mellicious | Network

Starting last night, Biggie has been so needy and pestering me all day. No naps. Just could not settle down. It was beginning to look like another instance of eating weird shit. Because of his bladder issues, he's been using the litter box often so I've been getting up and checking it every time. My knees are killing me.

I know he and Julio do not like the new food. And like it less with each meal. Finally this afternoon, Biggie just got up there by his plate and sat. And sat. And sat. I put out some more/fresh food and he just looked at it. Then I added some of the old stuff - the prescription stuff he got last year and they both started gobbling. I even mixed some of the hated stuff in and still gobbling. After they had had their fill, Biggie went in and pooped. It was tiny but it was a poop.

And they both went into the bedroom closet and are fast asleep. I sent a note to the vet hospital asking if the Purina was ok instead of the Royal Camin or Hills, she suggested and they replied quick as a wink, that it was fine. So. Whew. I'd still like to see a very big poop, tho. Just to be very sure.

And in other news... The power company reports as of 10 minutes ago that there are 3 active outages with 4,376 customers impacted and this is the map. I added the ME where my apartment is. I'm happy to report we have juice. Also that I am NOT taking it for granted. I have leftovers from last night for dinner and I think I'll nuke them now rather than wait and chance their being no nuke later.

hafnia

Woke up this morning to a note on Discord from

shadaras that someone had asked for permission to post fic they'd written based on the gigantic Regency origfic project.

Blinked, bleary-eyed, and went over to read the comment in question —

So… I started writing a comment several hours ago, and now I've got a 550-word flash fic about El, Mal, an egg, and several extended metaphors. Might you like to be the first to read it?

(I intend to post it publicly afterwards, unless you'd rather I didn't. In that case I'm just happy to have wrestled a small project to completion; ADHD has been making that hard for me lately!)

Immediately went, "!!" and commented back, of course, saying that I'd love to read it and there's no need to get my approval before posting.

They posted it.

It's really lovely.

Just like when I found out that people were writing stuff set on D&D campaigns I was running, it's very flattering and now I want to go "!!" and tell everyone to read it. Tragically, I cannot do so to the friends that I have locally, as, er, they're not fic people and the tags alone would put them off, but — dude, how cool is that?

yourlibrarian posting in

everykindofcraft

This month's post will be serving double duty as a community promo. I also run the

threeforthememories event, whose 2025 session will be open for posts on January 3, 2026 and will run for 3 weeks until January 24. Participant posts consist of 3 photos (only) you've taken of anything from 2025 that you find meaningful in some way or which represent how you experienced the year. These could be your crafting activities, or anything else you find relevant.

Questions? Visit the announcement post at

threeforthememories

This month's question involves the holidays. Do you normally do crafting over this period? Is it related to any holidays? Do you do craft gifting? And if so, what do you plan to gift this year?

brithistorian

Last night I discovered that Kiiras had released a Christmas song, called "Kiirasmas." I don't think I'd objectively say it's a good song, but it's still fun to listen to.
Watch on YouTube
A few years ago, I did a K-pop Christmas song Advent calendar. This morning, as I added "Kiirasmas" to my K-pop Christmas playlist, I realized that if I wanted to post the whole playlist one song a day, I'd have had to start back on October 15! ^^
After having to spend 40 minutes listening to the store playing Christmas music while I waited for the pharmacy to fill a prescription. I'd like to say: No matter how Christmas-adjacent some of its lyrics may be, "My Favorite Things" is not a Christmas song. I'm willing to get seriously injured on this hill. However, if it means that I'll hear "The Christmas Song" less often, I'm willing to act like it's a Christmas song.

china_shop

With the help of multiple people, I finally got the ancient $15 scanner to talk to my computer via shareware. Woohoo!

(Meanwhile, I can't write a story to save my life. Argh!)

case posting in

fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6922 ⌋

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

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #988.
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.

usuallyhats posting in

doctor_who_sonic

Do you have a Doctor Who community or a journal that we are not currently linking to? Leave a note in the comments and we'll add you to the watchlist (

doctor_watch).

