Aurendor D&D

Jan. 8th, 2026 12:34 am
settiai: (Fail -- iconzicons)
[personal profile] settiai
To add to a previous posts on the subject, my cleric, Siân, has had a really, really, really bad couple of weeks in-game. Over the course of the last three weeks or so, she has:

A list of bad things under the cut. )

Poor Siân really is well on her way towards a complete and total mental breakdown at the rate she's going.

no fandom : icons : Sand

Jan. 8th, 2026 12:14 am
highlander_ii: Chris Pine wearing jeans, kneeling on the ground ([ChrisP] 002)
[personal profile] highlander_ii posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: Sand
Fandom: none
Rating: G
Content notes: None apply
Summary: icons of sand, sand dunes, sandy beaches


Sand )

Aurendor D&D: Summary for 1/7 Game

Jan. 8th, 2026 12:10 am
settiai: (Siân -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

reading wednesday

Jan. 7th, 2026 07:58 pm
cofax7: John and Aeryn: it's braver sometimes just to run (FS - LGM Braver)
[personal profile] cofax7
Currently reading: The Virgin in the Ice, Ellis Peters. Not really intentionally, but last week I discovered that Hoopla has at least a few Brother Cadfael novels, unabridged, narrated by Patrick Tull. Patrick Tull is one of my two favorite narrators -- the other being Stephen Briggs. Tull narrated the whole Aubrey-Maturin series, which is how I came to adore him. He's so VERY good. Anyway, listening to him describe Brother Cadfael riding a horse through a snowstorm is a good way to manage my stress these days.

I'm also rereading Acuteneurosis' Don't Look Back Star Wars time-travel AU, in which Leia goes back in time and gets adopted by Shmi just before the Clone Wars start. It's similarly soothing, even if so far unfinished.

... so many unfinished SW AUs. Sigh.

!!! but wait! somehow my subscription expired? there's a whole new story! YAY!!

Just finished: The Leper of St Giles, see above. Also, over the holidays I read Cahokia Jazz by Henry Spufford, and although I went in cautiously, I enjoyed it. It's very much a noir novel, and apparently I didn't read it carefully enough to figure out the trigger for the AU. And I thought throwing Kroeber into the mix was a bit too much. A real strong piece of worldbuilding about the city itself. Sadly the noirishness meant that the female characters didn't get as much development as I would have liked. I enjoyed it over all, though, and have recommended it to a few people.

Up next: Not sure. I may see if I can find a copy of The Women of the Copper Country, by Mary Doria Russell. I somehow missed it when it was published, and I have loved some of her work.

OTOH I bought A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and The West Passage by Jared Pechacek over the holidays, so I may start one of those instead.

***

In other news, apparently it's a thing to reread LOTR and blog about it. Currently under way: Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions, and Roseanna from Nerds of a Feather. Oh, and Jared Pechacek--but that's on his Patreon; it's $1/mo, so I joined, and if anyone cares I can report on whether I think it's worth it.

***

Everything is too horrible right now. Keep the lights on. Hug your pups and kittens. Make things. Sing. Dance. Drink water. Breathe deep. Lift heavy things. Remember you are not alone. Ask for help if you need it.

***

In other news, I think my boss is worried about me. In an I-am-making-my-stress-too-obvious way. I'm so grateful we have him, and I'm worried about what happens when he transfers this summer.

Sigma

Jan. 7th, 2026 11:36 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Remember Sigma?

Was there ever a membership list made public?

Frick exhibit of Scandinavian art

Jan. 7th, 2026 11:08 pm
cellio: (Default)
[personal profile] cellio

This afternoon we saw a traveling exhibit at the Frick Art Museum, The Scandinavian Home. It's only there for a few more days; we kept meaning to go on a day with docent tours and logistics kept happening, but finally, success. (The remaining tours are this Friday and Saturday.)

