River: Done With 2025

Dec. 31st, 2025 12:29 pm
mdlbear: (river)
[personal profile] mdlbear

I'd be a lot happier to see the ass-end of 2025 if I wasn't pretty sure that 2026 is going to be worse -- for the US, anyway. Maybe not so much for me; I fled that country a year ago. But my kids are still stuck there.

The details -- goals from last New Year's Day )

I make that 680/11 = 61%. Last year was 68%, so only a little worse. Considering how bad it could have been, I'll take it.

spikedluv: (winter: mittens by raynedanser)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so got up and fooled around on the internet. (You might have noticed an early comment from me. *g*) The original plan was to go downtown, even though it actually felt weird to do so after three days staying home, and hit Price Chopper and Walmart. That plan changed when Pip called to tell me that the main road I’d be traveling was closed in at least three places (due to the heavy winds all night blowing snow onto the road). Easy decision to stay home. I’ll just have to do my shopping tomorrow, so *fingers crossed* I’m still feeling pretty good.

Pip called me again around 6:30am (it was early, but it felt later since I’d already been up for over 3 hours) to tell me that one of his employees was headed to urgent care with the same thing Pip had. He admitted that at one point he’d felt bad enough that he probably should have gone to urgent care, but he doesn’t like to admit to things like that in the moment. I hope I don’t start feeling like I want to head to urgent care. o_O But if this guy gets diagnosed, at least I’ll know what’s going on. Also, we’re guessing that Pip probably caught it at the garage Christmas party. Arrgh at people going out when they know they’re sick!

I have the stuffy AND runny nose today. How is it fair that you are stuffed up so you can't breathe, and also your nose is running?!! So far nothing worse. *fingers crossed*

I did three loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, emptied the dishwasher, cleaned the bathroom sink and toilet bowl, went for a couple walks with the dogs, baked chicken for the dogs’ meals, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, scooped kitty litter, returned a book to the library (when I was already out, I didn’t make a special trip!), placed a Chewy order, and shaved. I put a pork roast in the crock pot and made pulled pork for supper.

Since I stayed home I was able to type in one of my fic; I added 1,800 words to my Murder, She Wrote/Hudson & Rex crossover! AND got it posted, which is a nice bonus. I went with the Earl Grey tea today because I wanted something familiar and comforting. I sat down on the bed to write and ended up taking an hour nap with Midnight on my lap. I also watched-watched more Secrets of the Zoo.

Temps started out at 16.9(F) (interesting because the high is forecasted to be 18!) and reached 24.1. The wind was seriously ridiculous! In some places the walking trail was blown clear, and in others the snow was at least six inches deep. And walking into the wind felt like it was trying to push me backwards. Also, the roads weren’t great when I went out to pick up Ti. We live off of Route 20, which is a four-lane ‘highway’ here. The snow usually covers one lane when the wind is blowing, maybe edging a bit into a second lane, but today it covered all four! And visibility wasn’t great because of the blowing snow. I wonder when the wind is going to stop?!!


Mom Update:

I talked to mom and she sounded pretty good. I sound like a broken record, but it feels weird not to see her at least a few times a week.

New Year's Resolutions Check In

Dec. 31st, 2025 12:55 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
We made it to the end of December! All the way through 2025! \o/ If you made it this far -- even if you haven't finished everything you hoped for -- then pat yourself on the back. You worked hard for that. We have reached the beginning of winter. If you're doing seasonal goals, share what you're working on for this winter.

This year I'm trying something new, continuing to track goals at the end of each month. So far it seems to be helping, so that's encouraging. I'm looking at my goal list more often and trying to keep ticking off more of them. The main drawback is that this update becomes more of a chore each month. I have some new ideas to lighten the load for next year.

These are the previous check in posts:
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 4
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 10
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 17
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 24
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In February 28
New Year's Resolutions Check In March 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In April 30
New Year's Resolutions Check In May 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In June 30
New Year's Resolutions Check In July 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In August 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In September 30
New Year's Resolutions Check In October 31
New Year's Resolutions Check In November 30

Read more... )

Poem: "Eyes Wide, Mind Open"

Dec. 31st, 2025 12:49 am
ysabetwordsmith: Victor Frankenstein in his fancy clothes (Frankenstein)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This poem came out of the January 7, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] dialecticdreamer. It also fills the "Daughter of Earth" square in my 1-1-25 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Frankenstein's Family.