Editor's Note: If your item was not linked, it's because the header lacked the information that we like to give our readers. Please at least give the title, rating, and pairing or characters, and please include the header in the storypost itself, not just in the linking post. Spoiler warnings are also greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Off-Dreamwidth News
Blogtor Who's video of the day for yesterday was a clip from 1972's "The Sea Devils"
"The War Between the Land and the Sea" to be released on DVD and Blu-ray in February
Blogtor Who's video of the day for today is the trailer for the Season 21 Collection

(News via

doctorwhonews_feed and

blogtorwho_feed among others.)

If you were not linked, and would like to be, contact us in the comments with further information and your link.

sholio

And writing about it instead of getting ready to check out of my Airbnb as I ought to be.

( Spoilers obviously, especially for character death/survival )

calimac

My online play-reading group has been exploring, among other things, 19th century English comedy. We've done most of Oscar Wilde's drawing-room comedies (I know, technically Wilde was Irish, but he worked in England) and wondered what else there was. We tried a play by Arthur Wing Pinero, since I knew he was popular at the time, and though the text was genteely anti-semitic (the moral lesson seemed to be that pushy Cockney Jews shouldn't try to socialize with titled gentry; they wouldn't enjoy themselves), but we did enjoy reading the play - it was called The Cabinet Minister - and will probably return to Pinero eventually.

But for our next venture in this area, I suggested that we try a play that I knew was a big hit comedy in its day, the laugh riot of the 1860s, but whose reputation has been besmirched by a tragic event that occurred during a performance. I refer, of course, to Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor, and if you want to read it, it's here.

It turned out to be fairly funny, itself, and again worth reading. As with the Pinero, it's about titled gentry facing money problems - this time they're being cheated by a crooked agent - who are also being faced by a visit by an American cousin who has become the heir to another relative's fortune.

The cousin is from Vermont, specifically Brattleboro, which is at the old, longer-settled end of Vermont, but he sounds and acts more like a Kentucky hillbilly. Before he arrives, another relative who'd gone out to see him writes that he's been out shooting with a party of the Crow people. In Vermont? The Crows live around Montana. Maybe they too were visiting for some unspecified reason, but evidently for Taylor, America is some kind of black box out of which anything can come.

Our member who read the part of Asa, the cousin, had a great time with it. My principal role was that of an inexplicable - there's no explanation of what he's doing there - nobleman called Lord Dundreary, who became the play's breakout character in the first production from a flamboyant performance by the actor. Lord Dundreary is both dimwitted and an inveterate punster, which I guess go together in some people's opinion, and I found it challenging to get across wordplay like this:
Why does a duck go under water? for divers reasons.
Why does a duck come out of the water? for sundry reasons.
According to the misspelling of his dialogue, Lord Dundreary suffers from both an interdental lisp (th for s) and rhotacism (w for r). Trying to perform both of these at once gave me an accent which sounded to me more Eastern European than English.

Interesting play; I'm glad we tried it. We're also finishing up the more obscure end of Shakespeare, our last venture having been Timon of Athens, which is also about a seemingly well-off man with money problems. When it turns out that his open-hearted generosity has left him broke, and none of his beneficiaries will now lend him money in his need, Timon suddenly switches personality and becomes a toxic misanthrope for the rest of the play. His encounter with another, more natively misanthropic character - dueling curmudgeons! - in Act 4 Scene 3 is one of Shakespeare's little-known gems.

susandennis

Several months ago, I decided to have Christian (the designer) help me figure out my closet. I could call the closet designer people but Christian can do that, too, and give them better guidance or not call them and do something else. He said he'd be glad to and I told him then that I was in no hurry. Then I heard nothing.

Then I studied the space and what I want to accomplish and figured out a scheme involving the storage area and my brother and some shelves that I bought from Amazon. To be completed in January when said brother comes to visit.

Then, Christian called last night. We had a good laugh about his guilt at waiting so long and that the only reason he got around to it now is that he has a new Timber Ridge client. So he's going to meet with them on January 2 and then swing by here for lunch and a closet consult.

