fffriday | Member Posts

1. We walked up to Layla for bagels this morning, only I didn't end up getting a bagel after all, because they have a new seasonal pastry, orange blossom babka. I love orange, so I couldn't resist, and it was definitely a good choice. The smell was very faint, so I wasn't sure how orangey it would actually taste, but it turned out to be very flavorful. I'm not sure I'll actually get it again, since I'm trying to not eat pastries for breakfast very often, but I would get it again if the opportunity every arose.

2. The front yard is covered in soooooo many berries. Just a gross carpet of berries. But I did manage to rake up quite a bit of it and get it into the yard waste bin for tomorrow's pickup.

3. Gemma looks so proud of her hunt lol.

ranalore

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

Current Mood: productive
Current Location: the jianghu (don't i wish)

muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

Going back to Cry Cry Cry these last few weeks. I'm so obsessed with the storytelling in the music, especially the percussion (and some kind of drone?) around 2:54 to 3:20, before the mandoline comes back in.

sholio

I rewatched Neroon's introduction episode last night (and then a few more across his arc). It's so fascinating going back to season one now!

( Spoilers )

garonne

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

profiterole_reads

The first episode of the BL anime Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter was fun. A Japanese accountant ends up in a magical world.

I've read the first five tomes of the manga and it got boring after a while, so we'll see if I watch the entire season or if I drop it when the focus moves away from the relationship.

It's available on Crunchyroll.

oursin

What I read

Finished Diary at the Centre of the Earth, which I really enjoyed.

Then on to Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies (A Dance to the Music of Time) (1975) in anticipation of the final meeting of the reading group. This is the one that appears to have been invaded by characters from a Simon Raven novel, or that thing I have mentioned about writers getting a plot-bunny that was meant to go to someone else.... On another paw, at least Isobel gets rather more on-page time than she was usually wont.

Finished The Lathe of Heaven.

Discovered that there was a new David Wishart Corvinus mystery, Dead in the Water (2025) - I would say that not being informed of this is due to their only being available via Kindle these days, except Kobo, really not all that at keeping one informed of books in series one has been keeping up with. So I gritted my teeth, and read it via the app on the tablet. Not perhaps one of the top entrants in the series.

On the go

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count (2025), for the in-person book group meeting in a week on Sunday, and nearly finished. I have writ before of the genre of '4 (usually youngish) women, connected in some way, affronting their destinies', which was all over in the 60s-80s, but possibly not so much these days? to which this has some resemblances.

Up next

I got partner the most recent Slough House thriller for Christmas and he has now finished it, so I guess that's probably my next read.

rachelmanija

It's a zombie apocalypse, only instead of zombies, there's cats.

In a future in which 90% of the population owned a cat, a strange virus spreads. If you cuddle a cat, or a cat nuzzles you, you turn into a cat! It's a catastrophe! A catlamity! A nyandemic!

Not only are cats everywhere, but the cats are either instinctively trying to turn humans into cats, or they just want to be petted. Cue every zombie movie scene ever, but with cats. Cats scratch at the doors! Cats peer through the windows! Groups of cats ambush you in tunnels!

The characters are all very upset by this, because they love cats! And now there's cats everywhere, just begging to be skritched! And they can't skritch them! "We can't even squish their little toe beans!" The horror!

Needless to say, they would never ever harm a cat. In fact they feel bad when they're forced to spray cats with water to shoo them away.

I'm not sure how this can possibly be sustained for seven volumes, but on the other hand I could happily read seven volumes of it. The cat art is really fun and adorable. I would definitely do better in a zombie apocalypse than a cat apocalypse, because I would never be able to resist those cats.

Content notes: None, the cats are fine.

fiachairecht

I know

hollowbolding and I are virtually alone on team 'Moiraine and Siuan's romantic relationship was over before we saw them meet and Siuan died exactly as and when she should have' but that has never stopped me from making my feelings everyone else's problem anyway. Happy new year? Have a Toni/Mariah icon because my paid time ran out and I am debating whether it's reasonable for me to purchase more despite how much I think the site deserves it, given how little I'm here.

A LONELY TOWER that held the versions of you that thought love would make you a different person, through which you're dragging the ghost of your relationship hoping the remnants and memories of your love is enough to re-animate it in this life, in which you're living when your dear friend almalexia comes to kill you — a fanmix about moiraine, siuan, and the things love doesn't save

i. cornflower blue flower face ii. the scythe the last dinner party iii. the craving kingfisher sky iv. love's souvenir seven spires v. i buried us blackbriar vi. a vampire's view the flower kings vii. if i could madder mortem viii. hide in shade zeal & ardor ix. sun down shores glass hammer x. tower one the flower kings

[ openwhyd ]

( lyrics )

oursin

Happy birthday,

beeswing,

ciiriianan and

queen_ypolita!

vriddy

A couple of days ago, I dug out a Wind Breaker fic I've been puttering on since June last year... Honestly, it's just every single character involved in this panel losing their shit over what happened in that moment, because why should I be the only one suffering?! But anyway, slapping an ending on it has been hard, with a lot of false starts. I outlined another one that's meh and started writing it -- at some point, one just needs to finish things!! There are a lot of good lines in the first few chapters at least XD

Then this morning I went back to edit the kn8 fic, as usual. Once I was done, I checked the notes app on my phone because I'm going somewhere today that I haven't been to in a long time, and sometimes I leave myself tips about directions, how long it actually takes, things like that.

I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled to try to find a note from around that time (which didn't actually exist btw), and stumbled across a detailed note with... an ending for that fic?! One that includes a super fun concept I'd never have thought of except apparently I did?! *shakes past-me* WHY DID YOU NOT TELL MEEEE?!?!!! Haha. I'll have to remove/adjust some of the stuff I wrote a couple of days ago because the characters are in different locations, but I really really want to use that idea now in some way now XD

Thank you past-me............ I guess?! Hahaha

scintilla10

For this year, I'm going to try participating in a few things to help nurture and maintain habits related to writing and creative practice. We'll see how they feel!

cultivativity | Welcome & FAQ post

This is a space for cultivating creativity.

This is not set up as a challenge, as that implies competition or accountability to produce something (which are fun activities, and for which there are several other communities available). Rather, this community is organized as a series of modules designed to help build a practice to nurture our creative selves. Do the things you want, ignore the ones that don't.

getyourwordsout | Pledges & Requirements for 2026 Participation
I've never signed up to GYWO before! I decided to try a Habit Pledge. I chose The Excursionist level, which is writing for 180 days over the year (approx 15 days/month). This feels ambitious but not impossible to me, and I think working towards building a habit of regular writing will be more fruitful for me than monitoring my wordcounts.

I'm also going to try doing Fannish 50 again! "Make fifty posts about topics related to fandom. You may set any theme(s) you wish, or pick random topics for each post." The info & sign-up post for 2026 is here.

torachan

1. Apparently today is Three Kings Day as someone brought in a king cake to work, but it was actually a really good king cake! I've only had King Cake once before and found both the style of cake and frosting to be not my jam, but this is a Mexican style king cake, which is not actually cake, but rather just very sweet bread, and instead of royal icing on top, it has bits of like quince paste or something. It is still ring shaped and has a plastic baby Jesus in it, though. It was from the in-store bakery of a Mexican supermarket chain and there's one not that far from work so if I remember about it next year I might actually consider buying a whole one myself.

2. Cutie guy.

svgurl

snowflake_challenge is currently running throughout the month of January! You can jump in and catch up anytime.

gamechangerhr is a community dedicated to Game Changers book series/Heated Rivalry TV series. Discussions & fanworks on Rachel Reid's other Hockey Romance books are also allowed/welcome.

bookclub_dw is a Monthly Book Club where a host will pick three books, participants vote on them, and everyone reads the winner/discusses later.

moodthemeinayear is a low-pressure community dedicated to creating a custom mood theme

allbingo is running a Public Domain Bingo Fest through the month of January. There are pre-made cards or you can create your own based on the available prompts.

candyheartsex, an exchange focused on both platonic and romantic relationships, is still open for sign-ups until January 7th, 11:59PM EST.

purimgifts, an exchange focused on characters who are at least one of: women, Jewish, or persecuted (preferably by evil viziers), is open for both nominations and sign-ups until January 9th.

rewrite_a_fic is a low-commitment, multi-fandom event dedicated to rewriting a fic you've written before. More info can be found HERE.

fandom_empire is running a Monopoly Challenge. Sign-ups are open until January 15th, 11:59PM UTC.

fancake's theme of the month is: crack treated seriously. Click on the banner below to learn more.

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

friending_memes is hosting a new one for the New Year!

Click the banner to join us and make some new friends!

sholio

candyheartsex signups close tomorrow! I was going to try to do it this year, but ... I just don't think it's a good idea. I'm starting to really need a break from exchanges, so I'm going to take a couple months off (aside from the ones I already have, which will be over when Festivids wraps up at the end of January) and then show up again when H/C-ex signups open in March.

Amperslash is still looking for two pinch hits! You can find the details here at the Amperslash comm.

• PH 3 - 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) RPF, 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018), 镇魂 | Guardian - priest

• PH 9 - Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn, Honor Harrington Series - David Weber, The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison

If any of those sound like you might want to write them, the exchange has already had several delays and fingers crossed it'll be able to get them filled and open on time! I know there used to be some Guardian people around here; I don't know if anyone's still actively writing in it, or might be able to advertise the PH in Guardian-centric fandom spaces?

rocky41_7

First book of 2026! This was The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Michael Kaluta. I have no recollection of how this ended up on my TBR and I was a little skeptical checking it out in the library, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a lot of fun and I will definitely check out the second volume.

You might be a little confused in the beginning, as In the Night Garden is a series of nested stories within stories and the style takes a minute to get used to, but it's worth it. Valente unfolds a veritable matryoshka of tales into neat blooms whose petals all fit together. Retroactive reveals and recontextualiations are delightful here.

Valente's vivid prose brings together her fantastical tales with such clarity; she attends frequently to all five senses, so that the reader knows what the characters are not only seeing, but hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well. There's obviously a lot of fairy tale inspiration here, but Valente definitely brings her own flavor. Women are almost always the hero of Valente's tales (though they play the villains too!) and there are such a great variety of them. Monsters abound too, but they get their chance to tell a tale too. (There's also some gentle ribbing at the Arthurian legends, with one witch lamenting about "all that questing" princes get up to.)

I was so engrossed in the work I didn't realize until quite late in the book how little romance factors into it. In a fairy tale inspired book like this, I would have expected a great many characters motivated by romance, but I can only think of two here who are primarily motivated by a love interest, and this delights me too. I'm arospec myself and while I enjoy a good tale of romance, I also weary of how frequently and totally it is centered in stories, so I was really enthused by how little that's the case here.

Friendship and family relationships do make frequent appearances though, and the friendship between the orphan teller of tales and the young boy hanging onto her words is the framing story. Love between mother and daughter, between brother and sister, even between strangers is a common thread.

She also avoids a pitfall I see in various modern fantasy stories which are so keen to explain the magic of their world they strip it of all mystery. Valente's world remains largely unexplained and asks the reader to simply take it as it is, which I found fun and appropriately mysterious.

The style of the book allows Valente to pull in a great many diverse characters and voices, which she does it well. Most impressive though is her ability to pull a cohesive tapestry out of all the various threads she's juggling.

A really fun and unusual story which I enjoyed a lot--a great start to a new year of reading!

svgurl

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #1:
The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I'm svgurl. I'm in my 30s, and have been actively part of fandom on and off since 2007, when I created my LJ. The SV part of my username stands for Smallville, which was my original fandom and I was very mono fandom for years.

My profile is up to date and gives a little background history and the fandoms/ships I'm interested in. I'm focused on 9-1-1/Buddie these days, but I still love MCU, Smallville, Gilmore Girls, and past favorites do come up from time to time.

I can be found on various places:
AO3:

svgurl410
Tumblr:

svgurl410
Discord: svgurl

I mod:

comment_bingo: a bingo challenge that promotes commenting on other fanworks using the provided prompts

rarefemslashexchange: a rare f/f fandom exchange that runs once a year

This is my 5th year participating in the Snowflake Challenge and I really love the way it gives everyone a chance to interact with people that you normally wouldn't. I am not comfortable with just going to someone's journal and talk to them out of the blue, so it's nice that this gives you a chance to do just that. I am looking forward to doing more of that and meet more people on here as well! :)

cyphomandra

December was either gaming or Yuletiding. I did not read the Wells in December but I hadn't included them earlier, so here they are.

Libby Lawrence is good at pretending, Jodi McAlister
Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta
Behind Frenemy Lines, Zen Cho
Compulsory, Martha Wells (short story)
All Systems Red, Martha Wells
Artificial Condition, Martha Wells
Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, Martha Wells (short story)
Rogue protocol, Martha Wells
Exit strategy, Martha Wells
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, Martha Wells (short story)
Network effect, Martha Wells
Fugitive telemetry, Martha Wells
System collapse, Martha Wells

Libby Lawrence is Good at Pretending, Jodi McAlister. Uni theatre YA/new adult romance; Libby sleeps with the overly charming director just before he disappears (but just after he embezzles the group’s money); she doesn’t want to tell her best friend, who has her own issues, or any of the other theatre kids, as although she’s always previously been on the outside with bit parts, the replacement director’s cast her as the lead in Much Ado About Nothing. Messy but fun; the best friend part feels underdeveloped but the theatre stuff is good.

Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta. I kept feeling that I should have read this before, because it’s such an Australian classic. Josephine Alibrandi, Italian-Australian, is in her final year as a scholarship student at an exclusive Catholic high school; she fights with her mother (who has raised her on her own, despite her family’s disapproval of her single motherhood), goes out with boys, explores her family history and finally meets her father; it’s vivid, believable, and excellently characterised (Josie is prickly and stubborn and appealing, and her growth throughout the novel is great). Also has lots of Sydney in it.

Behind Frenemy Lines, Zen Cho. Kriya Rajasekar associates Charles Goh with the worst moments in her legal career - flubbing an interview, losing cases etc - and is appalled to discover she’s going to have to share an office with him when her boss/mentor takes her with him to a new legal firm. Charles, meanwhile, is appalled to discover he’s been anyone’s nemesis, and is increasingly concerned at how Kriya’s mentor is treating her. I enjoy Cho’s het romcoms (this is in the same continuity as The Friend Zone Experiment) but I don’t love them. This does have some great moments and I particularly like Charles, who determinedly dresses up in cosplay for his best friend’s lesbian sports-anime themed wedding (she and her wife bonded over their love for the fictitious Duke of Badminton series, which made me snort in amusement as someone who very briefly read fanfic for Prince of Tennis) and then takes the Tube to the venue.

I read all of the extant Murderbot books and shorts in a wild binge. I like them but do not feel fannish at all about them, although I can see why other people do. I like Murderbot and the voice is fantastic, but I find the humans rather interchangeable and I don’t like ART, who becomes increasingly prominent as the books go on. I will probably re-read these again at some stage and see if that changes.

snickfic

Clearing out the last of my movies watched last year.

We Bury the Dead (2026). After an American experimental weapons accident kills every human and animal on Madascar, an American woman (Daisy Ridley) comes to help identify bodies and search for her husband who was on a work retreat there. Also sometimes the dead don't stay dead.

As someone who is pretty over zombie movies, I liked this one quite a bit. First of all, it's Australian, and boy can you feel it. This is not your Hollywood zombie blockbuster or even your Danny Boyle zombie blockbuster. For starters, we spend relatively little time running from or fighting zombies. In fact, these are the most ambiguously threatening zombies I can remember seeing in a long long time, and I liked how much that complicated the story. It's also beautifully shot with great atmosphere and a score that really adds to the mood of the whole thing. And I really appreciated how our understanding of the central couple's married relationship gets more complicated as the film goes on.

That said, ( spoilers )

This movie feels like it invites comparison to 28 Years Later, if only by accident, given the timing. I know 28 Years Later has a lot of fans, and I didn't hate it, but overall I liked this a lot better for the indie feel, the focus on a female character, and honestly because I liked the cinematography better.

Anyway, it's out in theaters now. If it sounds fun, I recommend it!

--

Red Rooms (2023). A French-Canadian film about two female true crime fans following the trial of a man accused of raping and murdering underage teen girls. This movie is beautifully made, and with really visible care and precision. The director knew what he wanted to make, and he went for it. The result is moody and fucked up without ever feeling exploitative (to me); this is very much about the groupies, not about the man on trial, and we never seen the horrifying footage at the center of the trial.

It's also shippy as hell. Our main gal Kelly-Anne is a wealthy model and computer hacker who professes herself to be "not bad with numbers," who's obsessed with the trial for reasons that are to some extent left to the viewer, while Clementine is a less well-heeled diehard apologist for the man at the center of the trial and is convinced he's innocent. Somehow out of these two, it's Clementine who feels like the more well-adjusted person; it's questionable whether Kelly-Anne has any friends at all, and yet maybe Clementine becomes one. As a friend of mine described it, "Clementine’s more open neediness draws out a reciprocal vulnerability from Kelly-Anne."

High rec from me. If any of this sounds appealing to you, definitely check it out.

jjhunter

No one really believes Donald Trump is going to last. At the rate he's been declining, it would be a minor medical miracle if he survives to the end of his current term.

( Read more... )

tl;dr Who wants to live subject to immoral leaders and exploitive self-sabotaging systems? We are capable of better, and we do have collective powers to choose better and deny support to worse. Let's exercise those powers while we still can avert most of worst.

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FF Friday

December 2025

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Page Summary

torachan - Daily Happiness
ranalore - i'll give you three guesses what the animal's going to be, and the first two don't count
muccamukk - Music Wednesday
sholio - Babylon 5 randomness
garonne - Candy Hearts Exchange
profiterole_reads - Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter
oursin - Wednesday is indulging in a spicy margarita
rachelmanija - Night of the Living Cat # 1, by Hawkman & Mecha-Roots
fiachairecht - fanmix: a lonely tower
oursin - (no subject)
vriddy - Need to have a word with past-me
scintilla10 - Setting, nurturing, and maintaining writing habits in 2026
torachan - Daily Happiness
svgurl - current fandom events
sholio - Fandom things
rocky41_7 - Recent Reading: In the Night Garden
svgurl - snowflake challenge #1
cyphomandra - Books read, December
snickfic - Movies: We Bury the Dead, Red Rooms
jjhunter - The Emperor Has No Wits

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