ante_up_losers | Member Posts

Reading: Maybe it's a winter-based desire for comfort reads, but if it's not Murderbot or Rivers of London, it's not holding my attention right now. I have read the first chapter of The iron will of Genie Lo, which is now staring mournfully at me from the corner of my desk, after having had it's loan renewed for the second time. /o\ I did start listening to Robbery Under Arms - a classic Australian novel about bushranger Captain Starlight - and while it's fascinating it's very "If I'd just done the sensible thing at this point then I wouldn't be in jail waiting to hang", which gets a little repetitive. I'm still waiting on </>Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, the second book in the Edinburgh Nights series by T.L. Huchu, which my account tells me I requested as a purchase 12 months ago. The first book in the series was very good!

Watching: Dude has been making me watch Stranger Things. It's not usually my kind of thing, but I quite enjoyed season 2 when we watched it...over a year ago? We watched the first ep of season 3 a week ago and I said, "Who are these people and why are they like that?" so we skipped to the finale, which was satisfactory. The first couple of eps of season 4 are verging on too much horror for me, despite the arrival of Eddie.

Now he is making me watch ALL the Thor movies, including the bonus material. The first one is a fun romp. The second one wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. The Thor/Loki moments were golden, and Stellan Skarsgård is great. I felt sorry for Christopher Eccleston, as I think they cut his best moments. The next two will be rewatches.

Gaming: I bought a copy of Rayman Origins on GOG and have been happily slogging my way through the Jibberish Jungle. I'm stalled out on my other games as I seem to keep making the same mistakes. I guess what I need is to put more of my limited time into them. :-/

Other stuff: I have five different knitting projects sitting around. I should maybe finish the baby cardigan before my grand-nephew outgrows it, which means my friend's shawl will probably be ready for next winter. I have done a tiny bit of spinning, just to test what my shoulder can handle, but it's a test project in some boring leftover fibre so I'm not strongly motivated to work on it. I'm about half way through a jigsaw of a village on Santorini, which is a lovely warm contrast to the weather.

Life stuff: Work is quieter, as exams are over and results for the semester have been approved. We can take a little bit of a breather before getting ready for next semester. At home, we're planning to replace our ducted gas heating with reverse cycle air conditioning. It also means decommissioning our evaporative cooling which I'm not really happy about, but we need to cut our gas usage and this seems to be the only option. We're hoping to get a bit of rain this week.

dine

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dine

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dine

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dine

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harpers_child

1. I got a Surfans F20 for my birthday to replace my dying ipod touch. (It was last hooked up to a computer in 2012 and spent it's life in airplane mode. Battery no longer holds a charge for more than 20 mins and charging is unreliable.) I combed through all the backups on my external to find all my little stashes of music. Now to comb through it all and figure out what of the 263GB (+ because some of it's zipped/rar'd) I want to load.

1b. If you have a suggestion for music organization software, please share. Especially something that can find and replace duplicates.

1c. I should check to see if I've got any podfic that had been lost.

2. I'm going to be in Seattle early July for the My Chemical Romance show on the 11th. If you'll also be going and want to hang out while waiting for doors, I'd love to hang. Siblings, BiL, and Spouse will also be attending.

3. I've been dealing with a ovarian cyst the last few days and I'd like it to be over now, thank you. Pain is finally fading, but the first 24hrs were awful.

edit: I've unzipped everything. 259 GB over 20,819 files in 11,339 folders. The Surfans only sees 15,000 files so I've got to cut 5,819. I guess first pass will be album art. I know I have a lot of fanmixes in there. Second pass will be podfic and audiobooks because it turns out I don't actually like those.

edit2: Found a stash of unzipped fanmixes in a folder. After deleting non-music stuff from the I-tunes folders I've got 107 GB over 21,490 Files, 11,275 Folders. Mostly deleted video I have elsewhere and old copies of podcasts I don't listen to anymore.

scriggle

From my garden.

( flowers )

dine

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mific

I turned back on the AI functions for my iPad again so as to write a fic with minimal impediments (I have enough inbuilt impediments these days not to want more). So that's autocapitalisation, autocorrect, and predictive text. And JFC, but it's bossy! Constantly changing words from the way I wanted to write them to some AI bullshit of its own. I had to be super-vigilant with the betaing. Have since turned predictive text off again to see if that's better. I hate the AI aspect but it's such a tiresome slog correcting my own (numerous) typos with it all turned off.

Bum music, a bit of YT whimsy. In Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights panel there's a guy, face down, bum up, with sheet music stacked on his ass. So Amelia Hamrick transcribed it, James Spalink arranged it, and played it using period-type instruments. It's actually not bad.

I managed a short fic for into-a-bar. I've been using the challenge to add to my Losers in Pegasus series but was hoist with my own petard this time by being allocated an SGA character I'd killed off in the last fic! Finally figured out a solution (enter the clones!) but was unable to finish the longer fic (that gets Pooch to Atlantis) by the deadline, so that one will come later.

Still mostly doing art, and podficcing. And the podfics mean cover art so that's always fun. I now tend to beta-listen while working on the cover, although that makes it tricky to note down bits that I've flubbed.

My Mexican sunflower still has some flowers, which the bees will be grateful for. Pretty amazing, now we're past the shortest day of winter, but it's slowly winding up its flowering season. 10/10, will see how many years it can manage encores.

I have a few recs, but will do a separate post for those. Summer sounds a bit brutal up north (for many reasons). Hope you're all OK.

dine

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dine

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mergatrude

An Iranian Journey

Someone posted this on tumblr and I wanted to share it with you. We're all just people trying to live our lives despite the whims of our rulers.

scriggle

I went to see Materialists this afternoon. Partly to get away from this hideous heat though I was planning on seeing it in any event. It got me thinking that the last time I actually went to the theater to see a movie it was Knives Out. Call it the Evans effect. 😀

I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a decent rom-com that definitely has something to say about dating and "checking all the boxes."

The acting was good but Dakota Johnson somehow managed to not have much chemistry with either Pedro Pascal or Chris Evans imho.

Chris Evans looks especially soft and huggable in it.

dine

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dine

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mergatrude

And now if 'ere by chance I put
My fingers into glue
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe

Anyone who recognises this without using a search engine has my admiration, because it took me the best part of half an hour to remember enough lines to trigger recognition. ;-)

In the 'random drive-by rec' category...

I need to preface this by saying that The Murderbot Diaries are currently so important to me that I generally avoid fanfic. The canon is precious and I don't want it to get blurry with other people's stories, no matter how good they are (generally, I'm happy to roll around in the giant sandbox we made out of media). That said, the following fic beautifully laid out some things that it made my eyes leak a little. Bonus awesome fanart linked at the end.

rogue condition (8092 words) by shamoosh
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Non-Sexual Kink, Overstimulation, Post-Book 7: System Collapse, the rewards of being loved, 2 bots 1 hardware, once again it's only EMOTIONALLY horny, konmari the governor module, fuck it we’ll do it live school of kink negotiation, Sharing a Body
Series: Part 2 of sandbox environment
Summary:

You can’t be this stupid, ART said, which was insulting but also relieving, because it never talked to me that way during the trauma treatment. Maybe this wouldn’t turn into a BARF after all. Turn off your governor module, you idiot. It’s giving you brain worms.

It was -7C here this morning. I made sure to wear gloves when hanging out the washing. Hope you're all doing okay. ♥

dine

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mific

Going slowly with my into-a-bar fic, but meanwhile, I made art of Uhura from the mirror universe to celebrate Juneteenth day. Click through for the full size pic on AO3.