I didn't mention that I had a plan cause I figure this is the perfect way to vet my ideas and if they suck, then we can talk Plan B. Plus lunch with Christian is always a hoot. So no harm and maybe extra good.

susandennis

Probably the big news today will be clean linens on the bed. So quiet day. We have a new puzzle going in the elbow so there may be some of that.

Biggie is still under watch. He's still peeing a little and often and he's still NOT happy with the new food. He is, however, happy with the treat switch. There are two kinds of treats available for his prescription diet. One is NOT Biggie approved but the other is fine. He seems a bit more needy than usual - needing attention from me - but also more playful with Julio than usual. So, we wait and watch. And hope that if he takes a turn it's before Friday or after Sunday.

Shetland has been a British TV series (taken from Anne Cleeves books) that's been on for a fairly long while. I tried to watch it many times but could never latch on. There's at time and place and I finally found it. I'm now enjoying the heck out of the backlog of episodes. Way more good watching for me than the endless lonely hearts Christmas movies.

Ooops Eastside Emergency and Rescue just came up the drive - lights and sirens. Some Timberidge-ion is not having a wonderful morning.

Biggie keeps hopping up on the counter to check and see if there has been any improvement in the food situation. He takes a few bites and then leaves. And then, apparently, forgets and 15 mins later, repeats. It's pretty funny to watch. At least he still has an appetite!

Guess I'll go get the bed project started and... get dressed.

maju

The temperature has risen quite a bit today (it's well above freezing), and I finally managed to go out for a good brisk walk this morning, covering just over 6 km/4 miles. There was a small amount of ice here and there in shady patches on the roads but nothing I couldn't avoid. The forecast for tomorrow is rain, which is annoying. I guess I'll be climbing the stairs again for exercise.

muccamukk

Fandom and Art Stuff

elasticella: sapphic stocking stuffers.
Lots of great prompts! Open for fills until 31 December, or they're all full, whichever happens last.

Street Art Utopia: The Giant Kitten.
By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain

Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack.
I read this, and was like "hmmmmmmm." Because it seemed plausible that there were bots or whatever, but also a lot of people I'd seen critiquing the album were definitely humans that I knew. But also human conversation can be driven by bots without the humans realising it. And also, I don't care enough about TS to look into the whole mess. Then I saw the following.

MedusoneDeluxe: Rolling Stone embarrasses itself to defend Taylor Swift. Again. (Video: 41 Minutes).
I love it when people actually read the research. So probably not a significant number of bots, but also the science is so sloppy it's impossible to tell.

Trans Rights Are Human Rights
The Walrus: Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.
Lovely, thoughtful look at how we see gender, and maybe kids have this more figured out than a lot of adults to. Older piece, but I enjoyed reading it again.

The Guardian: The WI and Girlguiding have been pressured to exclude trans women – yet the law is clear as mud by Jess O'Thompson.
The Guardian published something non-terrible about trans people in the U.K.! Do the Dance of Joy!

CTV News: Skate Canada to stop hosting events in Alberta due to sports gender law.
Solidarity! From a national sporting organisation! A MIRACLE!

Canadian Politics Stuff
The Tyee: Human Rights Tribunal on RCMP Methods Delays Decision Nearly a Year.
This is some fucking bullshit. The elders are dying of old age before they're seeing any kind of justice. I am enjoying how Amanda Follett Hosgood is so out of fucks to give on the publication ban that she's basically putting up a bright red arrow pointing to A.B.'s name, even if she can't actually say it. Which is John Furlong, incidentally. And seriously, fuck that guy.

The Globe and Mail: Leilani Muir made history suing Alberta over forced sterilization.
This is an older obit, but I dug it up for a school project, and thought it was worth sharing. Not enough people know about Canada's eugenics policies.

Times Colonist: Residential school survivor says he will protest OneBC at other campuses.
We shouldn't need our elders to be superheroes, but nonetheless many of them are.

