Network

Entry tags:

A story about wishing

I finished up work at midday on 24th December, caught the train home, and walked straight up the hill to meet Matthias for food truck lunch and drinks in our favourite cafe/bar. He had spent the morning trundling around town collecting all the various bits and pieces of food that we'd preordered, and after we returned to the house, I set about enacting my plans for the twelve ensuing days of holiday: cooking, eating, reading, TV, and nothing more strenuous than swimming, yoga, and long walks. So far, everything's gone wonderfully: cold seafood dinner on Christmas Eve, a fantastic roast dinner for Christmas Day (we'll be eating the leftovers for at least the next four days), watching our way through the last season of Stranger Things in the living room lit only by the wood-burning stove, candlelight, and our various sets of string lights, reading nothing more demanding than Rumer Godden children's Christmas books, romance novels, Christmas romance novels, etc. Today we blew the cobwebs away with a 2.5-hour walk through the fens. The air was cold, the sky was clear blue, and the river water was still, and abundant with water birds, and everyone we met seemed relaxed and happy. We finished up with coffee in the market square.

Yuletide has been wonderful so far (initial terrifying moments when the mods somehow manage to open the collection with all author names revealed notwithstanding). I've been working my way backwards up through the alphabet — I do this as I feel most people read in descending alphabetically order and have run out of steam by the end, and I want to ensure authors who wrote for fandoms in the last quarter of the alphabet get love for their work too — at a leisurely pace, being more selective than in previous years in terms of what I choose to read, and I'm having a great time so far. My two fics have been well received by both their intended recipients, and other readers, which is always my main aspiration.

And then there's my own wonderful gift! I have been asking persistently for this fandom, and these two characters for the past eleven years — every single year in which I've participated in Yuletide, plus in several other exchanges as well — and no one ever wrote them, so when I saw what my gift involved, I almost danced around the room with happiness. And the fic itself is the fic of my dreams for these characters, and this fandom. What I always want from fanworks is more of the stuff that drew me to the specific characters in canon, and my author most certainly delivered in this regard: pitch perfect character voices, with a well-crafted little fic that reminded me all over again of all the specific things I love about these two characters individually, and together. I'm so happy!

Thrive (1030 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Isidore Orbus & Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Additional Tags: Found Family, Bologna, Healing, House Hunting
Summary:

Isidore and Bayblonne settle in Bologna.

I will share it again once authors are revealed, along with other recs from the collection. I hope everyone else who's participating in Yuletide has had an equally good time with this year's exchange.

( Another December talking meme response )

I'll finish up this post with a reminder that

fandomtrees is going to open for fills soon. It's easy to browse the tags to see what people have requested. If anyone is interested, my tree is here.

Current Mood: sleepy

Heated Rivalry S1

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Entry tags:

Yuletide and a few other things

So it seems I slept through the great deanoning of Yuletide, heh. Meaning that there was a glitch that revealed all the authors for a short while, soon after works reveal. I missed it, since I was too tired to read my gift right away on 24th, and didn’t even look at the Yuletide collection then.

I received a lovely and funny Meet You at the Blossom fic about my favorite threesome. This is basically Outsider POV fic even though the author didn’t tag it as such. But I love Ousider POV fics, and I enjoyed Que Siming’s sarcastic comments and Jinbao’s sweet cluelessness here a lot.

Throwing Flowers into the River (4,861 words)
Fandom: 花开有时颓靡无声 | Meet You at the Blossom (TV)
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jin Xiaobao/Zongzheng Huai'en, Jin Xiaobao/Su Yin, Jin Xiaobao/Su Yin/Zongzheng Huai'en, Jinbao/Que Siming
Characters: Jin Xiaobao, Zongzheng Huai'en, Jinbao, Que Siming, Su Yin
Additional Tags: Weddings, Requited Unrequited Love, Polyamory Negotiations
Summary: Jinbao and his Miracle Doctor return to the Jin mansion for the wedding of Jin Xiaobao and Zongzheng Huai'en, but a light-hearted game played between the two of them uncovers a secret that could turn the entire wedding day on its head.

Apart from reading Yuletide fics, yesterday I watched Exhuma, that horror movie with Kim Go Eun I mentioned before. It was pretty good and Kim Go Eun was wonderful. And it was tense and gory, but goriness was on an acceptable level for me, so I didn’t even have to fast-forward.

I also started Yumi’s Cells, because I wanted something cute and fluffy after Exhuma. I watched an episode and a half, and it’s fine and amusing at times, but for now I’m not very emotionally engaged. I do plan to watch more though, because I’m still very much in my ‘in love with Kim Go Eun’ phase, and she’s so good, and sweet and pretty here.

I also watched the new episodes of Burnout Syndrome (very good) and Dare You to Death (rather meh). But wow, Joong and Dunk both look exceptionally beautiful in this drama, so for now I will be watching for this one very shallow reason. 😊

I also wanted to rec a Youtube vid with Dew, Gun, and Off’s reaction to episode 5 of Burnout Syndrome, because it’s very funny, and it made me laugh. More with the embedded vid behind the cut, because thumbnail images are spoilery for the last episode.

See it here.

Watch on YouTube

I enjoyed this vid so much. From Gun commenting about his and Dew’s height difference and saying “I literally only come up to his shoulders”. To the three of them arguing about who’s the biggest red flag in this episode, and both Off and Dew saying it’s Jira, because he fools and manipulates both Koh and Pheem. And to Off first getting hilariously jealous over Dew and Gun’s romantic scenes, and then cheering Dew on during the last scene. And all three reacted to the ending of this episode the same way all the viewers reacted: “That’s it? It ends like this? That’s so mean.” 😊

Entry tags:

Sonobe Hideo (1870-1963)

Sonobe Hideo was born in 1870 up north in Sendai; her birth name was Kusaka Tarita (a first name meaning “enough,” possibly in the sense of “enough daughters already,” as she was number six). Her father was a stablemaster for the local lord, and she spent her early youth riding around on his horses and driving everyone to distraction. In 1886, the Jikishin Kage-ryu swordmaster Satake Kanryusai came to town with his wife Shigeo, a master of the naginata (polearm), to give a demonstration of their martial arts, fascinating Tarita, who joined him as a student (in spite of violent opposition from her family).

She helped out behind the scenes while learning the naginata from Kanryusai and Shigeo, becoming a certified master in 1888 at the age of eighteen. Kanryusai gave her the name Hideo in commemoration, which she used for the rest of her life (written with the characters 秀, excellent, and 雄, male, it is usually a man’s name, but was apparently intended to mean “superior to the men”; the “o” may also have been in honor of the same character in Shigeo’s name).

In 1891 Hideo married Yoshioka Gosaburo, a fellow swordmaster, but found herself widowed within only a few years. She fostered out her young daughter and continued her work as a traveling swordmaster. In 1896 the Satakes made her the head of the Jikishin Kage-ryu Naginata school, and in the same year she married Sonobe Masatoshi, a swordmaster in a related school, using his family name thereafter. While looking after the home and taking care of his mother and his children from a previous marriage, she continued to practice the naginata, defeating her husband every time they met in the dojo.

In 1899 she was the only woman to participate in the 4th All-Japan Kendo Tournament, handily defeating several formidable opponents, most of them close to a foot taller than she was. Thereafter, she taught naginata at her husband’s martial arts school in Kobe, the Kobukan, while also offering classes at regional women’s normal schools and private lessons to the nobility. “Keep the naginata in mind all the time, whether you’re sweeping the floor or walking down the street,” she advised. She continued to rack up an impressive record of tournament wins and teaching experience; in 1930 she took part in a woman’s match at the Imperial Palace against her student Yamauchi Sachiko (the former princess who ended up not marrying the Taisho Emperor, in favor of Kujo Sadako), which—amazingly—can be seen on video here.

Hideo founded her own naginata dojo, the Shutokukan, in 1936. Said to have lost only two matches throughout her life, she died in 1963 at the age of ninety-three. Training in her school of naginata is still an active concern.

Sources
https://koryu.com/library/wwj4/ (English) Article on Hideo and her martial arts practice
https://www.myday.com.tw/a_myday/product_view.php?apiname=api_japan_yahoo&itemcode=e1088243017 (Chinese) Sorry for the weird site link; this painting seems to show Satake Shigeo (on the left) fighting with naginata

Current Music: Unravel - Ellisa Sun

Entry tags:

tv: heated rivalry

See you at the cottage

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

Mod Post: Need Trees

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

fic rec,
meme

I was born like this, don't even gotta try

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

followfriday

Follow Friday 12-26-25

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Your Bandage"

And those who can remember when the night sky was a tapestry

In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and

nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.

At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift with

spatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.