Read more... )

Babylon 5 script books

Dec. 30th, 2025 09:27 pm
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I ended up getting a bunch of these for myself as a pre-Christmas gift, which ended up being a post-Christmas gift, but I have been having an amazing time going through them. I'll post more detailed reactions and scans as I go back through the books from the start - right now I'm just skimming - but here are a few interesting little tidbits so far!

Spoilers for the whole B5 series, obvs )

December Monthly Post

Dec. 31st, 2025 12:02 am
ysabetwordsmith: Bingo balls (bingo)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] allbingo
This is the December community post for [community profile] allbingo. What were your bingo activities during December? What are your plans for January?

For December we had:
[recurring]
Amnesty Fest by
Fill out extra squares from previous cards.
Posting will be December 1-31.

For January we will have:
[recurring theme, but all new prompts each year]
Public Domain Day Bingo hosted by [personal profile] cornerofmadness
Many new works are entering the public domain. Use them with great enthusiasm!
Posting will be January 1-31.

Check out the 2026 Community Calendar. Plenty of months remain open, including March and April if you want to run a fest early in the year.

You might also like some of the signup posts over at [community profile] goals_on_dw such as Fannish 50 or Writing Challenges.


[community profile] allbingo was created on January 6, 2014. We're coming up on our 12th anniversary! \o/ Thank you all for making this such an exciting ride.

Comments Received: 6,704
Journal Entries: 1,250
Tags: 734
Memories: 9
Icons Uploaded: 1

Interests: 85
Members: 557
Subscribers: 562

Good News

Dec. 31st, 2025 12:01 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Good news includes all the things which make us happy or otherwise feel good. It can be personal or public. We never know when something wonderful will happen, and when it does, most people want to share it with someone. It's disappointing when nobody is there to appreciate it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our joys and pat each other on the back.

What good news have you had recently? Are you anticipating any more? Have you found a cute picture or a video that makes you smile? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your life a little happier?

Too Much To Do

Dec. 30th, 2025 08:47 pm
fauxklore: (Default)
[personal profile] fauxklore
I hate how far behind I am on everything.

I did get out and run some errands yesterday. I needed to deposit a check at a credit union shared branch. Since that's close to the Oakton post office, I mailed about half of my holiday cards. (I am still working on writing the rest of them.) I also picked up prescription refills. Normally, I just get the refills by mail, but I was concerned that wouldn’t be timely enough with the holiday season.

In the course of attempting to clear a few things off my dining room table today, I discovered that I had missed the due date on my real estate taxes. I’ve now paid them on-line, but I had to add on an annoying fee. It’s my own fault, of course, but I hate that I’ve been so disorganized.

I’m also scouring my email trying to figure out what date I bought a particularly theatre ticket for. It’s not until late March, but I need to avoid creating schedule conflicts. This has prompted me to attempt to clear out a bunch of old email, which is, alas, going to be a lengthy process. (And, no, I haven’t found the theatre ticket yet.)

I still have tomorrow to get things done, at least until early evening when I’m telling a story.

Also, I lucked out and got a readers slot at the Moby Dick Marathon in New Bedford. If you want to hear me, I’ve got 10:15 to 10:20 p.m. on Saturday (January 3rd). The whole marathon is live streamed on YouTube and you can watch it afterwards at your convenience.
hekateras: (incog1)
[personal profile] hekateras posting in [community profile] wipbigbang
Project Title: Midday Vision
Fandom: Original Works
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76745961
Summary: A young man stays out of the heat.
Warnings: None
Characters: Original characters
Pairings:
When I Started: 2021
How I Lost My Shit: The WIP pile.
How I Finished My Shit: Done is better than perfect!!!

🗓️

Dec. 30th, 2025 04:32 pm
solarpsychedelic: (Default)
[personal profile] solarpsychedelic
The rain and the cold returned today. I got maybe only half of my to do list accomplished. The rest will have to wait then.

