wade in our workboots, try to finish the job
Aug. 21st, 2025 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Anyway, I did read something so Wednesday reading on a Thursday:
What I just finished
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, book one of the Burning Kingdoms trilogy. I really liked Suri's Books of Ambha duology - the second one in particular I thought was AMAZING - but this one isn't really doing it for me. It's fine.
What I'm reading now
Allegedly, the second book in the trilogy, The Oleander Sword but I haven't really been picking it up when I have time to read.
What I'm reading next
Well if I finish The Oleander Sword I will probably move onto the third book, The Lotus Empire, but who knows?
I did find time to finally watch K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix and I enjoyed it very much. It's like Buffy except there are 3 girls and they're in a band. Very fun!
Work today has been bonkers - it was 1 pm before I even thought about having breakfast so I just held out until 2 (my regular lunch time) for lunch. Hopefully the afternoon is quieter!
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AO3 Celebrates 9 Million Registered Users
Aug. 21st, 2025 11:30 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
What is better than having eight million passionate, dedicated users? Having nine million, of course! That's right, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently reached nine million registered users! Thanks a million (or rather, nine million!) to every member of our community for making this success possible.
Some of you have likely noticed that AO3 is occasionally—and temporarily— unavailable due to site maintenance. However, if you prepare yourself in advance, you don't need to be deprived of content!
The best way to prepare yourself for maintenance (both scheduled and unscheduled) is to download works in advance to tide you over until the site is accessible again. You can find instructions on how to download content from AO3 in our FAQs! Works are downloadable in several formats — AZW3, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and HTML — letting you enjoy reading across devices: desktop, mobile devices, or even eReaders. Whether the site is temporarily down or you're offline, having works downloaded means that you can always enjoy your favorite works!
Once again, thank you for your continued support of AO3 and for helping us grow each and every day. We look forward to celebrating many more achievements with you in the future!
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
most of them aren't wealthy enough to guillotine, just enough to be annoying
Aug. 20th, 2025 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Of course I'm used to literature being by and for the wealthy further back in history, and I don't say that I read about them without class consciousness, but somehow it's not as hard when it's from the 19th century or earlier. Maybe it's just that it's longer ago, or maybe it's because the society is more alien to me and harder to view through a personal lens.
But with these American upper middle class magazines from 1900-1940... well, the middle class was exploding in size and not all fiction or nonfiction was by and for the wealthy!
It's disorienting reading things about "every American girl" or "every new bride" in the 1920s that actually mean every American debutante. All four of my great-grandmothers got married in America around that time and none of them were worried about cruise ships and couture hats. (One was a nurse, one was a schoolteacher, one was a farmer's daughter and a farmer's wife, and one was a daughter of servants, from a big Catholic family.)
My tolerance for the wealthy perspective in fiction and nonfiction is lower the closer it gets to the present. I always have to overcome a strong impulse of disbelief that you're supposed to seriously sympathize with the idle rich, or people with maids, or the sphere where only people from recognizable New England families "count". Of course those people exist, but this is a big circulation women's magazine! Where are the average middle class women? The average middle class housewife was not a former debutante in 1908! But Woman's Home Companion could easily give the impression that she was. (Maybe there was a competing magazine that was preferred by the working middle classes. I'll try to find out.)
2025 OTW Election Results
Aug. 19th, 2025 01:48 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
The Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year's election. We would also like to thank our departing Board Directors, Jennifer Haynes and Zixin Zhang, for all their work during their Board terms. With that, we are pleased to present the results of the 2025 Election.
The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to the Board of Directors:
- Elizabeth Wiltshire
- Harlan Lieberman-Berg
The new members of the Board will formally begin their term overlap on October 1. We wish them well with their terms.
With that, the election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who got involved by spreading the word, asking the candidates questions, and, of course, voting! We look forward to seeing all of you again next year.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
i don't know how you keep on giving
Aug. 18th, 2025 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I guess I needed a little retail therapy...
Here's a cool link: On Set for The Pitt Season Two: Noah Wyle and the Cast Finally Lift the Curtain (contains some spoilers for season 2).
And here is a cute video of a bunch of NY Mets being interviewed at the Little League classic. #LFGM
*
The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens
Aug. 18th, 2025 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.
Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...
