Fic anniversary
Aug. 11th, 2025 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantIt was on August 11, 1999, that I (terrified, heart pounding, with a newly chosen pseudonym that I wasn't even quite sure I liked) hit Send on the message that put a Sentinel PWP called "Anoint" out on the SXF mailing list.
(This is really not meant to encourage anybody to go read that story, because I put it on AO3 for what felt like historical reasons, but I do not in any way think it's GOOD.)
I'm still happy to be here.[waves at old and new friends]
(This is really not meant to encourage anybody to go read that story, because I put it on AO3 for what felt like historical reasons, but I do not in any way think it's GOOD.)
I'm still happy to be here.[waves at old and new friends]
Check-In #3
Aug. 10th, 2025 08:31 amklb posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
pod_togetherHello Wonderful Participants!
Welcome to the final check-in! You can check in via email (pod.together@gmail.com), dreamwidth comment (comments on this post are screened), or with a discord message to klb, shmaylor, minnabird, or rockinhamburger. Please try to check-in within 48 hours. We will send a follow-up email to all those we haven't heard from at that time. If you signed up as a group and did not opt in to check-ins, you obviously aren't required to check-in, but are certainly welcome to if you would like!
In addition to the check-in, today is also the deadline to post your text to the AO3 collection. If you haven't already done so, please follow these posting instructions to post to the collection. (If your final product will be audio only, please let us know)
Podficcers, when you check in, please let us know what’s going well, any concerns you have, and where you are in regards to meeting the August 24th deadline (2 weeks from now).
Even if you feel confident about making the deadline, we strongly suggest recording ASAP if you haven't already done so! Pretty much every year we have at least one podficcer who gets sick, loses their voice, and needs a last-minute pinch hit. Hopefully that won't happen to you, but we encourage you to plan your recording schedule as if it might, just in case!
Also, podficcers, please take this check-in as an opportunity, if you haven’t already, to let your writers know everything you loved about the fic they wrote! This is such an important part of the collaborative process and is one that can be easy to overlook in the scramble to get things finished. Don’t make that mistake—this part of the process can be the difference between an overall mediocre collaborative experience and a positive one!
Writers, as long as your podficcer checks in, you’re not required to, but if you’re up for it we’d love to hear about any particular parts of your experience you want to share. The positive will make us smile, and the negative will give us an opportunity to offer help or give us valuable feedback that will help us tweak next year’s challenge to be better!
Some important notes/reminders:
Welcome to the final check-in! You can check in via email (pod.together@gmail.com), dreamwidth comment (comments on this post are screened), or with a discord message to klb, shmaylor, minnabird, or rockinhamburger. Please try to check-in within 48 hours. We will send a follow-up email to all those we haven't heard from at that time. If you signed up as a group and did not opt in to check-ins, you obviously aren't required to check-in, but are certainly welcome to if you would like!
In addition to the check-in, today is also the deadline to post your text to the AO3 collection. If you haven't already done so, please follow these posting instructions to post to the collection. (If your final product will be audio only, please let us know)
Podficcers, when you check in, please let us know what’s going well, any concerns you have, and where you are in regards to meeting the August 24th deadline (2 weeks from now).
Even if you feel confident about making the deadline, we strongly suggest recording ASAP if you haven't already done so! Pretty much every year we have at least one podficcer who gets sick, loses their voice, and needs a last-minute pinch hit. Hopefully that won't happen to you, but we encourage you to plan your recording schedule as if it might, just in case!
Also, podficcers, please take this check-in as an opportunity, if you haven’t already, to let your writers know everything you loved about the fic they wrote! This is such an important part of the collaborative process and is one that can be easy to overlook in the scramble to get things finished. Don’t make that mistake—this part of the process can be the difference between an overall mediocre collaborative experience and a positive one!
Writers, as long as your podficcer checks in, you’re not required to, but if you’re up for it we’d love to hear about any particular parts of your experience you want to share. The positive will make us smile, and the negative will give us an opportunity to offer help or give us valuable feedback that will help us tweak next year’s challenge to be better!
Some important notes/reminders:
- Remember to share any edited audio you have with your partner(s), and let them know what you’ve accomplished so far.