This time of year is weird because you know it’s near the end and yet here comes another day in December.
trobadora: (Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu - back to back)
[personal profile] trobadora
I haven't been having a great time and was in desperate need of a distraction, so first I took approximately fifty billion Guardian screencaps and made a picspam/quiz (hoping to see more people play!), and then I found a short drama to watch:

江湖夜雨终似梦 | Realm's Night Rain Dreamlike

It's a wuxia drama that takes quite a bit of inspiration from Word of Honor and is full of wuxia tropes besides. Two jianghu wanderers run into each other - one is on a revenge quest, the other is trying to fulfil a dead man's last wish by delivering a letter. I've seen people call them "budget Wen Kexing and budget Zhou Zishu", but that's rather reductive, not the least because both characters have elements of both Word of Honor characters. *g*

Anyway, I enjoyed this quite a bit! Jiang Hu (yes, that's what he's called) and Yeyu are both very fun characters with a great dynamic that shifts multiple times in multiple ways, and the plot and the revelations hold together pretty well. If I have one criticism, it's how brutal it is to the female characters. But one thing I appreciated was that the villains weren't all one-dimensional, and more than one of them got a backstory showing how they got to where they ended up, too. Well worth a watch.

This is on Youtube in 24 episodes, or 12 episodes or a compilation - the total runtime is 4 hours and 20 minutes.

Unfortuntately the soundtrack on Youtube is missing the background music in various places (and the compiled video seems to be missing some of the dialogue too?), but the subtitles are pretty good!

Ending spoilers: Highlight to read! *No happy ending here, alas. Both main characters die together.*

Btw, about the title - this is one of those "quote/saying in the title; characters named after it" kind of things - the first four characters are from a poem, and are also the main characters' names: jianghu ye yu - literally "night rain in (or of) the jianghu". That sort of allusion makes the whole thing basically untranslatable, and the English translation is made even more opaque by rendering "jianghu" as "realm". *g*

Jiang Hu quotes the relevant lines at the end of the last episode: 桃李春风一杯酒,江湖夜雨十年灯 - from a Song dynasty poem, 寄黄几复 "Writing to Huang Jifu" by 黄庭坚 Huang Tingjian.

I looked around for translations, and this page translates these lines as:
Each of us held a cup of wine and talked amid spring wind with peach and plum blossom,
For ten years we missed each other before lamps during night rain outside.

And a Reddit comment explains the meaning of the relevant lines in partiuclar in the context of the poem:
(Remembering the old time,) enjoying wine while watching the flowers of peach and apricot trees.
(Now,) tempered by the mundane life, 10 years flew by; I often stare at the light, (thinking of you.)

I'm not sure how you'd translate the entire title - "when the night rain in the jianghu ends (or when Jiang Hu and Yeyu end), it seems like a dream"? Maybe? Idk, this is way beyond my rudimentary Chinese. Anyone with better knowledge have any thoughts?

Fandom year in review

Dec. 30th, 2025 02:14 pm
sholio: glittery Christmas ornaments (Christmas ornament 2)
[personal profile] sholio
I used to do these more regularly, back in the LJ and early DW days when a lot of people used to do end-of-year lists of their fic in case you'd missed anything, before so much of it was consolidated on AO3. I never really was that organized about it, but over time my (slightly chaotic) end-of-year fandom posts were taken over by my origfic roundup posts, and I stopped doing them entirely. But as this is my 20th (or so) year in LJ/DW fandom, perhaps this is a good time to start doing them again, especially since this was a very exciting and interesting year for me! (I also did a year-end roundup meme over on Tumblr, which is where some of this was originally consolidated.)

I'm still in Biggles, but I also got into three, count 'em, 3 new fandoms, although none of them were entirely new to me:

  • MASH: rewatch of a show I watched a lot as a kid, but hadn't actually seen again as an adult (except a scattered episode here and there). I didn't expect it to grab me fannishly, but that's what I get for guessing. I've drifted out again now, I think, but it was a good time and a really delightful nostalgia rush.

  • Babylon 5: watched about two and a half seasons back in the 90s, always meant to go back and finish it before I got completely spoiled, fell as hard as I always suspected I would.

  • Murderbot: read the first book years ago, didn't really vibe with it, turned out to love the show.

I posted 215,777 words of fic on AO3 according to their stats. (My personal accounting is 296,200, which includes all the promptfic and unfinished fics.) This is way up from the last couple of years, and I'm also starting to write longer fic again - everything I posted in 2023-24 was under 10K.

