musesfool: kara cutting her hair (strangle the stars)
[personal profile] musesfool
Ugh, I woke up at 3:30 this morning coughing my lungs out and didn't really sleep much after that. It's that itchiness in my throat and chest that make me think allergies, especially given that I haven't really been around people except at the dentist's office yesterday, so I don't think it's covid? But who knows at this point? My quest to get this year's flu/covid shots has been derailed a couple of times but I am off again next Friday, so that is going to be my next attempt.

In more fannish news, I read that Dungeon Crawler Carl has been optioned for tv, and now I want a Carl vid to Mike Ness's version of "Don't Think Twice."

*

Festivids letter placeholder

Oct. 2nd, 2025 06:41 pm
fairestcat: Dreadful the cat (Default)
[personal profile] fairestcat
The letter will be here soon.
pixellated: (Default)
[personal profile] pixellated posting in [community profile] style_system
hi again! this is more of a general html/css question, but it has to work within dreamwidth's constraints, so i decided to ask it here. please let me know if this isn't the appropriate comm for this. i hope i used the right tags for this post.

here's what i'm trying to achieve (this would be displayed inside the most recent entry on my journal, so i can use regular CSS and not just inline, in case this matters):


i want to have a big box, and inside it a picture and a small box below that. i want the big box to resize responsively while keeping its proportions: suppose its width:height ratio is 1:2; i want it to keep that ratio always. as it resizes, i want the picture and small box inside to also resize while also keeping their proportions.

normally this would be really easy to do with aspect-ratio (<- this is a link to mozilla's developer resources) but that property doesn't seem to work on dreamwidth -- when i put it in my custom CSS, it doesn't seem to do anything, and it gets highlighted in red. (it works okay when i try it in online CSS editors, so i think it's not my mistake that's causing this.)

assuming this is true and i can't use aspect-ratio on DW, i need to cobble together some other solution, but i'm completely out of ideas. is this possible to achieve without aspect-ratio, or should i just change my idea to something that can be done on DW?

thanks again for your time!
brightknightie: Duncan with his sword against the Paris skyline (Other Fandom HL Duncan)
[personal profile] brightknightie posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Sign-ups are now open for [community profile] hlh_shortcuts 2025, the long-running annual Highlander Holiday Shortcuts fanfiction exchange!

When:
  • Sign-up: October 1 to 11, 2025 at 11:59PM CDT on AO3
  • Receive assignments: By October 14, 2025
  • Default deadline: November 20, 2025
  • Submissions: By December 15, 2025 on AO3
  • Stories revealed: The first on December 20, 2025 (the winter solstice, Duncan's birthday) and the rest a few per day as long as they last, per tradition

How:

Yay, Highlander fun and friends! Come play with us?

the audiobook experience

Oct. 2nd, 2025 07:43 am
marcicat: (tree with rainbow swirls)
[personal profile] marcicat
I never pay much attention to how long a visual-reading book is, even in e-books where you can see the page count super easily. IDK, 200 pages, 500 pages, those numbers mean nothing to me. (This is probably especially true in e-books, where the page numbering doesn't always make sense. 'There are 500 pages left in this book!' ::turns to the next page:: 'There are 450 pages left in this book!' ::baffled::)

But audiobooks are measured in hours, which is much easier for my brain to relate to. And I've been having a lot of fun comparing book summaries to book lengths, because they almost never match what I'd expect.

EXAMPLE 1: the entire summary of this book is essentially 'the roommate is a vampire.' somehow the audiobook is NINE HOURS long. I'm so curious what's going to happen for the 8 hours and 50 minutes that aren't the summary

EXAMPLE 2: the summary references a romance and a mystery and supernatural shenanigans and a team-up and cameos and backstory and lore and somehow this all happens in FIVE HOURS, despite the fact that the summary itself is practically a page long

Basically, audiobooks are teaching me a lot about what I like in storytelling, which is not something I expected, but which I'm very grateful for!

Ninefox Gambit comic

Oct. 2nd, 2025 03:55 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
There are parts of this comic theme I find wildly confusing, but after accidentally destroying my WordPress install ~a year ago, Ninefox Gambit comic is back online! Includes both the Cheris reboot prelude/origin story and Candle Arc comics.

ink and wash portrait of Kel Cheris ink and wash portrait of Shuos Jedao

(The companion site Candle Arc is more specifically focused on the 2D animated short in preproduction.)

...still buried under orchestration homework, see y'all later?!

Me-and-media update

Oct. 2nd, 2025 06:01 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
"Still Wishlisting. This will be super quick," she said three days ago, and then failed to post it.

Kdramas
Watched more of You and Everything Else and now feel I maligned it unduly based on the first seven minutes. The childhood scenes are excellent! Will definitely be watching more.

More of A Hundred Memories, which I'm loving, and two more episodes of Low Life.

And quite a lot more of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty (Netflix) with Andrew. We're both very much enjoying the cooking (schnitzel!), and surprisingly, both wishing the ship would just go away. (Normally I would be on board with romance storylines, and I can kiiiind of see what she sees in him, but this guy needs a LOT more redemption and power-differential mitigation before I'll like it.)