...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?
Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.
Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.
But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.
The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!
The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.
The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.
Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.
Chicken Florentine
Aug. 18th, 2025 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.
A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:
Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4] Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5] Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery.
(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))
Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.
Four Needle Double KnittingNew ways to double knit viaSlide-By & Picking
Aug. 17th, 2025 11:05 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
some people call me maurice
Aug. 17th, 2025 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The writing for Clark was great and he and Lois had fantastic chemistry. Mr. Terrific was indeed terrific! Plus KRYPTO!!! ( spoilers )
*
1 Million Mandarin Chinese Works on AO3
Aug. 17th, 2025 03:16 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
We're very excited to announce that AO3 now hosts more than one million 中文-普通话 國語 (Mandarin Chinese) fanworks! Mandarin Chinese is the first non-English language to pass one million fanworks, and we appreciate everyone who's helped us reach this milestone.
AO3 hosts fanworks in a wide variety of languages: currently, the count is around 150! You can browse the Work Languages page to see more. We're grateful that so many creators from so many backgrounds have chosen to host their fanworks on AO3, and we appreciate each and every fanwork that's been shared.
Since many users are multilingual, we wanted to open the floor: which language(s) do you prefer to engage with in fandom? Do you read, listen to, watch, and/or create works in the same language? Is your answer the same for all the fandoms you're part of?
Thanks to everyone who helped get us here! We look forward to seeing even more languages reach this milestone.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
Tiny House, Big Fix, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Aug. 16th, 2025 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

Of the MANY bait-and-switch books I've been tricked into reading, this takes the prize for the biggest switch. The back cover says it's about a single mom carpenter who builds a tiny house for herself and her daughters to live in. The title is about tiny houses. There is a tiny house on the cover. I read the book because I thought it would be about building a tiny house.
The book is actually about the events leading up to her building the tiny house. She doesn't build the tiny house until the LAST CHAPTER. It takes up about four pages.
Live Wife Reaction: GUUURRRLLL!!!!!
Aug. 16th, 2025 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I had paid in advance and scheduled this test several weeks ago. I made the reservation at home, from the computer, and immediately saved the date with a bunch of reminders in my calendar.
But when I got to the test site they didn't call my name at the appointed time. One of the desk workers asked me if I had an appointment and when she scanned my non-driver's ID card, she said, "Oh, you don't have an appointment today, but you had one yesterday!"
I had somehow managed to put the appointment in my calendar wrong, even though I thought I checked it so carefully! (I stopped myself from saying "I have ADHD!" with very great difficulty.)
She was very nice and helpful, though. She said she would reschedule my appointment and the payment would still be good; she found an opening that same day three hours later, and then when I said I could wait, she said actually the testing room wasn't full and she could let me take the test right away. So she did.
I have a total of (I think) 5 hours of driving lessons left, the first of which is in two weeks, when my instructor is back from his vacation. In the meantime, it's the second half of Wax's annual vacation starting today, and we will hopefully be trying chicken florentine for the first time this week.
Trapped, by Michael Northrop
Aug. 15th, 2025 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.
This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.
Why is this book so bad?
1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.
The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."
2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!
3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.
4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!
5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.
6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"
I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.
7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).
Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?
Spoilers! ( Read more... )
Truly terrible.
ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).
I'm not the world's most passionate guy - Community story, genderqueer Pierce Hawthorne
Aug. 15th, 2025 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Community (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Pierce Hawthorne & The Study Group, Pierce Hawthorne & Craig Pelton
Characters: Pierce Hawthorne, Craig Pelton, Britta Perry, Shirley Bennett
Additional Tags: Genderqueer Character, Canon-Compliant Pierce Hawthorne, Genderqueer Pierce Hawthorne
Summary:
Pierce experiments with his gender.
*I read a Tumblr post (linked as inspiration) about trans headcanons that cited a character named Pierce. I don't know who they were talking about, but in my heart, they were talking about this asshole.
Possible alternate tag: Queer and Woke are Not Synonyms
2025 OTW Board Voting Now Open!
Aug. 15th, 2025 02:07 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
The election has opened!
Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, should have a ballot by now. If you didn't get one, please check your spam folder first, then contact us via our contact form. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?"
The election will run through August 18, 2025, 23:59 UTC; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.