magid

Federal Ranger Cracka Buckshore's efforts to keep irate parents from lynching handsome Fodo Bathin are complicated when Cracka, Fodo, and everyone else on the planet are kidnapped and taken to an artificial universe.

Golden Sunlands by Christopher Rowley

sholio

I reposted some of my longer 3 Sentence Ficathon fills on AO3.

An Immodest Proposal (Babylon 5)
State of Change (Babylon 5)
Hypotheticals (Gattaca)

And a new B5 fic, written a little while back because I had the idea, but not posted until now:

Reliquary (Babylon 5, post-canon, canon compliant, character deaths)

Reposted under the cut.

( Reliquary - Babylon 5 - 1500 wds )

vriddy

Last week,

scytale commented in passing about how clingy these four are, which honestly is just a factual statement at this point, yet the universe immediately beamed a ficlet into my brain just based on that because this is what I am now.

Clingy | K-9 | Ren/Oboro/Fujimaru/Kagari | <850 words | rated M

Summary: This was all Fujimaru's fault. And Kagari's too. Maybe a little bit Yuushirou's, but he wasn't admitting to anything. Ren-san was perfect as always.

Yuushirou gets a boner during movie night.

Read it on Dreamwidth or AO3.

Current Mood: giddy

silverusagi

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

Current Mood: sleepy

sholio

This book is hard to tag - it's basically cosmic horror, or horror scifi. It is also one of the creepiest and trippiest things I've read in a long time and maybe ever.

I kinda vaguely knew about SCP as a collaborative wiki project from the 2000s, with user-submitted descriptions of imaginary (and frequently extradimensional) objects. This book is based on it. It's about a group of characters who work for the Antimemetics Division of the SCP Foundation, a department most people don't know about (because it's impossible to remember it for more than a few minutes after finding out about it) that handles "antimemes," which are the opposite of memes - if memes are catchy and transmissible, antimemes are intentionally unmemorable, to an extent where you need to use extraordinary measures, such as memory-enhancing drugs, just to recognize that they exist at all. It's information that functions as anti-information. And it turns out there are living creatures with antimemetic properties, as well as weapons that use it ...

( Lots and lots of spoilers )

vriddy

Two more little guys from K-9 are really capturing my imagination at the moment. Look at 'em:

Satsuki from K-9 embracing Yuu from the back and keeping Yuu quiet with a hand on his mouth

You can't just show me two characters that comfortably handsy with each other and not expect me to go "Oh 👀"?! For anyone familiar with Wind Breaker, their vibes are massively similar to Togame and Chouji, especially early on. They're scratching my "murderous protectiveness" itch in just the right way.

Yuu, the blond chibi, can transform into a cute sort of hybrid leopard and loves to fight.

Yuu from K-9, jumping backwards in hybrid human-leopard form

Meanwhile Satsuki can create and control huge branches. He may appear calmer and more reasonable, but that mostly means his expression won't change as he threatens to crush you between branches or tear your limbs apart. That kinda guy.

Satsuki from K-9 creating huge thick branches to attack with

Obviously, I love them. For many reasons, too. But also aren't their abilities kind of ridiculous?! This is a world in which only criminals get a superpower, one related to the crime they committed!! What kind of crime do you commit that you can transform into a leopard?!

And thus, having thought about it way too much, I'm writing what will apparently become my first K-9 multi-chapter fic. With zero members of my beloved OT4 showing up XD This series is just ridiculous. I love it. The author is clearly having a ton of fun, and I love that for them.

lb_lee

Crazy Boys Get Money (D Stories)
Summary: Two teens in Texas hook and heist their way out of danger. True story.
Series: LB autobio (D Stories)
Word Count: 8100
Notes: Winner by a long shot of the February fan poll. Depending on how this story is received, I’ll be pulling out more regarding this period of my life, a series called “the D Stories.” Normally I would break it into 3 installments, but due to the nature of the content, I have chosen to upload it all at once. I feel professionally obligated to disclaim that this story is not appropriate for anyone under 18… but this was my life when I was younger than that, and it's both insulting and degrading to say that my youth is unspeakable to the very age demographic it happens to.
Content warnings for anti-black racism; coerced, underaged, bad sex work, and (separate) consensual, okay teenage sex, along with the circumstances surrounding both. More information is in the comments.

( I suck him like a hospital Hoover sucking shit off a bathroom floor. )

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Music: Everclear - "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom"
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/12853.html

lb_lee posting in

pluralstories

As for the Voice giving her new ideas, elaborating details about the Empire, she read that creators, artists and writers--usually the mediocre ones--often projected their inspirations onto some outside source like their "Muse."

Blurb: A young woman, treated as a "human waste can" by the men around her, flees to the stars in pursuit of the Voice who has been her only comfort, and discovers its true nature.