- Once your podfic is complete, you should follow the posting instructions to add your podfic to the collection! Please also let us know when your project is fully finished and ready for reveals! :D
- As mentioned above, please make sure you are each giving your partners love and encouragement about the wonderful work they have done so far. Tell them what you think is great about their words and/or their audio. Sometimes in the rush to get things done, this step gets skipped, but it’s so important to everyone having a good experience!
- The Early Podfic submission date is Wednesday, August 20th. After the podfic deadline, mods will create a schedule for revealing completed projects, evenly distributed across a ten-day posting period. Projects that meet the Early Writing AND Early Podfic submission deadlines will be posted first, followed by projects that meet the Early Writing OR Early Podfic submission deadline, followed by all other projects.
- If you think it would enhance your podfic to have multiple voices contribute, feel free to let us know and we’d be happy to signal boost a search for volunteers!
Mistakes have been made
Aug. 9th, 2025 08:21 pmscaramoucheI waffled for weeks on whether to get the Humble Bundle of James Tynion IV's stuff (as of posting, there's five days of the offer left), before finally getting it and forgetting how weird my brain gets when I binge on creepy media.
BASICALLY, I should not have read The Department of Truth before bedtime. Even when I got Nice House on the Lake, I don't read a whole volume in one go! There's such a thing as pacing things out! Plus I made the other mistake of reading Deviant first without processing the consequences of it only being volume 1, i.e. the story is not done.😢
BASICALLY, I should not have read The Department of Truth before bedtime. Even when I got Nice House on the Lake, I don't read a whole volume in one go! There's such a thing as pacing things out! Plus I made the other mistake of reading Deviant first without processing the consequences of it only being volume 1, i.e. the story is not done.😢
Book Log: Women Who Ruled
Aug. 4th, 2025 07:19 pmscaramoucheI picked up Claudia Gold's Women Who Ruled: History's 50 Most Remarkable Women quite a while go from a warehouse sale, and it's languished long enough that I've mostly moved on to other topics, so making myself read this was both a tiresome nostalgia trip and a breezy rehash (each lady gets 4 to maximum of 9 pages each).
The book is Western Europe-centric so it's a big chunk of familiar names, and I would've been more patient about it if she hadn't included Lady Jane Grey. (Really????) Of the ancient-to-early modern era it covers, there's just the one ruler from the Ottoman empire, two from China, two from India, and none from non-ancient Egypt Africa. But I did get introduced to Margaret I of Denmark and hopefully I can get a biography of her one day.
I'd read Gold's biography about Henry II of England a while back and enjoyed it, so I was a little surprised by some of Gold's choices in how to describe the controversial reputations of some of the women, because she's kind to Thatcher and Marie Antoinette, but is very much not to Isabella of France and Empress Cixi. This just may be a consequence of writing a list-type book where there's only so much time to spare to research the individuals Gold maybe doesn't know as well, but it is a bit of a shame.
The book is Western Europe-centric so it's a big chunk of familiar names, and I would've been more patient about it if she hadn't included Lady Jane Grey. (Really????) Of the ancient-to-early modern era it covers, there's just the one ruler from the Ottoman empire, two from China, two from India, and none from non-ancient Egypt Africa. But I did get introduced to Margaret I of Denmark and hopefully I can get a biography of her one day.
I'd read Gold's biography about Henry II of England a while back and enjoyed it, so I was a little surprised by some of Gold's choices in how to describe the controversial reputations of some of the women, because she's kind to Thatcher and Marie Antoinette, but is very much not to Isabella of France and Empress Cixi. This just may be a consequence of writing a list-type book where there's only so much time to spare to research the individuals Gold maybe doesn't know as well, but it is a bit of a shame.
A Mermaid for Christmas & Legend of Mermaid
Aug. 2nd, 2025 06:36 pmscaramoucheI'd finished Raya Sirena a few weeks ago (what a nothingburger of a show, ultimately) and thought hey, I'm in the mood for some other mermaid media. H2O: Just Add Water unfortunately just left Netflix, and I didn't feel ready to start on season 2 of Siren without a recap. So, A Mermaid for Christmas, a made-for-tv rom com that was only ever available on Amazon prime until I finally found an alternate stream, it is.
Me: This is going to be so bad. SO BAD. SO SO SO BAD.
[half an hour later]
Me: Actually this is pretty funny, some of the jokes are legit, and some of the line readings are pretty good! Problem is, it's not zany ENOUGH, and it's hampered by a tiny budget that doesn't give it the glistening zany feel of a DCOM or Netflix Christmas film. It's not "good" but it is self-aware and managed to pull off lampshading jokes that usually sound embarrassed or tryhard, but here feel like they're bringing the audience in for the joke, and it's kinda charming for that. It's still not "good" and offers almost no eye candy for mermaid fen, but I had more fun in general than I did with Raya Sirena, so that's something.
Edited to add: I felt oddly unsatisfied that the movie was middling fine and that I kinda enjoyed it, so I ended up browsing listlessly for a bit and ended up watching the 2020 CN film Legend of Mermaid and it was so awful! Exactly the kind of bad I was looking for! And all is right with the world.
Edited again to add: I figured I might as well watch the sequel Legend of Mermaid II, and... oh? This one's actually fun! And funny! And has actual character arcs! And a villain twist that makes sense! And two things that felt like plot holes turned out not to be! Bonus majority female cast vs. the first movie's sexual menace towards women! This is legitimately a good movie, and much better than A Mermaid for Christmas even, what a wonder it is when there's good writing, what the heck.
What a rollercoaster.
Me: This is going to be so bad. SO BAD. SO SO SO BAD.
[half an hour later]
Me: Actually this is pretty funny, some of the jokes are legit, and some of the line readings are pretty good! Problem is, it's not zany ENOUGH, and it's hampered by a tiny budget that doesn't give it the glistening zany feel of a DCOM or Netflix Christmas film. It's not "good" but it is self-aware and managed to pull off lampshading jokes that usually sound embarrassed or tryhard, but here feel like they're bringing the audience in for the joke, and it's kinda charming for that. It's still not "good" and offers almost no eye candy for mermaid fen, but I had more fun in general than I did with Raya Sirena, so that's something.
Edited to add: I felt oddly unsatisfied that the movie was middling fine and that I kinda enjoyed it, so I ended up browsing listlessly for a bit and ended up watching the 2020 CN film Legend of Mermaid and it was so awful! Exactly the kind of bad I was looking for! And all is right with the world.
Edited again to add: I figured I might as well watch the sequel Legend of Mermaid II, and... oh? This one's actually fun! And funny! And has actual character arcs! And a villain twist that makes sense! And two things that felt like plot holes turned out not to be! Bonus majority female cast vs. the first movie's sexual menace towards women! This is legitimately a good movie, and much better than A Mermaid for Christmas even, what a wonder it is when there's good writing, what the heck.
What a rollercoaster.
Chicken adventures
Aug. 1st, 2025 02:50 pmresonantLast time I saw my hairstylist, she had just bought four chicks and was embarking on a lifestyle of backyard chicken-keeping. She told me all their names. It was sweet.
Turns out chick-sexing is an imperfect art. Over the intervening month, she started to hear one of the birds crowing, but it took a while to figure out which one. It was Dottie.
My stylist called everybody she knew out in the county until she found someone who was both interested in rooster and zoned for rooster. When she was carrying Dottie out to the car to take him to his new home, he crowed a goodbye at the coop as they passed.
Out of the coop they heard some farewell cackling. And more crowing.
Turns out chick-sexing is an imperfect art. Over the intervening month, she started to hear one of the birds crowing, but it took a while to figure out which one. It was Dottie.
My stylist called everybody she knew out in the county until she found someone who was both interested in rooster and zoned for rooster. When she was carrying Dottie out to the car to take him to his new home, he crowed a goodbye at the coop as they passed.
Out of the coop they heard some farewell cackling. And more crowing.
Book Log: Lamb
Aug. 1st, 2025 02:54 pmscaramoucheI got a copy of Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal thanks to a tumblr post (this one). It's a madcap (a word used in a review blurb on the jacket) comedy that's mainly about Joshua of Nazareth's childhood and teenhood, i.e. the missing years, from the POV of his childhood best friend who got excised from the gospels.
( Under cut. )
( Under cut. )