Times Colonist: Water-contaminated fuel caused crash of Port Hardy-bound plane: TSB.
This is neither here nor there, really, but I find Transportation Safety Board investigations really interesting. Even if they take a really long time (i.e. I found this while looking for information about a more recent crash, but will probably have to wait a couple years to find out what happened to that guy).

Slightly Dated U.S.A. Politics Stuff
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American: December 6, 2025.
Beautifully ties in the events of Pearl Harbor with the politics of today.

Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Parks's Historic Protest.

The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into, as the site says, new patterns, new connections, new relationships. Solidarity is always about connection across difference, about the way you stand with someone you have something crucial in common with but who may be different in other ways. It is a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole. It is e pluribus unum.

oursin

Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.

The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.

Well, we think there is some primeval fertility mojo all ready to support the threatened species, no?

The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)

And in related matters of burgeoning nature and the work of the National Trust, More than 300 seal pups have been born at a colony just a month into the breeding season:

Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals.
The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go.
Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.

***

And another form of conservation: The Digital Future of Stained Glass: Data Standards and Interoperability – Why Recording Stained Glass is Important. (What this sounds like to me is a whole lot of people not talking to one another while doing very similar work and only now getting together....):

Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.

Screaming in archivist been there and done that.

mallorys_camera

Scene 1 (Very vivid in my brain):

An outdoor tent at the fictional Wiltwyck Hospital under which people gather when they think they have COVID. The tent is pitched right outside the very oldest part of the hospital complex, the original building constructed in 1874, and it fronts a grove of very old trees (sugar maples? red oaks? white ash?) where birds sing and squirrels scamper, so the whole scene is very surreal, like a demented Hamptons garden party.

Since the pandemic went official, Grazia has barely been inside the hospital. Her job is to assess patients who score positive on the antigen test. Most of them are dispatched home. A few are culled from the herd and sent inside. It's kind of like a conveyor belt job in a donut factory. Simple. Mindless.

The 2020 summer in upstate New York was the hottest summer since they started keeping records. (That record has since been broken.) Inside her scrubs, beneath her full-isolation drag, Grazia is sweating like a pig and her breath rises up from her surgical mask & fogs the non-prescription glasses she's taken to buying at the Dollar Store because the hospital is too cheap to spring for protective eye gear.

She wants an N95 mask. The hospital won't spring for those, either. She even goes to a strip mall Home Depot for painter N95s though she knows they don't reliably protect against fluids.

She buys the last one anyway, wears it to work one day.

When she takes it off that night, her face is bruised.

###

Scene 2 (a jump):

The ER Director tells Grazia she is being floated inside the hospital because they're short-staffed. She objects to no avail.

Status detail about how the interior of the hospital where the ER once was is practically unrecognizeable—temporary space dividers cordoning off the space in weird ways.

###

Scene 3 (murky!):

The ICU. Six COVID patients. They look like extras in some weird science fiction movie about what happens after the aliens invade and start doing weird experiments on humans. Grazia is not taking care of the humans, she is taking care of their medical equipment. After all, the humans die. But the medical equipment can be reused!

Lots of grim medical status detail.

Grazia befriends a nurse named Julie. They do black humor banter.

###

Scene 4 (not thought out at all):

Julie gets COVID & ends up in the ICU, where she dies.

Grazia has a mental breakdown & ends up joining a religious cult.

Scene 5 (not thought out at all):

Neal rescues Grazia from the religious cult and nurses her back to mental stability.

Last bit has to be a conversation on Neal's front porch in the Catskills—so the prose can segue back to the opening scene of the novel when the five women are congregating there.

###

The religious interest is already pretty well foreshadowed, but I'll have to do some serious foreshadowing around the cult itself, plus decide: Is it a Christian cult or some weird Eastern Yoga cult?

When I first began tromping the local rail trail, I was flabbergasted to discover a Muktanada temple abutted it. Muktananda, an Indian yogic transplant, had a huge temple complex in Oakland; I once actually had a boyfriend who was a devotee. Muktananda's spiritual superpower apparently was the spontaneous awakening of kundalini in others. He particularly liked to awaken kundalini in underage female acolytes.