Current Mood: exhausted

Entry tags:

lifestuff

Already in the oven, nice and hot

My house is redolent of anise and molasses and sugar and all the good spices from baking cookies all day. I have this ancient recipe from my mom's side of the family for these anise cookies that almost no one likes, and I used to make them with Dad all the time but I find it intimidating at the best of times, and these days aren't exactly the best. But I had to type it up a few years ago for someone on metafilter, and so I decided to try my hand at them on my own with a little help from mlyn, and while it didn't go great, it also wasn't a total disaster, so I figured I'd try again this year because I've missed them. There's just really nothing else out there like them, and much as I like pfefferneuse, it's not nearly close enough, though that's really the only thing in the spice/uncommon-in-America flavor profile cookie I know of. Also since I never really know if I'm going to be around in a year, I wanted to enjoy them while I could.

Back a few years ago when I made them, I asked

musesfool, baker extraordinaire, for some advice on the recipe, because baking is just a mystery to me and I'm quite bad at it. She had some really good advice, but did I go look at it to refresh my memory before I began starting on the dough? No, I did not. So I made a lot of mistakes. Dad and I found it was best to let the dough sit in the fridge overnight, and the baked cookies are better when they sit for a day or two before icing, so it's kind of like a three-day extravaganza, and with my fatigue issues, I also have to constantly sit down. I am just fucking exhausted now and I still have more to do!

It makes so many cookies (and that was after my dad cut the recipe down three times!) that you're just baking and baking and baking. I had to shut the oven off and go sit for a while, in between big batches. But now they are baked and I will try to ice them all tomorrow, or at least as many as I can handle, so I can share them with the only people who wouldn't hate them. They don't taste terrible for all that I fucked up, but I can really tell I messed up mixing the early ingredients, and wish I'd read the instructions and musesfool's advice before I started. What a dumbass. Also, it's really a lie that turbinado sugar or succanat can substitute for white sugar. I didn't want to go out just to get sugar, which I thought I had enough of, but it does not turn out the same without white sugar and they are liars.

I bought myself some stuff to make a little Christmas dinner for one, but my stomach was roiling today for most of the day, and ended up just eating a bagel and some of the cookies that caught and were too burned to give away to anyone.

Now that I am so exhausted and the house smells so good, I think I'm going to head to bed early--I stayed up too late last night anyway, because it's my tradition to always watch It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve and then I was poking around in the Yuletide archive for far too long. I was so shocked that it opened in the middle of the day yesterday! I didn't see a whole lot that looked intriguing, since I'm so out of the loop on fandoms these days, but there's definitely some stuff to read and I was really thrilled to see that Rose Lerner's book True Pretenses had a fic written for it this year! So I had to read that one immediately.

Anyway, I hope you had a great holiday if you celebrate, and a very nice Thursday if you don't, and I will respond to all your kind comments on my last post soon, I promise.

Entry tags:

Yuletide!!

This is just a quick drive-by post to say: hello! I hope that those of you who are celebrating Christmas have had a lovely one, and that those of you who aren't have had a nice Thursday.

We're at my parents' place having a pleasantly low-key celebration (lots of joy! but also, us plus two elderly people = a lot of lying around on the couch reading, and not a lot of impetus to go all-out for the decorations and feasting), and meanwhile the weather is giving us scenic snow all around.

And also! I got an INCREDIBLY GOOD Yuletide fic!

The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom is a note-perfect post-canon story for Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born. I mostly enjoyed the heck out of that kdrama, in which everyone is a dramatic lesbian who cares deeply about their all-female melodramatic theater, but the heroine makes many incredibly stupid choices and there were various things that frustrated me about the ending. This story focuses on Seo Hyerang, a secondary character who does not care at all about our beloved stupid heroine (and that's beautiful to me), and it deftly and delightfully fixes almost all of my complaints, and made me cackle several times. It's everything I hoped and dreamed for in a Jeongnyeon fic! I'm so happy!!!

I think it's readable without canon knowledge, but you'll have to do a certain amount of piecing things together as you go, and the emotions won't hit as hard. I had many emotions, though. What a treat, what a delight!

Entry tags:

daily

Daily Check-In

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, December 25, to midnight on Friday, December 26 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34007 Daily check-in poll

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 19

How are you doing?

I am OK
13 (68.4%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
6 (31.6%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
6 (31.6%)

One other person
7 (36.8%)

More than one other person
6 (31.6%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Moonlight Mile - The Rolling Stones

Warm my bones.

