming smile. "What brings a leader of the people of Krynn so far from his lands?"

The man studied Aragorn for a moment, then leaned on his arms against the table to be closer. "For you to know such, I think I may have found the one I seek. I have heard that a mighty ranger had traded in his cloak for a crown, but perhaps the gods are guiding me fairly.

"Tanis Half-Elven."

"You may have indeed been guided well," Aragorn said, though he did wonder at gods meddling so. "What could the purpose be?"

"To learn, if in all the travels this man had, he ever encountered a shrine to one not of these lands, with rumors of an artifact buried near it," Tanis said. "There is trouble stirring in Krynn once more, and it is hoped that the Tears of Shinare can help bring some peace, or at least breathing room."

"Ahh, well, I see why you would consider a ranger the kind of man that might have stumbled over this," Aragorn said. "It is not, however, specific enough for my memory to aid you. Perhaps you would see your way to traveling with me, to where better memories and resources exist?"

Tanis sized him up again, then gave a nod. "You seem as the tales I heard, so I agree."

"And you meet the one I was given as well," Aragorn agreed. "We shall do all we can to help your lands survive the coming storms of danger."



Or read the community