Why is it worth your time?: This story is so good, it made us cry. CP is one of the most relatable fictional depictions of a person with a story continuously running through her head that we've seen. It is a story of daring to embrace madness and the stars.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate focus, otherworld (Empire of the Pigs), nonhumans, romantic relationships, visions, voices

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available on paperback, hardback, ebook, and audiobook forms, in English, German, and Japanese.

Misc Notes: This is a queer story. Tiptree (AKA Alice Sheldon) was a lesbian.

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Posted and commented on bnha_fans.

Commented on booknook.

Commented on getyourwordsout.

Signal boosts:

For anyone who missed my previous post about it, if you're stuck about what to post about now that snowflake_challenge is over, have a look at the Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition squee challenge for February that dreamersdare dreamt up ;D

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72752&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=english-proficiency-tests

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72752

From Tim Leonard:

I wonder if any English proficiency tests include deciphering things like this.

VHM: It was only twenty or so years ago that I learned about the word "beater" for a cheap, high-mileage, beat-up car that still performs reasonably well.

Selected readings

"List of language proficiency tests"
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) tests

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72752&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=english-proficiency-tests

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72752

silverusagi

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

Current Mood: accomplished

celli

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

landofnowhere

A bunch of ground to cover today, as last week I focused on the Johanna Kinkel book, but I also read a bunch of other stuff. Also I am in the middle of not one but two SF novels with complex worldbuilding.

Elizabeth the Queen by Maxwell Anderson. Readaloud; this is a Broadway play from 1930 that just entered the public domain. Generally fun Elizabeth/Essex drama. Contains a Prince Hal/Falstaff play within a play, but it didn't feel the most effective use of metatheatre. Also it is silent on the Shakespeare authorship question -- I thought it might be a Baconian play because Francis Bacon appears and Shakespeare doesn't, but it doesn't drop any hints in that direction, nor does it mention Shakespeare's, though Burbage and Heminges are characters. Arguably this is realistic; people don't talk all the time about who wrote a play.

As You Like It, William Shakespeare. Readaloud. I've lost track of how many times I've read this aloud, but it is still a very good play. This time around I mainly noticed all the talk about how winter's not so bad really, which hits differently when you're in the northern US and in the middle of weeks of sub-freezing weather. But the Forest of Arden has olive and palm trees, so it's clearly a different climate.

Swept Away, Beth O'Leary. Jo Walton recommends going into this one entirely unspoiled; I didn't, but I enjoyed it anyway. This is one of the books I had in mind when titling the post; the woman is 31, the man 23, which is not something I've seen much of in the genre.

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Slowly making my way through this; the plot is progressing as I'd expect it to and we are getting to see alien biology up close! Excited to see where it's going.

Chroniques du Pays des Mères, Élizabeth Vonarburg. Post-apocalyptic matriarchy with complex worldbuilding and good writing. Not only is it a meaty SF book, it's in French, so I may not be picking up everything that I could be. On the other hand I'm reading it at a set pace for an online book group, so I get to hear other people noticing things I'm not. There have been some exciting revelations and I'm restraining myself from reading ahead, but might reread to help figure out what's going on.

celli

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

hamsterwoman

Behold, I have read a book!

1. Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – I did this as part of a sync read with

lunasariel,

cyanmnemosyne, and

hidden_variable (though not all of us are yet finished), and you can see our in situ reactions as we read along here.

Back when this book first came out, a couple of flisters read it, and basically everything I learned about it from their write-ups made me feel like this book had been written just for me – magic school! dragons! learning to do chemistry with dragons at magic school! When I described this premise to L, her reaction was, “Did you black out and publish a novel?” So, yeah, this was incredibly well-suited to my interests, which raises the question of why it’s taken me nearly 3 years to read it, especially as I’ve owned a copy of this book for a while. And I liked it a lot! Not in an iddy way, which is a little bit of a surprise given just how well it aligns with some of my favorite tropes, but I’m both very glad that I finally read it and am curious to read more. (Book 2 is now out; let’s see if it takes me another 3 years to read it…)

( More, with spoilers )

*

I have also watched a thing:

The Goes Wrong Show:

rionaleonhart started posting gloriously cracktasting ficlets which were intriguing to read canon-blind (I’m a sucker for rivals-to-lovers, and Chris/Robert was clearly that), and also were giving me vaguely Taskmaster-y vibes in the combination of absurdity and disaster. And then Riona posted a very helpful fandom primer, from which I learned more context and also that the show was only about 6 hours of content (i.e. within my “impulse binge” parameters) and available to me to watch on YouTube. And I have now binged it, and had a great time, and am even more able to appreciate Riona’s Chris/Robert fic, heh.

