rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


In a magical version of the medieval Middle East, a middle-aged single mom, who was once the notorious pirate Amina al-Sirafi, is dragged out of retirement for one final job.

This book is a complete and utter delight from start to finish. It has all the pirate tropes you could possibly want - sea battles! sea monsters! quests for magical objects! loyal crews! tossed overboard! marooned! - and sly twists on others. It's got great characters. It's got hilarious dialogue and character interactions. The world is wonderfully detailed and varied, full of plausible historical details and with a lovely faux-historical feel. There are stories within stories. It's all marvelous.

As a child, I had a book called Muslim Saints and Mystics, which was a translation of parts of the Tazkirat al-Awliyā, a collection of stories about Muslim saints written around 1200. It was funny and magical, and some of the stories-within-stories in Amina al-Sirafi have a similar feel. The novel neatly toes the line between dialogue that feels fairly contemporary and a plausibly historical mindset. Amina is horny as hell, but a serious Muslim who believes in not having sex before marriage; as a result, she's had five husbands. There's a major trans character, in addition to several gay characters; Amina has come across people before who prefer to live as the other sex, and takes it in stride without resorting to Tumblr-esque labels or attitudes.

I loved every moment of this book, and was delighted that though it has a reasonable ending, it is the start of a trilogy. It's the first book I've read by Chakraborty, and I'm excited to read her City of Brass series.

Read more... )
pegkerr: (The worthies of Bree will be discussing)
[personal profile] pegkerr
This is sort of a last-week-and-this-week collage.

I recently had a new coworker start at my workplace who came from a job in a library system. She happened to mention in passing at a staff meeting that she was involved in organizing a writing contest for both individual and group projects. Intrigued, I sounded her out and asked her to tell me more.

She showed me the flyer, and one sentence stuck out for me:
In addition to being evaluated on quality, judges will also consider the role libraries have
played in supporting the organization or the creation of the work being submitted.
Now, I just happened to have a story hanging around in my computer that I had submitted to an anthology years ago, but it was rejected on the basis that it wasn't so much a story about bookstores (the anthology's theme) as about libraries. I'd tried various markets but had never sold it, but I still liked the story and had always thought it deserved an audience.

What's more, I knew that two of my friends had written stories about libraries, too: ([personal profile] naomikritzer and [personal profile] lydamorehouse). Could I get a few more, and we could submit it as a group project?

So, as part of my Year of Adventure, I have been doing something this past week that I've never tried before: I have been assembling an anthology. I was also able to solicit a story from Marissa Lingen and a poem from [personal profile] elisem. Another friend, Bruce Bethke, graciously agreed to put together the anthology's layout. (Bruce has had some experience with online publishing with his online anthology series Stupifying Stories.)

I will be submitting the contest entry later today.

(This is not the anthology's cover, but an image created in the spirit of the whole thing). The collection will be titled: Shelves of Wonder: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Libraries.

Wish us luck!

Description: Partial view of two arches. Behind the one on the right side is a portion of a tall bookshelf loaded with books. Behind the other arch to the left is a portion of a shining full moon, overwritten with the words "Shelves of Wonder."

Anthology

21 Anthology

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

gardening in winter

May. 30th, 2025 08:06 pm
tielan: brown chicken looking at camera, white chicken in profile (garden 01 - pumpkin vine)
[personal profile] tielan
It's Friday night, 8pm. I'm tired.

Think I'll get a wash and go lie in bed with the cats around me and read.

Here, have a garden update.

Murderbot 1x04

May. 29th, 2025 11:24 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
New episode is out already! At half an hour they are very bite-sized.

Spoilers had fun )

LOLOLLLLLLLLL

May. 29th, 2025 09:49 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
AppleTV posted the full credits for "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon," Murderbot's show-within-a-show. 10/10 no notes.

sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
The Mismatched Tropes Flash exchange had author reveals while I was traveling, and I wrote:

Last Minute Save (Vir & Londo, 1600 words)
In which Vir gets drugged and almost kidnapped/intergalactically trafficked, and Londo gets to be a Big Damn Hero.

p.s. Incredibly random Tumblr poll on whether Centauri or Narns have a higher body temperature FOR SCIENCE. (And fic.) If you do not have a Tumblr account, feel free to provide opinions in a comment.

Weather and Climate Livestream

May. 29th, 2025 02:08 am
mxcatmoon: Dukes Waterfall (Dukes Waterfall)
[personal profile] mxcatmoon posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
There's so many bad things going on requiring our attention that the cuts/firing in the meteorology and climate science communities gets less attention, but having a fully staffed NOAA is an important issue. Right now, there is a 100-hour livestream going on to call attention to how vital these services are, especially as hurricane season is upon us.  I have it on in the background right now.

What can we do? Watch the livestream, call our Representatives, and go to 5 Calls for sample script/letters.

Info and schedule: The Weather and Climate Livestream

Direct YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rG4ePBqD-E

light_of_summer: (Earth)
[personal profile] light_of_summer

FYI, I just found out about a 100-hour livestream of back-to-back, 15-minute-long weather & climate science presentations on the Live tab of the wclivestream channel on YouTube, at https://m.youtube.com/@wclivestream/streams. As of 7:45pm PDT on Wed 5/28/2025, around 90% of the presentations are still to come.

Presentations stream from May 28th 1pm EDT/10am PDT to Sun. June 1st 5:30pm EDT/2:30pm PDT.

Please check out the livestream and pass the word to anyone who might be interested—this is to raise awareness about the many kinds of weather and climate science that are at risk of losing their USA government funding, and to build public support for keeping these kinds of science funded.

More info about the livestream is available at https://wclivestream.com/

Thanks in advance for whatever you can do!

David Dastmalchian interview

May. 28th, 2025 02:29 pm
marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
[personal profile] marthawells
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/david-dastmalchian-murderbot-dexter-resurrection-interview/

"Now I feel much more comfortable advocating for [what I need]. To give you an example, on the set of Murderbot, going to my directors and writers, the showrunners, Chris and Paul [Weitz], and saying, ‘I'm really sorry, but on Wednesday at 2pm - I know I'm on the schedule that day, but is there any way I could be in my trailer for 45 minutes to have a therapy session?' and them being so supportive and loving and saying, ‘Of course, we will get you a Wi-Fi booster,’ because we were out in the middle of nowhere.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.


The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

Read more... )

Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.

Only One Bed meme

May. 27th, 2025 05:09 pm
sholio: Peggy Carter smiling (Avengers-Peggy smile)
[personal profile] sholio
Stolen / respectfully borrowed from [personal profile] rionaleonhart, a Tumblr meme now removed from its native ecosystem and repotted on DW [ETA: now tweaked a bit]:

Give me any two (or more) characters from a canon I’m familiar with, and I’ll tell you how they would cope in an ‘oh no, there’s only one bed’ scenario!

What you get might be anything from brief headcanons/thoughts to a small fic, depending on how much I have to say about those particular characters.

(Currently traveling, staying overnight on the road, would enjoy some fun distraction.)

Update: Based on how the comments are going, I edited the instructions slightly to hopefully bend the requests a little more towards characters from the same canon. (If you want two characters from different canons, feel free to ask for it - there are no wrong answers, it's very open-ended - but I'm really only going to be able to do headcanons for those, as I can't easily write crossovers, and I'm hoping for some of the other kind of prompts too!)

what a find by O. G.

May. 27th, 2025 08:57 pm
musesfool: the ocean (your ocean refuses no river)
[personal profile] musesfool
I slept through for a full 7 hours last night! right up until my alarm went off, actually, without waking up once!

I also got some fantastic videos of Baby Miss L going nuts about TATOES and BROCCOLI and also some mouse game she plays on my sister's tablet. She is such a character! <333

I haven't started the new season of Poker Face or Andor yet - I am still in HGTV mode. No emotional investment, and it satisfies both my nosiness about other people's houses and my need to be judgy about other people's aesthetic taste without hurting anyone's feelings.

Every time someone says they want to go BOLD with color and their palette is black and white I want to punch them. (I'm not saying black and white can't be a bold choice, just that it's not a bold COLOR choice.) Everyone wants POPS of COLOR but then the color turns out to be greige. I just...find it wearisome sometimes. I get it if you are doing a quick refresh in order to sell, since allegedly neutrals sell better? But these are people supposedly doing their "forever homes" or their "dream homes" so why not pick something interesting? At least a little bit? In the downstairs powder room??? I'm begging you, please!

Ahem.

If you asked me what my preferred home decor aesthetic is, I would say beachy with lots of blues and greens in various shades, and okay, a lot of white, a little gray, and some occasional wood or wicker accents. Definitely would want hardwood floors (or LVP that looked like hardwood). I'd want a large zero-access shower with a built-in bench with some fancy tile, and I wouldn't want to waste space on a tub (or double sinks, since I live alone), but I would like more linen/towel storage.

I would obviously want a large chef's kitchen, with FULL SIZE appliances and a big range - I don't go for that countertop stovetop and wall oven set up, I'd want a bigass stove with six burners - and I certainly wouldn't put it (or the sink) on an island. I'd like a large butcher block work surface and a breakfast nook with an eastern exposure, but don't need a formal dining room or a ginormous island. I do like white upper cabinets, probably with reeded glass doors, and then a color on the lower cabinets - a cobalt blue, maybe, or a deep teal.

The place I might go a little modern/industrial/maybe even avant garde would be in the light fixtures. I have seen some WILD chandeliers and lighting options on these shows and some of them are gorgeous.

Obviously I worked a lot of this out in the time between going into contract on my apartment and finally closing, so I was able to pick stuff out that all kind of went together, because I absolutely understand being a renter for years and not really being able to put your stamp on a place. (all the people who already live in their own houses who have no sense of their own style, though - they kind of baffle me, because didn't they paint/decorate their house? I get maybe not knowing what your architectural style is but these are mainly people in their 30s and older - they should have some sense of what they like, shouldn't they, even if they can't pin it to a specific style?)

Anyway, I don't need people to do their own homes in my preferred style, and some of these homes turn out to be gorgeous, but it would be nice if everyone wasn't doing the same things across several different home renovation shows. I guess HGTV has a bit of a house style? But if you've watched any of it, you can see why Keith and Evan from Bargain Block are my favorites - they actually do a lot of fun different things (or they used to, anyway), where even if it isn't something I'd choose, it still has a strong sense of style.

*
brokenframe: (Default)
[personal profile] brokenframe posting in [community profile] vidding
Title: California Dreamin'
Characters: Ensemble - Derek Hale, Peter Hale, Scott McCall, Liam Dunbar, Isaac Lahey, Vernon Boyd, Jackson Whittemore
TV Series: Teen Wolf
Music: California Dreamin' cover by Sia
Length: 3:36
Notes: Werewolf centric
Streaming/download at: DW | Tumblr

new Andor vid

May. 27th, 2025 12:58 pm
brainwane: My smiling face, including a small gold bindi (Default)
[personal profile] brainwane posting in [community profile] vidding
Just came across this on Bluesky: a Star Wars: Andor vid, centering on Season 2 Dedra, using Taylor Swift's "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart".

New Book...

May. 27th, 2025 06:00 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias

 

Brigadoon meets Buffy

When I wrote the first of the series, a couple friends said, you can’t ignore the vampires. So I put them in because yeah, they were a thing in Eastern Europe.(Maria Theresia sent investigators, even, in the mid-1700s...) But I don't read horror, and I'm indifferent to vamps unless they are characters, not monsters, so I tried to play around with the uncanny valley/alien idea. 

In THE PRINCESS AND THE SLAYMATE, Ruli, a new vampire, is trying to adjust to this change in…can you call it a life? She’s lost everything. But that including her old reputation for weakness and lack of direction, as she discovers the lure of badassery. 

At the same time, Kim and the crown prince of Dobrenica are on their honeymoon at last, but just as she and Alec are relishing the magic of Venice, they find themselves cornered and nearly grabbed by goons. Whose? More important, why? They have to figure out the roadmap to royal marriage while on the run.

Kim reaches out to Ruli for answers, and so begins a wild adventure as ancient enemies redefine what it means to be human. And inhuman. 

 

New Vid: I Cry for Love (BtVS)

May. 26th, 2025 02:09 pm
tafadhali: ([btvs] every little thing she does)
[personal profile] tafadhali posting in [community profile] vidding
Title: I Cry for Love
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Character/Pairing: Faith Lehane, Buffy/Faith
Music: "I Cry for Love" by Carrie Rodriguez
Summary: I bend I don't break / If I want I just take / If I cut I bleed / If I bleed I don't cry / Don't cry, don't cry

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

at the knees with a cutter

May. 25th, 2025 08:42 pm
musesfool: key lime pie (pie = love)
[personal profile] musesfool
The bbq was fun, even if the weather was chilly and rainy. We saw a huge double rainbow after it rained, and one of them was the most vivid and long-lasting rainbow I ever saw. it was pretty amazing.

Baby Miss L had a grand old time her in personal ball pit, and dancing to both the 90s playlist (it was a 90s-themed party) and later to her own favorite Elmo songs. She was really vibing with Pantera and Alice in Chains - that child is going to be in the mosh pit at the club before you know it.

In other news, Alyssa tried the confetti cookies and really liked them. This morning, she texted me like, "this is exactly what they're supposed to taste like!" Anthony and my sister also liked them, so I guess it's just me, but thy were disgustingly sweet to me. *hands* Trish also liked the brownies, so that worked out too! I will definitely have to make the brownies again, so I can taste them. My sister made ice cream cone cupcakes for the party, which I guess she used to make for the kids to take to school for their birthday's back in the day, so there was a nostalgia factor involved. They were good, though I still like my chocolate cupcake recipe best. *g*

Now I'm watching the Mets, though really, I'm listening to the local radio broadcast because good lord the ESPN broadcast is the worst. Simply terrible in all aspects.

*

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