autodach | Reading

In other news I have to knock up a quick (non-functional) web form today and I’m like, "Hm. I should download some kind of CSS framework to make this look at least vaguely legible" and I swear to god if I see another install page with sixteen options to import and compile a fucking CSS file into different frameworks and not one single "download here!" button I am going to go full Doctorow on this bullshit . . .

Leave a comment.⁺

shadaras

In non writing thoughts, by which I mean I wanted to talk about aikido and then realised that maybe I should mention watching a movie first, since I finally watched the new Benoit Blanc movie. xD

I watched Wake Up Dead Man today with

hafnia, who had seen it once before and was like "I am BITING MY TONGUE not to point out the REALLY GOOD FORESHADOWING", paused the movie at two points to tell me about (a) her opinions that the reading list in-universe could've been better (with her suggestions) and (b) A Science Complaint (while going "this is the only thing that annoys me about this movie"), and was delighted to agree with me about how well they used LIGHT. The cinematography was gorgeous, the plot was very fun, and I adored Father Jud and Martha and enjoyed going "ughhhh" about how awful many other characters were. The film quotes/references I caught were also great!

also my twin messaged me right as I was finishing the movie to tell me about a post he'd seen saying that the opening scene of the movie was filmed at the same location as Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video, including a tweet (bsky version) (bweet, my brain wants to say, but I think it's skeet. or just, y'know. tweet.) from Rian Johnson going "yes, it was, and I was the only person on set excited about this fact", which I thought was very funny in its own right and also incredible timing.

anyway, AIKIDO

Last night we had a new year's eve practice, and there weren't many people there, but—

There is so much joy in doing aikido on a mat where the practice is meant as meditation, and there are few enough people that you don't need to worry about throwing anyone into anyone else (or off the mat), and the people who are there are all advanced and so you don't need to worry too much about taking care of them (because their ukemi will take care of them).

( let me save your reading pages from how much I'm talking about aikido )

Sensei also was like "you could take nidan tomorrow and be fine" when I said that it was sort of frustrating knowing that in this, the lead-up to when I'll be taking nidan (at the end of May), I'll probably not be practicing more than once a week on average. She's right! I know she's right! I could take it tomorrow if I were asked to!

But it'll be better with more practice and active reminders of the stuff we don't do very often. Reversals (uke becomes nage). Weapon take-aways. Some nage-holds-the-jo, maybe? I'm solid on everything else, I think, though it's always nice to review koshinage. Working with friends on shodan prep last year means that most of it's in my body via taking ukemi, anyway, which is good.

shadaras

Start of a new year, fun! I hope it's a good year; certainly I'll try and work to make it good for me. <3

hafnia got me to sign up for

getyourwordsout with her this year, which should be fun. I'm doing it as a habit pledge, because that's usually not very hard for me and tracking wordcount seemed exhausting. (Which also means that Write Every Day folk will start seeing me around again in those posts. xD I have missed that since my writing brain plunged into a hole over the summer! I think I've crawled out of it now!)

anyway, VERY IMPORTANTLY, Yuletide creators have been revealed, so I can talk about what I wrote for it! :D

My assignment was for

china_shop, and we matched on The Spear Cuts Through Water, a book I adore and which I offered because I was like "okay if someone requests this fantastic book surely they will have ideas for what to write" and also the idea of having an excuse to read the book while thinking about the voice and feel of the prose was exciting.

I wrote a brief epilogue fic, barely over 1k: After the Moon Rose Anew (T, 1,048 words, Jun/Keema, post-canon)

Judging by all the lovely comments, I succeeded in my goal of matching the novel's prose! Most people commented on the voice! Considering how beautiful and lyrical the prose is, it's truly a joy and a relief to know I could match it for even a thousand words.

Also, it was just fun to reference as much as I could of what I found really cool about the prose: the layered POVs, the omniscient style that drifted between POV easily, the occasional brief asides to background POVs... Honestly, the poetics are easier for me to be confident in! I know I can do poetic prose; it's the smooth movement between heads that seems natural and is easy to follow that I wanted to learn from.

And

china_shop liked it, of course, which is the most important part of a gift—especially one for a friend!

Which: The odds of matching to a friend in Yuletide are... not that low if you both know you're in the same tiny fandom and that you're both going to request it, but I hadn't realised that

china_shop was going to request The Spear Cuts Through Water until after I'd already offered it, and she could of course not know I would offer it! Certainly we'd talked about the book before, but it's still very special to have this kind of match happen by chance. <3

The other fic I wrote for Yuletide was a pinch hit.

wolffyluna went up for PH, and one of the fandoms requested was Oathsworn, an actual play podcast I love. I knew that if WolffyLuna had listened to it, it was because of my promo posting about it. So, y'know. The pinch hit went up one evening, and I told myself that if it was still up when I got home from work the next day I could claim it.

