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Dec. 11th, 2025 09:36 am
oursin: hedgehog in santa hat saying bah humbug (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] crookedeye!

QC Rerun Time 2025 #44

Dec. 10th, 2025 09:00 pm
[syndicated profile] questionable_content_feed

It's hard to believe the first Cubetown visit was like 800 friggin' comics ago, holy crap. Time does weird things when you draw a comic every day for 20-odd years. As I recall, at this point I was still trying to figure out if QC would switch solely to focus on Marten and Claire's Cubetown adventures, or if I'd split the focus between Cubetown and Northampton. I ended up doing the latter, which I think was the right choice. Too many fun characters to just leave behind like that! And of course then I immediately added like four new ones, and then Anh basically took over the comic for a year. Is Sam still going through her goth phase? IS it just a phase? ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT (I will do whatever seems funniest at the time)

New community > comicsfanfiction

Dec. 10th, 2025 07:43 pm
flareonfury: (Felicia/Peter)
[personal profile] flareonfury posting in [site community profile] dw_community_promo
[community profile] comicsfanfiction


Community Description: [community profile] comicsfanfiction is for any comic book fanfiction including comic strips, webcomics, and graphic novels. Any rating is accepted. Feel free to post your old or new works!

Silksong: the "epilogue"

Dec. 10th, 2025 08:57 pm
schneefink: Quirrel from Hollow Knight sitting on a bench (HK Quirrel on bench)
[personal profile] schneefink
I played very little Silksong in the past 1-2 weeks and did pretty much everything I wanted to in my first playthrough (before the DLCs come out) so now is a good time to post the "epilogue" notes.

Things I did after the true ending )

Some more thoughts )

LPs I watched )

I already know what I want to play next: Hades 2, of course. (But probably not this year, I have a huge backlog of books etc.)

DecRecs 2025 days 6-10

Dec. 10th, 2025 11:35 am
forestofglory: E. H. Shepard drawing of Christopher Robin reading a book to Pooh (Default)
[personal profile] forestofglory
Here's the last several days of DecRecs!

Day 6
I am sick to day but I don't want to miss #DecRecs so you are getting an old favorite "Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

It's a delightful short story featuring fandom, friendship and robot pals!

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/

Day 7
I'm still not feeling great today so another old favorite for #decRecs "The Witches of Athens" by Lara Elena Donnelly is one of my comfort reads. It's everything that I want cozy SFF to be. Featuring sisterhood, coffee shops, and queer romance

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-witches-of-athens/

And since I mentioned cozy SFF this seems like a good time to link back to the piece I wrote about cozy SFF earlier this year -- "Domestic Labor and Community Building Rec List"

https://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/2025/05/29/domestic-labor-and-community-building-rec-list.html

Day 8
Doing a little better today so I want to talk about my favorite drama I watched this year for #DecRecs
Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung! It's a historical kdrama about a young woman who becomes a historian -- one of the people charged with writing down everything that happens in court for the historical record. It's so so good!

Things I love about Rookie Historian:
*It's thematically about history and why it matters!
*Young women succeeding at traditionally masculine jobs
*female friendship!
*it depicts but doesn't endorse monarchy
*The ML is a princess coded chaos mupet and I love him

Day 9
Since I just posted and annotated bibliography todays #DecRecs has to be Zotero!
Zotero is a free citation manager! It's great! I'm not an academic and am not writing papers for publication but I love it!
I have a lot of PDFs and they aren't always easy to sort through, but Zotero make it easy for me to find things! I can tag them and search.
I also love that I can drag and drop and Zotero will pick up any meta data!

Zotero is a great tool for fic research. I've used it to create bibliographies for several fics now (including an annotated bibliography for my most recent fic)
I generally create tag for each fic as go along and it makes it easy to find stuff again.

Day 10
Today for #DecRecs I want to rec Intergalactic Mixtape! This a SFF newsletter that my friend Renay started this year! It's got links to interesting articles and reviews, smart thoughts and recs! It's joy to get it in my inbox every week!

https://buttondown.com/intergalacticmixtape
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.

Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.

Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....

On the go

To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.

Up next

The new (double-issue) Literary Review

Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


An Icelandic horror novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal! I had no idea she's fluent in Icelandic.

Iðunn experiences unexplained fatigue and injuries when she wakes up, but is gaslit by doctors and offered idiotic remedies by co-workers. (Very relatable!) Meanwhile, she's being semi-stalked by her ex-boyfriend/co-worker, her parents refuse to accept that she's a vegetarian and keep serving her chicken, and the only living beings she actually likes are the neighborhood cats that she's allergic to.

After what feels like an extremely long time, it finally occurs to her that she might be sleepwalking, and some time after that, it finally occurs to her to video herself as she sleeps. At that point some genuinely scary/creepy/unsettling things happen, and I was very gripped by the story and its central mystery.

Is Iðunn going out at night and committing all the acts she's normally too beaten down or scared to do while sleepwalking or dissociating? Is she having a psychotic break? Is she a vampire? Is she possessed? Does it have something to do with a traumatic past event that's revealed about a third of the way in?

Other than the last question, I have no idea! The ending was so confusing that I have no idea what it was meant to convey, and it did not provide any answers to basically anything. I'm also not sure what all the thematic/political elements about the oppression of women had to do with anything, because they didn't clearly relate to anything that actually happened.

Spoilers!

Read more... )

This was a miss for me. But I was impressed by the very fluent and natural-sounding translation.

Content note: A very large number of cats are murdered. Can horror writers please knock it off with the dead cats? At this point it would count as a shocking twist if the cat doesn't die.

(no subject)

Dec. 10th, 2025 09:44 am
oursin: hedgehog in santa hat saying bah humbug (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] cofax7!

QC Rerun Time 2025 #3

Dec. 9th, 2025 09:21 pm
[syndicated profile] questionable_content_feed

A Bembo comic! Man I love these. IIRC, the whole idea for Bembo started off on twitter when I went on a bit of a "dumb barbarian but not in the way you'd expect" style of shitposting spree. Then later that year I needed some filler comics for the week between xmas and new year's so I decided to turn some of those posts into actual comics. And then it became a semi-regular thing! They're very fun and I hope to do more in the future. Bembo is obviously heavily indebted to Oglaf, a comic I adore. Go read Oglaf, unless you don't like cartoons with tits and wieners in them I guess.

Every time I see one of these old comics I think "man, remember when QC was about indie rock lol." Also remember when I used to make jokes about the size of Faye's ass but didn't really know how to draw thicker ladies yet so she pretty much looked like every other character, lol.

elisem: (Default)
[personal profile] elisem
 So, just a few minutes ago in one place or another, I was reading what someone had to say about style. In the course of exploring a particular writer's habits and style, they said that they themselves weren't sure they knew what style was.

A long time ago, a sentence came into my possession that has been both comforting and humbling by degrees. It is this: "Style is what you can't help doing."

The comforting part is that if you can't help having style, or doing style, or whatever sort of verbing of style is accurate for you and your work, then you might as well stop any worrying about style and get on with the work. Saves a tremendous amount of time, really.

Thoughts?

Liao Biblography

Dec. 9th, 2025 10:08 am
forestofglory: A Chinese landscape painting featuring water, trees and a mountain (West Lake)
[personal profile] forestofglory
For the Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction I offered to write a bibliography on a topic of the winner’s choosing. My friend Rae won the auction and asked me to write something about the material culture of the Khitan Liao or Jurchen Jin. I was not very familiar with either of these dynasties, but after some discussion and preliminary research to get a sense of what’s out there we chose to focus on Liao textiles.

The Liao Dynasty existed between 916 and 1125, roughly contemporaneous with the Song Dynasty. One of the reasons I wanted to research the Liao was that they are closer in time to bits of history I’m familiar with. Thanks to my love of The Long Ballad I got really into Tang history (618-907 CE), and more recently I’ve been working on translating stories from the Taiping Guangji (太平廣記), a group of tales compiled in the late 10th century– so I’ve been learning about that period as well.

Before I started the more in-depth research, I read a bit about Liao historiography, and I’ve included a few of those papers to help put the Liao in context, with a few other papers that aren’t on topic just for fun.

Read more... )

Tidying up some tabs

Dec. 9th, 2025 04:00 pm
oursin: hedgehog in santa hat saying bah humbug (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

London Pride has been handed down to us:

Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.

Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery

***

Heritage endangered:

On an old cobbled street in a market town, residents say hundreds of years of history are disappearing before their eyes as thieves keep stealing large slabs of Yorkshire stone.

The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.

Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert

According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.

I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.

And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.

***

Gender and learning:

The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???

Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)

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