daphneblithe

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“Can it run DOOM?”, CSS edition.

Mostly what this reminded me was that WASD+keypad was a fucking awful control scheme, hey. I’m pretty sure American McGee’s Alice (circa 2000) was the first game I played that didn’t use it — or didn’t have the option to use it — and forced me to learn to WASD+mouse. Which in the scheme of things was quite late, but I don’t think I played a lot of FPS after about the Duke Nukem 3D/Quake era. Either way, I hated it at the time. Ten zillion hours of World of Warcraft later, however, and . . . yeah. Those reflexes are never going back.

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alisx

We need to see the advent of workslop in the context of the technological aims of the last several decades, one of which has been to obfuscate the human labor involved in everything from driving to cooking to gathering (which I will note is one of our oldest human activities). Tap a few buttons and a meal appears at your door, or a car arrives to whisk you away, or a bag of supplies manifests itself. All the people who worked to make that happen—the cooks, the farmers, the designers, the engineers, the factory workers, the ship’s crews, the longshoremen, the mods, the pilots, the janitors, the bankers, the diplomats and council members the world over, and so on—are hidden away, made invisible.

Mandy Brown on the alienated everything.

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alisx

Kind, good, happy, secure people never go AI. They may be the hard-working columnist, the former blogger, the independent media entrepreneur, or the virtuosic book critic—you’ll never make sloppers out of them. But the bored pseudo-intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the fearful ink cannon, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go AI in a crisis.

Rusty Foster, with apologies to Dorothy Thompson.

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alisx

This is definitely satire but, also, a little part of me hopes it turns out to be the trailhead for an ARG . . .

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alisx

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alisx

A thousand blessings be upon all fanfic writers who seem to think catching international flights is like showing up for the inner city bus.

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firethesound

New words this week : 8,912 words which is back up, woo!

WIPs worked on this week : 2, with no new WIPs (yay!)

Still very tired and this is kind of a rough week, but it's halfway over and at least words are coming along!

The Old Guard

☆ food truck au : 8,912 words which brings the total to 147,812 words and I am fully in denial about what the finished wordcount on this thing will be because, seriously, how am I almost at 150k?? With five chapters still left to finish??? This is undoubtedly going to be the longest thing I've ever written and I'm not sure how to feel about that. Last chapter gave me a lot of trouble, and there's one particular conversation I wrote and rewrote and rewrote over and over before I think I've got it working, and hoping that my beta will confirm that it does (or will have some insight into why it's not!) and now after multiple chapters of smut, Chapter 14 is a bit of a quieter thing, jumping forward in time a little, and reeling back in some of the subplots I've left dangling for the past while.

alisx

I think Naoki Yoshida, a man in his 50s, dressing up in game cosplay for major fan festivals for Final Fantasy XIV is cringe. And yet no one ever calls it that because he isn’t ashamed of himself. Why should he be? He’s producer and director of the game.

He doesn’t need to do this. He does it because it builds community. It’s authentic. Why am I cringing? Why should I be embarrassed by this? Why should anyone?

You can say that it’s too authentic or too revealing. You can say “well, Amazon hired this person and she has to act enthusiastic” and the fact is that it’s just not true. This is cringe, yes, because cringe has come to mean a situation wherein someone is just being unvarnished and getting up on stage with absolutely no seeming shame about how they are supposed to be embarrassed.

And it’s beautiful.

On the beauty of the unvarnished self.

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alisx

Iran would not be treated as an “enemy of the west” were it not for what happened in 1953, when Winston Churchill’s government persuaded the CIA to launch a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The UK did so because Mossadegh sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: to stop a foreign power from stealing the nation’s wealth. The US, with UK support, tried twice to overthrow him, and succeeded on the second attempt, with the help of some opportunistic ayatollahs. It reinstated the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum, later BP.

George Monbiot on crude history.

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alisx

Some myths about autism. Honestly, in some regards I think these say more about non-autistic people than they do they reverse; my favourite being the “autistic people lack empathy” stereotype seemingly coming about because “empathy” studies were mostly measuring in-group bias (which autistic people do tend to have lower levels of, due to caring more about universal principles of fairness).

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aethel

1. Watched: Trust Me: The False Prophet, a Netflix documentary about a new cult within the FLDS community. I was interested because I'm always interested in fundamentalism and cults (and how people leave them), but afterward Netflix decided to start giving me extremely unpleasant recommendations related to one of the crimes committed by the cult leader. No, thank you.

Relatedly, a while ago I watched another Netflix documentary, One of Us, about ex-Hasidic Jews in New York. It was excellent, though I was disappointed to learn later that they recut the film to hide the fact that one of the subjects was a lesbian.