It was still up. So. I claimed it, and proceeded to spend the weekend mainlining episode transcripts and internally screaming about what even I was going to write, oh god, this would've been a lot easier if I'd gotten it as an assignment (which I could have! I'd also offered Oathsworn!) due to the time crunch.

I'm very pleased with what I came up with, especially considering the time pressure. And WolffyLuna liked it, especially the scenes I added post-deadline because I was like "WAIT I NEED THIS TOO", which made me very happy that I'd taken the time to write and add them. <3

I dream of what I'll become next life (3.5k, T, CNTW, Waloot-centric) is a character study of my favorite character, and also includes a dive into the chosen of the gods, a specific religion within the world, and also Waloot's whole deal of being an ordinary person who died, came back, and was one of the most magically powerful people in the area by the time the story concluded. She has a lot of angst. I gave her a bit of time with some weird horses (as WolffyLuna requested!) as part of helping her deal with that.

This, and the gift WolffyLuna wrote for me (my suspicion that we'd be trading Oathsworn fics also factored into taking the PH), are the first works for the fandom on ao3! Yay for Yuletide! It's very exciting! I hope more people take a chance on this COMPLETE actual play podcast! An ongoing apocalypse, a last stand against the oncoming hordes, and a lot of people desperately doing their best to survive and be in community with each other despite not always liking each other very much!

bethctg

place holder, where my masterlist of posts will go. (Nothing to see here, yet!)

maevedarcy in

recthething

To end 2025, I took part in

rec_cember and I wanted to crosspost the recs here in case people want to browse.

Rec-cember #1: works under 1000 words

Fandoms:

The Raven Cycle
Doctor Who
Carmilla
The Hunger Games
Teen Wolf

Rec-cember #2: Podfic

Fandoms:

9-1-1
All for the Game
Goncharov/The Magnus Archives
Original Work
Sense8
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Teen Wolf
The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself
The Raven Cycle
Venom (movies)

Rec-cember #3: my top fics of 2025

Fandoms:

Sense8
Venom (movies)
All for the Game
League of Legends
Doctor Who
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Game Changers/Heated Rivalry
Teen Wolf
Cunk on Earth/Interview with the Vampire crossover

thawrecka in

c_ent

Hand to Hand (1202 words) by thawrecka
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 永夜星河 | Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ling Miaomiao/Mu Sheng | Mu Ziqi, Ling Miaomiao & Mu Sheng | Mu Ziqi
Characters: Ling Miaomiao, Mu Sheng | Mu Ziqi
Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Holding Hands, Fluff, During Canon, Post-Canon
Summary:

Four moments in time when Ziqi and Miaomiao held hands.

tarlanx in

c_ent

Title: All My Roads, They Lead To You
Author: Tarlan (

tarlanx)
Fandom: Legend of Zang Hai (TV)
Pairing/Characters: Zang Hai/Zhuang Zhixing, background Xiang Antu/Zhao Tong'er (Femslash)
Rating/Category: PG13 SLASH
Word Count: 3255
Summary: With his vengeance behind him, Zang Hai is now Kuai Zhinu once more, but he finds he cannot get Zhuang Zhixing out of his mind.

Content Notes: Written for elwinfortuna for

yuletide 2025.

On AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75600966

trobadora

Yuletide author reveals have happened! I had one story in the regular collection and one in the Madness collection this year.

For my main fic, I matched on a request that I'd been eyeing for some years - for Zhu Yilong's Thermos Flower Series commercials. (Here is a nearly-complete playlist, lacking only the lily of the valley one, though the first on the list is a bit atypical.)

There's only one regular character in this series of commercials, but there is also a white cat that appears in several. So those were the two characters I decided to write about:

Zhu Yilong's character, the man with the magical thermoses, who I decided is a dragon (with some canon support, given the little cartoon dragon on the thermoses :p), and whom I named Ao Xing (after the dragon kings of the four seas, who are all "Ao Something").

the white cat - I decided this is a cat spirit, called him Xiao-Bai, and gave him a human form that - no surprise - looks like Bai Yu. (This Bai Yu, to be precise, which I knew my recipient would appreciate. *g*)

I didn't tag this as "Bai Yu/Zhu Yilong Character Combinations", because it isn't that, and I didn't tag it as Guardian RPF, because it isn't that either, but it's still Guardian-adjacent and Weilan-adjacent, after all. *g*

And I had a complete blast with this, worldbuilding and all! Tying things like the magically appearing flower decorations on the thermoses into the worldbuilding, inventing flower worlds of my own, and of course developing the relationship between the two characters - it really was a lot of fun. :D

And I did a fun thing with the narrative voice where the beginning of each chapter starts in a more distant/mythic, omniscient voice and then zooms in on the POV character, which I hope worked well!

I think this one's completely readablewithout canon knowledge, btw. Hardly anyone has read it (it really is niche even for Yuletide), but I hope a few more people will give it a chance. I'm pretty proud of how it came out!

**

Heart-Seed, Heart-Flower (8,465 words)
Fandom: Thermos "Flower Series" Commercials
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Characters: Zhu Yilong's Character (Thermos "Flower Series" Commercials), White Cat (Thermos "Flower Series" Commercials)
Content Tags: Magic Flowers, Magic Waters, Dragons, Cats, Shape-Shifters, Multiple Worlds, Lonely Wanderers, Magical Quests, Saving Worlds with a Magic Bottle
A/N: Many thanks to

china_shop for beta-reading, and to

douqi for double-checking the character naming!

Summary:

The bottle was plain and unadorned, the lotus pattern that would have signalled the success of his quest nowhere in evidence.

He'd failed.

allekha

Today, I celebrated Public Domain Day by uploading a few newly public-domain photos to Wikimedia Commons. Happy 2026!

I played a lot of video games I enjoyed this year:

"The Roottrees are Dead" is a fun web-simulation puzzle game

Oblivion (remastered) is very pretty even when disabling stuff to get better performance, improves on some problems in the original, and maintains that broken Oblivion charm

"The Crimson Diamond", despite my issues with the ending sequence, was a great throwback adventure game

I put a lot of hours into inventing farming and building community in "Roots of Pacha"

I played "Expelled!" in one sitting (does get a bit tedious to replay the day toward the end), but the MC is so much fun in how unapologetically ambitious and ruthless she is

Still haven't finished FFVII Rebirth, but there are so many games in the game!

Just started playing the stat-building game "The Royal Alchemist", and while it's not perfect (easy gameplay, lots of typos), I'm enjoyed the royal intrigue and reputation-building mechanics

And of course, I've been playing and modding Morrowind between writing way too many words of fanfic about it

Unfortunately, I had relatively bad luck in picking books I enjoyed this year. I DNF'd more than usual; the worsening editing standards in publishing are not helping, but I also happened to pick some that seemed interesting but ended up being a slog that I dropped or skimmed through after a certain point. After we started moving, I also did not do a lot of Japanese reading or watching, which I want to focus on more this year.

In skating, I finally received my new boots, which hopefully should fit better. I did a dance lift for the first time and passed a dance test, my upright spins are now much better, we fixed my bad-leg spiral, and my edge work is also improving. We even got me a baby Salchow that my coach immediately said I was doing wrong lmao. Onward and upward.

My partner and I bought a house, which was a pretty big deal. Moving was not at all fun, but we do enjoy being away from our landlord. There is still a lot to work on; however, we have managed some improvements already like replacing the furnace with a heat pump, and Z wants to learn more about plumbing and carpentry so he can do more on his own. I found out that the library system has thermal imaging cameras available, so I have one on hold to help find out where else we can improve our sealing.

brightknightie

Here are some recent fannish things I've happened to see and would like to share!

Spotlight: I went to Dickens Fair again this year and had a lovely time. As a fan of nineteenth-century literature and history, I find it immensely fun! It's certainly also delightful for a much broader circle than just those interests, though, and I'd like you all to know that it is a thing! The shortest description is: Dickens Fair is like a Renaissance Faire, except it's Victorian London at Christmastime. Imagine walking into the pages of A Christmas Carol, and, among the crowd, potentially running into not only the characters of that novel, but all Dickens novels and many other novels of that vintage, plus real historical folks, from Dickens himself to the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to Charlotte Bronte and Oscar Wilde. And, of course, Father Christmas.

Ficathons, fests & communities

Create & engage
- hlh_shortcuts, the annual Highlander exchange, released 20 new stories, and is currently in its "author guessing game phase," with reveals planned for January 5.
- snowflake_challenge, the annual challenge to highlight what we love about fandom and our fellow fans, with prompts but no deadlines, is up and running for '26.
- purimgifts, the annual exchange featuring characters "who are at least one of: women, Jewish, or persecuted (preferably by evil viziers)," has nominations and sign-ups 1/02-08; due 2/23.
- candyheartsex, an exchange focused on relationships (both platonic and not), has sign-ups through January 7.
- beagoldfish, a low-stakes "make-a-thon," runs through February 28.
- crackthewip, a fest encouraging finishing works-in-progress (WIPs), has both sign-ups and posting through June 30.
- inkingitout, an annual challenge to write 75K+ words, has sign-ups through January 3.
- rewrite_a_fic, a challenge to rewrite one of your own stories, runs through November 30.
- goals_on_dw is hosting a '26 "Fannish 50" blogging challenge.
- comment_bingo, a challenge to comment on others' works, runs its current round until March 31.
- allbingo's January theme is "Public Domain Day."
- trope_of_the_month's January theme is an amnesty (wild card for any previous month).
- whenisitdue tracks many more events than I note here!
Enjoy & share
- fancake (themed fanfic recs); January theme: "crack [that is, bonkers story concepts] treated seriously"
- gensplosion (gen fanfic recs)
- het_reccers (m/f fanfic recs)
- fanart_recs (fanart recs)
- recthething (fanwork recs)

Sidelight: I've realized that as much as I enjoy Jed MacKay's comic-book writing -- I picked up his Nova: Centurian series sight-unseen and will give it a fair shot, though I've never been interested in Nova -- the eighteen-issues-a-year release schedule for his X-Men run is wearing me out, and I don't even read any of the other gazillion X-titles. Money-grubbing, much, Marvel? Or just bitterly regretting what you did to the line to poison 20th-Century Fox's movie well? I may drop the series when this current storyline ends in a few months if they don't cut it out. (I hope they don't wear MacKay out!)

maevedarcy in

gamechangerhr

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

alisx

But that’s what every mass shooting is, in one way or another: an attack on community, the very essence of being human, committed by one atomized individual who’s lost that connection and who has easy access to a weapon that lets him shatter it for everyone else.

Will Bunch on community.

Leave a comment.⁺

umadoshi

Happy New Year, dear friends! May this year be infinitely better than last for all of us.

Our NYE was very quiet. We ordered pizza with Ginny and Kas, and after they went home, it was just us and the clowder and a Christmas pudding with brandy butter. The clock is ticking on our vacation time, but at least we still have a few more days of it.

I've decided to take the bingo card approach of setting goals for the new year, and I almost have a full card. (Thinking of twenty-four goals is hard! I need one more, and have a couple of ideas.) Most of what I've put down aren't so much one-and-done things, although I've tried to make more of them list items that can be ticked off than things that are like "do [x] once a week"; this has led to a mixed bag containing both "watch twelve movies" (rather than "watch one movie a month") and "read one volume of manga each week". Six of the current twenty-three goals are media intake of various sorts. ^^;

This afternoon I took a bit of time and finally went through my shelf and a half of Japanese-related books (mostly language-learning, but a handful of cultural reference books) and pruned about half of them. That freed up a fair bit of space (for this moment, all of my cookbooks now fit on their bookcase!), but wasn't as big a cull as I'd sort of figured I'd manage once I got started. >.< I currently have no idea what to do with the culled books, though, so maybe I'll manage to prune some more while I get that figured out. Part of me still clings to this faint hope with no basis in reality that I might yet possibly someday take another stab at studying the language, so I've hung on to some of those books, but there are also a handful of language-focused ones that that could conceivably be useful for reference for work. (And I kept nearly all of the cultural cultural reference books. And both dictionaries...)

Current Mood: thoughtful

cypresssunn

My sign up for the Fandom 50 for 2026 at

goals_on_dw, which will most likely overlap with whatever is running at

fandom50challenge.

Name: Cypress
My Fandom Fifty entries will be posted at: at my Fandom 50 for 2026 tag
My theme: mix n' match of fic, meta, shipping, odes to characters, playlists, games and reviews, plus and weekly posts (ie, music monday, trope tuesday, wip wednesday, throwback thursday, ect, ect)
My journal status: this years fandom 50 challenge posts will be open, otherwise my journal is increasingly friend-locked. may be subject to change, especially with nsfw posts.
Other details: heated rivalry got me acting like it 2015 and we're being properly fannish again. so there may be an excess of hockey smut posting... my other interests include interview with the vampire (the most perfect show on tv), 911 (the worst show on tv), a song of ice and fire, the expanse, the magicians, batman, and more genre fiction.
Anything else you want to share: i tried the fannish/fandom 50 in 2025 to some success but i had to give it up in the summer when my life got a bit too hectic. and even the stuff i did manage to post i never got up the guts to actually share. but this year is going to be my year. im going to try and be braver and bolder. so here's to a year of writing.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: the cottage, ottowa, canada
Current Music: gang of youths - the heart is a muscle

bluapapilio

[Official Site]

[Redeem Codes]

[My Friend ID: 1107370626]

I've heard mention of the new Chinese wuxia game called Where Winds Meet and I'm always up for testing my jinga tower of games so I downloaded it. It's 100gb holy moly, my other games are crying in fear of new updates that will tip me over. But let's not think about that!

I picked Chinese audio but I heard the English and it's really good too. The prologue shows a battered character with a baby on the run from multiple groups, they're after a piece of Jade he supposedly killed his adoptive father for a took but I'm not sure how it's connected to the baby. A friend comes to help him and gets hurt when seeing a bug come out of a guy's ear makes our guy flashback to some stuff that happened earlier. The main baddy I guess is a white-haired guy that sent the bug.

Then there's a time skip to the baby as a kid learning martial arts and going on about traveling the jianghu with his master.

Here's where you get to customize the child. I am not good at customizing so I generally pick a pre-set model and maybe tweak it, but I saw there was a gallery where people posted their designs and HOLY SHIT. You can not only make gorgeous characters, you can realistically make John Wick, Keanu Reeves, Michael Jackson, Sephiroth and also some freaky stuff I wish I could forget. If you want to use someone's whole design, you have to own all the stuff they use.

You can pick a girl or boy, 'graceful' or 'realistic' style or create your own. You can use some AI crap to use your voice or picture to make a character. I messed up my MC's appearance but there was a free change ticket in the inventory, and I've heard you'll have another opportunity later.

The child is now a young adult, his master (the character at the start) is off traveling somewhere. A hooded figure swoops in and steals MC's Jade. You can name your MC here but there's little choice since most is already taken, I had to use my username instead of an actual name. :/

The fighting system is overwhelming for me right now, it's going to make me a while to get used to the controls and when to use each thing. Luckily, you can enable a lot of helpful features such as map/area markings, deflect assists, storytelling mode etc. You can play solo or with others.

So far I've been stung by bees and poisoned by a miasma but healed on my own. Apparently you can get things that can only be healed by specific NPC healers or player healers.

Jiang Wulan is the name of the man who took the baby and Jade.

My big complaint so far is that the dialogue goes by so fast and it's auto, you can pause or read the backlog but the flow gets messed up if you have constantly pause for fear of missing something. In this case it would've been better to choose English voices, though not everything is voiced.

mekare

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

awanderingcoyote in

sid_guardian

This is the fanworks round-up post for December! Please link in the comments to any Guardian (or related fandoms) fanworks you created or enjoyed last month.

all kinds of fanworks are welcome – fic, art, vids, picspams, etc. - including those made for exchanges and events
new chapters of WIPs count
meta or discussion posts, too
whether or not you've already linked these in a post of their own, we still want them here!

If you're linking to fanworks you didn't create yourself, please clearly mark these "REC", so there's no confusion about authorship/creatorship.

(And please still do link your fanworks, meta, etc. separately, in their own post, at any time!)

So ... what Guardian and related fandoms works did you create or enjoy in December?

runpunkrun in

fancake

Photograph of a young Asian girl using a manual typewriter in an office and looking very serious as she stares straight into the camera. Her black hair is slicked into a low ponytail and her round glasses are so big they extend past her face. She's wearing a shirt and tie and an adult-sized yellow blazer that fits her like a dress, almost as if she has been shrunk. Text, in a typewriter font: Crack Treated Seriously, at Fancake.

Happy New Year! Our theme for January is crack treated seriously!

It's time to put on your serious face because this round is for fanworks with ideas that are very, very bonkers, but approached with the utmost dedication to making it work within whatever passes for reality in that fandom. As with our crack round, I ask that you avoid using language associated with drug use and addiction in your recs, as this kind of language, even when used for fun, can be hurtful and alienating.

Now go bananas—but seriously.

The tag for this round is: theme: crack treated seriously

If you're just joining us, be sure to check out our policy on content notes. Content notes aren't required, but they're nice to include in your recs, especially if a fanwork has untagged content that readers may wish to know about in advance.

( Rules! )

( Posting Template! )

( Promote this round! )

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