The pieces are mostly drawn from one private collection of works from Scandinavia from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the museum's description:

Exhibitions of Scandinavian art typically focus on either painting — often on the work of a single artist or theme such as landscape — or on artisanal design. The Scandinavian Home integrates folk, decorative, and fine art with “home” as a central metaphor, mirroring the tastes and convictions of the period’s collectors and creators.

There were a lot of paintings, many of them landscapes, many of them striking -- capturing the feel of hoarfrost or high-latitude twilights. The collection also included some furniture items, including this really nifty cabinet:

ornate mythological carvings on a tall, dark green cabinet

It's pretty shallow. I don't know its intended use:

view showing a side, maybe a foot deep

From the description:

Lars Kinsarvik, Norwegian 1846-1925:
The complex design of this cabinet rewards close looking: trolls, animals, enigmatic faces, and fantastical details peer out from the interlaced patterns -- folkloric imagery that helped forge a national design identity in Norway at the turn of the 20th century. [...] A chronicler of Viking ornament and rural material culture, he incorporated historical motifs into his invented repertiore of trolls and other imaginary creatures.

The exhibit includes an ornate chair (obviously well-used) by the same artist. The docent told this story: the collectors found the chair, very beat up and covered in crud, at some sale or other, bought it, and stuck it in their basement. Later they started to clean it up and realized they had something special, but they didn't know anything more about its origins. The chair was, it turned out, one of a pair: somewhere in Europe (I forget the details) they happened to be at a museum, saw the other one, and said "we have one just like that at home!". So that's how they found out who the artist was. I didn't ask, but I assume they acquired the cabinet sometime after that.

You can see the exhibit any time the museum is open (through Sunday), and we wandered around on our own for a while before the scheduled tour. The guided tour is about an hour; it was informative and the docent was friendly and approachable. I appreciate having a guided overview of an exhibit before diving into the details and reading all the little cards one by one (which at most museums is physically taxing for me). After the tour we went back through the exhibit to take a closer look at things.

I said that reading the display cards is usually a challenge. The Frick Museum gets major kudos for always having printed booklets (at decently large font) for people to use. Each page includes the information from the card and a small photo of the item it's for. Sometimes I have to do some flipping through the book when starting a new "section", especially when there are many rooms that you can take different paths through or when there are displays in the middle of the room as well as along the walls. But it works pretty well and it's a huge accessibility win. I don't know how long it'll be there, but I later found the PDF for this exhbibit on their website (and I see that somebody has already saved it in the Wayback Machine).

The exhibit included a few tapestries and carpets. Most were displayed so you could see only one side, as usual, but they had one hanging in a room so that you could view both sides. This is a tapestry from 1906 of wool and linen; they did not include information about dyes. After only 120 years of, presumably, being hung in range of sunlight, compare:

Front:

tans, browns, bright orange, dark blue, faded blue

Back:

green, richer blues, bright orange, yellows, tans

Daily Check-In

Jan. 7th, 2026 05:59 pm
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday, January 7, to midnight on Thursday, January 8. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34055 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 19

How are you doing?

I am OK.
10 (52.6%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
9 (47.4%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
8 (42.1%)

One other person.
7 (36.8%)

More than one other person.
4 (21.1%)




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.
 

Lake Lewisia #1353

Jan. 7th, 2026 04:39 pm
scrubjayspeaks: Town sign for (fictional) Lake Lewisia, showing icons of mountains and a lake with the letter L (Lake Lewisia)
[personal profile] scrubjayspeaks
She stepped onto the stage, wide-eyed and white knuckled around the gathered black plastic bag in her hands, and tentatively shuffled into the sizzle of the spotlight. Applause burst out from the audience, visible only around the very edges of the light as shadowy wings and horns, at the sight of her in her moth-eaten sweater and her coziest slippers. When she had stepped through her apartment door to take out the trash, she had expected to enter a hallway, rather than an elaborately dressed stage in mid-production somewhere in the fae realms, and she had no idea what to expect when she made it all the way to stage right.

---

LL#1353

Music Wednesday

Jan. 7th, 2026 04:23 pm
muccamukk: Orville Peck in a red Nudie suit, singing and playing guitar, while a pink and white musical score swirl behind him. (Music: Orville Peck)
[personal profile] muccamukk

Going back to Cry Cry Cry these last few weeks. I'm so obsessed with the storytelling in the music, especially the percussion (and some kind of drone?) around 2:54 to 3:20, before the mandoline comes back in.
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
Following two days at sea, the next step of the voyage was the Falkland Islands. This collection of islands comprises over 12,000km^2 (by comparison, Melbourne is approximately 2,500 km²) with a total population of about 3,500 (by comparison, Melbourne has approximately 5,300,000), nearly all of which reside in the settlement of Stanley. On a per capita basis, the islanders are quite well off, and to describe them as "quite British and a bit conservative" would be something of an understatement. Despite the small population, it does have an excellent museum. With few people and a rugged territory, wildlife is abundant, especially in the form of birds and sea mammals, and is quite notable. Penguins are, of course, a primary attraction, and a visit to nearby Yorke Bay provided the opportunity to encounter King, Gentoo penguins, and Magallanic penguins. The only land mammal that existed on the Falklands, the Falkland Islands wolf or warrah was hunted and poisoned to extinction by shepherds in the 19th century.

No discussion of the Falklands (or Islas Malvinas) can occur without discussion of ownership, especially in the wake of the 1982 war. To put the situation in a nutshell, the islands remained uninhabited until the French established a colony in 1764. The following year, the British established a settlement, but it is questionable whether they were aware of one another. The following year, the French surrendered their claim to Spain. A few years later, the British withdrew from the islands, and by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish abandoned their colony and garrison, leaving behind gauchos and fishermen. Later, a German-born Frenchman of Argentine citizenship established an Argentine colony, but the United States turned up with a warship in 1831 and dissolved that government. The following year, the British returned and reasserted their rule. The British have remained ever since, and the Argentinians continue to vigorously assert their claims. At the time of the war, I recall a young girl phoning talk-back radio and saying: "There are two big islands - why don't they have one each?" Such a sharing arrangement, as charming and persuasive as it might be, is challenged by the assertion of right through violence.

Leaving the Falklands meant another two days at sea before landing at Montevideo. This is an opportunity to describe the exceptional culinary experience offered by the cruise. Every day, with breakfast merging into lunch and then dinner, there is a plentiful and diverse buffet of excellent quality, which varies in theme each day (the Christmas Day French lunch was quite an experience). For those who prefer a serviced dinner, several restaurants are also available onboard. If you pay a little extra, you can access even more restaurants of an even higher standard. Coupled with the grand hotel breakfasts of the pre-cruise weeks, I am quite prepared to say that I have never eaten so well for such an extended period of time, and, despite a wonderful gymnasium that overlooks the bow of the ship, I rather suspect I have put on more than a few kilos in the past month. Still, as a once-in-a-lifetime voyage (of which I have at least one or two per year) I have very few regrets with experiencing this culinary indulgence.
sixbeforelunch: jeremy brett as sherlock holmes wearing a spiffy top hat, no text (holmes in top hat)
[personal profile] sixbeforelunch
Snowflake Challenge: A mug of coffee or hot chocolate with a snowflake shaped gingerbread cookie perched on the rim sits nestled amidst a softly bunched blanket. A few dried orange slices sit next to it.

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom.

John Green says of going to home games for AFC Wimbledon, "I'm with 8,000 people whose love is oriented in the same direction as mine." That, to me, is fandom. It's a group of people who have oriented their love in a similar direction, whether that's toward a show or an actor or a band or a character or a hobby or something else entirely. (Honestly, love oriented in the same direction might be foundational to almost all human-built institutions, and the problem with some of them is that the object of their love doesn't inspire pro-social behavior, but that's outside the scope of this post.) It doesn't matter what the object of the love is so much as the way that all that love aimed at a similar place amplifies itself, like vector multiplication.

The funny thing is, the way I do fandom these days, It's almost less about the object of the fandom and more about the idea of fandom, the love and the passion it inspires. Which is not to say that I'm not in some fandoms. I'm very active in Star Trek fandom, and love hanging out with people who love it with me. It's always fun to find people who share some of my other current interests like Sherlock Holmes, Murder She Wrote, Superman, and Jane Austen, or to reminisce happily with people who remember the loves that I'm less active in but still remember fondly like X-Files and Stargate.

But there are definitely people in fandom spaces with whom I share no fandoms, and I still enjoy their company, because they're doing the fandom thing too. That is, they're passionate about something, and so passionate that they want to talk about the thing, and make more of the thing, and put their joy and passion into the world so that other people can share it. Elsewhere on this year's snowflake, someone mentioned how much they love seeing someone be passionate about something, even if they don't share that passion. I like that. It is a joy to see humans be happy and excited about things they love, and to be unabashedly passionate about them.

Let people enjoy things has become a meme, almost a cliche, but that's because it so often needs to be said. Fandom at its best is a safe place where people are allowed to enjoy things without mockery or disdain, and in a world where that is all too often not the case, that's a very valuable thing.

Shopping

Jan. 7th, 2026 05:14 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
[personal profile] brickhousewench tipped me to Heading Prints, a company that makes scarves using book art as inspiration. They offer bandanas, skinny scarves, large rectangular scarves, square silky scarves, and also a few rings with designs to match some of their most popular scarf designs.  Also, these are much more affordable on average than most fashion scarves I've seen, although they do cost more than the cheap random ones in a discount store.

If you've seen my post "How to Simplify Fashion," then consider these scarves as an option for color-matching.  Look for a scarf whose colors you love and want to use.  Wear it while clothes shopping to test if new clothes match your colors.

work for idle hands

Jan. 8th, 2026 09:59 am
mergatrude: (sunburnt kanga)
[personal profile] mergatrude
I had time off over the xmas-new year close down and my goal was to do as little as possible. I made no lists or plans (aside from xmas lunch with the in-laws) and just let things happen. I managed to complete the singles and the first round of plying for my cable sock yarn project. I started and undid a pair of mittens for a work colleague three times (think I'm going to have to try something completely different), and finished a little knitting project.

Normally I don't like knitting things that involve sewing, but last year I started an Inside Cat bookmark with some random handspun yarn in an ugly colour that was the result of over-blending. It looks cursed, but I'm impressed with myself for knitting tiny ears, all the i-cord limbs that had to be attached, and a face? (Yeah, I have school-related sewing trauma.)

cursed cat thing )

We sold our on-site van a couple of months ago, so have nowhere to easily BEACH. But the coast is only a couple of hours drive away so on the 2nd I drove myself down there (no one else wanted to come and I was sick of them all) and did the BEACH thing myself (sorry, the all-caps is a family in-joke). I recharged the car, had haloumi and peach salad in a cafe at Mosquito Bay and then went for a swim at Lilli Pilli Beach. So relaxing, not having to cater for anyone else. The water was gorgeous despite all the seaweed, and I had a nap on the sand before driving home. Note to self: BEACH more often!

beautiful day at tiny Lilli Pilli Beach )

Now I'm back at work, there's a heatwave in the southeast (today is going to be 39C/102F, as is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow) but the aircon works here and at home. I hope everyone's year started well. :)
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


This all-new Painted Wastelands Bundle tours The Painted Wastelands, a prismatic pastel realm from Agamemnon Press for use with Old-School Essentials and other tabletop fantasy roleplaying games.

Bundle of Holding: The Painted Wastelands

Tomorrow never knows

Jan. 7th, 2026 08:54 pm
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Posted by Fred Clark

We have always been at war with ... Greenland? This was never the Proper Christian Stance enforced by white evangelical leaders, but the Proper Christian Stance is always changing.

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