I also started watching the Ncuti Gatwa run of Doctor Who, but gave up after a few episodes because it felt empty.

2. Books finished: It's been almost a month since my last post, so I've not only finished all the books I mentioned before, but forgotten them too! (Except for Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. Highly recommend. It had much better answers to my questions than They Thought They Were Free, which at best was trying to argue against 1950s popular misconceptions that everyone has since moved on from.)

I have a bad habit of finishing a novel, thinking "That was pretty good; I wonder what everyone else thought", and immediately discovering that the other three people on dreamwidth who read it thought it irredeemable trash and pointing out fatal flaws, souring my remembered enjoyment and making me wonder if my brain is deteriorating or if I've always been such an uncritical reader. Anyway, I just finished Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao, a fantasy novel by a Filipino(?) author featuring Japanese characters set in a world that reminded me of Spirited Away.

3. Currently reading: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother by Norma Dunning. So far so good; I thought it would be more academic, being based on a dissertation, but the author retooled it as more memoirish. Regardless, it's very readable, and the subject is interesting. I had heard of the disc numbers before, but only in brief mentions.

I currently have too many books checked out of the library, but I'm hoping to get to Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall and Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan before they are due back.

ETA: 4!! Almost forgot to say I posted two podfics for the Micro Pod Fic challenge: Bus to Strathclyde by PerfectlySteadfast (Doctor Who) and Command Performance by Laura JV (Star Trek)!

alisx

The best thing about making focaccia is getting focaccia, but the second best thing is making way too much mashed potatoes to put in it and then having leftover mashed potatoes.

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alisx

All my homies hate AI (my homies are gamers).

The videogame industry, and its fanbase, sure does have some problems. But I think findings like this show that, despite those, people know and appreciate the fact that everything from single-dev indies to the biggest Triple-A franchises are, ultimately, hand-crafted by human beings. Which makes sense if you think about it; most gamers would probably be able to name specific people in the industry who they admire and whose work they actively seek out, from game developers to artists to voice actors to writers to soundtrack creators. For all that gamers will obsessively pour thousands of hours into making number go up on a screen, they’re still pouring thousands of hours into making number go up in the context of art created by other humans. Not just mindlessly extruded slop.

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firethesound

2026 GOALS

2026 Total Wordcount Goal : 107,588 / 150,000

2026 Total Writing Days : 110 / 365

APRIL
Feeling pretty burned out in general, the first part of the month was still trying to recover from how rough the last half of March was for me, and then the last half has been its own thing. So, things have been tough in general. Words have been mostly okay, though.

April Wrap-Up : I finished the month with 28,510 words which wasn't quite as much as I'd hoped for. I was on track to finish and then spent this last week mostly hung up on a like 500 word chunk of conversation I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again. A total of 5 WIPs got words, with all words going into 5 Old Guard fics. I fell just shy of my goal of 30k, alas.

MAY
Hoping to build a little on my momentum, or at least keep it steady. Real Life stuff gets a little bananas this time of year as I start adding things back onto my schedule. Yard work starts taking up some of my free time again, etc, etc.

May Wordcount Goal : 30k because same as last month, that feels doable. This month might make it a little bit of a stretch, but not an unreasonable one.

May Fics to Focus On
☆ food truck au : and this fucking fic. I am at the point with it where I feel like it's all I'm going to be writing for the rest of my life. I'm now most of the way through Chapter 12 out of 18 total, but I have 26k of those incomplete chapters already written so that makes it a little less daunting. I'd wanted to start posting at the end of May, but looking at where I am, I don't think that's going to be possible. Estimated wordcount, 180k.

alisx

Today Fanfic Grammar Tip: “Prodigal” is not the adjectival form of “prodigy.”

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unfitforsociety

Batfamily

Bandaids for Bullet Wounds by

voidapologist
Jason gets drunk to celebrate his birthday after his return to Gotham, and ends up killing the Joker — but not in costume. One little slip up, and suddenly Batman knows that Jason Todd is alive and in Gotham, and seeks to bring him home with the help of Crime Alley’s new vigilante, Red Hood. Oh heart.

the fawcett proposition by

TheRoodHed
Batman assigns the Justice League to gather intelligence on Red Hood's expanding criminal empire. Clark can't see through the lead. Diana's operative gets made in seconds. Hal discovers movie night. Barry gets speed bumps.

Captain Marvel gets desk work.
Billy Batson buys a bus ticket.

(Or: a homeless twelve-year-old realizes that the crime lord of Gotham has built everything the system never gave either of them, and decides to ask for help. Jason Todd was not expecting to acquire a kid, and yet.) This series is SO GREAT! Billy asks the Red Hood for help with community building in Fawcett and both of them get a family (and a better life for themselves and their neighborhoods) out of it. Oh my heart!!!

✭

Crossover

Avengers/Batfamily

Blue Divergence by

mysterycyclone
"Forgive me, Tony."

Tony can't move. He freezes in place, hand twitching above the changed arc reactor. Confusion, followed by shock, followed very quickly by fear driven anger as Tony snap his eyes back to Strange.

Strange meets his gaze and says, "When you find him, ask Tim for help." AU of Dark Matter (previously recced), where Tony is also sent to the DCU by Strange during the battle on Titan.

✭

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Stars vs Wild on tv

unfitforsociety

The Pitt

enough for you to be open wide by

Siria
"Do you like karaoke?" Trinity asked, which wasn't a question that Mel could answer in a particularly empirical manner. Mel generally found bars and clubs to be intimidating. But maybe that might be different if she went into one of them with a friend? <333

✭

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Stars vs Wild on tv

unfitforsociety

Heated Rivalry

Bird Set Free by

Hth
His heart. Ilya does have one of those – that’s not a crime, is it? He keeps it on its leash, never lets it run loose to bite and steal and cause chaos. You know it's high quality yearning when it's happening even while they're together having sex. <333

Building A Home by

merakily
The ice is where Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov fall in love, but the (mostly Asian) grocery stores in Montreal are where they learn how to be in love with each other.

In which Ilya learns about mochi, Shane learns about Russian milk bags, and they both learn how to breathe. Together. Oh heart. Now I really want the story where Ilya makes mochi with Yuna.

Cliff's Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week (Is Probably Going Better Than Ilya's) by

petroltogo
Ilya disappears in Sochi. Half-way across the world his team does its best to help. Their best is more than anyone could have foreseen. This is laugh out loud hilarious. Highly recommended.

the comments are a dumpster fire by

trickysnail
Five times Shane and Ilya ran into each other's burner accounts online. This is so cute!

Is this thing on? by

ARustySpork
after an injury on the ice forces Shane into an early retirement, he and Svetlana start a podcast. This is so fun!

Of all the florists in Boston by

lilliesinwater
Shane gets hurt in the Boston vs. Montreal game. Ilya crashes out and buys all the lilies in Boston for him.

No one knows about them.

Except for Ilya's new florist, who never asked to get involved in dumb hockey boys and their messy drama. Also, Cliff is a good friend. Aw, this is super sweet.

Protected Person by

chinesebakery
Shane finds out on Twitter.

Not from a lawyer or a teammate or even one of the journalists who've been calling nonstop since the FanMail video went viral. He finds out at 6:47 am, still in bed, that Russia is coming for Ilya. Propaganda charges. Passport revocation. Return to the Russian Federation required.

What follows is weeks of watching everything fall apart. Ilya's career. Their safety. The system that was supposed to protect them. Shane keeps playing while Ilya can't. The lawyers file paperwork and say to wait. Montreal demands silence.

Shane faces a choice: keep his head down and trust the process, or burn down his career and force the world to pay attention.

He chooses fire. Wistful and thoughtful - a good read.

the sum of its parts by

FlameHazel18
this is a super cute social media series.

sure grandpa, let’s get you to bed by

goldenraeofsun
Scott’s age is Rozanov’s favorite topic, but now that Scott has come out, he shudders to think about what Rozanov will throw at him this season.

Or, 5 times Rozanov makes fun of Scott for being old, and 1 time he makes fun of Scott for being gay. Aw this is so cute!

You, me, and Lily by Anonymous
Jackie Pike finds "Lily's" number and tries to reach out. <333 I am so invested in Jackie and Ilya's friendship!

✭

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Stars vs Wild on tv

alisx

Music streaming services need a "I like this band but someone in it is cancelled so please continue to play things like this but that are not this" button, hey.

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alisx

Listening to Mum talk to her high school friend yesterday about all the Iran lego slop videos they see on Instagram and it’s like . . . fuckin’ hell man. Just. For real.

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daphneblithe

April 2019

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
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Page generated May. 11th, 2026 02:34 am

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doom.css

Hidden resources, hidden costs.

goAI

🤔

Thursday @ 1:34 pm

Thursday @ 9:16 am

WIP Wednesday

Authentic cringe.

Capital for oil.

Everything wrong.

(no subject)

Saturday @ 4:52 pm

Torment Nexus fans reject Torment Nexus.

April Wrap-Up / May Goals

Friday @ 10:39 am

and there's no room out there

with a shot off the glass

but then there's the 5-on-5 story

Thursday @ 6:07 pm

Thursday @ 11:10 am

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April 2019

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