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Thursday Recs

Nov. 27th, 2025 07:26 pm
soc_puppet: Dreamsheep, its wool patterned after the Polysexual Pride flag, in horizontal stripes of purple, white, and green; the Dreamwidth logo echos the colors. (Genderqueer)
[personal profile] soc_puppet posting in [community profile] queerly_beloved
Sneaking this in before homework pulls me away...


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Volunteer social thread #159

Nov. 28th, 2025 02:04 am
pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)
[personal profile] pauamma posting in [site community profile] dw_volunteers
I'm about to have dinner (at 2am, as one does).

How's everyone else doing?

(no subject)

Nov. 27th, 2025 06:24 pm
maju: Clean my kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] maju
It's been a long day.

The girls' eldest cousin L, who is about 27, arrived last from NY to stay with us for a couple of nights so she could go to the family Thanksgiving today, so the girls were all very excited.

This morning we left around 9:45 am to drive to the home of my son in law's sister D, about a 45 minute drive. By the time we arrived everybody else was there and our group of six brought the total to, I think, 14. My daughter stayed home because she had some work to do with colleagues in the UK, and when she set it up weeks ago she forgot that it would be Thanksgiving, because of course it didn't appear on her UK calendar.

We started eating snacks/appetisers around 11 a while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. At about 1:30 to 2 pm we sat down to dinner of turkey, mashed potato, baked potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, green beans, sweet potato pie (with and without marshmallows), corn, and possibly some other sides. I only ate a modest amount because of the earlier snacks, but I saw plates piled high with food being passed to other people. About 4 pm we reconvened for dessert: pumpkin pie, chocolate pie, cookies, and whipped cream. Basically it was an afternoon of eating.

Now I'm feeling really tired even though I mostly just sat around observing. The girls had a very exciting time with their cousins S (18 year old girl) and S (21 year old young man), as well as L, and also plus S and S's 17 year old step brother T. The older cousins look like Pied Pipers when the girls are around.

Son in law's family is apparently not very sports-minded; nobody watched a game of any kind. (Except for a Dog Show programme - these are dog people.)

Taking matters into my own hands

Nov. 27th, 2025 12:47 pm
susandennis: (Default)
[personal profile] susandennis
There was no line - no waiting. The turkey was nice and juicy and the ham was cooked well. The salad was excellent. And the mashed potatoes were better than usual. I passed on the yams and the oven baked vegetables and green beans casserole. The dressing was very difficult to describe. But, I'm pretty sure that in all 50 states, it would be prosecutable. It had the consistency of wet oatmeal. The color of baby shit. And zero flavor.

I did get enough of everything for leftovers but I'll be damned if I'm eating left overs without decent stuffing. So after I finished eating the good bits, I got in the car and went to Safeway and bought already chopped up onions and celery and some stuffing mix (I already had the chicken broth and butter on hand). In under 15 mins I had better than just decent stuffing.

I have enough for the left overs and plenty more for the freezer. It's delicious.

Thanksgiving travesty righted. By Me.

A Fable of Summertime...

Nov. 27th, 2025 08:04 pm
glinda: a cup of coffee, with a snowflake drawn in the foam (coffee/latte)
[personal profile] glinda
Sometime this summer, I rediscovered my fic writing muse. Which has been great, but has unfortunately also meant that I’ve fallen quite behind on writing up my monthly albums - I have several months of backlog! Fortunately, I have still actually been listening to the albums and noting them down, so I’ve been able to look back at my list and write them up.

First up, we’re all the way back to the summer, for my August album, which was Fable by Ainsley Hamil. (I really thought I’d at least started this post, I definitely remember sitting down in the days after the gig with the album on and the intent to write about it. I suspect I probably started writing it into the ‘create entries’ page and lost the draft.) I mostly know Ainsley Hamil as a Gaelic singer - competed for the Gold Medal at the Mod a couple of time - and this album is split pretty evenly between songs in Gaelic and English, with a Burns number thrown in for good measure. Personally I think if we’re talking traditional Gaelic modes, she’s better suited to puirt-a-beul than the strictures of the Gold Medal - I’ve seen her do puirt live and she’s very good, it’s not easy to keep up that level of articulation at that speed especially not in the middle of a gig! She has such a rich, warm singing voice, it’s a pleasure to listen to her sing, and always so tempting when the album finishes, to just stick it on again for another play through!

Unusually, I was listening to this album extensively because I was going to a gig, rather than going to the gig because I’d been listening to the album a lot. My local art centre hosts a folk music festival in a tent on it’s lawn every summer. (Not in one intense weekend but two bands per session, two sessions a night, five nights a week across two months.) Living near by and being a regular gig go-er, I go to a lot of these sessions, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, sometimes pre-planned, others spur of the moment because I walked past and thought ‘oh they’re good’ and stayed. The Ainsley Hamil gig was planned fairly far in advance, as a friend texted me just after the programme came out and asked if I fancied it, and as I did and it was a day I was on a helpful shift, we booked it and went. As it was her idea, and I’d agreed on the basis that I remembered what I’d heard of Hamil’s latest album being good, I thought I better swat up beforehand.

(It’s a lovely album, but gosh, live really is her forte, she was such a compelling and warm presence on stage, making her music come alive. In both Gaelic and Scots, her delivery on the album is more precise and probably more technically correct, but live she was so much more natural and felt much less constrained.)

The View from T'Khut

Nov. 27th, 2025 02:23 pm
laurajv: Holmes & Watson's car is as cool as Batman's (Default)
[personal profile] laurajv
The View from T'Khut (5776 words) by Laura JV
Chapters: 1/8
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Spock/Nyota Uhura, James T. Kirk/Spock, Sarek & Spock (Star Trek), Spock & Spock Prime
Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Spock Prime, James T. Kirk, Nyota Uhura, T'Pau (Star Trek), Sarek (Star Trek), Vulcan Characters (Star Trek), Crew of the Starship Enterprise
Additional Tags: Vulcan Culture (Star Trek), Vulcan Mind Melds (Star Trek), Vulcan Language (Star Trek), jj abrams should be ashamed of himself, Vulcan history, Vulcan mythology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, symbiotic red algae
Series: Part 1 of The View from T'Khut
Summary:

Part I: The Absent World. The planet vanishes, but her people go on.

Part II: An Archaeology of Loss. The world-death left a scar in spacetime, and a void in the heart of the Federation.

Part III: Time and Darkness. In which Ambassador Spock fires unexpected shots.



This story was a very long time coming. I have had the title for it for over a decade, and this summer I realized what story went with that title. It is complete but being posted in parts over the next few weeks and runs about 50K words all told.

Dept. of Thankfulness

Nov. 26th, 2025 09:03 am
kaffy_r: Chan, Binnie and Han of SKZ bouncing (3racha bouncing)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
I Am Blessed ...

.. even though I don't believe in blessings on most days ending in y. I have so much good in my life, and so many good people in my life, that some days I can hardly believe that the world has given them to me. 

Today in the U.S., a huge number of us celebrate Thanksgiving, and we do it with family gatherings that more than occasionally descend into chaos (both the good and bad kinds), food that generally involves a huge turkey, too much stuffing, too many mashed potatoes or candied yams, probably some green bean casserole and canonical pumpkin pie (I prefer squash pie, but that's me) and innumerable college football games. And although it sounds as if I am mocking all that, I am not. All of this somehow combines to make a good thing. 

It's also a day of mourning for members of First Nations and Indigenous Americans, who remember the landing of the Mayflower as the start of a centuries-long genocide, complete with theft of land, broken promises, broken families, and loss of culture. I don't want to write about my thankfulness, without acknowledging that the stories we learned in elementary school about The First Thanksgiving were so wrong as to be evil. I hope that those nations and tribes can find some glimmer of thankfulness in this day. God knows you deserve more than a little. 

Moar importantly, I am grateful for the friends I have in Chicago and Canada, and everywhere else. You are so loved by me. 

Finally, I am grateful to all of you here on Dreamwidth - whether you celebrated Thanksgiving last month up in Canada, down here across the U.S. or never at all in Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and everywhere else across the world. You have made my life infinitely more rich, more full of conversation, laughter, intent thought and completely spectacular funniness.  

Thank you. 

Thank you. 

Thank you. 

Thanksgiving

Nov. 27th, 2025 09:03 am
susandennis: (Default)
[personal profile] susandennis
We play volleyball with a beach ball. Under ordinary circumstances, we blow up a new one and can play with it for weeks or more before it starts losing air or gets a puncture. BUT we have one player who has long, pointed, hard fingernails. Sylvia used to routinely puncture balls. Then she didn't play for a year+ while she recovered from cancer. Now she's back and it's costing us a ball a game. We played with one ball for 6 weeks. She's been back now for 5 games and we've gone through 6 balls. The cost of the balls is not that big a deal but the stopping of the game to go get a new one is annoying and particularly for Steve who is the person in charge of the balls.

This will be a drama/dilemma for a while, I think. Stay tuned.

I have a perfectly good cart for hauling shit. Packages from the lockers, groceries to and from the car, puzzles down to the puzzle closet... It had double wheels which enable it to roll oh so easily. It folds up and lives in my closet. Sure it's old and battered but still works like a charm. I've had it for years and been perfectly happy with it until [personal profile] legalmoose rained on my parade this morning with talk of a Clax Cart. Which of course is now on sale. It does not have the double wheels but it does have the easily removable box. And 'dolly' like function. But, I think I can resist.

I do have a solid plan now for the storage room/closet rearrangement. I know what I want and I think it's doable with some Bro help. And it would mean that I would not need the Closet Reorganizer. I think Christian does not want to do it so is just 'being too busy'. Which is fine. If I'm wrong and I decide I want a professional, there are several closet places that have done work here at Timber Ridge and I'll just call one of them. BUT it would be lovely to skip that step.

I had a great idea/place to put one of those pull out shoe organizer cabinets. I had one all picked out and ready to order when I decided to burrow into the comments a little farther and discovered that probably my feet are too big. Most all of the ones I had my eyes on, said somewhere in the comments that it was great for kids shoes but anything bigger than an adult 7.5 was going to be too big to get the pull out to go back in. I wear a 9. Oh well. I couldn't even find one for big feet. Saved some money there!

Today they are doing a buffet for Thanksgiving dinner. It's from 11 to 1. Last year's power outage led them to a buffet scheme that works pretty well for the staff and for us. Easy to serve and really no waiting at all - even when they are serving everyone like today. As usual, I have extra meal money so I might just get two meals. One for eating and one for leftovers.

I remember once years and years ago when I was living on my own in Charlotte, NC, one of the nicer hotels had this marvelous scheme for Thanksgiving. It was buffet style and had all the usual Thanksgiving stuff plus a lot of nice, fancy extras but their main selling point was that the deal included a box of leftovers to take home! It was such a cool scheme. I had a group of friends and one year we all pitched in and got a room at the hotel overlooking the main street. We had cocktails in our room and then went down for dinner and then had dessert in our room while we watched the Christmas parade. And we all took home leftovers. It was a very grand Thanksgiving.

20251126_185303-COLLAGE
oursin: Hedgehog saying boggled hedgehog is boggled (Boggled hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

Norfolk's first capybara café opening in Toftwood, Dereham

That's right. An area which has had FORM for escaping invasive large semi-aquatic mammals: see this article by a guy who dealt with the coypu menace in the Broads.

Animal rights and protection orgs are already up in arms:
FOUR PAWS strongly opposes the keeping of wild or non-domesticated animals, such as capybaras, in settings where their complex welfare needs cannot be properly met.
Freedom for Animals has united with our colleagues at Born Free Foundation, Animal Aid, OneKind, World Animal Protection, and RSPCA to strongly urge the operators, and the local authority, to halt these plans before they get underway.
RSPCA criticises new ‘capybara cafes’

Apparently there is a whole thing of cafes where you can embrace cuddly animals in Asia: Cuddling capybaras and ogling otters: the problem with animal cafes in Asia: A boom in places offering petting sessions is linked to a rise in the illegal movement of exotic and endangered species, say experts:

Capybaras breed rapidly, can withstand a wide range of temperatures, and have a flexible diet of grasses and aquatic plants. “There is a high risk for them to be invasive,” Congdon says.

I will cop to have looked rather wistfully at a place in Australia which offered encounters with WOMBATTS, but a) that was in their native land and b) it looked like this was a sanctuary and they were rescue wombies, and thus one would be supporting the mission. (While interacting with ADORABLE WOMBATTS.)

***

And because tradition: this is one that I haven't iterated overmuch:

30 in 30: Marvel X-Men

Nov. 27th, 2025 11:19 am
senmut: a bright blue tribal seahorse (General: Tribal Seahorse)
[personal profile] senmut
AO3 Link | Ladies to the Rescue (150 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: X-Men [Comics]
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Rogue [X-Men], Jubilation Lee | Jubilee, Katherine Anne "Kitty" Pryde, Laura Kinney, James "Logan" Howlett | Wolverine
Additional Tags: Drabble and a Half
Summary:

Wolvie needs a rescue






Rogue looked away as Jubilee set off a light show in the dark of the power going out. Kitty had definitely delivered on that, and everyone they were facing was dazzled. They had waited just long enough for the night vision goggles to go on, after all.

Rogue let loose, drawing all attention to herself, letting Kitty have time to get back — and their fourth member to sniff out where the man they'd come for actually was.

No one had to guess when X-23 found him, as father and daughter cut a path back to this point.

"You look like hell, sugah," Rogue called to her long-time friend.

"You look like the cavalry," he said, before shorting out the one robotic enemy with a well-placed claw-punch.

"Time to exit!" Jubilee called out, and while the few standing tried to stop them, they were no match for Wolvie and his girls.

Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday

Nov. 27th, 2025 05:52 pm
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Today being (US)Thanksgiving, I will try to extend this back over the last year, more-or-less. I am thankful for...

  • Having survived what is now almost 13 months here in the Netherlands, making this my second Thanksgiving here. (And my fifth without Colleen, for which I am NOT thankful, but sad.)
  • Finally having gotten the kitchen and other parts of the house re-stocked to a useable level, if not exactly where we left off.
  • 220V house wiring, for electric kettles, other appliances, and vehicles.
  • Frame.work.
  • Having successfully signed up for health insurance and gotten reasonably-priced health care. Including for the cats, who don't have insurance.
  • While I'm on that subject, a vet who makes house calls.
  • Having, with N, started our (required for immigration) business, and thanks mainly to N's book, actually made some money at it.
  • Living in a country that has both good public transit, and excellent bike paths (which work just fine for mobility scooters).
  • (Tin)Lizzy and Scarlett-the-carlet, our folding mobility scooter and micro-car respectively.
  • Fuzzy blankets. NO thanks for whatever health problem makes me feel cold in the evening no matter what the ambient temperature.
  • Finally getting screen rotation working on my Frame.work convertible laptop. Whether it's automatic depends on the window manager, and possibly the phase of the moon. But it should be usable.
  • Walks, and occasionally st/rolls.
  • Compression socks. (No thanks for the condition they're supposed to improve.)
  • Hydrocortizone ointment.
  • The filk community.

Last year's Thanksgiving entry is mostly still applicable, but a few plans for what was then the coming year have, predictably, gone by the wayside again, and my health isn't holding up as well as I would like. I'd be thankful for executive function if I had any. I'll be thankful for good drugs once we get my BP and psych meds figured out.

Again, happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. (That includes us, but we're having the feast on Saturday to accommodate j's school schedule. Including the annual American Thanksgiving celebration in Leiden,)

muccamukk: Héloïse's faceless portrait in the hearth, a real flame rising from her painted heart. (Lady on Fire: Burning Art)
[personal profile] muccamukk


(When I saw her in concert, she was very pleased with that line).

(Video has a thread of a butch teen being socially pressured to feminise. But there's a happy ending.)

Happy Wanksgiving!

Nov. 27th, 2025 11:04 am
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I posted 10 drabbles to the Wanksgiving fest, which is currently anonymous. If you didn't get me to write for you, and you spot something in there that you think was me, leave me a comment with an "I think you wrote this!" and a request and I will follow up with you when I am not mid-giving-thanks.
sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
[personal profile] sovay
Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem what went wrong in the complicated spaces between them all those years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.

Nicked by M. T. Anderson

Nov. 27th, 2025 09:40 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll



A pious monk is dispatched on a mission about which he has serious reservations: steal the bones of St. Nicolas.

Nicked by M. T. Anderson

Sushi Half-Tail

Nov. 28th, 2025 01:09 am
tyger: Xaldin's Avatar Kingdom chibi. Text: Xaldin (Xaldin - chibi)
[personal profile] tyger

Yeah, Sushi did have to get part of his tail amputated. :(

Got a bit long. )

Other than that I did pmuch nothing today. Brain all gone. Barely even napped, despite having a terrible night's sleep due to worried. Bleh. Brain, getting all worked up like this doesn't! Actually! Stop me worrying! As well as, you know, not helping the situation at all to be overtired. SIGH.

Anyway, now is for sleeping again, so hopefully I'll sleep better today...

How Are You? (in Haiku)

Nov. 27th, 2025 06:32 am
jjhunter: Watercolor sketch of self-satisfied corvid winking with flaming phoenix feather in its beak (corvid with phoenix feather)
[personal profile] jjhunter
Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.

=

Signal-boosting much appreciated!
[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

Spotlight on Tag Wrangling

AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don't belong to any particular fandom (also known as "No Fandom" tags). This post overviews some of these upcoming changes.

In this round of updates, we continued to streamline creating new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic "No Fandom" tag announcements.

None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.

In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3's auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.

New Canonicals

The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:

In Conclusion

While some of these tags may be tags and concepts you're intimately familiar with, others may be concepts you've never heard of before. Fortunately, our fellow OTW volunteers at Fanlore may be able to help! As you may have seen in the comments sections of previous posts, Fanlore is a fantastic resource for learning more about these common fandom concepts, and about the history and lore of fandom in general. For the curious, here's a quick look at a few articles about concepts related to this month's new canonical tags:

While we won't be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future about tags we believe will most affect users. If you're interested in the changes we'll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.

You can also read previous updates on "No Fandom" tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:

For more information about AO3's tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.

In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected.​ If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.

Please keep in mind that discussions about what tags to canonize and what format they should take are ongoing. As a result, not all related concepts will be canonized at the same time. This does not mean that related or similar concepts will not be canonized in the future or that we have chosen to canonize one specific concept in lieu of another, simply that we likely either haven’t gotten to that related concept yet or that it needs further discussion and will take a bit longer for us to canonize it as a result. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Lastly, we're still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now to give us adequate time to do so.


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Ricky Buchanan