Other TV and films
More of The Newsreader, more Bluey. And at the cinema:

Prime Minister -- a documentary about our erstwhile leader Jacinda Ardern. This was really good -- very candid, brought up a lot of memories from the last 5 years, made me tear up.

The Ballad of Wallis Island -- an incredibly charming little film that hits all the expected beats but does it so well and with such specificity that it totally worked for me. I loved it! Made me cry. So very glad that I saw it at the movies, because the acting was amazing. Warning for gentle cringe humour. (Trailer.)

Writing/making things
alkjsdfhalkdjsfhalkdjsfhaskdljfhadslk BEARS!

Good things
Fish and chips and Low Life tonight. Cat and boy and internet. Writing, especially when it comes together.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39


When I see a fic tagged Choose Not to Warn

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sail on in
15 (38.5%)

approach cautiously
14 (35.9%)

avoid
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depends on the author
14 (35.9%)

depends on the fandom
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ticky-box full of delicious, delicious starch
14 (35.9%)

ticky-box full of native birds causing a ruckus
18 (46.2%)

ticky-box full of squid performing cirque du la marée
12 (30.8%)

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25 (64.1%)

starandrea: (Default)
[personal profile] starandrea
Happy October!

Recently I learned:
1) Tinnitus can sound like music.
2) Enzyme cleaners are great at unclogging pipes.
3) Less authentic mooncakes may be more delicious.
4) Some very dramatic plants think 50F is a killing frost.

Also, you can explain to your dog that you will always provide her with more food, you can show her all the food you have which is more than any three dogs could possibly need, and she will still ask for 100 dreambones so she can hide 50 of them for the hard times, and you will find them in places you never knew she'd been, usually still clean-ish and not gross but NOT ALWAYS.

On the plus side, when you ignore the lose bolt in her dog stroller too long and it falls out, never to be seen again, the internet can actually teach you enough about nuts and bolts that you can order a correctly sized replacement online, without having to interact with a single human being while still benefiting from humanity's collective wisdom and ingenuity.

I was cleaning yesterday: not the light garden, which I cleaned last week because plants were knocking on the door at the end of September this year, but all around the light garden because sometimes I worry that my laissez-faire attitude toward cleaning will result in a dust dragon, which sounds so much cooler than what I imagine I will find when I pick up all the blankets lying on the floor. (Dreambones, mostly.) There were no dragons, and the dreambones have been thrown away.

My point is, why do I worry so much? ("It's people like you who survive disasters," someone once told me. But waiting to survive a disaster doesn't seem like the most fulfilling use of my life on Earth.)

I have a Chinese journal now; it's mostly private because I'm using it for [community profile] inkingitout this year, but I'm also using it publicly for all the other challenges I've mentioned, and when I'm not tending the plants for hours I collect pictures from my or other local gardens, along with occasional fic recs or notes on the Untamed.

Welcome to follow or not as you wish: this isn't an advertisement, just a PSA given that some of us are in the same communities, and I'm not a big talker but I get that there's no reason to expect [personal profile] xinger ("star") and [personal profile] starandrea are the same person. They are.

In conclusion:
5) Last year's dahlias were yellow; why are they all red now?
6) A single vine can grow so many different kinds of gourds.
7) Glow in the dark bracelets light up night corn mazes.
8) Pledge of the Peony ftw.
musesfool: orange slices (orange you glad)
[personal profile] musesfool
Rabbit, rabbit! Gotta start the month out right!

According to the dentist, my teeth are mostly fine but another old filling has started to crack so he wants to take it out and put a crown on it. Since I have money in my FSA because I didn't order new glasses, I said let's do it! So as long as he gets the approval from my insurance, I should be having that done on 10/22. I'll probably still have to pay about $500 out of pocket, but that's better than the whole $1500. As always, he marveled about the Maryland bridge I have, which has been in place since 1994; even when I got it, my dentist at the time said it would probably only last 5 years, so it's quite impressive. "Those dentists back then knew what they were doing!" he told me today, and I wanted to be like, "1994 wasn't that long ago," but it was 31 years ago apparently. That just seems wrong.

Anyway, I could barely stay awake on my way home, so I crawled into bed and ended up sleeping for THREE HOURS, which I was not expecting. I will take it though.

I made pancakes for dinner, but as I was mixing up my wet ingredients, I put what I thought was vanilla in the mixing cup, but as soon as I smelled it, I knew it was the wrong bottle. It turned out to be fior di Sicilia, which is lovely and smells like an Italian bakery, but is not what I wanted in my pancakes. Whoops. The vanilla bottle is the same size, so I have now rearranged that shelf so the vanilla remains in front and the fior di Sicilia is back behind a bunch of stuff. I also redid my wet ingredients - it was only an egg and some milk, so not a huge loss to start over.

Now I'm going to watch the new episode of Slow Horses and then later, the season premiere of Abbott Elementary.

*

(no subject)

Oct. 1st, 2025 07:39 pm
goodbyebird: Agent Carter: Peggy looking down. (Agent Carter)
[personal profile] goodbyebird
+ My brain is mush. We dock sometime during tonight, so tomorrow will be another hectic day. Thankfully come Friday I shall have freedoooommmm.

+ I want a Big Barda icon but I'm too zapped to make one *sulk*

Maybe after I've had my shower.

+ Not helping: my mom constantly asking me when I can come see her in Oslo, and for plans this Christmas when she'll be visiting and living at my brother's. I do not have capacity for this. Love her to bits but it's tough to convey that SOCIAL BANK EMPTY, PLAN QUEUE FULL.

+ Booked my flu shot for next Thursday. Apparently they're not doing Covid shots at the doctor anymore, boo. And the only information I can find is that it becomes available week 42. Hopefully I manage to get in there early enough that it will mostly be in full effect by the time I go to Thailand.

+ One Battle After Another will be showing at the small local cinema next week. There's been some very positive buzz. I may try to lure some friends to come with.

+ Decided to try and move away from using GoodReads, and so far StoryGraph seems a good fit. I know there's quite a few options out there, but I only made it through two before settling on StoryGraph. (Fable being the second option, but just way too busy for me. Someone looking for a move involved and social experience might vibe with it!)

One of the fun things is you can make your own book lists or challenges. I started putting together a small Queer Comics one. I could only find two other comic/graphic novel challenges by searching, so that's certainly a void in need of filling that's what she said.

Anyways, I'm here, in case anybody else is stretching their wings.

Sad eta: Jane Goodall has passed.
prixmium: (Default)
[personal profile] prixmium
I have mentioned probably that specifically since July my creativity has kind of crashed and burned. It sucks a lot, and I had a very bad few days recently with my mental health. I feel a bit better at the moment, but I am still worried about my ability to maintain this outlook.

Currently, I am signed up for the bingo challenge at [community profile] fandom_empire and have been trying to track things over at [community profile] communal_creators.

Someone over at the latter suggested this word tracking spreadsheet template. Decided to try using it from today.

Out of Air, by Rachel Reiss

Oct. 1st, 2025 11:14 pm
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Just in terms of the premise, this is The Secret History meets Shadow Divers: a poor girl scuba diver falls in with a group of rich kid scuba divers, and they end up bound together by a shared deadly secret. There's other works it also reminded of, again just in terms of the premise, which are more spoilery: Read more... )

In the present timeline, Phoebe aka "Phibs," a poor aspiring underwater photographer, discovers a hidden underwater cave while on a diving trip with her four rich best friends, Gabriel (hot boy she likes), Will (Gabriel's fraternal twin, a joker), Lani (lost three fingers in past timeline, now afraid to dive), and Isabel (Lani's girlfriend). That is all the characterization Phibs's friends get, though Phibs herself gets a little bit more, or at least more backstory: she's the sole caretaker of her grandmother with dementia, and the women in her family have a possibly uncanny knack for finding things.

In the past timeline, Phibs finds five gold coins via the family knack, and something happens that led to Lani losing fingers and someone dying. In the present, Phibs finds a beautiful underwater cave with an air pocket. She and Gabriel rest and kiss in the air pocket... and then learn that there's a legend saying bad things happen to people who breathe the air in the cave. It seems to be true, as deeply creepy things begin happening to their bodies...

The plot and premise are great, and the diving and body horror/transformation scenes are really well-done. Reiss is a professional scuba diver, and you can tell. But the pacing feels a bit abrupt and choppy, which is not helped by the dual timelines cutting between the past and present, so that events that actually are set up still sometimes feel like they come out of the blue. I had a hard time figuring out the geography of anywhere that wasn't underwater, which is not a common complaint I have about books - for instance, I wasn't sure for most of the book whether the island base in the present storyline was a tiny island with only one house on it, or a large one with a town. And of course there's the mostly-nonexistent characterization, which is really the biggest problem with the book. If this had actual characters rather than "hot boy" and "Lani's girlfriend," it would have been so good.

I didn't mind that nothing is explained about what's actually up with the cave and Phibs's family knack, but in case you would mind: nothing is explained. I did enjoy reading the book but more attention to character and taking things slower could have made it excellent rather than just an enjoyable read with some standout elements.

workaday Wednesday

Oct. 1st, 2025 06:38 am
marcicat: (moon with clouds)
[personal profile] marcicat
It's Wednesday, and we're working! (PS: HAPPY OCTOBER! IT BE SPOOKY SEASON NOW!)

Several people at the office have commented on my lunchbox, and asked if it is Halloween themed. It is not, but from a distance, the white cats look a bit like they might be ghosts, and it definitely looks like it COULD be Halloween-themed.

At first, I thought 'oh no, I've accidentally picked a lunchbox that everyone thinks is Halloween-themed, how embarrassing!'

But then I thought 'wait, there's nothing wrong with a perceived-to-be-Halloween-themed lunchbox! I love my purple lunchbox with cats and stars!'

And THEN I galaxy-brained the situation, and realized what this means: I now have a PERFECT excuse to get MORE lunchboxes. One for each season, at least! HECK YEAH.

(I am definitely using 'office lunchbox' as a chance to indulge my inner child. Can't decide between the space lunchbox or the cats lunchbox? GET BOTH!)

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