update 17 May 2025

[meridian_rose]

So it's been about six weeks since I last posted and I am once again trying to catch up.
I finish and post a fic to AO3 last month so yay me I guess! And then IDK, falling behind.
Holiday in Bude would have been nicer with better weather. Again, along with previous holidays, maybe I should make a photo collage and write more. We got back late Saturday and did dawn vigil Easter Sunday service!

This got a bit longer than anticipated so, cut tags (I hope they work okay, advanced formatting isn't something I do much of these days!):

Books and TV
The weather's been nice on and off and I enjoy reading hard copies of books outside. So this week I read a book my sister recommended and lent me, "The Gospel of Loki" by Joanne M Harris (author of Chocolat).

A first person, irreverent, unreliable narration of Loki's journey from bodiless wildfire in the realm of Chaos through his adventures with Odin et al until Ragnarök. I enjoyed it a lot and remembered some key moments from my youthful reading of Norse myth, though I'm less familiar with them than some of the Greek myths. There's a sequel, "The Testament of Loki" which I'd like to look at in the future.
I've been reading a lot of the Agatha Raisin books recently so this was a nice change from the cosy mystery genre.

I mainlined "Rivals" s1 on Starz via Disney+ (Hulu exclusive in USA?) while petsitting for a couple of Saturdays at my sisters. I love it, even if almost everyone is Terrible in some way and there's near constant adultery. It's the 1980s so the whole culture and style is of that time and in many ways so over the top I just roll with it. Impressive cast list including David Tennant and Aidan Turner with a dodgy period appropriate moustache. Luke Pasqualino (BBC's Three Musketeers) continues to mature like fine wine.

The soundtrack is amazing, because it's the 80s, and I'm loving things like Taggie's ingenious alternative to GPS (she records herself giving map directions) because tech was in it's infancy; one character is proud of his connection to the relatively new idea of satellite TV.
This Rivals x Text posts is a pretty good overview and here's the trailer:

Watch on YouTube

Dreamwidth Communities

I am upset with myself for missing out on intoabar; the signups opened and closed between my reading of the communities and I missed it by some margin. I might still work on a crossover fic for my own pleasure, use a random generator to choose a character the way the mod does.


But then I'm still writing a very rough first draft for unconventionalcourtship and worrying about getting something finished and then polished before my assigned date to post in June. I decided to go with "Nautilus" which I watched recently.

I also think I missed checking in for getyourwordout this month. I'm failing at all the things.

However lands_of_magic will reopen "late summer or early fall" with a new name and new teams to shake things up so I guess that's something to look forward to :) (Even it does remind me of all the things I made for that comm that I haven't shared here yet!)

Also sunshine_revival is a replacement for the now defunct Sunshine Challenge coming in July.

Pinterest, WTF did you do?!

I've spent a lot of time using various means to download/archive my Pinterest boards from both my writer and my personal pinterest accounts (pics and/or links) after Pinterest have gone full on AI-censorship where bots start declaring your pins Bad and Wrong and in some cases blocking people's accounts losing them years of resources they've curated. I have a lot of feelings about AI and censorship and who gets to decide what's bad and why and the attempt to make every online space "safe" and "true" (see also Tumblr, Wattpad, etc) but mostly I'm channelling my rage into backing things up.
Couple of reddit posts about the situation pinterest is over; mass banning mega thread
Obligatory reminder: never trust one cloud service to keep backups of your stuff. This includes facebook photos or even draft fics at AO3, which is another thing people apparently use for writing without having a copy offline/backed up elsewhere and have lost work; why, oh why, NO, absolutely not, NEVER do this!
I don't use the site much any more if I'm honest, sometimes throw something in the like board (likes got put into a private board some time ago) or occasionally think to pin something writerly to one of the Writing Boards. I was shocked by the amount of sponsored pins appearing in my boards. People are complaining about AI generated images alongside the AI ban hammer.
I opened up a separate Chrome profile to help with some sorting and without adblock there are sites that pretty much unusable. It's horrifying.
Lots of feelings as I pick through the myriad pins that I once felt interesting enough to hold onto in some way. There are things I'm finding that delight me, things I'm rediscovering or am glad are still around, there's a lot of nostalgia for things I used to enjoy, sadness over sites that are long gone. So many sites/blogs/communities/accounts just deleted.

Lots of feelings in general, I guess.

My one shared photo this month is two; one my nephew took on my phone using a filter I didn't know I had. I'm a bull in this photo! We're at the Crooklets Beach Café in Bude. I'm informed that an episode of the TV series "Alex Rider" filmed part of an episode here. The second photo is a shot of the interior.

Comments

[meridian_rose]

I'm sure they'd enjoy that :)

Ooh, nice! It's always fun to see places you know on TV, or to visit somewhere filming's taken place. I've got pics from Cardiff Bay somewhere from Torchwood :)
The diner looked very American so is it an American themed place? :)
edit: I love the icon :D

[tellshannon815]

It is indeed American themed!