So, you know. A weird yoga cult appeals!

Except weird yoga cults are rarely evangelical, and I think Grazia must first become conscious of the cult because they set up some kind of recruitment station on the outskirts of the hospital's COVID tent.

But, hey! It's my party, and I can write what I want to. (Cue Leslie Gore.)

###

In other news...

Submitted a client invoice, which means I'm going to spend the next five days having massive anxiety attacks. (What if they never pay me???)

Also, the nearest train station to Betsy's house, where I will be spending the weekend, turns out to be on the Harlem Metro North line. Which means I'm gonna have to drive there.

At least the weather is temporarily warmer: Rumor has it temps will hit 50° today!

And RTT moderated a meeting between Ithaca's mayor & the downtown merchants last night. He looked spiffy:

maju

15. What job would you never do no matter how much it paid? Stripper, and many others.

16. What is the number one solution to healing the world? Impossible to say.

17. What could society do without? We could easily do without the current US president.

18. What stresses you out? Change, especially when it's forced on me. Moving house.

maju

I kept thinking yesterday was Thursday and now I'm convinced that today is Friday.

The girls' concert last night was fun in spite of the rather unskilled playing of some of the participants. There was a strings group, a brass band group, and the fifth grade chorus, and the absolute star of the show was a 3rd grader who had obviously been playing for several years, who played a violin solo. He almost received a standing ovation. The school band is restricted to 4th and 5th graders, except that 3rd graders who can already play an instrument are allowed to join.

I did get to go (obviously), because Aria spent the evening with a friend who lives four or five houses away. Aria was rather predictably still awake when we went to pick her up around 8:30 pm, and the other two went out for icecream with another family after the concert and they didn't get home until after 9, so it was a late night for everybody.

We (the adults in this household) were expecting the girls to be very grumpy and uncooperative this morning, but things went surprisingly smoothly. However, my daughter predicts that it won't be so pleasant after school; she thinks this will be a good night to have a movie night followed by an early bedtime for all.

unicornduke

Monday I painted the crafting room. I hadn't mean to get it all done but that's what ended up happening. My parents keep making cracks about leaving the house then coming home to me finishing a project, to which I go, hmm unlikely but what if

and then doing it

I taped all the important bits, cleaned the room out and rolled the walls in the afternoon while the light was good. I had been planning on doing a test corner to make sure I liked it and when I let it dry and I liked the color a lot, I just got a move on. I took a decent amount of breaks during the day, so painted the detail work during crafting that night, the edges near the windows, corners, near the ceiling and above the windows. Then I stayed late on the call and re-rolled the big areas for a second coat since it had dried by then.

Tuesday morning as soon as the light was good, I did touchups to all the places that I had missed, which wasn't too much. It wasn't actually noticeable from a distance but if you were close, it was possible to see the tan. Then I split more wood to get the pile of logs finish off. The creek down at west has frozen over far earlier than expected, so we won't be able to get a tractor across to skid logs from that hill. We have plans to go on the back hill at the main farm and get some trees from there. 9/25 bags for maple processing and a half tote for house wood. We think there's some basswood in one of the hedgerows that is shading future christmas tree fields, so we are going to take that down for wood.

This post has pre-paint photos. Room all painted. It's a very good color, in sunlight, it is more purple/blue and at night, it is more blue/grey. I like it a lot! It's lighter in person, the phone camera struggles.

An image of the room with light purple/blue/grey walls and dark trim around the window.

An image of the room with light purple/blue/grey walls and dark trim around the window.

( more house renovation details )

oursin

Hasppy birthday,

nomeancity!

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

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Catchy Name Needed

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a tiny thing, and yet

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Christmas music

Aha!

[ SECRET POST #6922 ]

Thursday 18th December 2025

Still thinking about B5? More likely than you think!

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Just when I think...

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This could hardly be more urgently phallic, hmmmmm???

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