November 5th, 2025
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
posted by [personal profile] sovay at 08:13pm on 04/11/2025
[personal profile] spatch and I have performed our civic duties and received stickers in exchange for the exercise of democracy. It's been at least a year since we had to prove our residence in this ward and precinct, but the original experience was so scarifying that we still show up carrying utility bills just in case. The moon was brilliantly full and some of the leaves streetlight-orange in it. Earlier in the afternoon, I walked some distance by the side of a road where the afternoon sun had tinted the conservation meadows like ambrotypes. I have seen the news of the death of Dick Cheney. Twenty-five years sooner would have been better, but I had begun to wonder if he was even in the machine. Since Halloween, WERS has been playing a lot of the Last Dinner Party's "This Is the Killer Speaking" (2025). I am completly unsurprised that the band has covered Sparks.
Music:: Damon & Naomi, "The Robot Speaks"
vivdunstan: Some of my Doctor Who etc books (drwho)
china_shop: An orange cartoon dog waving, with a blue-green abstract background. (Bingo!)
posted by [personal profile] china_shop at 12:22pm on 05/11/2025 under
I haven't done a media update in weeks! Here's what I've been watching and reading.

Reading
It didn't feel like a lot when I started, but cutting for length anyway. )

Kdramas
This always felt like a lot. )

Other TV
There's quite a lot here, too. )

Guardian/Fandom
Wishliiiiiiist! It went so well. Belated hooray for everyone and all the treats! :D

Perusing the Yuletide tagset was an object lesson in "other people's character preferences are not my character preferences, and that's okay." Still, I have a bunch of things to potentially treat if I can get into gear.

Films
Grace: a prayer for peace, a film about Aotearoa / New Zealand artist Robin White. Beautiful and arty, and I had trouble staying awake. (I'm not great at maintaining attention when there's no dialogue.)

Audio stuff
A handful of eps of Tech Won't Save Us, mostly AI-related. Some Guilty Feminist (UK), which is a bit hit-and-miss for me, but at least is tuned in to *gestures at the dumpster fire that is politics in a lot of places*
/o\ /o\ /o\(They have a new series of live shows called "The Road to Gilead", and are particularly loud about Farage's links to US right-wing anti-abortion group ADF.)
Writing Excuses. Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson.

Writing/making things
I currently have a thing at beta, and I'm gearing myself up to work on my Yuletide assignment fic.

I broke my [community profile] fan_flashworks streak during Guardian Wishlist. That's okay; I actually find streaks a bit burdensome when they get too long. I'm not in a pushing-myself headspace. Instead of writing anything for the Amnesty round, I posted some of the art I've been trying out via Youtube instructional videos for kids. (I'm so happy with how the eyes came out on the kitten-dragon.) (Youtube art videos for kids are excellent, btw! I've drawn a fox, a llama, an owl, a lemur, another dragon, a unicorn mer-red-panda, and a few other things, and they always turn out pleasingly, despite my zero skill level. I'm thinking of investing in a set of coloured pencils for grown-ups, but for now I'm enjoying the tin of miniature ones [personal profile] cyphomandra sent me before my hysterectomy and a few others left over from when I was five. :-)

Life/health/mental state things
Over the last few months, I've noticed more and more long silver hairs in my house. Hmph.

Good things
The Guardian Slo-Mo Rewatch on [community profile] sid_guardian. Guardian fandom generally. Yuletide. Podfic and audiobooks and Kdramas and libraries. The forecast for tomorrow is good. Kdramas. We went to an art exhibition opening yesterday evening, and it was great and made me want to make more things. Writers' Hour.

Poll #33799 Time is
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15


Time is

View Answers

an arrow
1 (6.7%)

a fruit fly
4 (26.7%)

a banana
1 (6.7%)

melting
1 (6.7%)

relentless
6 (40.0%)

elusive
3 (20.0%)

other
2 (13.3%)

ticky-box full of hippity-hoppity frogs
7 (46.7%)

ticky-box full of blue-haired punk red pandas being, on average, purple
8 (53.3%)

ticky-box full of weird clock karma
6 (40.0%)

ticky-box full of colouring in
6 (40.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
10 (66.7%)

November 4th, 2025

Posted by James Whitbrook

Lego Ideas In Development Sets 2025 Godzilla Et X Files Power Rangers

After a streak of high-profile crossover announcements, from 'X-Files' to 'Power Rangers', here's everything that's currently in development for Lego's crowd-supported line of sets.
posted by [personal profile] cosmolinguist at 09:11pm on 04/11/2025 under

I agreed to do a favor for someone at work that meant going to Sheffield this afternoon.

I was briefly filmed answering a few questions that the interviewer thought I had in advance but either I didn't, I didn't read the email that contained them, or I did read them but they were so boring and generic I forgot that they existed. All seem about equally likely.

It was very quick and dull but then I got to do something way more exciting, which was see [personal profile] sfred and actually catch up in person, something we haven't done in so long we don't even remember when it would last have happened. We agreed that Dreamwidth is a great way of keeping in touch, but also being able to hug was better. I was not prepared to be able to be gracious in response to being told that the gym has made me noticeably more hench, heh.

We talked a lot about how good the Springsteen movie was, of course.

Getting home was going far too smoothly (I got on a train with plenty of time to spare despite it arriving only three minutes after I got to the station! I'm not used to this) until we got delayed and then diverted around some kind of ominous-sounding incident in or near Stockport. By the time I finally got to Piccadilly, it was chaos as almost everything departs via Stockport and even trains that don't, like mine home, were held up behind all the other trains.

So I got home just in time to eat dinner and then it's bedtime!

I get to stay home tomorrow, and then I'm off again on Thursday, work takes me to Liverpool this time to do something equally dull but it'll take much longer.

dolorosa_12: (city lights)
Somewhat belatedly, let me catch up on TV logging. I watched five shows this month (although I'm cheating a bit as I only finished the fifth this evening), which were the usual mishmash of genres and tones. The shows in question were:

  • Season 3 of Blue Lights, a BBC police procedural miniseries set in Belfast. Although the characters are a familiar mix of well-worn stereotypes (the idealistic rookie, the maternal type who cares too much, the one who's joined the police in spite of a backlash from her community, the world-weary old hand, the maverick), they're written with heart and humanity. The true pleasure in this series, however, lies its sense of place — it's deeply grounded in its Belfast setting, and does a great job of showing the various political and social currents buffetting the city, and the wider region. The real villain, though, is austerity, in a way that I don't think I've seen explored so bluntly on UK TV in contemporary times.


  • A Thousand Blows, a fabulous historical miniseries by Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders), set in the East End of London in Victorian times. Here we encounter a variety of deprived, traumatised, down-on-their luck characters, who converge both in a series of boxing matches (initially bare-knuckled affairs in the local pub, later more genteel competitions organised by the aristocracy in the West End), and in a heist plot. The characters are fantastic, the writing is as lurid and melodramatic as a penny dreadful, and in essence it's a great retread of two concepts that Knight explored well in Peaky Blinders: certain people who were made to feel vulnerable and afraid become singlemindedly relentless in pursuing an existence where they will never feel fear or vulnerability again, even if they have to burn down the world and destroy all their meaningful relationships in the process, and communities battered by poverty, exploitation and lack of opportunity who accept a certain degree of violence and exploitation done to them (e.g. by gangs offering their 'protection') as long as it's people they perceive as being from their own community doing the violence. This is familiar ground for Steven Knight, and he explores it to great effect here — and hopefully in subsequent seasons!


  • Film Club, a sweet little six-part BBC miniseries about two rather lost twentysomethings who started a rather intense film club (no phones during the viewing, full thematic fancy dress, elaborate snacks, etc) during their university years and are desperately trying to keep its magic going some years after their graduation, when the realities of professional adult life have begun to wear them down. One character has had some form of psychological breakdown and moved back into the family home with her mother and sister, and remains trapped there by agoraphobia, and the other character is on the verge of leaving for a new job in a new city, and worrying how it will affect their friendship. It's a sweet-natured love story, with teeth, and in spite of a somewhat cinematic sense of heightened reality, the depiction of quarter life crisis existential angst is grounded in a truth that resonates a bit too much.


  • The latest season of Only Murders in the Building, which I thought was a massive return to form. This time, our trio of true crime podcast sleuths investigate the death of their apartment complex's doorman, which inevitably uncovers sometime much bigger, managing to skewer local New York politics (prior to today's election), oligarchy, housing pressures, and more. My patience with this series had been wearing thin two seasons ago, and I felt it was fast approaching over-milked cash cow territory, so I'm delighted to have been proved wrong. Your patience for this latest outing will probably hinge on your tolerance for New York (and New Yorker fiction about New York) nonsense, which it continues to lampoon with affection.


  • Riot Women, Sally Wainwright's latest love letter to the north of England and the strong, complex women who live there — this time, our cast of characters are a multigenerational group of misfits who start an all-woman punk band, with songs about menopause, feeling invisible and underappreciated, and so on. All of them are dealing with struggles at once soap operatic and banal: family tensions, empty-nested loss of sense of purpose, sandwiched pressure between troubled adult children and elderly parents in nursing homes, or showing early signs of dementia. Women's invisible labour is front and centre, but also women's anger, turned inwards and outwards. As always with Wainwright, the characters feel painfully real, and she does an incredible job of capturing the stories of the types of older women working ceaselessly (and often without much acknowledgement) upholding messy, multigenerational family households, doing all the work that no one ever notices, but whose absence would certainly be noticed. It's an absolute masterpiece — with an incredible soundtrack. (And, since this is not always a given with ostensibly feminist British cultural figures, it was fantastic to have unambiguous confirmation that Sally Wainwright's feminism is most definitely trans-inclusive.)


  • I don't think there was a single dud in this collection of shows!
    ranunculus: (Default)
    posted by [personal profile] ranunculus at 11:24am on 04/11/2025
    For the first night in almost 2 weeks I got a block of 6 hours of sleep.  YAY!

    Went down for my first shift taking care of the horses at Winter Quarters.  Thankfully it wasn't raining.  All the horses were in very high spirits, dashing around bucking and rearing.  Poor Firefly doesn't get to go out with the boys during the day.  She would instantly become obese if left to graze all day.  Instead she gets her portion of hay, in a barrel. 

    The wind is kicking up, it is threatening to really rain. Leaves are blowing off the oaks and fluttering down. 
    Here is a picture of the trees at the Main Gate swathed in yellow grapevines. 

    ranunculus: (Default)
    posted by [personal profile] ranunculus at 10:54am on 04/11/2025
    Decades ago Donald and I visited the Orkney Islands.  We had a wonderful time visiting a variety of Neolithic sites, including Maes Howe, The Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brogar all of which are in close proximity to each other. The major sites were documented and various facts (and guesses) about their age and function were readily available.   We also noted that there were lumps and bumps in the ground showing plenty of evidence of further human activity, though apparently no one knew much about those structures.  Years later I was intrigued to hear that an archeological dig had begun in a farm field between the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brogar.  https://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/

    Posted by James Whitbrook

    Destiny 2 Renegades Bryar Pistol

    'Renegades,' the 'Star Wars'-inspired upcoming expansion for Bungie's sci-fi shooter, will bring you plenty of firepower from a galaxy far, far away... and, of course, a certain laser sword.

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