dreamsheep | Member Posts

kinktober-2025 is an October prompt challenge, with three prompts for each day in October. The challenge to use one or more to create a work (or you can swap out for the alternatives).

whumptober is a month long prompt-based whump themed fanwork challenge set in October.

flufftober is a month long prompt based fluff themed fanwork challenge taking place in October

angstober is an angst themed month long prompt event in October

polyamships is running Polyartober, a daily art poly ship prompt challenge set in the month of October.

dreamwars is a Star Wars fandom chat community.

ships20in20 is an icon challenge community where once sign-ups open, you claim a ship and make twenty icons based off the ship and the provided themes.

thestoryinside, a comm where you sign up to and pick books for a partner's TBR list based off voted for themes and vice versa, is open for October sign-ups until September 30th.

festivids, a rare fandom fanvid exchange, is open for sign-ups until October 3rd, 11:59PM UTC (I know the page says Sept 30th but it has been extended)

amperslashexchange, a fic and art exchange for ambiguous relationships that are hard to definitively classify as either platonic (&) or romantic/sexual (/), is accepting nominations until October 4th, 11:59PM UTC.

swrarepairs, a Star Wars rare pair (fewer than 250 fics on AO3 that are completed, in English, and over one thousand words) fanwork exchange, has opened sign-ups until October 4th, 11:59PM Eastern.

eatdrinkmakemerry, a multifandom exchange celebrating food and drink, is open for sign-ups until October 5th, 8:59PM Pacific.

kaberett

Reading. ( Brosh, McMorland Hunter & Hughes, Melzack & Wall )

Dreamwidth! Down to two and a half months behind.

Writing. So many e-mails about objects. So many.

Watching. Farscape S02E06, Picture if You Will. The discussion about which of the Highly Specific Fetish Big Bads it was who was resurrecting in this particular context was entertaining in terms of highlighting the, you know, motifs. Of the work.

Playing. We have just managed some Fluxx. <3

Cooking. Batch of puff pastry for the sake of making two (of the three) things in East that call for it (because I could not quite bring myself to buy pre-made). Pleased with how the puff came out; mildly dubious about both the tomato, pistachio + saffron tart and the banana tarte tatin, but on the level of "I am unlikely to make these again", not "I regret making them".

Eating. On Tuesday we hit the point of Make The Internet Bring Us Pizza. The Pizza was very welcome.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to say goodbye to Ruby Violet, i.e. we had cake for breakfast, along with hot chocolate. The flavours were all ones I was familiar with but I'm still pleased to have had them. (It is not impossible I will decide I want to make another trip by myself, though, especially given that they currently have the malted milk on...)

As mentioned we then also availed ourselves of an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean Veggie Combo and a piece of Japanese Curry Bread, both of which I am pleased to have experienced.

Exploring. St Pancras Waterpoint! Brief turn through Camley Street Natural Park.

Growing. Spinach that I thought was unlikely to still be viable turns out to in fact still be Extremely Viable! Spinach is go! And the lambs' lettuce has self-seeded nicely (so in fact I also had some of that plus some allotment rocket accompanying the tomato tart). Tomatoes continue to produce tomatoes. Peppers various looked very happy last time I went to see them ~~so now I want to overwinter them all~~. At home, the pineapple continues to grow and the lemongrass isn't obviously dead yet (and I'm doing something right with at least the larger of the two orchids...)

Observing. BAT, extremely obliging with the aerobatics. Good sunsets. Cyclamen various. Moon.

estirose

(Yeah, I'm overly excited for no reason.)

Of the fandoms I nominated this year:

* Assemble with Care doesn't have any fic on the archive/isn't wrangled, so unsurprisingly it might take a bit for the mods to double check the character names.

* Cozy Grove is approved! I'm not surprised, because it's the easiest of my bunch to check (I'm essentially requesting the same characters as last year and it's a tiny tiny fandom).

* Fantasy Life is a canonical tag, but of the 3 characters I nominated, only Taylor (under Shushu | Taylor) is canonical; Chic and Madam Purl have never been tagged, and the last character is worldbuilding.

* Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time does not have a canonical tag. I would not be surprised if both games were put under Fantasy Life by the tag wranglers in the end - and I'm not actually overly bothered by that. Also, one of my noms is a one-shot NPC quest giver with limited dialogue (Monsieur Cobra) who just got introduced recently so he might take a sec. (The others are Chemmel, his assistant Mira, and Worldbuilding, all of which are easy to find.)

* My Time at Sandrock: This is getting very close to the limit (900+ works complete in English over 1000 words; 1400+ all together), so it's definitely going to be over the limit next year. So even though I went with two characters with canonicals (Heidi and Trudy), this one might take a bit of time to get approved. ETA: Just after I hit "post" I rechecked and this is approved!

I'm holding off on my letter to see if the two Fantasy Life fandoms get merged or not in queries (I'm hoping not for the purpose of Yuletide), but I wrote promo/review posts for the fandoms I nominated.

fred_mouse

I had a swathe of things I was hoping to do this morning, but each one I do takes longer than I was anticipating. One of the things I'm abandoning off the list is a well thought out blog post.

In other news,

Middlest is getting married.

At the Zoo.

In about 3 hours

And it is raining (it most likely won't be by then, but now I'm in a tizz about which trousers to wear to go with which jacket because I had not planned for 'dammit, I'll get cold'. I've already hemmed one pair of trousers, going to have to do another. very much appreciating magical hemming tape)

kaberett

Ruby Violet, my favourite source of ice cream, are continuing as a business (I feel like that bit is important to say first) but will alas be closing their King's Cross parlour for the last time at 5 p.m. Sunday next, the 5^th of October. They're apparently still intending to have their ice cream van at Granary Square during the summer, and to have a variety of "pop-up shops" around London, but... gosh I have a lot of feelings about the amount of post-therapy ice cream I have eaten at the lovely big wooden table indoors and on the benches and grass outside.

So today we went to say goodbye (and I managed to drag a university friend into joining us, as they're also independently fond), in the form of Dessert For Breakfast: apple crumble + the hazelnut & hazelnut brittle ice cream for me; sticky toffee pudding and coffee mocha ripple for A. Hot chocolate for both of us. (I'm very glad we had the Afternoon Tea Experience in 2023 for Animals Week; by the time I thought to try booking a farewell repeat it'd gone from the online shop.)

We followed this up with some slightly more savoury food from around the entire Coal Drops Yard situation (one veggie combo from an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean stall, mostly for me; one Japanese curry bread mostly for A); fifteen minutes or thereabouts poking around St Pancras Waterpoint, an old water tower that was having a serendipitous open day; and a quick poke around the Camley Street Natural Park, which A had not previously met.

I'm very glad we did it.

seleneheart

Title: A Thread of Comfort
Fandom: All Creatures Great and Small
Pairing/Characters: Tristan Farnon/James Herriot
Rating: T
Summary: Instead of sleeping in the tiny bed assigned to him, Tristan crawls into James' bed with him.
Warnings: none
Notes: Written for

embraidery as part of the

raremaleslashex. This fic is a bit of a mix of the books and the 2020 series. Beta by

delanach

On AO3: A Thread of Comfort

On

raselgethi: A Thread of Comfort

Current Mood: lethargic
Current Music: Ryan Adams - Out of the Woods

rydra_wong

For fans of body horror and/or excellent boss design, please enjoy the Gaping Dragon:

Watch on YouTube

Look, I just love its whole vagina dentata/Venus fly trap/ribcage/entire-body-as-maw/spine-snapping-backbends thing, okay? And it’s a fun fight, despite its absurd number of hitpoints and ability to kill you if it bumps you with a leg while it’s charging.

For anyone curious about how the process of figuring out a Dark Souls boss fight can go, some samples:

https://youtu.be/nnZP6WkKRpg?si=M3abOUFachMgs6cP&t=1143
https://youtu.be/u2U5mlfI6zM?si=Scx5xCM_Z7lB4bbX&t=5560 (after getting Capra on the second try, Mapocolops enters the Montage Of Despair zone)

Important context for some of what’s happening: Dark Souls has no animation cancelling, so if you press the “light attack” button twice, your character will swing twice, and if you press the “heal” button they will start the (slow) flask-drinking animation, even if you’ve subsequently realized this was a terrible idea and are now frantically pressing the buttons to dodge and screaming at your character to move. This is part of what requires you to be more deliberate and tactical; you can’t button-mash your way through even if you can mash buttons quickly.

(Also, both Reggie and Mapo started off summoning an NPC for assistance, but the trouble with it in this fight is that the NPC AI is not very bright and tends to stand in front of the dragon and get eaten early, leaving the player dealing with a boss that still has the extra HP to make up for the summons.)

Conversely, after having an un-fun time with Capra, Symbalily reads the fight near-perfectly on her first try: https://youtu.be/ByTGX1NRFs0?si=VBbn5DLh0hK-Gqp5&t=3183

(Team Halberd for the win; that two-handed R2 is so good.)

glinda

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

Current Music: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - Ralph Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony

fred_mouse

I haven't been seeing as many booklists as I sometimes do; maybe it is the quiet part of the year for it, or maybe I've just been skimming past and not registering them. Anyway, what have I found?

from the Otherwise Award site, Celebrating work from 2022-2023: Part I a list of works to consider from the years the awards were on hiatus. I was in a 'no, no more books' mood so was reading for interest but not to put things on the wishlist.

from pangur-and-grim at tumblr, their favourite books from this year. Not normally the kind of list I'd look at, but at first glance it starts with Alien Clay, which I loved, has a couple I think I'd like and a stack I've never heard of. It also has The Last Unicorn. There are six that Greer has read, and three 'up next'. Turned out some of the ones I hadn't read were already on the wishlist; i added all but one of the rest.

at tumblr, suspiciouspopsicle said I need some good fantasy or scifi to read that doesn't involve romance., First set of replies from specialagentartemis. Sadly, their absolute favourites is three I've read and one I don't want to (saw the movie, don't care), and the weird and interesting is a mix of read it, can't find it, that doesn't sound like my thing. Second from girlfailuregawain, where the ones I recognise make me a bit meh on looking up the rest, because very much Not My Taste. There are some more in the comments, but I ran out of steam. One book added to the maybe list.

I also added two to the wishlist after reading bibliofile's notes about them.

soc_puppet

Go check out

ao3_isdown! It's a journal that hosts fic prompt memes whenever AO3 goes down.

Prompts for the first meme are open for close to another three hours, as of this post; prompts will be open to fills for another week after the post closes to new prompts.

Anyway, go take a look! I've already made a little fill myself for Avery and Zeek, which I'll cross-post here, uh. Sooner or later, I promise!

Current Mood: jubilant

soc_puppet

I needed to do a five-to-seven minute history presentation for my Intro to Human Services class (with visual aids), and pick a topic from a pre-selected list; I chose the ADA, and presented on Wednesday. I got 100% 😃

Anyway, here's what I wrote, for anyone interested: ( The History of the ADA (sources linked at the end) )

Side note, one of my classmates picked the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, and her presentation was both fantastic and available on YouTube! Great use of humor to balance out a very dark topic. If you've got about six minutes, I recommend giving it a watch 👍

Current Mood: productive

kaberett

I cannot tell if it's that I'm asleep, or that I'm Not A Biologist, or just that this paragraph (from The Challenge of Pain, Melzack & Wall) is actually very, but I am... struggling to persuade it to resolve into meaning:

Embryological and anatomical studies of fish, amphibians, and reptiles reveal that, even in the lowest vertebrates, reflexes are created by internuncial cells that link the sensory input to the motor output. During embryological development in these species, behaviour becomes increasingly a function of earlier sensory inputs as a result of the memory traces they have etched into the neural connections. Behaviour, then, is not merely the expression of a response to a stimulus, but a dynamic process comprising multiple interacting factors. Coghill (1929) was the first to propound this principle, based on his brilliant neuroembryological-behavioural studies of salamanders, which has been substantially confirmed by later investigators. Given this fundamental principle -- that organisms are not passive receivers manipulated by environmental inputs but act dynamically on those inputs so that behaviour becomes variable, unique and creative -- the remainder of evolution becomes comprehensible as a gradual development of mechanisms that make each new species increasingly independent of the push-and-pull of environmental circumstances.

Other than (but also, actually, in addition to) being sufficiently puzzled by this that I should definitely Go To Bed: I have caught up (mostly) on the PD e-mail. I completed one EYB indexing project and have been happily rolling around in making a start on the next. I made pastry, and used it as a prompt to unfuck the kitchen some, and then made progress on project Cook All The Things (From This One Book). I went on a Stupid Little Walk for my Stupid Mental Health. I am very very tired, and it has been a good day.

kaberett

Discount raspberry trifle + freshly toasted flaked almonds. Excellent bonus pudding yes.
Social limb-wiggle! Outside, half under the trees, interspersed with The Toddler being Delighted to see us.
Some successful communication debugging, thus far of the "okay, well, we now have a better understanding of the shape of the problem" variety rather than in the "... and we've implemented a solution" sense, which is still useful progress.
Successfully got a bunch of other people's stuff out of my house and headed back to its people, even though this involved both Actually Parcelling It Up and then a whole entire trip to the post office. Good Job Alex.
FRIEND HAS FINISHED ORPHAN BLACK. FRIEND SCREAMED AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT. I am thrilled she loved it & was willing to yell about it all the way through when I didn't even try to lure her. She got here by herself. I am DELIGHTED. Did I mention I'm delighted? I'm delighted and I've had some Big Feelings and I have ALSO had some brand new-to-me horror from the penultimate episode Revealed unto me! Which is a different kind of delightful!

starandrea

In times like these it feels important to be visible when spoons and safety allow, so I just wanted to say: you are loved, and we're here for you. You're in this world to be exactly who you are.

In the immortal words of a fellow teacher explaining the plan for getting three different field trip groups along multiple walking routes to the same destination at the same time (cartoon maps and faux football play diagrams were involved), when responding to the following question:

"What do we do if it rains?"
"...If it rains, we go out and we fight. We fight and we fight and we win."

Relatedly, in the way that all things are, I'm enjoying

communal_creators right now. I joined, as with

battleshipex, because Marci did. And as with

battleshipex, it has done great things for my creative output and self-expression. (Along with drabble community

chenqing_100, a serene place that inspires me to contemplate the drabble-esque qualities of classical Chinese.)

Autumn arrives as well, and with it, the soft opening of my indoor light garden. Every single one of my high intensity lights from Gardeners' Supply is going strong, but none of my low-intensity lights from Amazon has lasted more than two seasons. On a quest, then, to find new gentle lights for my less sun-hungry plants, I tried the Gardeners' Supply light guide (illustrated) and laughed at the following multiple choice question:

"What kind of gardener are you?"
1) Tabletop: "I just want to keep my African violets happy."
2) Floor Plant Fanatic: "I've got a few monster-sized Monsteras and fiddle-leaf figs to tend to."
3) Plant Parenting Pro: "I'm growing light-loving houseplants of all sizes, including an orchid, several succulents, and a sago palm."

Option 3 may not quite cover it, but that's as high as the scale goes and I embrace it.

the_shoshanna

So remember how Booking.com told me our hotel reservation in Aberystwyth was confirmed, but when we got there the hotel had never heard of us? The agent I talked to on the phone on the spot said that if I booked one of the alternative hotels they'd email me, Booking.com would cover any extra cost. I booked one of them, it was quite nice, and it cost an extra £105; but a follow-up "sorry about the screw-up" form email from B.c said that they would refund up to £51.90. (Which is a weird number; I have no idea how they came up with it.) So obviously I was not happy about eating the other £53.10!

Well, it took an hour on the phone with them again today, but I emphasized that the first agent had specifically said that if I chose one of their options I would not face any extra expense, and also used the phrase "Booking.com's error" a couple of times, and in the end I did get the full amount refunded! (Well, they issued it as an in-house "cash credit," but I can withdraw it all to a credit card.) Victory is mine!

kaberett

Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
I mentioned these books to simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)

fred_mouse

I keep thinking about making a happy post, and then there are too many moving parts and argh. Instead, you get a possible insight into my mind you didn't need. I keep reading

it also predates genAI

in the verb form related to predator, rather than date and time. I'm not sure what is eating the genAI, and I'm not sure I want to (is it silverfish? it absolutely would not surprise me if it were silverfish).

(note also that I get a giggle out of un-ionised vs union-ised)

kaberett

A little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...

... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).

What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.

duskpeterson

Most of the official documents of the Koretian government are locked away or in active use, but the outer chamber of the historian's room boasts a magnificent chart of the bloodlines of the previous rulers of Koretia. You will see that there are two main bloodlines; both were cut off by wartime casualties, although the last surviving direct descendant of the second line died surprisingly recently. See the section of this book on Valouse for more details.

The Jackal's previous bloodline is unknown, but the Koretian ruler has established a new bloodline by selecting a young kinsman as his heir. The kinsmanship is dually established through a wardship and through a blood-brotherhood of an earlier generation.

[Translator's note: With his usual reticence, the Ambassador fails to cite plainly his own connection to Koretia's royal line. That connection is mentioned often in Empty Dagger Hand.]

glassy_witch

There's a lot of people genuinely frothing at the mouth about all sorts of things - and most of them, im fairly sure, are entirely imaginary.

I watched one video.of a person calmly stating that gun control was a valid suggestion on how to reduce the frequency and impact of mass shootings in the USA.

This to me sounded perfectly reasonable. It was someone making the point that controls would not necessarily mean "not letting anyone have a gun ever". They were suggesting things like... Checking that the person seeking to own the gun was properly trained in weapons handling. That they had a safe and secure storage solution for their firearm(s). That they were not known to be involved in criminal activities. That they would understand how to clean and service their firearm(s) to prevent accidents due to poor maintenance etc.

I see absolutely nothing in there that says "we're taking all your firearms away". Its just saying "Be responsible for a lethal weapon". A question WAS raised on why on earth any civilian would "need" military grade weaponry, but that's a separate thing.

Instead of bothering to listen to the suggestions, the respondent (who is apparently a vicar-equivalent!) immediately accused the person making those suggestions of "celebrating" the recent shooting of that fellow in Utah.

Excuse me? Where did THAT come from? No one mentioned any one specific incident. In fact, the initial suggestions were in relation to the frighteningly regular mass shootings they seem to indulge in across the pond. But this chap just started shouting and waving his arms about and doing the full on "I denounce thee" nonsense that you would see in the comedy stereotypical American church set up. Properly frothing, properly wide boggle eyes, pointing, and generally carrying on.

And I was flummoxed. I don't actually know if the guy is hearing imaginary voices saying things he doesn't like and had decided to shout at them, or if he knew he was lying and just trying to shout until the other person gave up and let him feel like he'd won some kind of point.

It makes me sad to see someone who is meant to be a community leader being either deranged, or simply being a bully and a liar. Neither one of those options is going to be healthy for that community.

But then we hear those charming individuals on our various radio phone-ins and the like, complaining about "them immigrunts innit". Parroting back absolute nonsense like 5 star hotel stays, free iPads, free Xboxes and similar. It's all completely untrue, but they've been told it's the case by the likes of Farage and pals and so theh blindly believe it.

I don't think they are necessarily evil. I do think they are possibly a bit simple, and don't have the capacity for rational thought. But not evil.

The ones who wind them up though? The ones who have vast sums of money at their fingertips and the ability to get their insidious, divisive, and simply untrue rhetoric out there? Yes. They are evil, i believe. They arrived on the planet twisted and broken somehow. They make up nonsense stories, then sit back and wait for the people they have duped to do their dirty work.

Thing is, I don't think anyone of us gain from shouting at the duped. If anything, they need a bit of care and understanding, too. For the most part, we're going to be looking at people who have been isolated and lied to. People who have maybe struggled because of financial woes, mental health issues, physical health problems which scuppered the dreams they had for themselves. People who just didnt get the opportunities they should have because of...name your poison. Could have been local government cuts which meant the training opportunities they wanted weren't available. The schools they attended couldn't afford the number of staff required to look after the volume of students. That so many conditions and issues that are at least recognised now never were back in "their" day. And so they hear about someone else getting what they think they should have been given, and they explode with righteous indignation. Which is all the more terrible when it's all lies.

Taking these disenfranchised people and riling them up to cause trouble is a repugnant tactic. And often employed by those who've never actually struggled with anything. Look at the usual suspects in this - they are all the same. I'd put money on all of them being utterly revolting school bullies and now it's only the degree of their financial privilege that separates them.

I dont know what we're meant to do. We could TRY telling them the truth, but its hard to believe the second story you've been told, particularly when you've invested so much time and energy in the first one (and hatred IS exhausting). The shame of having been tricked might simply be too painful to admit.

But I do think that at least here in the UK we should have our Parliament come together and state the truth of things. And members who lie aboit basic facts should be held accountable for their lies. Can you imagine how much better things could be, practically overnight, if every MP irrespective of rosette colour chose to make public the plain facts of the matters that divide this country - not the interpretations? If they all, as one body, sought to work for the good of the country as a whole, rather than slagging each other off all the time?

Imagine that.

For sheep that dream of Dreamwidth.

fandom comms/events

vital functions

Yuletide noms are getting approved!

Wedding!

(almost the) end of an era

Fic: A Thread of Comfort

"Don't get vored"

A Change Is As Good As a Rest (But Rest Also Helps)

booklists - august and september

New fic meme journal

History of the Americans with Disabilities Act

yes good day.

some good things

"older but no more the wise, we've learned the art of compromise" (suzy bogguss)

Success!

some good things

drive by post

[pain] I have definitely inadvertently trained The Algorithm to tell me about relevant papers

FIC: Historian's room (Tempestuous Tours)

It's all a bit weird.

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