My parents' apartment building is in a U shape, and on the roof, the bottom of the U is the social area - tables, chairs, plants, tiles. The two sides are closed off from general use - the water tower, electrical system access, stuff where you need it clear for safety.

I recently found out someone's been sneaking up onto the roof to smoke, and they've been doing it in the social area, or so close to it to make no difference. I figure that if they could smoke in their apartment, they would, so this is probably someone's kid, and it's easier to go to the roof to smoke than head out to the breezeway next to the building.

My concern's not any of that, but rather that they're doing it badly. When I was told about the sneaking, I remarked that they'd do better to sneak farther away from the social area so the smell doesn't linger. I said if it's cigarettes, they should do it over the breezeway so they can tap the ash away, and if they're really dedicated, they should bring along a tin of some kind to carry the refuse away with them to dispose of the evidence later. The smoking's one thing to protest, and what really gets to me is the person's total lack of tradecraft.

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: near the lake they call Michigan

Entry tags:

Fannish Fifty Challenge: Post # 47: Community Pimping: Multifandom Multimedia Microbang

No-stress Multimedia Multifandom Microbang! No sign-ups, no check-ins, and optional addition to AO3 Collection. This looks to me like a lot of fun -- AND YAYS FOR NO STRESS -- and a lot of creative options.

community pimping banner

Click here to see the comm's DW page and get more details.

Entry tags:

Christmas at Chandler Elementary

Today I've been remembering Christmas songs we sang in my elementary school auditorium, long ago. "Nuttin' for Christmas" was a favorite, largely because the line "Climbed a tree and tore my pants" always made the kids laugh.

We did a full-on musical production of A Christmas Carol when I was maybe eight years old. I played a ragamuffin and learned a dance routine for it, but then got the flu and missed the evening performance. (I ended up giving my actress heroine Joanna Bergman this experience in Can't Find My Way Home.) I still remember some of the lyrics and melody for one of our Christmas Carol songs, but I can't find it anywhere online--and in the age of AI, it's even more difficult than the last time I looked. The lyric I remember is: "Bless the goose, poor bird, his day is done / Bless the cheery warmth of our old hearth (Oh Merry Christmas) / God bless us everyone." (We pronounced "hearth" to rhyme with "earth," and no one corrected us.) I did find a Christmas Carol song online called "God Bless Us Everyone," but it's not the song I remember.

Entry tags:

music,
rec

My two favorite Christmas song videos

Watch on YouTube

( lyrics )

Watch on YouTube

( lyrics )

Entry tags:

write every day

Write every day: Day 25

Day 24: Alibi sentence. So much family time (mostly in a good way)! How about you?

Tally:
( Read more... )
Day 24:

luzula,

china_shop,

trobadora,

badly_knitted,

goddess47,

sylvanwitch,

cornerofmadness,

sanguinity

Day 25:

luzula

Bonus farm news: So much delicious Christmas food! Mmmmmmmm.

Entry tags:

Hallmark Christmas movie stuff

My alarm went off this morning (only at ten, but I needed it) to make sure I was up in time to walk Teddy before his humans were away for their Christmas lunch.

I thought I was the first person to make it downatairs this morning but while I was just getting to the bottom of the stairs I was already greeted by angelofthenorth already in her usual comfy chair saying "Merry Christmas! Do you want some bucks fizz?" (Which is basically a pre-made mimosa. Luckily I'd been reminded of this recently by being offered it after the ceremony at the wedding we were at a few weeks ago; I'd been able to ask D then to remind me what it is.)

It's a lovely Christmas morning: chilly but not cold, usually pretty sunny, and dry.

It had been a week or so since Teddy and I had seen each other so we were both very excited to do so again.

On our walk, we saw a young probably-dad-type person heading to the recycling bin in front of his house with an armful of cardboard, the boxes already broken down. We grinned a greeting at each other.

A few houses down, a woman in pajamas and a big scarf was just trying to nip out to her car in front of the house, but since Teddy wants to say hello to everyone (human or dog) and assumes every human wants to pet him, so I couldn't drag him past her before she gave in and ruffled his ears and said "Merry Christmas" to me.

As we were leaving the park, I noticed we'd just been joined by two kids with the kind of lightsabers that make the noise when you hit them against each other, and a little scotty dog that I know is called Biscuit because they were getting told off/called over when they were ignoring the humans to say hello to Teddy.

I got home, opening the door to the lovely smells of angelofthenorth already well into the process of cooking our amazing Christmas dinner.