hp_diversity | Member Posts

Maybe I'm on the threshold of being able to articulate some new facet of the problem that I haven't been able to express before, or maybe it's all the same noise.

( tldr )

delphi

Fandom 50 #3

Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, 1979's is one that's probably popped into my head at least one morning a week since I was five:

Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn

Watch on YouTube

delphi

Another theatrical streaming plug:

The pro-shot of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Ncuti Gatwa, Sharon D. Clarke, and Hugh Skinner, will be streaming on Youtube from March 12th to 18th!

Watch on YouTube

A bit from the show:

Watch on YouTube

National Theatre at Home has been one of my favourite streaming services for a long time now, with the way it bring UK theatre to someone like me (not in the UK, also not living in a place that gets much in the way of touring shows), and I'm really happy they're releasing this one for free on a bigger platform.

delphi

If anyone's interested in checking out some queer comedy theatre with a slate of great trans and gnc performers:

The Joy Who Lived: March 31st to April 12th

You can find a list of shows by date or you can browse by category. Shows are running both in person in Los Angeles and as live streaming events that are also available to view up to two weeks afterwards. I tuned in a while back for their fundraising show, a chaotic live runthrough of the Ocean's 11 script called Gender Heist, and it was a heck of a good time.

ursamajor

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: i hope this song will guide you home

Stuck in my head this week: the CHVRCHES cover of Such Great Heights. Lauren Mayberry was the opener for the Northeastern leg of the Postal Service anniversary tour, and I have been enjoyably earwormed with her band's version of this song. It's making me want to do a ukelele cover of it, somehow.

( YT video within )

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I don't usually pay that much attention to celebrity news, nor am I a fan of horror movies (I tend to run screaming the other direction), but it feels right to rewatch Army of Darkness upon hearing the news that whatever cancer Bruce Campbell's just announced that he's got is "treatable, but not curable." But jeez, that's like two major ones of these "fuck cancer" announcements in just a few weeks now. Le sigh.

Of course, this means I'll need to figure out how to get ahold of a copy of said movie, and I'm feeling just cantankerous enough about the state of media preservation that I'm wondering where I can pick up a physical copy on DVD (yes, DVD, we don't have a BluRay player). And it turns out there's apparently fifty bajillion editions, heh.

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This year's hamantaschen flavors: vanilla dough with cherry preserves, vanilla dough with apricot hot pepper jelly, chocolate dough with raspberry preserves, chocolate dough with peanut butter. I tried out Smitten Kitchen's dough recipe this year to see how a buttery dough behaved compared to the oil-based recipe I usually use from

noghri, with mixed success. The chocolate dough options remained intact, probably partly because I didn't roll it out to 1/8" thin, partly because I froze the peanut butter balls before folding them into the dough, and partly because the raspberry preserves were thick enough to not spread. I think it came out a little dry relative to the fillings, probably two minutes too long in the oven. The vanilla dough behaved with the apricot hot pepper jelly because it wasn't really a jelly, definitely more of a preserves texture. But with the cherry "preserves," it was another story, because the texture of that was much closer to an improperly-set jam, which I only realized starting to scoop it into the cookies. If you think all of the blowouts were the cherry ones, you'd be right!

Had friends over for dinner to help eat the hamantaschen, and I also made chicken adobo and rice and a mizuna salad with seaweed dressing. K brought fancy fruity sodas from TJ's, and we didn't remotely realize how late it had gotten until one of us looked at our watches and gasped that it was after midnight, heh. I really ought to do that more often; I like hosting my friends and us gossiping around a table until all hours. Plus, it's good motivation to keep things a bit tidier around here!

And it felt good to show off progress in the library/my office. Still need to figure out the desk situation; still need to frame the art I want to hang up in there; still want this rug to drape over the back of the glider chair. And I need to figure out a good reading lamp. But now that we've been here almost five years, figuring out how to make things the way we want; what we want to change, what we want to keep.

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I never did post about our Super Bowl menu, but we made:

- Seattle: Teriyaki Wings, because it's a thing; every Seattle local friend I've ever visited there has taken me out for teriyaki there.
- Boston: Miso Clam Chowder. Used the Saveur recipe as a base, then to get it closer to Oga-style, added an assortment of Japanese mushrooms. Subbed out the cream for coconut milk, but that swung the flavor profile significantly more Thai, so I may need to consider other options if I want it to taste like Oga's. And I'll go ahead and pick up some ume next time for a topping, I think it needs just a bit of that fermented sourness to taste right.

I ran out of steam before making it to the Boston Cream Pie (Joanne Chang's, of course), but I did also make a smoked salmon dip: cream cheese, lemon juice, dill, onion powder, green onions, garlic, chili crisp, and smoked salmon on top.

primeideal

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms. Treats are enabled.

Note for this particular exchange: I hope to be traveling at the time gifts are revealed, I may not be able to comment promptly. I look forward to savoring my gift when I have time to sit at a computer and read!

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

Anathem

Pre-Contact Mathic Life

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution

Pre-Contact Mathic Life:

I love all the weird math monk stuff. Patterns for bells and sleeping arrangements! Clock towers! Labyrinths between the different tiers! Everything the Ita are doing behind the scenes to make it functional! Anything set in the world of the concents would be great. It sounds like Saunt Edhar's is more ascetic than some of the other concents, so something set elsewhere with different traditions could be a neat contrast.

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution:

What's going to happen post-canon as people react to new jargon from the Daban Arnud? Weird/nonsensical multilingual puns that make no sense? What languages do people speak with each other on the Daban Arnud? Were there Millennials patiently waiting to add their neologisms and then oops, aliens? Do the avout incorporate any vocabulary from the saeculars, or do they still consider that a corrupting influence?

Paradises Lost
WB: Any

What a fascinating story! The contrasts between how the Zeroes feel that they might be depriving their descendants of something important, and the descendants' awareness of their own good fortune, are powerful. "History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again." Guh. And the commentary about "noble lies" being condescending and potentially as dangerous as fundamentalism was really well done. Anything in this setting would be fascinating, with canon characters and/or OCs.

I'd be interested in any other traditions similar to the way religion develops on the ship--things arising to respond to societal issues, and then over the generations, growing and evolving into something the Zero generation couldn't have predicted.

More about the dynamics of family units, motherchildren versus fatherchildren? What considerations do people take in choosing someone else to reproduce with?

Some of the missing scenes? How do we get from "Luis arguing about religion" to "Luis gets elected council leader" so quickly?

Future communication with earth? Do other ships eventually arrive on the new planet? What traditions have developed by that point?

Project Hail Mary

Steve Hatch

I love Steve and how faith and science complement each other for him. Ryland kind of lampshades "you're the most optimistic guy I've ever met," which is saying something by the standards of an Andy Weir novel. More about his optimism in dark times? He seems very confident in his belief that the Beatles are just objectively the best musicians; more of his unshakable takes? Is he still alive by the time of the Beatle (spaceships)' return, and if so, what does he make of them? How does he incorporate the discovery of Eridians into his worldview?

Remembrance of Earth's Past

Cheng Xin
Yang Dong
Ye Wenjie

Cheng Xin:

A fix-it where she doesn't miss Yun Tianming at their star? Any kind of outside POV on her and the many different hats she wears: Older men patronizing her during Project Staircase? The humans resenting her in Australia? Luo Ji and the museum? What if she'd stayed on the cylinder worlds near Jupiter where things felt "normal" and 2000s-y? Her relationship with Guan Yifan--is he really a different kind of human for having been to space, or are they more two sides of the same coin?

Yang Dong:

For someone who has very little time "on screen," she casts a long shadow over all of the books. More about her friendship with the programmer from "Death's End," and/or with Luo Ji? What if she'd survived--what would she have made of her mother's betrayal? How would things have gone with Ding Yi?

Ye Wenjie:

Secrets at Red Coast Base? Some more of the "declassified" documents? The early days of the ETO? What did she work out about Dark Forest theory before meeting Luo Ji? What if Yang Dong had talked to her about the documents she'd sneaked a look at? Or if Ye had lived long enough to discover more of Deterrence theory herself?

Steerswoman
WB: Any
Bel & or / Rowan

I was thrilled by the worldbuilding in this series--the depiction of Rowan's scientific inquiry is great, even if our perspective as readers is different from the characters'. And I especially enjoyed the complexity of Outskirter society in "Steerswoman's Road"--the tribes closer to the Inner Lands growing more militaristic and less cultured, the Face People and Efraim's weirdness around women, the naming ceremony and recitation of ancestors, the importance of poetry and lore--that makes them much more than "wilderness raiders."

There are lots of great tropey moments with Bel and Rowan that can be either shippy or gen: huddling for warmth, teaching each other swordplay, taking care of each other when they get dysentery! If you're so inclined, I'd be interested to see a shippy expansion on any of these, or something else along these lines. Another misunderstanding with the courtship gifts outside the tent?

Something more worldbuilding-focused elsewhere in the world would also be neat--documents at the Archives? Steerswomen and wizards' POV on the same events? What does religion look like in a world where Christian symbols and language exist but most people don't remember their homeworld? (I'd prefer no authorial bashing of any specific belief system or lack thereof, but canon-typical disagreements/skepticism on different characters' part is fine and expected!)

Crossover Fandom:

Sazed (Mistborn) & Taravangian (Stormlight Archive)
They both control two Shards now--Sazed's seem like inherent opposites, Taravangian's don't. What happens when they meet? Taravangian tries to talk Sazed into letting Taravangian combine more shards for the greater good? Sazed turns Taravangian's logic against him? Could they meet in some kind of pocket universe/Cognitive Realm nonsense/AU setting where their immense powers don't really come into play and it's just the two guys bickering at each other?

primeideal

Last bingo square: "Generic Title," title needs to contain one of a handful of cliche words, including "Bone" as an option. After a false start, tracked down this, the first in a trilogy.

The world of the Scattered Archipelago is almost all ocean, and there's a lot of seafaring. There's an ongoing war between the Hundred Islands and the Gaunt Islands, with both sides accusing the others of kidnapping children and forcing them into slavery or human sacrifice, but it's been going on so long that the beginning has probably been forgotten. Ships have historically been constructed from the bones of arakeesians (water dragons), but they're almost extinct now, so maybe the war will fizzle out because of lack of weapons?

This was a good example of indirect worldbuilding through language choice. The captain of a ship is generically "shipwife" and the disciplinary officer is "deckmother" (regardless of their actual sex); the default for generic person is always "woman or man" (rather than "man or woman"); ships are referred to as "he," a generic form of bravado is "tits" (where our world might use "balls"), etc. Not tendentious, but a good example of how background language subtly reflects how the characters, and the readers, view society.

There is also some interesting worldbuilding going on around the nonhuman creatures in the world. A ship can get magically-boosted wind speed/direction through the help of its "gullaime," a birdlike creature with magical powers, and the gullaimes seem to be related to the arakeesians in some fashion. But humans' exploitation of the gullaimes is basically slavery plus brutal eye trauma. It's strongly implied that the only reason our protagonists' ship is able to survive when others wouldn't is because they have an especially strong gullaime, or maybe just one that's been mutilated less than typical.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really invested in the POV character. Joron Twiner, nineteen, has been condemned to the "black ships" (crewed by criminals with lingering death sentences) after a miscarriage of justice. A young aristocrat killed his father in, essentially, a drunken vehicular accident (I liked this twist just because it was so mundane and, in a sad way, reflective of our world). Joron got his revenge in a duel, but due to the very hierarchical classist/ableist society, was criminialized anyway via a miscarriage of justice. Before the book begins, he was briefly made shipwife of his own ship, the "Tide Child" just because he wasn't part of any existing faction, and drinks away his days.

Then "Lucky" Meas Gilbryn shows up. A formidable shipwife and daughter of the ruler of the lands, she's been sentenced to the black ships nevertheless, and begins whipping everybody into shape on "Tide Child." Joron is demoted to "deckkeeper" (second-in-command), and basically we're just watching from his point of view as she delivers a bunch of training montages, etc.

I can see how, if Meas is the most active, taking-agency character, you might not want the entire story to be from her POV--she could come off as too overpowered. But Joron is even less interesting. It's not clear why she keeps him as her #2, he's mostly just along for the ride, and sometimes to play good cop to her bad cop. And then there's a Goblin Emperor-esque theme developing of "I can never be friends with these people, just their officer, oh well." Even when he occasionally shows agency, jumping into a fight, he doesn't know why he's doing it: "He almost brought his hand to his mouth upon saying it, he was so shocked by his own words."

At first we're told that Joron resents Meas for "taking" his job, even though he doesn't really do anything with it, and sort of led to believe that his alcoholism will become a problem. But that just fizzles out. There's a lot of one-liner italicized flashbacks to "as my father used to say" or to his father's death, but it doesn't really add anything. And maybe there's supposed to be a plotline around him overcoming cowardice, but I don't feel like his actions are that strange or unusual, everybody has a self-preservation instinct even on a ship of people condemned to death.

Meas does a lot of "who's with me? Are you with me?" "yes we're with you, shipwife" "I can't hear you, are you with me???" "Yes Shipwife!" "Say it louder" "YES SHIPWIFE" "okay, good, let's go." I find this kind of audience-participation thing patronizing, I don't need to see it in fiction.

The text tries to depict the horrors of war via "hurry up and wait" themes and repetition. As realistic as it is, I'm not sure it pays off in prose. Joron felt anxious. And then the enemy ship drew closer. The parrot said some curse words. And then the enemy ship drew closer. Meas adjusted her lucky hat. And then the enemy ship drew closer. We get it.

On a sentence level, it didn't seem to be very well edited, there are various runaway sentences and dangling modifiers:

"It did not take long for Tide Child, carried on the strange magic of the windtalker, which cooed to itself as it worked, for the ship’s lookouts to get a clearer look at the flukeboats."

"Solemn Muffaz nodded to Gavith, who ran to the bell on the rail at the fore of the rump of the ship." There's nothing wrong with this sentence but I feel like five consecutive prepositional phrases (of the exact same word/letter count) is too much.

When it comes to Call A Rabbit a Smeerp, everyone's threshold is different, but the sun, moon, and stars are, respectively, personified as the Eye, Blind Eye, and Bones of Skearith the Godbird. Every time. Characters get "eyeburned" instead of "sunburned." For me, personally, this was unnecessary and distracting.

Meas' backstory was intriguing. Hundred Islands culture places a strong value on childbirth and healthy babies; if a mother survives her first delivery and the baby has no birth defects, it's sacrified to become a magical "ghostlight" for the non-black ships. But Meas survived this ritual because the gods (Maiden, Mother, and Hag instead of Crone) didn't want her, hence the "Lucky" epithet. Meas' mother had twelve more children, which, as the most prolific matriarch on the islands, makes her the ruler. But Meas got sentenced to the black ships anyway. Is that because she's secretly working to end the war once and for all? Or some other kind of treachery?

This and the worldbuilding were compelling, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in seeking out two more books from Joron's POV. There's a lot of "oh well, we will probably all die, but we've been sentenced to death anyway so let's just do our duty," but after a few quick deaths of named characters in the early chapters, most of the book comes and goes without the stakes or tension feeling earned.

Bingo: Generic Title, could also count for Pirates, previous Readalong. Maybe Down with the System?

delphi

Fandom 50 #2

Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, here's 1978's:

Trinque l'amourette by La Bottine Souriante

Watch on YouTube

delphi

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

delphi

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

delphi

Fandom 50 #1

I'm trying another March to March round of Fandom 50 (the challenge where you try to make fifty themed posts in a year), and this time around I thought I'd focus on Canadian music. As a bit of extra fun for myself, I'm going to try to find one song I love per year from the past fifty years—and as it happens, 1977 gave us one of my all-time faves.

We're Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time) by Trooper

Watch on YouTube

delphi

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

HP Diversity

Member Posts

vicious circle?

Post and Jam: Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn (1979)

The Importance of Being Earnest - Streaming March 12-18

The Joy Who Lived

just press post already

Dear Author (Sufficiently Advanced 2026)

(SFF Bingo): The Bone Ships, by RJ Barker

Post and Jam: Trinque l'amourette by La Bottine Souriante (1978)

Six Sentence Sunday

What I'm Reading: Rivages lointains | Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Anaïs Flogny (2023)

Post and Jam: We're Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time) by Trooper [1977]

Six Sentence Sunday

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