followfriday

Today is partly cloudy, chilly, and windy.

I haven't fed the birds yet. Already I've seen one male and two female house finches, plus a male cardinal. :D

EDIT 2/20/26 -- I fed the birds. I've seen a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

I put out water for the birds.

.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

8 Queer (mostly M/M) Hockey Books We Love!

A week and a half ago, we posted about our favorite sports books with queer characters. When we were collecting the recommendations for that post, we got so many recommendations for hockey books that we decided to break them out into their own post! Today, we bring that post to you, in celebration of the Olympic men’s hockey semi-finals taking place today (game one started just a few minutes before I started this post, in fact). Most of these are m/m, which wasn’t intentional, but here we are I suppose.

Current Mood: busy

huxleyenne

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Current Mood: numb

melagan

The fest is open until the end of the month. If McShep is your jam be sure to check out the

Romancing McShep 2026 collection

I'm still working on my story. Yes, I thought I'd be done and have it posted by now. The story thought differently *shrug*

I'll just be making another cup of coffee and staring at the bloody thing until the words form into something comprehensible.

Or type something. That's probably a better plan. :)

linky

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vriddy

I remembered an old fic snippet from yonks ago, a terrible BNHA fic called Plucking that I apparently already mentioned over 2 years ago hah. This used to be a stress relief fic in which Hawks endures a no good very bad time anytime I was having a rough time. In 2023 I was apparently staging a rescue for him since I felt better, but looking at the end it looks like that might have been an hallucination, whoops. I wrote "Post anon?" in the notes because I guess it is extremely heavy on whump and angst but heh.

Anyway, it didn't seem like it had been migrated when I moved to Scrivener so I went back hunting into my 4tw files. And wow I found some other stuff that also missed the migration. Mostly written 2022-2023 if I believe my tracking spreadsheet haha. See, when I started writing I had a directory per fandom which made sense in theory, except that then I wrote like 200 fics for BNHA including several multi-chapters, and 2-10 fics for other fandoms. Things got better organised in 2024, apparently (or more like I gave up and created a new directory called BNHA (2024)), and I was good at migrating existing WIPs into BNHA (2025) when the year changed but some stuff got lost in the pre-2024 reshuffle. Several seem like 60-90% finished :0

I checked other fandoms too and found maybe one or two mostly developed concepts for Mairimashita Iruma-kun which I haven't written for since 2021 and it's making me a bit nostalgic... I think I never ended up writing up a post about it, but this was a fandom I tried the "Save The Cat" outlining method for and it utterly broke my brain and the story. Beat sheets don't work well with how I think, it seems. BUT this also reminds me I should have handwritten notes for that full outline and I wonder if I could try to revive that story, too... Like it was a fake dating OT3 and I don't know how I tried to make fake dating work for 3 people!! Maybe I can salvage the heart of it and do something with it? I haven't watched the canon in years either, apparently I stopped watching the anime in the middle of season 2... but that also kinda makes me want to catch up!! Especially since the official Mafia AU also made me nostalgic for the original characters recently. Although I seem to have paused my manga reading for that as well. I think it might be common for me to kind of drift off with "episodic"-style series, but hey maybe that means it shouldn't be too hard to pick back up either.

Anyway I find myself with more ongoing WIPs than I expected!! I think it'd be cool to slap an ending on the ones that have a good chunk written already. There's a couple that are so nearly there for BNHA that I had to check if I didn't somehow post them without remembering, despite the unfinished sentences and couple of bits with brackets lol. [ first kiss description here ].

Current Mood: surprised

ysabetwordsmith

These are active communities in Dreamwidth from Winter 2025-2026. They include things I've posted, but only the active ones; the thematic posts also list dormant communities of interest. This list includes some communities that I've found and saved but haven't made it into thematic posts yet. This post covers A-I.

See my Follow Friday Master Post for more topics.

Highly active with multiple posts per day, daily posts, or too many to count easily
Active with (one, multiple, many) posts in (current or recent month)
Somewhat active (latest post within current year, not in last month or few)
Low traffic (latest post in previous year)
Dormant (latest post before previous year, but could be revived because membership is open and posting is open to all members or anyone)
Dead (not listed because there are no recent posts, plus membership and/or posting are moderated)
Note that some communities are only active during a limited time, or only have gather posts on a certain schedule.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

svgurl

fanmix_monthly is a fanmix & mixtape community that also has optional monthly prompts

comicsfanfiction is a community for posting fanfiction based on comics

voiceinmyear is a community to share any kind of audio-based narrative entertainment

10trueloves is a low pressure multi-fandom community dedicated to creating works for your favorite character and 10 different ships

fandombingo is running a Kisses, Chaos, Catastrophe Bingo. Sign-ups are open until February 21st.

flufftober is running a Spring Edition from March 9th-22nd.

fiachairecht is running bring her bleeding heart to me, a dark femslash commentfic meme for femslash february.

highadrenalineexchange, an exchange where you have two weeks to write 10k (or draw a 25-panel/10-page comic) and one week to edit, is open for nominations until February 20th, 9:59PM EST. They will reopen when sign-ups do.

the_mane_event, a multifandom gift exchange for all things hair-related, is accepting nominations until February 22nd, 11:59PM UTC.

unsent_letters_exchange, an epistolary fic exchange, is accepting nominations until February 25th, 11:59PM UTC.

goreswap, a multifandom exchange dedicated to gore, has opened sign-ups until February 25th, 11:59PM EST.

firstandlastexchange is running a 2026 multifandom omegaverse Kink/Prompt Meme. Prompting will be open until the end of the year and it will be open for fills indefinitely.

ruric

I realise it's only mid month but February has been a MONTH.

( The Oh Noes cut for those who'd rather avoid them- not personal ones cos I'm OK )

7. It has been grey and wet here in London for ever - at least from the start of the year with maybe 2 days of blue skies and sunshine and it's taking a toll.

8. Went to Wales last week and only took one of the two cats. The other hid and so stayed home with a pile of food. Athena - the usually quiet reserved cat - came with me and we had some bonding time without her sister getting in the way. Artemis, the little fiend who stayed home, has been making up for the fact that she was cruelly abandoned - in a warm flat with plenty of food and water and oodles of toys - ever since!

9. Relatedly having spent the week in the cosy, tidy cottage I'm even more determined to subdue and sort out the utter chaos of my living situation in London where I have tried to effectively cram the. Contents of a 3 bed house into what is essentially a two room flat.

10. I've not been able to get to the allotment or do any gardening because WET. Not amused.

The Hell Yes's

1. I spent last week working remotely from the cottage which also included a lot of naps, TV, good food and a ridiculous amount of crocheting. And though it took me 2 days to get the cottage warm - it was Wales and the mountains looked fancy with a good dusting of snow. I beached myself on the couch and barely moved from Monday to Saturday (it was grey, wet and cold there too). Of course coming home on Saturday the weather did change and for a few precious hours there were blue skies and sunshine.

2. I gave myself a pass this week and lived on ready meals while trying to bring some order to 3 work related email inboxes and 2 personal ones. I'm getting there.

3. Work has at least been productive if not enjoyable. But tomorrow I'm going to a Park colleague's community planting day for a couple of hours, next week I'm spending a day handing out free trees and the week after we are having our borough wide seed swap - all of which should be fun things.

4. Crocheting has been super productive - at the beginning of the month I finished a blanket I started the week before Xmas, I've got about half a hexi cardigan finished (even though I have to frog some back), I've almost finished the granny squares for two project bags (just need to stitch them together, line them and make handles), and I'm just over halfway through some Wednesday evening classes to crochet an Easter/Spring wreath. Crochet club every Friday from 1 to 2:30pm is the non-negotiable in my diary. Time to be creative, learn new stuff, have a chat and hang out with 5-7 other fun women.

5. The ex is at the cottage this week which means I get to use his washing machine tomorrow before and after work (2-3 loads of washing) and do some more if needed early Saturday morning.

6. On that note I'm taking myself off to bed with a giant mug of Horlicks and a couple of eps of Starfleet Academy!

ysabetwordsmith

New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater

A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.

This is super exciting because of its double benefit: battery materials and drinking water. Also awesome, unlike rare minerals used in many batteries, sodium is something Earth has in great abundance. \o/

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and cooler, but still unseasonably warm.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and a male house finch.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I saw a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I refilled the hopper feeder.

I raked off the leaves from the goddess garden. There I found one lavender crocus in bloom along with many more sprouts.

Oddly the honeybees are not visiting the crocuses as usual. Instead they are nosing around the seeds in the hopper feeder. Go figure.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I started raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the east side. So many shoots now!

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I finished raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the west side. Just as I wrapped up that activity, it started drizzling rain. *sigh* I was hoping to gather up leaves later and put them somewhere, possibly behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

My seed starting kit arrived! :D What makes this awesome is that it comes with its own light system. That means it's not restricted to window use; it can go anywhere -- within reach of an outlet if we use a USB wall wart, or wherever else with some sort of battery pack. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out.

While I was heading to the mailbox to fetch that package, it started raining again. There are puddles in the street. But then the sun came out, so I looked around -- and glimpsed part of a rainbow to the northeast. Naturally I trotted up the road in pursuit of a better view. It was a bright, full rainbow with a partial double on the outside. :D 3q3q3q!!! Definitely one of the better ones I've seen. I got a lot wetter than was strictly necessary, but I so don't care.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- The rain let up.

I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the rain garden and dumped them behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the daffodil bed, filling the trolley twice, and dumped them behind the log garden. Then I raked the leaves away from the front of the log garden and dumped them behind. This revealed a lot of shoots, mostly grape hyacinths with some crocuses mixed in.

I heard honking overhead and saw a skein of geese flying north. :D

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: calm

vriddy

No sketches in Volume 4 (cool additional scene fragments instead), but a few 4-koma comics with Massive Revelations for fans of Kagari and Fujimaru........ Massive. THIS IS HUGE!! XD

(You can click on the images to make them larger.)

( 4-koma: Matching )

( 4-koma: Shigure's secret )

( 4-koma: A new friend )

( 4-koma: Oboro's wish )

( Bonus Illustration )

witchpoetdreamer

It might take me a decade to write this book and I frankly don't care. Vampire stories have been in my mind since discovering Anne Rice's stories as a young teen (more specifically Queen of the Damned starring Aaliyah and Stuart Townsend). I first wrote them in a self-insert isekai fantasy novel around the age of 15, where Death was a child, all my friends were characters and a half-vampire was the main love interest (this was before Twilight). I never finished writing that novel, and I'm never going to because frankly, it was really bad. But it was really fun.

As a young adult, my stories were mostly inspired by the MCU (I was a huge Thor fan, thanks Tom Hiddleston), mythology, and something closer to urban fantasy. I was in a huge reading slump (fanfictions not counting), so my writing was very sparse, stories playing mainly in my head as a movie or in bits and pieces of prose poetry. Around 2014, I did my first NaNoWriMo and wrote a ghost story that I rewrote in 2016 during the same event (I dropped out of NaNo afterwards, the two years I wrote during the event completely drained me of writing energy for most of the year so it wasn't really worth it for me). I haven't written anything extensively since (fanfictions not counting -- look, I know that writing fanfics is writing, reading fanfics is reading, but I've always liked working on my own stories or reading other people's, and it really bums me out when I'm not doing those things. It's less about hierarchy than it is about discovering stories I don't know anything about yet, if that makes sense. It's the discovery part that I miss).

Cue to now, I've made the decision that to unlock my writing in a way that feels satisfying to me, I need to write about my first literary love: vampires. So I made a notebook for it:

( Read more... )

Current Mood: excited

ashelterofpages

So, in a couple hours I'm going in for my first tattoo consolation! I'm So Nervous, folks. Like, also excited, and I know nothing is going to happen, but still. I have pictures of both work the artist has done in the past that i like/makes me think of what I want, as well as other images for reference of the things I'm actually looking to get done, but still. Vrrrr.

After that, I'm headed to S's house for the weekend/some of next week for house-sitting. I'll be all alone for the weekend that's going to be great. I'm going to try and get some writing done, but also I have some beta work I need to get through for a friend.

Oh, speaking of writing, I did get through all those stories I mentioned last weekend. I already got a rejection on one, but that's fine. I wasn't entirely sure on it, even though I really did like what I'd come up with. I wasn't sure it hit what they were looking for as well as I'd hoped it would.

I need to do some more zine work soon too. I have all the text worked out, but I want to go through some public domain image sites and get a few to mix into the zine itself. My plan is to go through the text I have, then make a list of things that I can search for and see what I can find/maybe do minor edits on. If I were a better artist, I'd try and draw stuff myself, but I'm a much better writier than I am anything else.

melagan

From Fanlore:

Fanon is any element that is widely accepted among fans, but has little or no basis in canon.

Sometimes it's a small event in canon that gets exaggerated; sometimes it's something in a fanfic story that gets picked up on and repeated by other writers until it's so common that newbies might think it's a canonical fact.

A variation of fanon is "personal canon" or "headcanon," which is a set of "fanon"-like facts that are accepted as canon by an individual fan or a smaller group of fans, sometimes in the making of a shared universe.

I would love to know your favorite piece of Fanon. Or many pieces of Fanon. There's no need to pick just one!

linky

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Current Mood: tired from gym

brithistorian

I finished the third book in the trilogy just before going to sleep last night. It was a good read, but when all is said and done, I feel like there are a number of loose ends that, when tugged at, cause the whole thing to threaten to fall apart, if not to actually do so.

My main objection is the rest of the world. The events in the trilogy happen in the US, and we're told in mentions here and there that the rest of the world is different, likely doing better. But, except for a couple of very specific events — which are instigated by Americans — the rest of the world just stays out. The closest analogy I can think of is North Korea. Except that North Korea invests a lot in its military to keep the rest of the world out, whereas Kress's America seems to have no functioning military, or at least none that ever gets mentioned. It's like the rest of the world just goes "Oh, they're crazy. Let's stay out of there." Which doesn't seem likely, because people have time and time again demonstrated a complete inability to leave people alone.

And while the ending of the final volume is somewhat more satisfying than the ends of volumes 1 and 2, it also very much sets it up for Kress to potentially write a fourth book. And not a small opening. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had ended with a bookseller unpacking a crate of old books they'd just bought, finding a copy of How to Make Rings of Power: Complete and Unabridged by Sauron and trying to decide whether or not to put it on the shelf.

So more or less a mixed reaction. Some parts I though were good, some parts not so good. Thought-provoking, though not necessarily in the ways the author intended.

Also, I've got one comment on the physical book (and so nothing Kress could have done anything about): Maybe publicity works different in publishing, or maybe the publicity department at Tor in the mid-'90s had never heard of "underpromise then overdeliver," but I found the front cover text on this book kind of hilarious:

First Wells's The Time Machine,

then Clarke's Childhood's End, now...

BEGGARS RIDE

NANCY KRESS

mellowtigger

I normally sleep in on my "weekends" like today. Now that I have shifts for safety patrol at a local school, though, I find myself still waking up on "work schedule" even on my days off. So it wasn't unexpected that I should wake up at 5:30am today and find myself with little to do but roam Reddit on my smartphone while resting snugly in my electric blanket-warmed bed on a cold snowy morning.

This resistance song was posted to the Minneapolis subreddit by a child of the singer, a family member woken by a text message informing them of the song's posting to YouTube. Welcome to today's theme song:

Watch on YouTube

...I'm an ordinary American. I grew up blue in the promised land.
Two tours in Vietnam. 40 years Republican.
But I drive my old Ram pickup truck. I sold my house because my pension sucks.
I buy scratch tickets when I'm out of luck. Then I watched the news and said, "What the fuck".

I'm an ordinary American, no longer Republican.
I can't sit down when I need to stand, when government men kill an innocent man
and a mother in a car trying to drive away from a masked man on a frozen day,
pumping bullets in her face just to make her pay for living her life the American way.

We are ordinary Americans on a Minnesota street in a messed up land,
Thousands marching hand in hand to bring us back to a promised land.
Wake up America, heed the call. High saints, you know musket balls.
Stand up strong and stand up tall. Stand together for one and all.

I'm an ordinary American. I grew up blue in the promised land.
Two tours in Vietnam. 40 years Republican.
Hey, now we're fighting in another war.
But now I know what we're fighting for.

Welcome to the Resistance, old man.

For the moment, the story of the "Concord Hymn" poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson (pictured on the statue in the video, about the Battle of Concord in 1775) is still available on this Park webpage. I'm sure that it will soon be removed, lest people get the wrong ideas about this Republican government's fascist authoritarianism. It's safely recorded at Archive.org too.

Now, excuse me. I need to get dressed for my shift at the nearby school, watching so I both 1) warn children and teachers about the federal government coming to abduct any of them and 2) record illegal conduct to assist the abducted and prosecute the abhorrent offenders.

I am anti-fascist, and you should be too.

tozka

Took a few weeks off from social media and came back to sad news about spikedluv; she was really great and I'll miss seeing her around here.

Internet Stuff

"Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.

We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same." - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Erin Kissane

Books

Some very interesting upcoming queer SFF books on this list from renay of ladybusiness -- I added like 6 books to my TBR/wishlist
rachelmanija posted a transcript of an interview she did about starting her bookshop
The Classics Club is a long-running reading challenge/club focused on reading and writing about classic books-- 50 books in 5 years, actually.
Found a new-to-me small publisher: Space Wizard, "an independent publishing house focused on telling great science fiction and fantasy stories with queer elements and under-represented people."

RSS Feeds

The K6 Project (RSS) -- covering the different re-uses of the iconic red phone boxes found throughout the UK!
Live Laugh Blog (RSS) -- fun personal blog with many millenial-nostalgic aesthetic things that make me happy
Tedium (RSS) -- online magazine focusing on "tedious" things; example: the history of the magalog aka magazine-catalog

I also subscribed to the Persephone Books monthly newsletter, as I read two previous issues and enjoyed them. They're subtle marketing, more about vibes, focused on sharing things similar to Persephone Books/the people who enjoy them then about blasting sales info or whatever.

<- previous linkspam | link library | all link posts ->

svgurl

This is my table from

elasticella's Fresh Femslash Salad Bar Event.

svgurl's salad bar

salad 1	waking up together & 3500 words
salad 2	snowed in & 2500 words
salad 3	cuddling & 2000 words
salad 4	hair braiding & 4000 words
salad 5	cooking together & 5000 words
salad 6	first kiss & 1000 words
salad 7	stargazing & 1500 words
salad 8	renovations & 5500 words
salad 9	slow dancing & 3000 words
salad 10	second chance & 4500 words

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Member Posts

Birdfeeding

Books

Personal Post

Romancing McShep Happy-ending Fest 2026

Girls Remix: Women of Tokusatsu Exchange Letter

Finding old fic snippets

Follow Friday 2-20-26: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 A-I

current fandom events

The Oh Noes and the Hell Yes's!

Energy

Birdfeeding

K-9: Volume 4 extras, with translation

Currently writing: Vampire Novel

(no subject)

Canon vs Fanon

Community Thursday

Book reaction: Beggars Ride (Nancy Kress)

theme song: Fourty Years Republican

queer books, red phone boxes, ghost in the machine

Internet Stuff

Books

RSS Feeds

fresh femslash salad bar table

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February 2026

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