( More, with spoilers )

Great fun, and I’m sad there isn’t more to binge. (Well, I understand there are plays which predate the show, but I’d need to track them down somewhere.)

thewayne

Sigh. And it happened in my state of New Mexico.

Raw milk is something that Robert FUCKING Kennedy Junior Mint advocates for, claiming it's healthy. It is decidedly not. It's swarming with pathogens that can be quite deadly which is why the death rate went down after pasteurization became a dairy industry standard practice.

So all together now: Hey, Hey, RFK: how many kids have you killed today!

The medical examiner can't directly tie the infant's death to the raw milk consumption of the mother except noting there's not many other places the child could have contracted listeria from.

What's worse, I just read today that women are now training for pregnancy like they train for doing a triathlon. Including the consumption of raw milk. Thus I expect this is just the first such report that we'll be seeing like this.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/

sovay

In compensation for a day-consuming stat appointment, I got to spend some more time with the Salem Street Burying Ground and found one of those puddled-iron sunsets on the way home. I hadn't brought my camera, but I had my phone.

( So I break every mirror to see myself clearer. )

I seem to have missed Candlemas this year, so have a belated invocation to Brigid: Emma Christian, "Vreeshey, Vreeshey." The temperature rose to just freezing this afternoon and a whole shelf of snow-crust calved off the roof onto the front steps.

Current Music: Rose Betts, "Save Me a Seat"

kareila

Someone that I follow posted a list of the Hugo award winners for Best Novel, so here is where I stand with those as of today.

I have read: ( 22 books )

I own a copy but have not yet read: ( 11 books )

I started but did not finish: ( 3 books )

I have not read: ( 38 books )

I feel pretty good about this representation, especially since I've read (and mostly enjoyed) the most recent winners for twelve years running, up to last year's which I just haven't gotten around to yet. But some of them I know I will never read, and that's okay.

Current Mood: accomplished

james_davis_nicoll

This all-new Human Gorilla Heists Bundle presents .PDF ebooks from Human Gorilla Creations that help you create tabletop fantasy roleplaying adventures of thieves and thievery.

Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists

thewayne

On Tuesday, after suffering a day of blowback, Adobe rescinds its kill order and announces the program is going into maintenance mode. The original email sent to registered and paying users apparently said "We're contacting you to let you know that Adobe will be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, 2026. As an existing Animate user, you may continue to use Animate, but please note that technical support will no longer be available after March 1, 2027."

Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.

Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"

Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."

YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.

After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."

There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.

The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/

Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course

Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate

EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.

Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.

And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/

Profile

magid

February 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Page Summary

james_davis_nicoll - Golden Sunlands by Christopher Rowley
sholio - Recent fic (mostly Babylon 5) on AO3
vriddy - New K-9 fic: Clingy (Ren/Oboro/Fujimaru/Kagari)
silverusagi - Reading
sholio - There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (SCP Foundation)
vriddy - Yuu and Satsuki from K-9, aka Leopard and Treeguy
lb_lee - Autobio: Crazy Boys Get Money
lb_lee in pluralstories - With Delicate Mad Hands, by James Tiptree Jr. (sci-fi novella, 1981)
vriddy - Community Thursday
languagelog_feed - English proficiency tests
silverusagi - Finished for real
celli - a totally different book!
landofnowhere - wednesday books has older women romancing younger men
celli - I'm not quite as obsessed with HR as this makes me sound...it really just worked out this way...
hamsterwoman - To Shape a Dragon's Breath + The Goes Wrong Show
thewayne - Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy
sovay - Let the lights run like rivers all over my skin
kareila - another reading list
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists
thewayne - Adobe announces it's killing off the Animate software program Monday

Style Credit

Style: Pink Panther for Lefty by sarken

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Feb. 5th, 2026 02:46 pm

Network

Navigation

Golden Sunlands by Christopher Rowley

Recent fic (mostly Babylon 5) on AO3

New K-9 fic: Clingy (Ren/Oboro/Fujimaru/Kagari)

Reading

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (SCP Foundation)

Yuu and Satsuki from K-9, aka Leopard and Treeguy

Autobio: Crazy Boys Get Money

With Delicate Mad Hands, by James Tiptree Jr. (sci-fi novella, 1981)

Community Thursday

English proficiency tests

Finished for real

a totally different book!

wednesday books has older women romancing younger men

I'm not quite as obsessed with HR as this makes me sound...it really just worked out this way...

To Shape a Dragon's Breath + The Goes Wrong Show

Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy

Let the lights run like rivers all over my skin

another reading list

Bundle of Holding: Human Gorilla Heists

Adobe announces it's killing off the Animate software program Monday

Profile

February 2026

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags