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Current Music: Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: Voz emplumada del monte

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Dónde tienen su hogar las aves migratorias?

Where do migratory birds have their home?

Below are just three screenshots from a series of 16 photos on the Instagram account of somadifusa (Laura Ortiz), of murals she and the tattoo artist Azul Luna (Instagram account azulunailustra) painted in Bogota, Colombia.

I'm captivated by these images both of traveling swallows, some bearing backpacks and baskets, some with shells on their back like hermit crabs, and of hearts that are also nests, or that morph into shells, or sprout flowers and eyes. "Home is where the heart is," or the heart makes the home.

They write [my clunky translation--see the link at the end to see their original]

I have seen swallows nest in dark passageways, in airports, beneath bridges, in the palm of a hand and in the center of a star. Their wings cover kilometers, crossing the scars of the earth, their free flight reminding us that to migrate is not a crime and that borders are imaginary.

They conclude their post with a Spanish translation of a poem they believe is by Emily Dickinson, but there's absolutely no sign of it in English, and no sign of it in Spanish, either, except their post. Very strange... Please let them not have been taken in by an AI hallucination... please let there be some other explanation

Original post on Instagram

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I wish this were an exaggeration

What I have seen, essentially wall-to-wall across social media, for the past week:
-'Why is no one talking about [this atrocity]?'
-'Why are people talking about [this injustice and not that injustice]?' (Often two different posts by two different people, in quick succession, with said injustices reversed.)
-'What you are doing in response to [this injustice] is insufficient.'
-'If you haven't mentioned [this atrocity] on your social media, you're part of the problem.'
-'If you've mentioned [this injustice and not that injustice] on your social media, you're a hypocrite and part of the problem.'
-'You're protesting the wrong way.'
-'Protesting when it's permitted by the state isn't real protest.'
-'These protests are all a bit cringe, aren't they?'
-'You're condemning [this atrocity], but not in the right way.'
-'You're condemning [this atrocity], but far too late.' (This coming, without irony, from the same people I witnessed several years ago saying, 'it's never too late to find courage and speak out publicly against [this same atrocity].')

What I have seen, in much smaller numbers — a little fragment struggling to stay afloat in the deluge:
-'[This injustice] is an injustice for these specific reasons, and here is something concrete that anyone reading/viewing this post can do to help.'

Needless to say, whenever I witnessed the latter, I actually did the things suggested, and felt much more of a sense of agency and purpose, than when I saw the former.

(And obviously I recognise the irony of being irritated by people complaining about what they see/don't see on social media rather than trying to offer concrete solutions to the consequences of major (geo)political injustices ... and then writing a whole post complaining about what I see/don't see on social media. But I am just. so. tired.)

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FIC "Night Watch" (Oh Whistle - MRJ) Parkins/Wilson G

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Guess who's working the election next week!

I honestly should stop by the ETG thrift store and see if I can get a different dress, though - my options are long pants and sleeves, or a bright red dress, which seems... well, anyway. It's a great dress in most other contexts, though. (Maybe a skirt? I could find a skirt and a nice short-sleeved top? Then again, if this weather continues the way it has been I might be better off bundled up! It's mid-June and my heater is on.)

*************

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FIC "Mon cœur est pour toi" (Aces High) Captain Sinclair/Stephen Croft T

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Current Music: Muna, "Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)"

With that you're-on-camera smile like she wants to try me on

Shortly after we had headed off to collect fish and chips for dinner with my mother,

spatch's delivery of "Frying tonight!" led into my description of Kenneth Williams as the "total package." We had earlier in the day been discussing the cultural relativity of communicating in quotations. At one point in order to indicate that it was time to leave the house, I called, "To the lighthouse!"

(Fresh Pond Seafood gave us extra of everything and I had a lovely interaction with a young trans woman wearing all the jewelry she had been able to find in her newly moved house. The treasury looked spectacular on her, especially the rhyme of the silver heart bangle on her wrist with her heart-framed, literally rose-tinted glasses.)

WERS has introduced me to Muna's "Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)" (2021), which I assume is on rotation either because it's Pride or because it's a banger. I am as incapable of selecting one favorite fictional lesbian as any other single shot, but the first contenders look like the ironclad classics of Florian del Guiz in Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Manke and Rifkele in Sholem Asch's גאָט פֿון נעקאָמע/God of Vengeance (1907), and Corky and Violet in the Wachowskis' Bound (1996).

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2515 / Fic - The Pitt

the body holds its shape
The Pitt | Jack/Robby | ~2400 words | Thanks to

sheafrotherdon and

trinityofone for audiencing/betaing.

(Also on AO3)

( 'No,' Jack said. 'No fucking way, tea doesn't do this. I've had tea before. My grandmother drank tea every day of her life, god rest her, and nothing like this ever happened to her.' Or; the Pitt has a bodyswap incident. )

Current Mood: drained

reading

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[ SECRET POST #6737 ]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #964.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Pizza activity spikes just before reports of Israel attacking Iran

So I guess we can just add this to the Waffle House and Yankee Candle indices.

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Picture Book Monday: Chooch Helped

I wrapped up the Newbery Honor books of 2025 with Andrea L. Rogers’ Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott Medal this year for Rebecca Lee Kunz’s rich sunset-colored illustrations. It’s a picture book about a long-suffering older sister who watches as her two-year-old brother “helps” various family members complete their tasks, usually by accidentally making more tasks by spilling the flour, pulling up the newly planted garden vegetables, tearing out the stitches in a freshly sewn pucker-toe moccasin, etc.

The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!

As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.

(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)

The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.

Current Music: Laufey, "Silver Lining"

When you go to hell, I'll go there with you, too

I wish to express my strenuous distaste for this week starting off with the curtain rod falling onto my head as I stepped into the shower with such force that

spatch heard the noise of stainless steel onto skull from the bedroom. It hurt appallingly. It still doesn't feel so hot. I called after-hours care and was duly presented with a checklist of symptoms of concussion and brain bleed to watch out for, an activity not exactly compatible with attempting to plunge myself into unconsciousness for the few short hours before I need to be functional for already scheduled calls and appointments. I would like to know who I need to sacrifice to get a break. I always liked haruspicy. I know it's your own liver that counts.

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fic,
fic:bts

BTS drabble: Backwards Compatibility

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You can send this on to any dads in your life.

[ SECRET POST #6736 ]

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Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #964.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: curious

Middle earth

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Weekly proof of life: mostly media, including a review of my history with Leverage

Eating: This weekend is

scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.)

Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.

I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far.

Watching: Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that,

scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.

Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to

wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as

scruloose and

wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.

We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4.

wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.

But last week,

scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.

Sabrina Carpenter album cover take

Ophie Dokie released us from the requirement to have one of these, but then linked to a video I thought was quite good (

BryonyClaire: Sabrina Carpenter has divided the internet - is satire dead?), and then I saw how it's been rolling out across the Internet. So here goes. ( cutting for the sake of people who are sick of this discourse. )

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We can rely on each other from one corner to another

This is going to be a fairly short catch up, in spite of all the things that have been going on. I don't think I've posted properly on Dreamwidth for several weeks — but I have been massively busy. This weekend is the first time in quite a while that I've felt relaxed and not as if I were lacking in huge quantities of sleep.

My mum, and then sister #1 arrived to visit. Mum will be back (she's doing her usual multiple-month European summer holiday), but my sister just stayed for a few days. Currently the pair of them are in Italy, wandering around beautiful places (which I envy) in 35-degree heat (which I don't).

My sister's time in the UK coincided with Beyoncé's London concerts, and she asked if I wanted to go if she covered the costs (she's always wanted to see Beyoncé in concert and had never had the opportunity since she doesn't tour Australia any more) and dealt with all the palaver of sitting online refreshing the ticketing website when they went live. So now I can cross 'attend massive stadium concert' off my list of cultural experiences. The London weather did not cooperate (although fortunately our seats were under cover), but that didn't stop procedings: nine outfit changes, incredible band and dancers, lots of theatre and pyrotechnics, and of course music and stage presence enough to fill that vast space. I wouldn't say it's my favourite way to experience live music (I like gigs in weird little clubs with thirty other people), but I'm glad I went.

We only got home after midnight, and I then went out the next night to the silent disco ('90s music-themed this time) with Matthias, so I was completely exhausted.

Beyond that, my family's visit involved a lot of good food (my sister took me out for a meal at this place as a fortieth birthday present, she, Mum, Matthias and I went to this place for lunch, etc), some wandering around London, and a chance to see the excellent British Library exhibition on the history of gardening in the UK.

Unfortunately, my sister also brought her Australian germs with her, and I was then horrendously sick with a cold for most of last week, recovering just in time to head over to Worcester for a conference. Refreshingly, this was the first library or educational conference I've attended in several years that wasn't completely dominated by the topic of generative AI (indeed it didn't even get mentioned until one of the questions asked of the presenter of the final presentation), which was nice. I returned home on Friday, immediately cancelled my classes at the gym for Saturday, and collapsed in exhaustion.

My most recent reading (with the exception of Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum) has been decidedly mediocre, and I think the combination of my low tolerance for a) poor editing and copyediting and b) 'cosy' fiction is going to lead me to be a lot more cautious in picking up any currently hyped SFF (especially fantasy) unless I am already familiar with the author. I came to the realisation after reading two such disappointing books in quick succession that although I love stories which involve a lot of domesticity, cosiness just does not work for me, since it seems to currently translate as no conflict (or the kinds of conflict that are easily resolved by a conversation, or a character spontaneously offering help with nothing previously building to that point). Hopefully I'll make better book choices after this previous run.

I think it's possibly fair to say that I want cosy cottagecore in my own life, and not in my fiction!

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my writing: fics: bnha

Pinch hits revealed!

While I was actively writing BNHA fic a couple of months ago, I also ended up picking up a couple of pinch hits which have since been revealed!

Exploring Hawks' complicated relationship with his mother in

unsent_letters_exchange:

Appendix B | Hawks & Toomie | 1.2k words | rated T
Summary: At sixteen, a week after being taught how to break into a computer, Hawks breaks into the Hero Public Safety Commission's database to look up his own file. Whatever he expected to find in there, it didn't include dozens of letters from his mother.
Read it on Dreamwidth or AO3.

And indulgent Dabi/Hawks vampire AU for the

fangfrenzyficexchange :D

Addiction in the making | Dabi/Hawks | 1.4k words | rated T
Summary: Hero society's best kept secret might be that every Pro Hero in the Top 10 is turned into a vampire. Dabi knows, though he doesn't realise that Hawks' secret is a little different...
Read it on Dreamwidth or on AO3.