I started making vids again, and posted 3 (2 MASH as treats for last year's Festivids, 1 for Murderbot).

In general, I started being able to "do" visual media again last winter. I hadn't really been watching anything for the past couple of years, or watching vids, or really doing much of anything in a visual medium. Last winter I bought a tablet (Black Friday sale) that I planned to use for media watching, and it did in fact work out very well for that! I wanted it at least partly as a distraction from IRL, which has really been A Lot - not even speaking about world events, but just me personally. My stepdad died in January, and I've spent this past year traveling back and forth between my mom's place and here, helping her adjust. And then I got back into actual travel this fall, with a trip to England and then most recently Hawaii for the holidays. So it's been nice to have visual media as a kind of touchstone to anchor me by. I also read a lot.

I'm coming off a bad couple of years, in fandom and overall - I burned out, I lost some friends, I was kind of hard to deal with in general, I think. But this year has felt much better to me. I've been having an amazing time with my new shiny things, I'm creatively active and excited about writing in a way that I haven't really felt in years, and I really like a lot of what I wrote this year. There have still been ups and downs even with that, of course - I have *got* to get back in the habit of editing more before I post things, I know I'll be happier with it. But all in all, I like where things are for me now.

I honestly kind of hope I don't get into anything new in 2026, at least not right away, because I'm really happy with my current fandoms and I have lots more to "say" about them in fic, I feel!

Nature

Dec. 30th, 2025 02:30 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Scientists stunned by a massive hydrothermal field off Greece

Scientists have uncovered an extensive underwater vent system near Milos, Greece, hidden along active fault lines beneath the seafloor. These geological fractures act as pathways for hot, gas-rich fluids to escape, forming clusters of vents with striking visual diversity. The discovery surprised researchers, who observed boiling fluids and vibrant microbial mats during deep-sea dives. Milos now stands out as one of the Mediterranean’s most important sites for studying Earth’s dynamic interior.


This is fascinating, but it is not surprising. Most seams leak. If you want to find vent systems, identify underwater faultlines and check them for leaks.

Birdfeeding

Dec. 30th, 2025 01:57 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is cloudy and cool.  It spit snow a bit yesterday but didn't amount to anything.

I fed the birds.  There was a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches perched in the forest garden waiting to be fed.  :D

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 12/30/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 12/30/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 12/30/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Poem: "The Last Command"

Dec. 30th, 2025 01:19 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It fills "The Last Command" square in my 1-1-24 card for the Public Domain Bingo fest. It has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred. This is the third poem in the series Crystal Wood; it follows "Trees of Glass" and "Ghost Forests."

Warning: This poem is dark science fiction along the lines of ecological horror.

Read more... )
bluapapilio: Teddy bear charging drained battery (line battery charging)
[personal profile] bluapapilio

This is where I put I stopped on MAL/MU so I'm just going to trust it since it's so close to the end anyway. I do think I ended up just past the Broccoli Divine Tree arc with the anime.

Chapter 90 reread: I love how Mob is just 'Ritsu's brother' to Shou. XD

Dimple and Mob taking turns saving each other;;



"Nobody can rate someone else's thoughts as if it were a scoreboard!"

Mob was trying to calmly talk to Suzuki but then he talked down to Shou and that made Mob go to 77%. And Shou's face when he realized Mob was getting mad for him. Shou tried to jump in to help Mob but got smacked down. 😭

Reigen also tried to help but failed and got attacked, but Serizawa saved him! Aaand Mob reached 100%. Wait, has Reigen never seen him at that point?

Mob spotting Ritsu and remembering hurting him. 😭 He went from 100% Ecstasy to 100% Shame like whiplash.

Teru saying Mob is 'just a regular junior high student'. :')

The omake where they tried to influence their anime designs hahah. Dimple is...cute? Mob is muscular and Reigen is handsome.

Mob is so unbelievably kind. He can put himself in someone else's shoes and understand how and why he needs to make a move.

I missed this manga and the characters. I'm so grateful to this challenge for motivating me to go back into so much. ❤️️

Profile

cornerofmadness: (Default)
cornerofmadness

December 2025

S M T W T F S
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 3031   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Dec. 31st, 2025 03:57 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios