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Unchained Love: fanfic: an irresistible force
Fandom: Unchained Love (mods: you can use the Cdrama tag)
Pairing: Xiao Duo/Bu Yinlou
Author's note: spoilers for a minor scene.
Challenge: Wrench
Length: 100 words
Summary: Yinlou promised the flowers would fall from the tree. She doesn't like to break her promises.
( Read more... )
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I don't know what to make of this

The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:
Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?
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Daily Check-In
How are you doing?
I am OK
7 (46.7%)
I am not OK, but don't need help right now
8 (53.3%)
I could use some help
0 (0.0%)
How many other humans live with you?
I am living single
3 (20.0%)
One other person
7 (46.7%)
More than one other person
5 (33.3%)
Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
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Short Story
https://pseudopod.org/2025/09/26/pseudopod-995-data-ghost/
Also, Queen Demon, the sequel to Witch King, will be out on October 7, in ebook, hardcover, and audiobook narrated by Eric Mok.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/queen-demon-martha-wells/b7abd63577bd30a5?ean=9781250826916&next=t
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#12 Meeting an Ally (part 4 of 4, complete )
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 4 of 4, complete
Word count (story only): 1845
[Tuesday, May 5, 2020, midday]
:: Meeting new people is seldom easy, but the situation is complicated by several factors, leaving Aidan, Vic, Ed, and Mac trying to break several boulder-sized problems into gravel that they can move more easily. Part of the Edison’s Mirror arc. ::
Back to Meeting an Ally, part 3
To the Edison's Mirror Index
On to Shopping and Sharing
“Should we wait for Vic to get back?” Shandiin asked.
Aidan considered, but Ed spoke up before the older man. “No. He’s going to stay and help for as long as he can. That could be ten hours, twenty, or several days.”
“There are things called food and sleep,” Henry protested.
( Read more... )
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Chicagoans, post pics and video!
Fascist Trump’s allies are out today repeating the “cities are war zones” lie, so anybody in Chicago needs to get out there and starting posting pictures of their “war zone” just like Portland.
“Chicago’s a nightmare, it is literally a war zone” — Rand Paul
People you expect to know better will not, in fact know better. I’ve run into this too damn many times. People who you’d think wouldn’t bite on this bullshit absolutely will bite on this bullshit. So you need to reveal the lie through a massive flood of photographic evidence you vouch for personally, yourself.
Post your reality, Chicago. Everywhere. Starting right now.
(video with relevant quote via Aaron Rupar)
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
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vital functions
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.
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Plumbing - Glad I'm not the owner.
They never found what caused the water.
So, Friday I got messages there was a plumbing emergency and they needed to get into my apartment. I couldn't get in touch with them, so I left work early- only to find there was not water all over the place. When I called again, I got through. They said they'd already been in and everything was fine. OK, thanks for letting me know.
A few hours later they sent a text that there was a plumbing issue that "may eventually involve your unit." There will be visits sometime between Tuesday and Thursday to evaluate.
I get stressed out about maintenance and people in my apartment, and especially about the idea of relocating. I'm trying not to catastrophize, though.
At least I'm not the owner.
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Minipoem time
Seahorse
I carried you
Even though
I—
I am no woman;
(I will love all things that grow
And are,
And am,
Not barren)
You taught my roots to drink
My trunk to span realms
My branches to embrace the stars:
We were the world,
Together.
You were never as heavy
As how
The world
Saw me.
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The School Reader: Second Book
A book concerned chiefly with reading. Vocabulary words listed before each story, poem, or bit. Interesting for the view of what they used to teach children. Views of science and of character.
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[ SECRET POST #6841 ]
⌈ Secret Post #6841 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.

( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #977.
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.
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Check-In Post - Sept 28th 2025
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question (courtesy of
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If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
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God knows what indiscretions I committed
I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."
The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.
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Tiger by the Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse

Nine science fiction stories by the author of The Universe Between.
Tiger by the Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse
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Sunday 28/09/2025
2) It’s nice and warm on my sunny balcony, perfect to properly wake up with a cup of coffee
3) Going out for dinner with my parents
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I just watched the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters!
And since I also have Netflix.... I fired it up and watched it at pretty much the same time they were watching it two states away!
This is an animated movie that released theatrically a month or so ago. And it was a blast. A trio of young women (older teens?) are a pop group called Huntr/x that are hugely famous and popular. Secretly they are demon hunters, keeping Korea (and the world?) safe from the demon horde of Gwi-Ma as their songs reinforce a shield called the Honmoon. Gwi-Ma sends a boy band of demons - the Saja Boys - to interfere with Huntr/x and destroy their plans to finalize the seal of the Honmoon. Things go great, things go bad, total chaos - cats and dogs living together. Well, birds with hats and too many eyes and cat/tigers that look to me like they came from a Miyazaki film (very cool).
It was riotously funny, I was laughing out loud at it (but I have notoriously questionable taste). The music was great, and they did a fantastic job with the mix so that you could actually hear and understand the singing! They really played up the tropes of: girls instantly falling in love with boy band performers, automatic choreography and singing synchronization, etc. But you did actually get to see the girls rehearsing for an important performance.
I thought it was a lot of fun for a very silly, animated movie. Russet didn't care for it as much, saying (via text): "Well. That was. Something". If you're interested but hesitant, I'd suggest watching the four or so trailers that Netflix has with it. That should set your opinion firmly one way or another.